Friday, July 3, 2009 at 5:33PM My article about subtractive design appeared in Game Developer Magazine in March, but I kept forgetting to post it on my own site. A request for a digital copy of the article from a lead designer at Relic Entertainment finally got me to actually do the work. By popular demand, here you go.
Monday, June 22, 2009 at 1:47PM Street Fighter HD Remix is on sale for $10 this week on XBLA, rather than the usual $15 price. Here's the long list of features that you get for this surprisingly low price.
If you're late to the party on this game, it's an update to Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo where the bottom tier characters are better and the top tier is just barely worse. Many lopsided matchups from the previous game are now less lopsided and move inputs like Cammy's Hooligan throw and Fei Long's flying kick ("chicken wing") are no longer difficult for the sake of being difficult. You even get SSF2T (without any gameplay changes) in the package as well.
You can read a lot more about the game here.
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 11:00AM This offer
Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 1:18PM ;)
After years of the development, the Yomi card game is approaching its final form...slowly. At this point, I'm just waiting for Udon to complete the rest of the art (and waiting...and waiting...), though there is still time for minor balance tweaking in the meantime. This is a strangely familiar situation for me.
The deck boxes for the two main characters are pictured above, along with some of the cards. Looking good?
If you're going to this year's Evolution fighting game tournament in Las Vegas (www.evo2k.com), you'll get to see the game in-person, and playtest all 10 decks (not an official event, I just mean while you're waiting around). I won't actually be selling decks there--again, not all the art is there even though the gameplay is--but if you're going to attend the event and you're really intent on buying some decks rather than printing them out yourself, check out this thread.
Incidentally, you can print out playtest versions of all 10 decks yourself (currently one version out of date, but update coming within a week!) and find more information about Yomi at www.sirlin.net/yomi or just download the rules here.
Yomi: Fighting Card game is a simple card game that simulates the mindgames that occur during a fighting game. It's a fixed-deck game, so all you need is one deck and an opponent with one deck to play. There's no rip-off scheme of selling you rare cards in random packs. There will be 10 decks in the initial release, then 6 boss decks in a (much) later release. Each deck represents one character and can also double as deck of regular playing cards. The characters are from my Fantasy-Strike world, and they seem ripe to be in a fighting game someday.
If you are publisher/distributor and are interested in Yomi, or if you are would like to make a connection for me with publisher or distributor, use the contact form.
Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 12:06AM Today I was was a speaker/panelist at a Stanford University event called How They Got Game put on by Professor Henry Lowood of the Libraries and Academic Information Resources department. The theme was professional gaming, examined from several angles. We looked at the perspective of players and how they prepare for events, the challenges of managing teams and entire gaming leagues, and how to take professional gaming to the next level in North America.
Annie "Exstasy" Leung talked about the gaming competitions she's been involved in for the last four years, including Unreal Tournament 3 and Guitar Hero. She emphasized that practicing long hours was vitally important, and that playing games at home is quite a different matter than playing them at a competition with all the noise and distractions. She said she tried to create distractions at home while practicing to simulate this, and at events sometimes wears those big helicopter pilot earphones with tons of noise-canceling.
A professional Fifa player (his name isn't on the schedule, I'll add if when I find out his name) talked about the frustrations of having to learn different versions of a game. Fifa on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are very similar, one is a port of the other. But the PC version is substantially different, with different ball physics(!) so playing that is like playing a totally different game. Ball physics and lots of other things also changed between Fifa 08 and Fifa 09, so he said there is really no way to be good at a game with different physics than to practice it endlessly, even if you are already a master of the 08 version. He mentioned one ridiculous tournament where the organizers required the players play the game using a different camera angle for television purposes, but this of course throws out their months (or years) of practice and is clearly unacceptable. Luckily, the later rounds were played using the standard camera angle because the organizers did find a way to broadcast with the camera angle they wanted while the players played using the standard view.
A top European Quake player joined us via video conferencing
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