RoboBlitz Postmortem

Gamasutra has an excellent RoboBlitz postmortem article. It delves into the details of the development cycle for this indie game with some interesting facts.

• game development was self-funded by Naked Sky
• they blew all their money and had to borrow some to cover their costs
• they had to make the game under 50 Mb to meet Xbox Live distribution requirements
  
• it uses both the Unreal Engine 3 and the proFX engine for procedural textures
• it only took 12 people 11 months to produce

The most interesting fact to me is that 80% of the textures for each level at generated at load time, thereby reducing the total size of the game, and allowing for a larger set of textures to paint their 19 levels with. (See previous post on procedural textures and animation). This fact alone may have enormous repercussions in game development, and hopefully machinima.

Independent Games Festival Mod Nominees

So busy these days.

The mod category nominees for the Independent Games Festival have been announced. The most surprising thing, to myself at least, are the large number of FPS mods. The entire category is dominated by FPS mods, especially for games like UT 2004 and Half Life 2 with only a few non-FPS mods listed for games like Neverwinter Nights or Homeworld.

Does this mean that few non-FPS mods are ever made or that those mods were not submitted to the festival, or that they were and were not considered of sufficient quality? Considering the popularity of RTS and RPG games in particular, I suspect that it is either category 2 or 3 (not submitted or not of a high enough quality). There are no mods for popular games like GTA or Oblivion (there is one for Morrowind), and the only RTS mods are for Homeworld, Warcraft III (no recent RTS games), and one nomination for a Civ IV mod (turn-based strategy). I was also surprised to see how many mods there were for Max Payne 2, a game I thought did not do so well in terms of sales, so the fact that there are three mod nominations for the game appears to be an aberration.

It's unfortunate that Dystopia was not nominated as I think it's one of the best mods I've played for Half Life 2.

Dystopian visions

Dystopia, the winner of the Independent Games Festival HL2 Mod of the Year, has become a favorite of mine. I think that it springs from two reasons.

• 1. The darkly cyberpunk vision is something that is not found in the me-too WWII mods that are found almost everywhere else.


• 2. The game vaguely reminds me of Tribes, which in my opinion was one of the best games ever made.















The second reason is noteworthy for the same reason that I found Tribes so compelling. The game allows the user the absolute freedom to define their role in-game. Unlike BF2, where you select a class that completely predefines your role on the battlefield, Dystopia and Tribes provide a wealth of choices. Both allow 3 types of armor (light, medium, heavy) and a wide selection of weapons (although some are limited by class). In Tribes you could choose various packs (although only one per armor) that provided benefits on the battlefield. Some favorites were the energy pack (energy for skiiing across the landscape), the repair pack (for turret monkeys to repair turrets and defensive teammates) and the shield pack (for heavies on the flag). In Dystopia there are a lot more modules to choose from, but there is an inverse relationship between armor and modules. Light armors have the widest selection, including the cyberdeck, while the heavy armor has the least amount of selection. In Tribes the heavier the armor, the more weapons, while in Dystopia the weapons are limited for all armors (mostly one main, one sidearm, and a few extras like grenades).


The cyberdeck is one of the unique aspects of the game. Hackers can login to a computer terminal and enter cyberspace, a realm where the normal rules of physics do not apply. Hackers can then access various components such as turrets, doors, and spawn points and change access for their side. Hackers can also encrypt components under their control, which forces their opponents to spend valuable time and energy hacking their way around these security blocks.


Another distinguishing feature are the stealth packs that result in a Predator-like stealth field around the player, rendering them virtually invisible to their opponents. In order to combat this there are TAC scan modules (all enemies show up on radar for a brief period of time), and a visual scanning module that shows ememies up in infrared. These options provide for a great deal of tactics in the game that are not normally found beyond the need to kill your opponent in other games, and it makes the game both more thought-provoking and more frustrating, especially when dealing with people who have no idea what they are doing.

There's a basic player guide here, and a forum where people can find answers to their questions. I look forward to seeing where this mod goes in the future, and especially hope that more great maps come out to provide some options for playing.