After just ranting about 3K total war in the last blog, I'm going to settle down and actually talk about goings on at the Offy D corp this time. One thing I've been doing just this week is preparing to make a new narrative series in 3K total war. DAMMIT.
Okay, well I'll have to go on about it a little bit more then. I'll be applying the 100% narrative style to a total war game here, which I have some apprehensions about. The very first time I tried an entirely scripted video was in total war, and I never thought it fit that well. I can't remember whether people really liked it. I do remember that around that time was the first time I did abridged gameplay commentary instead, and discovered that it was much popular per unit of labour required to make it, which had continued to be true until this day. I've ranted about that before though.
Back to the 3K narrative, I spend the couple of weeks prior to this one stressing about how exactly it could be done. The most obvious thing I could do to roughly dramatise the wars and politics implied by the gameplay, but there is already a story that does that - they call it 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', maybe you've heard of it, they made a total war game about it or something. While this would probably have worked, I wasn't especially interested in making a worse version of something that exists already. I thinking over and over again that I needed some kind of twist or subversion to make my take on the story different.
I decided that to get this, I would have to play as Liu Bei, as he is the de facto hero of the original novel. The subversion I wanted to go for was to have Liu Bei and his brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei actually be the same three brothers from the very beginning of the novel, Zhang Jue, Zhang Liang and Zhang Bao. This comparison fits well, for both sets of brothers are ideals-driven, pro-commoner warlords, but with different approaches to solve the empire's problems. Liu and company want to restore an idealised version of the old Han empire, in which life was supposedly more fair for common people. The Zhang brothers want to overthrow the government and remake it from their own ideals, with the fairness built in.
I liked the idea of comparing the two takes on the same issue, and wanted to play the campaign in such as way that Liu Bei is constantly helping the Yellow Turbans. It quickly became clear, however, that the game itself would prevent such a gameplay style from achieving anything. For example, the first thing you have to do in the Liu Bei campaign is kill a load of Yellow Turbans, and you will be attacked by them constantly thereafter. This could still be dealt with the narrative, but it got messy, and I predicted with would rapidly become a story that all but ignores Liu's true identity, since little of the game allows it to be expressed.
With that aside, but still wanting to do something that twists the usual story in some way, I've now started writing something where the theme will be a focus on not just Liu Bei, but the 'honour' of the nobility in general. After all, Liu Bei is not even guaranteed to remain in the story, since he is mortal in the campaign, and may well die of old age as we go along, so it can't really be just about him.
The new angle will be to highlight how the pursuit of virtue doesn't produce the results that ideals-driven characters like Liu Bei expect, and ultimately how the idea that a lack of virtue is the cause of the civil war is never challenged. For example, the novel famously starts with the claim that the break up of the empire is inevitable, and that its subsequent reformation is also inevitable. The theme of the series will to raise the question of WHY each thing is inevitable, rather than considering it to be axiomatic, as the novel and its characters do.
Now this is some lofty literati arty farty posturing at the end of the day, but now that I have idea for how to at least do something a little different to the source material, I feel much more inspired at actually write about it. This weekend I'll be starting to record gameplay, and we'll just see how long it is before my idea of having a theme and stuff holds before it turns into a weird multi-universe time travel anime, as all great works of fiction eventually must. I mean, gonna have to put some dynasty warriors references in there somewhere, and that's a slippery slope...
"'FEEL THE POWER OF MY MAAAAAGGGIIIICCCCC,' the scholar said with an austere composure. The southern belle laughed so hard that her cigarette span down onto the map table, burning a small model ship.
'That's it!' Zhuge Liang snapped, his open-chested gown wafting ever wider as he jumped forwards. 'We should use a fire attack!'
Chuck Buck nodded, and raised an eyebrow."
Maybe I should write it like this...
Okay, the other thing I've been doing recently is working on my sensational video game, Godless Tactics, aka Ice Emblem. Recently I've really ironed out some bugs, and have got to the point where I don't find a major issue every time I sit down to test it, which has gotta be something special. Also, courtesy of my lovely other half, we've got some brand new tile graphics to make the environments look way better.
On the programming side, I've been working a lot on making the AI more clever if you play on Hard difficulty. For example, you can see here an enemy that realised it could not deal damage to me, so ran away to avoid being attacked. We can see the thought process with my new funky AI decision making debug text in the corner. COULD NOT DEAL DAMANGE. This AI can't spell, clearly.
The next stage will be to make a nice UI, and make some images used in cutscenes. Overall, the pace of progress has been very good recently, and I think I'll be looking for some people to test it for me this year, so watch out! I think I really will have something to show at the next E3. Main stage will be free, right?!
Now, the next thing that's happening is that I'm moving house soon! Will be leaving England in fact, and travelling to the ancient land of Wales! Far less mainstream, don't ya know? So that will be a big project this summer, but of relevance to the Offy D corp is the fact that we plan to get a house with more rooms than we currently have, so I can make some kind of office space to record in. Gonna get a bigger desk, maybe a second monitor, maybe sound echo-reduction thingys... It's gonna be a swell setup like you see on the internet sometimes and stuff. And most importantly for me, gonna try and move so we're not next to a main road, as that makes recording really annoying right now, constant interruptions and from big vehicles, and background sound from small ones.
AAAANNNDDD while I'm spending money, I might get a new PC as well, since 3KTW is lagging me out, as is my video editor half the time. And I want to play Fallout 4 VR with the graphics turned up. For business reasons of course. Basically the Offy D corp is going to level up soon, and while this will make little to no difference to anything on your end, I'll probably be happier about things.
Also, the landlord bulldozed our garden earlier this week without telling us, so screw this place.
That's probably it for channel news. I've been writing so much recently, it's very fun, so I'm glad with how the channel has been going. The only thing between me and being a pro is... views! So watch my videos today. TODAY.
Now, let me rant about video games again, in...
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WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
I played some of Assassins Creed Unity. Very pretty. Very icon. Very, very, very icons. Icons... no... please... I doesn't have to be this way... AAAARRRGGHHH?! Well yes, it's one of the games that cemented the genre of 'Ubisoft game' as something people don't really enjoy but tolerate for their own reasons. it's kind of fun, the daunting amount of non-fun stuff you have to do in order to experience all the content without makes me not want to actually finish it. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm still at the beginning.
One thing that confuses me about it is the setting. It's set in revolutionary france, but why? The story so far is about getting revenge for the evil templar's killing your father, and you are hostile to both sides in the revolution. It's just going on in the background, unmentioned by the characters, so I find it a bit wasteful. I often think while playing that game, and many others, that so much work went into making the settings, the atmosphere, the vistas, but that they weren't required, or perhaps weren't integrated into the gameplay. Well, ACU has lots of extremely good graphics, atmosphere and historical detail, so that's nice, but it doesn't carry the actual action of the gameplay very far.
I also played Kingdoms and Castles, a little indie town builder. It's nice, but has no content. You can build a town, but nothing happens if you do, and there is no goal or objective to doing so. It's like age of empires, only it's just you alone on the map making buildings and putting more and more houses down until you fill the space. In this way it's like a tech demo rather than a game - they've got a game engine that lets you build towns, now what's the game actually going be? I heard they are working on adding rival towns to compete for resources, which gives you the beginnings of a full on game, but my approach to that kind of thing is: I was able to play it NOW, and it isn't a game now, so that's a problem. Also, it had some aggregious UI layering issues that I smugly scoffed at, thinking 'I would never let that go in MY game', so I enjoyed that.
Finally I've been playing the Serious Sam VR games, the series of high-paced doom-like shooters ported to VR. They are good! However, I encounted a game breaking bug in the first game, and gave up, especially since that first one is really low budget with beginner-tier level design (aka little to no level design), so it's a bit of a chore. I played 'Last Hope', which is a VR only serious sam game which good production values, but it's a standing wave shooter, so you can only play it for a few hours before you've seen it all. Planning to try Serious Sam 2 and 3 next, which I've heard are much better regarded.
Also having low field of view due to being in VR makes the frantic twitch shooting action of the games kinda hard to keep up with, especially as manually aiming guns makes you focus on the center of your vision so much. In that way, a direct port to VR makes the games kinda hard, as opposed to something that was always meant to be VR. Well... better git gud then.
Also I played the first hour or two of Prey and thought it was too derivative and dry, even though I considered it theoretically good on paper. If it existed in a world without Bioshock of Half Life, it would be genius. Might play more, if I can be bothered.
Oh and I completed Bloodborne again, and got the full ending and all that.
AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
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That's it, just spend hours writing this rubbish, so I hope liked it. Next time I'll tell you how that whole renting a house in wales thing is coming along. See ya!
