Lessee...

My PS3 died. Totally bit it.

I was playing Darksiders and while my character was running through some water, the game locked up. Being a game developer and knowing how intense rendering water can be, I was upset, but willling to forgive and forget.

I rebooted and played for another couple of hours...

...and I locked up again. No water in sight. I shut the machine down and tried to reboot. I was presented with a flashing red light.

I tried rebooting again, at which point, the status light of the PS3 turned yellow. I tried again and again... same result.

Decision time: send the machine in for service, pay $140, not knowing if I would get my fully backwards compatible 60GB machine back or not. (Highly unlikely.)

I took a chance and tried to repair it myself.

After following the procedure I discovered online, sure enough, my PS3 was resurrected.

Here was my mistake: I should have backed up my data. I did not.

Again playing Darksiders, the game locked up, this time for good. I attempted a second repair, but alas, was not successful.

And so I bought a new PS3 slim, thinking I could swap my old PS3 hard drive loaded with paid and bought content.

Nope. Not even the free content. Content on a PS3 is encryted to only function on the PS3 that the harddrive has been formatted to...

aight. this is running long. I shall continue the saga at a later date.

Been a while since an update, so I suppose I should keep the blog alive and post something up. So what have I been up to...?

There'a been a lot of chatter about Zynga and their success lately. I know my facebook has been inundated with Mafia Wars spam from so called "friends" asking me join their gang and stuff. I bit the bullet, made a fake FB account and finally gave Mafia Wars a spin. I normally would not have considered it to be a game I would play as it stretches the definition of game pretty far, but I do appreciate how people get hooked on it. Somebody over at Zynga put a lot of effort into the pacing of the rewards that the game doles out. Not sure how much I will continue to play once finish my analysis of it however.

Back in the world of "real" games, A couple months ago I popped Killzone 2 back into my ps3 and went for the platinum trophy. I am glad I did. I enjoyed the game the first time I played through back in April, but by the time I was done with the platinum, I loved the game. The most difficult parts of getting platinum were the Radec Battle on the hardest difficulty and getting ranked in the top 1% of players. The Radec Battle took many tries, but after a while it comes down to the right combination of weapons, tactics, and management of trigger volumes that control the flow of enemies. (I wrote up a detail walkthrough on the forums of www.gamefaqs.com. Search for it if you are having trouble with this mission. Numerous people said it enabled them to finally beat it. Getting ranked as top 1% was more an excercise in dedication. When going for this trophy you have 1 week to do it, from Sunday night to Sunday night when rankings are posted. I had taken a week off work to move into a new house, so I packed and moved boxes and furniture all day and play Killzone 2 for 5-6 hours a night. It was actually really fun, and I feel like I have a better grip on the mechanics of the game now. I can't wait for Killzone 3!

Well, that's all for now. Apologies if this post does follow my traditional formatting as I am typing it in on an iTouch and the blogger compose mode does not seem to work properly.

For Sale: Arcade Games

While the new projects at work are just getting kicked off and I decide what to do with this space, I'll just randomly post game related stuff as the urge takes me.

First up:
ARCADE GAMES FOR SALE!!!

Buyer must pick up. 60046 Zip.

Shinobi. Fully working game in kitted cabinet in nice condition. Monitor is great. Big, red, ball top, leaf joystick is beautiful. Marquee is nice condition. Minor blemishes in workwood. Keep as is or would make a great cabinet for your home arcade project.
$200


Heavy Barrel. Fully working game in a Frankenstein of a cabinet that is in atrocious shape. Started life as a Zaxxon. Must have been a Gunsmoke at some point, judging by burn-in on screen. Heavy Barrel marquee and monitor bezel in decent/good shape. ORIGINAL, DATA EAST, BARREL TOP, LS-30 STYLE ROTATARY STICKS are dirty and in need of a cleaning/service, but fully functional.
$200 for the whole thing. Get it out of here in one piece, or I can strip the worthwhile parts and sell them to you at an extra charge ($300) to cover the hassle of cleaning up the mess made destroying the cabinet. Your choice.

Respond in comments section. First come, first served.

Status: Project Cancelled.

There is a bit of bad news to report. The project has been cancelled.

Suffice it to say that the situation is quite a disappointment for me personally. Looking back at some of the other less successful projects I have been involved with over the years, I came to realize that my best chance at success would occur when I had the greatest amount of control. I have been working towards crafting that type of opportunity for some time and this project was the best crack at it yet; I was steering what the game was, how the game played, how the game looked, and how it was going to be developed. With our schedule and technology firmly in place, we were ready to start cranking out content and building levels as soon as we could get a few extra hands on deck. By my estimation, we could have had real game play within a few weeks.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. I can't really say too much about the reasons why the project was cancelled at this point, and I know that I haven't even revealed what the game itself was. I would look into getting permission to reveal more info, but at this point I am predicting that the project will be ressurrected in the future. Some might say that is overly optimistic of me, but for now I am going to hold off on getting clearance to share what we were up to.

But all is not doom and gloom. Everyone still has their jobs, we advanced the technology and know how of the company considerably, and there are a number of new opportunities in the works to explore in the near future.

Status: 08-26-09: Good Demo.

Yesterday afternoon's demo/budget meeting went off without a hitch. I think the bosses were impressed with the progress we have made so far and liked what they saw on screen. My manpower and cost estimates seemed to be on target, as I did not hear any objections to the numbers that came out of the project management system. And so we have been given the go ahead to soldier on and continue developing the game.

That leaves Tino and myself with just about a month before more people are freed up from other projects and added to the our team. We have a lot of work to do in that time. We're going to finish up the week tomorrow with our regularly scheduled meeting to discuss outstanding tasks and figure out what we want to tackle in anticipation of having a real, bona fide team.

One final note, Chris Brewer again lent his talents to the cause and released yet another version of our custom operating system. We can now quickly boot into the game and access the hardware from our PCs without a lot of telnet malarkey. This is huge. Also, we are noticing considerable performance gains in game, which is always welcomed. SWEET!

All right... this day is nearly over. I am about to head home and get some sleep.

Status: 08-26-09. Last Minute Cram.

Whoa, got a little behind with the updates. It's been a madhouse. Big important meeting with the big cheeses tomorrow to go over the project budget.

I redid the project estimates yet AGAIN, just in time. Reorganized and reformatted the whole shebang. Fortunately, my numbers look pretty good, so I think the I am in decent shape for the grilling tomorrow afternoon.

We're also using the meeting as an opportunity to show management what we've accomplished thus far. As such, Tino and I have been trying to clean up as much stuff as possible over the past couple of days. Naturally, we broke everything. The game was in complete disarray this morning, but with a little effort and a some extra hours, we made serious advances. I just put the final bit of polish on the art a few minutes ago. I think it should show well. We have a lot of fancy new rendering technology to dazzle and amaze with.

Ok, that's it. Off to bed for a couple hours sleep, then right back into the office bright and early to set the machine up in the conference room and do final prep!

Status: 08-14-09. Back Home.

I am back home from Siggraph. Saw some pretty cool stuff. Lot's of food for thought. I would say this year's big concepts were "Games" and "3D Display."

In terms of "Games" everyone seemed to be talking about them. The Siggraph organization recognized realtime graphics with its own Realtime Theater showcasing the latest and greatest games and demos. Even the movie guys were making a point of highlighting the fact that they used realtime techniques and technologies to solve some of their offline rendering issues. I saw and heard a lot about thatgamecompany's Flower, which I ended up enjoying quite a bit, despite the subject matter falling far outside my typical gaming tastes.

As far as "3D Display" was concerned, they seemed everywhere, (or perhaps I was just looking out for them as perception is a topic of great interest to me.) There were a variety of solutions: polarized glasses, multiscreen and mirror contraptions, some sort of lenticular type screen surface, and so on. Some of the different approaches worked better than others, but all of it was intriguing.

Back home on the project front, There was great progress on our effects systems. Fully 3D particles with accurate physics are new for us, as is the ability to render any particle type with full blown programmable shaders.

It is now Tino's turn to be out of town on vacation, so I am going to use the next couple weeks to generate new content for him. I have grown tired of our little smattering of placeholder art already, so I want some fresh stuff to go in the game when he gets back. So there's that, as well as ongoing schedule maintenance. If time allows, I have a couple of design docs to knock out for new game play features.

That is all!

Status: 08-03-09. Out for Siggraph.

Ok, this is this weeks status update already as I am out the door in mere minutes to hop a flight to Siggraph down in New Orleans.

I am looking forward to hitting the Siggraph expo floor this year. There's a bunch of new announcements happening. Pixologic is expected to deliver some details about the upcoming 3.5 release, The Blender Foundation is to do the same in regards to their epic 2.5 release/overhaul, and hopefully 3DCoat is there with their voxel sculpting software. I am also looking to scope out new technologies such as 3D displays, affordable motion capture suites, rapid prototyping solutions, and so on... A week of total computer graphics nerdosity!

On the project front, a bunch of kick ass work went into our particle systems recently. Very cool things happening here. I almost do not want to have to leave town. I can't wait to get back in town and see how far it will have progressed.

Aight, that's it. See ya next week!

Status: 07-30-09. First Controller Protos!!!

Tino has been hard at work on a bunch of stuff. After the successful proof of concept implementations of our screen space shader effects, he's gone back and refined a couple of them and added another big one. On Monday, we're going to sit down and go over each effect and specify how we can bring them up to final quality. A couple of added features here, some number tweaking there, and I think we'll be looking pretty good.

The hardware guys came through with a number of interesting controller prototypes on Wednesday. They have a big challenge ahead of them to create the device I am looking for, but major steps forward were made this week. I am looking forward to the next batch.

By all counts, this is a really great time for the project. It's so cool to see the creativity and exploration of various concepts at this phase, both in hardware and software. Way to go guys!

All right... I'm back to turning out some artwork before I head off to Siggraph next week.

Status: 07-24-09

This week, I have mostly been working on: Schedules.

I am spec'ing the Operator Adjustables screens. WHEEEEEEEEEE!

Status: 07-16-09

For me personally, this week has largely been all about staring at schedules and projections. I probably have another week's worth left, at least. I am itching to turn out some art and get some new stuff on screen!

On the software side, great progress is happening daily. We're really looking to blur the line between film and videogames with this project, and so far we are making great strides to that end; I am well pleased. Once we're a bit further along, I will go into more detail, but at the moment I am confident in saying that there are certainly no other coin op games out there that are doing what we are doing.

Regarding the new controller, the driver that interfaces the current working unit with the development system was revisited. We're getting much better performance out of the thing now, so that's all good. Tomorrow there's a meeting scheduled to look at progress on the first prototype of the device, so I am anxiously looking forward to that.

In addition to the weekly status updates, in the next week or so, I hope to write a little about how the project got started, so come on back!

Status: 07-10-09

Wow, the last two weeks have been pure rock and roll. Let's see...

As we are developing a brand new type of controller for the game, we need to begin development of the game itself while the device is still being designed. I did some looking around and found some hardware that I hoped might serve as a temporary stand in. The big unknown was if we could get it to run on our dev systems at all. Fortune smiled on us however as once it was in house we handed it off to Mr. Chris Brewer who just totally blew us all away by getting it hooked up and returning data within the space of a day.

Another day or two of clean up, and Chris handed it off to Tino Kalafatis, programmer on the project. A few hours later and POW! The device was integrated into the game. Stellar work.

This week, Chris went back and took another look at his work and found a was able to make significant improvements to his code. Again, he handed it off to Tino and within a day, it all automagically went in and worked.

I was happy to see substantial progress on the hardware front, because I personally have been up to my neck in projections and scheduling. It's not all bad, but just not as exciting and initially rewarding as seeing stuff happening on screen for the first time.

That is it for now. There's more progress brewing today that I cannot wait to share next week!

Project: Ground Rules.

Welcome!

Here's the deal: Over here at Incredible Technologies, I have recently kicked off development of a brand new game and I want to share the process with you, the reader. Why? Well, first and foremost, I am extremely excited about this project; more so than any other I have yet to work on. So much so in fact, that I feel compelled to share the experience with the everyone that cares to listen!

In addition, the current reality of coin op coverage in the regular gaming press these days is that coin op games do not get much love. I would like to see that change. Part of the reason for this situation is that coin op companies are not doing enough to engage the end user. So by effectively leveraging the power of blogs, social media networks, and so forth, the hope is that with regular updates of interesting content, this game might just help coin op grab a little more “ink,” as it were.

To those ends, the goal is to update the blog twice a week with behind the scenes information and commentary. I will talk about the process of building a game start to finish: from the original germ of the idea all the way to bringing the final product to market. Look for interviews and guest pieces from members of the team, discussions regarding the decisions concerning the game we are making and why, and maybe even a coin op history lesson or two along the way.

It should be noted however that here are a few things I will not be doing, at least not right away. The coin op industry is highly competitive and extremely fleet. Should the game be revealed too early, it is possible that it could be beaten to market. With that in mind, I will not be talking directly about the specifics of the game play or even the genre the game falls under for a period of time. Fortunately, development cycles for coin op games are markedly shorter than those typical of console titles, so please just hang in there and stay tuned.

Hopefully you too will be able to share my enthusiasm through this blog. So if you are a player, perhaps you will follow along in anticipation, eventually seeking the game out upon release in order to try it. Perhaps you are one of our customers and want to know all about that next great product for your locations. You might even be a member of the gaming press, tired of covering the upteenth console World War II shooter, looking for fresh gaming stories to liven up your site with.

Whatever the case, keep coming back, and I will try to keep it entertaining and insightful!