The last time I scribbled about Assassin’s Creed, it was with Assassin’s Creed II, whereby I did a post-completion double-take when I realised I had just been manoeuvred into an in-context fist fight with the Pope.
I may have just found my equivalent double-take moment in this follow up title. As it could be considered spoilery, I’ll hide it behind the jump.
This is my last post in this run of “Incomplete Works” but I foresee that I will add more in the future when the following happens:
1) I inevitably start and subsequently run out of steam on a new project.
2) I want to talk about myself again without actually directly talking about myself.
Ego - A pixelated author self insertion character.
Today’s incomplete work is therefore highly relevant as we’re on the theme of talking about myself. Today is Ego.
Ego is a game that I have been building with the help of Game Maker , a fantastic easy-to-learn deeper-than-you-think game development environment that utilises its own very easy to pick up language and is loved by many many startup indie game developers. I consider myself to now be a hobbiest indie game developer having made the horrendously difficult and un-enjoyable Pavlov’s Keyboard (I dare you to have fun) and now this little project.
The game is about creativity and how we often create copies of ourselves in our work. It’s largely a reaction to a lot of my comic work where I have a tendency to draw myself as main characters, or an abstraction of my personality as the main character and it’s a trait that I know others possess as well. Needless to say, the playable character in Ego is a pixelated version of myself just to drive the point home.
Ego is in an alpha state at present. The basic gameplay is there, although there are a few occasional glitches that I can’t quite figure out with the sound and occasionally controls, but it’s largely just graphical and doesn’t actually break the game.
In the tradition of some of my favourite indie studios, I thought I’d offer my initial playable build for feedback and potential enjoyment. One recent victim player got very stuck on one of the levels and started trying to solve it in a rather unusual way and I’d be interested to see if anyone else does the same.
Download Ego – Windows only – .rar file that extracts a single playable .exe
Oh, and just as a quick warning: It’s very short at the moment. The equivalent of a comic that has hit the ten-page mark.
Additional Notes:
Indie studio that is taking the novel concept of a completely open alpha phase: Wolfire Games. These are the guys behind Lugaru, and more recently the Humble Bundles, which have been an incredibly fresh, interesting and overwhelmingly well received idea. Their open alpha involves distributing the current alpha build to everyone that has pre-ordered the game, allowing them to see exactly how the game is progressing and offers a remarkably deep insight into how these things are made. Their site is worth a look and their blog is worth subscribing to, even if the open alpha doesn’t interest you.
I know not everyone uses windows, but really, industry standard and all. If Steam have only just started offering things on Mac and the only other companies producing for Mac are quirky ones like Blizzard or Maxis, then I feel justified in the excuse of “I am not those stuidos”. I can barely grasp what’s going on in the programming here and it’s insultingly simple.
Also, I’m not sure I fully comprehend what Linux is. It sounds like some kind of cat. Maybe an open source cat.
A while ago, I mentioned that I enjoyed Avatar and that it was something I wanted to talk about. I realise that makes it sound like I’m looking for some sort of counseling or that I feel it’s something I need to confess as opposed to express, but I did find it a genuinely interesting film and I’m a little perplexed as to why it received so much hate and negative criticism from the greater geekdom. Perhaps it was just because it did really well and there’s an instinct to disregard anything that’s mainstream.
The theme is what interests me the most. I’m not talking about the basic plot of a man from an industrial and technological culture defecting to a more spiritual and romanticized tribal way of life in the style of dances with wolves or Space-Pocahontas or anything like that. What I mean the basic theme that underpins the entire film: that of escapism.
People who know me would say that I’m not a particularly sporty person. This actually isn’t true: for a large portion of my live I have been involved in competitive dinghy sailing which really is more intense than most people realise, which was always hilarious on the occasions I would take said people out on a boat with me. What those that know me would assume is that I’m not sporty because I don’t ply football very well and don’t spend any time watching the football or formula one or rugby or cricket, therefore I’m not sporty. This is fair enough as I don’t have a huge amount of time for sport as I find it for the most part tedious.
I have found myself enjoying a sport. I have found myself enjoying Starcraft 2.
For as long as I can remember, my computer has been on the very edge of technology. It has always been just a few steps away from being obsolete, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That’s a lie, I would have it another way and I intend to very soon, but it’s a convenient lie that makes me feel special, or at least that it’s on purpose.
I remember being very excited about the release of “Lemmings 2”, not really because it was an amazing game; it wasn’t, they tried to improve the original’s purity by adding in more pointless skills in what was to become my first experience with something suffering from feature creep, but it was a game that would run on the family computer. This was a time where every (very large) game box I picked up had the words “requires a 386 or higher” that disheartened me so much to the point that I believe “386 or higher” became a running joke with my parents because it had become one of those stupid borderline meaningless phrases that I thought might have more meaning than it did.
I’ve always bought and built middle of the range PCs (because to go for the most technologically advanced is a fools errand for anyone that needs their money to eat) and always found myself very quickly having to trick it in to playing certain games, but lately I’ve found a few titles manage to run below the recommended specifications that they list.
What this boils down to is a very roundabout and drop-in-the-ocean love letter to Blizzard and Starcraft 2, which has listed on the back of the box “2.6 GHz or Higher” and yet runs perfectly well (with perfectly meaning all the graphical settings reduced to zero) on my barely-scraping-2.3GHz-if-I-had-the-guts-to-overclock-it-but-last-time-I-tried-something-like-that-there-was-fire-so-closer-to-2.2 machine.
The game itself is fantastic (the description “chess on steroids” is apt), the design is near flawless, the multiplayer is fair and challenging, and the single player storyline has accurately been described as “something a twelve year old would enjoy” which makes me feel guilty for enjoying it so much, because I suspect they’re right. The fact that Blizzard have spent the time to ensure that it will run smoothly on a machine that is now pushing six years old is unbelievable and a testament to their professionalism.
The first thing that popped into my head when I got Starcraft 2 working however was “I wonder if Sim City 2000 WOULD have worked on the 286 after all and why didn’t I at least try?”. Maybe the lesson here is I should stop believing everything I read. Maybe it’s that the more things change the more they stay the same. Maybe it’s that I ramble about things nobody is interested in when I’m hungry. Regardless, technology is ever evolving, but it’s refreshing to see that not everyone is trying to dismiss everything that’s for the most part considered obsolete.
