Pirate's life for me

Its almost strange not to start .plan with "it's been a while since I posted a .plan" kinda phrase. Perhaps I'm giving in to vanity. Last year was .planless for me and now- two blog posts in two months. Surely something's wrong with me.
Anyway, I just finished a surprisingly short art contract. Blake's blog touched upon it already, since he was contracted by Twintale to work on The Pirate Tales too (creating damn fine backgrounds art, let me tell you. I'm a jealous little twat, I cant help but envy his art, sue me).
Surprising because I must say I was a little bit skeptical of the whole idea that game will be created in a month. But its been month and a half and the game is here. Granted, its got testing phase and some polishing will occur, perhaps some things will be redone, but the play mechanics are there, the whole 100 or so levels are there, art is there... the game is there.



And its not a simple match clone either the gameplay is quite unique. In Pirate Tales, matching on its own means nothing, you dont get no points for simply matching a red piece with another two depressingly similar pieces. Matching is just a tool to complete objectives (which are tied neatly into a funky story), a way to interact with the gameboard, not a goal on its own.
My job was to supply the GUI, game pieces, portraits for all the characters, opponents and objectives as well as any other tiny unnoticable little thingummies we dont think about but any game needs them nevertheless.
Blake Lowry made the gorgeous backdrops for game. I really felt guilty when, while tinkering with the GUI, I realized that this part will be omitted by gui. As I said before, I'm a sucker for his art. Those flowers on your doorstep this morning, Blake? That was me.








Thats the cool thing about freelancing, you get to work with so many different cool guys on so many different cool projects.

For those who dont dig pirates, I just found a cool reading- an excerpt
from Jeff Minter's (of Tempest, Gridrunner++ and Llamatron fame) book "History of Llamasoft". Truly an inspiring reading. I dont know, the guy is so really humble and..I dunno, the word that creeps upon me is "sober". A rarity in neon flashing, ego cult driven online environment we have today.
Here's a paragraph I really really liked, made me kinda all warm inside, I even dont know why, technically, it was before my time:

"One problem we had with the PET was that there was no sound generator built in to the machine, which made designing satisfying games a bit harder - games aren't really games without a few electronic burbles to signify the firing of shots and the explosions of enemies.

However, we discovered a way to work around it. If you placed an AM radio near the machine while it was working, the CPU would generate RF noise that could be picked up as interference on the radio. And we found that if you altered what the CPU was doing you could cause variations in that noise. If you stuck it into a tight loop, and then caused that loop to lengthen slightly with each iteration, then you could actually hear quite a passable 'zap' noise in the interference on the radio."

Man, thats just plain awesome... :)



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