Plan for Tyler Frans

Haven't been by GG.com in awhile and figured I'd update my .plan.

-TSRR-

Toothless Stumpjumpin Roadkill Rally is coming along nicely. Emp (one of our programmers) test drove our latest vehicle for TSRR, the F150 4x4. I must say it sure does get exciting when your ideas begin to come to life. Seeing the screenshots of two tribal armors roaming around T2 maps in a F150 was rather hillarious. :) We've finally received the morian and wadtool for World Craft and textures, so fleshing out Hicksville, USA is finally underway. We're really blessed to have such a great team.

-The future of Eye Sore Studios?-

I had the nostalgia bug this last week and decided to go through some of my past works I have boxed up in my garage. I came across some old concept art and pieced treatments I was doing for an anime indie company back in '95. After reading some of my old work and thinking, "Whoa, here's a great storyline for a game" ... I sat down and thought about the possibility of creating the game. There's definitely a great story to be told and it'd be fairly easy to tailor it to gameplay.

I took the next step and spun the ideas to my programmers about game development for a stand-alone title. They were very enthusiastic ... so now the ball is rolling. We may be jumping at a lease of the V12 engine in the near future.

Yesterday Dave Meddish, Pete Osborne and myself hit the Roadhouse to bs and toss the concept around over some steak and brew. All went well and Dave hit the nail on the head with "gameplay, gameplay, gameplay."

So what now? I've dove back into research on the background story (already had damn near 6 years invested) and I've gone back to working on my old and new concept art. With any luck, this is the birth pangs of our future.

-Gaming in general-

Just spoke with Nels Bruckner the other day and found out he's landed a gig with Sony, he'd mentioned Pipeworks is on its way out (if not dead already). It's unfortunate that Pipeworks hit such dire straits, alot of great talent under one roof. I wish Nels luck on his new job.

With the latest schtuff happening over at Dynamix (patch recall, layoffs - once again, etc, etc), I'm alittle worried about about the support we were promised for TSRR and it got my brain jogging about the industry in general. There's been alot of bad blood lately among the Sierra family: Rogue versus Valve, MM3D reopening its lawsuit against Sierra, etc. And the bad mojo isn't just within Sierra's realm, alot of PC developers are hanging on by their nails right now. Novalogic is clinging to its latest production with the hope it will pull it out of the hole. If not, they are dead in the water. From a gameplayer perspective, I'm really forseeing Console pushing PC to small productions. I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft turns its production funding towards XBox games exclusively. If you merge pc power with console ... ;)

Stability and "finished" games are what'll pull me to buying a good console system. I know, as a die hard gamer, I'm tired of getting ump-teen million patches through the life of damn near every game I purchase nowadays. I realize the majority of this is optimization since there's no way any QA could nail all the system configs out there. But, yeesh ... companies seem to have turned to the public to bug hunt for them exclusively now, which is great, but I see it as more of a money saver in their eyes than a true "optimizing our product to finished quality." Finished games have become a "beta in a box", you pay $60 and over the next year or two, they'll try and finish the game they spent years developing. Never thought my old Airborne Rigger training creed would become my game purchasing creed: "I will be sure always." :\ Kill the early marketing and just finish the game ... pleeeeeease. I know I can wait. :)

Anywho, that's my take on things lately. I'm contemplating picking up some old humorous (Grim Fandango, Disc World, etc) titles and some adventure titles just to reaffirm my faith and love of gaming. The RTS and FPS is kinda on the downslide in innovation. Everything is geared toward eye candy. E3 has shown some pretty cool titles, but nothing I'm absolutely drooling over. Okay, I take that back ... Operation Flashpoint is on my hot list. :)

Take care,
T. "Sty" Frans