Blog for Nauris Krauze at GarageGames.com

State of the Union Illustrated

Nauris Krauze — 2008-05-21T17:38:06+00:00

Well, it's been a while. Kind of understatement really. My .plans are getting semi-yearly and sound more and more like state of the union speech. All is well and I am a shining city on the hill. Or somesuch.
Thing is, this has been a really full year-and-half, full of various projects and thingies. I've finally gotten used to working on a purely freelance basis and love it. There are some drawbacks, such as being a lone wolf, which sometimes make life.. well.. lonely. Not having someone behind you pointing out stuff, critisizing things or boosting morale time to time, is kinda downer.
Partially I've balanced it out, taking on some local contract work here in Latvia, like for CTXM, a company recently dubbed by Gamasutra as "the biggest XBLA developer you don't know about". It's good to be able to barge into some offices time to time, screaming "Banzai!" and see that you are, actually, working for real people in real flesh in real offices, not just some virtual entities who might as well exist entirely in my head.

One of my proudest moments were when "Carribean Hideway", a TGB casual game landed on top10 at Bigfishgames, in third position among puzzle games and fourth position among all the games together. I did the GUI, gamepieces, characters, basically all, except for backgrounds which were done by Ever Great Blake Lowry. The funny thing is, the game was relesead year before as Pirate Tales and it didnt do that well. "Carribean Hideaway" simply was much more polished version with metagame added and..well, it just felt right.
I know, it's been discussed endless times that polish makes or breaks your game but I'll say that again - an additional month of polish can mean x10 financial difference for your baby. Spit and polish!

Another feat I'm really proud about is a project I just completed my part but can't really talk about yet. It's a casual game for Wii, a mix of quest, hidden-object and courtroom drama. It was also a project where I most severly felt how working alone might backfire. Although for the first two months I conscripted my brother to help out, the workload turned out to be much higher than anticipated. In the end it meant me being the weakest link when it came to deadlines and that's really a title I'm not comfortable with. At times I felt really burnt out in spite of project itself being really interesting and people I worked with being really nice chaps.
Main reason was simply underestimating the amount of work needed for hidden object game. For those out there who are planning to ride the wave of current popularity of the genre - think twice, plan carefully and be prepared for surprises, the amount of art assets needed is huge. No..that doesnt sound right... HUGE!
Anyway, towards the end I learned a trick or two, streamlined the whole process and it has been valuable experience. So.. all's well and I'm a shining city on top of the hill. Or somesuch.
:)

Also, I got involved in a really neat project, developed by Max Gaming Technologies and 21-6 Productions- a Firefighter Safety sim - a "serious game" aimed at preparing Incident Commanders - kind of a tool that allows playing out various scenarios and see consequences of various decisions in virtual environment. My work was mostly GUI-oriented with some illustration thrown in.

The local company CTXM contracted me for various thingies but nothing of that has been released yet and some stuff has been put on backburner like this Robin Hood casual game I was asked to write and draw inter-mission comics for.

And then a really zany and cool project that's still in progress by Christian Rousselle, inspired by oldie-but-goodie - "Gravity Force". I'm doing level backgrounds plus some other stuff and it's one of those times when you can have refreshing freedom artistically. The theme and game itself allows me running amok with scissors (and battleaxes and sabres and cutlasses if I feel like it) artistically and in the end it always looks kinda.. ok :) In screenshots you can see the whole level while in game it's usually something like one sixth that fills the screen.

Among in-progress things, there's also an quest "Resonance", low-res, old-school and with quite unusual play-mechanics. Which reminds me that I still owe Vince some backgrounds...

On my own spare time I'm slowly tinkering and experimenting with a pet-project of mine. It's basically turn-based mech strategy with, hopefully, some interesting and unusual play mechanics, with simple metagame thrown on top of it. A bit like Jagged Alliance, man I loved that game.
I'm still just planning and testing some things graphically, looking for where to cut some corners and basically make it feasable for couple of guys to actually finish. Time.. there's never enough of it.. Or somesuch.

Apart from gamedev, I did this and that, some posters-flyers-tickets-whatnot but nothing too extensive, I guess I just like games too much to spend too long on something that's not games. One neat thingie was kinda small story-book project for a company that's selling sports and tourism equipment. They've always been kinda green and hippy company and the book had to reflect that. So it's a story about three weird characters who, in search of stuff to do, become champions of forest. Kinda whacky so I loved it :)

And for those who havent fallen asleep yet - some sketches and thingummies for my personal pleasure:

Oh.. almost forgot... 56K warning! :P

Jelly Fish Named Azad and Marbles Blasted To XP

Nauris Krauze — 2007-03-20T12:13:57+00:00

Talk about schizophrenic blog titles ;)

As I've said before, life of a mercenary is pretty cool in that you get to work on such different stuff. There's also that "freedom" bit although I find it kind of vague. It's true that as a freelancer you can always choose whether to work or not, but on the other hand, its like choosing whether to eat or not. What you can though, is choosing what kinds of project to work on without having to break a work relationship i.e. - leave your job for another just because your current employer has decided to tie themselves for the next year to a project that doesnt really interest you.
Which reminds me of a recent feature on Gamasutra about free agency. Quite an interesting read, if you havent checked it out yet. Clickity click here.

So I've been working on very different stuff for the last year. One, for example, was Marble Blast GUI reskin for Hasbro's PC based NetJet game system .
Plastic Games subcontracted me to spice up the original's GUI a little and also make it a bit more "kid-centric" since thats the target audience for NetJet.
The basis was original Marble Blast:

and in the end it was turned into this:

And then again, I could also work on concept art for sureal sci-fi shooter-adventure Galaxy Rage where player travels stars with jelly fish-like organic space ship named Azad, hunt for treasures happens in landscapes that seem to be pulled out of incoherent dreams and ship's mission control and news-filter computer has a crush on the main hero.
Here are some sketches for the ship's bridge, showing the evolution of concept. It was supposed to be organic in nature and we came up with an idea that it's floating in a swamp-like environment, with its very own mini ecosystem.

I was provided list of elements that should be on the bridge as well as things that player will have to do there and a basic layout done in Google Sketch that I used as the starting point.
I have to say that I cant wait to see it in action :)

Hmm.. did I mention in my title that .plan is image-heavy? Ah well :) Just to make it all worse for those on dial-up - here are couple of personal thingummies, not meant for anything specific.

Pirate's life for me

Nauris Krauze — 2007-02-16T17:29:33+00:00

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... :)

"Say "Hallo" to my reader friends, Sharky..."

Retrospective blabber

Nauris Krauze — 2007-01-12T01:48:17+00:00

It's kind of weird, but dates don't lie - year 2006 was .plan free for me. And I wasn't "out of the loop" either, GG site is an integral part of my daily routine. It's just that there was no time to sit down and actually write anything. Which probably means you can't accuse me of being an attention whore :P

Anyway, last year was really important for me. There were quite some changes in my personal life, I relocated back to my home country, I got to work on various really cool projects, I became a full time freelancer with all its pros and cons and finally, when all is said'n done - I have become a tiny bit of a better artist too. So, when I look back, on the whole, I think last year was a good one.

Relocating and going full time freelancing have opened a whole new world for me. Before, I was in a bit of a peculiar position in that I could do whatever I wanted and didnt have to worry about such insignificant details like "money".
Last year that changed and, boy, did it change the pace of my life. Which I'm really glad about. I wouldnt have had chance to work on all those cool things if I wasnt so much more alert and on-the-lookout now when freelancing is THE source of my income.
Well, living in Latvia tones down the urgency somewhat. Its equivalent of living in Mexico, I guess. Stuff is just so much cheaper here that I can live comfortably while charging indy prices.
Wouldnt work if I had stayed in Switzerland, a complete opposite price-wise.
Plus, I get proper beer now :)

Last year also marked completion of "simple casual game". It was thought that I'll spend around month on it. Instead, it was full year. Of course, I didnt work on it all the time, but still. I'm talking about MGT's "Kachinko"
and it could well be the game that educated me about gamedev better than long studies in some fancy-pants university would. I'll do post-mortem on the art side of things somewhen soon, it was truly a great learning experience for me.

As was working with GG's Joe Maruschak on "Rack 'em Up Road Trip". I worked only on some assets (tables and cues) but communication with Joe is so educational that in the end you almost feel like you should be paying GG for chance of working with him, not the other way around.

Another cool thing has been an ongoing project, a promotional comic for Max Gaming Technologies game in making "Tankerz". Its a weird post-apocalyptic action game with wacky characters and..well, its just weird in a cool way, alright? I have been given complete freedom with the comic and I had an idea that perhaps the main characters in the comic are not the ones player plays with in-game, just couple of dudes who happen to meet all the key characters and visit the key locations but who dont play any integral part in the game-plot. Thus the Sarge and the Private were born, two ex-military guys who wander around the nuclear wasteland, trying to understand this brave new world, where everything has changed. Its been taken more time than I thought it would, not because of the art, but because of the writing, its such a laconic format.

There have been quite a lot of other stuff too, some I cant talk about yet, some, I'm unsure whether I can talk about or not, some just hasnt made that milestone where you can sit back and say: "here, this is how much the game has improved and I did this and that".
However, one cool thing I think I can talk about is "Galaxy Rage", an open-ended shooter with sureal visuals, intriguing plot and really REALLY interesting world. I was asked to provide concepts for locations/planets and they had to be unusual and sureal (there's a reason for those worlds looking so strange). Screens on their website show build with placeholder art, pre-my-concepts so, you know, it'll look even cooler :)

Player's space ship which is also a sentient jellyfish and also a good friend of main hero. I'm not even intoxicated while writing this.

Player's hazard suit. Its not manufactured, in fact, its alive and has been grown on player.

A neurotic ocean

A cold and dangerous place.

Dejobaan are aiming for Galaxy Rage release this summer and I really hope they make it, its so interesting and unusual project. And I hope I'll be so lucky and keep on getting chances of working with cool people on cool schtuff. Cause I love it :)
There, that was my mandatory Retrospective Blog :P

Saturday Nov 26 21:32

Nauris Krauze — 2005-11-26T21:32:23+00:00

Yeh, long time no type.

Yeh, long time no type.
I'm not much of a .plan-posting type, its been a while since the last one. The thing with .plans is- if you dont post them regularly, there are lots of things which you dont feel like writing about after a while.
Anyway, things have been whizzing past with the speed of light.
Pre-IGF days were the busiest, since it was a significant milestone for so many projects. I dont know why, but non-negotiable deadlines are so invigorating. Perhaps I'm just an adrenaline junkie.
There's just something sweet in that sudden Paul's "hey, it's not in the high priority tasks, but what if we did make a new art for all the GUI for Flash Bios?" And you both know its crazy because there's other stuff to be done, and deadline is looming and the countdown is not days anymore, its hours... And then you MAKE time. Ok, I'm rambling, but its just seriously cool until the deadline passes, of course, and then you hit pillows with that dull thud.

- Hey, why dont we give GUI an overhaul now, instead of after-IGF, huh?
- You're completely out of your bonkers. Sure, let's do it!

Well, helluva run it was. There was work on couple of other games during that time, but they're kinda not of public knowledge as of yet.
Then i lost my hard drive, as well as motherboard, ram and cpu. Well, crap happens, I can only be thankful that it happened right after the IGF and not before. Plus I have an external hard drive for backups which means I salvaged most of the stuff. Lucky me.
Anyway, apart from that adrenaline pump, things have been running in a rather zen-like fashion, if I may.
There was a short contract work for 21-6. Nothing big, couple of skins, it was more of filling-the-gaps job, but anyway, it was cool having the opportunity to work with Justin Mette. He's a cool guy, clear-headed and smart. If I'll say anything more, I'll sound like some matchmaker, I guess.

Skinned by me, models by Craig Fortune and L Foster.

Other contract thingie has been for Bryan Edds, I guess I just liked the weird world idea where all characters are marbles, the game world "isnt real" and..well its weird :)

Its a mockup thingie, but using actual in-game assets

Some location images. I since its "all about marbles", I wanted everything have slightly "roundish" shapes. It's actually quite hard to draw world inhabited by marbles. In such a world there wouldnt be steps, for example and architecture would be Really Weird, but after some discussions, we decided to keep basic concepts recognizable. The first images just looked unrecognizable and alien, it certainly wasnt a world bipeds like us could make much sense of.

Snachurz have been progressing slowly but steadily. Which is other way of saying that it's been coming slower than we expected back in the summer. On the other hand, stuff is being done, James Urquhart is doing his code voodoo, Ben "Djaggernaut" Chavigner is secretly lowering my self-esteem by churning out really niiiiiice (and I mean niiiiice) models and skins and Craig Fortune is betraying the fancy-pants artists species by actually understanding what James is talking about, while bombarding me with 3D models. I guess its some kind of indie family thing. I've heard that families are like fudge- mostly sweet with a few nuts. That nuts thing? Thats me.

Rocket Launcer Rocky With Its Trusty Companion The Projectile

Speaking of nuts... Tom Bampton and me have been kicking around an idea about turn based strategy for like...ages. So recently Tom just said something sophisticated along the lines "f*k it" and actually started coding. We decided that initial plans are way too grand and the whole stuff is prone to burn-out and fizzle. So currently we're aiming for much more contained design upon which to build later.
Its basically a turn-based strategy, a "mini-Civ" if you will, set in a harsh post-apocalyptic world which allows rich pickings for ruthless warlords and enlightened restorers alike. Welcome to the Sunburn.

Misc Stuff

I thought it would be cool to share some of the recent findings of mine. None of them alone is important enough for a .plan or even forum post, yet I believe they could help some. In fact, I'm convinced many of you have stumbled upon cool thingummies like these, so perhaps its not such a bad idea to include them in the end of your .plans. Perhaps with time not only pictures would indicate a "healthy" .plan but also such random findings.

Aenigma Fonts
Free fonts are chore. Lots of font libraries on the net boast having free fonts, but once you start downloading them and reading licenses of individual fonts included in .zips, the picture becomes bleaker and bleaker- many of them dont allow use in commercial products, many are free only for indie comics, some are emailware and author wants written request sent before use. It's a mess.
That's why I was pleasantly surprised, stumbling upon Aenigma Fonts. They're all made by one person, they all have once license and they're all free for commercial use. Those are quality fonts, all kinds, lots of them. Nice website, nice font previews. Enjoy.

Van Buren Design Docs
Van Buren was the code name of Fallout3 back from when it was the Black Isle that worked on the franchise. Fallout fan-site No Mutants Allowed has somehow gotten their dirty radiated hands on the design docs for locations and quests that were used for Van Buren.
Lookie for docs HERE.
I believe they'd be of interest to anyone who's on a crusade to create a complex game, with many dependencies, bunch of locations where player might and will return numerous times, character progression etc. In other words- RPG.
Docs are messy, they obviously were meant for strictly internal use, and writers knew well that they'd change numerous times. I think that adds to the value of documents, and sets apart them from other design docs floating "in the internets". Warning- if you have High Sensitivity perk, avoid the docs- chance of Strong Language random encounter is pretty high. There, thats all the encouragement you need ;)
Ah, I'd recommend starting reading with 01_Tibbets_Prison.doc since its the first location and the document is also kind of a template for all the other location docs.

John Sawyer on project management
Another goodie on No Mutants Allowed. John Sawyer, formerly of Black Isle Studios, gives good tips on project management. The target audience is mod teams, but it doesnt really matter in this case. Some good stuff HERE.

Moonpod Developer Diary
Good stuff. Indie developers from Moonpod, creators of Starscape, are keeping "kinda monthly" dev diary. Good read, shows the progress and evolution of their upcoming project, various decisions they have made and why they were made. HERE.

Well, that's about it :)

Wednesday May 18 20:42

Nauris Krauze — 2005-05-18T20:42:40+00:00

It's getting harder and harder to actually sit down and write a .plan. Time has become a scarce commodity. Not a bad thing really, but then again - .plan writing has that special retrospective quality that helps you get your mind straight. So in fact, all the .plans, including this, are amateurish efforts of self-analysis. Bear with me in this journey through oceans of Rorschach specks and jungles of banana trees.

First, at last I'm happy and proud owner of Nikon D70 digital camera. I had craved for digital camera for some time, but also wanted one that could use the objectives of my F65. Finally price of D70 has fallen to acceptable level and I got around to purchasing it.
Of course, I immediately set out for some texture hunt and realized how weird people are looking at me, with my camera and tripod, focusing on some ugly ghetto cement wall. I guess I'll just have to get used to it.
Currently I've set myself unofficial goal of creating pretty varied texture library, in July I'm spending two weeks home in Latvia and there should be some rich pickings of post-soviet nature.

Second, Snachurz love continues, we had some debates and there have been some serious tech changes, but we'll talk about them when we have more to show. Right now just some concept art for one of the maps Craig is slaving on.

Third, with all the Snachurz work, contract thingies and helping here and there, I suddenly understood that I havent done any art just for my own pleasure, its always some kind of task. A rather bad thing, since certain art muscles become fat and slow that way. So I decided to start speedpainting. Basically, its simply painting roughly, keeping time in mind, picture shouldnt take more than 30 minutes. So you end up just barely defining shapes and getting mood and then- finita la comedia, move on to the next one. Had forgotten how much fun it can be, not really worrying about anything, just hacking away. Kinda like GID mentality.

Here are some of the quickies. Time ranges from 15 to 30 minutes per each.

Finally, some last GID doodles for Antocalypse Now. Now, I didnt really spend much time on this GID, mostly because Tom had gathered bunch of cool artists and not much needed doing in the first place:) Most of my work was done pre-GID with concepts.
From what Tom was blabbering, I gathered game had very Nam feeling, desperate, f*k all, we-are-all-gonna-die-anyway. Which I followed.

On the GID day, it appeared that not much 2D work was needed anyway, so I just polluted IRC channel till Tom shut my mouth saying i should make something for the menu screen. Which was fine and dandy, only noone had any clue what the game was called. Since I had googled lots of Vietnam related images in the morning, Apocalypse Now imagery was burnt into my frontlobe so I asked what about Antocalypse Now? Which was fine with Tom so ANow it was. Thats the great thing about gidding, such stuff gets easily out of way. Go snitch to Copola now. Next step obviously was imitating Apocalypse Now movie poster, just because it was the sillyiest thing to do and all. I think it's got the right feeling of the original.

For the rest of the GID I slacked and watched those 3D monster gurus in work and threw around silly remarks like the only pupil who has not gotten after-lessons assignment but hangs around anyway and wrecks everybody's nerves.
Oh, yeh, I also made this little composition portrait of Djaggs beautiful ant soldier and gave it a cigarette. Just because it was GID and I could. Was supposed to be a portrait of selected unit but it didnt make it into the game. So here it is- limited edition, rarity and whatnot.

And finally, on an even merrier note, I'm ready to share my late-nights addiction - a small, yet really interesting shareware beta of a game made by Turkish couple. Mount&Blade, check out
Taleworlds .
Its RPG. With dynamic gameworld ala Pirates! With *tumtetum* mounted combat I have never seen before. Why hasnt anyone made a game like that before? It gives completely different tone to combat, charging enemy knights on your steed, arrows zipping by and sticking in your shield while you do medieval equivalent of drive-by shooting but with pitchfork or turkish sword. Game is obviously not finished yet, but beta has large community already, eagerly waiting for mod tools, flooding poor devs with suggestions and sharing their adventures in forums. Recommended. Mounted combat has never been more fun. Oh, wait, I havent really seen mounted combat before!
Btw, cool dude (he's so cool because he works on Snachurz, dig it?) Robert Brower is in final stages of preparing for release of horse pack for Torque. Last I heard, he's putting together some promo materials, pack itself is ready. No its not pimping. Yes, I wish him the best.

You know what? With M&B and the brand new fan-made expansion pack for Thief2 (with cinematics, pro-level voice acting and even more pro map-design) my gaming needs are covered for now. Retail shelves can start crying for me, because I sure am not gonna cry for them.

Ok, so it was lengthy incoherent rambling, but hey- it has pictures! And I feel better already. See, its cheaper than renting couch for 50 bucks per hour in the office of complete stranger who couldnt care less whether you hated your father or like to dress like wookie when its full moon.

Saturday Mar 5 17:50

Nauris Krauze — 2005-03-05T17:50:25+00:00

Torque2D quickstart pack and other stuff

Well, I guess I start every .plan of mine with "busy busy weeks" but thats the truth! And I still maintain it's a good thing :)

Snachurz are taking its toll, plus Craig and Robert, gearheads that they are, decided to create a bikes pack and I'm forced to research net for lots of shiny pictures just to be able to skin them in a convincing manner. Since I'm in no way fan of motorbikes, I suspect lots of looking over my shoulder and remarks like: "that's nowhere near as it should be" by Craig and Robert in near future:) But that's all good, I'm actually eager to try my hand on these puppies.

(Work in progress shot, Craig screams that forks on dirtbike and cruiser are placeholders. I heard you first time, man:)

In between all that, there has been an odd contract work then and now, and I like it, as it allows to take another task, when previous one becomes tedious, thus keeping me fresh all the time.

However, the main reason of this .plan is umm..lets call it Torque2D Quickstart Pack, although its not exactly t2d specific, and not exactly all-encompassing to be called truly quickstart pack. It's basically a collection of tiles and sprites, some taken from long dead 2D projects, some created specifically for this pack.
Its meant primarily for coders who are tinkering with T2D and prolly want to have some placeholder art to test ideas with. As I said before, its not all-encompassing, initial idea was to provide small sets of environments for side-scrollers, some "puzzly" elements etc, but we decided that it'd take too much time and effort we werent really ready to spare for a free pack.
Oh yes, there was an idea of creating commercial one, at some point, but in the end, i personally see no reason why people would spend money for a pack that does not feature hundreds of tiles and sprites. Plus, its really easy to modify 3D models and retexture them so no one even notices that this model has been in other games as well, but with 2d art you cant really do that. So, free it is.
Oh yeah, you can download it here or simply visit De-Railed homepage.

Below are some samples of what can be found in the pack. One thing, though, the top down forest+city shot is slightly doctored picture, since it was meant to be used in game as background at some point. However, those changes arent really that significant.

Tuesday Feb 15 11:22

Nauris Krauze — 2005-02-15T11:22:51+00:00

Busy busy busy, which is a good thing, indeed.

These have been couple of busy weeks. Thats kind of understatement, though :)
First, there was "T2D fever" during which Craig Fortune and me did some of the art for Torque 2D demos. In three words - it was a blast! Josh and Melv allowed us to go crazy, and you dont tell artist to go mad twice. We dutifully went berserk.
I think each tiny idea went through at least couple of reworks, just because we wanted to.
During all this brainstorming we stumbled upon couple of interesting gameplay ideas that T2D would be well suited for, but were a bit too grand to implement in
a short time, plus Josh played the devil's advocate and challenged us to make them not simply demos, but full games. So we decided to put them in dusty drawer and pursue a bit later, emphasis on "bit".
It's hard to keep focus when such an awesome tech gives heaps of ideas, but
one...must...resist... and Snachurz
is our main prerogative.

Work on Snachurz has been gliding nicely, us fancy pants artists have been working on art assets while Russ and Robert are tinkering around with code. The idea is to get very basic prototype working somewhen soonish, like this weekend, to see how things look, what works and what doesnt work that well.
No real point babbling about it now, although I sure will when we have something slapped together :)
Plus, De-Railed itself has gotten a website
now, check out www.de-railed.com, its our home now:) Not promising new content every day, though, actual development gets kinda...you know...priority :)

Here's one of the Snachurz vehicles without mounted weapons, so its currently peacful hippie aircraft :) We call it Egghead. Requires some environmental map tweaking as well as some additional bells and whistles, but for prototype we'd be set with even much less finalized art anyway..
Pity you cant see its sexy rotors in action :)

On other news - I've been doing some stuff for Paul Dana and, although I cant ramble about it and steal Paul's thunder, I must say one thing, otherwise I'll burst - It Damn Well Rocks! Its a small game, with no need for huge art, but its amazingly fun. The idea is so simple, yet makes so much sense and plays so well.
One evening, when Paul sent me prototype (no art, nothing) I had to give up my PC to my wife for about an hour until she went through all the content in prototype. Damn you, Paul, when you release this puppy, I'll keep it secret from my Significant Other, or I'll be not able to work anymore :P

Friday Jan 14 16:29

Nauris Krauze — 2005-01-14T16:29:29+00:00

Airborne snatchers and hunt for The Programmer.

Long time no .plan - I've been awfully busy and lots of things have happened. However, in this .plan I'll be talking about one of them.

GarageGames is a truly exceptional community in the sense that its here that you'll find some of the best and dedicated indies. I've come to know several really great guys its a pleasure to work with. One of them is
Craig Fortune - we just somehow "click" with each other. During the last months we did this and that together, finding that we can produce lots of stuff in no time, exploiting each other's strengths. Craig is awesome 3D modeller; I'd love to think I'm fairly good with one dimension less.

I think it was one of the GiDs during which we understood that this tandem works together well. I must tell you, there's no better way of finding how well you work together than a GiD, when there's constant pressure and assets have to be produced in a hurry. See BattleSheep for the results of one zany Game in a Day :)

Anyway, to cut long story short, me and Craig decided that its probably a good idea to work together more than on occasional GiDs, and maybe forming a "band" together. I say "band" because its definitely is not a "company" yet, for we havent bothered with formalities and most likely will not, until the need really arises, and I also have learned to distrust word "team" because there are so many people nowdays, running around with fire in their eyes and yelling about 15-20 people teams they have brought together. Needless to say, most of them collapse under their own weight in no time. So "band" it is. We want to keep things as small, flexible and efficient as possible, so its not a problem simply remembering all the members of a collective :)

Shortly before this decision Craig had introduced a simple, yet elegent and tempting idea of a game. So the "band" which goes under the name De-railed, will be working on Snachurz a stylish airborne shooter with emphasis on multiplayer aspect and an arcade mentality. Plus, couple of unique selling points. Actually, the work has already begun - there's a fair bunch of art assets created, we have roughly shaped the idea and written basic design guidelines. No design bible on thousand-something pages though, and it'll be kept that way. However, there are some things still to be defined, the reason they are not yet is that it would be foolish to tackle them without the input from programmer. And now comes the part of the .plan - we are looking for one :)
Caring, passionate, intelligent and non-smoker... wait no, as this is not a marriage proposal, forget what I just said :) What we are looking for is good programmer, familiar with Torque, able to cover all the bases. IRC-active so we are in touch and not left each in his own basement pondering on what the others are doing, if anything at all. Person one can bounce ideas off, able to keep focus, minor madness is not a minus :) In short: The Cool Guy Who Can Get The Stuff Done.
In other words, we are searching for a partner in crime, with whom to work together and form a company together when the time comes. Someone with whom we have that right kind of chemistry that allows us all to work efficiently together. Third of the say, third of the fame, glam, girls (you can keep mine, as I'm married:) and profits. Yes, its bad taste to lure specialists with uncertain income in an uncertain future, but we believe we actually might have some chance.

To see what all this Snachurz fuss is about - visit the website - its slightly too representative for a project at this stage; I must confess. It was created mainly to lure unsuspecting programmers. So in a way its recruiting effort; see, we care about you :)
If you are interested, think you could handle two fancy pants artists, want to make a fun game, want not just toy with technology, but create a product people will want to play, make it your business - contact either Craig or myself. (Me: most@parks.lv ; Craig - craigfortune@gmail.com ) Drop a line, ask around, make up your mind.
Thanks for your patience, if you are reading this sentence, it means you have it in huge amounts :)

Tuesday Jan 27 0:09

Nauris Krauze — 2004-01-27T00:09:09+00:00

I've entered kind of steady flow of busy-ness:)

I've entered kind of steady flow of busy-ness:)
Its a good feeling, kind of numb working-bees' nirvana. I've been tinkering with Artefacts Inc. graphics, there have been some small freelancing jobs, I have been doing some small additional textures for Lore as at this point concepts are not so needed.
Then there is desk full of sketches for one as of yet unnanounced project and an hour ago Logan whistled and I'm doing some Realm Wars concepts.

Alright, I must admit that this .plan is more like sharing of a Good Feeling(tm) than real .plan :)

Oh, and besides, my wife threatened to never feed me again if I dont make a homepage for her photo-obsession. So I forced myself to learn some basic HTML just to survive (sandwitches for the rest of my life? no way!)
At the end, I made online den for myself as well, so now we both have web outposts as true Netizens. If you want to check out my "m@d html skllzz", head to Dual-Light.com :)