Blog for Jeremy Alessi at GarageGames.com

Games Demystified: Portal

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-08-26T16:04:15+00:00

The new Games Demystified is up on Gamasutra today.

http://www.gamasutra.com

or

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3770/games_demystified_portal.php

I primarily scoped it to the "flinging" technique that was employed in the game along with some pseudo rendering. I wanted to cover the rendering in more depth but that has been reserved for later.

Games Demystified, Super Mario Galaxy

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-03-27T18:10:44+00:00

If you pass by Gamasutra today take a look at the Cover Feature. It's an article I wrote detailing the physics in Super Mario Galaxy. There's some source code with it as well which is nice for conceptual purposes. I didn't use Torque because I would have done this in the engine code which isn't free to pass around.

Gamasutra (it's on the front page today)

Direct Link to Article ( for future reference )

Statue of Liberty Size Up

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-03-10T22:05:55+00:00

As I'm nearly done with the low spec PC port of Full Contact Debate (www.fullcontactdebate.com) so I thought I'd get a little head start on the Oust style Statue of Liberty map which is coming up. I'd like to share a little screen which demonstrates the scale present in Full Contact Debate.

In the screen shot you can see the Statue of Liberty (in all her bump mapped glory) is about as high as the separation of the marble on the Washington Monument which is where construction had to be halted for a time and new darker marble was used for the rest. That spot is ~150 feet up on the actual monument. The Statue of Liberty is 151 feet tall in reality. I designed the maps in FCD to be nearly to scale save for some elements which suck for gameplay, for example the reflecting pool isn't nearly as long across because it took forever to cross the map.

Having a little reality basis in the map design has been really fun because of the facts you pick up along the way. It also helps corral the design process.

Something kind of funny is how small Barack Obama is compared to the Monument and Statue. It's a bit like where's Waldo but he's over on the left side of the screen, look for the blue name ;)

Look for the low spec PC build by March 12th and version 0.002 of FCD by April 6th.

Thanks for tuning in!

Big Weekend, Low Spec PC Port Coming

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-03-10T04:35:24+00:00

Full Contact Debate (www.fullcontactdebate.com) multiplied its player base this weekend in large part because of the Mac port. The game is now hosting more than 1,200 players with new users joining by the minute. Reviews of course are mixed but the fact that people are posting about this game on outside forums and even on their own personal blogs is reassuring.

The truth is this game isn't complete and I hyped it up quite a bit to gain attention but the rate at which people are starting to roll-in is a little scary. Luckily the back-end seems solid enough and with a versioning system in place I can fix mistakes and release new builds at will. I knew that having a fail-safe would be the key to making this game a success because there would never be any way I could make this game great the first time out.

Now that the Mac port is out there I have begun porting over to 1.5.2 PC so that I can connect the PC players and the Mac players as well as offer non-shader PC users something to enjoy. I knew going in that a TGEA version would yield the least amount of users but you can't beat the screenshots. Whether I should have taken the road I did using a hype-first usability-second strategy is debatable. I am quickly catching up on the usability front however so I'm not too worried.

In closing, it's been really entertaining to watch people play the game and see what they say. The feedback I'm getting by releasing the game so early and just studying users in a candid manner is amazing. I expect that version 0.002 ( I planned to do 1,000 revisions by version 1.0 :) will be a huge improvement over 0.001 in technical terms as well as content wise. There'll be another locale as well as new secrets in the first locale to keep things fresh.

Look for the low-spec PC port this week.

Full Contact Debate Mac Build is Up ...

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-03-06T00:17:28+00:00

The Mac build of Full Contact Debate is now up:
FullContactDebate.com.

If anyone has a Mac and has been even remotely interested in testing this game I'd love to see you on there. I was able to do extensive testing with the PC version but I only have one Mac so this could get ugly in a hurry! The server will be running and I'll be checking throughout the evening for other players so head on in and cast your vote ;)

For giggles ...

The actual game ...

Full Contact Debate Mac Port

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-03-04T07:39:54+00:00

I had planned to wait on porting Full Contact Debate to the Mac. However, I decided that I needed a TGE 1.5 build of the game and while I was at it I might as well start on a different platform just to keep things fresh. It's taken about 2 days to work all the kinks out but the port down from TGEA hasn't been too bad. I've also got the nice little touches like a Mac keyboard controller image in the game so it's pretty much completely Mac-afied ;)

Working with TGEA up till now has been a learning experience. The rendering details are definitely a lot more complex although rewarding. I feel that as a single developer having never used it before that I got reasonably far with it. My name appears in the engine some 228 times signaling changes I made and that doesn't include all the script, gui, php, and mysql stuff I did to make FCD what it is.

Unfortunately, I do feel that going much further with modifying TGEA will be counter-productive. A new TGEA will be released addressing all of the issues I fixed I'm sure (Matt Fairfax mentioned 99% of TGE functionality). Thus, I feel it's better to reach out to another platform and then consolidate all my changes with the newer version of TGEA. I'll still be bug fixing minor things but some of the larger things missing from TGEA that are in TGE I will not be getting into.

The best part of all this is that I finally got my network running and hosting Torque servers. I have always had issues (unpredictable hosting behavior) with this but after fighting to get two servers running from behind the same router I think I finally got all the details down about configuring the network with various ports and DHCP leases.

Look for the Mac build up on FullContactDebate.com sometime this week. Thanks for tuning in!

The Polls...

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-02-29T19:24:43+00:00

Coming to an end of our first complete week of play these are the poll numbers coming out of Full Contact Debate:

FullContactDebate.com
==============================================================
Barack Obama 75200

Ron Paul 54700

Mike Huckabee 36850

John McCain 34050

Hillary Clinton 20500
==============================================================

Increase your candidate's rank in the polls by scoring flag captures, finding secrets, or by inviting your friends!

That's right, new this week is a 500 point bonus for any registered Full Contact Debate Community member and their candidate of choice. If you want to increase your candidate's presence in our polls register through our website and and play the game or invite your friends and other candidate supporters today!

Why piracy and sales are both dead ...

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-02-25T18:33:05+00:00

In a recent forum discussion I mentioned that piracy was dead. Someone else mentioned Steam as a solution. To a degree Steam is a solution. More to the point though is that content is going free. As some may have noticed my latest game Full Contact Debate is free. I did this honestly for a few reasons. First of all it's not a game just for a game's sake it's a game to promote voting in a free election so charging for it would be a bit of an oxymoron. After conceiving the idea I realized though that I could still monetize this game without selling it.

Most cinema isn't sold directly to the consumer and neither is most music. TV and radio push through more programming than any other source within their respective mediums. All of that content is paid for by advertising physical products. Since games are in their infancy compared to TV and radio we just hadn't hit the point where we needed this segment of the market to open up.

Now the cool part. Games are a better source for advertising than TV or radio. Many people flick the channel or turn the station when advertising comes on in those other mediums. Unless it's cinema with product placement (which is usually only for a split second) people can ignore it. In games however (especially mutiplayer) people play over and over and over viewing the same scenes hundreds or thousands of times. If you advertise in those scenes you've got the best source of advertising yet seen.

The best part about this is that the games still need to be great. If you make a crappy game no one is going to play those levels countless times. So a developer must still make the best damn game they can muster. In fact you'd actually have to go a step further in making sure the gameplay doesn't get old because you'll no longer be able to rely on your marketing, licensing, etc... to push your game along for you. With Ad supported games it's all about how good the gameplay is. If it's not long lasting you won't make any money.

How does this all relate back to piracy? You want to give this game away and just have as many people play it as possible. Gone are the worries about someone copying this and passing it around for free ... instead you want this to happen. Alternative revenue stream supported games turn piracy into a benefit!

Will there still be hackers who do stuff to your game? Sure but with no barrier to entry it'd be more work for other people to use a hack that disables advertising or whatever than it would to just install the regular game and have fun. As I said above the bottomline is actually better games that are longer lasting and less focused on hype (though without some hype or good hook people won't play it in the first place). I have a feeling too that this new model will weed out a lot of clones. If it's all free gamers won't be afraid to take a dive into something different and if that different game is also really fun and long lasting it'll make money.

The gaming landscape is changing rapidly... unless you're making one of the top 15 games of the year selling your game to individuals won't be an option much longer. Someone somewhere will be making something for free that rivals or kicks the snot out of whatever you're trying to sell. Of course on the bright side you won't have to bang your head against the keyboard worrying about piracy anymore.

Full Contact Debate Weekend Update

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-02-23T01:45:32+00:00

I'm mirroring this email to the Full Contact Debate Community here so any people still on the sidelines can get involved.

===========================================================================
Full Contact Debate Weekend Update - www.fullcontactdebate.com
===========================================================================

Entering the weekend it looks like Ron Paul is leading the charge in our polls. If there are any McCain, Obama, Clinton, or Huckabee fans they might want to get in the game and score some points! In addition I want to make a call for scheduled playtimes at 9PM EST every day. Since Wednesday there's been some decent action but mostly 3-4 player matches which isn't too intense so let's get some big battles going on. Don't be afraid to start your own servers if one isn't present and make sure to exempt the game from your firewalls so you don't crash someone else's server.

Some highlights from during the week:

- JimmyHat shocked and awed us all with his insight on the political landscape in one of the more heated in-game political discussions
- Flabbypig played traitor by playing for the Democrats and hiding the Republican flag in BFE
- Constitution1 was the first player to discover a certain unidentified hidden area and earn an extra 10000 points in the polls (hint: there are 2 more hidden areas ;)
- Master K, Jason, Constitution1 and MidnightS all took part in a pseudo king of the hill battle high in the sky ... how we did it we won't say

Stay tuned for more, we're working on the next map as well as improved gameplay. Register for our forums to leave any feedback you have!

Anyone that hasn't joined up yet needs to get the game and put some playtime in. There's no time like the weekend! See you in the game!

Full Contact Debate is Live!

Jeremy Alessi — 2008-02-21T02:56:24+00:00

FullContactDebate.com

Click on the Game link to download the game from one of the mirrors. For all the Ron Paul fans out there, we got him in today ;) About 25 people pre-registered and should have received an email. If you didn't get it make sure to check your spam filter. Thanks and see you in the game!