Balbiccini

katleroux: Also, I’m a jackalope. Isn’t she gorgeous?...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:21:41 -0800

Also, I’m a jackalope.

Isn’t she gorgeous? DIBS!

psdo: goddessofcheese: psdo: goddessofcheese: bubonickitten: ...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:13:00 -0800

goddessofcheese:

psdo:

goddessofcheese:

bubonickitten:

riotcharazord:

pinkpapermoon:

hahahahahahahahaha ha

oh my god

But… there is one they fear…

Bambikiin….

I used to be a fawn like you…

fasdlkfjas;ldkfjas;ldfkjasdlkf

oh bugger we broke psdo.

1) I AM DYING

2) I AM ABSOLUTELY FUSRODAH-ING ALL THE RABBITS NEXT TIME I LOAD UP SKYRIM.

WHAT IS AIR!

Hey again ... I want your opinion on one thing (^-^). What is your opinion on text-adventure games? or text games(interactive fiction) in general. Do you think it is even impressive to be able to make one? I've been having a little trouble designing my games in order to fit into 2d/3d format ... they only work as text based rpgs. Do people even play text based games anymore. I do ... I love me some Zork ^-^. So thanks in advance ^-^

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:53:49 -0800

Zork was the first game I ever played :) I used to telnet into some server and play Zork 1-3 and I think some others. They are impressive because it takes a hell of a lot of planning to make them fun :) Myst is probably a prime example of how to do a “text adventure,” but with pictures. I don’t even know where I would start with a text adventure game, I’m not a very strong writer :)

agentawesome: hahahahahahaha Almost went an entire day of...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:09:56 -0800

agentawesome:

hahahahahahaha

Almost went an entire day of playing Skyrim without hearing the arrow speech, but then… with about an hour left in the day it happened. :(

Hellgate: London Icon. This is the first game that I worked on...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:45:10 -0800

Hellgate: London Icon. This is the first game that I worked on that was “finished.” It was a great experience, but damn were the hours gnarly :D

Why hello Smithing 100 :)

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:41:29 -0800

Why hello Smithing 100 :)

A Maniac song for my girlfriend :) her name is Kat Leroux, I...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:55:06 -0800

A Maniac song for my girlfriend :) her name is Kat Leroux, I paid for it to be made.

Hey dude! How's it going? I'm a beginner game dev really interested in turning my ideas into virtual experiences. It's great to see other game devs around on tumblr. Anyways I'll see you around!

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:48:03 -0800

See you around too :)

WOT?: Oh my God, I'm brilliant...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:33:38 -0800

WOT?: Oh my God, I'm brilliant...:

gunluva:

No, seriously, I am just an absolute creative genius! Somebody, anybody, from a game design team big or small, studio, company, anybody, please please *please* contact me. I have ideas, phenomenal, slightly crazy, ideas for games, but I don’t have the ability to make them happen. Others do! And my…

Your best bet is someone who is independent. Unfortunately it’s really dangerous for people at large companies to accept game ideas from people outside of the company. For example, I work for BioWare and if I were to take your idea, create a prototype or something and pitch it, you could then later claim the idea and it would just get ugly so we’re told to not accept ideas from the public hehehe. I think you should tag more things in your post to try and get more attention. There are a lot of great independent developers and I am confident at least some of them are on Tumblr :)

I know you probably get this a lot, and I sincerely hope I'm not annoying you but...I'm a young aspiring game developer. Right now, I'm in the planning stages of my first game, which I want to be a browser based side scroller. I have some background in C++ (I took a class in community college) and web languages, but not enough to make a lot of leeway. What languages do I start with and what tools do you recommend? Are there any good books for beginners to make a start? Thank you. :)

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:56:44 -0800

Sorry for not getting to this right away; I wasn’t sure how to answer it so I thought on it for two days and still came up kind of empty. Also, I wouldn’t worry about bothering someone when you’re curious about your future. Only a heartless person would be annoyed by someone aspiring to be something and asking questions on how to get there.

A browser based side scroller is definitely a challenge, but Flash might be your safest bet for cross-platform compatibility. There are libraries out there, like Flixel, as well as a million tutorials. If you want to get crazy, you could technically use jQuery to build a platform engine, but it’d be one hell of a task! Since you’re familiar with C++, PHP wouldn’t be hard for you to pick up, but that would only be used for any back-end stuff you do (leaderboards, accounts, etc.) coupled with MySQL for storing data about players, not the actual platformer itself.

Not sure I can recommend many books for making web-based platformers, especially since I’ve only read game design books (with the exception of the O’Reilly PHP/MySQL/Javascript book I have).

I think the best advice I can give you when it comes to languages is to read up on all of them for your project (Flash, HTML5 [keep in mind the browser support], javascript/jQuery, PHP, etc.). See which ones share similar syntax with what you’re used to and just go for it. The only language I wont recommend for your first language is Python. Not because python is hard or confusing, but it’s just such a pretty and simple syntax that all other languages become a pain in the ass. It spoils you :)

I gotta get back to work now, but I hope this answers at least some of your questions. Feel free to fire any more you have at me, I don’t mind at all. I’m not the most knowledgeable person, but I can always ask people who know more than me and answer your questions by proxy.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:17:15 -0800

LOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

Cool Story, Bro: Impending Changes

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:57:43 -0800

Cool Story, Bro: Impending Changes:

coolstorybrogame:

Lol it took everything I had not to write “Impending Doom”. XD

Well we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Bob recently went through the application process and was hired to a major game studio. He starts in January! Friends and family already know more about this, but…

This is a tough break. I have run into a very similar situation where I wasn’t able to work on a project because I was employed at Flagship Studios (we made Hellgate: London and Mythos). The worst part was the project was finally out of the “design doc” phase and had a basic build with a single weapon and basic client/server multiplayer working. One of these days, I swear, I’ll relaunch my project “Einherjar” :)

Some of My Recent Projects at KlickNation, now BioWare Social

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:52:15 -0800

Recently (within the last few months) I’ve been working on various prototype “features” for the games that I work on or something related to those games. However, not long ago I made a pretty rad app for Android (and can easily be ported to iPhone). I want to share some with the people who are out there and are curious enough to click the links.

For Superhero City, a facebook RPG game I work on, I prototyped a new mission system that I hope we will implement in some fashion. Check it out HERE. Basically, our game is about Superheroes, but we don’t have enough comic book inspired features. My redesigned mission system is essentially a comic book that unlocks as you progress through the story by doing “missions.” After showing a few coworkers and getting a lot of feedback, I’m pretty optimistic that we will eventually do this :) I know our Artists would love to make a full on comic book instead of just small tiles to represent parts of the story.

For Age of Immortals, a game we made for SyFy games, I started work on a new forum redesign; which will be adopted by all of our games eventually. Check it out HERE. This was a pretty quick mock up and the conversion to vBulletin 4 theme is going pretty well. The reason I started this project was simply because our existing forums were very rushed and weren’t done very well (I made them, they’re awful and I’m embarrassed by them). Hopefully this new design and layout will breathe new life into our forums and help them grow to be even more popular.

I also started working on a webpage for my brother. He’s helping start a business, so I thought I’d give him a hand with a nice wordpress theme so he can manage news posts and various information with ease :) I’ll post links when it’s announced.

The other day a coworker of mine poked me about doing some mockups for one of our games that we have put on hold, Starship Command. By hold I mean it’s still up and running, we’re just not developing new features or maintaining the code. Anyway, he asked me to mock up a carousel to look like it’s rotating in 3D. So I whipped THIS ugly thing together in a very short time (there’s an interesting bug/feature). The plan for it is to have our player’s choose which account they want to play on (we allow multiple accounts per facebook account) in a nice sexy interface. Currently it looks like cards layed out next to each other, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t sexy either :)

I think, after all of this, I’m going to start work on a design document for a Facebook RPG involving faction territory wars. We’ll see, just an idea rolling around in my head. I really love designing games and then prototyping the user experience in jQuery, not sure why it’s so enjoyable.

Well I’m incredibly tired, good night everyone.

$(me).fadeOut();

Ohai there and thanks for following my tiny blog. I see you live in Sacramento! Did you happen to take part in NaNoWriMo this year? And super nice to see other game dev people here on tumblr :D

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:36:54 -0800

I did not participate in NaNoWriMo because I’m not much of a writer :) My creative sparks are spent on various game designs, feature implementations for existing games (mostly the ones I work on at work) or helping other people by making tools and stuff to improve their job/hobby.

I need to do this!

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:03:05 -0800

I need to do this!

Welll.. that is what happens ... I don't want to add to your fear, but I used to be quite skilled at C++. I have forgotten a lot of it's syntax. Python is a pretty language ^-^'. I prefer RPGs ... and as for games I'm working on now ... like it states on my blog ... I I was working on the "blueprint" for a game called Time Assassin, but realized that with some modification and about a month of extra planning/etc... I could combine that with a previous idea of mine,in short a sci-fi RPG ^-^''

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:11:44 -0800

Haha, awesome. I’ll continue to avoid Python for as long as I can! Sci-Fi RPG eh? Sounds like fun :)

So, I heard your girlfriend is pretty hot. Is this true?

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:11:06 -0800

Yep. Definitely. Mhmmm!

Hi... me again ... if you don't mind me asking ... what kind of games do you make in your free-time ... any particular genre you prefer making ... and what language do you use. I'm more comfortable using Python, but am known to use others such as C++, Actionscript 2.0 or PHP if I think it's necessary.

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:34:44 -0800

I don’t really have a specific genre of game that I make in my free time, but Platformers are always fun and pretty much every language can make them :) I never got into Flash, but lately I haven’t been making any games since I’m working a lot. Currently I just stick to writing design documents for our games or coming up with new games and pitching them to people at my company.

When it comes to languages, I can’t say I favor a single one. If I’m making a web game, I use PHP for the frontend and backend, but if I’m making a game with a compiled language it would have to be C++. I haven’t dabbled in too many different languages and I’m terrified of Python. I have this fear that if I start using Python, I’ll forget the syntax for every other language because of how beautiful it is to read hehehe

How about you, what kind of games do you make in your free-time and also are you working on any right now? I’d love to hear more about them!

Um... Hi. Thanks for following me. Also, do you really work for BioWare? I was just wondering what the whole BioWare "Social" is about.

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:15:14 -0800

A company that I have been working for since early 2010, KlickNation, was acquired by EA/BioWare on Dec 1st of this year. We make facebook games under the BioWare name now and have combined our studio of 70 people with the existing BioWare San Francisco studio that had about 30 employees. We are now known as “BioWare Social” and have a strong focus on making quality facebook games.

So ya, I do work for BioWare now, which I still haven’t gotten used to saying. Today is my 5th day as a BioWare employee and it’s been great so far haha.

Well... I live in Iceland. The gaming market here is rather big for a country with a population of 300k. With companies like CCP(creators of Eve Online) & Dexoris(created a bunch of award winning iphone games) continuing to thrive. There's defiantly job possibilities here. That John Carmack sounds like a visionary and that quote surely is inspirational. I actually am right now heading into the last exam of the college I'm in ... I'm transfering to the Creative & Technical institute of Iceland :)

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:24:57 -0800

That’s fantastic :) CCP throws an epic party at GDC every year. It was great to meet you and I definitely look forward to talking to you some more. Best of luck on your exam!