This is one of those things

That makes Valve such a top developer as they are.
These two stories:

119!!(

andthis


The fact that they're going this far to put new (completely free by the way, once you have the game) content into Team Fortress 2, a game that is so old as to have had 119 updates.

It seems like they consider it a responsibility to keep people happy. or something.

murder simulators

I'd like to rename this column "Murder simulators"

if you're curious about what happend

about the 'tester bug'? As far as I know, it's still in the game. There's much worse problems with the game.

Which reminds me, that's another way things can fuck up in the game industry. What the developer will do is not be able to fix small bugs because they just can't achieve stability. Which means it runs. without crashing. That's of course on a whole different level of severity and must be addressed.

But what happens is that- oops, that little stuff just isnt important. It's just polish anyway. Which is of course what separates good, from bad, from mediocre games.


Then, timewise then, you get the worst thing in the game industry right now. Consoles can patch. Oh shit, now they can update! Which you'd think would be agood thing but what it means is that as soon as you pick up a new game, as soon as you connect, you have to download the update for it.

This makes developers lazy. This makes developers lazy. They don't fix things because they know they can put out a patch for it. I know for a fact A lot of bugs got waived, pushed to the next version because of this. I'm not even kidding. A lot of people in the game industry i've talked to have said the same. Makes 'em lazy.

So the worst games, you'll have to download multiple patches, or the patch will be a really high number. bad sign.

DLC!

how's it going?

So my contract finally expired at Sony. i guess i'm looking for work now. I can animate and model & texture in Maya. I can do character design.

http://thejeremycampbellexperience.com/index.html

Let me know if you find out anything.

definiton of a 'tester bug'

Here's a bug i found awhile back. I can't tell you what game i'm working on (even though it has been released) or where i'm employed at, so i don't get into trouble NDA-wise. but i just can't let this one slide because i think it illustrates how it is that things go wrong in games.

When the user's character throws a grenade, the pin is still attached.

WTF? I mean damn, how does something like that get by? you may be asking yourself. i mean, anyone who's seen any movies knows you gotta pull the pin to arm a grenade. And this game is supposed to be 'realistic'.

A 'tester bug' is a bug that only testers would find. We find them by doing weird, counterintuitive shit that doesn't win us the game. It's also kind of a negative term, and often used as a rationale to close bugs. Ordinary people supposedly never do these things. To find that grenade bug for instance, you'd have to walk over and inspect a live grenade, instead of running in the opposite direction. But do you think it will never be noticed by anyone, ever?

Little things like this send a message: We don't care. Polish. Polish is what separates the good developers from the ones who are in it for the paycheck.

How does something like this happen? Probably, the modeler was given the assignment 'model a grenade'. He does it, checks in the asset. Goes to the pub. Programmer writes code that spawns a grenade when the user gives the command to throw one. He just makes a reference to the asset, he never even sees it. It's neither of their job, really, to make sure it's used correctly. But no one looked to see that the user's haracter was throwing a grenade with an attached pin. No one's looking at the big picture and that's the problem.

It's Test's job to find it. Okay, we found it. What happens now?

By the way, the bug was closed. (waived, actually, which means it's pushed back to the next patch) Will it ever be addressed? Who knows? That's another thing mediocre developers do- slack off on everything until something gets to a crisis point and then use that as an excuse to only work on the most egregious bugs. Again, i'm not mentioning any developer's names here, please don't sue me.

game development

i'm gonna use this space to put down a few things i've learned from my time in games. From the test point of view, which is where i am now. I've been on the development side as well, so i have an idea of what goes on there. i have an idea of what's blame-worthy or not. because sometimes, you'll just have an honest bug. Look- all games have bugs, before they go out- that's the facts of life in software development. I'm saying that you can judge a developer- you can tell if the developer is any good or not by the quality of their bugs.

And whether they get fixed or not.
And in what order.
And does fixing them cause more bugs?
And do they stay fixed, or reappear later?

(oh my god i have stories for each of these) I'd probably violate my NDA if i told these, and probably get fired, so i'll have to generalize.


Notice that all of these factors have nothing to do with whether the game is fun or not.That's a whole nother can of worms, but that tells you a lot about the developer as well. Ask yourself questions like this:
Does the game make things that you would think would be fun into tedious chores?
or
Does the game make things you might not think of normally as fun into fun experiences?
Is it fun just to move around in the game?


more to come on this subject for sure...

QA

I also wanted to tell you my idea for a tv series. It'd be an episodic ensemble-cast comedy sort of in the vein of 'the Office'. But it's about testers for a major software company. i think there's a lot of potential for humor(i see it as very grim, Dilbert-style humor) in that sort of setting. Also, I think now everybody knows about video games and enough people are in the tech industry that i think a lot of the jokes wouldn't go over people's heads.

Ensemble Cast- There's a lot of potential for weird, interesting characters. It's really pretty diverse bunch of characters, different races, different genders, different stages in life, all in it for different reasons.

Yeah, really original, i know. I'm inspired by my real life. But i think i could make it interesting, funny and watchable. I suppose what i should do now is write out a pilot. I'd like to shoot a video of a sample episode. Some vignettes, maybe, slices of life, really, they don't have to fit together into a plot yet. I think it'd be cool to use people from work as my actors, i guess i should have at least a script ready to approach them with. I know some people who would be totally down with it.

right now i'm putting ideas together to see how much material i have.What do you think? Good Idea? if you want to give me money to film my idea please email me at :jeremy.campbell@gmail.com










Marketing department:
Everyone's young, beautiful, chuggin' red bulls all the time and pulling mad crazy overtime, then going out to the club 'cuz why bother to go to sleep

changes

So now i've got a job working at Sony. FPQA Test.First Party Qa Test. Testing games for the PS3. There's not much more i can say. NDA you know. But anyway, it's limited. Short term contract. Big company, well established ways of doing things. Reminds me a lot of when i worked at SEGA, way back in the days of the Saturn. Yeah.

You don't hear much of me lately cause i'm dealing with setting up my life around my new job and the baby. The game i'm on is going into crunch time so it's overtime for everyone.
Another thing i remember from way back when i worked at SEGA. i was a younger guy back then and living by myself, i could take as much overtime as they offered. But now i have to have someone set up to take care of the baby. Takes up more of my time.

Which is why my second demo reel is moving so slowly. I'm going to make a second one, put it up on YouTube again. It's going to be modeling and texturing. But theres also going to be some animation. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the music.

here's my demo reel

Up on YouTube.

It's just my animation work. I'm trying to get a job at Pixar. I know, everyone wants that.

my website

Upon which you may see my art-work:

thejeremycampbellexperience.com

a modest proposal

Something really bothers me about the animation industry right now. Everybody seems to send their stuff to Korea. Why? Even good animators like Genndy Tartakovsky and Craig McCracken. There's more new animation being made now than for a long time and there's a distribution channel for it (cable) but none of it is actually being animated here. It's apparently 'just how it's done now'. This is distressing for a couple of reasons.

One- Outsourcing Creative work. This isn't just labor. This isn't just something anyone can do. This is creative work. Even inbetweens are creative work. Which brings me to the second point:
Work for new artists. Used to be, young artists would get to build up their skills on the crap work like inbetweens. Then they'd have a foundation for drawing animation, and know what's required to work in a studio. Now, no one can get those skills. School teaches you basic principles (if you're lucky), but you need to work on a real series to apply those principles. So, there's never going to be a native animation industry here. It's all overseas.

How come this is the way it's done? Money? Probably.

Also, I should probably say that I have nothing against Korea or their animation industry. They're selling a product that people want to buy- more power to them. What i don't like is the people who made the decision that outsourcing jobs was a good idea.

The real point of this diatribe? Someone needs to found a studio that will do that, if that's how the industry works now, no one does animation in-house, then someone needs to make an inbetweens studio in America. There are a ton of people who want to get into animation- i went to school with a bunch of them. Probably i have enough connections to staff a studio like that. i don't really know. I don't really know the size of the staff or the amount of money involved. We'd of course need it to be very cheap, to compete with Korea. Office space is pretty cheap in some places here, and no Aeron chairs for anyone. Is that cheap enough?

This studio would have these benefits:
Rapid turnaround.-It just has to be faster to FedEx stuff to Burbank than to send it overseas.Has to.
No Language barrier.-This shit should be obvious.
No culture differences-This is a little more subtle. Animation depends on physical acting. A lot of physical acting is gestures and poses, a lot of which are culture specific. An American company would know what you mean.
Possibly starting a new industry in the Bay Area.

what do you think?
-jeremy

video game ads

It's awesome how it realizes the concepts of the game- visually.
I love that little sigh when the drug hits the swimming demon girl.
I love the music.
I love the mario costume.

video game ads

Tells a whole story in 1:11. Leaves a cliffhanger at the end.. it's up to you!

I can't tell you how beautiful and cool i think this is.

anyway, 2fort totally owns

if you read the link, here's my opinion.
There have been 3 versions of 2Fort, right? something like that. i remember Team Fortress and TFC. The 2Fort in TF2 seems smaller. Not merely overall smaller in feel, but really smaller relative to the players. This affects everything. It affects:
The areas that a sentry gun can cover.
The distance an engy has to run to restock and supply that sentrygun.
The ability of a spy to avoid bumping into people while cloaked.
The usefulness of snipers.(the central area used to be a wide open space, sniper heaven, no-man's land.)
Soldiers, same deal- they need line of sight just like snipers

So, Tf2's 2fort is smaller, and these changes all favor the defense. SO people complain that it's a map that ends in stalemate. and that's valid. But i think the map is fine. First of all, i like that it's strongly defense-oriented. i like trying to break a strong defense. Sometimes i like trying to set up a strong defense. People have always surprised me with new tactics they come up with to break a well-entrenched defense.

Second, i think it's in the plan of the game, that it favors the offense. The additions to the game all seem to be offensive i.e., the medic's ubercharge(the medic's special ability- he can make a teammate invulnerable for 10 seconds), the critical hit system(sometimes your shots do more damage if you have been hitting a lot lately-'you're on a roll'(fucxin' great idea in my opinion), the spawn timing(how long it takes for you to respawn after being killed varies according to i think your overall team's score or how well they're doing- again, 'your team is on a roll'.

So anyway, wha i think is that, yes, 2fort has gotten smaller and a lot easier to defend, the new elements in TF2 make up for it. Or at least compensate for it.

I'm gonna go with Valve on this one. It's fine the way it is. It seems like most of the changes made appear to have been made for a reason.

2Fort owns

2Fort owns.

this is a link to a forum discussing a particular map, in a particular game.
more specifically, a new version of this map, one that shipped with a new game that was a sequel to a game which was actually a mod of a very popular game of its day (around 1996-7, in my dim memory)

i was reading these forum posts and i suddenly realized this alien, arcane language that was being used, on the face of it it's totally absurd.
and yet, i understood every word that people said. bizarre.

TF2 more

i can't stand it anymore. i must play right now. My name is Podgorny. If you see me, shoot me. Unless you're a medic, in which case heal me.

TF2

It's a game where character design & art direction has finally taken its role of importance in games. The nine classes are so distinct from each other. Not a single element was left the same. From hats to boots to faces to weapons to even postures and styles of running, the classes are designed to be recognizable at a distance. The simplified art direction helps this immeasurably. And the animation and textures are so good that it looks stylish instead of simple or cheesy.

it's so good.

In the developer commentaries they mention J.C. Leyendecker as an inspiration for the style of shaders. This is awesome. This is where i've been waiting for games to go. Because if you think about it, advertising and poster illustration has similar goals- to be read instantly, to convey information stylishly.

another developer would use an out-of-the-box cel-style shader for the characters, but Valve didn't. Notice there are no thick black lines around the models, like all cel-shaders have. They wrote their own shaders, ones that instead force a rim light on edges (the opposite of the ink outline in fact) to help visibility. And the transition from light to shadow has a little highlight to pick it out clearer.

All these go to make the character's silhouettes individual and distinctive. Silhouette is a basic feature of character design, especially in animation. It's one i've always tried to get into my character designs. you can see them at my 'please hire me' website:
thejeremycampbellexperience.com
you can also find my email there if you want to send mee feedback. please do, if it moves you.

i wish i could work at Valve. They seem to 'get it'. i want you to know that someone understands and appreciates your hard work. please hire me.

Team Fortress

it's good.

super mario 64 more more

other games that were like that:
The afore mentioned Tony Hawk and Mario.

SSX. All of the SSXes. if you've played it you know what i mean. i keep saying that. i feel like those should be a tagline or something. It also kind of sucks, as an attittude, because i believe you should try to be accessible. as much as possible. try to make situations understandable in layman's terms as the old saying goes. i don't know what to say, if you've never played SSX please play it.

super mario 64 more

best game ever made? Definitely in the running.

Though you can't really rate games like that. Ther'es different genres. And in games, genres are more important because...
different genres have differnt control schemes, whole different ways of interacting with the world.

anyways, Super Mario 64- Best Game Ever Made?

i could believe that-for these reasons-

1. It's overall coherence. Everything about the game works, and works together. The art direction supports the cartoony physics, makes it Believable.

2. The Game teaches you how to use it. you are taught your character's moves by gradually increasing challenges involving those moves, training you to use itself. Then making you use the moves again later on, possibly in an area you'd been in before.

3. (here's something i've noticed about all the best games, (the ones that have reached a certain level of complexity perhaps)) You Can Recognize a Person by the way they Play. Simply getting around in the game environment, moveing from place to place, each player expressed a different style. if you've ever played it you'll know what i mean.
maybe an example. This is about another game. kevin said this about Tony Hawk, another game which is complex enough to be good. i hope i remembered it right.
"I like to trick off the railslide and then ollie, trick, ollie, from place to place, but i noticed that you like to grind to get around, you grind-jump-trick-to a grind again. It's different styles."
i hope i remembered that right. Anyway, the point is that- there's such an abundance of choices of stunts, really all fun stuff, that everyone played it differently.