The Force Unleashed Demo Impressions

Well, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo was released yesterday, and me being me decided to try it. The demo is about 1.3GB on PSN - and it shows you exactly what to expect when the game finally ships in about a month's time. (It's the same demo in the exclusive GameTrailers videos and I think the same demo that was shown at GC2008.) The demo played exactly as expected, giving you a good sense of power, being able to throw around practically anything that isn't tethered to the ground, and the Force meter depletes in a very sensible way. What do I mean by sensible? It doesn't deplete while you are fiddling with something you've Force Gripped (at least in easy, didn't bother trying harder difficulties), which means plenty of leeway to fiddle with something in the full 3D space (yes, you can control it to move left, right, up, down, forwards and backwards relative to your character, and if you are forceful enough, you can get it to actually rotate).

The way Force Lightning is used seems like a pretty sensible evolution for someone who has a lot of energy to spare, imbuing your lightsaber attacks with lightning and even a small shockwave. You have a sensible air combo with which to attack enemies, and taking down larger more difficult enemies require QTE-esque button pressing, which is fine.

So, what's wrong with it? It seems that Western developers can never get the camera right. (Too Human being the poster child of high profile game with terrible camera. At least in the demo, I'm not gonna even buy the full game seeing how 1up and gamespot tore it up.) The camera isn't broken, but you do occasionally find yourself fighting with the camera since if you can't see the enemy, you can't lock onto them. This means that pressing the lock button in hopes it will give you sight of your next enemy is unfortunately not gonna work. This is actually perfectly acceptable, since you can lock on to quite the variety of objects, so that could cause a problem.

There is the occasional strange bug with the camera, where the camera can somehow end up stuck in a peculiar angle under your character, I'm not sure why, I'm not sure how, but it is annoying to have it just plain stuck. Thoughtfully, a camera center/reset system is in place and is triggered by pressing down on the right stick (PS owners will know this as R3.), which does remedy the problem, although it would've been much nicer if the camera didn't get stuck to begin with.

The game should be pretty good. It'll come down to level design and enemy variety, I guess.

Sword Fantasy! Maybe Sticks First.

I've once again decided to begin work on developing a game engine for Sword Fantasy. I've decided to start with Haaf's Game Engine, and hopefully I'll have some rudimentary version of the game engine running. The goal is to finish the game engine before moving on to Sword Fantasy. My goals:

1. Implement a working collision detection engine, either by using an existing one or writing my own.

2. Work on loading screens, menus, narration, message boxes, inventory screens and so on.

3. Obviously, implement some text file parser into the engine for maps, scripts, AI behaviour and savegames.

4. Implement a savegame system. (This will probably more of a between areas kind of thing since I intend for Sword Fantasy to be linear in fashion. I'm not fond of backtracking through a game.) This aims to eventually have a flag system so that if you want to backtrack, you can, although the game will have a mission selector.

5. Implement a physics engine. This is the tricky one. I know there are good ones out there - I am currently looking at Box2D and Chipmunk. I think I lack the skill to implement one - and since it's unimportant or more of a luxury, I'll probably skip this goal if it means I'll actually finish the engine. I know that having one of these will eventually afford me fun puzzles, great graphics and awesome tools with which to build fun levels. However, if it will cost me too much time and effort to implement one, I'll stick with lame math. :P

6. Make a rudimentary game. Obviously, making the engine doesn't equal making a game - and since I don't have the confidence to pull Sword Fantasy off yet, I'll be making a simpler similar game to test and demo my final completed merged engine.

As for development timeline:

End of September 2008: Swords + Sticks with rudimentary menu, loading process and exactly one level.

End of December 2008: Swords + Sticks with menus and options (hopefully with gamepad support - since it is meant for gamepads, although the control scheme will work well with keyboards - mice support will come eventually and hopefully the game will scale well to more than one resolution, so some rudimentary error prone option will be around I guess) that save OR inventory, save game system and (hopefully) a repertoire of five levels

I don't expect to finish anything.

Looking Back A Year to 2007

1. At the beginning of the year, I still thought Guitar Hero was an average game with a peripheral. There was little doubt in my mind I wasn't going to get into it. Forward to today and Rock Band - you can guess where that thought went. To think it would be triggered by a friend + bongos + DDR. The randomness of my brain and my life is beyond understanding. 2. I made a resolution to study harder than I did in 2006. That obviously didn't go very far - and the degenerating process is still occuring this year. My results seem doomed to enter the land of awful this semester.

3. Surprisingly, I'm following even fewer shows this year than last year. I think a good reason is that there are fewer shows to follow due to the WGA strike and the lot. The effect is somehow spilling over to anime as well, so I'm guessing I'm just not in the mood for watching shows this year. Studying and gaming must be taking some sort of priority I guess.