I’ll definitely talk more about it when I get closer to a complete game. Just know that, even though this is not a zombie shooter, it is shaping up to be real competition for Zombpocalypse.  The action is pretty intense and the AI has much more variety.  On top of that, it will be available for download on your Xbox 360. I’m getting pretty stoked over the progress so far, and I can’t wait to tell you guys more. Hang in there.

I keep reading that “digital distribution is the way”.  It seems to be the strong push, and future generations will likely accept it more easily than I have.  I still don’t know that I have accepted it, as I own very little digital content outside of my music collection (which I translated from my CD collection).  The only thing that I seem to have accepted is digital services, like Netflix.  In a strange way, I justify it as a bargain because I watch far more movies and shows than it would cost me to purchase them, so the economy works in my favor.  With video games, I just can’t bring myself to paying for anything digital, other than little dollar games.

There is something about the video game experience that begins before you even sit to play the game.  The thrill of the hunt for an anticipated title, getting your buddy/girlfriend to drive because you know that you’ll be reading the manual on the way home, cracking open that case and holding a physical medium in your hands, knowing that what you have in your hands cannot be taken away because your account provider doesn’t want to support it anymore.  I can’t imagine paying for digital content and having it taken from me, without warning.  This has already happened in several other forms, such as digital books.  All of the things that digital content can not provide are lost to a generation of people who make purchasing decisions from the first 2-5 minutes of the game.

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I’ve been working behind the scenes for some time now, but I hate to talk about it until it materializes into something more interesting.  I can say that it’s not a zombie game, but I think it’s going to be something that is just as fun and fast paced as you remember Zombpocalypse.  I can also say that this new project is my first move into the Xbox360 Indie Games category.  This will be my first console game in about 7 years, so I hope I still have the touch.

I’ve been procrastinating on the actual gameplay =( however, doing everything else from GUI to flow design…  I’m a still stuck on what weapons to code.  Traditional weapons, like the ones I typically like, don’t fit the theme for this new game.  It’s not exactly a place for machine guns and rocket launchers.  I hate game design some days =/.

I did add a bunch of code to start splitting the “trial ware” from the “pay” version of the game.  Right now I am thinking of limiting by the following.

• Limited play time, like 5 minutes or so (this might be automatic from XBLA’s internal trial ware delivery system)
• No saved high scores.
• The high score is capped at 100k (or some arbitrary number).  Though, if the score is not being saved, I guess this doesn’t really matter.
• No “trophies”.  Microsoft is stupid and doesn’t allow Indie games to give out Achievements, so I thought I’d have my own “trophies” and add them to the high score table somehow.  That way, other users can still see your fake achievements from the high score table.

Distributed High Scores are only possible because of a workaround that jwatte wrote.  Basically it broadcasts to the XBLA intranet that it has a networked session.  Others join the session, and their high scores get shared, storing the union of all high scores.  In theory, you will never have everyone’s high scores, but you’ll get pretty close because if person A and B share their scores and person C meets up with person A, then person C gets B from A.  They don’t even have to join your game, they just have to be online with a Gold Members account.  The network sessions are just running in the background.  Pretty genius stuff.

I don’t know if the email I received was legitimate, but it’s a sad day for Windows users. Below are the listings of stop dates for Windows support of various platforms.

This does spring to mind a few bitter sweet thoughts on modern PCs. It is pretty amazing how far we’ve come in the PC market. My entry into the world of PCs started with my dads old Tandy computer. It had an abysmal processor and no hard drive. I had to insert a boot disk, then swap the 5.25″ disk for the application that I wanted to run. He later got a second drive, so that we could simply leave the boot disk into the primary drive. It was pretty space age stuff. I was pretty young at the time, and it was hard for me to even fathom what I was looking at. It was cool and interesting, and maybe even a little mystical to see little monochromatic pixels flicker on that heavy terminal display. The whole thing could have crushed me, had it fallen on me.

Year’s progressed, and I didn’t get back into computers until later versions of DOS. This was around the time that video games on the PC really hit their stride for me. Shareware disks were flying off the shelves of every mom and pop computer store and big budget games shipped on a metric ton of 3.5″ floppy disks. Hard drives were tipping the scales at a whopping 80MB, and it felt like every new PC on the market was showing revolutionary leaps in performance, not just evolutionary. I can still remember the day that I installed the Windows 3.11 update that finally put color on the screen.

Eventually, somewhere between Windows 3.11 and Windows XP, we lost something. The growth of PC performance seemed to be fighting to keep up with the successive versions of Windows. Features, like “real mode”, that once gave us console-like control over the PC was gone, and 2x increases in our clock rates only seemed to give us a perceived boost of maybe 1.2x. For every upgrade to the hardware, we had to give more to the operating system. The standard practice seemed to be a consumption of 50% or more of your resources, even in more recent iterations of Windows. It is not difficult to imagine sometimes, why it would take 3x the system memory and dedicate video memory to run a port of a console game that was released on 5 year old hardware. Open your Windows task manager some day and you’ll see an endless scroll of processes and services that may only be used in the most rare occasions, and yet they wait patiently, consuming physical memory and random idle clock cycles.

I wonder sometimes, what it would be like to exploit the power of modern PC’s with a more streamlined OS made for gamers. With all of the security measures and anti-virus abstraction layers in place for a modern OS, like Windows 7, I don’t know that it would ever be possible. I would like to believe that Microsoft is trying to do the right thing for gamers, but I have to question them when I can’t even browse the web on my quad-core laptop, without being plugged into an outlet, because Windows 7 services are consuming my CPU cycles.

I have probably clocked less than 500 hours on this Xbox 360 and it bricked on me…  I had not used it in weeks and suddenly it doesn’t work anymore.  Good ol’ Red Ring of Death.

Xbox Red Ring Support Link

It doesn’t seem too long ago that the industry was climbing out of certain doom.  A byproduct of poor games that flooded the market, the gaming industry witnessed it’s first crash.  Atari released multiple competing consoles in succession while competitors continued to create and promote their own.  The devaluing of games continued with the uncontrollable influx of poor quality games.  Without any control over the rate of titles published for these consoles, many stores were left with mountains of nameless/faceless games that consumed shelf space.

Buying into the craze of video games, retailers were burned and left with overstock that failed to sell.  The massive failure of some higher profile titles (like ET) were the nail in the coffin for the gaming industry as a whole.  Consumers had lost trust in games, retailers had lost trust in games; there was no one left.  It was only by dumb luck (or sheer genius) that Nintendo found success, and revitalized the industry.  Still, it took decades to shake the stigma of video games being an overpriced toy for children.

Now, less than 30 years later, it feels too similar to those days.  We have the “little brother” consoles that are still in circulation (PS2, NGC, Xbox) while the latest generation of home consoles overtakes the main TV.  This is in addition to PSP, DS, DS Lite, DSi, DSXL, 3DS, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Zune, and various other mobile gaming platforms.  Did I miss any?  In addition to a console market that is reaching dangerous levels of saturation, we have an even less controllable situation on the PC front.

PC games are more famously being sold online, these days, in the form of casual games.  With web portals appearing everywhere, each trying to take a piece of the core and casual market, it’s becoming harder to dig through the collection of clones to find a unique experience.  By no surprise, many casual web portals have reduced their price points from $20 to just $7.  This has it’s own share of issues, but more importantly, the flood of free Flash games and the rise of game maker tools sets the expectations pretty low for the PC experience.  The bar is continually lowered as games become easier to create.  Now, with high school kids pushing out free web games and college students making games in their free time, it is a wonder that anyone would pay for games anymore.

I fear that the quality, and the trust, in games is falling out again.  Let’s face it; how many times have you been burned by a bad purchase from the App Store?

Watching the recent trailer of Gears of War 3 made the tiny little fan-boy inside of me giggle with warm and fuzzy feelings of utter desperation.  Though this type of trailer had been done for the original Gears of War, the actual story didn’t even come close.  Epic’s attempts to invoke any kind of emotional story was laughable in the actual game, despite their trailers that seemed to push the question, “can games make you cry”.  After all, who really cared about the “feelings” of a man with 24″ biceps, holding the world’s most powerful shotgun?

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