It’s been ages since I’ve done a personal blog. Winter’s just been kind of dull for me, but I’ll try to write a few things.
I’ve been watching a lot of classic movies lately. Spelunky and La-Mulana reminded me that I still hadn’t seen Indiana Jones, so I decided it would be a good idea to see where culture comes from. So far I’ve seen:
• Indiana Jones 1,2 and 3
• Terminator 1 and 2
• All of the Rocky Films
• Rambo 1 and 2
My favorite of the bunch has to be the earlier Rocky films, but I also loved Terminator 2. I expected Indiana Jones to be more about exploring temples and ancient cultures, and less about cheesy action scenes with Nazis. So I was a bit disappointed there.
I’m interested to hear from you guys about what other old films I should watch. I’ve really not seen very many.
I’m still playing a lot of games on Steam. I’ll do another batch of reviews soon.
I watched Indie Game: The Movie again. It made me feel like I’ve sold out a bit, in the sense that I’ve started making games based on what the players want, rather than what I want. If it was up to me, I’d make the EBF games more like the RPGs I played when I was a kid. With no bestiary, cheap enemies, really hard to find secrets, no easy mode, and stuff like that. But instead I’ve tried to make EBF4 as accessible as possible, and as a result, I think it feels a lot less personal.
Interestingly, most of the game developers that were featured in Indie Game had made very hard games, and that didn’t seem to hurt their popularity at all. Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Fez were all very difficult, either in their action or in their cryptic puzzles.
Edmund McMillen made an interesting point in one interview about Binding of Isaac. He said he didn’t like displaying numbers in his games, or explaining the mechanics in detail, leaving the player to learn and memorize everything by themselves. I would kind of like to do a bit more of that in EBF (for example, by not explicitly mentioning the special effects of equips or skills), but I wonder how well that would go down with players.
Anyway, I don’t plan on changing the way I make games, since this approach has worked well for me so far. And I’ve not totally sold out; I still do a lot of things that many casual players don’t like. (like making unobtainable ultimate weapons, the cut-out art style, some super hard puzzles, and troll bosses like the glitch)
Oh well.
Now that the Kongregate release of EBF4 is out of the way, I’m going to be getting ready for the Steam release. It shouldn’t take too long, as I’ve already solved most of the hardest problems. All I have to do is get rid of Kongregate’s branding, change the loading screen, add support for multiple resolutions, stick in Steam’s API, make some more Steam store graphics, and package the game nicely. Hopefully that won’t take too long, but tricky problems have a way of popping up.
The developer of Intrusion 2 was awesome enough to help me out with a few things, so you should go buy his game!
And one last thing; I’ve got a girlfriend now!
She’s fun to hang out with, and we’ve got a lot in common, so that’s nice.
And I don’t have to play Outlast by myself anymore! Hurray!
