Drew Clinkenbeard

So I have seen a few films lately notably ‘Iron Man‘, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian‘, and as of this moment I am watching ‘In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale‘.  It seems like all of these movies should have been good. Two of them were one of them not so much.

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The other day the following comic from XKCD struck me as amusing:

It also made me think, the last gift I got my mother was a robot. I bought my mother a roomba and now she has a robot roaming free in her home. I may be working with a team designing a robotic soccer team. My friends mother was buying digital picture frames for her parents. We live in a science fiction world and NO ONE NOTICED. We all carry communicators. I am laying in bed typing this on a machine about 10000 times more powerful than what sent men to the moon. If the allies had this computer during WWII Hitler would have been dead,,,, crap godwins law.

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    I have often thought about making movies and writing stories and all the rest. It has led me to notice things in films that I had never picked up on before. What comes to mind is an ending scene in a movie where there are two characters standing next to one another each of them holding a cup of coffee. The cups of coffee (well probably tea considering the movie, and no I am not going to say what the film was so there =-þ) cause the viewer to connect the two in a much closer fashion than would ordinarily be the case. I thought it was interesting.

I would be upset by noticing things like this except I usually don’t unless I have seen the film several times.

The reason I was watching the film YET again is because I like having something in the background while I code and I have spent most of the day writing php. Not for homework as I should have been, nor was it for a job as would of been nice but just for myself which is the best of all. Evidently I do like to code. I am in the process of making a database driven wish list for me, my family, and my friends to use. I decided this way we wouldn’t have to keep doing the whole “what do you want for your birthday/holiday?” crap. It’ll be great. The things it needs are:

• Individual user log ins
• anonymous ‘purchased’ notification
• easy item updating

and for the future:

• Email notification for list updates
• maybe an RSS feed instead of that

So far this whole thing has been kind of fun. It is enjoyable setting up the DB and the connections and learning about PHP and java script. These are all things I think I should have learned in school but we didn’t. All in all the programing curriculum at CSUCI is some what lacking.

designing levels is a bitch can be extremely challenging. Think about it you must balance the challenge to your players, you have to give them a reason to be there you have to keep it interesting. This all boils down to knowing your audience and, most importantly, knowing yourself. It’s a bit like dating, the hardest part is getting them to play the game. Once they are playing the game a lot of forgiveness can be had. Never the less the game must still keep their interest. If you make it to hard they will stop, if you make it too easy they will stop, if its too predictable, unpredictable, unrealistic, the list goes on the elements must be balanced, or at least close to it, in order to keep the players happy.

So suppose you keep all that in mind you balance everything you design your level; pouring heart and soul into a creation that at last is perfect. Then once the players are released into the level they run through destroying everything, ignoring your clever plans and plots, slaughtering your minions, and generally laying waste to hours, day or months of planning. It’s like watching some one take a flamethrower to the Mona Lisa. I am mostly thinking about DnD levels, but it applies to all RPGs as well as FPSs. There are pages and pages writen about this on the interweb so I am not going to go to indepth other than to say I have a great deal of respect for the people who do it for a living and make the games I love so well. The level design in games like the Half-Life series, Duke Nukem, Fear, Doom II, Quake II and Blood. Here I feel I should mention Doom III, it started out well enough but by the half way point the levels became formulaic, walk in the room shoot the monster, turn around, shoot the new monster that just spawned in, collect the item, lather, rinse, repeat. So what is the key? Hell if I know. Seriously though it comes down to knowing your audience. You have to make them want to play.
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