Busy Holidays

I've been real busy so I haven't posted much lately. Hopefully after the holidays I'll have more to say about video games.

Simple Lighthouse Build

Using the new creative mode on our current server, I found an interesting island a little ways into the ocean. I decided to build a fairly simple lighthouse that uses 4 pieces of lava to generate light. I really had fun doing this since it was a simple project that I could build in a small amount of free time. The project including schematic are up on PlanetMinecraft for anyone interested.

View Lighthouse

Parkour Park Project

If you've followed my blog for a while you might remember my previous post with the video of Tharesan running our Parkour course. Well, I got around to posting it and uploading the schematic to PlanetMinecraft for anyone that is interested. Keep in mind that it was built for an old version of the game and the ladders might not quite work the same any more.

View Parkour Park

Rubik's Roller Coaster

Lilei and I made this great roller coaster a while ago based on a Rubik's Cube theme. She came up with the idea for the Rubik's Cube and I ended up building most of it. Then I came up with the idea to make it into a ride and she made most of the ride. If you like it, check it out on the project page from PlanetMinecraft:

View Rubik's Rollercoaster

Sad World Texture Pack

I made a texture pack a while back and I thought it would be a fun thing to share here. You can find it on the PlanetMinecraft page with a lot more screenshots. Here is one of them so you can get an idea of what it looks like. Basically it is a modification of the default texture pack to make everything more "realistic" like many other modern video games.


View Sad World

Do NOT buy From Dust

I recently pre-ordered From Dust from Steam because after watching some gameplay footage from the xbox 360 version I thought that the game would be excellent once it had mouse controls. When I finally played the game, I found out that they in fact did not really make mouse controls for it and instead made the mouse act like it was an analogue stick (which it is not). Other people complain about the DRM in the game, but for me the real problem is that they never made the correct version of the game, the one that you can play with a point and click interface.

I encourage everyone that reads this to never buy the game From Dust unless they fix the controls.

Diablo 3 Beta soon (tm) and Gameplay Preview

If there's one game I'm really looking forward to it's Diablo 3. I've really been wanting to play a Diablo game with my friends for a very long time and I'm excited that it's finally getting close to release. The beta is rumored to be coming out any time with the most recent batch of info about the game becoming public in this last week. To celebrate, here's a video from G4 showing some gameplay previews from the upcoming game.

PC Games - E3 2012 - Diablo III

League of Legends Dominion

I know I haven't been posting on here as much as I used to, but there have been a lot of big announcements in gaming lately. Today Riot released a video announcing a new game mode for League of Legends called Dominion, which seems a lot like a king of the hill kind of game. It should provide some interesting new gameplay experiences for people that enjoy League of Legends but were getting tired of the standard lane gameplay. Without further ado, here's the video from Riot's youtube channel.

Steam Sales

So if you checked steam at all last week you would have noticed that there were many many deals on the store. I ended up buying a whole bunch of games for myself and as gifts for my family and close friends. At this point I don't know when I'll get around to playing any of them, but I always feel good collecting more games and supporting the developers.

Infamous 2 and SCC

In the last 2 days I complete both inFamous 2 (on PS3) and Splinter Cell: Conviction (on PC). For inFamous, I played through the game continuing the evil story from the first game. I had a really good time with it and found the story interesting. In particular, the ending was pretty surprising to me. I can't wait to play through the good story line. I would recommend this game to anyone that has played the first one (which is free to download from the welcome back program).

As far as Splinter Cell: Conviction goes, I wouldn't really recommend the game to anyone. The story is pretty forgettable to me (having not played any of the other titles in the series) and the gameplay was only sort of good. I initially tried playing the game with a controller, but the controls made the game unnecessarily hard. Once I switched to mouse and keyboard, the difficulty went from impossible to easy. The random bad guys walk around swearing all the time, so if that is something you don't want to deal with, then there is no reason to play this game.

Console game stores

With the recent "Welcome Back" program that Sony is running I've had a chance to use the PSN store. The store is somewhat useable, but it has a lot of areas in which it could be improved. I think perhaps the biggest improvement would be a web browser based store similar to the Steam store. I would be much more likely to buy stuff if I could have a tab open on my web browser all the time showing me what the current deals are, and letting me manage and view wishlists directly from the web. I think then Sony (and Nintendo could do this too) could afford to have many more sales on games, which would lead me to buy even more. Basically, I want my playstation to have access to the excellent Steam store user experience.

Making a Minecraft Texture Pack on a Mac

I'm working on a texture pack for Minecraft. It's not going to be anything super amazing, but it will be made by me and using my Mac laptop. I've had a few issues that I was able to solve, so I figured I should spread the knowledge by making a post here.

First of all, it's helpful to have the basic images to start from (for image sizing if nothing else). On a mac, those are located in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin in the file called "minecraft.jar". To get at them you need to extract the contents of the minecraft.jar file. Probably the easiest way is to copy it and rename it minecraft.zip (click use zip in the popup) and then double click it. This should give you a folder called "minecraft" that has pretty much all of the data you'll be interested in using for your texture pack and a lot of other files you won't care about.

The method I use is to create a new working folder for my texture pack and only copy the images I'm interested in changing as I work on the pack. The first most interesting file is "terrain.png" and it has pretty much all of the terrain images that are used in rendering the world. Others of the textures, such as the skins for creatures and the player, are found in inside directories and should be placed in directories with the same names in your texture pack.

The final step for your texture pack to work is to compress it. On the mac, this is most easily done by selecting all the files inside your texture pack directory (the one with terrain.png at the top level) and right clicking then selecting "compress" from the dropdown menu. This will create a file called, "Archive.zip" that you should rename to be whatever you want your texture pack to be called.

I hope this post will be useful for other people trying to make texture packs on their Macs. I'll share some of the image editing software that I've found useful once I get a little more time to try it all out.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

I beat AC:B recently. The game was pretty fun. The plot was kinda silly. The multiplayer is quite enjoyable. Blog post done.

Another Day of Failed Attempts

I spent a good amount of time today trying to get Prince of Persia to function in a window, but it still didn't work. I tried installing Windows XP on VirtualBox but the 3d support in VirtualBox appears to be the problem. For whatever reason, the card it pretends to be isn't good enough for any of the PoP games.

As a result I'll probably just play through the games without streaming. I might try to see if I can record some of the gameplay to post on my youtube channel with something like FRAPS for those people that are interested in seeing it.

Windowed Gaming Woes

Yesterday, I saw that the Prince of Persia series was on sale on Steam, so I went ahead and picked up the games. I figured I could try streaming them to let my viewers have a different kind of game to watch. Also, I haven't actually played through any of those games yet. As you might be able to guess from my tone so far, I didn't actually get to stream any of the games. The main problem is that I can't stream a game that is fullscreen on my computer; it has to be windowed. As a result I spent the entire time of my stream last night trying to find a workaround to get the game into windowed mode. I tried something called UniWS (doesn't deal with windowed mode, but does make it widescreen), DXWnd (last updated 5+ years ago), and all forms of alt-enter or -window. It appears that there is no way to actually get the game into windowed mode at the current time.

However, there could be a sneaky work around by running the game in a virtual OS. I downloaded VirtualBox and installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it. Then I installed the 3d drivers from VirtualBox followed by installing wine and steam using wine. After that I mounted my steamapps directory so that I could copy the already downloaded Prince of Persia from my host machine to the virtual machine. Sadly, somewhere in this mix, the evidence of my graphics card didn't get passed down, so the PoP launcher claims that my graphics card doesn't have 3d capabilities. By the time I finished all of this it was nearly 3am, so I decided that I should get some sleep.

The plan for tonight is to try installing windows XP on VirtualBox to see if I can get it to work that way with one less layer of abstraction.

My first boss kill in Terraria

Just a short post to say that I defeated the Eye of Cthulhu in Terraria last night and that I'm pretty happy about it. Here's a video of the fight:

Terraria Wiki

As those who have been watching my stream know, I've been playing Terraria a lot lately. It's a really fun game with a lot depth and tons of things to find. I personally try to explore and discover things on my own, but there are occasions when I need a little extra help to understand what something is. At times like that I have gone to the Terraria Wiki from wikia. In it's current form, it essentially has all of the essential information, but I think that the organization is somewhat lacking. If you don't mind doing a bit of hunting, you can eventually find what you are looking for.

However, I just now found the official Terraria Wiki, which seems to have a much better organization than the one I've been looking at. I haven't used it much so I can't comment on the completeness of the information, but it should be a good resource nonetheless. So for all of you Terraria players, check them out.

Terraria Stand Alone Server on the Way

So I've really started liking Terraria and wanting to be able to play with my friends. After playing the game shortly after launch, I've been somewhat disappointed in the server software that is available at this point. However, the developers have said that they are going to eventually release separate server software so that people can run dedicated servers. I for one hope that some software is released for Linux because I personally much prefer running servers on Linux. In addition, they intend to allow for easier joining of games using the Steam API, which would mean you could click on a friend to invite him to your game or join his game. To read more that was said by the developer that goes by the name "Blue" read this forum post.

Diablo 3 Follower Preview

Blizzard has recently talked a bit about how followers will work in Diablo 3 and I thought I should say a little something about it. Based on a particular blue post on the subject, the point of followers is to give people playing through on single player a bit of the feel of having a friend with them. The balance of the followers is such that they will be useful on the first playthrough, but will have a severe dropoff in usefulness on the harder difficulties, making multiplayer the much better way to play in the long run. Also, they can provide an introductory feel to multiplayer.

Followers also stop following you when you play with a friend. I personally plan to play the game with friends as often as I possibly can because I really enjoy the social interactions that come along with most of the games I play. To hopefully give you a feel for how followers work in game, here is the video Blizzard released showing follower gameplay.

Trying out Terraria

I decided to pick up a game I saw on Steam today called Terraria. It looked quite interesting being a side scrolling platform type game, but with elements of construction and harvesting. In a way it's very similar to Minecraft, but in only 2 dimensions. You can still build enclosures through the use of wall blocks and they feel a lot like a home you might find in an NES platformer. You can even place tables, and ledges and other things to decorate your homes.

Another good thing about the game is that there seems to be a large variety of enemies to fight in the world. The first thing I found was a green slime, and I hit it a few times to kill it, granting me some coins. Terraria also has some sort of economy built in. I've heard rumors that you can somehow create rooms and have NPCs appear in them that will buy and sell things with you by exchanging currency you get from killing things.

Another feature I enjoy is the large variety of weapons available to use. I logged into my friend's server shortly after installing the game to find people running around with tons of different weapons that I didn't expect. I felt overwhelmed in that world however and left shortly after to explore things a bit on my own single player world. There is a helper guy that starts with you that gives you some idea of how to get started. He recommends you chop down some trees and set up a workbench to craft more complicated designs on. I only had a short time in which I could play the game, so I barely scratched the surface of the many many items there are to craft. This is definitely a game I'll be playing more in the future.

For your information, this is the trailer for the game:

Console vs. PC Controls (controller vs. mouse+keyboard)

It is pretty common for gamers to discuss which control scheme is better for FPS games. I'll go ahead and state my opinion up front that a mouse is way better for aiming in an FPS and for that reason, PCs win outright in the competition for better First Person Shooter controls. However, despite the fact that many game developers seem to think that shooters are the only kind of game in the world, there are many other kinds of games that people make and that are fun to play. Perhaps a better way to look at these control schemes is to consider their roots.

The console controller with dual analog sticks that is the prevalent control scheme for console games (they even have them on the wii classic controller) first appeared in the late 90s and seems to have won out due to the increased precision of control over a simple direction pad or camera buttons for the 3d games that were being released. Analog sticks provide a much needed increase in the number of levels of movement available so that the player can in theory move exactly where he wants to. In practice, the issue is nearly always bad camera control, either with automatic camera movement, or with player controlled movement that can sometime be too sensitive, or too slow, or both. Camera control is a very hard problem for console games.

For this same reason, first person shooters do not work well with an analog stick camera control. If you turn the sensitivity way up to be able to turn around fast enough, you lose the ability to make small movements to aim accurately, while if you have the sensitivity low enough to be able to aim accurately, you can no longer turn around fast enough to deal with threats behind you (or circling around you). The mouse somewhat solves this problem, although there is still a limit to how far it can move, based on the size of the mousepad. In practice, there is nearly always a sensitivity level you can choose for a mouse that allows for all of the necessary movements quick enough while maintaining the subtle precision aiming capabilities.

The weakness of PC controls comes from the keyboard, which was designed to mimic the text input of a typewriter. The keyboard is quite good when you need to input text, which is occasionally important for some video games (particularly ones with text chat in multiplayer). However, when used to control movement, the keyboard is much less accurate and only provides two options for each direction of control, on or off. If you want to move forward, you can press the move forward button (usually 'w') and you move forward, but you can't really slow down your movement by only pressing it halfway down. The common solution is to have a speed modifier button for "sneak", "walk" and "run" speeds. This input is still a digital choice and does not allow for the full analog selection provided by an analog stick. Thus for precision of character movement, a console analog stick wins out. A key point to realize is that for FPS games it is much more important to be able to face and aim the right way than it is to be able to move to a slightly more precise position, giving PC controls the advantage. In platformers, where precision of movement is more important, the analog input of controllers wins out every time.

In this post I've discussed the two control schemes I deal with most of the time in my gaming, however there are many more possible controls that have been explored that you can read about on wikipedia. Touch screens and motion sensors seem to be a newer input type that is growing in install base, but I believe there has yet to be seen a game that best uses those inputs for gaming. FPS games control poorly, or at least non-intuitively using motion and touch controls. I am excited to see what things people can come up with to innovate gaming.

Starcraft 2, Day 2

On my second day of Starcraft 2, my friend Phorisc wanted to play with me so I started by playing a 2v2 where we placed into Diamond. Then we played some 3v3s with Bothari and after that I played my 1v1 matches for the day. Sadly, my stream stopped working somewhere in the middle of the 3v3 matches so my triumphant victory while playing terran (my worst race) was not recorded and I can't share it with you. Instead, I have to share the placement match with Phorisc on my team. I also helped Phorisc set up his stream by pointing him at my Streaming Tutorial.

HoN Turns 1 Year Old

Heroes of Newerth, a game similar to League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients (or SotiS for SC2) has reached a year since it first released and left beta. I've played it a very little on and off since the beta, and I've never really been able to get into it. I think the reason I haven't gotten into it is because I don't have the patience to endure the learning curve while dealing with a bunch of angry players that hate that I haven't played it as much as they have. In any case, S2Games (the company that makes it) has a bunch of stuff planned to celebrate the occasion, so I might have to play a couple games again just to remind myself how little I enjoy it. I must say that the game does seem well tuned for people that are already very experienced at it (or DotA since it was made to appeal to hardcore DotA players).

Probably the best news for people that aren't ready to spend $30 on the game just yet is that they're allowing anyone to play for free for 11 days as part of this celebration so if you want to try it go to their website and sign up.

Tharesan's Shinobi Texture Pack

My friend Tharesan made a new Texture Pack. Here's my video showing off some of the blocks and a link to the planetminecraft download. If you like it support his pack by upvoting it.



View Tharesan's Shinobi Pack

Starcraft 2 Journey from Bronze Day 1

It has been a long time since I've played Starcraft 2 regularly and I decided I should give it a shot again. Last season my 1v1 was primarily just worker rushes to farm portraits. I didn't really get all that many, but I did manage to get my league down from gold that I placed into to bronze. As a result, my placement for Season 2 is also bronze (after 1 match).

Today I started my 1v1 journey on the ladder. I played a handful of matches, and to my surprise, I'm bad enough to actually lose to bronze players. I really feel like I need to get better at the basics of the game, like macro, micro and understanding the flow of the game first before I worry about strategy. I'm playing random because I feel like I should get to know all of the races and how they play, even though I feel like zerg is my strongest race (and favorite to play). Hopefully I discover some useful things over the next little while as I continue to try to play a few games a day (casually like a normal person) and be able to move up to at least Platinum if not Diamond.

If you have any suggestions for what strategy I should use as I attempt to improve in Starcraft, feel free to leave a reply here or on my facebook wall (or twitter @cordoro1). I do plan to stream the whole thing.

Diablo 3 Beta Tentative Date

Okay, I've posted a lot today already but I feel like I need to add one more thing because of how important Diablo 3 is to me. According to the Blizzard post tracker on d3db.com, the Diablo 3 Beta is planned to begin somewhere between July 1st and September 30th, 2011. I am very excited.

LoL Tenacity

So I just heard that they're adding a new stat to League of Legends called "Tenacity" so that they could add a few more items that have the stat. For a list of the items and a discussion on the topic, see this post on the LoL forums. Tenacity is basically the stat that Mercury Treads had before, that reduces the duration of crowd control effects. I believe the way it works, is that each point of tenacity gives you 1% duration reduction of CC. The big catch is that tenacity doesn't stack and you only get the bonus from the single item you have with the highest value. At this point, only two values exist, 35 from merc treads, or 25 from everything else you can get, meaning you get 35% CC reduction from merc treads and 25% from any of the other items you can get. I think this change will give many more options to many of the champions in the game that were particularly vulnerable to CC since you no longer have to get merc treads to resist it.

Just for more complete information, here are the new and changed items related to tenacity:

Mercury's Treads (Rework)
Cost: 1200
+35 Tenacity, +25 Magic resist.
Enhanced movement speed 2

Cloak and Dagger :
Cost: 1450
+25 Tenacity
+20% attack speed
+20% critical chance

Moonflair Spellblade :
Cost: 1290
+50 Ability power
+ 25 Tenacity

Eleisa's Miracle :
+25 Health Regen per 5 sec
+20 Mana Regen per 5 sec
+25 Tenacity

It looks like there's a tenacity item here for almost everyone that could want one. Here's the patch notes video if you want to hear about the changes straight from Riot:

GameDev Story

So last night I was originally planning on doing some streaming of Recettear or something, but before that I decided to play a little GameDev Story (links in the next paragraph). After a couple hours I decided I was just going to play all the way to the end of year 20 where the scores stop being reported to Game Center. I ended up taking quite a few hours and getting about 4 games of the year before the end of year 20, but the entire thing took quite a few hours. My iPod Touch's battery ran out during the time, so I had to plug it in to charge so that I could keep playing. This game is ridiculously addicting, and I'm afraid I need to keep myself from ever playing it again so that I don't get sucked into not following through with my plans.

For those that aren't familiar with what GameDev Story is, it's a game for iOS (and Android too I think) where you run a game development studio. You hire employees, keep them motivated, give them different jobs within the studio, and develop a bunch of games with an array of genres and game types. One of my best games from last night was an Action Ninja game. I also had an Online Sim History game that did quite well too for some reason. As the game progresses, different consoles come out, and developing for a console always results in better returns than developing for the PC, but they have higher licensing and development costs. Once you move in to a large office and develop a game that makes it into the "hall of fame" you can develop sequels. I would never have imagined that I would develop upwards of 10 sequels to my Checkers Board game, but they always sold well and would score very high in graphics if you can believe it. The game is pretty fun, especially for people who have a desire to some day work in the video game industry. You can develop all sorts of strange combinations, like Robot Trivia games.

If you do decide to pick up the game, please try to keep track of your life so that you don't lose it. This game is way more addicting than World of Warcraft.

Gaming Poll

I decided I wanted to remove the poll from my blog footer so I figured it would be good to keep a record of what it looked like when it close. This post just holds a screenshot of the final state of the poll. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Indie Game: Dwarfs!?

So today I decided to try out a new game that I haven't heard of before, so I got a game called Dwarfs!? on steam. The first thing I noticed from the video is that the dwarfs seem kinda like ants digging around underground, and honestly it feels a little that way. I consider this to be a good thing. But imagine if your ant could also fight using axes to keep back the mystical shaman they find hidden in caves. In reality, the standard game mode (called arcade) is quite simple, and gives you a time limit in which to explore as much area and as many caves as possible, while defeating any baddies you find along the way. Oh, and as dwarfs, you're also trying to collect treasure. As you gather treasure, you can use it to train more troops, close of dangerous areas of the map, and build new outposts to train troops to defend your miners. At $10 it's a pretty good buy that I would recommend to pretty much anyone that wants some single player strategy gaming.

Oh, and coincidentally, my high score at the time of writing is 5th on the 5 minute arcade mode on Normal difficulty. Here is the video:

I beat Portal 2!

So last night I beat Portal 2 on my stream and I must say, the game was a great experience. The first thing you notice when the game starts is that it has a great sense of humor. The script is very well written and the voice actors execute it extraordinarily well. Even when I wasn't laughing, I felt like I was enjoying myself with my virtual friend in the game. Another game that similarly has good writing and makes you feel like you're rarely left alone is Uncharted 2. I think the technique that both of these games use to keep the flow natural and enjoyable is to play the voices at times where you are platforming, allowing the player to do a little bit of multitasking by advancing story and gameplay simultaneously.

In terms of the levels, I believe the design team did an excellent job of keeping the objectives clear while still providing challenge and opportunities to think about how to solve the puzzles. Nothing is more obnoxious than a level where there is no clear goal, but Valve avoids those problems for the most part. The various features available in the game build on each other as you progress, so you are never presented with a huge jump in difficulty, but there is always a new challenge to deal with, so it never feels boring. Beyond the level design, the environments are varied and interesting, and span a large amount of Aperture Science history, giving you a look into the past for the lab you are being tested in. Portal 2 is a game that I highly recommend to everyone that has any inclination to play video games. If you'd rather just watch someone else play it, you can check out my playthrough on my Portal 2 youtube playlist.

Moving to justin.tv

Even though I originally started streaming on ustream, I had recently been having problems with it. The main problem was that videos I recorded there would not upload to youtube automatically and required me downloading them, and then compressing them again in another program. This conversion resulted in a huge loss in quality, and the audio and video being out of sync. Clearly this is not a good way to make youtube videos, so I decided to switch to streaming on justin.tv.

There are a couple benefits to justin.tv from my point of view, and the main one is that uploading videos to youtube is way easier. Whenever I stream to justin.tv, the video is automatically saved (for 7 days). While the video is saved, I can easily go back and watch it to make highlights. These highlights can then be uploaded to youtube, and the best part is that justin.tv will split the video automatically for you, so that you can upload something that is longer than 15 minutes in multiple parts. I used to have to watch the clock to try to stop the video every 10-15 minutes to be sure the video would upload. The other benefit to streaming on justin.tv is that they seem to have way more gaming streams, meaning people that are interested in watching games will be more likely to be on justin.tv already, giving me a greater chance of higher exposure.

Razer Carcharias Test

Two days ago, the audio in my stream had an obnoxious clicking sound that I was able to trace to the microphone input. I've been using a cheap $20 headset and mic that I got more than 3 years ago so I figured it might be time to upgrade to something a little better. I read a bunch of reviews online and decided that the Razer Carcharias would be worth trying out so I went to Best Buy and picked one up. The headphone part was fine and was definitely nicer than what I had at home. However, the problem I was trying to solve was getting a better microphone sound for my stream. It turns out that the microphone on the Razer Carcharias is worse than the one on the cheap set and does a worse job of picking up my voice. In addition, I found a lot more static in the signal coming from the Carcharias mic, so I decided to return them.

This morning before I returned them, I gave my old set another try, and the clicking noise was gone from the mic. My recommendation would be to only get a Razer Carcharias if you don't care too much about the microphone and plan to only use it for gaming with the occasional communication through steam, ventrilo or teamspeak.

What the Birds?

I was looking at the iOS app store today and I noticed that of the top 5 paid games, 2 of them are Angry Birds and 2 of them are games with icons that look very similar to Angry Birds. I think if you want to get a top selling iOS app these days, the best way is probably to create an icon for your app that has a cute chubby bird on it. That gives me a good idea for yet another project to work on when I can find some time...

Nintendo announces Wii 2

So I guess today Nintendo announced the Wii 2. Sounds like a good idea to me except for one or two things. First of all, the name doesn't follow Nintendo's regular naming scheme for consoles. Until the Wii, they'd always used Nintendo somewhere in the name for the console. The only time they reused the name of their previous console was in the Super Nintendo (SNES). This time, they seem to have followed the pattern set by their competitor, Sony, by just adding a number to the end. Come on Nintendo, couldn't you come up with something original? It sounds like you're just saying, "We too." I'd even settle for it being called the Super Wii over Wii 2.

Actually, I can't really come up with anything else to complain about other than the name, especially since there really aren't that many details about it yet. We will definitely get to hear a lot more about it at E3 this June and then I might have more to say. I've always liked Nintendo, and I'm sure this system won't be a big disappointment, especially since I already have a 3DS and they will probably do some things together.

If you want to read more about it, here is a list of recent blog posts about the announcement: ZDNet, PCMag(talks a little about hardware), 2D-X, T3, NDTV

Update: It appears that the official name of the project from Nintendo is Project Cafe, which is much less silly than the name that is being reported in most of the media.

ryAnime Texture Pack

My friend Tharesan recently made a texture pack for Minecraft that I thought I should show off. The pack can be downloaded from his page on planet minecraft. The change that you notice most immediately is that fires from furnaces and torches are blue instead of red, giving the lighting a cooler feel. The major changes are with the items and the skins for some of the mobs. Bows and arrows instead show up as shurikens. Swords have different blades and handles depending on the material, and all of the armor feels much more like it's out of some anime, with holes in places that reduce the practicality of the armor but make it just that much more awesome.

In terms of the changes to mobs, wolves have different skins, and tamed wolves look like huskies, but I wasn't able to find any wild wolfs in my short test to see what they look like. Skeletons look like bandits or ninjas wielding shurikens and are definitely fearsome. All in all, it's an enjoyable texture pack that leaves most of the terrain untouched for people like me that enjoy the look of terrain, while changing the feel of the items to keep the game fresh and engaging. Good job Tharesan! Check below for my video review.

What is missing from motion-controlled shooting games

When I got my Wii way back when it first came out in November of 2006 I was really excited for the new gameplay possibilities it would provide. In particular, I believed that shooters would finally be playable on consoles. No offense to anyone that exclusively plays shooters on consoles, but a mouse just provides much better accuracy and control than a thumb-stick ever will be able to. With the Wii remote, you can just point at the screen and pull a trigger to fire, much like gun-wielding arcade games.

In order to try out the motion-controlled shooting experience, I got a game called Elebits. The aiming at the screen works well, and the player quickly becomes accustomed to pointing to get the cursor to move. The one big downfall of this targeting scheme comes when the player needs to change the direction of the camera. The only way to move the camera is to move the pointer to the edge of the screen and wait there until the camera has moved far enough and then return the pointer to the center of the screen. This method of controlling the camera is just as bad as using a joystick, and in fact a little bit worse. For instance, if you move the cursor just a little bit past the edge of the screen and leave the screen entirely, the sensor no longer knows which direction to turn, so it either turns the wrong way or doesn't turn at all. Maybe that's why all the shooting games in arcades are rail shooter (a game where the camera control is scripted, and the action is always where the camera is looking). Unless something is done to improve the current state of motion-controls for consoles (and most arcade games), rail shooters are the best kind of motion-controlled shooters we will have.

The way I would implement a motion-controlled shooter to make the controls non-frustrating and intuitive would require hardware that is more expensive and perhaps less practical to have in one's living room. Most importantly, the player would need to have a surround display system. I mean that a set of displays, or one large, curved display, would need to be placed around the player to allow for a 360 degree view at all times. The player could then point the wand/gun/whatever in any direction and use a joystick to move relative to that pointing direction. The result would be an intuitive, accurate, and easy to control shooter with motion controls. The only downside is that the display technology is much more expensive than people are willing to pay. One might also want more displays to look up and down in addition to the horizontal directions.

Should I return to LoL

I recently decided to take a break from League of Legends. This happened at the time I made my previous blog post about competitive gaming. I uninstalled the game because a particular interaction I had in the game got me quite upset, and I didn't like how I felt. Since then, I haven't missed the game very much, and I've gotten much more interest in my stream from playing Minecraft. However, I do still think the game has good things to it, and would like to play it again at some point. Recently I've been trying to think about the things that would need to happen for me to be able to handle playing again.

First, I think everyone would have to only focus on the good things during the actual gameplay. This focus would be much more positive and help everyone on the team to be friendlier and more supportive of each other. Second, after the game ends, I'd be willing to accept comments about how everyone who played could improve, but I don't believe most interactions with the enemy team would be useful. I find that almost all the time, conversations with the enemy team are just a stream of insults and destructive to the morale of everyone. However, even when bringing up areas for improvement, I think there should be a clear message that good things did come from that player, and that they could be just a little bit better with this change or that change.

The primary motivation for these changes is to keep myself motivated and prevent me from getting so angry again. I will admit that my anger wasn't fully justified, but I also had many stressful things coming up in my life that kept me from keeping as level a head as I normally try to maintain. I also think that these changes will make me a more enjoyable team mate, and a better person at life in general.

Bukkit Server Tutorial on Windows

Are consoles holding back PC gaming?

People close to me know what my answer to this question is. A resounding yes. I've played a variety of games in recent years and I own a couple consoles (ps3 and wii) as well as a decent gaming PC (though it is a couple years old now). One game from the last few years that really got me interested was Borderlands. I'm one of the people that is of the opinion that FPS games are best controlled with a keyboard and mouse, and are therefore always better on a PC. I got the game for PC and as I played it, I noticed a huge annoyance in the way the menus worked. It was almost always better to take your hand off the mouse when in the menus and use the arrow keys and enter key to navigate them. This is terrible. The mouse was designed to make user interfaces better and more accessible but in Borderlands, the mouse is unusable for the interface entirely. Sadly, Borderlands is not the only game that I've played in the last few years to have this problem.

Today I found a blog post from the developer of Battlefield 3 about their position on this subject. They believe, like I do, that pc games in recent are plagued with engines, graphics, and user interface designed for consoles with minor changes to the PC version. To quote the Battlefield 3 blog, "console games are generally ported to the PC with some higher resolution textures." It is good to hear that Battlefield 3 is being developed in the opposite way. The PC version is the definitive version while the console versions are going to be ports with scaled down textures. I hope that more developers will see the light and develop for the PC when the game in question makes more sense as a PC title. They can still release console versions, but PC games should be PC games primarily, and console ports second. I suppose mobile phone ports could come third since people only really want to play angry birds on those platforms, but that's a discussion for another day.

How we use TNT in Minecraft

UPDATE 4 Aug 2011: People might be coming here to find out how to activate TNT. A patch since this video was made requires the use of redstone to activate TNT blocks. I hope that helps.



azmyth gives us an explanation of how to use TNT in Minecraft. Very educational and fun to watch.

Games vs. Toys

There's some difference between games and toys. Traditionally, games are defined by a set of rules which award points to the players to determine a winner based on some combination of skill, strength and luck. Toys on the other hand are merely an object usually intended for a child to play with. Games provide a set of restrictions on their users that typically increase the opportunity for fun as long as the right boundaries are chosen. Toys on the other hand can be used in any way that the user can come up with. An individual playing a game repeatedly can develop skill or strength, or just attempt to happen across better luck while repeated use of toys allows the exploration of a new world of possibilities each time.

Video games are a relatively modern kind of game, although I believe they regularly fill in somewhere between the traditional view of games and toys. In recent years, there has been a great increase in open-ended gameplay. Sometimes, there are products that are called video games, that are really just video toys. For instance, Garry's Mod (for Halflife 2), is a modification of the Source engine that allows the user to place a bunch of objects and interact with them. Often this interaction is very similar to ones that I had with my G.I. Joe figurines when I was younger. I believe there is great value in the interactions we have with toys, and the possibilities are endless when we are allowed to include our imagination in experiences. While I don't always think that adding more open-endedness to video games is a good thing, I do believe that there is a very useful and constructive place for video toys in our lives.

Easy Sphere Tutorial for Minecraft

I just want to emphasize that spheres made with this technique are not the most high quality, but they should be easy for anyone to make without downloading an extra program. I hope you find this tutorial useful. Here are the links relative to this video:

• Circle Chart
• High Quality Sphere Tool

Multiplayer Gaming

In case you haven't noticed, my poll for this week has to do with what kind of multiplayer gaming people prefer. I know which I prefer, but I don't want to reveal it until after the poll expires. However, I do want to talk a little bit about the good things that come from each type of multiplayer gaming without discussing the combination of the two.

First, competitive gaming in this context consists of games that directly match their players against each other as opponents. When on player does well, it is typically at the expense of another player. While players are assumed to follow a set of rules that describe the conditions of the game (assume hacks and cheating don't happen), humans are frequently capable of executing highly unpredictable behavior that can create a huge variety of experiences. A few examples of competitive games are Halflife 2 Deathmatch, Starcraft 1v1 matches, Street Fighter, and Super Smash Brothers.

On the other hand, cooperative games get a group of players and put them on the same team in order to overcome a shared opponent. Players who do well usually assist their team mates, causing them to also do well. Often the opponent or challenge to overcome is scripted, or has some predictable behavior that can be learned and overcome. Some cooperative games are World of Warcraft dungeons and raids, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, Little Big Planet, and Contra.

Both cooperative and competitive gaming have good things about them that can provide varied and satisfying experiences. Both allow for social interaction, which I believe to be an important part of life. Many of my close friends live some distance from me these days, so it is valuable to my life to be able to continue to enjoy my friendships through multiplayer gaming experiences across the internet. Between the options of competitive and cooperative multiplayer out there, I'm sure there's a gaming experience for everyone.

Why does competitive gaming bring out the worst in people?

So today I started wondering about why the players in all of the competitive games I play end up treating each other like trash. I mean, we're all people, and in fact we're all part of a small subset of society that tends to be looked down on for isolating ourselves in our mothers' basements and playing games online all day. If anything, we should be supportive of each other and avoid causing extra hardship when there are plenty of other people telling us that we're wasting our lives away by playing video games at all.

Part of it may be that many players allow themselves to get too close to the game, and identify too closely with the character that they are controlling. It could be that the players stand to lose or gain something by the results of a given match, whether it be achievements, or points or whatever. Perhaps some players are just angry at life, and are happy to take out their frustration on strangers across the internet.

While these all might contribute to the irritability of many gamers, I think a huge part of the problem is that gamers forget to recognize each other as human beings. In some sense, many games present the opposition in a similar way that war propaganda would discuss whatever country happens to have a differing point of view to our own. For instance, when you choose to identify with the Horde, you immediately become a part of an endless conflict with the races of the Alliance, even if you have no idea what they did wrong. Pretty quickly, some Alliance member will pick on you causing your hatred to grow, even when there is not necessarily a cause for such hostility between a particular set of two individuals (I want to add that I think it is very good that opposing factions in World of Warcraft only have limited communication options to reduce the anger).

While competitive athletics also have some pretty hostile encounters from time to time, I think that the practice of greeting your opponents before a sporting event, and congratulating the winner after help to contribute to good sportsmanship. At least at some point, players are able to see their opponent as a relatable human being with similar interests. Tempers can still run high at times, but at least good behavior is encouraged by the rules of engagement. Youth sports tend to have coaches that ideally teach their players how to be a good sport, and a gracious winner (or loser).

If I could make a proposal for all competitive video games to at least consider in the future to attempt to improve the sportsmanship of their players it would be the following 3 things:

1. Give players a chance to hang out with each other in a non-competitive environment. This could be a lobby, or a cooperative game mode.
2. If possible, provide some sort of training to players that describes the kind of behavior that is good, and what kind of behavior is unacceptable. This should include rules that are clearly listed.
3. Enforce punishment for players that violate the sportsmanship rules. Even better than punishment would be to provide rewards to players that are good sports and increase the quality of the community.

Competition is frequently a good thing for people. Competition is often what keeps people working to improve and better themselves. Competition is the basis of the free market, and is a huge part of the world economy. While competition is an important part of life, everyone needs to learn to manage their anger and frustration and keep an eye on the good in every situation.

Darkspore Beta

So I got into the Darkspore Beta by using the "click here" link on the steam page and I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts on the gameplay. The first thing I noticed was that the game was actually and action RPG, which I didn't really expect. I saw that it was from Maxis (known for simulation games) and I expected something kinda like Spore. It was a very pleasant surprise to find that the core gameplay is essentially a hack and slash class-based RPG much like Diablo, or Torchlight. Without going into too much detail on other games, Darkspore stands out in the genre by having 100 different classes to choose from. That is actually a slight exaggeration I believe because they reuse a lot of the same types of skills but mix them up differently for the different classes.

A feature that Darkspore borrows from the original Spore game is the character editor, although it is much more restricted in Darkspore. Each class has a preset structure to it, but the player can customize many of the features in the same way that creatures in Spore could be modified. The textures on each monster that you control can also be varied, making it possible for each player to use a set of avatars that are entirely unique to that player. The one downside to this huge level of customization is that, with 100 classes, the player can quickly feel overwhelmed with the huge number of things that must be done to play all of the classes.

Another interesting thing about Darkspore comes in the way you choose which classes to use in a given level. Each player chooses 3 classes, and those classes can be switched to from whichever is the active one on a relatively short cooldown. That means that there are 100 choose 3 possible class combinations for a player to pick from on a given level. It also means that for a player playing the game alone, he can bring a healer, and tank, and a damage dealer class all together and switch between them as needed.

Probably the best thing about Darkspore is the automatic matchmaking system. If you want to play a game, you can choose to have the game pick people for you to play with, and the game quickly forms and starts. That also means that you don't have to dig through pages of password protected games just to find one that you can get into. I believe that automated matchmaking is a must for a title to be a quality multiplayer experience these days. Maybe I'm just spoiled because of how easy it is to get a good matchup quickly in other recent online games.

Sona wins games!

This is just an example of how Sona wins games.

My 3ds Mii QR code

More about the 3ds

So I recently had someone ask me how the 3D images work on my 3ds. I explained something about the little slots in the screen that direct different pixels to each of your eyes to make things appear to have depth to them. Today I found an interesting article with microscope pictures of the 3ds screen: The 3DS Under a Microscope - Nukezilla. It pretty interesting to me that the bars dividing the slots are that big (in relation to the size of the pixels).

Another thing I noticed about the 3ds is that the aliasing of the 3D shapes seems to be even more exaggerated when the 3D is on. I think that comes from the way that the image is rendered twice from slightly different angles, so there are 2 chances for jaggies on the edges. Where a normal rasterized image only has the chance for aliasing once, the 3ds has aliasing for both eyes, and, in particular, the jaggies don't line up and cause an extra level of visual confusion that isn't there for movie images (because of very aggressive anti-aliasing for computer generated images).

First impressions of the 3ds

So I went and got a 3ds today from Toys R Us. Who knew they were still in business? Anyway, I spent a few minutes playing around with it and I though I could share some of my impressions with you.

The first thing I noticed when I turned it on was that the 3d screen was almost too much, but that was probably because I was moving at the time. After I sat down and adjusted the 3d slider, I felt much better about my 3d experience. For it to work right, you have to hold it kinda close to your face, which may be part of why they recommend taking a break every 30 minutes from the 3d experience.

As far as software goes, the first game I played on it is built in and called Face Raiders. What you do is take a picture of your face first, then you proceed to fire balls to knock floating heads out of the sky. And by that I mean, you turn the device around the world, and it augments reality to show flying heads attacking you. I felt kinda awkward doing this in a public place as I had to get up off my chair to defeat the boss that was behind me. The game worked very well and was very impressive I thought. Augmented reality gaming is probably at its best (for now) in Face Raiders.

Then I tried out AR Games after returning to my car to get the AR cards that I hadn't realized I'd need. AR Games is another set of games that augments reality, but it all based around the card you place on a flat surface. Similar to Face Raiders, you shoot balls at targets, but this time they are objects that seem to spawn from the card that you placed down. It was a really fun game, but again, I felt awkward performing in front of a group of people when I was the only one that could actually see the dragon emerging from the card and trying to scratch my face off. I eventually won and moved on to make myself a Mii.

Similar to the software on the Wii, the 3ds allows you to customize your Miis however you wish, but with a few additional parts. I however chose the other option, to have the Mii be based on a picture. I moved myself to a good location, and took the picture of myself. The generated Mii was acceptable, and as I was told, was a pretty good representation of myself. All in all I've had fun with my 3ds so far and I would recommend it to anyone who has $250 that they don't have anything else to do with.

Vs. AI is fun

I just wanted to show off how fun it is to play vs. AI in League of Legends with this picture. The character selection screen had no discussion.

Random Steam Game

I just found a great website to help me when I'm in an indecisive mood but want to play something on Steam. If you have steam and are ever faced with this situation, I recommend checking it out. I just tried it out and got Alien Swarm.

Parkour Parkour!

Tharesan spent a long time building this city environment in which he could do parkour. I helped a little bit and Lilei also helped with decorating the interiors of the apartments. Here's a short video of Tharesan doing a quick lap around the city.

Minecraft's Appeal

I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately and there are reasons for it. A big part of why I play video games is for the social interaction. While the social tools in Minecraft aren't nearly as good as they could be, playing on a server is very much a social activity. I made a server so that I can hang out and play with all my friends that are interested in exploring, gathering materials, and building awesome stuff. And before you ask, no you cannot have access to my server unless you actually know me.

I have heard some complaints that Minecraft has bad graphics and just doesn't have enough of a point to make it an interesting game. Those complaints come from a lack of understanding of what Minecraft is. You, as the player, can come up with the point of the game for yourself, or you can depend on the other players if you have a multiplayer server to inspire your actions. And if you think about it, the collection of parts and construction of objects is very much like playing with Legos. The blocks in Minecraft are restricted to cubes (and occasionally half cubes), which is slightly different than the Lego restrictions, but similar enough to the basic building blocks from a set of Legos. Of course there are custom blocks made for specific types of building projects, such as light sabers for Lego men to hold in the Star Wars sets. I argue that those pieces are similar to a player holding a sword.

It is also for this reason that I do not want to install the iConomy server mod to my minecraft server. I think that adding a currency to the game is perhaps a little bit of overkill. There are already tons of resources to collect and use for various things. Depending which projects you are working on, you might want to trade the cobblestone you've collected to someone else that has surplus iron. On my server, however, the barter system has almost entirely been done away with in favor of community drive building projects. A couple people get an idea, and everyone that hears about it wants to contribute. It's really a good feeling to have a game that is almost entirely cooperative to contrast with all of the other popular games that tend to thrive on being competitive.

Tutorial video for Spawner Trap

Thanks to Salamislacks and his incredible research and engineering efforts we have this wonderful monster spawner building with a trap floor to kill the monsters. We get lots of monster drops from it. Here's a video explaining how the trap floor works.

Minecraft Lava Pyramid

We just made a lava pyramid on our minecraft server live on the stream. Here is the recording of that event.

What I think makes League of Legends good. Part 2

Last time I covered some of the design decisions that went into League of Legends and why I think those decisions were good ones. Today I continue my analysis with the following topics.

Learning Curve:

The first thing I noticed when I played League of Legends was how easy it was to get into the game. I was a new player to the genre, although I had played RTS games as well as games like Diablo 2, so the control scheme was familiar. The game got me right into the action after a short tutorial (which I will talk about next). I was surprised that I was able to just play the game without really having a clue what I was doing or what any of the terminology meant. For instance, there is a list of recommended items for each character which isn't terrible. If a new player just sticks to that list, they won't be at a huge disadvantage, to many of the other players with more experience.

Speaking of experience, League of Legends uses it as a representation of how much a player has played the game. That means that as you play more, they advance your experience level. With that level advancement come additional gameplay mechanics, such as more summoner spells, additional rune slots, and more masteries to pick from. A beginner has little to worry about besides picking his or her character, while the more experienced user can spend the time customizing his masteries and selecting a rune page to match. There is however a side effect of this system, and that is that more experienced players have a noticeable advantage by having these additional features unlocked.

Match Making:

The way League of Legends gets around the experience advantage is by using their matchmaking system. When a new player decides to play a game, the system attempts to match that player with other new players, thereby keeping the overall balance of runes and masteries even between the teams. Even when a new player queues with a more experienced friend, the matchmaking system does its best to find players that will keep the teams balanced. The result is a game that is generally more evenly matched and enjoyable for everyone involved.

Tutorials:

Even before a player begins their first game in League of Legends, the client suggests that the player go through a short tutorial. This tutorial is well designed and teaches the player some of the basics of the game on a simple map with only one lane and scripted events that walk the player through the required steps to win a match. A voice guides the player and provides positive reinforcement that is very welcoming, and encouraging. After the tutorial, the player is offered a choice to play a practice game against some bots. This practice game provides quests and optional advice that teaches the new player a lot of the terminology that is regularly used in the game. The result is a player that is at least partly familiar with the things he or she will hear from other players in normal games.

Map Design:

I'm going to focus on Summoner's Rift, the standard 5v5 map that I spend most of my time on in League of Legends, for this discussion, but I believe the general design applies to all of the maps that Riot has made for their game. In warcraft 3 one of the main resources that players would collect is lumber. This meant that trees were easy to add to the map as obstacles for DotA, and that it was easy to add ways for those trees to be destroyed for gameplay purposes. The main downside of this is that the map ends up with a lot of small features that allow a short cut to happen that aren't readily apparent to the new player. League of Legends takes the approach of making the impassable terrain immediately discernable to even an inexperienced player. There are still some "short cuts" that cater to the players looking for a bit more of depth in game play, but the spell that gives all characters the ability to jump over certain spots in the terrain isn't available until level 12, after the player has time to complete quite a few games.

Persistant Rewards:

All most of the hero-based games like League of Legends are role playing games (RPGs), and involve the development of skills and abilities for the hero. League of Legends has an extra level of character progression that extends beyond the progression of an individual battle. The summoner is the term for the persistant character who summons the champions to battle each time, and has the ability to prepare two spells for use in assisting the hero with his or her combat against the enemy. The summoner is the one that gains experience and levels. The summoner is able to unlock new champions and skins permanently. The summoner gathers runes into run pages that heros can use to improve their fighting abilities.

The idea of RPG-like persistant character progression is not unique to League of Legends and has been a good reason why games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft have a tendency to really draw in their customers to keep playing. In all honesty, it could be seen as a negative feature for a game to use this technique to draw in players for more and more time as they accumulate the various rewards available to them in the game. I think there is still a good amount of enjoyment that a player can get from the sense of accomplishment that these little checkpoints provide.

What does Spleef mean?

Spleefing is a game inside minecraft where you try to dig out the ground underneath your opponent to make him or her fall. When you do this in a controlled environment then no one gets hurt and it can turn out to be a lot of fun. Here's a video I recorded last night of Azmyth and Tharesan spleefing in the spleef arena I built.

What I think makes League of Legends good. Part 1

Currently, League of Legends (LoL) is one of the games I play the most. It is a game in a category of games that they call MOBA and I like to call Hero Arena (HA) games. Basically, each game of this type has a set of heros (or champions) that are placed on teams. Each hero has some abilities that can typically be improved as a match progresses and the objective can be a few different things. The most popular objective, and the one used in LoL, is the destruction of the enemy base after the progressive destruction of a series of defensive structures. In a standard 5 vs. 5 game of LoL, there are 3 "lanes" each with 3 turrets defending an inhibitor (a building that prevents the enemy from spawning "super minions") and then 2 more turrets defending the main base building (called a nexus). Periodically, minions are spawned that follow a set path down the lanes towards the enemy base and it is the job of the heros (controlled by players) to influence the battle of the minions to cause the destruction of the enemy defensive structures.

There are a few things that attract me to the game including the accessibility of the game, the transparency of the developer, the colorful, stylized graphics, and the enjoyable voice acting. Today I want to write about the things I like about League of Legends in terms of game design, and particularly what is good about their decisions and how they generally make the game easier to get into for the new player. I'm going to do my best to focus on the decisions they made in designing League of Legends, and try my best to avoid talking too much about other games competing with League of Legends in the same genre. To some extent this is unavoidable because they are all based on DotA and some of the decisions are in direct contrast to the decisions their competitors have made.

Denying:

While on the subject of differences from the competition it is important to bring up the concept of denying. To discuss what it means to deny, we must first look at DotA, a game built on the Warcraft 3 engine. (Disclaimer: I have barely played any games of DotA because I didn't find it fun so I could be way off in my description here). In Warcraft 3, a Real-time Strategy Game, the player controls a group of units at a time and gives those units commands. Warcraft 3 made heavy use of heros in its basic gameplay and they functioned similarly to heros in LoL, except that the player also had the control of standard army units, and worker units. All units could be given the command to attack specific targets. As a convenience for when your own units or buildings got in the way, it was possible to order your units to destroy your own allied units. There was rarely a benefit to this practice, but it was allowed for the rare circumstances when pathing wouldn't work, or when you needed food that was being used by a weak unit to train a more powerful unit.

In Dota, a map was set up just like I described for League of Legends. The default behavior built in to Warcraft 3 was used for hero experience and gold, and that is that the hero that lands the killing blow on a unit gets gold for that kill, and every unit that dies in range of the hero grants some amount of experience to the hero, increasing its level and power. Gold is a powerful resource because it is what is required to purchase items for your hero that greatly increase his or her effectiveness in battle. It was quickly discovered that a player could attack the minions on his own side when they were almost dead to prevent the enemy heros from being able to get the gold from those kills. Additionally, gold is granted for killing towers, and once again, you could kill your own tower to prevent the enemy from getting gold for the kill.

Riot Games (the makers of LoL) decided that denying should not be a part of League of Legends. First they say that killing your own units just feels weird, and I have to agree with them on that. Second, I think that it is non-intuitive to a new player that he should kill his own units. As a new player coming to the game, you see the two waring factions locked in battle and so in order to help your team gain an advantage you kill your own troops? That's just silly. Riot made the decision to not allow the player to kill his own units, and instead increase the importance of harassing early in the game.

Harassing:

Early in the game, heros tend to distribute themselves to a couple of different lanes to gather gold from the enemy minions (as well as some from the neutral minions in the jungle, but I'll get to the jungle another time). In DotA, resources for using abilities were relatively scares, especially early in the game. In contrast, League of Legends is designed with slightly higher base resources, and a regeneration of resources that is high enough to be useful. Mana still can run out, but players are encouraged to attempt to deal damage to weaken their enemies to the point that they can either force them to retreat to heal, or maybe even kill their enemies, forcing them to wait a short time to respawn. The higher focus on harassing makes the game feel more like a battle and less like a game to see who can kill minions better than their enemy.

Punishment vs. Rewards:

This is perhaps the most important thing that I think Riot has done in their design of LoL. The entire design of the game seems to be of the mentality that players should be rewarded for playing the game and punishment should be kept to a minimum. One prime example can be seen in the way League of Legends deals with killed heros. When a hero kills another hero, the killing hero gains a good amount of gold and any assisting heros on the same team gain a smaller amount of gold as a reward for doing something good. The hero that has died is taken out of the fight for a short time, but has no equipment, experience or gold taken from him. Other games punish players for death much more harshly, by removing the things they have obtained. Harsh punishments can be depressing to a player, and even more so to a player that is new and has to deal with deaths perhaps a little more frequently than the more experienced players.

Free to Play:

League of Legends is a "free" game. That means that the game is free for anyone to download, install and play as much as they want, with one catch. That is that it is supported by micro-transactions. Each week, Riot sets 10 of the heros in the game to be free for anyone to use. This set of 10 heros changes from week to week. Each hero can be unlocked by playing the game for a certain amount of time, or by paying a small fee to the company to buy permanent access to a particular hero. Also, alternate looks for heros can be unlocked by similar small payments of approximately $4-$14. I'll probably talk more about this topic in a future post, but the important part for my current discussion is that it is easy for people to play the game since there is no cost upfront, which means that you can play with friends whenever you want. For me, gaming is much more fun when it becomes a social experience.

This post is getting kind of long so I'm going to stop here for now. Topics for next time: Persistant Rewards, Tutorials, Map Design and Learning Curve.

First Stream

I figured it would be nice to show some results of my first attempt at streaming. I just uploaded the video of the game we won in League of Legends to youtube, so here it is:

Slime Time!

So I was wandering around my server today and I found something interesting in a door. There were a bunch of slimes hanging out so I thought I'd take some screenshots. Here are the pictures for you to experience some of the fun I had with my new friends.

To comment or not to comment

When I learned to program in college, the instructor taught us that comments are a very important part of writing code. I for one believe this to be true. However, today I read a blog post that claims that commenting should be a lower priority concern for programmers. Riyad Mammadov said, "If the choice is between a well-designed program without comments and a thoroughly commented but poorly architected one, I will choose the former any day of the week." I can get on board with him on this to some extent. I do believe that well-designed code is a very important aspect of programming. Things should be modular and easy to extend, and writing unit tests can be a very good way of making sure things are working write. However, I believe that even with the most verbose programming possible, there are times where you just can't figure out what a single line of code is actually doing, and why it's written the way it is.

Obviously anyone would prefer a well-designed program, however, I think in most cases it is not impossible to have both good design, and good comments in the code. Maybe it's just the academic in me speaking, but I believe technical writing skills are very important to the successfulness of a programmer in contributing to a team working on a project. This is even more true when the project is something like a video game, where the team is a more diverse group than just a bunch of programmers. Even immigrants that might know programming languages better than English should make their best effort to at least be able to communicate efficiently to help the team be successful.

Setting Up Game Streaming

For a while I've wanted to figure out how to stream the games I play so that other people could watch if they wanted. I know I enjoy watching other people play games from time to time, so I thought it could be fun to have other people watch me. I've tried to get stuff set up for streaming before, but the sound didn't work right, or the video would end up choppy, or something would just go wrong. But yesterday, I was successful.

The key for me was a program called XSplit. I've watched a lot of other people stream League of Legends on own3d.tv and so I decided to make a channel there. They suggest using XSplit so I downloaded it and installed it. After setting up XSplit, I clicked broadcast to my own3d channel, and nothing showed up. It seemed like I was broadcasting, but even my friends couldn't see anything on my channel for some reason. The only time video would show up is when I'd turn off the broadcast. A brief amount of video would get through right at the end of the broadcast. I still haven't figured out why XSplit didn't work for me with own3d (I might need to open ports or something).

So I decided to try out my ustream.tv account that I'd already set up in my previous attempt at streaming since XSplit has an option to use a ustream account. Magically, it just worked. I did spend some time playing around with the settings in XSplit to get the sound to work right, but I was able to broadcast 2 hours of minecraft just fine. Then I decided to play a couple games of League of Legends, and they also worked just fine. One thing I'd noticed other streamers using to get LoL to work in windowed fullscreen mode, was a program to shift the window slightly. This thread on the LoL forums tells you where to get the program and how to set it up.

I also tried streaming a Starcraft 2 game, but the stream was kinda choppy, probably because I had the graphics a little too high. In the end, I'm glad to have streaming set up on my computer and I hope my experience with setting it up can help other people in the future