That Namelezz Blog

The game industry as of now looks like this:

- The occasional rogue indie game that blows all other games out of the water because of its uniqueness

- Sequels to all the award-winning series and milking money out of every old franchise (Guitar Hero)

- Unreleased games full of hype which turn out to be bad.

And that’s why we need to rewind the clock a bit – let’s go back to the year 1998 when an extraordinary game was released – a game which spawned numerous other games! We’re talking about Half-Life, a game by Valve Software and published by Sierra Interactive. I spent most of my childhood playing this little gem and all it’s mods.

One of those mods was Sven Co-op. It is currently the most longest living Half-Life modification, participating in all of ModDB’s Mod of the Year Awards from the start.

What made it special was the atmosphere in the game. In a game where you are forced to cooperate with other players, usually strangers, gave you very little room of your own. There was no “I” in a team, instead you broke through waves of enemies with covering fire, friendly NPCs and friends yelling “Grenade!” around you. This concept was unique from the start – everyone wanted to play HL1 with their friends! The trick was that the custom maps took the lead instead of the original Half-Life campaign – making Sven Co-op’s replayability almost endless.

Whether it was afrikakorps, toonrun or svencoop – I loved all the custom maps. There was some that I never understood but still played through. There were also some that never had players playing them, forcing me to switch server.

But these custom maps were just that – custom! Toonrun was a cartoony land full of weird enemies, essentially throwing you into another world full of puzzle-solving and epic boss fights. Afrikakorps had a WW2 vibe, killing soldiers in a desert environment didn’t fit the game at all but everyone loved it. Svencoop was one of the best as well. It had a consistent storyline, hilarious puzzles and lovely use of cooperative elements. If you have ever tried to push a crate through a narrow trench with bullsquids all over you, you really realized the point of the cooperative gameplay. It’s a lovely feeling when you’re about to get slaughtered by three vortigaunts and suddenly a friend shotguns them in the face and heals you.

But why am I writing in the past tense? Sven Co-op is still alive and well! It has just released another update and it’s as playable as ever. For me it’s a nostalgia trip – for you, if you haven’t played it, it’s a unique experience that you will remember the rest of your gaming days.

Oh, and if you see me playing, say “Hi”. I’m “Namelezz” in-game. Who knows, maybe we’ll get together to kill monsters sometime soon.

Sven Co-op website:  http://www.svencoop.com

I really like the new Steam UI. It’s sleek, looks good and works really well on all aspects. Can you disagree to a view like this?

The new Steam Game Library Grid is a lovely way to show your games - you can even zoom in and out to show more games at once!

While the grid itself is lovely, so are the new library functions. You can fill in categories to save your games in (eg. “Works on laptop” or “Half-Life Saga”), it shows which games have Steam Cloud implemented and each game has a lovely splash page with achievements, statistics and it even shows friends which own that game!

There’s still some quirks I don’t like. I don’t like the ultraslow scrolling of Store pages, automatically playing game videos (it’s hell with a mobile internet like myself) nor the lack of small 16×16  icons for each game. You can’t shrink Steam into a mini games list like before which is also a minus for guys who love minimalistic designs (such as myself).

I still love it. If you’d like to try it, head to http://store.steampowered.com/uiupdate and apply in the beta!

Welcome to our first Making of Arcane, Stealth & Power blog post. In this post we’ll show you how we made the majestic desert city of Yamar from fantasy to reality.

We started with a simple goal: we wanted a highly populated trade center into the game which would have lots of possibilities for the game’s three character classes. In less than three hours Zee made a lovely sprite sheet which would make the base of the city of Yamar. Of course we needed a landmark to build the city on and our innovation was the movie Aladdin and it’s lovely golden onion roofs. Those roofs were the first props made into Yamar.

We started our city on a tower base, a floating platform on a gray surface that would eventually become the fabled golden tower of Yamar.

These towers are crucial to show class differences in the game; the nimble and acrobatic Assassin is the only one lightweight enough to climb them to the top and thus evade a lot of combat situations. They will also make great vantage points for assassinations using bow and arrows. Next up was making them really look like towers, so Zee got right on it.

Zee made the onion roofs look brilliant. This is an early test shot with floating platforms but gives an idea of the height and build of the towers.

We got the onion roofs and thus we got the visual style that would make Yamar look lovely. After a few more sprite crunching, blood, sweat and tears we got them to look like someone could actually live in them. OBSERVE!

Windows, balconies and gradients implemented. Detail is present and this is almost the finished graphical style.

Thus we have lovely towers of Yamar looking great. But what about the rest of the streets? What is on the surface of Yamar? What is on the surface of the Jetsons? More buildings of course! A little more primitive, there will eventually be slums, a marketplace, some government housing that are almost as majestic as the palaces and towers. But here’s some sneaky peeks of what we made for the surface.

Climb up high into the towers and this view will open to you. Calm waves, clouds and almost endless desert go far into the horizon.

Here's an old picture of the surface way back when we still had no seamless style for the buildings.

What was the end result of Yamarian Nights then? Of course the thing we sought after: a huge trade metropolis! With rich and poor people alike, Yamar is a huge desert city and I think we got the message through. See for yourself!

Yamar has a lot of people, a lot of interactivity and a lot of visual splendor. This is what Yamar looks like right now.

Thanks for staying with us for this blog post. Be sure to keep your eyes out for the next one where we will show in detail how we got complete pedestrian randomization in-game!

Welcome to That Namelezz Blog, the blog I keep up so you can pretend you’re entertained by my shoddy writing. The last blog (which was working, lovely and perfect) got database corrupted due to exceeding my MySQL quota, so here’s my new blog with even more interesting stuff to gawk at.

I’ll be making new posts and I’m not bringing the old posts back. First reason is because I can’t and second reason is that they are horrible.

I’ll start with Arcane, Stealth & Power news next. If you don’t know yet, I’m working on a game called “Arcane, Stealth & Power” which is an episodic sidescroller-RPG focused in combat. It is being developed by two persons, me and a great graphics artist called Zee. We’ve formed an indie game company called NZ Game Development.

That’s all you need to know for now, see you in future posts.