#early pc

Behold the peak of 1980 alpha-energy: a man who has finally found a machine he can "respect." Nothing says "I’m a serious professional" like a sweater vest the color of a bruised plum and a computer that looks like a microwave had a child with a wood-paneled station wagon.

The Compucolor II was clearly designed for the man who wants to fight Klingons in 8 glorious foreground colors while his disk drive makes sounds like a blender crushing gravel. Check out that keyboard, it’s not just a peripheral; it’s a topographical map of a Lego factory, featuring enough multicolored keys to launch a nuclear strike or, more likely, just type out a very slow grocery list in BASIC. For the low, low price of $1,595 (roughly $6,500 in today’s money), you too could own a screen with "16,484 individually-accessible plot blocks." Move over, 4K resolution; the age of the "plot block" is here, and it is beautifully, chunky-ly beige.

J(a)SON Post #2

Interfacing:

Games like Deus Ex, VtM:B, Prey 2017, etc. include interesting interfaces for things like computers, security terminals, etc. Rather than just simply showing the player the information they need to see and then moving on, they opt to allow the player to explore an interface with a degree of control closer to that of a real device or an operating system. The first time I saw the interface for controlling cameras in Deus Ex, all of the synapsis in my brain fired at once when I realized you can just manually rotate the cameras and enable /disable them individually. It doesn't take that much extra effort to include this degree of interactivity, and it baffles me as to why so few big budget games do so. At a certain point in development, I realized I needed a system like this, so I set it up so that I could easily create and assign an interface to any device that needs one. As you can see in the photos above, each interface has its own pre-render that depicts a closeup of whatever the player is interacting with. This allows me the freedom to basically do whatever I want with them, and it opens up the door to some pretty fun possibilities. On a surface level it allows a higher degree of player freedom as they can do things like manually set the timer on the c4, but it will also allow me to do some more ambitious stuff like create a micro-os for the computers that lets you check email, mess with a pseudo-code terminal, and play picross. This week I've been working on the ATM, which will allow you to enter any bank account information that you come across and drain whatever amount of money you want from the account. I'm looking forward to sharing more of the interfaces as I develop them, so I guess you'll see them then.

Conclusion:

J(a)SON Post #3

Stealing Money For Fun & Profit:

Most of my week was spent playing dark souls 2 again, but aside from that I spent most of my time working on the ATM's functionality. The ATM is heavily inspired by the ATMs in Deus Ex, and just like in that game you can input an account's information and then drain it. In the gif above you can see an example of me sneaking into the nefarious Doctor Spider's evil bank account and stealing 200 bucks. You can also blow up the ATM to get 75 bucks worth of wads of money to come out of it, or you can try to hack the ATM and get it to lock up like a dummy. Pretty simple stuff, but it always feels amazing to sneak into someone's bank account and steal all their money, and in the game as well! For those interested, I used jwildfire for the background fractal textures on the ATM UI. That program is amazing and I'd highly recommended checking it out (especially if you have an affinity for y2k visuals).

Building a Gas Station:

After a while spent purely implementing devices and mechanics, I was really itchin' to make an environment. I decided to start putting together a gas station since it's the smallest environment segment I have planned for the main map. In the images above you can probably get a good feel for my process on an environment like this. I haven't ever really done whiteboxing before this project, but I've found it to be very helpful when having to make more detailed environments. I actually hate having to litter an environment with smaller details and objects, which is the main reason why most of the environments in my previous games feel pretty sparse. I can't just get away with broad strokes this time around though, so I started to employ "words" that dictate where a planned object should go. Texturing all of the products in the gas station is easily the most tedious part, and it burns me out pretty quickly. So far, I've only textured 4 chip bag variants and 4 cereal box variants, and most of the products are yet untextured. These environments always look pretty terrible before I get them in engine and all lit up, so I have to trust that it's gonna look and feel a lot better once that is done.

Conclusion: