Friday, July 31, 2015

For the King - Teaser Trailer

This is the game my son, Gordon Moran, and his friends at IronOak Games are developing. Please send him lots of money when Kickstarter is activated in September.

I'm buying a university and a professor character for the game. The professor will battle the forces of evil and superstition. Ms. Sandwalk is contributing enough for a medieval faire with lots of games where you can win prizes.

Find out more at http://www.ironoakgames.com.



20 comments:

  1. What does it take to buy a force of evil?

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  2. After 3 seconds of watching this game I made up my mind..

    Thanks , but no thanks

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  3. What's up with the polygons? They look weird in today's age of photo-realistic CGI. Doom 20+ years ago looked more advanced that this.

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    1. Hmmm ... looks like this is not the game for you! You missed the point entirely.

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    2. What's up with the inability to differentiate between purposefully chosen styles in design? People could do this 6000+ years ago.

      Also based off your comment I don't think you even know what Doom is.

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    3. I realize that it was intentional. But I personally find the choice unpleasant. Just like the random crap that abstract expressionists "paint" is not a good choice of art just because it's intentional.

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    4. Well, photo-realism in CGI is generally not archived through more topology, but through texture maps. I generally prefer my CGI wo be actual CGI and that means I'm in for generated textures, but not for image textures. If you go that route, you are looking at graphics that are pretty close to what you can actually render in real time. A quick make of a human with makehuman reduced to the number of Tris you could reasonably put into a game looks like this:
      http://post-neo.com/evo/poly.png
      Anything that looks more photorealistic is based on using bump and normal maps, which are pre-rendered. Since the game says it uses algorithmic content, pre-rendering isn't really an option (or you lose quite a bit of the advantages that algorithmic generation provides - you have to contrain how things are built quite a lot).

      So, I'm not sure that this is even intentionally abstract in style, it's just that you would have to make changes to the gameplay if you were to go for more photorealism, which with the current technology would require you to bake out a lot of stuff.

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    5. Absolutely true. Lighting and rendering arguably play the most important part in making something looking photo real. The advancements in these areas over the last few years are astounding. So while we choose a faceted look for our art style as a nod to early CGI, the rendering is what brings the look into modern times.
      Obviously, it's not for everyone, but having grown in the dawn of CGI, this style is very near and dear to my heart. There's beauty in the raw building materials of 3D games. Not to mention it allows a tiny team to produce more content by reducing the authoring time, so we can provide a richer, deeper gameplay experience. And in the end, it's all about the gameplay.

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  4. How long does it take to complete a project like this?

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    1. For a team of 3, it's projected to take about 1.5 years to the initial launch. Maybe more :)

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    2. Gordon, just hire a god and you got it done in 6 days dude.

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  5. I don't think I belong to the "target audience". Larry Laffer, Tetris, or even the original Lemmings, (not the 3D) are more like games I used to enjoy But back then there was not much else to choose from. But Myst remains the game as far as I am concerned. I also found "Shivers" entertaining. Maybe I am getting old?

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    1. According to the website the game is old-school, referencing Wizardry and Ultima. I'm at least interested...

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    2. Don't forget netHack! That may to TOO old school for some however. Still, one of the great classics.

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  6. In the front page of Sandwalk, the video that appears for the trailer of the game is one showing John Parrington talking about the Deeper Genome. Is that what's in the game?

    This was on a Chrome browser. Once I clicked through to the full thread the video became the actual game trailer. But the thought of Parrington being the subject of a video game is entrancing.

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    1. Oops. Probably just my browser. Now the front page video for the game is the correct one.

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