Category Archives: 3D/if

2009: A Shecky Greene Kind of Year

December 22, 2009

For Vespers, I’d say 2009 was a mixed bag. We started out with some nice momentum, on many fronts, and it lasted about half the year. N.R., as usual, was a model of consistency, churning out an impressive amount of material. He completed all of the models and textures for Act I, which was a nice accomplishment, in addition to all of our GUI and logo work. He’s already started chipping away at the additional models needed for Act II and beyond, with much of the work already done. We also got our web site up and running, and although it needs additional content, it’s good to have most of the structure already in place, with the connection to this blog. The forums are also ready to go, for the most part, but I’ll wait on opening those up until we start the alpha testing sometime early in [More...]

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Touché, aaronius

November 23, 2009

Occasionally I surf around the IFDB looking for goodies. I really like the way it is set up, as it takes a number of cues from other community sites that encourage engagement and social interaction. Often I’ll find myself weaving my way through games, reviews, and lists before realizing how much time has passed, and typically I’ll come out with a couple of new games to add to the play list. I also absolutely love how it is so smoothly integrated with Zoom (and others, like iPhone Frotz), which so effectively feeds the immediate gratification beast. Anyway, I digress.

I was flipping through some IFDB pages the other day, looking for some choice information on this year’s IFComp winner, Rover’s Day Out, when I noticed that it had already made someone’s online IFDB poll:

“Games with Impossible-to-film moments”, by aaronius.

Okay, I [More...]

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The End of January Vespers Thing

February 1, 2009

January was a very busy month for the game, and I feel like we’ve made some great progress on a number of fronts. I think part of the reason is that we had set a goal for ourselves: try as hard as we could to get most of the work for Act I finished by January 29th, the date of the first Utah Indie Gamers night of 2009, so we could show it off in public. Setting goals can be useful for getting people focused on particular tasks, and it’s probably a good way to work even when those goals aren’t met.

Which is a good thing, because we didn’t meet that goal.

Which itself is probably a good thing, because I wouldn’t have been able to show it off at the Utah Indie Gamers night anyway. This past Tuesday morning, I recall having a slight wispy cough as I [More...]

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Write from the Start

January 18, 2009

So pretty much one of the most challenging parts of making games for the small indie or hobbyist developer is getting the extra help you need. The developer who can do it all on his or her own — programming, artwork, writing, modeling, animation, web design, yada yada — is a rare breed with far too much talent and disposable time. When I made Missions of the Reliant way back when, in (gulp) 1994, I could handle most of it myself because things were just…simpler. I didn’t have to worry about modeling or animation, and web design meant little more than plain text and a few animated GIFs (mostly I just focused on BBS’s and AOL — and, sadly enough, eWorld). Life, as they say, was so much easier when we were young.

Unless you start from the beginning with a set of partners, it’s tough to find people [More...]

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An Interview With SPA*

July 31, 2008

Earlier this year, Spanish IF author and aficionado Urbatain asked to do an interview with me on Vespers. Over about three months, we exchanged a number of e-mails and covered a variety of topics, mostly on different aspects of the 3D adaptation of interactive fiction. It turned out to be a really long interview in the end, but it probably could have gone on much longer. He asked a lot of challenging questions, and I think his enthusiasm for the project really shows, which made for an enjoyable interaction.

Urbatain’s intention was to publish the interview in the Spanish-language web-zine SPAC (Sociedad para la Promoción de Aventuras Conversacionales), and also to share it with Jimmy Maher and SPAC’s English inspiration, SPAG (Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games). I lost track and didn’t realize the interview was put up on SPAC’s web site last week, translated into Spanish.

The [More...]

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You Got Turn-Based Chocolate In My Real-Time Peanut Butter

July 28, 2008

The whole idea behind this Vespers project thingy is to take a rich textual world created in interactive fiction and extrude it, so to speak, into three visual dimensions. As I’ve discovered, a whole mess of issues arise when moving from the predominantly discrete world of IF to the largely continuous world of 3D. That applies, of course, to space: in IF, space is divided into discrete locations, with little to no functional representation of spacial relationships within those locations, while in 3D, space is represented on a more familiar continuous scale. Likewise, it applies to time: rare exceptions aside, IF is turn-based with discrete time steps, while first-person 3D games are real-time and continuous.

The question is, can a game really be both at the same time?

In terms of space, that’s not really a difficult stretch. Most locations in IF are just discrete representations of a location in [More...]

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Vespers: The Power of the Bool

April 23, 2008

One of the things that has always been nagging at me since starting development on Vespers is game performance. We haven’t really been developing with frame rate in mind, our thought being that we would leave optimization until we had most of the content plugged in. Most of that optimization would come from the graphics end — LOD, portals and zones, textures, things like that — but that’s a lot of work for the artist to do, and it’s not terribly exciting work at that.

Still, after trying out the game on a number of different systems, I was not very happy with performance even at this unoptimized stage. Frame rates on the better systems would rarely get to 30fps, even at lower screen resolutions. And in far too many areas, rates were commonly in the teens. In some places with a lot of objects in the field of view, [More...]

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Vespers: Adventures with NPCs, Part IV

March 20, 2008


This is the fourth installment of my blog series introducing the six NPCs in Vespers, detailing the development process from text to functioning 3D characters. The three previous installments can be found at Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Once again it’s time to resume my efforts to bring our NPCs to life, beginning with bits and pieces of text from the IF version of Vespers and ending with a modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D character. It’s been a while since my last entry, which described Lucca, the youngest monk at St. Cuthbert’s. This time I discuss the development of Ignatius, perhaps the most mysterious of the brothers at the monastery, and the one most distrusting of the Abbot at the start of the game.

Ignatius: From Concept to Character

Each of the characters in the game has their own challenges, and Ignatius is no [More...]

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Vespers Update 2/18

February 18, 2008

Time for another update, the first since starting this blog. There has been some progress in a few areas, although perhaps not enough to warrant one of my more extensive blogs like on GarageGames.

Characters and Animation

Happily, we’ve finally replaced our previous animator, who left us for more prosperous opportunities. In his place we now have two individuals helping with the character animations, James and Matt, which I hardly have to say is a real gift. Progress on the new characters has been slow so far as we get those two up to speed and comfortable with the art flow. We’ve also made a few adjustments to what we were doing previously; in addition to entirely new character rigs, we’ve also been experimenting with a system to provide some pretty nifty lip syncing to go with the voices.

The lip sync process uses a software program called Magpie Pro, [More...]

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Implementing an IF interface in 3D

February 12, 2008

Most of today’s graphical adventure games eschew text input and output for more streamlined, symbolic interfaces and visual feedback. The typical IF game is somewhat unique these days in that it relies entirely on text for both purposes. There are advantages and disadvantages to each interface type, but what I want to know is, could a hybrid IF-like interface work in a 3D graphical game?

Rather than going into the why, I thought I’d discuss the what, so at least you’ll have an idea what I’m talking about and how it might work. Cue the screen shot.

This is a shot of the kitchen, which is still a work in progress. The cupboard is to the left, a table is straight ahead, and a locked hatch in the floor is in the back to the right. At the bottom of the screen is the text output window. Here’s a [More...]

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