Category Archives: 3D/if

Adventures with NPCs Redux: Lucca

By Rubes | Published: May 28, 2010

Here we resume our 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. Last time I discussed the development of Constantin, the large hulking monk with a short temper. This time I relate the development of Lucca, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

Lucca was going to be a tough character to convincingly recreate. He’s the youngest member of the monastery, a teenager who recently joined the order. He’s very attached to Matteo, one of the monastery’s father figures, and is generally an emotional character during the course of the game. Again, we didn’t have a lot of text to go on initially aside from a short description:

The youngest of those who remain, Lucca joined the monastery only a few short months ago. The

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Adventures with NPCs Redux: Constantin

By Rubes | Published: April 26, 2010

We continue on with our 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. Last time I discussed the development of Matteo, the oldest monk at the monastery; the second character we tackled was Constantin, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.

We started out with a very general picture of Constantin; he’s middle-aged, a handyman around the monastery (he was a former blacksmith), and a notably large man with a short temper. Again, we didn’t have a lot of text to go on initially aside from a short description (which was actually removed from the game prior to the final release):

An enormous, hulking man, Constantin is taking the lack of food worse than the rest of the brothers. The former blacksmith has taken to

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End of March Vespers Update (or, How To Drop A Girl)

By Rubes | Published: March 31, 2010

March comes, March goes. Lion, lamb, all the usual stuff.

March is always a busy month, what with GDC and sundry work-related conferences and travels. And this year, of course, there was PAX East. Man, how I wanted to be there for that. It was, by still rare accounts, an amazing show of force by the IF community, and from what I can tell a great time was had by all. It sounds like there was a groundswell of new or renewed interest in IF, which can only be a Good Thing. And, of course, GET LAMP. I can’t help but feel like I missed a significant event in IF and the opportunity to meet some great folks, but at the same time I am excited that it occurred and grateful that there are those who could make something like that happen.

Making things happen is a good [More...]

Also posted in Vespers, interactive fiction | 5 Comments

2009: A Shecky Greene Kind of Year

By Rubes | Published: 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

By Rubes | Published: 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

By Rubes | Published: 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

By Rubes | Published: 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...]

Also posted in game design, interactive fiction, story in games | 6 Comments

An Interview With SPA*

By Rubes | Published: 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...]

Also posted in Vespers, interactive fiction | 6 Comments

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

By Rubes | Published: 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

By Rubes | Published: 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...]

Also posted in Vespers, adventure games | 6 Comments