1. Loved it. The event went off without a hitch. Brewvies was a great place to have it, especially with the beer and food to go along with the big screen. I was a little worried at first, since it was a pretty large theater with 160 seats, not intuitively conducive to an informal screening and discussion. But seeing the film up on the large screen was very cool, and the post-movie discussion actually worked quite well.
2. This:
Impressive lineup
was exceptionally cool to see. Not sure why, but this probably made the night. That, and seeing Jason’s reaction to it.
3. Who knew? Taking photographs of a cinema marquee, no big deal. Taking photos of the lingerie and sex shop next door to the cinema, not all that appreciated.
4. Final head count was 52. I was a little worried about the turnout, mostly because of the size of the theater. I was really hoping for at least 40, so I was extremely happy. Also, we only lost 2 people during the show, and even those people left about half way through. It wasn’t like they got 10 minutes into the film and realized the terrible mistake they had made.
5. The great thing about Jason is that he can so effortlessly entertain a room. Some really great questions from the crowd, and he just took them and carried the discussion in all sorts of interesting directions. Someone even got in a question about textfiles.com, which was nice to see.
6. Best un-asked question of the night: “I dragged my girlfriend to this show. Do you have any recommendations on how I might best make it up to her?”
7. When I went to go grab the DVD from the player in the projection booth, there was a DVD of Inception sitting right nearby. Oh, the temptation.
8. We had the place reserved from 7 to 10PM, and we got kicked out. Getting kicked out is never a bad sign.
All in all, a fantastic event. It was nice to hang out all afternoon and evening with Jason and to get to know him a bit better. I’m glad everything worked out well, and it seemed like he had a genuinely good time here. Now we’ll just have to come up with another reason to have him come back. I’m sure we’ll be able to fill the place next time.
Thank you to all who came and helped make this a great evening!
Well, after taking the summer off from the blog, we’re now officially back in business. And what better way to start back in than with an excellent announcement about Jason Scott’s documentary film on the history of text adventure games, GET LAMP.
The Official GET LAMP SLC flier
Jason is making the rounds during the months of September and October to promote the movie, thanks to a special “all-you-can-jet” ticket through JetBlue airlines. Since JetBlue flies into Salt Lake City, I invited him to stop in for a screening, and he accepted.
The screening will take place at Brewvies Cinema Pub, a cool place in downtown SLC that serves beer and food with movies, so it should make for a great place to see the film on the big screen. Jason will be there for commentary and Q&A after the film. Since SLC has a fairly strong IT community, I hope to see a good crowd that will be able to relate with much of his background. The Brewvies theater can hold up to about 170 people, so if we can get the word out in time, we could get a good group together. Plus, if we can get more than 100 people, Brewvies will cut the cost of the facility rental in half!
The event will be on Sunday, September 12th at 7:30PM, is open to the public, and admission is FREE. Keep in mind, however, that since Brewvies serves alcohol, admission is open only to those 21 and older, unfortunately.
A link to an entry for the event on Facebook is here, for those of you interested. If you’re in SLC, please come to the screening! Full report to follow.
Well, not the usual GDC Austin, at least. It seems that GDC has decided to reformulate (and rename) the former GDC Austin as GDC Online, which is now geared towards “connected games including casual, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.” So instead of a smaller version of the more general GDC, it’s now focusing primarily on online games.
I’m disappointed, but I think I can understand the move. I really liked having a smaller, more accessible GDC than the big one in San Francisco. It probably makes more sense to have a meeting that focuses on a particular area of game development, rather than just another “mini” GDC, especially with the rise of other conferences and meetings like PAX and IndieCade, both of which are around the same time in the fall.
I have no particular interest in the topics of GDC Online, so that’s a conference I won’t be attending. I’ll miss having GDC Austin to look forward to, but perhaps that will just free me up for the other conferences.
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 son of a count, he had never seen death before the arrival of the plague. It haunts him.
After some discussion between myself and Jason Devlin (the author), we decided we wanted Lucca to have pale skin (maybe slightly paler than the rest), blue eyes, and delicate facial features; probably quite frail overall with a slight build and thin face. We presented these ideas to N.R. Bharathae, our lead artist, who came up with his concept for Lucca.
Figure 1. Lucca (with Matteo) concept sketch.
This looked like a perfect starting point. Using this, N.R. designed Lucca’s 3D model and then applied some of his slick textures. As with the others, we were going for a more realistic appearance for our characters. N.R. did a great job with him.
Figure 2. Lucca textures.
Figure 3. The Lucca model.
During this time, we continued in our task of finding and recording a voice actor for the part. Matching a voice for a young man would not be as difficult as for some other parts, but the real challenge was finding someone who could play the part convincingly, given that Lucca expresses a great deal of tearful emotion during the game. Fortunately, we were able to find Christopher LeCluyse.
Christopher is a veteran of the stage, both acting and singing. Not only that, he also has expertise in medieval literature, and was able to help out with some little-known facts and inconsistencies in our story. For instance, Christopher pointed out to us that, during the time period of our game (ca. 1300-1400), pews did not yet exist in churches — only choir stalls. So we were able to make that adjustment in our storyline and setting.
Figure 4. Christopher and Lucca.
“Christopher LeCluyse (Lucca) brings to Vespers twenty years of professional vocal training and performance and a doctorate in medieval language and literature. He sings regularly with a variety of choral and early music groups and has appeared on recordings with Conspirare. Chris is also a professor of English and writing center director at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.” — C.L.
Finally, there’s the work of our animators. Lucca presented a different kind of challenge than the previous characters, because we wanted to try something a little more complex with the way he idles. At the beginning of the game, Lucca is first seen running into Matteo’s room in the dormitory, where he then scrabbles frantically at the ground, trying to unearth one of the stones in the floor:
Matteo's Room
This room is small: the same as all the others. A bed is pushed up against one wall, opposite the door to the north.
Lucca scrabbles frantically at the ground, his blood staining the stones.
>EXAMINE GROUND
Lucca scrabbles at the stone, trying desperately to unearth it from all sides.
>TALK TO LUCCA
"Why do you dig, Lucca?" you ask.
"Matteo is hiding something. I just know it's under here."
>AGAIN
"Why do you think that?" The blood pours from his fingers.
"I just know," he sobs. "He scrapes around here at night."
>AGAIN
"Leave me alone," he blubbers through the tear-laden mucus that streams from his nose.
>ASK LUCCA ABOUT MATTEO
"He knows something, but he won't tell me," he sobs more heavily for a moment. "He tells me nothing anymore."
My thought was to have Lucca idle using a cyclic sequence, showing him repeatedly scraping at the stone in the floor. But playing this sequence over and over again, without any alteration, would quickly get old and not look very professional. My thought was to try and break the monotony by including a few additional idle sequences played at random points during the cyclic sequence — one trying to pull up the stone, one showing him rubbing his bloody hands, and another showing him wiping the tears from his eyes. That means four idle sequences — one cyclic and three non-cyclic. All need to be designed using the root position as a launching point for any speech animations called from player interaction:
Figure 5. Modifications to the usual animation flow sequence to accomodate additional idle sequences.
What the hell does all that mean? Basically, only that each sequence — whether it’s an idle sequence or speech sequence — has to start and finish in the root position to maintain consistency. The thing we need to keep in mind is that speech can be triggered during the cyclic idle sequence or during one of the other idle sequences and to account for that. Once a speech animation is finished, we always return to the cyclic idle sequence and start again. It can look a little robotic at times, but overall I think it works well.
Here is the text portion of the game given above, as we developed it in 3D with animation and sound. This is from an older video on Google.
Figure 6. Lucca in action.
So that’s how we went through the process of developing Lucca from a text character in an interactive fiction game into a 3D animated and speaking NPC model — a nice combination of writing, modeling, texturing, animating, and voice work. Next time I’ll introduce Ignatius, one of the more mysterious and suspicious characters in the game.
One of the things I noticed when I posted the request for beta testers is that a number of interested people didn’t quite have the system specs I believed were needed to run the game smoothly – namely, a dedicated graphics card with a decent amount of video RAM. Systems with integrated graphics chips, at least in my mind, have not traditionally handled fairly intensive 3D games very well, hence the decision to exclude those systems, at least at the start.
That, and I didn’t have access to a decent system with an integrated graphics chip to test the game. That has now changed.
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my little server box for a while now, and with Apple’s recent tax-free sales event, I decided to make the leap and bought myself a tax-free Mac Mini. It’s a bottom-of-the-line model, although the specs have reached the point where they begin to put my old G5 desktop to shame: 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chip. It’s a sweet little machine, with more than enough power for my server needs. Plus, it’s just an amazing piece of technologic design. It’s incredibly compact, and it is absolutely, positively silent. No fan noise, no hard drive clicking. I can hardly believe the thing is powered on. I love the little bugger.
But surely there’s no way it could handle the hulking behemoth that is Vespers.
Naturally, this is the first thing I wanted to try once I got the sucker booted up and organized. Doubtless, once the opening sequence started, the frame rate would freeze up and I’d struggle just to quit the application.
Quite the contrary, actually. For the most part, the game seemed to run at least as smoothly – if not better – than my old desktop with the fancy schmancy dedicated ATI graphics card. Frame rates in many cases exceeded what I was getting on the older machine.
A few caveats: I was running the game at a very small screen resolution, and it did struggle off and on during the early stages of play. I’m not sure if that was related to loading the massive pile of textures into memory (which, on the Mini, the chip shares with the main memory) or just from ongoing background processes, but after a couple of minutes of play all the lag disappeared and it ran about as smoothly as I’ve seen it anywhere.
I’ll have to do some retesting and profiling to see what’s going on, but the results are pretty encouraging. Apparently, integrated graphics chips have come a long way since I last checked.
So if you’re one of those who is still interested in testing, and you have a (relatively recent) system that uses an integrated graphics chip, let me know and we’ll see how things go.
The monk turns to you and proclaims:
"The Monk's Brew is a blog about indie game design, development, and play, with a particular emphasis on the adventure genre. It is brought to you by Rubes, an indie game developer from Salt Lake City, Utah."
The monk looks up from his mug and utters:
"Rubes (Mike Rubin) is an indie game developer who started gaming with text adventures and this book, even before the heyday of the Apple ][. He's also the budding pioneer of a new genre in computer gaming, three-dimensional interactive fiction (3D/if). His first project in this genre is Vespers."
> DESCRIBE VESPERS
The monk clears his throat and begins:
"Vespers is an adaptation of Jason Devlin's interactive fiction work of the same name. It is an experiment to discover what kind of horribly disfigured offspring might result from the mating of an IF engine with a 3D first-person graphics engine."
