Defining Awesome

Game trailers.

They are cool and fun to watch. I was watching a trailer for Call of Duty 4 the other day. The cinematics are nice, the music is decent, the graphics are excellent, some ragdoll effects etc…

…but when you actually download a demo of the game, it’s all the same crap.

• You walk straight and you shoot bad guys.
• You want to go right, you can’t because the map makers didn’t forecast this.
• You go back to the “designers” path, you spot a civilian, you kill him.
• The game ends cause you’re not “supposed” to kill civilians (when in fact it is just lazyness of the developers cause they don’t know how to handle the plot if you kill an important character)
• I press alt+f4 and then shift+delete on the game folder

Why isn’t there any (decent) Soldat clone out there?

I have been waiting for a long time now. Soldat  is 5 years old. During this time no game has come to take place of the number 1 side-view multiplayer action game. To be honest I am very dissapointed. There are similar games and some that might be considered direct Soldat clones. I want to list all of them in a future article, this is just a prelude to what I want to write about. I’m asking for a little help. If you know any game that you might consider a Soldat clone please post the link in the comments. read more »

From time to time I get e-mails from fellow game developers, people just starting out asking me for advice. Usually when people start their journey they want to make the next big 3D MMORPG. I have decided to write down my answer to them for everyone to enjoy.
This is for the people that are making or want to make games, but what I will write about spans nearly everything in life. So be sure to read what I’m saying if you have ever wanted to achieve something.

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Here’s some more dev candy. After loading Soldat PMS maps to the Crimson engine I decided to test how it plays. I love doing fun stuff like this so I made a video showing the character and hydroplane from Crimson Glory inside a Soldat map.
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I managed to get Soldat’s native map format PMS to work with the Crimson Engine. This was the first thought I had after switching back to 2D, to do this. This does not mean my new game will use PMS maps, they are too limited. I plan on expanding the map format with all sorts of cool stuff and possibilites. About what it will contain, that means what kind of maps can you expect from my new game, I’ll write later.

 Meanwhile here’s a video I made of Soldat maps working with Crimson.

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I present you with the first post from a new series on my blog. I think you know what this is about.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Jesse Ventura again with Arnold in the same movie after watching The Predator, search no more. The Running Man is a film set in 2017, in a doomed world, where a brutal reality show takes place used by the Justice Department’s – Entertainment Division (that’s the actual name) to control the nation. It is a typical 80’s movie, with action, blood, 1-liners and muscles starring our favorite austrian actor.

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Crimson Glory is officially open source. You can download it and do whatever you want with it, unless you want to use it commercially (more info in license.txt).

I want you to get the source code, educate yourself and maybe help me out with it. Add stuff, modify, optimize, suggestions are welcome. I’m using this in my new game, the structure of the engine and all of its core components like scripting and entities will be the same.

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Here’s an idea.

This spawned after my brother proposed it, we discussed it intensely and I realized I had a very similar idea years ago while playing Day of defeat, but I never thought of doing that in Soldat or in any other game. Now it seems very intriguing.

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A few days ago I released the much anticipated Crimson Glory. All the reasons for it being cancelled were stated in my news post on soldat.pl on June 16. Fortunately all is not lost. The Crimson Engine was from beginning developed with 2D games in mind. I was making it with the intention of maybe even doing Soldat 2 based on it.  read more »

Some fucking controversy.

That’s what it needs. It is just boring as hell as it is now. All the controversy in the entire history of gaming is either caused by blood and gore or by big tits (the latter happened only once and stopped being interesting after people realized they were fake). Blood and gore is not controversial anymore since Doom. I think we have seen everything since then. Decapitated bodies, guts falling out of the belly, spiked heads, eating blood for health (Wolf3d), chainsaws, synthesized death screams. Now as you see, as cool as it is, it is a very limited area. There isn’t much you can invent more (well I have a couple ideas), just play some recent games like Manhunt. I mean there is nothing wrong with games like that, they are awesome, but they became boring. Gore is not interesting anymore. So what kind of controversy do I want?

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