Thursday, November 25, 2010

Poker Night at the Inventory Review



Poker Night at the Inventory is a pretty entertaining game. 
I personally knew the basics of Texas Hold'em and could just go right in and start dealing.

Overexcited about Heavy Weapons Guy (Obviously) i sit down, the first line i hear from Heavy is ..."In" and i start laughing :)


Although that gaming night i smiled and laughed at all the conversation going on all night. I'm exited over hearing Heavy's background stories and i'm also glad to get to know these two guys i did not know before, Strong Bad and Tycho. Even though Strong Bad is sometimes quite annoying -.-


I love the combination of different characters gathered in one place, just as i loved the same thing in Team Fortress 2. It came to me that this is what's making this game. The characters, the fantastic conversations, and the way we all play together makes this game fun and entertaining. Poker is a nice relaxed touched and i like it.


I think this is the cheapest fun I've had in a game (not counting free games and*mhmh*downloaded games)


After a few rounds, the Heavy buys in with the Iron Curtain...
I realize that..."Oh, i forgot you could win stuff to TF2" and it was good that i realized that because before the release of this game i really only saw it as another "Buy TF2 items and get a free game" and a game that used Heavy to get any profit at all. But i think Heavy was used well, over my expectations, and together with Max, Strong Bad and Tycho they make a great game with style.


If we look into gameplay i really could wish for some additions...
like in "face up" moments where you hear a drum roll and see close up expressions of the characters. I'm so focused on really looking what my opponent has a chance of getting that the excitement get ruined and i have no idea how it goes before the Game Master tells it. It gets me confused and i would have wanted just a small text explaining what the character have at the moment and who's currently the strongest.


Also i'm only a beginner to this game but there is something when the pot gets split between the two (or more) left. But the master takes it as my opponent won, but we got the same amount back. I would have needed an explanation to that.


Otherwise just minor problems...
I realized that the texture of Tychos nose gets very weird with the lowest graphics.


All summed up, if i would give this game a rate i would give it
7/10
It's a great game and with that low price it's even better.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Engineer Techno Behind The Scenes! Part 3 - The video



My first idea was to make a DJ Hero inspired music video for the song, there began the preparations.

I found the perfect map...
gm_rave_final
by Kainy
(If you're downloading it, don't forget the Sound Fix Download)








Turntable:

My first task on the map was to make a turntable with spinning vinyls.
For the vinyls i used a CD model (Download) and re skinned it myself to make it black.
















I thought my plan for spinning vinyls was great and easy but it was proven very hard.
My plan was to set the vinyls on a spinning axis on the base, then place the Engys hand also on a spinning axis on the vinyl. Though i found out the placing an axis on a rag-doll hand was hard, also if you accidentally dropped the hand from it's freeze it would break the whole contraption. Another problem was generally to make the vinyl spin good when moving Engys hand, you needed to be exactly right with the movement to not break the physics of the vinyl.
Enough Gmod talk :P

I left that idea and decided that just having them there would be good enough, giving me a plus that i now could resize them too without breaking them.

The rest of the turntable is created by various "wire" buttons and machinery. If you look closely on the video you can see that all the buttons were acting weird during the whole recording. They started floating in nowhere and spinning and turning, something i also could not do anything about :(

Buttons and such were more lined up when i began recording,
After recording it kinda looked like this.
















Lighting, props and people:
The lights and the dancing combines is what made this recording laggy, it also messed up a lot of ideas since it was so laggy. Movements were not as smooth and easy handed as I've wanted them to be.

Sexy Alyx is teasing you.
Female Pyro says hi!




























I first planned of Female Pyro and Alyx to dance a lot more and more sexy, but the lights made any physgun movement kinda laggy and slow. It ended up with a few clips that i could use.


Then, in true club style, i added the Heavy Bouncer. Of course Heavy became the bouncer, who else? :P

Heavy is Bouncer!













Dark Shades (Download),

One Mac Headphone (It's the headphone model with "nocolide" and turned inside Heavy so that only one is visible)
A Gun (On his hip, you could not see it in the movie)
and A Stunstick was good enough to make me giggle at my creation :) in a good way.

More like a bodyguard with the ear piece but it looked cool.















The dancing combines and zombies...
PARTY!!!














Yes, as many have commented they are looping the "i'm on fire" animation. Though i did not do much to make them to that. I actually used one of the first swep weapons i ever downloaded to Gmod,
the Raveball by Killburn! (Download)
The "Raveball" is the light source on the top left.
Just throw it and NPC combines and zombies start to
dance like in the movie.
















It's a classic and that swep is what's causing the lazer beems too. Try it out yourself around some combine NPCs and you'll understand (Download)


Other Tricks and facts:

  • Moving Camera: Download
  • The Beginning of the movie uses a "tint" filter removing some colors and make the picture dirty.
  • The Rest uses a simple green filter, some pictures have added overexposure.
  • The camera bouncing to the beat is simply made by zooming and panning.
  • The flashing lights are lamps with thrusters.
  • The DJ Engineer Poster is one of these re skinned and some times resized by me.
  • During the recording of the dancing NPCs my approx Frames per second was 3.
  • I found out about Female Pyros extremely jiggly breasts in the middle of recoding her.
  • You can see the turntable stop buttons turn as i move The Engy at 3:38.


Hope you enjoyed my three part behind the scene, you have been asking for it so long now.
I must give you credit if you have read all these parts now, i hope you've learned something.

Please leave a comment on what you found out reading this, i would really appreciate it :)