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.

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 :)

Engineer Techno Behind The Scenes! Part 2 - The music

Making the Engineer Techno music:
I can't force an idea out of my head, an idea can come to me at any time, anywhere!
This is a good example of exactly that... My friend CrimsonCombine introduced me to the song Ghost n Stuff a while ago and i loved it! I listened to it constantly and i had a CD in my car with Ghost n Stuff included. And suddenly one day, i just caught myself mumbling "En-gi-neer" to the baseline, and i almost drove into the ditch after shocking myself with that discovery! I listened to the song a few more times and later i upgraded the phrase to "En-gi-neer, tech-no" since me and my friends joked about Engineers "Heck no" response just a few days earlier, it just came to me.

That's the origin!
I found an instrumental version of the song and placed "En-gi-neer, tech-no" in the right position to the instrumental. And from that i began building the song around it. I started this project early this summer and worked with it from time to time parallel with my other projects (like Panic Sniper).
This is how a Vegas timeline can look like after a song like this done by me...
This is the first chorus, the first marker there is when the base kicks in after the Engineers mixed cheer.

Also there are a few rows more.

I actually finished it over a month ago, but i kept changing it until i did not want to change it anymore.

The scratching:
In my general quest to always try and make something cool that's not very common in Garry's Mod movies, i decided that i should make this song kind of like a DJ mix. Maybe there's someone out there that has made anything containing TF2, scratching and DJ-ing before but i could not find anything greater.

Some people think that's me personally scratching the engineers voice clips, but it's not.
I know a few things about mixing and such but not enough to do it live. So the key is that i used a big load of scratch samples and blended them with the Engis clips in Vegas in a kind of "Fake Scratch".
Sort of simulating the sound that scratching a vinyl back and forth does.

Extra "behind" stuff:
Some guys was wondering how the song sounded without the instrumental...
So here you get some examples without the instrumental.

Hope you enjoyed this second behind the scene segment,
Please leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Engineer Techno Behind The Scenes! Part 1 - The logo

Making the DJ Engineer logotype:
I know a few Photoshop tricks and now it was time to show it off!

I began with a good Engineer pose with Valves Model Viewer tool. This is a combination of the already existing cheering and pointing animation merged together with a happy Engy face. Green background (for easy extraction) and then Print Screen.

Then it was time to find a proper base image.
Went around on Google until i found this DJ Hero Screenshot.

Then took some time to insert the Engineer into this picture. It took some time but it ended up quite well.
I used layers, paint and the Clone tool to remove visible parts of the original DJ hero guy behind my inserted Engineer. Used the brushes to add some shining effects where it was needed, for example where the white shines behind him to the right. And good enough!

Then went to cooltext.com and got the DJ engineer text. Put it together with the TF2 logo.
And there we have it!

(If you look close on the TF2 logo you'll see and engineer face in the middle, that because that's the first skin idea for my vinyls in my Engineer Techno Music Video but i scratched that idea after i've seen it in Gmod and used it here instead)


Here you go, you can have these pictures and use them as you want:
Backgrounds, TF2 Sprays, blog posts etc.

Original Wide

Icon style

Spray Files:
Some have been asking for sprays for TF2, L4D etc.
So i saved you some work and did the files myself...

Original:
Download Here

Or use the one i'm using, one with a MisterMild logo and "Engineer Techno @ Youtube" text in the corners:
Download Here

Hope you enjoyed this Behind the Scene segment,
Please leave a comment, i'd appreciate that :)

Turn your life upside down!

And maybe some celebrity faces too...click here!


Enjoy! :)