Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well I had a good time in PA. We played original RISK, Clone Wars RISK and LoTR RISK along with Zombies and some Gamecube and shot some bb’s and pellets, watched some movies (Porky’s!!)… damn straight.
Oh and the commercial shoot. That was cool too. I got there early no problem, and we were set up and shooting around 7:30. I got to wear my usual street clothes, the wardrobe lady just picked out one of the sweaters I brought for me to put on, and I had to lose my hat cause of the big G logo for GarageGames. The scene we shot was a line of people standing waiting for an ATM. There’s a woman at the ATM, an old man first after her, then a little old asian lady (reminded me of my obaa-san a bit, tho she looked more philippino), then the principal character – a guy dressed in a suit playing a PSP – then a woman and then me at the back talking on my cellphone. Yea, I got to “talk” on my cellphone. Way cool. So anyways the whole scene is that the dude is playing this PSP and he’s so intense… so intense… all the sudden he starts freaking out cause he won (presumably) and screams and shouts then turns and hugs the old lady, who is like “wtf?” and pushes him back and beans him in the head with her handbag while shouting “police! police!”. Then the principle character dashes out (we were shooting inside a mall in Staten Is btw) and the woman turns to the old man and says “He tried to stab me with a calculator! You saw it!”. We shot it from 3 different angles: the first we just stood in line and the principal character just played with this intense look on his face; the second was shot from a ladder so you could see the PSP screen, tho they had to greenscreen it cause the two games they had sucked for what they wanted ; and then we shot the action scene. That took the longest obviously. probably almost 30 takes even. Still, we wrapped around 9:30. Not a bad day’s work, pretty good pay for 3 hours too It’s a commercial for SpikeTV – I’ll try and get details as to when it will be aired – I’m def taping it and putting it online!! 🙂

After that I gave my GDC presentation for the IGDA NJ chapter meeting. It’s online now here, I’d suggest you have a look if you’re going to GDC this year! Everything you want to know abotu GDC is in it. Check it out!

Link is working now!

But now it’s back to the grindstone and like woah. Yea look at the time. I want to get up in 5 hours 😛 I still have to stop off at Kinko’s to have them whip me up some more biz cards. Plus I’m still scrambling to get stuff ready for GDC – in less than a week now! Holy crap where has the time gone?? So much stuff so much stuff… head is spinning…

Tonight however I focused mainly on GC. In my last entry I stated my frustration with a problem I was having. Well as I was trying to get some sleep the amazingly simple solution struck me so hard I wanted to scream. As I said I was having a missile sprite collide with the edge of a tile to check for walls. Well DUH the walls are sprites too!! So I just had the missiles collide directly with the walls – took me like less than 30 mins to get working. Good lord 😛

So I finished all the special actions on Sat while I was waiting for the chapter meeting to start since I got to the location like 2 hours beforehand because I went straight from the shoot. Tonight I finally got a chance to play a game using them and I was immediately dissapointed. The problem was the fact that you could only place a planet or carry out a special action. So I made a decision and changed things up a bit.

The way special actions work now is that you get the ability to use them by taking over other player’s planets. For each planet you conquer you get one special action pellet, the number of special action pellets you have is shown under your panel. After you place a planet, if you have any special action pellets you can use up to three. So you can do as many as three special actions per turn. You still lose rings on the planets you choose, as well as a pellet for each special action. If you don’t want to use any pellets or less than three, you can manually end your turn with the End Turn button (used to be the Menu button, but the menu has always been accessible from the Esc key).

I think the game plays a lot better now with this change. Another change I made was to not allow the Star Buster special action to blow up a star immediately, rather it blows after the next player places a planet. I think that’s an interesting twist.

Anyways lookin good, I’m pretty sure it’s just spit and polish here on out for GC as far as GDC is concerned. Can’t wait. Here are some new screens

Here are the special action pellets. Right now you can have a maximum of 20. They line up in 5 rows of 5. Note also the End Turn button

Red used one of his special actions to put a Planetary Shield around Blue for a turn. Note he lost rings and a pellet

Blue pays back the favor to Red

Uh huh that’s it – nothing else exciting to take pics of. Oh I also forgot to mention that players lose pellets when a planet goes into a black hole or gets destroyed by a supernova.

Annnnnnd one final note is that I fixed up the screen/gui so that when the board shakes the player panels don’t shake as well. That just irked me cause the text wouldn’t move while the panels shook. So now the board shakes when a planet explodes or a star blows up.

Righty then. I’m off for a few winks…