Author: DaveWeLike

I'm the editor of StuffWeLike.com.

PR: The Blackwell Legacy (Announcement)

Wadjet Eye Games (www.wadjeteyegames.com) is proud to announce its latest adventure game entitled The Blackwell Legacy! Unlike their previous games The Blackwell Legacy is structured in an episodic style.

The Blackwell Legacy is a miniseries of adventure games that stars a medium named Rosangela Blackwell and her spirit guide Joey Mallone. Their mission, it seems, is to assist tormented spirits and investigate supernatural events.

The Blackwell Legacy has been built for old school adventure gamers. Wadjet Eye Games has hired Ian Schlaepfer, who made underground adventure waves with his Apprentice series (http://www.herculeaneffort.com), to create the sprite art for The Blackwell Legacy! Wadjet Eye has gone on to ensure that this game has an authentic adventure feel.

Screenshots:

http://www.davelgil.com/boe/BL1.gif

http://www.davelgil.com/boe/BL3.gif

http://www.davelgil.com/boe/BL4.gif

Promo Poster – http://www.davelgil.com/boe/BL_poster2.jpg

Resume

The most important aspect of your work life is keeping an up to date and easy to read resume. Yesturday I received a resume from a 3D Artist. The layout of the resume was fine: work history, education history, self-taught education history, summary of skills, and a little more information about him. The guy seems to have worked on some interesting stuff, but he forgets one thing – URLs! Even if you don’t have a portfolio provide some direct links to rendered pictures, hosted on ImageShack or some other provider!

An employeer won’t sit down and email over 5,000 applicants and ask where are your pictures. If you don’t want to put the direct links in your resume then at least include them in your email.

StuffWeLike.com Video Cast Episode 4 – Now Online

Remember that if you want your game to be reviewed on our show, send me an email.

File Size: 83 megabytes
Length: 18:00 minutes
Hosts: David Rodriguez, Spencer Beebe, and Mark Gravender
Edited by: Andrew Cefalo
Music by: Rob Davidson
Covered Stories:
Wii Production Exceeding Expectations
Buy Xbox 360 Get Free Game
Wii Kiosk Troubles
Burger King Games
Preorders for Wii’s and PS3’s
Napster for College Students
TerraWars NY Invasion (PC Game Review)
The Departed (Movie Review)
Employee of the Month (Movie Review)

Triangles and Quads, Oh My!

Some of you probably know that there’s a difference in this 3D term. Triangles are half of a quad. So when you’re counting your polycount – a triangle is half of your quad. Now the issue comes into play when you wonder, which one to use in game. Well check which one your counting!

I finally found a 3D Aritst for The Divine (after 2 months of searching!) and now bam – he’s working at bullet speed and then Keanu Reeves comes in and does his Matrix bullet stopping moves! Well I didn’t tell him to count triangles and not quads… Instead of reducing the polygon count (done in quads) to half of what it currently is, he has decided to redo the entire ship. What that means is that we’ve wasted two days.

But fear not! We’ve decided to use those ships afterall as the high poly models for cutscenes! I don’t know when the new models will be made public but if we can get them to look any similar to what the high polygon models (over 2,000 tri polygons, we want a max of 1,500) look like I know that anyone who sees the screenshots will be even more amazed than what is currently on the website!

$ of your assests? – Developer Poll

I was actually requested this topic by a reader named Robert: “I’ve always been very interested in exact figures developers have paid for art, sound assets. Maybe if you could ask some developers and post the info. The name of the artist or composer doesn’t have to be included…”

So I do ask you fellow developers – how much do you normally pay for all of these assets?

With my current game, The Divine, I’ve actually avoided paying any of my staff upfront. I’ve worked out a royalty system so basically they all have an incentive to make this game awesome.

In the commercial game industry you can see from the 2003 Developer Salary Survey (it’s the most current online edition, offline is already 2006) that paying your workers can cost a serious amount of money!

So as I asked above if you are a developer please post (comments section) some information to help Robert out.

Thanks! 🙂