Brain of James

Jai_OpenSparring_June19-37, originally uploaded by JamesEverett.

I started training with Jai a couple of months back. They’re close enough to the office to make it without ducking out of work early and run Saturday classes to boot. June 19th they organized an open sparring day, inviting in other clubs for some friendly rounds. Looked like it went really well, I had just ducked out of Full Code Press for an hour to take these.

Here Wit and Wimbledon watch two of the guys figuring out how it all works.

Gas Station Green, originally uploaded by JamesEverett.

Osaka, Japan.

Ghosts on the Crosswalk, originally uploaded by JamesEverett.

View large, on black.

I’ve started posting photos from my trip back to Japan around the last Tokyo Game Show. Will be doing a batch every day till they’re all up.

The full set will end up in my Flickr set of Japan 2009, in the meantime a few of my picks will show up here.

The Shatter soundtrack has gotten lots of well deserved love, and our man Corie Geerders put together this amazing music video for the Amethyst Caverns track. Features an appearance by Module and was shot on a 5d Mk II. Expect more Shatter goodness soon when we release on Steam soon!

Sitting in the J-Hoppers hostel in Osaka right now, hoping for the rain to go away . Started the journey over two weeks ago with a few days in Singapore for DICE Asia and Game Connect Asia. Saw some great presentations and well moderated panels, participated in a panel on Breaking into the Game Industry for students (I hope we didn’t crush too many dreams, but the truth doesn’t change!) and made a bunch of new friends. Game devs the world over are great people to hang out with. The crew from the Philippines need to watch out, with all of those invites I might just show up on someone’s door.

If my notes are legible when I dig them up I’ll post some, but I recall Scott Foe’s presentation being a hit and Nelson Wong and Takahiro Murakami had a great term for cultural differences that make games succeed/fail in different markets: The Oddness. My bossman Mario Wynands apparently rocked the house, but because I listen to him all the time I went to a different session

Flew up to Tokyo right into the waiting arms of a pre-TGS game dev party, caught up with some old acquaintances and managed to leave a refill of biz cards back at the hotel. Clever. From there the week rolled on between wandering with my camera, chatting with developers and random folk, and being blissfully lost in Tokyo.

Tokyo Game Show was smaller than I remember it from 3 years ago, I actually found chunks of the hall unoccupied by booths. Going on a business day was absolutely the way to do it though, 24,000 people vs. 70,000. Actually got hands on time with a few games.

• Uncharted 2 is fantastic, I need a PS3.
• Bayonetta is a natural evolution of Devil May Cry, in the short demo I played the combat system was crazy fast and completely over the top. Wanted to try out the easy mode automatic system to see just how it works, but with just one session I stuck to the core game and had some fun.
• Lost Planet 2 multiplayer was equal parts excellent and frustrating. Fighting the giant beast with 3 other people is great, instant death water pit that you can’t see coming not so much.
• Red Steel 2 looks nice, plays quite well when you’re pointed at the screen, and the Motion Plus for the sword is solid. Swinging the sword can make it difficult to reorient your cursor on the screen though, will want to see if players can adapt to that.
• Nier was a big WTH? Muddy textures, very limited combat moveset, and the demo was all of 5 minutes trapped in a single rectangular hallway beating on two giant armoured guys. Some of the combat impact was satisfying but I played this right after Bayonetta and the comparison was not at all favourable for Nier.
• Best of TGS for me: PixelJunk Shooter. Beautiful fluid dynamics, lots of character to the worlds and the scientists you have to rescue, and devious puzzles + action. Many twin stick games that put rotation on the right stick are a pain to aim and shoot accurately. Q Games has got it so well tuned that after a couple of minutes you don’t even think about it. Execution is everything.

September 30th was Pecha Kucha Tokyo vol 65 which was full of fun presentations and interesting people. Mathematical models of crazy architectural shapes, a cross stitching champion, dolls constructed from leather, beautiful lighting installations, and me bringing up the rear. I talked about Shatter, how we made it and how wonderful it was for us as creators to make our own thing instead of always working for hire on someone else’s property. Everyone loved the art, and the pictures of the guys with beards (James, Jos, I’m looking at you) elicited positive noises from the female members of the audience. 20 seconds of video at the end, just 20 seconds, and lots of people got hooked on the music! Module you need to tour Japan my friend.

Also, there has been music, lots and lots of music. After despairing that Singapore was completely hopeless musically (one place I heard a cover band go from It’s Raining Men to Bryan Adams to Black Eyed Peas as if it was the most normal thing in he world) we stumbled into a Tittsworth set at Zirca. Zouk is one of the other major clubs out there, and I had no idea who was playing until I looked at the ticket after I was in the door. To my delight: Steve Aoki and Diplo. Oh yes. Japan has been brilliant, with Ken Ishii and Dr. Shingo at Womb capping my first week nicely. So far though the best set to rock my feet off was Baiyon playing at Metro in Kyoto last night. Absolutely sublime from start to finish and he even threw some Eden tracks in there. My hat goes off to Dylan from Q-Games who told me about the gig, would never have known otherwise.

No photos yet, this little netbook Josh kindly lent me is lovely for small stuff, but processing RAW images kills the poor thing.

After months of slammed work to get games out the door I can feel my batteries recharging and my brain starting to spin back up in new directions. Back to New Zealand next week, but now it’s time to go walk some of Osaka.

GAMMA is an amazing event in Montreal which coincides with the Montreal International Game Summit. The Kokoromi collective (Cindy, Damien, Heather and Phil) put out a call for games tied to a theme to be played at a party on giant projection screens. Now in its third year the Kokoromi crew decided to run with 3D as their theme, so retro-future it’ll make your eyes water.

I’ve tried and failed to get a game completed the first two years, but this year was Win. Working with the insanely talented Antony Blackett (code) and Corie Geerders (art, and famous director of F*Dance) put together a weird game of support rather than destruction.

The goals were: playable and interesting with 3D anaglyphic glasses, playable at a party in under 5 minutes, uses an Xbox 360 controller for input.

So you control the game with the Left Analog Stick, it takes 3 minutes to win, and it has a strange zen quality which rewards not panicking. (Which was an unintended consequence of the control being very hard until you learn to release the stick to neutral for each movement. We may do a new version in the future with a different control scheme to see how that feels, but doing this thing in spare moments between other projects… we’ll see.)

So here it is, download Blotto Brace.

Requires a gamepad of some kind, playing it on a keyboard is damn near impossible (that will probably be the update we release) and 3D glasses are highly recommended. Run the fullscreen version only on 4:3 monitors, widescreen will make you cry.

The party kicks off right about now and it’s the first one I’ll be missing since flying from NZ would be prohibitively expensive. In my place I give you this game! Massive props to Ants and Corie for making this possible.

• Went to Christchurch, it’s flat. Heard some good dubstep and DnB, took photos of the Garden City Big Band and plenty more of the city itself, made the mistake of going up the gondola while it was covered with cloud.
• Went to Auckland, attended Semi-Permanent 08 and spoke at the Media Design School. More excellent dubstep (Loefah!) and awesome people. Also, Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I have Learned in my Life So Far is a great project/list.
• Participated in the Lost Sport finals with Team Wellington. We won gold in the 7 circuit labyrinth!

Team Wellington – Multiverse Olympics 24 Aug 2008 from Jo Eaton on Vimeo.