Happy Queen’s Day! Today Everyone is Dutch!

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

Queen’s Day, a day of national unity for almost a hundred years now. It’s a day marked by the free market, where people sell stuff on the streets — basically like a massive garage sale. It’s a day of celebratory drinking, much like St. Patrick’s for the Irish, Mardi Gras for the Nawlinsians and Carnival for Rio. It’s a day of merriment and a day of Orange. Amsterdam is the focal point of many, many people and each year the amount of people pushing themselves into the center of Amsterdam swells. They keep coming from further and further away, people fly over as the reputation spreads to other countries.

Interestingly, for the last twenty years or so, as the popularity of going into Amsterdam on the day itself has grown, many people who live in Amsterdam have started fleeing the city and staying indoors until everyone has left again. It gets so busy it’s silly. The people in Amsterdam don’t celebrate Queen’s Day anymore? Sure they do, they just do it the evening before in something that’s started to be known as Queen’s Night and it’s usually a lot more relaxed, since the city isn’t filled to the brim with people desperate to have a good time, hopped up on  pills or drunk off their mind. No, Queen’s Night belongs to the people of Amsterdam, the hosts , while Queen’s Day belongs to the guests. (I’m sure this goes for other, larger cities in the Netherlands as well, like The Hague, Utrecht and Rotterdam.)

This year’s Queen’s Night was kind of spurred on by my brother, who was jonesing for some fun. I was looking to skip Queen’s Day this year, having not heard about any parties or events going on. My brother convinced me to go out and have a drink somewhere, so after training I went with him to swing by a BBQ that Moulsari was at, to drop of some stuff that I was holding for her. When we got there, around nine, people were already slightly intoxicated and having fun out in the street, eating sausages, drinking wine. We immediately got taken in and set up with a drink and a sausage. The evening turned out to be a lot of fun, meeting a bunch of people, mostly foreigners and expats, and having a good time.

Today we’re staying in, hanging out, and waiting for the party to die down again, and tonight we’ll move out into the city and see what’s going on. Looking forward to chilling out for a while. Happy Queen’s Day!

Queen's Day

Corrosion and Competition

by Dennis••3•Posted inDevelopment

Zombie PandemicSpending lot of my time on the development of Shadowrun: Corrosion, I naturally keep an eye out on what the competition is doing. Nine out of ten times you stumble upon something, it’s an established game, or an established studio doing a new game, and it usually looks and feels and acts a lot better than our project does at the moment. Most of the time the games are either super simple or unnecessarily complex to the point where it’s not playable. Sometimes it’s…clunky. Not the mechanics, but rather the interface. Future Lost is a good example of that. Great idea, good mechanics, good visuals if you’re into that kind of thing, but the interface sucks big time. Due to our decision to base the game on rather complex mechanics of the third edition of Shadowrun, partly so that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, partly to promote Shadowrun, and partly because it would give current players of Shadowrun a sense of familiarity, our own mechanics are still a little clunky, but we’re working on that and I’m confident we’ll get that under control.

And then sometimes you stumble upon a game that is such a gem in the rough, even in its open beta; Zombie Pandemic. God this game is good. It’s really what I aspire Corrosion to be like some day soon. It’s a great concept, it’s got great visuals, it’s got great and simple mechanics that for the statistician among us still gives a fair amount of depth. It also has fairly good interface, but those maps! Those maps are fucking awesome. The way to get around is clever and fun and their looting system is awesome and their combat system is not just statiscs and not full fledged action either. It straddles that line just right. The way you progress your character and the missions the game offers… and it’s huge! I love it. Anyone who’s a fan of browser games, especially browser games about zombies, should really try it out.

God, it just reminds me of how far away of our goal we are. Sure, they have a small team of people and we’re with two. They’ve got a business, a business model geared towards monetisation and therefore can invest in graphics and artists and perhaps hire people to do work for them while we have no plans to monetise, especially considering we’re floating on someone else’s IP, and we’ve got very limited funds to pour into this, especially considering how we have no real way to make money off of the game. I wish I was independently wealthy. I’d quit my job and work on this project full time.

Kane & Lynch 2 – Dog Days

by Dennis••0•Posted inGaming

Due to my webserver being down for a spell tonight as the administrator was upgrading the firewall (Thanks Marco!) I couldn’t really do any coding on Corrosion, so I decided to play some Kane &  Lynch 2: Dog Days. I have had this game in my posession for a long time but haven’t had the opportunity to actually play it. Having installed it and played the first chapter, all I can say is that it’s gorgeous! A lot richer, fuller and engrossing than the first one, but the characters are as damaged and flawed as they used to be. This is going to be awesome.

The trailer below is the opening scene of the game, which I just think is masterfully done. Kane’s violent scenes are so brutal and raw and so perfectly juxtaposed with Lynch’s tranquil and heavily medicated scenes. Lord knows Lynch needs his medication!

Sleep

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

I’m starting to notice just how much effect a good night’s sleep has on me. Having had a rough couple of years in which I didn’t want to sleep for reasons I won’t go into, I am what you’d call pretty sleep deprived most of the time. Nowadays, I try to sleep 7 or eight hours, and I notice that getting less than that will start to wear on me if I keep it up for too long. Sometimes it’s out of my hands, like last night, I kept waking up because I was laying on my arms and my arms kept falling asleep (a problem I have a lot the last few years) and I wake up because of the pain in my arms or the inability for me to even move them properly as I change positions.

I find that one of two things start happening to me when I don’t sleep; either I get this crazy burst of nervous energy that propells me through the day and I absolutely crash a few days later, or I get hyper emotional and everything reminds me of my parents or I somehow relate to my parents or is somehow a reflection of all the things I couldn’t do for them before they died.

I kind of like the first one and I can’t say that I’m averse to the second one either, but both sap my energy, my tolerance, my patience and make me a nightmare for the people around me.