Jason T Clark.net

There are times when nostalgia can spark new ideas for video games. You know, like World Wars, Civil Wars, Tribal Wars, and Star Wars (remember, the first one came out in the seventies). In my case, nostalgia has spark up the idea of creating a video game based on a dice game that me and “the fellas” used to play on the floor in my apartment (or on the street corner for some of them), and that game is called Cee-Lo. No, not the guy from Goodie Mob, or most recently Gnarls Barkley, but Cee-Lo the dice game.

Now, it goes by alot of names, like Headcrack, Tripps, and my personal fave, 456. Although there are games out there where you can play a number of dice games, such as craps, I have yet to see anyone implement a 456 game. When I was introduced to it, I thought it was much “cooler” than craps, since there were so much slang used around playing the game itself. Terms like, “Aced Out”, or “Rolling Box Cars”, or “Trips”, or “Tracey Lee” which means you rolled 3 for your point (I think it stemmed from a play on the word “Tre” which means three in loosely translated Spanish).

At any rate, my idea is to design a 2D video game, much like the Microsoft Games that are installed on your PC by default, possibly leveraging XNA to eventually offer it on XBL to the masses.

OK so, I’ve briefly alluded to the work I’ve been doing around a couple projects that I’ve been working on, namely the Unreal Jack City project, and Unreal Demolition. Here’s where they stand from my perspective, and how I’ll be progressing on them.

Unreal Jack City

I was working on the design document over the weekend after watching New Jack City on YouTube five times over, and realized that there is plethora of content to be leveraged for this project. To add, I think a total conversion mod of this magnitude is going to require quite a bit of work from the design perspective, and from the development perspective. So, I think a more realistic goal for this project is to first get a workable design document completed, and then to begin work on developing a small prototype based on that design. Something like 1 short mission, that includes a glimpse of what the environment might look like, possibly a couple character models, and some decent logic which accurately portrays a small element of the game. Taking on this project from a holistic view has made me realize the amount of work that would have to be done in order to get 5 levels completed for such a content saturated idea.

Unreal Demolition 2

Since this project has already taken off by the works of Dan Weiss and the rest of the team, my goal is to simply pitch in from the scripting perspective, and to eventually try to get a level or two completed. Team Derby has been at this for quite some time, so me being the newbie to the team has its downsides, especially since I have to come up to speed on what they’ve got going on.

I’m going to write another post about a new idea that I have for a much smaller, more tangible project in a few days, so stay tuned.

Amidst getting underway on a few projects, I noticed that my true attention has been  slightly diverted to the game design and game production side of things.  Now, this doesn’t mean that tools engineering and gameplay programming isn’t of any interest to me, it’s just that I do like the higher level aspects of the process.  This doesn’t take away from the fact that still need to become an expert C++ programmer, as well as a great Microsoft Project user, does it?  I think well rounded designers and producers should be able to handle either or at times when absolutely necessary.

At any rate, I fell upon this essay by Chris Crawford who wrote this as a game designer back in 1982.  It’s been electronically reprinted, and is still a very valid resource when trying to ascertain what it means to design games.

If it peaks your interest at all, take a look.   I think once I’m done reading it, I’ll try and give my synopsis.