So I’m winding down my internship with Legendary Fighter Studios this week… it’s a sad day.  I’ve had a great time working here and have learned so much about writing for the Internet and writing for technology and video games.  The Internet is changing the way people advertise, changing the way people view and interact with video games, and it’s changing the way we consume information and goods.  It’s been a pleasure learning about this and learning to use the Internet in a new way for advertising and getting the word out about Aces Wild and Legendary Fighter Studios.  Advertising is no longer limited to major corporations with massive amounts of money, with know how and determination the underground world of blogs and forums is making it easier for the smaller companies to get more recognition.  It’s an exciting time for video games, advertisers, and journalists as the online world grows and consumers become more accustomed to it and it further becomes a way of life no longer will major corporations be the sole provider of media.

So thanks so much to Legendary Fighter Studios and in particular Tyler Doak.  I had a blast and I know Aces Wild and all your other games will be a success!

Legendary Fighter Studios is setting the deadline for Aces Wild for September of 2010 to be complete.  The studio will have been working on Aces Wild for 2 years at that deadline, after that they will begin to focus more heavily on other games.  Once Aces Wild is polished and ready for show they will be persuing all avenues of distribution through all publishers.  It’s likely the game will be put on xbox live community games, which is a xbox live service that allows nearly anyone to upload their game online and anyone with xbox live can download the game for play.  The game isn’t quite at beta stages yet, but the studio will be focusing all it’s energy on Aces Wild until September 2010.  They will be working more on the combat before any further assets are added. Alongside that they will design destructable environments and then balance that with character switching.  Once thats complete they will be cranking out the assets and designing more levels.  It’s an exciting future for Legendary Fighter Studios.

Tyler has haulted all other projects to work enitely on Aces Wild and has much professional support from interested gaming companies and lots of personal support from friends and family.

Tyler recently realized he is making way too many moves for each character.  He was really worried about making sure players had enough tools to be creative and got too caught up in their creativity.  Recently trying to consolidate all the move sets into something more elegant.  Putting that on top of having switchable characters and characters were starting to loose originality and individuality, so by having a tighter move set then the characters are more original and you can appreciate the diversity more.  It also means a lot less assets which mean the game can come out quicker.  A lot of it had to do with an old design idea and he hadn’t planned on having that many playable characters, he had a pipe dream of having basically the same move done in different directions having unique animations.  He doesn’t really need to do that though, he can get a lot of variety out of one animation if you design it right and use other simple rendering stuff.

Tyler has been working on the Input Buffer for Aces Wild. An Input Buffer creates a buffer for the users input, technically, it records all of your inputs for a certain amount of time and gives you leeway for making combos and performing all your actions quickly and smoothly.  Unless you had perfect timing without an input buffer their would gaps between your actions.  So the input buffer allows you to mash out what you want with some leeway and makes the game play feel a lot better.  Heres an interesting video that sort of explains it with the help of Guilty Gear.

It took a long time for Tyler to get it to work properly in his games, and he had to reprogram how all the characters were controlled.  In the end it “works and feels tons better,” according to tyler.

You can see the recorded inputs on the left. The oldest input is dropped every frame and each other one comes to the front. Each input in the buffer is read each frame and removed if that input is used.

Heres a hilarious tutorial on how to make your make up look like you have “anime” eyes.  Which I assume just means make your eyes look big and child-like.  This girl is really good at make-up instruction and it’s interesting how she has made a living of doing this on YouTube.

Heres an awesome new video really getting to the core of the issues with the new PSP from Sony.  Just kidding!  It’s actually totally mocking the new PSP!

Legendary Fighter Studios is taking a two week break from developing Aces Wild after learning of the 2beegame independent game competition results.  Tyler will be working on a competitive fighting game called Rival Century, an adventure game called Jamie and The Tower, and a music-outer space based action game focusing on music.  He will also be looking at other games and taking a break from Aces Wild to get new ideas and to improve upon Aces Wild.

In this time I’ll try to keep the blog interesting with various pop culture tidbits I find on the internet.  Everyone should let me know if the stuff I post is lame or awesome.  Thanks!

So 2beegames.com had their second independent game competition recently and Aces Wild was entered in the competition.  This was the second independent game competition on 2beegames.com that Aces Wild was entered in. Aces Wild was in the first independent game competition that 2BeeGames held and was one of the final contestants.  Unfortunately Aces Wild was not a finalist in this competition.

After sitting down with Tyler, the game creator, and discussing why he thinks Aces Wild wasn’t as successful in this competition it sounds ultimately like the game wasn’t polished enough, the level-design made it feel incomplete, and there wasn’t much context for players to use all the abilities and actions of the characters.  Tyler didn’t feel the other games were in much better shape than his, though.  He agrees his game does need improvement, and he continues to work daily on it.

I also think Aces Wild should have been a finalist in the 2beegames competition.  Of course, I’m not nearly as knowledgable about games or independent game development as the judges at 2BeeGames but I have been playing video games since I could walk and Aces Wild has some of the most amazing art I’ve seen in a video game and the fact that it was developed and designed entirely by one person is amazing.  We’ll see what the future holds for Aces Wild and Tyler!

Today I’m going to talk about the characters Tyler has developed so far in Aces Wild.  The main and first character is Ace, who has big dark hair and is in slacks and what looks like a navy track jacket with some basic tennis-shoes.  I like the design and look of this character, though technical things like his head is proportionately much smaller than his body are still being worked out.  Also this character’s style of dress is a little dull in comparison with some of the other characters but that seems to work with the characters personality.  It seems the character is supposed to be this every day guy.

The next character developed was Leslie which I think is the most successful, or interesting thus far.  Although he has the technical issue of tiny head and hands that are much larger than his head, he is still the most aesthetically pleasing for me.  The clothing choice was risky but rewarding, it looks like a gray three-piece suit but without the jacket and a pink under shirt so it’s basically gray slacks, a gray vest, a pink under shirt and a red ascot.  The ascot is the real kicker, ascot as making a come back, at least in my mind.  They are bold yet very dignified.  It’s also interesting the contrast in the skin tones, Ace has almost an olive complexion while Leslie is extremely pale, bordering on vampire or albino.

Then there’s this intentionally vague character “ninja.”  Ninja is faceless and sort of shapeless entirely, he’s wearing what looks like traditional ninja clothing which is like baggy shorts with wrapped calves and what almost looks like a robe for a shirt.  He has a scarf wrapped around his head and then something that looks like some kind of face guard over top of it, it’s a little scary looking, which I’m sure isn’t an accident.  He looks the most interesting in action, when he runs he is bent nearly all the way over, it’s really intense looking.

Samson, the final character seems to be based around a mutual friend of Tyler and I.  He’s wearing  a trucker hat and a trench coat with some jeans and a t-shirt and what look like just some regular working boots, oh and he’s carrying a giant sword thing with him.  I’m not sure why he choose to incorporate the trucker hat and the trench coat, though like I said I think it’s inspired by someone we both know who dresses in this sort of grungy “i’m too cool to care what people think of me” way.  Oh, and Samson is a smoker, in his still shot he is smoking a cigarette coolly in the same “too cool” way.  Maybe I would like this character more if he didn’t remind me so much of this person we know, who is actually a very nice guy he just puts out a weird vibe sometimes and can come off as arrogant or ridiculous.  I wish that when Samson was running the trench tails blowing behind him looked more real but it’s little things like that that may slow down the game, or at least slow down production.

Overall all the characters are extremely good and I actually had a hard time picking out real issues I had with them.  Samson is probably my favorite just because of what he is wearing and his overall look with his big platinum blonde hair.  I think they’re all pleasing aesthetically and of course I have my own preferences.  You shoud check them out yourself, though!

So everyone complains about the violence in video games and violence in movies but now everyone has something new to complain about!  Violence with the iphone! Now little kids with iphones can really not understand that toys are not guns.  This iphone application lets you load different guns and even lets you tap the trigger which results in real gun firing sound effects.  It’s amazing.  I’m actually not complaining, I think it’s hilarious and it kinda makes me want an iphone is all I’m saying.  The app is called ishotty.

Haha I mean even the ishotty.com website lists the number 3 reason for getting ishotty as “If your mother told you not to play with weapons as a kid, now you can have one”  Thats just awesome!