Some Dishwasher History

I’ve been hard at work on The Dishwasher for over a year now, and I was just looking at my changelog, which I started in August, after it became apparent that The Dishwasher was not to remain some silly Prototype. To tell you the truth, after The Dishwasher was in the hands of the Dream Build Play judges and before it won the contract, I started working on a new game/reskinning of Dishwasher called Fruit: The Game. The idea of Fruit involved a bunch of fruit battling junk food, the joke was that no matter how gory the evisceration of cupcakes and chips, you couldn’t really complain about the violence, right?

Back to The Dishwasher–a lot of people ask if it’s just me working on it, how I make games, etc., and I figured posting the changelog would provide some insight into the mayhem that goes on here. I hop between sound, art, netcode, core code, level design, and more art sporadically, fixing things as regularly as I break things. There are a lot of features in the changelog that I’ve since gotten rid of, especially with magic use (and fyi, I took out the green skull collect button–all pickups now use the classic DMC/NG/GoW absorb style), and there are a lot of features that won’t make much sense.

Anyway, here’s several months of Dishwasher history. Make sure you start at the bottom for proper chronology!

Closure and Pluggage

Well, I finally made it back home Friday morning, after two nights in O’Hare.  The Friday morning flight was even delayed twice–which is what happened with the previous two flights before they were canceled.  Nice little scare to end the trip with!

In other news:

The kind folks at xbox360fanboy.com plugged The Dishwasher again.  From the post:

High in potassium and hella’ delicious. We say good job to you Mr. (XNA all-star) Silva, Dead Samurai looks amazing and the extreme amount of blood and blurring effects makes our eyes water with happiness. We say, bring on the dish washing!

Read it!

Still trapped…

My flight got canceled a second time, so it looks like I’ll be spending another night in O’Hare in Chicago.

In the meantime, I have another guest column up up bit-tech; I wanted to name it “The One Where I Wax Philosophical” or something but those wacky British editors change the title.

Read: Halo 3 and the Art of Repetition

Update: Looks like I’m in the news again, for all the wrong reasons!

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/snowstorm.nearly.foot.2.646975.html

Trapped in Chicago…

I’m trapped in O’Hare in Chicago. I was supposed to fly back to Syracuse last night but my flight was canceled. I slept in the airport for a few hours, and am getting a lot of work done today (though haggard as anything). My flight out of here is supposed to be at 6:55 PM tonight, but it’s snowing like crazy out there and about 1/3 of all the flights on the screens are canceled. Fingers crossed I may someday see my beloved upstate NY.

I made a friend here, who I’ve named Bess Fren Inna Whole Why Whirl. Here are pictures:

Yeah, I’m going nuts.

Update: my friend AJ wants me to mention that she’s helping me, through advanced technology such as AIM, along the road to insanity.  She’s no Bess Fren, but she tries.

Guest column is up!

I wrote a guest column for bit-tech.net; check it out.  It’s all about the whole Dream Build Play episode of last summer, and is a great read for James Silva stalkers enthusiasts.

Dishwashirts are finally available for purchase

Sorry, I got sidetracked by the Orange Box, Halo 3, and chicken wings. I’ll never do it again, I swear.

I’ve got Dishwashirts available at skastudios.vg. I took some totally awful digital cam pictures of them, which may or may not improve sales. I’m asking $10, which isn’t much more than cost, but you Norwegians out there may have to pay a bit for shipping (I’m looking at you, Cryovat).

More on repetition and games

I just thought of another game that could’ve used more repetition: God of War 2.

Granted, it was an amazing game with some crazy cool parts, but like Halo 3, some of the protagonist’s badassery was dampened by the fact that you would be thrust from one completely unfamiliar situation to the next with no common frame of reference. It’s the classic picture of a vengeful hero who has been going in circles in the west wing of the antagonist’s base because he can’t find the right lever or whose quest of revenge comes to a very non-epic end when he doesn’t notice a particular climbable rock wall during an intensely cinematic moment and plunges with the platform he was riding on into the lava for the sixth consecutive time.

I thought Bioshock really nailed the whole repetition thing. Little variety in monsters, recognizable environment hazards (oil slicks, water, security systems), good level layout and a nice checkpoint arrow.

Also, The Dishwasher was in magazine (an Edge magazine, to be exact). Here’s a cell phone screenie:

The article is mostly on XNA, but it’s nice that they put some juicy screens in there.

Seattle Ho!

I just reached Seattle!

They charge $10/day for Internet.

More info to come!

The Incredible Blog Relaunch

Anyone keeping tabs on me will notice some things:

• The original blog somehow died
• The site has become extremely minimal (geocities-esque, even)

I think I know what happened, but I’m not sure. My guess is that somehow someone got some malicious whatnot on my simplePHP blog, which resulted in timeouts for any IP trying to connect to the site after the first attempt. Weeks of timeouts, even.

Well, we can all stop panicking now. I’ve decided to use a wordpress blog because it’s got a robust editor and is most likely more stable than my site.

Anyway…

The big news is that I’m going to GameFest. I’m currently in the Syracuse airport, headed West. The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a finalist in the dream.build.play competition, and we’ll see how it does on Monday.

For anyone who hasn’t seen The Dishwasher in action, here’s a (slightly dated) video: