@WhiteboySlim and I took part in a FTL pairing session last night and recorded it over Google Hangout. We decided to roll with a new strategy to us both in building our ship around drones using the Engi Cruiser. It is a very lucky run for this build and we had to cut it short to head to bed.

Stay tuned for the thrilling part 2 conclusion of our FTL session coming soon!

Watch the session and let us know if you have any suggestions for our build and strat for the remaining sectors and boss fight!

I contacted Tiny Build Games and asked them for some copies of "No Time To Explain" and they were nice enough to share some love. I have 3 copies of the game to give away, so if you are interested hit up the comments to enter. I will be picking 3 people from http://www.random.org/ in order you enter and will send out keys to the winners next week on 9/2/2013 @ 1P PST.

What are you waiting for, you should enter, THERE IS NOT TIME LEFT TO EXPLAIN!

http://tinybuild.com/

Really interesting homebrew project recreating Portal on the DS. Does anyone with a homebrew DS want to try this out and report back? Totally love to hear about how this plays.

"This game is an adaptation of the portal games for the nintendo DS. It includes most of the mechanics found in the original. The code was written entirely by smealum and the graphics were all made by Lobo.

This version is the first public release. It is very buggy and incomplete, but it is mostly playable. It includes 14 levels made by smealum, loganino and tenteran. It also features a full-fledged on-board level editor inspired by portal 2′s own perpetual testing initiative."

http://smealum.net/ASDS/

I wanted to talk about some of the new things we are doing on the site as well as a bit about some of the technology we use to make Cheerful Ghost. I put the finishing touches on a new private message system this weekend and am pretty happy with the result. A week or so ago CapnCurry asked me how he could distribute Card Hunter beta keys to people on the site and I didn't have a good recommendation for him. He suggested a simple message system and the gears in my head turned a bit. I spent a week thinking about how to build things and spend a few days hacking on it.

how private messages work

If you want to send a private message to anyone on the site you can do that in a few ways. If you are in a comment chain and want to send someone a message there is a message icon you can click to send. If you are viewing someones profile there is also a message icon you can click to send a message. The message system is very simple and I borrowed heavily from how text messages work. To manage all the messages you have, in the drop down there is a private messages inbox with each private message thread available to read. Want to start a new thread? Send a new private message or continue where you left off.

the cheerful ghost roundtable

The Cheerful Ghost Roundtable is a new YouTube video cast by members of the Cheerful Ghost community about awesome stuff in gaming. We film each new episode of the Roundtable every two weeks live over Google Hangout. Right now the show is published to the main page but as we continue with it, you will be able to subscribe to it in iTunes and any other Podcast program you use. I will also put a link to each episode in a new "Roundtable" navigation area page in the next month or so.

We just finished up Episode 3 last night and I am very happy with how that turned out. I want the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable to be something really special and if you have any suggestions or ideas on how to do that, let me know. If you have a topic suggestion, let me know.

If you haven't watched them yet, why not start with episode one?

Episode 1 - "The Indie Revolution": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy_D1tdNXv4
Episode 2 - "The Internet Hate Factory": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-IwC9j1U8g
Episode 3 - "CONSOLES!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAcMDGJcHI

responsive design & why it matters

I started Cheerful Ghost with some pretty awesome goals. One of those goals was that the site had to work the same on mobile, tablets and desktop browsers. I set that as a goal because as a software engineer I have worked for many companies that don't do that and I wanted to be able to ship something that works the way I think it should. I decided from the starting code I wrote, the site would keep this in mind.

I started with a pretty basic "responsive design" framework when the site first launched. I was pretty new to design and the front end so the first design of Cheerful Ghost was pretty rough. The site worked the same on phones, tablets and desktops but it lacked polish and the shine the site has now.

Cheerful Ghost received a pretty awesome overhaul a year after launch and the fruits of that you see now. Since then the site has evolved but the core tenant of keeping the site working the same on phones, tablets and desktops hasn't changed.

In fact, one fun way to test how that works is by dragging the edge of your browser around. In most browsers you can see the site "respond" to its new width and adapt. Many sites on the Internet don't do that and this is one really cool feature of Cheerful Ghost I love. It responds to the browser it lives in.

One technology we use to make this happen is the Open Source responsive design framework, Bootstrap 2.3.2. Recently Bootstrap 3.0 was released and after PAX I am going to spend time to upgrade the site to Bootstrap 3.0. Bootstrap 3.0 is a great new release that was built from the ground up to consider mobile first. What this means is that certain elements it provides that were not awesome on mobile, will now be. It also changes a few elements visually and drops support for some older web browsers.

As Cheerful Ghost improves we can't keep compatibility with everything. As such we are going to drop support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6. I don't think this will impact too many people because according to our logs Internet Explorer is our 5th used browser and only one person came to the site last month in IE 7. That said over the next year we will drop support for IE 8 and that browser isn't widely used on the site either. I'd love to keep support for everything, but as as a lone developer I can only do so much. :D

http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/
http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2013/08/19/bootstrap-3-released/

Thanks for making Cheerful Ghost the coolest gaming community on the net and I hope to see you in the upcoming months!

In this episode we discuss the PS4, XBox One, Wii U, Steam Box and the current generation of consoles. We also talk a bit about what sucked in the last gen. and what we want to see going forward.

During the middle portion of the video I was experiencing technical difficulties, which happens from time to time with a live show on Google Hangout. On one hand, technical difficulties suck but on the other hand, hilarious!

Show Notes:

• Plants vz Zombies 2: http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1550


• Guild Wars 2 Free to Play Weekend: http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/38


• The Enchanted Forest: http://www.enchantedforest.com/


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.O.B.


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64


• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4


• http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/meet-xbox-one


• Apple TV App Store: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/08/18/there-could-still-be-a-november-surprise-for-apple-tv/


• Steam Box Piston Pre-orders: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416457,00.asp

What do you think about current and next gen consoles? Do you have a Wii U? Are you going to pickup a PS4 at launch?

Just watched an awesome fan video called "Link to the Future." It starts off as a pretty reasonable Zelda fan film and then Doc. Brown shows up with a DeLorean. You heard me, now watch it, watch it now.

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEVdWlNCUkg

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvk5L3wjRo0

Behind the scenes+more info on how they were made:
http://www.the3gi.com/linktothefuture.htm

I heard about Analgesic Production's first game Anodyne when it hit the Pirate Bay. When it made it to the popular Torrent site they dropped the price of the game to help promote it and the story of what happened broke in the gaming community. I picked up the Anodyne game+score bundle during the Pirate Bay promotion.

Anodyne is a fantastic game that really immersed me in its landscape and gameplay. To this day when I listen to the score on my iPhone I am immediately transported back into the game and its a really magical experience. When I read on Twitter that Sean and Jon of Analgesic Productions were working on a new game and it was taking shape I contacted them. Even The Ocean is looking to be a really interesting game and I look forward to checking it out at PAX.

This interview contains a spoiler to Star Trek Into Darkness.

jdodson: I wonder if you could explain a bit about Even The Ocean. How is turning out?

Sean: I think it's coming along nicely. We've had this core mechanic of managing energy (rather than insta-death or health) ready pretty early on, and recently we've been figuring out the best ways to sort of express that through the worlds in EtO...how best to pace the game, etc. The past 5 months, when I get time to work on EtO, has been a mix of level design, infrastructure programming (to handle a game of EtO's scale), planning out world/story/game design with Jon, and music. And I guess a little bit of marketing. I expect work to go faster after PAX - this summer I've been doing things with Anodyne iOS and Japanese Anodyne, plus I've been travelling a bit so it's been harder to hit a good workflow. Jon was able to start working in July, so things have been more motivating since there's been art! Overall, creating EtO is a very challenging thing from a design standpoint - while it does retain platformer traits, there's a lot of open questions as to how we design the rest. So hopefully things turn out okay!

jdodson: Anodyne is an awesome game that features a very ethereal story that wasn’t entirely straightforward. Will Even The Ocean follow suit or will it approach things differently?

Jon: We're still figuring out how the narrative will be structured. What we do know is that it will follow two separate characters, Even and Aliph. Even is a person living in a modern-day city (not fantasy, but fictitious). Aliph is a sort of dream avatar of Even who exists in a fantasy world that is more focused on strange natural terrain. The story will have a bit more of a plot than Anodyne, but that will still probably be pretty loose. There will hopefully be more context for being able to interpret the storylines based on the parallels between the two main characters.

Sean: I think something we are interested in doing is trying to step the coherence of the narrative up one level...there's a unique set of challenges to designing a world with little explicit narrative interference (like Anodyne), and there's another set of challenges when designing interacting worlds with a moderate amount of narrative interference.

jdodson: It looks like Even the Ocean will take the player between a dream world and an urban setting. Anodyne had these elements too and I am curious if these games are spiritually linked together in some way?

Sean: I think they are linked in that they are both looking at characteristics of a person in an abstracted way. Like you can observe what someone is feeling or thinking by giving them dialogue or interactions with other things, in some fictional reality. But you can also try to do something similar by giving a character some set of game mechanics and letting them go into a designed world, and see what you can learn about a character through that, which is what Anodyne tried to do. EtO is trying a similar thing, but we are using the world of Even and world of Aliph as a contrast.

jdodson: Will Young or any other character from Anodyne make an appearance?

Jon: Hmm, we haven't really talked about this! Knowing us, almost definitely yes, but who knows how or in what context!

jdodson: One element of Even The Ocean is that the dream world and real world will be visually different. This is a very unique idea and I am curious if these differences will relate to the gameplay itself?

Jon: Yes, Even's world will not really have platforming/actiony gameplay in the way that Aliph's world does (it won't be a parkour game!). Those areas will be more RPG-esque in that they will mostly consist of walking around and talking to people. I'm still working out the visual styles though, so I've yet to see even how those will interact.

jdodson: Can you explain a bit about the main character Aliph and how she fits in with the world you are building?

Sean: Aliph is a repairperson for these power plants in their fictional world - and Aliph's role evolves a bit throughout the game...not to a hero, but more of an observer/investigator to their world and why it is the way it is and why it is changing. Aliph's events roughly kind of explore a similar idea to what Even experiences in the looks into Even's life, though I don't have any direct interactions planned, where like - Even gets really mad or something, and then there's a fire in Aliph's world, or whatever.

jdodson: Anodyne used Adobe Air as the language and framework you used to knit the game together. Are you using this stack for Even The Ocean or are you using something different this time?

Sean: The things that have changed are the language, framework, and level editor. I'm coding in HaXe 3 now, using a HaXeFlixel + OpenFL stack, and the level editor is in-game, though we still use DAME for almost-final tiling passes. I changed because I liked the open-ness of HaXe a lot more, and I think it is going nice places, and it also compiles down to CPP, so perhaps that makes something like porting EtO to PS4 or whatever more feasible.

jdodson: Even The Ocean is still in its early stages but I am curious if you guys have a rough timeline for a beta and launch?

Sean: None at all! Well, I'd like to finish things up before GDC next year. We might do a public (or press/friends-only) demo sometime after PAX, and we'll probably have a set of testers before launch. I'm not sure when that would be. I feel like things are going to progress faster than they have after PAX, since I won't have Anodyne stuff to do, and I'll be more settled in to where I did most of the Anodyne dev. There are narrative things to figure out and some design things, but I think things will progress faster once we figure those out. I have a sense of scale for the game, it is slightly larger than Anodyne, but we did most of Anodyne's content in a 6 month period with work and full-time school. So I think we will be able to finish more now that we are doing games full time. Or maybe not!

!!The following question contains Star Trek into Darkness spoilers!!

jdodson: In the new film Star Trek Into Darkness we find out that the Khan’s blood has magical powers that can bring people back to life. This is used to bring back Captain Kirk and a Tribble. I am curious if a universe where one can magically inject oneself with “bring me back to life juice” is one where the threat of death is real. In the end doesn’t this drop any kind of tension because now and in the future any major character can simply be revived?

Jon: Yeah there were a lot of things that felt sort of narratively broken about that film. Magic revive blood definitely breaks the universe. Plus, weren't Khan and his family engineered? That means someone basically already invented the stuff. Also the female characters in that movie were pretty poorly written. There were fun parts to it though, I suppose.

Sean: I haven't seen it, but I feel like humans (or sentient beings) would figure out something to get all pissy about even if we couldn't die. Like life partners, or varying quality of lives, choosing whether or not to revive yourself...etc.

jdodson: Many Indie games use Kickstarter to help fund their next games, including some bigger studios like Double Fine. Is this something you have considered for Even The Ocean?

Jon: No, we are fortunate enough to not really need the money right now. And I wouldn't like the stress of all the backers and rewards. There's enough stress as it is, just getting stuff done day-to-day without thousands of people already having paid for what you're making.

Sean: It would be a pain in the ass. I guess if something horrible happened and we were REALLY close to finishing but running out of money then I might do it as a way to get "pre-order" money. But I wouldn't offer rewards or anything. Dunno.

jdodson: After school are you considering doing game development full time?

Jon: We both just graduated this past spring and we are now doing game dev full time :D

Sean: Yeah, for the near future it is going to be what I do most of the time, though of course, who knows what will be happening in a year or two.. No school also opens up time to pursue other hobbies, so that will be interesting as well!

jdodson: You guys will be at PAX Prime at the Indie Mega Booth. Anything we can look forward to when we stop by to check it out?

Jon: We'll be giving away buttons that I made featuring Young, Miao Xiao Tuan Er, and the protagonists of Even the Ocean. Also we're shooting to have some playable demo of Even the Ocean to show.

Sean: We'll also be showing Anodyne, mentioning the upcoming Japan release on Sep 4th. And our awesome localizers, Kakehashi Games - http://www.kakehashigames.com/ .


jdodson: I wanted to thank you guys for talking to me about your new game and I wish you well. Is there anything you want to say before we finish up?

Jon: Thanks for your interest! Keep on spreading positive energy in the internet video game community!

Sean: Thanks for the interview!!! Looking forward to see you.

http://www.eventheocean.com/
http://seagaia.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/anodyne-pirate-bay-promo-post-mortem/

New Starcrafts video highlighting the Zerg Larva being somewhat OP. At least, on the creep. :D

Creepy new trailer released with news of The Binding of Issac Rebirth launching on Steam in 2014. The trailer is creepy, strange and neat all in one.

Starcraft Universe is a new fan created Starcraft II map that is essentially a Starcraft MMO. Blizzard highlights the new mod in a recent blog post and video tear down giving us all more reasons to play Stacraft 2 again.

http://us.battle.net//sc2/en/blog/8996231#best

PC Gamer creates a list of the top 25 shooters of all time. Unreal Tournament, BioShock, Wolfenstein, Counter-strike, Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands 2, Doom, Quake III & Half-life 2 all make the list and one spot they gave to Team Fortress 2.

http://www.pcgamer.com/gallery/the-best-shooters-of-all-time/

"Delve deeper into the world of Destiny with the Bungie team to discover more ways to become legend on this new adventure."

Destiny looks beautiful and this documentary shows off how much time and polish Bungie has been spending on it. I am interested to see how the on the fly co-op works in the game as well as experience the lush visuals first hand.