Jono's game dev blog

From Monday the 15th of July to Tuesday the 23rd, I was in Melbourne for PAX Australia with Sue and Kamil to show our game The Legacy of Barubash This post is about about the daily events, the second post will be about the actual experience, people I met and the city itself. On Monday we got on a flight at like 6AM or something and landed in Melbourn at 11AM? After that we got settled into our hotel room which only had 2 keys which really sucked because there was 6 of us staying in the room, it really limited us in how often we could go our own separate way, after that I went to the local Harbourtown for a bit and got some lunch, for dinner we went to a Chinese place in the QV building.

Tobe's Vertical Adventure is a rather simple platformer game released for PC on the 19th of July 2011. It's about some guy being dropped into caves by his girlfriend while looking for treasure, what exists of the story is told through very static cutscenes. The gameplay consists of moving downwards while collecting gems, avoiding hazards and heading for the large treasure chest at the bottom, once you open it a timer starts, the level changes slightly to open more paths and you need to get out as quickly as possible. It's a pretty good idea for a game but the execution just isn't there. There's two power ups to collect, one is balloons for gliding and the other is a portable rope for climbing. Unfortunately they are only useful in a limited amount of situations and I couldn't find a way to switch items so you need to use the balloons up before you can use the ropes, this is frustrating when you are trying to escape. There's two characters to choose fr...

Once again a bunch of games/movies/anime I either haven't completed or don't feel like writing a full review on. The Fast and The Furious 6 An action movie about fast cars and rich criminals trying to get back a friend that they thought had died by working with some government guy to prevent other criminals from obtaining certain technology, it's a very very dumb movie but it was fun to watch with friends. The Big Lebowski A comedy about an unemployed guy who calls himself "The Dude" and gets involved in a series of strange events because he shares his name with a rich guy. Very funny but the plot is inconsequential and the ending to each part feels kind of anticlimatic and ultimately pointless. Animal Crossing New Leaf Animal Crossing is a strange game, it's about playing a human who lives in a village full of animals, there's no real point to the game apart from paying off loans. Apart from that you can just play very freely and do activitie...

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a 3rd person shooter with some adventure elements, it was developed by Naughty Dog and released in 2007 for the PS3. Uncharted is a game about a fictional descendant of Francis Drake called Nathan Drake who finds a map to El Dorado and sets off to find it along with his old friend Victor Sullivan and a journalist called Elena Fisher. Unfortunately after a few chapters both of them are gone after the first few chapters, so you have to deal with Drake talking to himself and looking at things in the distance. Thankfully he does find Elena after a while and that's when the story really picks up and gets much better.

Another post for media that either has too little content for a full review, hasn't been completed, or I just don't feel like writing a whole article for. Lume Lume is a point and click puzzle game, all of the level is actually filmed which makes it look really nice and then the characters are added on top, the main aim of the game is to get into the house and to set up a windmill to restore power. It can be completed in under an hour if you know what you are doing, I ended up using a walkthrough because the puzzles felt so unorganised and it wasn't that great at telling you how to do things or what you needed to do next. The first puzzle was obviously the easiest but it requires you to clean up a whole rotating wire puzzle just to connect some wires together and the other puzzles require a similar tedious effort. It feels kind of empty when you complete the few puzzles there are because it says that it's only part 1 of Lume. I had high hopes for this game after ...

Been playing and watching a bunch of things but haven't had the time to finish them. Games: Deus Ex: Human Revolution: This is actually the kind of cyberpunk story driven game I've been looking for, it's a sci-fi game about the advancement of humans by merging themselves with technology and the possible side effects, reliance problems and the new class divide it could create. The graphics are great and it actually shows they had artistic aspirations and art direction, which is something I wish more games would do, unfortunately the performance isn't exactly the best. There's a lot of chatting to people and interesting decisions to make, even your combat actions and exploration effect what people say and think about you. One thing I really like is how much they make the game mechanics into something that's actually part of the game, upgrades that give you new abilities are augments and all of the HUD is due to your eye augmentation .