http://www.threadless.com/submission/421687/Gamer_Coat_of_Arms

As promised in my last post, I have been working on getting this blog migrated over to a new site and turning www.reedaraymond.com into a portfolio and resume site.

Click • Play • Die will be an all-purpose gaming blog basically a continuation of what I do here, recording my adventures in game design, video gaming, and tabletop gaming. I hope you enjoy the new site and the new look.

I will keep this blog up here until I finish the redesign, but future blog posts will only be on Click • Play • Die.

The panel began as a discussion on gamification of life and using games as a tool through which to access the art and culture offered by museums; basically, museums are increasingly turning to games as a way to break from the norm of museum culture and encourage visitors to engage with art on a more active level. The conversation quickly evolved from “games as a way to engage with artwork” into “games as artwork” where the games themselves become the museum pieces. This elevation from Game Designer to Game Artist seemed to please a few of the panel members.

The event featured 5 game designers and several of the games they had developed for the event. Of particular interest was the work of SF game design company Situate, who specialize in real-world social gaming. This is game design on a massive scale. Their games have turned the streets of San Francisco into a citywide game of tag or converted entire museums into interactive scavenger hunts. As an aspiring game designer, I often find myself looking for where to apply my passion and talents; do I focus on video game development? Social gaming? Board games? Situate’s discussion opened my mind to a whole new form of game — no-tech gaming that augments our own reality rather than relying on a vehicle to deliver the game to us, be it board, book or console.

Other panel members touched on the corporatization of the game industry and the elitist atmosphere at such events as GDC, bemoaning the loss of a truly independent game development culture.

Efforts to create a venue for the unsung indy developers were highlighted, such as rave-esque warehouse parties of Babycasltes in New York or the nascent Glitch Lab in LA. The lack of such a space in San Francisco, ground zero of game design, has my mind going in interesting directions.

If you have time, head over to SFMOMA and check out some of the games yourself. The panel is over, but the panelists’ games are still available for exploration.

In other news, I am working on turning this page into a portfolio/resume page and migrating my blog to a new site (name TBD). Still working on site design, but expect changes in the future.

Here is my first crack at a hero shot of our protag, Ikiru.

He does some serious damage with that mop.

The final game will require that I learn a lot more coding than I already have, but for now I am having a blast with making the characters in Illustrator. I’ll post more as I make them.

So, without further delay, here are just a few of the things keeping me busy lately.

Painting in Photoshop

I spent a day doing a pencil drawing and decided to use it as a template for my first real effort with painting in Photoshop. Dassance gave me a great book with loads of tips and techniques for PS painting and this project has been a veritable playground for exploration and experimentation. I’m looking forward to finishing it up so I can do it all over again, armed with everything I’ve learned this first time with the work.

Illustrator T-Shirts

This shirt was up on Threadless for voting. Unfortunately after a 6 days of scoring, it only has a 1.6 out of 5. Doesn’t look like it’s gonna see the light of day, but it still has one day of scoring so feel free to pop in and cast your vote!

Don’t even ask. This design came to me in a super-vivid dream where I saw this exact design printed on t-shirts through some guys window. When I first woke up it made perfect sense to me, but now… Anyway, I still think the design is sweet. Unfortunately, Threadless didn’t and they didn’t put it up for scoring.

So there we have just a couple of the projects that have been keeping me up at night. I won’t post any of my web work because it is still so rough, but rest assured that there will be updates on that front in the near future.

Reed out.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times, as businesses struggle to stay afloat in the frigid economy, or is it evidence of the increasing board game-ification of the D&D franchise by its toy-manufacturing parent company. WotC has been releasing ever more D&D themed board games – a trend that I enthusiastically support so long as it doesn’t impact the continued development of D&D as a RPG. And there is no doubting that 4e is much more board game-esque than any of its predecessors.

No need to worry yet, though, as it might simply be a reorganization. I don’t think we have heard the last from Rich Baker, Bill Slavicsek, David Noonan or Steve Winter, as WotC often taps its laid-off talent for freelance work. Hopefully we will have years of quality D&D from these talented game designers.

Best of luck to all the employees let go this season, and Merry Christmas.

I did manage to tear myself away long enough to record one of my adventures in comic form for your enjoyment.

One of the paradoxes of D&D is that it was born from tabletop tactical war-games, but when it comes to simulating large-scale conflicts, the 5 member adventuring party  model falls flat, especially if you’re trying to recreate a grand battle between armies of 10,000 soldiers. How can the players stand out in such a massive army? More importantly, how can 5 adventurers make a difference against an enemy 10,000 strong?

There are several very important things to remember.

1. The PCs don’t need to kill the entire enemy force single-handedly. It might seem obvious, but in a game built around balanced encounters, players and DM alike get used to the players vanquishing entire teams of monsters.
2. Large battles are fought by smaller teams with specialized jobs. Treat the adventuring party as an elite strike-force. This is what my battle mechanic is based on.
3. The PCs are heroes. Don’t forget that the PCs are probably the most powerful people on the battlefield. Let them feel that way. Make sure they feel like they’re having a significant impact on the course of the battle. One hero can change the course of history; the adventuring party has 5.

Keeping all this in mind, we can start to think about how the battle will look. The PCs will participate in 3 out of 5 possible battles. In the beginning they will be presented with 4 options of where to focus their attentions on the battlefield leading up to the climactic encounter with the enemy commander. Each scenario carries with it a possible bonus or penalty that will have an impact on the final encounter with the enemy commander. After completing two encounters on the field, the PCs come up against the leader of the enemy forces, aided by the choices they made or hindered by the battles left unfought.

But I’m not here to review Mark of the Assassin. It was a fun bit of DLC that kept me thoroughly entertained for an evening and it is worth the eight bucks I spent on it. But that isn’t what has kept me thinking about the game even days after completing it. What struck me about Mark of the Assassin was its star, Felicia Day, who takes on the role of Tallis, a Qunari assassin. The character is modeled to look remarkably like Felicia herself, which I’ll admit was a little strange for me at first. I’ve never been one for celebrity chasing and to actually be able to control one felt odd, like some strangely voyeuristic puppeteer. Needless to say, I stuck to playing Hawke and only possessed Tallis to force a potion down her throat (turns out Felicia Day has a poorly developed sense of self-preservation).

It wasn’t the writing, or the voice acting or even the Felicia-shaped Tallis that impressed me most about Felicia’s appearance in Mark of the Assassin. It was that she was in it at all, and more importantly, that we gamers actually care. We care more than if Tallis were instead voiced by some A-list actress like Jennifer Connolly or (shudder) Angelina Jolie. We care because, while Felicia Day is an actress, she was a gamer first, and when we play Mark of the Assassins we see Felicia and say, “Look, she’s one of us and she made it!”

She stands as inspiration to us gamers with a bit of talent and the ambition to take our passion beyond the pastime. She is proof that it can be done. Sure, it takes hard work, but so does anything worth doing. Felicia didn’t get the Guild produced on her first attempt. She had to work hard to turn her passion into a profession. The single greatest achievement Mark of the Assassin unlocked in me was the desire to put down the controller and get to work.

At first I attributed it to a past life, echos from that time I was a pleb in Rome filtering through the ages like I’d spent too much time in Assassin’s Creed’s Animus.  Or maybe it was just my own over-active imagination. Then I read an interesting observation by Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe on how video games might alter our own sense memories.

His post led me to view my intense experience in the ruins in an entirely different light. Is it possible that my sense memories didn’t come from a past life at all, but were instead implanted firmly into my subconscious by hours of playing Caesar III during my formative years? It makes sense. Video games are immersive, and as technology and game design advances it becomes easier and easier to lose yourself in them, similar to how Assassin’s Creed caused me to view a walk downtown as an obstacle course. Who need’s Abstergo when your XBox is creating real memories of events that only happened in a binary universe.

I can hear the masses railing against this brainwash from in front of their TVs as their waistlines expand. Even my parental superego raises an eyebrow at the possibility that experiences might be injected directly into my temporal lobe. But, if true, is this really such a bad thing? Some might argue that the realism of first person shooters is desensitizing us to violence and lay the atrocities of the mentally disturbed on the shoulders of recreational games. But even as I accept that my perceptions of real life events might have been altered by my time with video games, I refuse to believe that they can control us. If anything, my experience at the ruins was only heightened by these digital memories. While immersed in Assassin’s Creed, an everyday walk on the town becomes an adventure, and life gets a little bit more interesting, even if it isn’t entirely real. Is that such a bad thing?