ninjaworkshop

New Year

dmboyle — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:49:26 +0000

As we roll into the New Year, things are going very well with Berimbau. With the upcoming ModDB Mod of the Year competition starting January 2nd, we’re in full gear to bring out a lot of media and show people what we’ve got cooking.

Audi has been working on redesigning the Phalanx model, the original model implemented in Berimbau. Unfortunately when Audi topped it with his Ninja-Knight, we realized that Phalanx just couldn’t keep up. With a combination of the original model and some concept sketches by David Boyle, we’re on track to bring Phalanx up to par.

The newer, Work in Progress Phalanx, left, next to the older Phalanx, right.

Mike is working hard to get ported to Scratch SDK, and we should have a much better build soon for testers.

Happy New Year!

Testing…

Zan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:44:03 +0000

Port of the game to scratch SDK seems to be going really well. Mike has gotten a bit more intimate with systems he wasn’t very familiar with, like the camera. This opens up to a lot more customization on that front without him relying on someone else.

I conducted a playtest last night with a local tester who was new to computer FPS, and definitely new to the sword fighting genre. I had him walk through what he was doing, feeling, and what confused him. It was a great experience and allowed me to get some good feedback of what it’s like for a new user to approach the game. Expect a lot in the way of usability improvements in the upcoming build. The worst thing for a new player is a giant learning curve and hopefully we can make that curve more of a straight line.

Happy Holidays!

-Zan

Back to Basics

Zan — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:30:20 +0000

We’ve encountered so many issues building upon the HL2DM source that we’ve decided to step back and recode the mod from the Scratch SDK. It should address most of the problems we’ve had with animations and prediction (Hopefully)
It’s a bit of work for Mike, but he’s a trooper and says he thinks he can finish it up in about 5 to 7 days.

In addition to starting over for the mod itself, I decided now would be a good time to give the main site a new, fresh look and clear out all the junk that has accumulated here over the past few months. Most of the news posts and screenshots just don’t give a good example of where the mod is now. Let me know in the comments what you think of the new design, and expect new media over the next few days.

Pretty soon we’re going to be opening up the floodgates a bit to let more testers in. We’re reaching a part of development where we really need testers of different abilities and backgrounds to help us out with usability. If you’re interested and want to get a jump on the competition, zing me an email to zan@ninjaworkshop.com with a bit of your gaming background, your age, and why you think you should test Berimbau.

-Zan