The DayZ Update
I've been doing these for several weeks now and I've come to the conclusion that something has been missing from them. As much as I enjoy writing about "DayZ" and my experiences with it, I feel that words alone don't always capture what makes it such a compelling gaming experience.
So, I've decided to add some video to these posts whenever possible to (hopefully) make them more interesting and engaging for you and better convey just what this whole "DayZ" thing is all about from my perspective.
To kick things off, I have not one but two videos with commentary depicting trips through Balota, which is one of the scariest areas for new players to spawn into in the game.
The first takes place at dusk and has been tweaked with YouTube's automatic lighting adjustment tool to make everything a little easier to see. The down side to this is that scenes that were extremely dark look very blurry when adjusted in this manner but I figured it was better for things to be visible and blurry than completely dark.
I know a lot of people, myself included, don't generally enjoy video of this game in the dark; however, something happens at the end that made it worth keeping and posting for me, so I highly recommend skipping to about 45 minutes in if the nighttime setting isn't doing it for you– just so you can see the end.
The second video is much more along the lines of what I intend to do on a regular basis and should (again, hopefully) be entertaining and useful for anyone interested in "DayZ" videos.
And for those of you who just can't get enough of me playing and talking about "DayZ," here is the Test video I did earlier in the week that has a few minor A/V problems but was still worth posting in my opinion.
Beyond all that, I managed to make a pretty strong recovery from the horrifying incident that led to me losing my precious M14 AIM when I immediately got attacked by a random player with a hatchet as I was logging in while in the middle of the woods. I managed to shoot and kill him as I went down, but was unable to find the bodies having been quite literally in the middle of nowhere when it happened. :(
Fortunately, I was able to use that incident as an opportunity to make the above videos and in a matter of hours was able to build up a new character that has already gotten into all sorts of adventures that I'll talk about next time.
DayZ - http://www.dayzmod.com
Shout Out: QnOmniKai
I know this is starting to feel like a "DayZ" blog and I promise to come up with a "non-DayZ-related" shout out for next week, but I do want to give it up for one of the best "DayZ" streamers on twitch.tv (QnOmniKai). If you like watching people play "DayZ" live, this stream is hard to beat with its quirky, good-time feel, giveaways, viewer participation and generally positive tone. Chat is well moderated for the most part and Kai generally comes across as a good guy trying to have a good time with a good game and good friends. Definitely worth a look if you ask me.
QnOmniKai (via twitch.tv)
Development Update
Wrapping up a lot of the game logic and game data manipulation code this week. It's all still fairly brutal but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Should have it pretty well in hand by the end of the month.
Unfortunately, I'm still very much behind with regard to my self-imposed development schedule as a result of several of these recent programming tasks taking significantly longer than I'd originally predicted. Everything will get done eventually but it's looking doubtful that I'll be able to finish the game before the holiday game release season starts.
This has me thinking that it may be a better idea to wait to announce and release the new game until after the holidays so that I can spend more time polishing it and avoid the situation I found myself in with "Powergrids–" struggling to get media coverage amid a sea of triple-A game releases.
In any case, I'm going to need to start dividing my time between developing the new game and some paying work in the not-too-distant future to keep myself afloat financially but I still have a few weeks left to focus and get as much done as I can before circumstances change.
In the meantime, I'll try to make these development updates interesting, but I may need to stop doing them every week if I can't think of anything more compelling to say than "I'm doing a ton of really boring and difficult work that's essential to making a great game." :)
Powergrids - (My current iOS game.)
Whew... That was a lot of stuff! Until next time, have a good week folks!
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