I have been working on reorganizing the site a little over the last couple of nights and this was the night for the Cat-Life series reorganization.

Officially, Cat-Life is now Cat-Life O, Cat-Life GS, and Cat-Life for Source.  Cat-Life O is basically a history page describing the mess that WAS the Original Cat-Life.  Cat-Life GS is the modern version of the mod, which I am initiating an Overhaul for various reasons outlined on that page.  And Cat-Life for Source is only being developed in the background for now until we finish Cat-Life GS.

In total, the news is that I am basically taking a hands-on leadership role in all of the projects now.  I will be spearheading the Cat-Life GS Overhaul and Planning and Directing the Cat-Life for Source development.

Certainly, however, you can get more details off of the individual pages.

Behind The Scenes and unused footage from the A-Kon 21 BWL RoadTrip.

Thanks again to all the folks that made this such a fun trip.

RIP broken shades — 2009 – 2010

The Wildcat visits A-Kon 21 during June of 2010.  We recommend watching this video in full screen mode.

Additional credits:

Music: King Cobra of Key City Productions

Other Music includes:

Six Flags Over Texas Theme 1961
Six Flags Over Texas Theme 1967
Skin On Our Teeth from Left 4 Dead
The Monsters Within from Left 4 Dead
Wild Encounter by The Wildcat

Left 4 Dead is a product of Valve Software.

Other BWL Soundtracks Used:

Cat-Life for Source
Duke Nukem: Transcendent Horizon
Team Play

Thanks to everyone that helped make A-Kon a great convention this year, and to all the people that helped make this video fun.

Update: You can watch the Behind the Scenes video here for unused and behind the scenes clips.

Last year, we offered a fair amount of coverage of E3 despite lacking the resources to attend in person.  We provided links and summaries and commentary in one gigantic news post.

This year… Nothing.

Why?

It’s actually quite simple.  If you look at our E3 post last year, you’ll notice that we covered mostly the PC related topics and only really looked at the consoles for their next big upgrades or to see games that would have at least a PC port.

This year… the upgrades have names.  And that’s about it.

Okay, that isn’t totally fair, but it is a serious issue for me.  We now know that project natal will be called “Kinect”.  The urge to steal a joke from Atop the Fourth Wall is incredible here, but I’ll resist.  We also know it will be bundled with XBox 360 Slim.

That’s right, no next generation consoles were revealed here.  Just a “slim” version of the original that can completely destroy your disk if you move the system while it is spinning.

The PS3 Move and Eye thing looks decent.  But really, it is still just a Wii rip-off.  It should work better, but then again, so should the Wii by now.

So what did Nintendo announce?  The 3DS of course.  Built in 3D, this is a great idea and I am honestly most likely to pick up one of these some day.  But seriously, where’s the new controller or console?

More importantly for me, where’s the PC advancements and announcements?

Well… basically, they’re all in with the consoles.  Yes, we can expect a lot of console ports in the coming year.

Don’t get me wrong, Fallout New Vegas looks nice and Portal 2 is good news.  But really, we’re looking at ports of Medal of Honor, CoD Black Ops, and other games.

Oh, and a BFBC 2 add-on pack.

…

yea…

…

Announced for PC in 1997

The simple truth is, I still pine of the days of Duke Nukem 3D and Tomb Raider games.  Back in those days, there would be countless photos and news posts.  Huge game announcements would be made there.  The entire event was one massive spectacle.  The consoles had big news.  The PC had big news.  The hardware had big news.  It was all huge.

E3 1997 gave us Half-Life, Unreal, SiN, Quake II, and Metal Gear Solid.

On a side note, can you believe Alan Wake was debuted in 2005?

E3 took a nose dive toward the end of its public run and was restructured as closed door meetings for 2007 and 2008 with around 15,000 in attendance total.  Compare that to the 2005 estimate of 70,000.

Max Payne Gameplay first shown at E3 in 1998

The key here was that so many “outsiders”… read that as gamers, bloggers, and effectively the entire customer base… had started attending to make reports.  The scaled back shows were limited to “industry professionals”.

I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong THAT idea was, but it happened.

In the end, I feel that the 2000′s in general brought a bit of a change to E3′s nature, dragging the presentations into a purely console focus and more or less dumping anything else.

Don’t get me wrong, PC developers and hardware groups may still be there… but when was the last time you saw them given top billing.

“but that just reflects the market,” some of you say.  Sure.  Consoles are nice because they come equipped for your games.  No maintaining an expensive computer system here.  And lovely extras like movies and blueray players also help.

My point isn’t that PC is better then everything… that’s a given…

No, I’m simply disappointed that more time and space isn’t given to PC, software companies, hardware, etc.

I can sort of understand the focus on PS3 this year for Portal 2 simply because PS3 had been completely abandoned since the orange box.  Knowing people with the PS3, I’m certainly glad VALVe finally gave them the attention they deserved as paying customers… even if it did require MicroSoft demanding money from free DLC to finally change Gabe’s mind.

*sigh*  I digress.  I’ve gotten very far off topic.

We didn’t cover E3 as heavily this year because I didn’t have the time to sift through all of the news to find the few genuinely good announcements.  For what it’s worth, E3 has drastically improved in the past two – once again open to the public… sort of – years.

Even so, I don’t see any reason to report on E3 again until the show improves further, and especially when the developers come up with new consoles and games as opposed to Wii rip-offs, “Slim” products, and a hearty supply of sequels.

Seriously…

When E3 revives its glory days or betters them, we’ll pay more attention.  Need I point out that I question whether we would even be able to attend such an expo… even if we did have the needed funding… even in the current “open” format of the show?

What do they consider “credentials” anyway?  Driver License?  Web Site Receipts?  A really big role of one dollar bills?

I’d rather stick with QuakeCon, A-Kon, and other conventions that really focus on the most important people… the customers.

The first episode of BWL’s Video update is finished.  It did, however, end up longer then I had anticipated originally and was thus divided into two parts.

In this episode we take a look at some project news including Cat-Life and our comics.  We also visit the steam chat room briefly with our “From the Chat Room” segments.  And our main topic of the day is machinima… what we see in other people’s works and what we hope to do with our three planned shows.

I suggest using the “Full Screen” option for watching this video.  You’ll get more out of it I think.

Part 1

Part 2

In the end, this episode was delayed for a few extra weeks due to schedule issues mainly.  And, given the subject matter’s resolutions, there is a fluctuation in the size of the letter boxing on most of the machinima topic.  Also, there are a few errors that I left in simply because it would have been more trouble then necessary to repair.

This episode ran longer then my intended 15 minute time limit with the “From the Chat Room” features cut down to a few short minutes each.  We had already realized that From the Chat Room could be a full audio program of its own and planned to release the full discussion separately.  So be sure to check out our full “From the Chat Room” mp3 as hosted by ModDB.

The mp3 has been edited to cut out our long dead air pauses and many “uhms” and “ughs” plus a few other less important or classified bits of the discussion.  The full session is around 35 minutes in length.

From The Chat Room: Episode 1 audio – BWL Development – Mod DB

In future episodes, I plan to focus more on the “From the Chat Room” segment and use that more for our main topic and news sections as it really turned into more interesting discussion.

Thanks again to Syrus Rayne, Radu Iceman, and BiGToM for helping with that.  As for why we chose to use steam instead of our Ventrilo server… well… the idea behind “From The Chat Room” is that members of our steam group can join in on the discussion at any time.  It’s not meant to be a “podcast” as much as it is a chat room segment for the show.

Of course, that does mean there are some buggy moments with the audio in the full mp3 and a somewhat lower quality to the sound as compared to something like skype or a shout-cast service of some sort.

Until May 24th, Portal is available for free on steam.  Download it now.  And since Valve has now adapted Steam and some games to support Mac, you Mac users can now play this great game for free as well.

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

…Also…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj1fYlwR00

Visit the Pernumbra: Black Plague Walkthrough page to view all 16 parts.  Or watch the first part below.  I suggest watching in full screen.

Alright folks, got an LP update for you all. I’ve reached part 7 of my Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past LP. For those of you who are interested, I’ll link it below.

I’ve been having fun with this LP so far. It’s difficult to provide meaningful or at the very least interesting commentary, but I’m trying my best. Hopefully those who watch it enjoy it. Zelda LTTP is one of my absolute favorite games, though this is the first time I’ve really played it in a very long time.

Let’s Play Zelda: A Link to the Past

]]> http://www.bwldevelopment.com/archives/1325/feed 0 http://www.bwldevelopment.com/archives/1314 http://www.bwldevelopment.com/archives/1314#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 01:25:51 +0000 The Wildcat http://www.bwldevelopment.com/?p=1314 Ncevy Sbbyf!

UPDATE:

Yes indeed, I don’t usually make an April Fools gag, but this year I thought I’d give it a try… with the main punchline being the Team Play Episode 1 I uploaded.

I tried my best to make my actions fairly transparent.  I didn’t want anyone thinking I really had decided to drop our standard of quality, but simply to have some fun with the day itself.

Included in this bit was the change of skins on the homepage, on the forums [seriously... Naruto?], and the giving up on my map in favor of a largely incomplete map Radu had once been working on.

I also posted on my DA account a bunch of “new” pictures in keeping with the idea that I was adding content more quickly.  Of course, in reality, most of those pictures were 10 to 15 years old… back when I was in High School and college.

I’ll leave those up, but will probably move most of them to scraps… I saved the last three because they are some of my better works and I decided to actually offer prints of them.

I’m also going to keep Radu’s Beta3 map on the server if we want to play on it some time, but we’ll go back to flatgrass and other normal maps for our defaults until I finish the real gm_bwl map set I’m working on.

Yes, I decided to split the one gigantic map into a couple of large maps.  It should play a little better when finished.

Happy April Fools day everyone!

Oh and yes, if you somehow didn’t figure it out.. and I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t… Ncevy Sbbyf! is April Fools! in rot13.