voyage to mars
Sorry, guys: no annual 'Ragnar blogs the Oscars' this year, and I'm ashamed to say that I didn't even have the energy to stay up to watch the show. It's been a tough month, and I was totally wiped out last night after a full weekend of work - the second in a row, following a busy travelling schedule. I was going to try and avoid spoilers this morning, and watch the show in reruns, but that turned out to be a futile exercise. This is the first year in, well,
years that I've missed the Academy Awards, but I have to say that neither the nominees nor the host made it seem worth my while to stay up all night. Not that they were bad movies - quite the contrary - but there were few surprises.
If they bring back Steve Martin and nominate
Batman Begins,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
Land of the Dead,
Serenity, and
Doom for best movie of 2005 - then hell, yeah, I'll stay up and blog myself silly next year. That's my promise to you.
Speaking of movies, I watched
Constantine last night (in a rare reprieve from the game development grind), and I'll try not to damn it with faint praise. It was good. It was much, much better than it could have been, and not quite as good as it should have been...if that makes any sense whatsoever. I love
Hellblazer, the comic book, and the US-centric changes imposed on the character and the setting aren't all good, but L.A. works, Keanu works (incredibly enough), hell works really well, and the movie stays true - for the most part - to John Constantine and his world. There were some excellent scenes in there, and some not-quite-as-excellent ones, and the movie was a bit slow-moving and ponderous at times, but, hell, let's be grateful that it turned out as well as it did. I had fun, and I hope this kickstarts a franchise.
And I have to say it was nice to see the 'Vertigo' logo up on the big screen. Gave me the chills, it did. Bring on a Gaiman-scripted
Sandman, and I'll be very happy.
Good Lord, is it Thursday already? The insanity! [Aaand, of course, now it's
Saturday: I can't even seem finish a post and click 'publish' these days.]
I've barely had time to breathe this week, as next week's deadline inches - or rushes, like a train you have to catch, but then miss by four-and-a-half seconds, and you swear the conductor saw you before blowing his whistle, he totally did that on purpose - ever closer. How are we doing? We're not done. We're getting there, but we're not done. It's tight, but then it's
always tight. It wouldn't be game development otherwise. If you've got too much time to spare, you're not doing it right, and you're not doing enough. If you don't have blood running from your nose and your brain is screaming - screaming! - for some goddamn sleep, you're working in the wrong business, buddy.
And if this one's breaking our backs, pre-E3 crunch time - early April to mid May - will pop both of our kneecaps and pull our fingernails out, ever so slowly. That one's the biggie. We'll be positioned in a pretty sweet spot on the show floor, with a sizeable stand right next door to Sony's, so
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey will need to look absolutely fantastic. Of course,
Dreamfall won't be the only Funcom game (nor the biggest) to be shown at E3 - but it will definitely be the best adventure game at E3, or I'll eat my, uh, lunch. (Hey, the competition's fierce. I don't want to have to eat anything disgusting.)
The game does look - and more importantly
feel - pretty good right now, even with tons of stuff missing. It's unique and it's different, and there's honestly nothing else like it out there. Unfortunately, you'll still have to take my word for it. The marketing and PR guys have a plan for what we're going to reveal when, and we have to stick with that plan. Things will be happening throughout March and April, culminating in L.A. in May, at which point we'll reveal mostly everything we're willing to reveal. We don't want to go into spoiler territory, and boy, are there plenty of opportunities for spoilers in this one.
I'll try and post a few tidbits in this journal between now and next Friday, time - and PR people - permitting. Check back soon.
[I thought I'd posted this one yesterday, but apparently not. Sunday thoughts to brighten your Monday AMs, then. Hurray!]
Another busy one - I'm not ignoring you guys - as the days draw nearer to the next big
Dreamfall milestone on March 4th. We're in the midst of a working weekend, and the team's pulling together to make this upcoming version as good as it can possibly get. All the little bits and pieces are fitting very nicely together, though time is always an issue: there's never enough of it. We always want to add another layer of spit and polish to our work. The reality of game development, however, mandates that you stop and move on to the next thing. After all, the locations and characters we spend months staring at, players will only see for an hour or two. It's important to focus on the right things.
On Thursday, we had our first motion capture session on the project, and our actor - who went to a mime school in Paris, no less - provided us with some really excellent motions (captured in our high tech in-house studio) that will serve as the foundation for cinematic sequences and other animations. I'm guessing that about half - perhaps more - of the animations in the game will be created partially or wholly using mocap (there's a new word you can throw around), while the remaining animations will be done by hand, old school. We have three animators working on the project, all of whom are quite capable of churning out top notch work, but mocap is extremely useful when creating things like realistic character behaviour, movement and idle cycles, and long animations for cinematic sequences.
WorthPlaying have posted their
Most Wanted list for 2005, and
Dreamfall is number two, right behind
Jade Empire - which makes sense, because
Jade Empire is
my most wanted game for this year. We're definitely honoured and humbled to be included in such great company, ahead of great games like
Splinter Cell 3, the new
Zelda title, and
Final Fantasy XII.
So far this year, we've been named 'most wanted' by GameSpy, Eurogamer, CGM, PC Zone - and that's just off the top of my head. Expectations are running high, but we aim to deliver on all counts.
Celebrating Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia
can be tough:
[The] religious police mobilize a few days before February 14, making the rounds of gift and flower shops.It's like something out of
1984. I've been lucky enough to visit Saudi Arabia on a couple of occasions, and it's an intriguing and (for the most part) friendly country, but I can see where observing a Western, ostensibly Christian, holiday celebrating romantic love might be considered a tad radical. Still, when you need to go underground to buy a rose for your valentine, circumventing laws and risking heavy fines and detention - that's true love, baby.
As a PC-slash-Mac user - with a dual laptop setup at home - I'm always debating what parts of my digital life belong where. My extensive iTunes library, for example, resides on the PC, simply because that's where I ripped all the CDs in my B.A. (Before Apple) days. In the past week, however, I've begun using the Music Store (through the magic of pre-paid cards and US IP addresses), and since the Mac accompanied me on my pan-West Coast trip, those tracks reside on the PowerBook - as well as on my new 1GB
iPod shuffle, which syncs with its 12" cousin, while the iPod mini syncs with the Dell.
See how this gets confusing?
About a week ago, I purchased
iLife '05, mostly because of the new
iPhoto upgrade. The plan was to transfer all my digital photos from the PC to the Mac. Just to confuse matters even more, however, I discovered a fantastic application today -
Picasa 2 - which might very well have iPhoto beat. Of course, Picasa is only available for the PC. And once I start power-using either of the two applications, it'll be hard to go back.
I guess there's something to be said for sticking with one platform.
I'm starting to recover from the inevitable jet lag, and next week will hopefully be a pretty normal, albeit intense, week. We have a scant three weeks until our next major milestone, and this is a biggie. By March 4th, we need the first few chapters of
Dreamfall polished and ready for prime time. Everything needs to look smart: scenery, characters, animations, special effects, GUI, sound, music - everything. Scary. But I'm confident we'll hit our target and blow minds.
Once again: Oslo. Luckily, there's no snow, and it's not particularly cold either. It ain't California, but it could be much worse. (It usually is.)
The flight was absolutely horrible, and please remind me to never, ever travel through Charles De Gaulle ever again, unless I absolutely have to. France is fantastic, and Paris a great city, but that airport must be one of the worst in Europe. A complete lack of signs, illogical layout, and a dearth of information makes it impossible to figure out where to go, and how to get there. (And the less said about the toilets, the better.) I spent a good ten minutes walking back and forth between the gate and passport control until I realised that I actually had to go into the arrivals hall before I could transfer to my Oslo flight. I fly a lot, and the airports in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and London are well suited as hubs. Paris? Mmm, not so much, no. Being freakishly tall, I also had to endure Air France's version of the iron maiden. Not fun.
Well, at least I get to keep my feet on the ground for the next, oooh, twenty-three days?
San Francisco, and the end of my trip. Though I'm happy to be going back, it would have been nice to have a few more days to enjoy the city. I love it here; next to New York, San Francisco is my favourite US city. The trip has gone very well, business wise, and I've had a chance to do other things as well; a bit of shopping (though this is the first time in years I've been to America without buying a single DVD), hanging out with friends, visiting some excellent restaurants - I can definitely recommend Houston's and The Lobster in Santa Monica; they're both fantastic. I'll be back in the country in about four weeks (San Francisco again), and then again a week after that (New York), and then, of course, there's E3. Those frequent flyer miles are adding up. Am I getting any work done at all? Why yes, surprisingly enough. I'm able to work on the road, and being away from the office gives me some perspective and inspiration as well. Of course, I need to hunker down and roll up my sleeves once I get back to Norway, but that's okay.
Time to head through security and find my gate: AirFrance to Paris, and then up to Oslo; a good seventeen hours away. Yay.
Combining work with Super Bowl XXXIX, trying to stay on top of things in Norway while I'm here in Seattle. As expected, it's cold and wet out, so I'm staying put in my hotel room for the rest of the evening. I'm actually able to work remotely with the game editor, 'Laidback', through my office PC using remote desktop on my Apple laptop - which, to me, is just amazing. I can do everything I need to do from any hotel or coffee shop in the world, as long as I've got a solid wi-fi connection.
Santa Monica. The weather is absolutely lovely, and, as always, I start wondering what the hell I'm doing in Norway when I could be living out here. You know, aside from family, friends, a great job - seasons. I like the odd cold and rainy day. It's easier to get in a writing mood when the weather's miserable.
I enjoyed Las Vegas more this time around, even though I didn't really get to see much of it. We came in Monday evening, attended the D.I.C.E. Summit on Tuesday, and left again Wednesday morning for L.A. The highlight of the conference was seeing Stan Lee speak, and while the awards ceremony on Tuesday was a huge letdown...hey, free food! You can't complain. But it's depressing that after so many years, our industry still doesn't have an awards show that's up to scratch. This one didn't have a single video clip from any of the nominated games, which is just insane.
We stayed at the New York, New York Hotel & Casino which is about as Vegas as it gets, but it was so over the top that I couldn't help loving it. It was just like being inside a twisted Disneyland version of the real New York, except not really. It was enormous, and it must have cost a fortune to build. The amount of money that changes hands in that place is unfathomable.
Santa Monica is also all about money; people have it, and they flaunt it with expensive cars and designer clothes, but it's a world away from Vegas. I really like staying here, and I usually get the opportunity a couple of times a year. It's the one place in the Los Angeles area that feels like a proper city where you can walk around, shop, eat, hang out, and view the stunning Pacific Ocean sunsets. Of course, we're here for work, but there are fringe benefits to these long and tiring trips.
On Sunday, we set course for Seattle, which means that I'll have to readjust to cold weather again. Can't say I'm looking forward to that part.
