PixlBit

I've been pretty under the radar the last few weeks, so it's time to put the periscope up, do some recon to find out what my friends are up to, and send out an update transmission. Last week we had my grandpa's funeral and it went really well. The honor guard turned out to give him a gun-salute as well as give the folded American flag to my grandmother. After the funeral we started a bathroom renovation at our house so everything has been messy. However, my Xbox has still been getting some love despite the distractions.

Gaming

The games I've been spending the most time with the past couple weeks are Silent Hill Homecoming and Mass Effect.

Mass Effect: I haven't talked about it in a long time but I'm a big Mass Effect fan. In fact I'm quite a unique Mass Effect fan because I'm one of the few ME fanboys that hasn't played ME3 yet. It's similar to how I'm one of the Elder Scrolls fans that hasn't played Skyrim because I'm waiting for an Ultimate edition. The reason why I didn't buy ME3 back when it launched was because I'm in the midst of replaying the first two games with a fresh Shepard and I've been taking so many breaks from the project that it's taking a very long time. When I got to the end of Mass Effect 2 I honestly wasn't happy with my Shepard. I wanted to go back with all the knowledge I now have, and do things the way I was happiest with. For example, in ME1 I hate Kaiden Alenko's guts, but for some reason I let him live on Virmire and Ashley Williams died in his place. I also want to experiment with the classes more. There's some bigger choices like that which I want to correct, plus lots of smaller things like the way Shepard looks. It's a pretty time consuming "project" if you want to call it that, but it's been fun. I'm currently in the middle of ME1 with my new Shepard.

I think I'm going to start a Mass Effect blog series updating you on the progress I'm making with that new Shepard, just like how I've been doing the Dark Souls Diary and the progress I'm making in that game. I have so much to say about Mass Effect that doing a blog series about it would be more effective than just cramming all this writing into a general update. I really try to keep these things bite size and it never works. I'm not a very bite size thinker and writer, no matter how much I try to be.

Silent Hill: Silent Hill 5 is the other game I mentioned I was playing. Homecoming isn't a great game, but I still like it. The music is great, there's good atmosphere and I still really like this basic Silent Hill formula of, "Sick cult, mystery, suspense, fog, monsters, melee combat, and very limited ammo." It's a predictable formula, but I think the difference between a good SH game and a bad one is how well that vague formula is interpreted and executed. Execution is everything in these games, in fact execution is critical in every aspect of game design. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel when making a game, more often you just have to make a better wheel than anybody else. There's a lot of sloppy execution in Homecoming from level breaking bugs to the hit boxes in combat to the lag between pulling the trigger and getting a response not only from your character but also the hit-react of the enemy, but this game is still very interesting to me. I bought Homecoming when it came out, fricken years ago, but I never finished the game because there were much better games to play. So now I'm going to finish it while I have the drive to do it.

Gaming dream: I know people who don't remember their dreams, I know people who even claim they don't dream when they sleep. I can't imagine what that's like. Maybe it's more peaceful. My brain is busy as shit when I dream, just like my brain is busy as shit when I'm awake. It takes 9 milligrams of Melatonin and 2,120 milligrams of Valerian Root at night to even slow me down to the point I can sleep. When I'm sleeping I often dream up things that become inspirations for gameplay design ideas and level design ideas. Last night when I was asleep I had this dream where I was fighting Pyramid Head. Sounds pretty jacked, right? I thought it was amazing, the coolest thing about this dream was that I was literally playing a design idea out in my dream and altering it. It was probably the most fleshed out design idea I've ever dreamed about. Most of the time when I dream about design it's fairly thin and the only usable thing I pull from it is an environment, a certain atmosphere, a certain lighting scheme, and color palette.

In the Pyramid Head dream I had last night there was so much detail and focus that it even had a checkpoint save system and I was contemplating how my mechanics would work on a 360 controller. That's a lot of detail, to the point where you're wondering where the attack button should be, and what amount of distance you should cover when you do a dodging roll in combat. The dream focused on a battle between P-Head and myself and I kept dying, getting re-spawned at the checkpoint, and changing things to make it better. The battle took place in a small and unusual boss battle area, I was in a house that was extrapolated from the room similar to "The Room" you live in during Silent Hill 4. Except the house was on the edge of a sheer cliff face. Some areas of the house were missing the wall on the cliff-side of the structure and allowing a light source to come in as well as a vista looking out on the grey expanse and sounds of thunder from far off storms out in the abyss. It was like being in Dark Souls' Lordran and looking out at the cloud layers, but much darker and greyer. In the house I was battling Pyramid Head in, a lot of the walls and pieces of furniture were destructible too.

If I could sum up the gameplay ideas I had in that dream it would be Dark Souls + Splinter Cell + Silent Hill. I've never thought consciously about merging the combat from Dark Souls into Silent Hill, but obviously my unconscious brain has been thinking about it and it came up in the dream. I'm such a jabroni for not thinking of it until now. It's obvious! Dark Souls has the most satisfying third person melee combat I've ever played in a game. If the people who get contracted to do Silent Hill games are going to continue doing SH with a focus on third person movement and melee combat, they really need to play Dark Souls and learn a thing or two like I did.

In the dream I was dodging P-Head's melee attacks, rolling, taking cover behind walls, kitchen counter-tops, crawling under tables, scrambling around, and trying to attack P-Head with melee damage or ranged damage when I had the chance. It was a very defensive battle because Pyramid Head's aggression and speed were out of control. At one point in the dream Pyramid Head's classic giant knife was replaced with the giant hammer that the big butcher zombies use in Resident Evil 5. P-Head's giant knife is an iconic weapon, but it's very slow and long. Once Pyramid Head switched to using the giant Resident Evil hammer, he was much faster because the hammer was a little shorter and he could grasp it with both hands. He was using the hammer to swipe at me, often times obliterating kitchen tables, counter-tops, and sections of walls in the house. At one point he used his hammer to jab me in the chest and it knocked my character all the way down a hallway and I hit the wall at the end of it. I hit the floor, saw Pyramid Head walking towards me down the hallway, and my character staggered up and start darting down a perpendicular hallway path, trying to find a way to escape P-Head's line of sight and hide in a room as his footsteps got closer.

As for the Splinter Cell element, I've always wanted to have stealth in horror games. Every horror game I've ever played has avoided having stealth, crouching, and sneaking as part of the mechanics. Why? Why the fuck not allow players to sneak around? Horror games always give you a club or a gun, put you out in the open, and have monsters swarm you. In real life when humans come across giant predators or danger, things like stealth and evasion can end up being huge parts of surviving the event. So in my Pyramid Head dream there were points in the battle where I was running from him desperately and trying to hide so he lost track of me and I could turn the tables on him by hunting him. P-Head would swing his hammer, make a hole in a wall, and I would press the A button to climb through it to escape him. Then once I got through the wall and out of his line of sight I would press the crouch button to sneak around and quiet my footsteps. While he was walking around to find a way to get to me (he could've busted the entire wall down to get to me, but I wanted to have an opportunity to escape him so I made him search for me) I would try and hide in shadows, climb up into spaces in the ceiling, hide in closets while peeking through the wood slatted closet doors in 1st person to see if he was around (like Solid Snake peeking through the slat in his cardboard box hide-out), or squeeze into gaps between walls so I could slide between the walls and get to other rooms without being seen. The mechanic where I find holes in walls and slip into the space between two walls to slide between them is certainly inspired by the sequence in Condemned 2: Bloodshot where you have to evade the rabid brown bear in the log cabin.

It was a lot of fun and quite dynamic. You could go from the absolute chaos of seeing Pyramid Head tear the house apart and the resulting particle effects simulating chips of wood flying around, to seeing him quietly and stealthily through the slats of a closet door as he menacingly stands in the room and looks around trying to sniff you out. You have the choices of grabbing a melee weapon and trying to fight him head on with blocks, parries, dodges, and strikes, or sneaking around and catching him with sneak ranged attacks, back stabs, and environmental attacks. Either way you fight him, he will just get more and more furious, and every attack will cause him to start bashing his hammer around and send you flying so you never feel too empowered. Silent Hill combat needs to be fun for once, not just serviceable, and it needs to be as challenging as Dark Souls.

That was a great gaming dream, and I wish I could build onto that and make it into a real Silent Hill. I've thought of similar mechanics and level designs for a first person adventure zombie game but that's a whole other story.

Do you dream about games at night and come up with ideas too?