PixlBit

Thanks Travis! I was really excited and impressed by the program and facilities at Westwood, but I'm every bit as excited about trying to get into DigiPen. It's a lot of change, I'd be out of my family home for the first time, and living out of Colorado for the first time, but if I can get into the school I'd absolutely be ready to dive in and move out there into student housing. I've also never been a math whiz. I always test high in reading and writing, and comparatively math is my biggest weakness, so I'm going to try and make it a strength by taking classes, getting a tudor, and chipping away at the opportunities they have at our community college so I can get ready for applying to DigiPen.

Thanks Larry! I think it's cool that you started an engineering degree, was it software engineering or architectural? Was that all before you were in the military?

Thanks Shane, I appreciate it! Uncertainty definitely played a big role in the past few years and it's why it took me so long to start looking into design schools, but this year I've been feeling hungry and ambitious so I'm trying to feed off that and get all of it started finally.

Thanks Alex

How have things been going for you in Belgium lately?

That's really cool Tami. I actually have a friend from England named Evy that I email with and she just happens to also be pagan and says really wise and similar things, I always find her perspective to be really interesting. She talks a lot about energies, the weather and its effects on people, and I find that her sayings are quite calming.

Your support and friendship means a lot. On a way other side note, I've been adding random pics of puppies to my blogs now, and I blog about once a month so it's like a pup-of-the-month type of situation. I love pics of Kaylee and kitty pics in general, but since there's a few people including yourself that occasionally post them I'll do the pup-of-the-month for now. I was going to do kitties with every blog but I'll try to do pups, maybe I'll give in and do both eventually though.

Thanks Matt

I get real excited about the material and around other people who like it and want to build things, so finding the right school is crucial and exhilirating at the same time. I didn't get excited like that about the other programs and fields I tried out in school, so it's been neat getting tastes of design classes and being hungry for a lot more.

I haven't played Ghosts yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets really racist as well. I don't think they are trying to offend people, but they do for a lot of reasons. I think the offensive contexts of the games are the result of a variety of reasons. They design a very arcade-y, fast paced, action packed game that works well and can be fun, but they also want to tell a very self-serious war story in each game that's suppose to capture feelings of heroism, camaraderie, and patriotism that Americans really enjoy in war stories (a good example would be a film like Saving Private Ryan) but in the end they miss all those and end up coming across as extremely ignorant. They don't have any of the nuances, downtime, character development, and maturity that a good honest war film or war story might have.

In a good war film you will see the conflict from both sides to a degree, you will learn to empathize with all the people on various sides who are suffering. Good war stories shouldn't be about painting one side as good and the other side as a faceless ethnically different band of evil barbarians. In Clint Eastwood's films Letters From Iwo Jima, and Flags of Our Fathers he tells the stories of the battle of Iwo Jima in Japan from both the American and Japanese side. I thought they did a pretty respectable and honest job of exploring the horrors of war, the cultures and peoples on both sides, and bringing to light the humans and families suffering on each side.

Call of Duty stories lack every bit of that, and some of it has to do with ignorance and patriotism, but a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that they plainly are making a type of fast-paced action video game that I don't see being able to support a good honest war story. You can't build characters, atmosphere, explore serious concepts, and create a believable conflict if you have the pace of the game tuned to the max all the time, and all the interaction revolving around shooting. To even give CoD a chance to tell a decent story they would basically have to become an entirely different game. More of a Half Life or Bioshock-ish style game or inject a bunch of 1st person adventure-game and exploration focused mechanics, conversations, things to pick up and read, etc. I don't know how a CoD game could tell a good war story unless they basically became a different game. I'm glad I don't work on CoD games because trying to write a story for them would be really disappointing or frustrating I bet.

I'm a big Halo fan and I mostly enjoyed the stories from Halo 2 and 3. Those two games let you see the conflict from both the Chief and the Arbiter's perspectives. Those are super big action games but they vary the pace more than a current CoD game does, and they work a lot more through cut scenes and in-game dialogue during exploration. Plus those two Halo games let you play as major characters from each faction and see the religious, racial, and hierarchical conflict in the Covenant which is interesting and is a fairly robust space opera for such an action heavy game. CoD lets you play as people from various factions but I can never tell the differences between them, I'm just another hot-shot with a gun ready to blast people, and all the bad guys are just painted as one-note terrorists and foreigners. They don't build interesting heroes or interesting villains, it's just a hot mess of people with their country's flag patched on their shoulder shooting at each other.

I think it's great that you document your development efforts here on the site Matt. Once I start building things I want to try and do the same thing so that I can vent here and share the experiences, good and bad. We have a good tight knit community to get moral support and feedback from.

I remember seeing you fall through that bridge in the beta video, lol.

I'll have the game soon in the next day or so I hope. I've been wondering what the starting classes are like and which one I'm going to choose once I start. I don't know how accurate or up to date the wiki is but when I checked on the classes there I saw some weird new ones, and I didn't see any that start with a shield. Do any start with shields, or do you start finding shields fairly soon in the adventure?

When I did DS1 I tried out a few different classes before moving past the tutorial area, I might do the same for DS2. I want a lightweight character with a bow, 100% PHY shield, and a melee weapon. The longsword was my main weapon in DS1, but I've been hearing from the Giant Bomb guys that there's a lot of armored enemies in DS2 and using a mace is really good at dealing with them? I don't know what melee weapon I'll end up falling back on in this game so I'll have to keep my options open I guess.

I  was about to ask if it was Justin or your wife that did the illustrations. Nice work from Justin, I think they're great.