Hello, my name is Ben. It has been one year, five months since I last played World of Warcraft. I am proud of my resistance to the temptations that keep tugging at me, like The Burning Crusade, the fact that all my friends and family still play, and the peer pressure brought on by the Scroll of Resurrection.
Despite my resilience heretofore, I find it hard to escape the shadow of WoW that looms over my game. This is particularly obvious in my control scheme. Left click to look around your character. Right click to turn him. Scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Some of these are standard features of PC RPG controls, but I find that as I refine the controls, almost all my decisions are made by furrowing my brow and trying to conjure memories of how they did it in WoW.
As you might imagine, this is cause for concern. The easy thing would be to grab The Burning Crusade free trial from my bookshelf and fire up my old account. (I stood over the trash can for a minute after receiving said free trial but could not bring myself to toss it. Now it just watches me work.)
No, the right thing to do is mimic the intuitive parts of the WoW control scheme then try to improve on the frustrating bits. I don't want my game to look or feel like WoW, but genre is a useful thing and must be acknowledged, even as it relates to keyboard input.
Now if I could just remember those frustrating bits...
Thursday, September 13, 2007
In Blizzard's shadow
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B! This is awesome. Cameron and I are excited to be able to follow your progress on the game! We each had a lot of fun making the blue guy run around and swing at the red guy. I look forward to playing future web installments of "Benjamin--gamemaster of Shannara." And don't take that admissions lady's advice! Leave the guitar in its case and keep playing with video games.
ReplyDeleteThanks! You get the prize for being the first person ever to comment on my blog. Glad you enjoyed playing with the blue box guy. I'm hoping to have some more interesting things to look at soon.
ReplyDeleteLater,
B
Ben, This is awesome! I ran blue man off the cliff though and hes still running into the blue yonder. Oh well! Im excited to read your progress with the game. Keep writing!
ReplyDeleteSo Ben I guess I'm not cool enough to be on your blog update email list, huh? :) Anyway, it's cool to see you guys are still plodding along on that game and to read some blog posts about your experience. (Btw, thanks to blogger.com for displaying the ENTIRE interface in Czech with no button for English translation solely because my IP address originates in the Czech Republic...)
ReplyDeleteBen--Well-first thing I did was zoom in too closely and my little blueman was stuck. So, naturally I right clicked to make it a full screen. Well, I now had a very large blue man-still stuck. Then, being the alert, perceptive computer whiz that I am-I realized that I didn't know how the get that big thing off my screen. In desperation (since your dad was no where near) I resorted to the esc key. It worked. Yeah!
ReplyDeleteMy next plan is to make a date with dad. I'm not sure I'm up to the computer game stuff on my own, but for you I will give it my all (with his help of course.)
I did have fun with the Unity download. I was able to figure out how to do it and make the little box on there demo spin so fast it burst into flame. Am I hot or what?
Thanks for the comments, guys. Sorry for leaving you off, Jamie. I didn't have an email address. Glad somebody sent it to you, even if the interface is in Czech.
ReplyDeleteMom, congrats on downloading the Unity plugin. I've been getting a lot of comments about the controls for the blue guy being a little confusing, so I'll work on that. It's not your fault he got stuck.