Infinitap Games

Pacing a game is hard - especially a horror game. In this video, I talk about how I've learned about pacing from films and what I'm trying to do with Neverending Nightmares.

For real, John Carter was really good! That was the only problem I had with it, like you said, the length and pacing. That movie could have been trimmed down a good half-hour at least.

A rumor I heard about the movie's title that may not be true; you know how confusing it was that the movie was called John Carter when the book series it draws from was John Carter of Mars? Those are two small but very important words that tell you why you should care about what some guy named John Carter is up to. Supposedly, someone at the studio was a bit superstitious, and pointed out that no movie with the word "Mars" in the title had ever been successful. Mars Attacks, Mission to Mars, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (which has its moments). So the decision was allegedly made to drop the "of Mars" from the title, which ultimately didn't make a difference. Or at least not a positive one. It could all be crap, as simple one or two word titles for big (or potentially big) franchises is a pretty common trend in Hollywood films, but I think it's a fun rumor!

Also to actually talk about games, some of my favorite parts in games are the downtime. The only thing I really remember about Doom 3 is the beginning where you can walk around the station and interact with the computers. The ingame computer UI was such a cool and underutilized design.

Technically the first book in the Barsoom series was "A Princess of Mars", but they didn't want to alienate the male target audiences by thinking it's about princesses. I think Andrew Stanton, the director was saying the first movie is called "John Carter" and not "John Carter of Mars" because it's about how he changes from John Carter of Earth to John Carter of Mars... I think I heard the same thing about the superstition somewhere. I do agree that John Carter is a really generic name, and it's tough to get excited about.

It's funny you mention Doom 3. I'm actually playing through that now. I actually have a lot to say about that game, but I want to wait until I finish it before I make a video. It's an interesting game. I didn't like it when it came out mostly because I think I expected it to be an action game, but as a horror game, I'm appreciating it more.

Oh cool, looking forward to it. I haven't played Doom 3 in forever, but I was just really disappointed in it at the time. Looking at it as a horror game would be a new spin on it.

I think id software has become great at making engines and tech but not so much at stringing everything together into a fun game.

Doom 3 just did the same thing too often. It worked at first, but after a while you really develop a sense of where the next monster is going to jump out from. They did a lot right in Delta Labs, that really shook things up again, though, I'll give them credit for that one. I also liked the addon, by the way, with its relic's special abilities, the gravity gun and all that, but that was more gameplay than atmosphere that I liked there.

id is definitely good at making tech although I don't think Rage really rocked the world technically like the previous id games. Megatexturing is a really cool idea and I think could work well for a lot of games, but it sees like a twitch FPS is probably not one of them. I think John Carmack even admitted the way to make the game look crappy is to turn around really fast. I think they only keep the low rez mip targets in memory, so the game needs to load in.

Unreal games sometimes had that problem. Gears of War sometimes was caught with low rez textures but usually only when you spawned at a checkpoint. Borderlands 2 has that issue pretty much every time you open a chest. The ammo pickups are all low rez.

I think moving forward, texture streaming is going to be one of the most important features of the engine. Looking at next gen consoles, they have 8 GB of RAM, which is going to be mostly used for hi rez texture data. I think a lot of game engines will use JPG compression and on the fly decoding to BC4-7 texture formats, which the video card can use. Interestingly, the Xbox One has JPG texture decoder hardware that can help with this.

Rage used JPEG XR compression for all of its megatexture data, so that part of the engine was forward thinking.