Some great news today:)

Bunch of gaming websites posted news about Shadow of a Soul (YAY!). Not because of the $450 press release I sent, but because I went and begged them to post news about the game. They seemed to like the trailer and general concept. I’m really thankful to those folks.

I also received my second pre-order today. This one doesn’t really count since I made a friend order the game at gun point. Still, money is money :) I can buy myself lots of cakes with that.

I’m still trying to find a goddamned simple email solution that is not fucked up like Thunderbird. I just want to be able to see my contacts and correspondence together, that’s all. I spend so much time sorting through emails and double checking every one to see whether I replied or not. It’s getting ridiculous.

On the game side, today I thought a lot about body awareness, or sometimes it’s called full body awareness. For about a million years, no fps game has ever featured full body awareness (a feature that basically lets you see your legs and arms when you look down). My plan was to implement full body awareness into Shadow of a Soul and make full use of it. It’s not an essential feature by any means, and still lot’s of games don’t bother using it.

The main reason (at least for me) is performance cost. If 99.9% of the gaming community doesn’t ask questions or complain (OMG dude! the guy doesn’t have any legs! WTF!) about something, that means it’s basically a useless feature. I heard that it’s was employed to great effect in a game called Mirror’s Edge; however, I don’t know anything about that, and, frankly, I’m too lazy to look it up.

As I said, it was my intention to add that feature to the game, but it in the end I decided against it. Firstly, because of certain design decisions I made; it makes the pipeline very complicated. Secondly, since I’m not trying to make a game that contains graphics that you can only fully enable three years from now, performance is an important consideration. There are a lot of folks out there with budget graphic cards – me included – so I don’t want to lose that market. Thirdly, I decided I could pretty much implement all the things I wanted to do with FBA into the game with a few clever little tricks and some minor modifications.

I also spent 2 or 3 hours today writing a piece called, Ferzan vs. News Editors (working title). In it I talk about my struggles with gaming site news editors. Overall, it’s a very controversial article about the evil cult of news editors. About 80% of it is finished. I plan to finish and post it tomorrow or the day after. And if I die tomorrow, you know who’s to blame!