LyCheSis op:inion

Latest WIPs

The new art design is coming along well and I am now working towards showing the player what has to be done as well as what he is able to do.

It's becoming clear that I have several color matching directions (rows, columns and matching the central ring) and while these make the game interesting they are not merging together fluidly. The game mechanics are still somewhat complicated for anyone to just pick up and start playing. 

I'll have to address this before I can let anyone play this, but as soon as I have I will put up a playable demo of this.

This is another screenshot from my colours game. I changed a couple of gameplay mechanics and noticed that not all additions improve the playability. I'll have to change the graphical presentation of the game to improve the gameplay.

I therefore posted this screenshot just before changing everything (again).

The game will still look similair to it's current form but I want to overhaul the 3D side of it so that I can also do something with the surroundings.

I'll keep you posted...   hopefully soon

 

After finishing a game project for Capture in the beginning of the year I found that the game engine Unity3D, that we had decided on using, was also quite good realising game projects that I had been wanting to do at home.

I have purchased Unity3D some time ago and here are the first screenshots of two games that I have been fiddeling with.

The first one is an evolution of my Colours game, that I had already done an early prototype of in Microsofts XNA, only to find out that making an installable version for distribution is quite a chore. Being a 3D game engine I did a couple of tests to find out how to use this new dimension for Colours and this is now the first variation where I have the feeling that it actually takes advantage of being in 3D. It does change the game slightly, but I already had several extensions for the original game idea. I therefore don't think that it will be a less enjoyable game than the 1992 version.

The second game is a Snakes variation which I started mainly to test a couple of game mechanics in Unity3D. Being a simple type of game I can very easily test aspects of Unity3D before using them in bigger games and it will also result in a little online browser game that should provide a little fun time on my sites (sometime in the future).

I already have several other ideas for games but, as always, work commitments and private stuff keep development moving at a slow pace.

While awaiting a final release date for Squares upcoming Final Fantasy XIII I had a look around previous Final Fantasy releases and made a list.

Now I know it's a bit unfair to leave out Final Fantasy XI and add the delay to Final Fantasy XII but for me MMORPG variant wasn't really a Final Fantasy and since it came out pretty soon after Final Fantasy X it's development had probably started long before FFX was finished.

At the same time FFX-2 was only half a new Final Fantasy because it built on an existing FF world. Probably a tribute to having two Final Fantasy's in the pipeline at the same time. This would also explain the long wait from FFX. 

Game	System	JP Release	EU Release	Gap to last game	Gap EU to JAP release
Final Fantasy VII	PSX	31.1.1997	17.11.1997		10 months
Final Fantasy VIII	PSX	11.2.1999	27.10.1999	23 months	8 months
Final Fantasy IX	PSX	7.7.2000	16.2.2001	17 months	7 Months
Final Fantasy X	PS2	19.7.2001	29.5.2002	12 months	10 months
Final Fantasy X-2	PS2	13.3.2003	20.2.2004	32 months	11 months
Final Fantasy XII	PS2	16.3.2006	23.2.2007	36 months	11 months
Final Fantasy XIII	PS3	Q4, 2009	Q2, 2010	42 months	6 months

What becomes clear is that, as the visuals get increasingly elaborate so does the development time increase. At the same time it isn't a linear growth. What remains is that the european release often trails the initial release by nearly a whole year - time will tell if Sqare Enix manages to keep the european FFXIII inside the 2nd quarter of 2010 or if all the projected dates for FFXIII are completely wrong because Squenix may want to delay the world release to get the Xbox360 version ready at the same time as the PS3 version.

Sooo, the front page is new. Something broke my website and since I was to lazy to find the problem I redid the front page with a nice slideshow which will do until I rebuild the rest of the site. The blog survived unscathed and I used the occasion to update it's software, hoping that nothing broke on the way.

I also relaunched the Amiga Graphics Archive with my own gallery system because ZenPhoto got a bit too cumbersome for my taste. 

I must admit that even I was not immune against the onslaught of music games. And that's when I let myself get talked into Guitar Hero III and Rockband right after that, with me enjoying the latter rather more music wise.

Standing in front of the TV with a plastic guitar trying to look like a rockstar is something that takes getting used to but it has it's charm and by now I think I am quite decent at this game. It has this incredible feeling of achievement and it is really something different than sitting on the sofa frantically pressing buttons on the Xbox360 controller.

One fun thing with Rockband was that you can customize your character much more freely than in Guitar Hero III. I have created two outfits until now that I quite like and I thought I'd share them here.

The "Angel" outfit was first and the final configuration after many experiments with white clothes.  The "Devil" is more openhearted (not all that easy if you look at the stuff available in the Rockband shop) and I think it works perfectly together with the facepaint and tattoos.

One thing that bugs me with the Xbox360 is that it is not really possible to make screenshots except by taking photos of the TV. I'd love a photo mode like in GranTurismo for the PS2 where you could pose and save your pictures to a USB stick. The Xbox360 ought to have a screenshot button that would do this for you anytime you needed to but I guess that would be difficult because of copyright restrictions.

I also bought a couple of DLC tunes vom the XBLA. Part of this list consists of tunes that came with the european version of Rockband and some songs where (kind of) accidents but I'll add descriptions to this list later on. I can simply never remember which songs are in my list so here it is, for me and anybody who is interested

Song	Artist
Beetlebum	Blur
Monsoon	Tokio Hotel
Manu Chao	Les Wampas
Moving to Seattle	The Material
Promised Land	Vesuvius
Still Alive	GLaDOS
Countdown to Insanity	H-Blockx
Perfekte Welle	Juli
Tell Me Baby	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Kickstart My Heart	Mötley Crüe
New Wave	Pleymo
Rock'n'Roll Star	Oasis
My Curse	Killswitch Engage
Hier Kommt Alex	Die Toten Hosen
Hysteria	Muse
Snow ((Hey Oh))	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Constant Motion	Dream Theater

"Symphonic Shades" was Chris Hülsbeck's dream of bringing a whole concert with his videogame music to life with a proper symphonic orchestra into reality. The first concert was sold out within days of it's announcement and I was one of the lucky ones to find out in time to get a couple of tickets (later a second concert was announced for the same evening, three hours later, which sold out just as fast)

I was very excited to be at this concert as this was my very first videogame concert. I had already listened to renditions of Final Fantasy from Nobue Uematsu, but never live, and I was used to these concerts and remixes sometimes sounding a bit strang.
I am a great fand of Chris's Amiga music and I have also bought nearly all of his Soundtrack CDs, although I have to say that his Style worked better with the rough and gritty sounding Amiga soundchip. Even the remixes of his own songs seldomly reached quality of the originals.

That said I can safely claim that "Symphonic Shades" was worth it. The songs that were played worked well with the orchestral arrangement (most of the songs were arranged by Jonne Valtonen aka "Purple Motion") with only the odd deviation into the strange.
"Gem'X" had a man hitting coffee cups for percussion which sounded a bit strange and den symphonic rendition of "Shades" had a real synthesizer playing lead which sounded a bit out of place and ever so slightly out of tune.
The only real letdown was the Turrican II theme which was supposed to be some sort of journey through several classical ages which was either to high for me or just simply failed to recreate the atmosphere and 'power' that was behind the original. I also expected the Turrican 3 Piano Suite to be good but it was souly played by a finnish piano virtuoso called Jari Salmela who raced through the theme rather faster than his fingers could move and I rather missed the orchestral accompaniment which would have given the ending theme so much more emotion.
Apart from these small gripes the songs were very good. The X-Out theme was great, R-Type was fantastic (although a slightly jumpy beat struck me as weird), Tunnel B1 was brilliant despite being fronted by a 5 minute percussion solo.
"Karawane der Elefanten" was the only new song and as such failed (in my eyes) to convey any sort of Hülsbeckiism, but that may only be me wanting to hear something I can recognize.

The complete playlist:

1. Grand Monster Slam - Opening Fanfare
2. X-Out - Main Theme 
3. Jim Power - Main Theme
4. Tower of Babel
5. Turrican 3 - Piano Suite
6. Gem'X - Main Theme
7. Apidya II - Suite
8. R-Type - Main Theme
9. Licht am Ende des Tunnels - Suite
10. The Great Giana Sisters - Suite
11. Tunnel B1 - Suite
12. Symphonic Shades
13. Karawane der Elefanten
14. Turrican II Renderings - Main Theme

There will be a Soundtrack CD of this concert in late 2008 which is supposed to feature all Songs from this evening. As it will feature recordings made during the week up to the concert itself it should probably sound more balanced than the live concert and maybe the timing issues will also be corrected (I'm no expert in symphonic music but there were parts where some parts of the orchestra semed to lag behind the rest but because I have seen this happen in professional soundtrack recordings I am not quite sure if this isn't some kind of special rhythm thing).

I will have an eye out for the CD and I hope there will be new opportunities for videogame concerts when (or if) the Games Convention comes to Cologne next year (but there have been signs of Leipzig putting up a fight so there may be two events next year very close to oneanother that'll both be only half baked).

  It was nice seeing Chris Hüslbeck personally attending this event and we even managed to get him onto the stage for the final applause as he prefers to stay in the background. But as a musician he has made a name for himself and an impressive legacy ranging over two decades in the videogame industry.

One last thing that struck me when seeing the audience at the concert was that they were all round about the same age, my age, all with their love and enthusiasm for Amiga and C64 music and one thing dawned to me:  man, we're getting old

This is a project that I have been wanting to do for a long time. It features graphics and animations made by various artists and information surrounding the Commodore Amiga computer - the computer that really got me started into making everything that I am doing today. I have been slaving away grabbing images, searching for information and putting it all together to make a gallery full of everything that made the Amiga as astonishing now as it was 20 years ago.

I hope that you will enjoy the new site and that you will come back frequently as I am full of plans on things that I want to add to the new site:

Amiga Graphics Archive

I have started a new spaceship project called Poseidon. It's a heavy bomber that originated from a couple of design ideas I had long been wanting to do. I also decided to make this WIP more public than my previous ones by posting it on www.scifi-meshes.com.

http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/3d-wips/42914-poseidon-large-bomber.html

I think it is working out quite well at the moment. I'll keep my forum post uptodate.

 

Here's the new and improved AnimA-TV logo. It will be featured on the redesigned www.anima-tv.net as soon as the relaunch is complete.
The logo was completely rebuilt and now features highly detailed bevel edges and creases. This catches the reflections and specular lights much better than the old logo and also looks much better with the new nodal surface settings.

Hi, this time I have measured my Xbox 360.

I had heard quite drastic numbers so I was prepared for anything but as it turned out it wasn't quite as bad as I had feared

Xbox 360 (Normal PAL Version with HDMI) 

Application	Consumption	Comment
Standby	3W
Downloading	80W	Console in standby turned off while downloading over XBLA
DVD Playback	90W
Dashboard	100W
Playing	100 - 125W	Tested it with Burnout Paradise and Lost Odyssey

A harddrive can add 5W to these numbers but they also vary by that amount so it could be irrelevant.

Another thing I noticed was that this loud noise which the Xbox360 makes doesn't come from the harddrive. It seems to be one of the fans which is weird since it is a sound that I normaly would have linked to that of a harddrive. I wished Microsoft would have taken as much care with the internal design of the Xbox360 as Sony had with the PlayStation3 but, hey, you can't have everything. Still - for a game like Lost Odyssey the noise level of the console is very close to ruining the whole gaming experience. 

I have started to play around with Microsoft's XNA Framework in C# and, as a first project, started porting my old puzzle game "Colours". I created that game 1992 on my Amiga in AMOS Basic and have ported it successfully to HTML/JavaScript round about 2004. Several attempts to port it to the PC in Blitz Basic / DarkBasic Professional failed because the languages were a little bit to basic for my likeing (and because I accidently deleted a prototype version that was quite close to getting finished).

Starting with C# wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped because I am used to PHP and doing everything myself. C# has load of features for handling variable scopes and breaks pretty fast if you try to be smart and ignore all that, which is what you can do in PHP. Also, the XNA Framework is huge and does loads of stuff for you, but if don't know what structure it expects then you're a bit lost.

There is a very good list of tutorials and websites for XNA and the basic things are very easy to understand. But some of the more advanced examples work very differently and aren't documented very well which leaves you out in the cold as soon as you have understood the basics. Maybe the Creators Club is better but I haven't yet decided if I will manage to keep going long enough so that the 100$ membership fee won't be wasted.

At the moment I have the blocks, playfield, gravity, colour reactions, cursor movement and score counting running. I still need lots of graphical effects (such as exploding blocks, score overlays and the whole gui) on my todo list as well as everything outside of the actual game. I also have lots of ideas on how to extend the game from it's 1992 feature set so that will be quite interesting to see those coming along.

I already had Rez on the PS2 and loved this little gem. When I heard that is was going to be released on the Xbox360 in HD (720p) I was quite excited to see what they had made of it for this new iteration.

The graphics look wunderfull and the sound is great. The game has been converted very faithfully to the Xbox360, including the controller rumble which you have to enable the first time around.

Improvements to the original are mostly with it's enhanced resolution although there are also a couple of minor details that seem to have been added including some extra effects (one spectacular glare effect that makes fighting the area 4 end boss quite taxing).

Overall the game seems a little bit more difficult than the PS2 version (having not played the DreamCast version I can't really tell how faithful it is to the original).

I am not sure that it is worthy it's 800 Microsoft Points pricetag having already bought the PS2 version (although it would have been terrible if it had been a full price game). It does have a limited long time playability with only 5 levels to unlock but it also has a uniquely fun gameplay that just works wonderfully on HDTV with a good surround sound setup.

For a rail-shooter remake this is very good (I don't think we stand a chance of Starblade or Starblade: Operation Blue Planet getting released on any next-gen console) and if you haven't had a chance to play this one before it is certainly a recommended buy. If, like me, you have the old version this still is nice to have, but just keep in mind that this is only a remake, not a second part.

My Achievements

	The EARTH Play mode area1 cleared! Area 2 unlocked!
	The MARS Play mode area2 cleared! Area3 unlocked!
	The VENUS Play mode area3 cleared! Area4 unlocked!
	The URANUS Play mode area4 cleared! Achieve 100% analyzation in areas1-4 to unlock area5!

Here are a couple of models that I have been working on for the last couple of months. The Veloque fighter has been in the albums for quite some time but hasn't been announced properly. I created it from a sketch I made on paper and I made it to test modelling techniques for subpatch modelling with Lightwave. I deliberately tried a couple of difficult shapes to find solutions for the usual problems and I think I succeeded quite well in solving a couple of them.

It may have become a bit overloaded in the meantime so I may have to reduce oder modify a couple of shapes.

 

 The second WIP is a long one streaching from an idea I had for a couple of years in the shape of the Titan carrier (or Damocles as it's predecessor was called). It's purely polygon modelling and therefore not as demanding as the Veloque. It is based on the basic shape of a two bladed broadsword and will be (once completed) over 1km long. I have planned to launch the SpaceHead and Veloque fighters from it's hangars but it will be quite some time until I will be able to do this. It is very likely that I will port these meshes into XSI before hand because LightWave isn't quite as good at handling and combing complex mesh objects in one scene, so that will further delay the completion of this project, but I will keep you posted.

After playing this part in the Final Fantasy row since it's release in germany (23. February 2007 - yeah, thats half a year after the US and nearly a whole year after japan) I have finally finished the game.

After my failed attempt at defeating Vayne a couple of months ago I took some time off finishing most of the hunts and getting all of the espers. Usually in Final Fantasy you have quite a good chance in defeating the big boss if you manage to defeat most of the extra beasts before hand and therefore this time Vayne didn't stand a chance.

In addition to the higher level I also had quite a good and demanding time gathering extras for my sky pirate's den. This is quite a simple thing to implement for the game developer but it somehow adds a nice incentive to the game. Quite similair to the achievements you get on the Xbox or Half Life. I'll just show you has become of mine:

Quite crowded by now, but I did leave out a couple of things, including the Tiamat and several other things just because I thought it was about time to finish .

My final stats are just over 4.000.000 clan points with all characters being at level 68 (and Vaan leveling to 69 inside the Bahamuth). Final playtime was about 170 hours which must be the longest time I have spent on a Final Fantasy (or any game for that matter).

Now let's just hope Final Fantasy XIII isn't going to be late. 

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Hi, my name is Daniel Kluth and I'm a 3D artist and web designer currently working for Capture in Düsseldorf.
I work with Lightwave3D, Autodesk XSI and several other tools.

• Taking Form
• Just before the change
• New games underway
• The long wait
• Partially new
• Rockband star
• Symphonic Shades
• Amiga Graphics Archive
• New spaceship in the pipeline
• New AnimA coming

• Games [7]
• WIPs [7]
• Unity3D [3]
• Colours [4]
• Lightwave3D [2]
• General [4]
• Hardware [3]

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