I’ve been tinkering around with the Lassie engine for the past few days, because I’ve somehow gotten it into my head that I want to try my hand at making adventure games that run in Flash. So far, it’s really not all that difficult to use. It might end up being a useful platform for prototyping my crazy little experimental interactive storytelling ideas.

Because you’ve all been so nice, here’s a screenshot of what I’ve made so far.

Also, today I purchased the new Phoenix Wright game. I sure hope it’s every bit as great as the first one.

You may or may not have noticed that after over a year of using the same white-on-black colour scheme on this blog, I’ve gone and changed it to a bright-greenish-yellow-and-purple. Nine out of ten pianists agree that it hurts the eyes much less than the old one did, all the while still retaining that trademark Deirdra Kiai Productions ugliness. Hopefully, you will feel the same way.

In even more uninteresting news, the “Who am I?” page has also had an overhaul.

One thing I’m finding extremely important in game design is the ability to work with constraints. I’ve continuously been seeing all too many young hopefuls like myself striving to create the Next Big Thing That Will Revolutionize The Industry And Gaming As A Whole, and that’s been bugging me a bit. Ambition is nice and all, but these so-called great ideas rarely end up in a concrete, playable form, and that’s far from revolutionary.

Kids, if you ever want to create anything that’s at all useful, you’re going to have to take technology and your own abilities into account. By making my own amateur games, I learned to design according to what I could program, draw, and implement with the tools at my disposal. More recently, working with the folks at Telltale taught me that it takes a hell of a lot of creativity to work with a limited budget and marketplace realities. A lot of people just don’t realise this, assuming instead that the reason nothing new and fresh is coming out of the game industry is because people are unimaginative. I tell you, most professional game designers have more revolutionary ideas than you can shake the projectile-type object of your choice at. They’re just not economically feasible, is all.

And that, my friends, is my incoherent rant of the day. I do hope you found it enjoyable.

As you can imagine from my last post, I’ve been keeping myself quite busy with my new Wii. It’s wonderful. I’ve fallen absolutely madly in love with it. I can’t possibly imagine playing games with a normal controller again.

I mean, really. The Wii has so much potential for adventure games, it’s amazing. What better way to create immersive interactive stories than to do so on a system that even my parents can pick up and play effortlessly? Gawrsh, I wish I were developing games for the Wii. Sadly, as a lowly student, I have to resort to making games for the PC instead. Woe is me.

Now for something completely different: a piece of music I just wrote. It’ll likely be featured in a future game or something.