Bert Vandecasteele

Month: November 2015

  • The Interview

    The Interview

    So! I made another game!

    Actually, I made this back when my online portfolio launched, but it had kind of fallen by the wayside because I was busy doing other things (like work).

    So what is it?

    I made a text adventure to promote myself. It’s a rush job consisting of weird ideas, experiments with multiple endings, variables and flags, and 40 degree fever. Play at your own risk.

    The game’s made with Twine, which is a really cool (and noob-friendly) program for this kind of stuff. I’ll probably make a real text adventure at some point, but seeing how this has taken me most of a weekend to get done, it’s probably going to have to wait a bit.

    So what’s this game look like from the inside?

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.42This is the main structure. Every square has some form of text in it.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.55Enhance! I actually set out to make a regular branching dialogue. In hindsight, a lot of the game ended up more visual novel-y (and thus straightly structured) than I wanted because I got lost in endless descriptions of random stuff. What can I say, I love world-building.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.59And this is what some snippets look like up close. The hard part about Twine was that they just released a 2.0 and everything I knew from 1.X was redundant – yet still annoyingly present in the Google cache. Figuring out how to get multiple variables to trigger at the same time (which was important for the actual interview part) was a real bitch.

    So there you have it. Alternatively, you can download the source file (which is actually just a .html, rendering all of this infinitely less cool) and import it into Twine yourself.

    In summary!

    By the way, there’s quite a bit of other stuff on the portfolio that’s worth checking out. I’ll probably go into detail about that somewhere down the line!

  • Friday Quote

    The guilt gnawed inside of me, nibbling at my throat, its spikey fingers clutching my lungs.

    “I’m so sorry”, I said.

    She looked at me. An incredulous frown formed on her face. “You’re dying. You don’t need to apologize to anyone.”

    I wanted to punch her. Instead, I just looked at the floor again and let the guilt devour me.

    (From: The Back of my Mind)

  • Rick and *buuuurp* Morty

    Rick and *buuuurp* Morty

    Imagine you have a crazy scientist grandfather.  A bit of a boozer, and a borderline asshole, but in his own quirky way, he loves you and you love him. Now, you’re thirteen, hormones are dancing around in your pants, and you’re in love with this girl way out of your league. Your scientist grandfather decides to help you out with a carefully crafted concoction of insect pheromones that should make you irresistible. And it works! You’re irresistible! Only side effect: The object of your desire turns into a huge roach. You and your gramps try to fix the mistake, but things only get worse, until you grandfather just burps, shrugs and opens a portal to parallel universe in which parallel you and your parallel grandfather die a horrible, horrible death. Problem solved – just take their place! All you have to do is bury your own decaying corpse…

    Welcome to Rick and Morty, one of the darkest, funniest, most existentialist animated comedies currently on TV! Penned by Community’s Dan Harmon at his absolute worst and thus, if you know the man, absolute best, Rick and Morty takes the tried-and-true Saturday morning cartoon setting – excited kid and his extravagant gramps have scientific adventures – and completely rips it a new one. Morty isn’t excited, he’s existentially/hormonally confused and in constant fear of his life; Rick isn’t just extravagant, he’s a narcissistic alcoholic with no moral compass or regard for human life. This is Back to the Future on LSD, guys. Better strap yourself in.


    Hey look! It’s my biggest fear!
     

    For me personally, Rick and Morty hurts to watch. It’s disgusting, it’s weird, it makes the universe around us feel gargantuan and that scares the beejeesus out of me. But in its own weird way, through all the dark humor, this show’s got a brilliantly functioning emotional compass. The two titular characters and their dysfunctional family might constantly be on the verge of a neurotic breakdown – they still do have each other. And that’s the one ray of light that makes this show more than just a dark sci-fi comedy.


    “Oh man!”
    You can check out this wonderful gem of a show – currently in its stellar second season – on Adult Swim. They’ve even got half of their episodes online. Most episodes work on their own, so start watching!

  • Quote Friday

    Her feet slipped, the world swiftly snapped in half, and she crashed into him. And as Penny saw her mother rushing towards her, she realized the truth: No amount of damage control that could fix this.

    (From: “The Back of My Mind”)

  • Assassin’s Creed: Again

    Assassin’s Creed: Again

    I can’t remember the last time I wrote something about an Assassin’s Creed game. Thankfully, my blog and the wonderful people at TickCounter can:

    Boy, time flies, huh! In four-and-something years, the Assassin's Creed series has evolved all the way from the renaissance to industrialized London. Its gameplay, however, remains fixated soundly in the stone age. For those not in the know: Assassin's Creed is a historical videogame in which you take on the role of - surprise - someone who kills people. Templars, more specifically, which are kind of the bad guys but it's been 6 games since I've last cared about what they were. In this series, we've been transported to Italy during the Renaissance, the Carribean during the golden age of piracy (the one not featuring Napster), the American independence and French revolution. And as unlikely as this sounds: If you've played one, you've really played them all. Seriously, this franchise has changed little to nothing since I wrote those words of praise about Assassin's Creed II. There have been no less than seven Assassin's Creed games in the main series, and none of them have changed the formula in the slightest. There's still the hidden switch blade. There's still climbing towers to get a lay of the land. There's still that god damn free running system that does not work seriously Evie get the hell off that pole why do you do this to me!? And the worst part? Even though Ubi's so adamant on making these games exactly the same, they still manage to fuck some of them up. Assassin's Creed III was the most interesting story told by your accountant cousin. Unity was an incredible buggy mess. Now, granted, Syndicate does quite the okay job. The game looks stellar, and London is a solid piece of eye candy to interact with. It's a return to form after the abysmal Unity, but as the steam train rolls into assassination station, London, I can't help but shake the feeling that this is yet another Rome/Florence/Boston/Havana/Paris and I'll do nothing but climb towers and get dumb collectibles and listen to an inane story about dudes trying to kill each other because reasons, only historically. The most exciting new things about this game: There's carriages! You can play as a woman! You can meet Dickens and Darwin! And thanks to Graham Bell you can climb towers faster! Faster? Gosh, that sounds swell. Ubi, if it weren't for the possibility of having an Assassin's Creed set in pre- or post-war Berlin, I'd quit playing these games. Anyway, enough with the ranting. Time for a song:

    "We're doing a sequel - There's no need to disguise - The studio considers us a viable franchise"

  • Friday Quote

    In a flash, Sonia is wide awake. A look of horror on her face, she squirms free of her constraints and grabs the nurse. His arms flail around wildly, trying to grab her and push her down, but Sonia has the upper hand. Blood runs over her fingernails as they dig deeper and deeper down the nurse’s eyeballs. Then, she strangles him until he is dead.

    (From a horror project I’m working on)

  • Cars. Guns. Women. Spectre?

    Cars. Guns. Women. Spectre?

    (Mathijs, you warned me!)

    SPECTRE.

    I had high hopes for SPECTRE. I mean, they capitalized the 24th Bond movie’s name and everything! That could only mean it would be awesome, right?

    I mean, come on. Just read that out loud.

    SPECTRE.

    Rawr.

    Only the thing is: SPECTRE is a disgrace – a low-effort Bond movie created by a director whose default mode of filmmaking is the shrug and an actor so cocky the interviews make it sound like he made this display of blandness entirely by himself.

    Capitalization tricked me. In what follows, SPECTRE will be refered to in a more fitting typesetting, spectre.


    Here’s a trailer because you might not know what a Bond movie is.
     

    spectre starts out incredible – an unbelievable long take featuring an elevator, a hotel room, a rooftop and, oh, just about a hundred extras dancing around a plaza in Mexico City. This sequence is amazing: Action! Humor! Sexy times! It’s all there.

    Then Sam Smith’s horrible falsetto theme song starts.

    After that, it’s about ninety minutes of typical cock-tease bond: spectre introduces Ralph Fiennes, the new M, but doesn’t do anything interesting with him. spectre introduces Andrew Scott, who plays C and previously played Moriarti on Sherlock, and doesn’t let him do anything interesting, either. Then finally, spectre introduces Christoph Waltz, the villain, and doesn’t let him do anything interesting, either. Monica Bellucci shows up, doesn’t do anything interesting other than sit on a bed in underwear, and to add insult to injury spectre‘s inane plot quickly throws her in the garbage for the much younger Lea Seydoux, who does super interesting things!! — but only when there’s no bad guys around. Cars are raced, but not very fast, Bond’s head gets drilled into, but not very deep, and big explosions follow small explosions for no reason because, shrug, spectre.

    Then, the credits roll, and lo and behold, no actor has done anything remotely interesting, safe for the overly cocky and at times scarily unlikable Craig and Ben Wishaw (Q), who’s transformed from sexy geek-chic to MI6’s closeted nerd who does all his top-secret development in an Austrian ski lift on a laptop that’s at least ten years old.

    Everything in this movie screams of low-effort. Interesting callbacks happen, but that’s all they are: Callbacks. Nothing interesting is done with the ominous white cat, with the mysterious organization that ties everything together – not even with the Bond girl, who can’t show her amazing qualities or ditto sideboob and is thus reduced to an insultingly bland blank slate. Sure, Bond objectifies women, and it’s kind of disgusting – but in spectre, the Bond girl ceases to be a woman in favor of a plot device whose only defining factor is that she, surprise, needs saving!

    Craig, Mendes, come see me after class, because I’m seriously disappointed in you.

    SERIOUSLY DISAPPOINTED.

    (And that’s how you use capitalization, hah!)

  • Friday Quote

    Zusammen stellen sich YUSSUF (9) und sein Lehrer PIET (28) die Frage: Was heißt es, Deutsch zu sein? Muss man die Bundesliga schauen? Karneval mögen? Wie pünktlich muss man sein? Sind Oktoberfest und Eisbein Pflicht – und wenn ja, was heißt das für Muslime? Muss man Goethe lesen, oder reicht Kästner? Wie viel muss man wissen von Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt und Anne Frank? Und: Wie gut muss man im Deutschdiktat so sein?

    (From a German movie project I’m working on)

  • Six cameras, one computer – and whole lot of sick moves

    Six cameras, one computer – and whole lot of sick moves

    Sometimes, unexpected things happen. It’s one of those cool things of being a writer – like going to Austria or accidently being in LA when your short film is in theatres. And that’s how I found myself in a photo studio in Kreuzberg doing motion capture for a video game.

    Now, you might’ve seen professional motion capture – actors in spandex suits covered with Styrofoam balls, running around and overacting like they’ve just been cast in the next silent comedy.

    You know what? Turns out that costs a lot of money!

    Until I learned about this:

    That’s right. Markerless motion capture with a handful of Playstation cameras. Seriously. The whole thing is probably the nerdiest thing ever – I mean come on, you don’t even have to change out of your Firefly shirt!

    This is what the set-up looks like:

    IMG_20151023_112635550The process was pretty straightforward (and that’s coming from someone who barely knows two lines of C): You set it up, calibrate the room, and then start capturing. We ran into a couple of issues distinguishing parts of our bodies from the floor, but after the computer model magically stopped locking its hands to its crotch, everything went swimmingly.

    So yeah. Here’s me.

    IMG_20151023_174018373My sick moves have officially been downloaded to the computer. Pretending to run around in a white room might be one of the geekiest things I have ever done – but seeing how I had an absolute blast, I guess I should go full-out geek more often.

    At the risk of making this whole post sound like an advertisment: If you wanna know more, here’s a link to their website.