Monday, February 26, 2007

Brisbane Australia Gamers Meetup

Yug from Australian Gamer and Hawk from Game Arena had a Brisbane Gamers Meetup party this last weekend. There are some pictures and links to youtube moves here.

Everybody loved my t-shirt which Connie had gotten me for Christmas.
Eventually some people from Auran turned up, including Michael and Joseph (who definitely won the prize for best t-shirt of the night).
It has a graphic equalizer display on the front that lights up in response to ambient audio input just as you would expect a graphic equalizer display. Yug took some pictures of it but I don't see any posted. If you look at the picture of the 3 girls dancing you can see me talking in the background on the right. See that yellow-ish smear of color? That’s my shirt.

You can buy one for yourself from Thinkgeek.

5 comments:

BugHunter said...

Unrelated to this post:

A friend just asked if Fury will run on Mac?

What's the plan on that?

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

It will if you run that thing that lets Macs run windows... but no, there are no plans for a Mac version currently.

I started to do a "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" answer but couldn't find the right mix between being funny and being a jack ass.

BugHunter said...

An MMO client has to be a big enough pain in the butt to develop without worrying about multiple OSes I'd imagine.

Back to your icons now. :)

Speaking of which, I (Warlock) was playing WoW with my brother (Paladin) the other day. I've been getting pretty frustrated with him not healing, or using any of his abilities to save us during critical times, when he said, "You've got to see these icons, they all look the same. I can't tell which one is which ability without reading them, and then it's too late."

I didn't think about it before because I tend to just memorize the hotkeys, but a lot of my friends that I convince to play games with me, aren't really gamers, to the icon means a lot to them.

ps. Don't read that like I'm telling you how to make icons. I can't figure out how to type it like, "hey here's an interesting conversation I had the other day that relates to what you do."

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

So what level are you guys? And did your brother level up that character?
The point being is that I’ve always thought that if you leveled up the character in most games, having the new spells & abilities doled out to you slowly every other level that the icons really could look like anything because you’d have gotten used to them over time.
I’ve been taking much more care in Fury because you can literally have every single spell and ability in the game. Because of the way the game set up where you mix and match your abilities, saving off multiple incarnations of your character, you might not only not be familiar with the icons but also with their layout on your quick bar. You could have been playing for years, but the incarnation you are using might be something you just threw together. I am trying to make the icon art more meaningful so you have a basic idea of what it does just by looking at it.
Granted it isn’t perfect. There are lots of subtle things about a lot of the abilities that necessitates reading their descriptions even if you know generically what they do. Cameron is also still balancing out the abilities so there is also difficulty of keeping up with things that change. He went through a little while ago and changed a lot of the group buffs to single target, and the single target ones to self-only. That meant I had to go through all of the icon art and reflect that change.
At one point I was going to do a developer diary about drawing the icons but there has just been way too actually work on my plate to get around to it. Maybe soon now that the game is going be making another spike in the press thanks to Gamecock.

BugHunter said...

The characters I was talking about might actually relate more to Fury than normal. They are only level 17, get played maybe once a week, and are alts.

He doesn't play the character often enough to be familiar with his abilities, hasn't been playing the character long enough to have even tried each of the abilities. There is most definately a portion of it that is a result of the kind of gamer he is, and the frequency of using the character.

I can see myself doing the same thing in Fury. Having an incarnation that I use rarely and in only specific grouping circumstances. I won't have a problem with it so much, but my brother certainly would if the icons all look too similar.

"Too similar"...That sucks. I would expect all the healing spells to look similar, but how similar is "too similar"? Maybe some gamers just can't be accomodated, and they just have to deal with it.