aabicus

I write articles! I also make games, release videos, voice act and lots of other cool things.

I Attended IEM Oakland!

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Hi everybody! I’ve been a bit silent on the blog recently, mostly been working on my first quarter of schoolwork at the UCSC Games & Playable Media Master’s program. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding, and I’ll be updating you all as soon as the quarter ends and I can catch my breath. One of my favorite parts of the program are the other students; they’re all  driven game developers who look out for each other, and love to play board/video games together! Several of them are frequent Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players, and recently we got the exciting… [Continue Reading]

Payday The Heist: AI Bots Explained

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The bots in Payday: The Heist are designed to fill the role of an average if unremarkable teammate. They’ve got a number of behavioral quirks and coded advantages over humans, but that’s just to compensate for all the really basic stuff they can’t do at all. This guide will cover every possible difference I’ve found between the Payday: The Heist bots and their human counterparts. Statistics AI bots have 75 hitpoints that are constantly regenerating, turning them into pretty impressive bullet sponges so long as they aren’t standing out in the open taking suppressing fire from three different directions. When… [Continue Reading]

Medical Necessity Dev Diary #8

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Happy Saturday! As mentioned last time, we’re moving heavily into the “content creation” phase and out of the “setting up the core elements of the game” phase, which means we’ve got lots of exciting new art and quality-of-life assets to showcase! https://gfycat.com/AcceptableGrossCorydorascatfish There are three major new elements this GIF showcases. Firstly, Carry finished an update to the camera; now the screen will zoom in or pull out so the full team can be seen at any given time. We’re still planning on finding a hybrid compromise between this new camera and the aforementioned off-screen indicators for specific far-off characters… [Continue Reading]

Medical Necessity Dev Diary #7

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Happy Saturday everyone! As always, we’ve got exciting things to report on our Medical Necessity progress! The biggest change is that we’ve finally finished the weapon roster, so let’s go over the different guns that will be present for the initial campaign! These six weapons will be wielded by enemies and allies, and can be equipped by the player as healing versions. (Note that we gave the player 2000 extra health in these example GIFs just so we could get lengthy footage of the bots firing) https://gfycat.com/AshamedEnviousBlacklab The Sniper rifle is the dedicated long-range weapon. It has a slow firing… [Continue Reading]

Major League Magic Tournament Results!

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Thank you to everybody who joined in watching the first ever Major League Magic tournament! Everybody had a lot of fun, and we totally plan on having more tournaments down the line. The Major League Magic team learned a lot of valuable feedback that’ll help them refine their game going forward (they especially liked SilverWolf’s suggestions from the Twitch feed), and Joey and Ben loved their prizes! Ben is the asset director from Medical Necessity you keep reading about in our dev diaries. I had a blast shoutcasting, and a small cadre of the players (mostly JayZ, Pat, Ben, and Joey) shuffled… [Continue Reading]

Friday Major League Magic Tournament, With Prizes!

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You’ve heard a lot about Medical Necessity in my weekly dev diaries, but it’s not the only game being developed in my college Masters’ course! A large team led by Ahmet Terzioglu has been developing a competitive multiplayer game tentatively called Major League Magic, and at 3pm PST the first Major League Magic tournament will be streaming on Twitch! This is the first public opportunity to see the most ambitious project in our class, don’t miss it! Major League Magic is a 3v3 online brawler where both teams select their spells from over a dozen options and fight for three rounds. These… [Continue Reading]

Medical Necessity Dev Diary #6

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Hope everyone’s having a great weekend! I’m really excited to show you some of the biggest changes to Medical Necessity yet! https://gfycat.com/ImmaculateIllustriousLangur Ben has begun work on turning our test maps into full-fledged environments! Our levels will be following a campaign, and that campaign will take the player character and his teammates through multiple different biomes, from deserts and cities to even underground caves. Our first levels will take place in the forest, we plan to theme these levels around “many individual obstacles”, with few indoor environments and large structures. Similar to how every campaign in Left 4 Dead 2… [Continue Reading]

Medical Necessity Dev Diary #5

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Happy Saturday! As always, let’s look at some gameplay footage from our most recent Medical Necessity build and go over the updates we’ve completed this week: https://gfycat.com/CompleteAssuredGarpike If you look at last week’s footage, the first new thing that pops out is probably that green bar at the bottom. That’s the Team Health Counter, an experimental feature Pat added that tracks the total remaining health on the player’s team. Our intention was to aid the player in keeping track of the overall state of the team, to counteract the tunnel vision that playtesters were showing when focusing on their current… [Continue Reading]

Doki Doki Literature Club review

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Notice: If you haven’t played Doki Doki Literature Club, you really should before you read this article.  I openly admit that there are more relevant modern titles I should be reviewing before Doki Doki Literature Club, but sadly I haven’t played very many newly-released games. Most of my favorites are legacy franchises with infinite replayability, like Payday, Overwatch, and Left 4 Dead. But I couldn’t play any of these games when I spent winter break at my parents for the holidays since I had to leave my desktop in Santa Clara. Luckily this gave me a chance to try a… [Continue Reading]

Medical Necessity Dev Diary #4

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Another Saturday, another update for Medical Necessity! And we have a lot to talk about this week! First things first, I’m excited to introduce Matt and Steven, our new audio designers! Hailing from San Francisco State University, they’ll be working with Pat for the next few weeks to design the different sound effects, music, and ambiance for our game. We’ve added a lot of different changes, all of which are visible in this GIF, so let’s break them down part by part! https://gfycat.com/ImmenseOfficialBluebottle Artwise, the player character’s healthbar has changed back to the original, dynamically-colored green circle in order to… [Continue Reading]