PAX Prime 2014

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So, if you hadn't heard, Axiom Verge was at PAX Prime, again at the Sony booth!  

Here's the Sony booth.  The layout was a bit awkward this time, but it didn't seem to keep a steady stream of players from squeezing in.  You can see Matt Bodega helping to set up.

Here's the Sony booth.  The layout was a bit awkward this time, but it didn't seem to keep a steady stream of players from squeezing in.  You can see Matt Bodega helping to set up.

Again I had two Kiosks.

This was the same demo shown at E3.

This was the same demo shown at E3.

I  hung out a lot with Dan Adelman, who I hope to work with in the future.  He introduced me to a lot of folks and gave some of his industry insight.


I went to a couple of more parties this time, and Chloe was there to take some pictures.  Here's me with Ian Stocker, of Escape Goat fame.

Here I am looking super chunky, talking with Susan Wright of Life Goes On, Dan Adelman, and Ryan Roth, the composer for Starseed Pilgrim and many others.

Below is a very expressive Phedran (a prominent indie youtube personality), Susan Wright, Dan Adelman, and myself.

I met Cale Bradbury and some folks from Klei at the "Humble Bundle Party".  Cale is a master of all kinds of trippy games and art (like Snakes on a Cartesian Plane).  He gave me a zine created entirely from sine waves.  Here he is playing Axiom Verge.

Tim Schafer did his Grim Fandango signing in the next row over from AV.

And then, I went insane!  No, just kidding.  I really don't know how to end this.  For the most part it was a very busy 4 days of introducing people to AV, doing interviews, and going to parties with industry folk.  We should be seeing more stuff come online over the next few weeks!

AV Trailer in Store Kiosks!

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IMG_6728.JPG

In case you want to prove to your mom that you have a real job, having your game trailer showing at Target is a good first step!  Unfortunately the box design is kinda placeholder - I didn't actually think this was going to go up until September, so I just put what I had in temporarily.  As a bonus you can also watch the trailer on the Vita and get an idea how it'll look with the pixels nicely shrunk down!

Rambling on Glitches

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What do you think is going on here?

What do you think is going on here?

So as you know, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make glitches be a useful and fun thing as opposed to something that makes you want to break your console.  I also like them to somewhat accurately reflect the kind of issues that can arise in real software, and a lot of this has to do with taking advantage of how RAM and VRAM are laid out.

At some point in the past, I was presented with a unique way of analyzing crash dumps:  Someone had found that if you converted them to images, you could actually spot patterns indicating if there was a problem in the stack or the heap based on how it looked.  I remembered this and was unable to find that.  But!  In my searches, I found something even better.

I found this browsing through Chrome's memory.

I found this browsing through Chrome's memory.

It's called Haywire, it's by Jamie Fenton, and it is good.

If you've ever used an emulator (PSSST, I wrote one at one point), you might have noticed tools built in to let you see the VRAM contents.  Haywire is kind of like that, but for the RAM of running programs in Windows.  You can actually watch the contents of RAM update in real time!

What's more, you can open and view files.  It doesn't "know" how to read images, but if you know the line width of your image and whether to interpret it as 32, 24, or 16-bit, you can see ... something.  And it will be righteously scrambled.  Here are some dumps I made today:

Here's one of the bosses.

Here's one of the bosses.

A scrambled shot from the intro cutscene.

A scrambled shot from the intro cutscene.

Some random part of Photoshop's memory where it stores icons.

Some random part of Photoshop's memory where it stores icons.

You can also set it to interpret at unicode!  I found this in UltraEdit.  I couldn't find the text of my currently open document, though!

You can also set it to interpret at unicode!  I found this in UltraEdit.  I couldn't find the text of my currently open document, though!




Relics of the Past

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Today I was scrounging around in my hard drive, trying to find the origins of some artwork, and I came across the image on the top left.  The Photoshop group was called "TODO:  Infested Labs".  Dated 6/7/2010, it was probably one of the first images I'd made.  I have no recollection of making it at all!  I can only surmise that it was placeholder, since by the next iteration, it looked like the save room in the upper right, dating from 6/21/2010.  I'd even made the animation in Photoshop as a sequence of layers, but I guess I hadn't thought of adding the shaft yet.

The one on the bottom is the current version of that save station - what you see shortly after starting the game.  It's interesting to me how drastically the colors changed; I don't even remember there being a purple and beige theme ... glad I changed that.  This is what happens when you work on a game over multiple years - you barely remember what you were doing at the start of the project!