A BRIEF HISTORYMy name is Sigvatr. I am known here and there on the internet for doing various things, including getting banned from these forums and just about every other forum in existence (Derek said I could re-register if I had information on a game I was working on to post; I promise I will be good this time). Anyway...
My reputation as a shock artist causes me some frustration. I am a passionate and dedicated game designer who spends most of his time working on genuinely interesting and polished projects. However, the relatively small amount of time I have spent on pulling pranks in the past is what got me on Fox News, into advisory consultations with Australia's intelligence agency and effectively banned from a country. It takes a few weeks and a few Red Bulls to make a blatantly offensive computer game with Commodore 64 style graphics, but many years of extremely hard work to create a professional quality, rock solid cross-platform computer game. Especially when you create literally every aspect of the game by yourself. Which is what I do.
Way back in 2007 I started working on a game known as Link-Dead with Soldat creator Michal Marcinkowski. My duties were chiefly creating the game's graphics, occasionally writing caffeine-fueled ten page rants on game design and persistently arguing with Michal about how we should do things. After two years of stern dedication and enormous dreams that never came to fruition, I eventually realized that by trying to work with someone else I was actually trying to turn them into my pawn.
I'm as egotistical as the next game designer and think that I am capable of conjuring up brilliant gameplay ideas and sharp, witty criticism of other games beyond the abilities of most people who involve themselves with gaming in any particular way. I had my first taste of making my own games sixteen years ago and have truly and sincerely felt that I was destined to create amazing computer games for my entire life. Combined with Michal's confidence in his own abilities due to the success of his 2002 release of Soldat, the partnership was eventually shattered due to my realization that I cannot make any compromises when it comes to game design, specifically letting other people make decisions I disagree with.
This happened a bit more than a year ago and I have not spoken with Michal since then. I effectively threw two years of hard work into my junk folder and forced Michal to start from ground-zero in terms of Link-Dead's graphics. Frankly it's a lot of drama I don't want to go over anymore, so we'll just leave it at that.
After my realization that I would have to be completely self-sufficient in my quest to create exceptional computer games, I essentially disappeared from the internet for over a year. In fact, I didn't even have an internet connection at all for the majority of that time. I spent my time in mostly self-induced isolation teaching myself to program, which is the one thing that has been holding me back from being a completely self-sufficient game designer and very likely also the reason I spent so many years trying to start and manage game design projects with strangers that always ended in a lot of unnecessary drama.
Frankly, computer programming terrified me for my entire life. I didn't feel like I had either the time or ability to include game programming in my already stressful roster of everything else that entails the creation of a computer game, including creating graphics, sound effects, music, etc... Surprisingly, I found that computer programming came very naturally to me, and in the past year that I have been programming for I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience to such a degree that I only get around 4-5 hours of sleep at night due to my eagerness to program for extremely long sessions (think several days without sleeping).
My lifestyle and routine are pretty much been set in concrete now that I have nailed the last nail into the coffin. There is absolutely nothing holding me back as a game designer anymore and I am so enthralled in my passion of game design that I spend the vast majority of my waking time working on my my project(s).
It just so happens that I have been putting 100+ hours of work a week into game design for the past year, which has been difficult to juggle with a part-time job, a wife and the recent addition of a baby (I'm a daddy!). To be honest, not having the internet for such a long time did help out in this department quite a lot. I didn't want to announce anything (or even make an appearance online) for quite a long time and am only doing so now because I am at the stage of development in this project where I can regularly update people on my progress and keep it interesting.
So, I've started my own game company called Brain Damage and am ready now to make my announcement now...
THE EVOLUTION OF CYBORG WARCyborg War is essentially a fork of the still-in-development Link-Dead. None of the assets from Link-Dead are being used (in fact, they aren't being used in either of the two projects), but I have carried over all of my ideas and inspirations from the prior project unscathed by criticism or petty disagreement. When Michal first made his announcement about Link-Dead, he had literally dreamed the idea for the game up in a brief flash of creativity on that very day. There were no details, only a vague idea of what the game should be. I began working with Michal only a day or two after his announcement, so we both nurtured the spirit of the game from the ground up. Due to this, some of my essence remains in Link-Dead and some of Michal's essence has carried over to Cyborg War as we both worked on the same iteration for so long. However, now the two games share few similarities aside from generalities and as a result of our vast differences and disagreements.
Long story short, Cyborg War is not Link-Dead; in fact it is a very different game. I just want to make that clear here and now, and I also want to make it clear that there is no competition or ill-feelings involved at work here. These two projects being discussed here grew from the same seed, but are now maturing into completely separate trees.
CYBORG WARCyborg War is the first episode in the projected Humanity Extinct series of computer games and is a team-play based, multiplayer platform game designed for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms. Taking place in the corroded and weathered ruins of a future civilization and a dead ecosystem where organic life is no longer supported, the human species has brought about its own extinction. In the wake of humanity, an incongruous and synthetic ecosystem of rapidly evolving mechanical life transforms the planet into a nightmare never before imagined.
Cyborg War is a game of high-impact side-scrolling chaos and destruction. Projected with a capacity for 64 players in one game, players play the role of one of two teams which are chosen from a bank of unsettlingly dystopian races and fight over extremely large, detailed battlegrounds spanning several miles in length and reaching into the stratosphere. The keys to victory in Cyborg War are patience, long-term planning and lightning-fast reflexes which maintain an atmosphere of constant tension. Combined with a real-time, procedurally generated soundtrack and visuals, a morbidly styled underlying theme and nihilistic inspirations, the end result is the conjuration of an experience of perpetual, pulsating dread and vast, exploratory possibilities.
TECHNOLOGYThe Cyborg War game itself is constructed on top of two core technologies developed in C++ from the ground up specifically for this game:
Concussion Engine - The Concussion Engine is a 2D, side-scrolling game engine developed specifically for the purposes of supporting extremely large, reactive and meticulously detailed environments. With such an ambitious goal in mind, it has been designed according to the central tenants of speed and efficiency.
As well as providing the obligatory physics, graphics, networking and artificial intelligence functionality necessary to any platform game engine, The Concussion Engine makes possible fully destructible and visually mutable environments over hundreds of miles in length and hundreds of stories high, dynamic, real-time seasonal weather simulation and day/night cycling and a wide range of GPU enhanced shader effects that push the boundaries of what was once thought possible in a 2D game.
Hive Mind - Hive Mind is an omniscient distributed artificial intelligence that engineers the player's experience by manipulating nearly every aspect of the game. Designed to instill a combination of terror and wonder, Hive Mind silently, efficiently and without feeling plots the evolution of Cyborg War's persistent and player-driven story across servers, battlefields and individual players' computers. Based around the philosophy that everything affects everything, Hive Mind is designed to take into consideration the smallest details of an individual player's experience and the grand evolution of global warfare.
From a designer's point of view, Hive Mind is essentially an evolution of the idea of procedural generation. While procedural generation typically refers to content that is generated at particular intervals such as the beginning of a game level, Hive Mind procedural generates game content real time. Using an efficient seeding and mutation-aware system as its memory model, Hive Mind can provide unfathomably large amounts of extremely varied content on a perpetual basis while utilizing a considerably small memory footprint.
Although the full possibilities are yet to be explored, Hive Mind is capable of providing a reactive, real-time soundtrack, the generation of effectively infinitely sized maps, the initialization and evolution of gripping and suspenseful narratives utilizing thousands of participants, an all-around, stalking persona and a curiously familiar metaphor for the Cyborg War setting.
DESIGNER'S NOTESI have been working on Cyborg War in it's current iteration for slightly more than a year now. When I began working on this project, I set myself a projected release date of 2013, or four years of dedicated full-time work. Now a quarter through that development time, I have to say that I believe it was an accurate estimation. Having had more than a decade to refine my skills in the development of graphics and audio, I am still not a weathered and experienced programmer. However, I have already reached the stage where I feel confident that I can effectively and efficiently program anything I set my mind too, even it requires doing some research.
A notable game design community socialite once said of me that I am, "notorious for starting awesome projects and never finishing them." He might be right about that and I can understand that the prospect of this project being finished might seem dim. However, the sheer awesomeness in my point of view of this project makes me feel more than confident that it will be completed, polished and all. I have started a lot of awesome projects in the past, but in retrospect, I never finished them because they just weren't awesome enough to justify investing the time in. Judging by my work habits over the past year, I still have plenty to invest in and from and even the repercussions of attempting to support an unemployed mommywife and a month-old baby boy named Thor on the wages of a part time job have not stopped me from persisting to dedicate a very large amount of my time to my most ambitious project yet.
For your persistence in reading a giant wall of text, here is a sample from the Cyborg War soundtrack for your listening pleasure. This is a completely human-written song, so don't pretend that computers could ever make music that sounds this good. Computers don't have the ability to experience in the way that a human does, which makes their creative abilities inferior to ours, if not simply fakery, or something.
Haha, whatever. I actually completely disagree with all of those insinuations. A great deal of my inspiration in this project stems from my faith in the notion that computer-generated (some would say imposter) creative expression will one day supercede the abilities of the human spirit. I think this inspiration shines through in both the technical and thematic aspects of Cyborg War and I do enjoy toying with the idea of one day relegating human creativity and expression to its true, atomic, automatic linearity.
Heil Hitler!
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