(Half)Brick Week

This week saw the start of a couple of things.

First up, it saw the start of this, my final year of university.  Hard to believe that I’m now on the home stretch.  It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was taking an SAT test to see if I could even apply to go to uni, let alone be two thirds done.

Of course, this being the final year the gloves have come off and we are playing sheep stations!  Well, almost.  A large part of this year is our 3rd Year Game Project.  This class runs over both semesters and by the end of this semester we will need to submit a completed and playable prototype.  This will then be used to build the final submission version of the game at the end of second semester.  Not a small task by any means.  This is also a group project and there have been plenty of horror stories of groups imploding in the past, so we have plenty to keep us on our toes.

The second thing was that I was selected to do an internship as one of my subjects this semester.  The call had been put out just before Uni went back asking people if they were interested to reply, answering a few questions and providing a link to their portfolio as well as a copy of their CV.  We talked about it at home and decided that at the very least it was worth going through the process, so I took the plunge and sent everything off.  A couple of days later I got an email from my university saying my details had been sent off to a studio and that they would be in touch with me if they wanted to schedule an interview.  Skip to the following week and I get an email from the studio on the Monday asking if I can come in for an interview on the Tuesday.  Of course, it being holidays still I have plenty of time and I say yes so we schedule it in.

Wow.  I got an interview.  That is so cool.  The email didn’t say what role they were considering me for, but that’s ok.  The fact that they wanted to talk to me was brilliant as far as I was concerned.  So over the next day or so I sorted out my portfolio, which was a bit hard as I didn’t know exactly what to take to show them.  So I grabbed a bit of everything, some of my art, my photography, my writing, voice acting, anything that I thought would be valuable.  I also started to experience something I hadn’t felt for a long time - nerves.  I was going off to be interviewed for an internship position by a game developer, and the last time I had a “job” interview was almost a decade ago.

I don’t like to be late, I never have.  I’ll leave to be somewhere with plenty of time to get there.  When I was working, I used to leave home to get to the office at least half an hour before I was scheduled to “clock on”.  It gave me a chance to get settled, have a coffee, read my emails, plan my day as best I could and get my head in the right place before getting on with it.  I employ the same strategy going to Uni and I did the same here.  My interview was scheduled for midday, I pulled into the carpark and got off my bike at 11:15.  I’d had a really good run in.  So, what to do for 45 minutes?  Thankfully, there is a pub just down the road, so I wandered down there for a nice long glass of lemonade and killed half an hour watching the cricket on TV before heading back up to the studio.

While I was waiting in reception the Human Resource manager wandered out and sat down with me.  We chatted for the next fifteen or twenty minutes until the guys doing my interview were ready and then away I went.  The interview went well I thought, the guys were interesting and I felt happy with how things had gone.  I also found out during the interview that they had me pegged for design or production and I felt that my strengths leant toward the production side of things given that I’d fulfilled that role on two projects last year, and I said as much.  Then the half hour was up and I was on my way, waiting to hear back from them to find out if I’d been successful or not.  We’d been told in an earlier email that decisions would be made quickly and we would know as soon as possible as if we were successful it would probably require the dropping of an enrolled class to take on a new one.

Skip forward to Thursday.  My family and I are down at Gold Coast airport waiting to board a flight to Sydney to go to a wedding the following day.  My Razer Nabu smartband had arrived the previous day and I was wearing it when it buzzed while we were in the airport newsagency.  I checked the display and it was an email from the studio.  I pulled my phone out and checked my email.  

I’d been selected!  I’m not ashamed to admit that I let out a bit of a whoop and a fist pump right there.  Which of course made my wife look at me like I was from some other dimension.  Right at that moment though, I was on top of the world.  I’d been selected to be a part of the program as the producer.  I emailed back while we were standing in the queue to board the plane, gratefully accepting the offer to join the program and acknowledging that I’d be available the following Wednesday for the first group meeting.

And so it came to pass on that Wednesday, I along with my three colleagues from Griffith University became the newest participants in the Halfbrick Academy.  For the next 14 weeks we will be working one day a week at the studio on a project set by them.  We will be graded, we will have to write a report on what we’ve achieved along with a few other tasks.  To say I’m over the moon about this would be a complete understatement.  I have the opportunity to work with people in a well known and successful studio, to learn as much as I can AND be able to put what I learn into use immediately.  

One thing I know though, you’d better hang on, cause this is gonna be one hell of a ride!

A few thoughts on... Alpha Protocol

Over the summer break I spent some time playing a few of the older games in my collection.  I’ve already written a few words about Binary Domain and I thought I’d follow that up with another game published by Sega.  Alpha Protocol was released in 2010 and developed by Obsidian Entertainment.  Obsidian are responsible for games like Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas and most recently Pillars of Eternity.  

Alpha Protocol follows the trials of one Michael Thornton, an ex special services operative who is recruited by a secret government agency (Alpha Protocol), and on his first mission cast out by them as an expendable asset.  Fortunately for the player, Mr Thornton has a strong survival instinct, not to mention what could be called an overdeveloped sense of vengeance as he sets out to find out who tried to get rid of him and why.

Alpha Protocol is a couple of years older than Binary Domain and this does show in some of the animation sequences, but the story builds nicely as you interact with a variety of characters from the UAE, Rome, Moscow and Taipei.  Your interactions with these characters are handled through response selections during conversations.  The wrinkle that Obsidian threw in here is that you only have a short amount of time to choose your desired response.  These responses may be professional, suave, flirty, etc, and it’s up to the player to decide how they want the tone of conversation to go.  As with many games that have player conversations, the NPC response may be favourable, neutral or negative.  This impacts the player on not only how the conversation actually goes, but also on whether NPC’s may be recruited as allies and even handlers for later missions.

Players will have access to a safe house in each of the game's locations.  Within the safe house they may restock ammunition, purchase weapon and suit upgrades and sell off surplus items.  They will also have access to email which will periodically provide the player with some opportunities.  The majority of these will be related to intel you receive and what you choose to do with it.  You can either sell it on the black market, blackmail the company involved or hand it over to a reporter NPC for her to use (and obtain some small payment).  All of this tries to help the player feel like they have some control over what’s happening, and overall it achieves this goal.

There are a number of “boss battles” that take place through the game, and it seems here it’s where Obsidian let the ball drop.  The difficulty curve you encounter when you face the boss fights is off the charts in comparison to what you have been experiencing, and once the battle is over things go back to the level they were at.  I had trouble with a couple of fights, namely the nutcase that is Konstantin Brayko.  This narcotic snorting, dual gun wielding madman was initially the toughest opponent I faced.  Let him get to close and he cuts you up with his knife, and while he’s high on whatever it is he’s snorting, he’s damn near bulletproof.  But Brayko pales into insignificance when you confront the final boss, one of your fellow Alpha Protocol operatives and a previous handler, Darcy.  Seems that Darcy has the best arm and biggest hands of anyone alive as not only can he throw multiple grenades at the same time, he can throw them with great accuracy and further than you can shoot with an assault rifle!

This final battle was probably the most disappointing part of this game for me.  I’d enjoyed the narrative with its twists and turns.  I’d accepted the choices I’d made along the way and how those choices had shaped my version of Michael Thornton.  But all of that felt like it was wasted when it came to the final battle.  It’s a real pity, I enjoyed everything up to that point but frustration with the final battle almost got the better of me.  I’d like to see Obsidian revisit some of the ideas from Alpha Protocol in the future, particularly the timed conversation responses, those gave a sense of urgency, of thinking quickly and dealing with the consequences of your actions, even of those consequences don’t show up right away.