Author: Gleb K.

The entire meeting could have been an e-mail.

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

And your entire social event could have been in, for example, Gather.Town.

As the pandemic continues, it is interesting to observe that more people are finding value in what games have been doing for years – simulating the physical presence.

Last month I got to participate in an event for entrepreneurs where my sole job was to explain to people how to move around and where to go. This made me realise that games nowadays rely to the extreme on tutorials, but imagine how many grandmas could have played World of Knitcraft, if only there was a friendly human to assist them at the start? Alas, to see a life GM nowadays in most MMO’s is a rare sight, indeed.

Paldies, Jūrmala!

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

I will admit that it is nice to crawl from under a rock and participate in a big event (as big as it gets in a little Baltic country). GameWave2021 was an interesting event to participate in and very accommodating for online participation. And I don’t know why I still get surprised, because if any industry should be able to do this it would be game development industry. A bunch of interesting things and unusual opportunities.

Shout out to game jam team Neguli for being super kind and letting me be a digital nuisance for short time. it was fun to doodle!

And now to dust off an old concept, stuff it into TabletopSim and see if it hold any water…

Ding-dong! The white witch is dead

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

-Here is the idea: we make a crossover between Pokemon combat and FF combat, but real-time instead of turn-based. There will be monsters to catch and tough boss battles. And I mean proper tough! Players will have to die and adjust their team compositions and strategy. All the game outside the combat is going to be basic as hell, standard RPG grind. Don’t forget plenty of back-tracking. 

-What about the story?

-The story will be packed with cliches and tropes from several well-known cultures in real life, so no need to be original there. Characters will be clueless about the most obvious things. The main protagonist will be a little boy and his mom dies in the first minutes of gameplay. He will have a Jamaican-accented (*note: In the English version) sidekick who will shame and bully the kid into overcoming his trauma to save the world. Basically, this will be a story for a kindergartener with the gameplay for an experienced player.

-Dunno. Feels a bit stretched…

-We get Studio Ghibli to make the models and fully animated cutscenes. That will make it work, surely?

And it did. The end.

This is how I imagine Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch got developed

The immortalisation of the muscles of the 38th Governor of California

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

I am one of those people who used to pirate games back in the days of my school days, since I’ve had no money to just buy them. Nowadays when I stumble upon those games, I buy them for my library collection. A lot of old games finally spilled into Steam lately and I was notified of the fact the King’s Bounty was available. Not the 1990 King’s Bounty, but it’s “spiritual successor” from 2008. It turns out that they they also released a couple of DLCs and I thought that I’d give a quick try to the last one in the line – King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North.

As I started the game, a picture of a surprisingly suntanned viking looked at me from the starting screen and a thought crossed my mind:that I have seen that bulging forearm somewhere before. I am only aware of one glorious barbarian in pop culture, so a quick search for “arnold with sword” revealed that I was probably correct in my assumption.

A sudden reminder that the industry has been photobashing since before people even knew what Photoshop is.