Story Telling - Valve Style

This may be me drifting into Half Life withdrawal waiting, apparently indefinitely, for episode 3 to be released, but I thought I would put this 10 minute clip of the beginning of episode 1.

This game is now three years old, but it still demonstrates what amazing story tellers and game developers the folks at Valve are. Realize that after the first two and a half minutes, this stops being a cut scene and turns into gameplay, and there are no more cut scenes in the whole game! Within the next three minutes you are re-introduced to four characters and, through deft touches of humour and tenderness, are made to care for each of them. Hell, in most games I couldn't give a rat's ass about about any of the characters after playing the game for hours.

Not to mention the technical achievement of the interactions between Alyx, Dog and the constantly moving, first-person, camera that represents Gordon (not to mention with their environment too). In addition, the subtlety in the animations of Alyx and Dog are better than in most games' cut scenes, and remember, this is mostly gameplay.

Anyway, watch and judge for yourself.

Mike

Model Ship Update: Yards

This time, I thought I would be more detailed in the stages in preparing something to be put on the model. The ship has six yards, the horizontal beams from which the rectangular sails hang. These are all cut from apple wood doweling, but I had a bit of a problem. Whether through poor planning on my part or the kit's, I ended up with two pieces of doweling that were each just a little too short for what I needed for one of the yards. I went to the hobbie shop, but the only doweling they had was just pine or something, not even close to the same. I decided the better option would be to join together the two pieces I had.

One handy tool has been this little saw that I've used to cut all the timber.	Another was a rotery tool that I clamped in a vice to make a little lathe.
Using these two tools, I roughed out notchs in each dowel.	I then used an exacto-knife to square out the notchs.
Ordinary carpenter's glue is fine for wood on wood. I used regular super glue on everything else.	Another great tool has been this little drill set. This I used to make pilot holes for two brass pins.
The pins are actually small nails that were used extensively when planking the hull.	Clamp and let dry.
Then, using these mini wire cutters ...	... I clipped off the heads and points of the nails.
However, this still just looks like a chunk of dowel.	Sanding smooths it out and tapers the ends. (sorry the picture's so blurry)
Three coats of varnish, a little coloured MinWax wood filler, and some polishing with steel wool, and the joint doesn't look bad.	Here are all six yards. I've included a scale figure to give you how big these would be in real life (and this isn't a large ship). It's not hard to see where a lot of Canada's old growth forests went.

Mike

RIP