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Hive Rise Rises - Review

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:47:11 -0500

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Hive Rise is a free MMORTS, which is something you don’t see much of. And apart from most free MMO games this one is actually pretty good!

Everything in Hive Rise is simple, there are two resource types, three types of unit factories with 3-5 units each and a big ‘GO!’ button on the main menu to get you right into the action. The battlefield is a repeating pattern of 1024 hexagon shaped bases, and it’s in the desert. I could go into depth about what units are good against what and so on, but I don’t need to, it’s really that simple

Like the trend suggests this title is supported by micro transactions, you can use your real money to buy fictional money to buy upgrades like air strikes, being able to call in reinforcements and being able to see who your opponent is (yes, you can’t see your opponent’s name unless you buy this upgrade).

If you’re a hard core gamer that likes to work hard for his upgrades you can always just play the game, you get 100 coins for 10 minutes of play, the cheapest upgrade costs 48 000 coins. That’s 80 hours of MMORTSing to be able to permanently see what the name of your enemy is (the expensive stuff costs more than 200 000 coins). Luckily, 3 days and 30 days versions are also available for all upgrades, so for the price of 1 500 coins you can see the name of your adversaries for three days, sounds fair.

Hive Rise is a free MMORTS, which is something you don’t see much of. And apart from most free MMO games this one is actually pretty good! It's made by the young German company Vulcando Games who also have made a few other cool games I've never heard of before. Everything in Hive Rise is simple, there are two resource types, three types of unit factories with 3-5 units each and a big ‘GO!’ button on the main menu to get you right into the action. The battlefield is a repeating pattern of 1024 hexagon shaped bases, and it’s in the desert. I could go into depth about what units are good against what and so on, but I don’t need to, it’s really that simple! Like the trend suggests, this title is supported by micro transactions. You can use your real money to buy fictional money to buy upgrades like air strikes, being able to call in reinforcements and being able to see who your opponent is (yes, you can’t see your opponent’s name unless you buy this upgrade). If you’re a hard core gamer who likes to work hard for your upgrades you can always just play the game. You get 100 coins for 10 minutes of play, the cheapest upgrade costs 48 000 coins. That’s 80 hours of MMORTSing to be able to permanently see what the name of your enemy is (the expensive stuff costs more than 200 000 coins). Luckily, 3 days and 30 days versions are also available for all upgrades, so for the price of 1 500 coins you can see the name of your adversaries for three days, sounds fair. [center][/center] This part is something I don’t really understand the point of just yet, before each battle you get to select a play mode. At the start you can only choose ‘hive master’, this is the normal play mode. when you’ve got 300 000 score points you unlock three new play modes to choose from and at 500 000 you unlock the last three. When a battle is over you get a trophy that gets shinier the more score you got during the round. But I have no idea why I would want these trophies, especially when some of the play modes are simply restricting you to either infantry, aircraft or tanks. Each game lasts for 10 minutes, so when you’ve pressed the big ‘GO!’ button and selected a play mode you’ll get right to the game. But before you get to destroy stuff you have 30 seconds to prepare, hopefully you’ll be spending this time on building your resource buildings and getting your first units out the factories. After those 30 seconds you need to pray that no one was waiting with his massive army right outside the door, ready to rip anything behind those steel doors to shreds as soon as they open. [center][/center] While the time is ticking you should try attacking your enemies to capture their bases, this is done Battlefield style, by putting a unit next to the flag in the middle of the base. If you survive the 10 minutes, all of your units and buildings will explode and you’ll be presented with your score and trophy. If you did something remarkable like exploring a whole lot, getting a lot of resources or becoming defeated extremely fast you’ll also get a cool sticker reward. You can slap this sticker onto the locker next to your trophy locker, where you also can admire your beautiful trophies, amazing. Other than the big ‘GO!’ button, you can play via the lobby. There are four different ways to play from the lobby, you can co-operate with up to three friends on the public battlefield (doing this you will all wipe the floor with the competition, guaranteed). You can also just start next to each other on the battlefield, but without being on the same team. There are also the classic deathmatch and team deathmatch modes on instanced arenas with up to 64 players and 100 hex bases. [center][/center] The game is fairly balanced and free from bugs, the graphics are nothing fancy so even older computers should be able to run the game fine. The thing I’m missing in this is a more defined objective and not only ‘than kill as much as you can to get an as high score as you can’. Maybe add some special super bases that everyone wants, to give the game some spice at least. Because as much fun this game is right now, I’m having a hard time seeing how this will appeal to people in the long run if nothing is done about this. All in all Hive Rise delivers a very solid experience, it’s got lots of neat stuff like the stickers, a nice interface, almost no lag and above all it's got simple gameplay. The pathfinding isn’t great but I’m guessing they had to do some heavy optimizing to be able to take 1000 players, at least my units don’t get stuck. I didn’t run into a single bug during my play time today and both me and my friend had a great time. It’s free and it’s a small download so it’s not like you’ve got anything to loose. Get to it Originally posted on The Human Pond. Track me

School Project

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:20:15 -0600

What's been taking most of my time lately is my school project. Me and my friend are going to make a Half-Life 2 singleplayer mod mainly to test our skills and to learn how it really is to make a mod. Most of the time up 'til now has gone into writing a story, a script, planning and so on (boring stuff). But now we've come to the fun part, actually making all the stuff! We're gonna make our own models, textures, choreographed scenes, dialogue sounds and maps. Our current aim is to finish the introduction map so we have something awesome to show during the presentation. Today we recorded the dialogue, I'm doing the players voice and our mate is doing Steve's (the only dude in there) voice. And I have to say that the recordings turned out extremely awesome! Top sound quality and very good voice acting from both me and him, it's gonna be totally awesome once I have it all lip synced and choreographed. I'll definitely upload something once I've got some more stuff to show, that scene is top priority right now. Well, right after that PM we have to write, *sigh* more writing. Anyways, here are the progress videos I've made: [center] Silverfisk School Project Progress 1 video - Mod DB Silverfisk School Project Progress 2 video - Mod DB Silverfisk School Project Progress 3 video - Mod DB[/center] - Track me - Website

Replayability in games

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:09:08 -0600

The reason I want to play Lugaru more is because I can still get better at it even after playing through it many times. If the story was deeper I might play it even more, If a game puts too much weight on the goal (save someone for example) instead of the gameplay (kicking people's ass being fun), it won't be as much fun saving that guy over and over. Because when you've saved him once, the fun part of simply saving him is gone, so then it's only up to the game's gameplay to keep you entertained. If a single player game can teach you how it's played but still after a year of playing the game you find it challenging when the game tries to challenge you, that's going to be a game that's fun to play for a long time. If you after learning the game can get pro after a week it's not going to live for long. A story can be really useful getting players through hard parts, becasue the story gives them the motivation to do it. There are games like the Half-Life series for example, those games are pretty easy to learn and pretty easy to master, those games rely on introducing new stuff in every upcomming game, kinda like mini games (Magnusson device, driving the vehicles, find the battery to power the gate, escort citizens, defend the position, and so on). I don't like replaying those games actually, but I do like playing Lugaru over and over. I think that's because David focused on that one aspect, the fighting, and tried to make it as deep and good as possible. That made the game really hard for beginners, but despite being so hard it's still pretty forgiving, you get to restart immediately and if you get totally owned by a wolf or something you might fly across the map and that makes it fun to die. Or maybe your last seconds you where owning the shit out of those three rabbits before you got killed giving you that satisfaction even though you lost. In Lugaru you're always learning and trying to develop new tactics. I never find myself doing that in Half-Life, there it's run and gun and if I don't have much HP left it's sneak and gun, the games are pretty much straight forward. The fun for me in the Half-Life games is discovering the mini games and the environments.

Originally posted as a comment by Silverfish on Wolfire Blog using Disqus. Thanks for reading, please track my profile and comment!

Overgrowth, Pimpage and Black Mesa

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:34:43 -0600

My ModDB profile have now been officially pimped with some new screenshots, a video and a new header. I'll try to keep my profile up to date with new screenshots and videos from now on. [center] Playing With NPCs[/center]I have taken upon me the task to update Overgrowth's game profile here on ModDB, the first news post was a great success and more will come tomorrow, I suggest you go check it out! The Black Mesa dev team just released the official trailer for their mod, [center][/center][center]Black Mesa Official Trailer[/center] I can barely wait to get my hands on this baby. Since I'm a mapper it's gonna be really interesting to see what they have come up with. Thanks for reading. Track me to recieve updates, comment to recieve appreciation, do both to recieve cake (hint: the cake is a lie).

HUC 2.2 And Awesome Games

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:28:51 -0600

The new version of Hammer Units Converter has been released for you to download. I know I said that I probably wouldn't continue developing it seven months ago when I released version 1.1, but I did and this version is much better than the previous ones. So here I go again; this will probably be the final version of this program, unless a bug is found or I get a feature request I decide to include. In other news, I have not been mapping as much as I want to, mainly because of school but also because when I haven't been mapping for a while, I simply get lazy. Me and my friend have resumed the work on our school project, we're making a singleplayer mod in the Orange Box engine, we've just finished the story so actual work on the mod has not been started yet. You might get some more info on that later (we will add the mod to ModDB when we have something to show). I have been following the progress of an awesome game-to-be lately, it's known as Overgrowth (releaseQ1 2009). In this game you'll be a rabbit on two legs beating the shit out of other rabbits, wolves, cats, rats etc., it may sound stupid but it's gonna be awesome. You may have heard of a game called Lugaru, well Overgrowth is basically Lugaru 2. Wolfire Games - who are developing Overgrowth - have been releasing alpha versions of their game to those who preorder. So if you're a fan of indie games, a furry or if you're simply looking to beat the living shit out of something, I suggest you download the Lugaru demo, it won't let you down. Also, Darkfall Online is going to accept more people into beta around now, "on or around November 10th" they say, wich is today. I don't think they'll start sending the e-mails today though, it's in the Darkfall dev's nature to be late, I hope I'm one of the lucky ones in any case. And if I don't get in there's always the open beta to look forward to, wich should be a few weeks from now at the latest, since they're aiming for a release in early december. The last four days I've been entertaining myself with the Left 4 Dead demo and I must say it's quite entertaining. I have been playing two player split screen with a few chosen ones, it works like a charm, both online and offline. Of course I have the standard complaints about the match making system, it's not like I dislike it (sometimes I can't bother to find a good server), it's rather that they decided to leave the server browser out that upsets me. It's not that big of a problem though, you can bring up the console and write openserverbrowser to get it up anyway, but you can only join those servers that have changed a certain server setting. I'm very much looking forward to the full game. You might be familiar with Cortex Command, a 2D sidescrolling shooter with pixel physics. Data Realms have released a new build (build 22) recently. This is in my opinion the best build so far as it features lots of new weapons, new actors, new drop ships, fixes, self preserving AI, a full mission and more. It's actually starting to look like a proper game. Don't ask me why it haven't got a profile here on ModDB, it's a mystery. Thank you very much for reading, comments appreciated, please track me to recieve updates.

Hammer Units Converter 2.0

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:18:07 -0500

I'm writing this message to inform you that version 2.0 of the Hammer Units Converter is in development, this is a complete rewrite of the program, but this time I'm getting some help from my dear friend Precautious (maxdata1 (at) hotmail.com). So far the interface is done, Precautious is working on the whole math part, hoping to make stuff easier for me. This is how it looks at the moment: As you can see it looks completely different from the previous versions. We are also going to add support for yards and 3D-skybox units. This is just the interface and none of it works yet, if all goes well you should be able to download a working version before november the 2nd. If you have any feature requests or comments, post below. Remember to track my profile to recieve updates as they become available (see under 'Profile' to the right).

What have I been up to?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:33:34 -0500

So, what have I been up to? Well to begin with school has started, this means less time for modding and more time for boring stuff. This wasn't a very good time for school to start because I was like "Yeah I have no school so I can do all theese projects at once!". And then school came so I have to prioritize. The map I was talking about in the previous news post was for Follow Freeman, it's mostly done but I ran into some issues, for example the RPG guys on my map don't wanna fire, i've tried if they do in normal HL2 and they do so I don't know what's wrong there, I'm gonna solve it somehow... Also my NPCs don't want to start running for the players at one place. I'm gonna redo all those NPCs to make sure I get it right. My priorities right now are as follows: 1. School 2. Finish the Follow Freeman map (so I can be done with it and put all my work into The Wind) 3. The Wind 4. Anything else "Anything else" includes tutorials I wanna do, gaming, translating stuff, testing stuff and other stuff I like to do or have said I'll do. Peoeple shouldn't be allowed to play games as little as I've been the last few weeks. :-( Oh, "Anything else" also includes the next version of Hammer Units Converter, I'm gonna add yards to it, and I might add a function to calculate between 3D skybox sizes too as I often find myself doing that manually (which is so 2007). I might also rewrite the whole application because I've learned so much stuff about Java this year in school (and will learn much more) so it'd be for the best. I'm thinking about doing a tutorial about doing cliffs in Hammer, or if you have a special request I'd do a tutorial about that instead, just send a mail or PM if you've got any good ideas. Thanks for reading! Don't forget to watch me.

Tutorial and stuff

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:04:05 -0500

It was quite some time since I posted my first blog post and since then alot of stuff has happened. I've bought a new 22 inch widescreen monitor for example, it's a breeze working in Hammer now :-D . And speaking of wich, I've been mapping much since I've taken on a freelance mapping project, I'll let you know for what it's being made when it's made public. My mapping for The Wind have also been progressing. Like three weeks ago I recorded some material for a Hammer tutorial I was going to make, today I finished it by adding the text and stuff, you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MePcEVArjJw , the tutorial is about how to make a scripted event in Hammer, I'd appreciate if you watched, rated and commented! The program I made, Hammer Units Converter, now has over 100 downloads, I'm really proud I got that many downloads and I hope people will keep discovering it and telling their friends, thanks. Another great thing is that the school starts tomorrow! It's gonna be great, I got much to learn. The class im looking forward most to is Virtual Environments, we get to learn 3DS Max. And of course meeting my friends will be great too, this will be my last year in this school. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!

1000 Visitors!

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:16:29 -0500

This is an epic moment as my ModDB profile recently had its 1,000th visitor! I just felt that this would justify a blog post. Now that I'm at it I can talk about some other shit too, well I'm a mapper, I make maps for the Source engine and I always try to get better by experimenting and just mapping. I'm in a mod team, we are making a movie called The Wind. I like playing games, today I've been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Day of Defeat: Source (the beta rocks) and I've been mapping, I'm making a new little experiment, it's like a fantasy castle thingy. You can see it if I ever finish it, but don't count on it. More about the games I like: I often play random mods for Half-Life 2 and random indie games like Platinum Arts Sandbox (BTW I made the Swedish translation for that one!) and I'm waiting for Lugaru 1.5 (Lugaru 2's engine with Lugaru 1's gameplay), check out the Wolfire blog for that. Another game I've been waiting for in over a year now is Darkfall... Oh the vicious game that is Darkfall, the devs for that game do not know what a deadline is it seems, but they have officially announced the beta for this year and I believe them. Just now I read Deathbal101's blog, it turns out we have quite a lot in common and I find his writing to be interesting. In other (very random) news: I turned in some late assignments for school, we had until today before they lock our grades so I just turned in two half finished assignments, dunno if they'll affect my grades but anyways. This concludes my first blog post, ever. So thank you for reading and have a nice day! PS: Check out the program I made! Hammer Units Converter is the name, DL and comment!