TYLER Projects | the blog

Equip: Tiger’s Claw

News article

Mac OS and Win XP concurrently installed with no conflicts!
But dunno about longhorn.

PS3 delayed

Rumors have been flying all over the place about whether Sony can meet their deadline. Well, it’s official, Sony just announced that they will be pushing the PS3 launch to November, just in time to fight with Revolution. But at same time, they announced their specs just to whip up some appetite.

Reviews of their specs

Her Highness (very ironically) is now the resident Geisha french maid…

..who drives a sports car.

Sicshot finally moved in with the rest of us. But it wasn’t long before he set fire to the microwave and freaked out. We forgot he hadn’t got the cooking training yet.

Eventually he was found at the bottom of the pool. TYLER casualties 10%.

Matrix went for a night out on the town looking for an interview with the vampire. He subsequently went about making almost everyone in the house a vampire.

More TYLER vampire photos here:
Vampire Geisha maid give Shirley a peck
Cervantes gets a new bed

However there was only 1 coffin available (and it was out in the courtyard) so all the vampires got a serious sun tan. TYLER casualties 60%.

Tired of mourning. Malc fell asleep in the wrong place at the wrong time…

..becoming a “Man on Fire” literally. TYLER casualties 70%.

We didn’t save the game…I hope.

The “office” is really shaping up. We still can’t squeeze everyone into one lot so we’re gonna have leave the current office as a branch office while Her highness has offered to do up the “main office”. In other news, DZ’s sim seems to have automatically (I didn’t control the sims at all) taken up the mantle of resident DJ.

Cervantes takes over when DZ’s sim has to go to the toilet.

Despite forcing everyone to take cooking lessons TY’s Sim somehow managed to set fire to the kitchen. I suspect it’s because he was talking to someone else instead of watching the stove / microwave.

Tyler’s SIMs have just moved into their new office! Their office is kinda bare right now. Anyone care to help them decorate?

Finally got sometime to work on more special effects. Here’s the cannon special effect, I’ve been told it looks more like missiles but oh heck. It looks good and that’s all that matters. Soon it’ll be time for me to work on the simpler special effects.

I’ve already uploaded the cannon effect to our project management site so you guys start using it.

Check out the latest SFX here!

This should be the final version for now…
Feeling tempted to redraw this..

I had an informal meeting with Dr. Hong Hai (Dean of NTU Business School). Got some very interesting ideas and advice. He strongly adviced us to go in as a WOFE (wholly owned Foreign Enterprise) taking avantage of the relaxing of the rules on foreign ownership. Protection on IP was a major issue as well.

Anyway I went to look up the proceedures for starting a WOFE in China, details are here. The captial requirements are 100,000.00 CNY (China Yuan Renminbi) = 20,158.14 SGD (Singapore Dollars) and it varies depending on the nature of the business (lower for IT vs. manufacturing) and the city you want to start in (Shenzhen lower than Shanghai).

Another issue he asked us to consider are the size of the Singaporean community over there, hence Suzhou would be a good place with more Singaporeans.

He also had some other advice but I’ll brief the board in our next board meeting.

One key problem we’re going to have to deal with before we launch our game is “Smacktalk”.

Gamers playing online can be very foul, perhaps because they think they can cuss with impunity. I’m sure you guys who played Gunbound may have noticed 60% of the talk during each game is spent trading insults. Taunting opponents can be a very effective means to lower their prowess. However it also reduces the fun factor of the game and diminishes the overall experience.

It’s been cited as a major reason for the low uptake of Xbox:Live and the lack of voice chat support in many online multiplayer games.

Marvelgirl and I attended the Ebay contest briefing. Ebay deals with fraud and users who abuse the system by having this “reputation” system. Every seller has a reputation/feedback list. If a seller has alot of bad rep you probably don’t want to buy from this person.

Likewise for our game, we can also have a reputation system. Everyone gets to give everyone else a reputation rating. If you see someone with a really bad reputation rating, chances are you won’t want to play with the guy.

Also another takeback from my IS401 project discussion: The development of Wi-Max in Singapore could lead to more accessibility for our game (and importantly, lower costs for users) who want to play on the move.