TomMannino.com

Some Woahs and some WTFs, emphasis mine:

According to Variety, the deal was inked with Grosvenor Park in order to fund the production of a number of titles including Castlevania, which has been written by Paul Anderson (Resident Evil), a sequel to John Woo’s Hard Boiled and a big-screen adaptation of Pac-Man.

“This financing is helping us in our expansion plans to greenlight films more quickly,” said Steven Paul, head of Crystal Sky.

“We’re now one of the few companies to have a big budget with which to develop our slate.”

Crystal Sky Pictures is also producing a new Tekken movie, scheduled for release in 2009.

…………………..PacMan?

Castlevania Film House Gets $200 mln Financing : Next Generation – Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News – Home of Edge Online

I fully and readily admit to LARPing quite extensively in high school. This caught my eye, because I’ve always been a fan of Shadowrun, (while I admit to never actually playing a game, I’ve made several characters and almost played in two games,) and of course a fan of cyberpunk. These people set up a Shadowrun LARP using laser tag weaponry and did it in a really awesome and fitting warehouse setting. Very, very cool.

LARPing to me is one of the more pure forms of interactive storytelling. It’s a game, it’s acting, it’s storytelling. It’s also ruined by negative stereotypes and it’s my experience that most of the people that tend to do it are super obsessed with it and make it their life.

I think I would enjoy some sort of convention or amusement park setting where everyone who was attending was a ‘character,’ the boundaries and time limits and rules were clear, and you could play as a character for a weekend or whatever.

shadowrun: Shadowrun LARP

This week, R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties webcomicry wrote and made the web comic idea I had always wanted to. Basically try to sum up every gaming-related web comic ever created and create the arch typical web comic out of it.

One thing I frequently reference and like to talk about is Genre Theory, which states that all genre, (I abstract to forms of media, as well,) go through three periods or phases: primitive, classical, and revisionist. To explain them, I’ll use Westerns as an example.

• The primitive genre phase is the first, and consists of the establishment of rules, norms, and boundaries in which the genre will operate within. We’re talking, for Westerns, very simple things. A Western is set in the Wild West, there’s Sheriffs, Native Americans, Schoolmarms, people use horses and ride in stagecoaches. Also, too-too-twains.
• The classical genre phase is the second, and is when the genre finally solidifies most or all of it’s rules, and does the best it can with the rules it has. This also manifests by allowing the user to make assumptions. An example in this in Westerns is knowing that the Sheriff is the local law enforcement, we don’t need to hear a line like “I’m the Sheriff. I’m the local law enforcement round these parts.” Or another example being, when we hear Native Americans start to hoot and holler, we know for a fact that they are bad and we have to skedaddle or we’re going to get scalped. This is sometimes harder to tell because the examples illustrate themselves by NOT telling you things, and by just showing them.
• The revisionist genre phase is the last in the cycle of evolution of genre, when people take the rules and start to stand them on their heads. Westerns experienced this when shows like Maverick started to play with the rules. The main character in this show was a gambler, conniver and trickster, and operated in the wild west not by using his guns, but his brain. Other westerns played with the stereotypes, making African Americans the main characters, or making the sheriff corrupt, or the Native Americans good guys.

This is all important to illustrate because I will probably be referencing it quite a bit. In the case of web comics, I would say that we’re currently in the middle or end of the classical era. Looking at web comics as a genre, it’s established, people are developing patterns and routines and rules. Specific web comic genres themselves, like ‘the gamer web comic’ are very well-defined, so much so now that other web comics can be meta and parody them, saying there’s the magical equation to making a gaming web comic.

I say ‘middle or end’ of classical era because web comics are starting to emerge to play with the rules. Without listing every single one, let’s use XKCD and Cyanide and Happiness as examples. Both comics are story and content-rich, and use minimal substantial artwork to get their points across. KXCD focuses on intellectual and ‘geek’ humor, while C&H is more shock and base humor. I’d say that the fact that there are great web comics out there that ‘only’ use stick figures to convey their humor and story means rules are very defined, and assumptions can be made. I.e. these two webcomics would be just as good if they were full illustrated, but the genre has matured enough that we can see past the stick figures.

This was up for a Webby if I’m not mistaken. It’s an awesome look at the history and evolution of video games from a very basic perspective. Very well done, and something I’m very interesting in. It teaches and shows the user things while they interact with the experience using casual game mechanics. This is obviously instead of watching a video or clicking through a sideshow, which you could have done to display the same information.

People understand games.

I, Videogame – Discovery Channel

A friend asked me where I learned screenwriting from, and that he was interested in doing so himself, and my response got a bit carried away, so I will share it with the world.

I say that I effectively minored in screenwriting at college. I took 4-5 classes total, one of which was a workshop where I wrote a (bad) 120 page screenplay. We didn’t really have a screenwriting major or minor but I took enough classes in it to claim I did.

The best thing to do first is to use a word processing program that does the formatting for you. I posted about it previously but make an account on this site and fool around with it for a bit:

http://www.zhura.com/

This is actually a good start for learning about proper formatting:
http://www.scriptologist.com/Magazine/Formatting/formatting.html

Keeping in mind that the only hard-and-fast ‘rules’ are what types of things go where, (i.e. actions, headings, character names, dialog, parentheticals). Once you get that down, you learn the all the tips for writing good screenplays.

Off the top of my head, there’s some basic rules to keep in mind. One of the most important ones drilled in my head is that when writing a screenplay, you need to remember what you AREN’T doing. You’re not directing actors, you’re not planning shots, you’re not pacing dramatic moments. A good way to learn this basically is reading actual scripts for ‘real’ plays, and then comparing them to screenplays written about the actual plays. (Top of my head, Glengarry and Glen Ross, in fact any of Mamets plays-turned-movies.)

It may be obvious but reminding yourself you’re writing a play that will end up on screen is sometimes important. Save the acting to the actors, the directing to the directors, and the cinematography for the cinematographer.

This manifests in many different ways, one of which being things like giving a character an accent. That is not your job, that is the actors job. Type the words in English and let them come up with the accents and pidgin words. The rare exception to this is if you have someone with a thick accent being misinterpreted, but then you usually explain that in the actions surrounding the incident. It’s sometimes acceptable to make a Note: within the script but it should be used sparingly.

And of course the last one is, if you’re writing a screenplay for your eyes only, for one of your own projects, you can break or bend any of these rules.

I’m more then happy to show you the basics and/or critique any work do, either formatting critique or content critique.

Ren’Py is an engine that supports the creation of visual novels and dating sims, forms of computer-mediated storytelling. It supports a movie script-like syntax that makes creating simple games easy, while still being customizable and extensible by advanced creators. With no additional work by the game-maker, it supports features expected of all visual novels, like loading, saving, preferences, and rollback.

I’ve always been interested in this concept of creating a ’storytelling engine.’  This one in particular is based heavily on Python and has you writing a lot of scripts.  In this case, this is one of those things I know I could do myself in Flash, but the fact that someone took the time to make a universal engine is appealing to me, in that I *wouldn’t* have to do it myself in Flash.

The appeal of these things is that the time saved from not having to do it yourself can be spent on better telling a story.  This is the main appeal to me.  I’m not sure how complicated the games can be, but when you refer to them as “visual novels” it suddenly becomes more acceptable to make them just narrative-heavy interactive works of fiction.  It’s worth trying out.

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page