Disgaea 3!

Well, it's been a long time since I've posted, mostly because I've been busy moving to Seattle, WA, and getting everything organized. The trip was about 30hrs long as I was traveling half way across the country in order to get here. Once we got here it took us a while to find a place to stay and once we did another friend of mine decided to come up and live with us. Enough about that, let's get to the game!

The game this time is Disgaea 3, which I've put around 100hrs into and still have quite a bit to accomplish. As with all Disgaea games it's a tile based strategy with 3D environments and 2D sprites for characters and enemies. The plot consists of a Netherworld Academy with the Overlord as the Dean and the Greater Demons as Teachers. You're a honor student in this school as well as the Overlords son, Mao, although I say honor student, it's not really what comes to mind. Demons are expected to not attend classes, and to follow their instincts for causing trouble and chaos. Throughout the course of the game you meet other students, be them honor students or delinquits, a few teachers and the infamous PTA. Mao's goal in life is to destroy his father and take over the throne, with him is his butler Geoffry who has raised Mao since he was a young demon in training. Mao is learning how to become a super hero in order to defeat his father, and is researching this with comics, video games, and any other materials he can get his hands on.

As with most tile based strategy games you're givin a select few characters at the beginning to get things started. The first few battles begin by pitting Mao against easy tutorial missions dealing teach the ropes of the controls and battle system and leave the more intricate game play strategies a little less apparent. The first Disgaea game introduced Item World, where you plow through levels of monsters increasing the potential of the weapon. This concept is in Disgaea 2 and follows through to Disgaea 3, with the new game comes an introduction to a new concept, the Class World. Essentially all it is, is an Item World for character building. Instead of delving into an sword to increase the stat bonuses and strength of the weapon, you delve into a character to increase the stats, transfer abilities between characters, or transfer evilties. Apart from that the new Disgaea is pretty similiar to its predecessors.

The music in the game needs a lot of work, I think there's a total of two or three songs for the duration of the game. I did find a music store which I could purchase approximately 10+ songs but I lacked the money for them at the time the shop randomly spawned in the Item World so I was unable to find out if there is an option to adjust the music in certain areas. One other area I feel the game could improve on is sprite detail. It's like they brought Super Nintendo quality sprites and tossed them on higher quality 3D landscapes.

I'll add some things to this post later to elaborate more...like pictures!

Experments Projects Start Of Classes

So classes officially started last week. I'm already impressed with what were going to be doing this semester especially with my Cent 315 course. Or final project for Cent 315 is a fully functioning online course system that can manage students tasks virtual machines vpn's and ways into the network (also to build the network) to audio and video and between the instructor and students as well as recording and storing the video for later use. Of course we are expected to try and get it to actually work as much as possible with the equipment we have. Sounds like its gonna be fun and challenging. Ive already picked out a few different candidates for software we can use though im still open to more. One of the things im considering is using our xserve to do quicktime streaming that may be the easeast for playing back old videos or even just handling all of the streaming. But for the live confrencing part im not so sure im looking into microsoft's communication server. Im trying to install that locally in a few virtual machines at home just to see how it goes. Man does it require a lot of things to run though. Server 2003, Sqlserver, Active Directory, Dns, IIS, and the list goes on. Was having trouble for a while trying to get it to connect to the instance of SQL server I installed finally figured out why it was not working. The SQL server version i installed was pre sp1 doh... Updating now will try again when done.

Introduction

Hello! Welcome to Innoblox, a blog that follows game concepts and will introduce new ones that can help push the game industry forward with new innovative games. The name Innoblox can be thought of as Innovation and Blocks, concepts utilizing innovation as the building blocks of a better game!

Just to start this blog off I want to post a little bit about myself, I recently graduated college with a Bachelors in Game Software Development. I am very passionate about games, having played them since I was 6 years old playing on my mother's ColecoVision. This blogs design, at least from my contribution, will be towards game concepts: Building, Tweaking, and Analyzing.