I played The Marriage, read the explanation and read the interview with Rod Humble on Arthouse Games. Good thoughts all around. Good interview. If you haven’t yet played the game, do so. If you haven’t read the interview, I suggest it.
The circles represent outside elements effecting the marriage. Will this one be for the better?
The game is interesting. I’m glad it’s getting the attention it is, but I must say I’m disappointed.
“I like to jump. You like to jump. My mom likes to jump. We all like to jump.” – My 6th grade jump instructor
Little Loki Escapes from Hell, which I developed at Liquid Generation, was my first experience developing a reflex based platformer game. It was the result of a bit of brainstorming and a good deal of freedom during the calm storm between projects. It was the type of project I’d been wanting to develop for a while and I dived in. I invite you to read about a story of its development.
I remember when I first got my Wii online, I immediately went to try out some flash games. If you found the right mouse controlled stuff, it would become clear that there was territory to be explored.
I was just looking through some things at wiicade.com and thinking about it. I don’t see anything particularly innovative, but they’re pushing and making high quality stuff and that’s really good to see.
I didn’t spot anything that seemed specifically built for the wii. By that I mean, something that didn’t seem just as fun with a mouse. Playing with a wiimote is a different experience, but not by much.
What kind of a game would it take to separate the motes from the mice?
I don’t know really, but I like the gun games and the missile flight one is pretty cool. . . . A sword game could be interesting.
-Christopher J. Rock
Hello everybody! I am Bryson Whiteman, the one and only. And I’m here to say a few words about all this Sokay business. It may seem like all this happened over night. 
Like I put it all together as I do Ikea furniture, spending half a day flipping pieces around trying to match them to the clearly illustrated drawings, sweating and frustrated, cursing when the drawer turns out to be upside down. I’d like to squash all these rumors and confirm to you once and for all that all this Sokay business did not happen over night. It happened over the course of many nights, as a matter of fact, and I’d like to say some words about it.
In 2002 I created the Sokay label with my good old friend Ricky Enriquez. We had just began work on a new project, a video game made in Flash. The then un-named project was meant to push our capabilities as far as possible. We saw the success of the format in games like Alien Hominid and wanted to go even further to provide an experience similar to popping that new cart you got for your birthday into your Sega Genesis. We weren’t aiming to simply make a single stage. We wanted to create a full game. With a full world. And characters that lived in the world, that weren’t just placed there arbitrarily. This project became Thugjacker, which is the first game released by Sokay.
Ricky and I had worked together on many projects over the course of several years at that point, nothing that ever came to completion. Comics and animations mostly. Thugjacker was our first game. We designed a pipeline that was adapted from a previous Flash project and just saw where it lead us. I worked with my lack of actionscript experience and kept it real, we didn’t want to lower expectations just because it was difficult. We were going to make something that we were proud of.
We released a 2 level demo of Thugjacker to the world on Thugtober 31st, 2004. A month prior to that we released a teaser animation. I was biting my nails because I had no idea how the world would react to it. The game impressed colleagues, fellow artists, but I had no idea how the general public would interpret it. I discovered soon that it was a success, all the work paid off. The release changed the direction we headed.
It wasn’t until this year that significant movement has taken place within the group. 
On February 27th of this year we released LUV Tank. It was a small project that I intended to jumpstart the team again. A few new members join in with David Rodriguez creating the concept and doing the character animation and the duo Trek & Ryan G contributing a soundtrack. Ricky returned to do the cinema scenes and I did the design, planning, Flash work and background art. A much different game but it retained that “Sokay Spirit”.
So what are we doing here? The point of this blog was to get out some ideas. I quickly discovered that there’s a lot more work that goes into game development than one would imagine without the firsthand experience. It’s great to think of great ideas for the “ultimate game” but it’s incredibly difficult to fill in the gaps of your idea to make it a cohesive experience. And it’s even more difficult to make it a fun and enjoyable to a wide array of people. I look at a lot of these principles as common sense because these are qualities that I’ve absorbed from a lifetime of game experience. I’m also keen with expressing these ideals as I’m trained as an artist. It’s great that we have this internet as a vast resource and our technology is all peachy these days so anybody with a bit of spare time and a bit of patience can bust out a game in Flash and show it to the world. 
There’s a lot of talented people out there. But for one reason or another they don’t seem to “get it” or maybe don’t have the determination to “make it happen”, when it comes to making quality work. I thought things were kind of bad a couple years ago when we released Thugjacker but it seems that things have grown even more diluted. More people are out there making stuff but they’re making average games. But if you dig, you just may find gold. And you will. I still think our work is “buried treasure” and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes it takes time for people to notice brilliance.
You might consider this blog an excercise in arrogance. There’s no problem with that. If you disagree, call us on our bullshit and fight back. We want to bring about discussion of serious topics about a medium that often is not taken very seriously. Sometimes you have to fight for the truth, even if it’s your own.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading! I know that fool Chris types too much but we want to make this a varied experience. I don’t care to get as serious as Chris a lot of the time so we’ll see how things turn out.
Adieu.
-Bryson
The player generally controls a “player character” within a game. I’ve heard designers discuss whether or not the player is becoming the player character, playing their role as a fictional character, or replacing them as their real selves within the fictional world. When you play Mario, are you playing as Mario as he saves the Mushroom Kingdom or are you saving the Mushroom Kingdom yourself? A lot of people say both are happening. You are yourself and the player character at the same time. How can that be possible?
I believe the blur comes from two issues. One, I’ll call an “illusion of individuality,” and the second “empathy.”
Now for a listing of events in which you have no interest!
My film went well last week. Everyone else’s work has gone smoothly as well. Last one tomorrow, then my mind can drift from shooting mode.
Meteor Henry continues nicely. My ultimate trigonometry AS file is annihilating, but I have a couple more updates to make before it is truly unstoppable. Before I do those, I have to throw together an AS file for converting between different coordinate systems, which may include 3D systems. The two of those would make a lot of physics and 3D rendering very simple. I look forward to seeing them in action and will try to get them up here for distribution.
I believe today I will finish an old blog article and try to get some writing done on a film I’d like to start next fall.
I am happy and productive!
-Christopher J. Rock
Sokay is a Los Angeles native game development crew.
The say it never rains in Southern California.
At Sokay, we make it rain.
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