Before I forget, a few pics that ended up on Flickr…

Images by Mat, of course. A few more (just a few!!) are on the official Flickr feed for us.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity – ‘Captive’ by Will Carpenter

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

Guild Wars – ‘No Beautiful Day’ by Melanie Lauterbach

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

By complete coincidence – I was looking at Aion-Welten.de, who’ve been driving traffic this way recently (Hello, Germans!) – I found a video of NCsoft Interactive’s panel presentation at Penny Arcade Expo, which is embedded below. This first part deals mostly with Aion, and is a good general overview of the game.

You’ll quickly see that this has been recorded by a fan in the audience, so excuse the quality. Come to think of it, that leads me to ask your opinion: wouldn’t you like to see this stuff recorded and presented officially through NCsoft channels?

Indeed, perhaps this is something my team should be doing (given we’re doing so much other video stuff). Hmmmm? Do let me know in comments. The more of you who want it… the more likely it’ll happen for future events.

Hint. Hint.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

To save on embeds – part 2, where Joe Morrissey talks about Issue 13 (although I’d dare say you eagle-eyed Forum users know all this already) is here… and part 4, which confusingly seems to continue from part 2, is here.

While it’s not a full-fledged preview, Shawn Schuster over at Massively gave special mention to Aion’s presence at PAX, which is holding its own against ‘MMOs With Three-Letter-Acronyms That Begin With W’:

With the NCsoft booth occupying some precious real estate in the middle of the exhibition floor, the Aion side of that booth faced the entrance, which worked well in their favor. Even the buzz around the booth and from passersby seemed very positive during the first ever public hands-on of this fantasy/flight MMO.

(Although of course, technically, PAX is hosting the first ever US-based public hands-on – as we debuted Aion at Games Convention.)

Let’s hope players like what they see (and play), eh?

Stacks of MOO boxes

More MOO cards

Stacks and stacks and stacks

Cards being sorted

Saturday cards, lined up

Ooooh, what’s this then?

Hint: that’s German text.

Got someone to throw a glass of water over a colleague today – and caught it all on film. Boy, some days… more on what that’s about soon enough.

Working hard on everything Leipzig. Pay attention to Twitter, if you’re that way inclined (or if you’re not, the most recent updates are on the front page here) and you’ll get a minute-by-minute.

Okay, you won’t, that would be stupid, but you’ll get occasional random updates when I’m too busy to sit and type here. Tonight my brain isn’t functioning enough to do anything more creative, so you see me here, rambling.

Let’s see.

We’ve now seen whizzo 3D mockups of the booth for Leipzig/GC. They look fantastic. I was tempted to ask if I could put them up here, and might still do. I always love looking at those sort of things – photo realistic fantasy architecture. The scale of the stand is just colossal, too. We were looking at one view and someone said “We’re thinking of replacing those TVs, as they might be too small.” Without being sarcastic* I had to say “What TVs?” as I couldn’t even see them.

Some pointing revealed them – three 42in widescreen TVs… which looked like matchboxes on the side of this stand. It’s… big.

We’re recording material for episode no. 4 of the podcast tomorrow; going to try and make the whole thing a lot faster this time out, more bite-sized. Speaking of podcasts if you haven’t listened to TabulaCast recently go have a listen – John and Matt did an excellent interview with TR’s Lead Designer, Tom Potter. Tom strikes me as a really good guy (not met him yet), and I was impressed with the questions, and with the interview style. Well done guys!

Speaking of interviews, you’ll like this (although I suspect, not a lot). Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl asked me to answer a few questions on ‘getting into the games business’ recently, and I finally got around to answering them. Honestly, I pretty much dashed off my answers because I was in a hurry. I have no way of knowing if he edited what I wrote… because naturally he translated it into German and posted it on his (official) Aion blog. So if you read German, then…

By the way, have you seen the Aion site now? It’s beautiful. Like the game. Trust me on the latter; been editing video of it all afternoon.

Uhhh… yeah, that’ll be it for now I think. Lots of video editing right now, casting should conclude next week, more Leipzig stuff is coming… and more I can’t even think through or process. G’night zzzzzzzz.

* Which most people I work with would agree, is an unusual occurrence.

The other day Seb Streiffert, our English language Aion Community Coordinator, asked for the 100 or so members of the official Aion: The Tower of Eternity Facebook group to recruit a few friends. He wanted to get the group up to 500 people.

To give the group an incentive to recruit people, he promised the release of some new concept art if the number was met.

First thought: really smart idea from a really smart guy. (Seb’s a textbook example of showing potential employers that you’re super-passionate about the job before you even apply for it; he ran an excellent Aion fansite before we headhunted him for the job.)

Second thought: will they make it?

I guess I shouldn’t have wondered, because in just under two days the group’s grown past 500 members, and Seb – true to his word – released not one but two pieces of concept art as a thank-you. Here’s number one, and here’s number two.

If you’re on Facebook, you too can get sneaky peeks at cool Aion stuff by joining the official group for the game. So there.