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PETAR.KOTEVSKI.NET
News & Events
Ideas & Rants
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DISCLAIMER: The articles and commentary expressed on this site are personal and do not represent in any way the opinions of any companies that I work for (or have worked for) or represent (or have represented in the past). The program code and instruction on this page is provided "as-is". I am not responsible for any damage occurring from using that code or following any instructions as specified here.

NEWS
Welcome to the relaunched site!
Saturday, 31 August 2013

Welcome to the new and relaunched petar.kotevski.net. It has been 5 years since this site was last updated, and the site design was looking pretty dated, so I decided to reboot it.

The new design has the same goals - no fancy stuff, quick loading and easy maintenance. I tried using some of them fancy CMS packages (Joomla and the like) - but they are horrible. That is why I decided to stick with my dear old TARATURcms - proudly programmed in ASP years ago by yours truly.

I have been in Macedonia for almost the past 3 years. I rested a little bit, got my bearings, founded a gamedev studio (www.kamaikamai.com) and created a prototype for our first game - you will be hearing about it shortly. Developing this new game helped me clarify some of my ideas about game development, and I will be writing about them on this site (in the Ideas&Rants section).

I also plan on updating this site more regularly. You know you have heard that before...
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Thanksgiving update!
Sunday, 30 November 2008

Finally, an update to the site (and I also implemented reCaptcha for the Macedonian side of the site). I have updated my resume for anyone interested in what I am currently working on at Bungie. It is really interesting, just the right amount of challenge and plain hard work- we are really cooking up something incredibly good for Bungies' next offering. Meanwhile, I dug out a low-enough resolution version of the Bungie vidoc (developer diary) that I was featured in. Here it is, preserved for posterity:

Watch Halo 3 Cinema Paradiso vidoc

In other news, I have been playing a lot of games and thus not had some time to write up impressions of them. I just posted my Assassins Creed review, and I am working on reviews for Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4, Dead Space, Mirrors Edge (quick preview: I love it!), Gears of War 2 (quick preview: I hate it), Winning Eleven 2007 (yeah I know it's 2009 almost), GTA IV, Far Cry 2, Fable 2, Crysis Warhead.... In a word - a lot of stuff. I will try to miss one night of playing Winning Eleven 2007 on XBOX Live to write up more stuff for the site. Also, keep an eye out for Halo 3: Recon ODST. You have never seen an expansion like that one, trust me.
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FIGHT THE KIPPLE!
Friday, 13 June 2008

    "Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more"

The internet is the greatest modern kipple agent. When nobody is around, junk reproduces itself in comment posts or indeed any unprotected form on your site. I had not checked the site for a month or so, and when I finally did, the comment sections were full of url's for everything from viagra to penis enlargement to "meet hot women". So I had to install the contemporary equivalent of a Voight-Kampf test - a program that can distinguish between a bot and a human.

    I found this great script called reCAPTCHA which was really easy to integrate into the site code, so now every time you write a comment - you have to type in 2 words presented to you in a distorted image. It's a little annoying, but the cool thing is that they are using words that people type to digitize books. That alone made me overlook the relative ugliness of the form they provide.     By the way, I can't believe that kipple is not in my computer's spelling dictionary. It's one of the coolest concepts, introduced in Phillip K. Dicks story "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" (that's where the quote is from).
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'Bout time for a site update, huh?
Friday, 28 March 2008

Haven't had much time to keep the site up-to date recently, but a lot of interesting things happened.

Working at Bungie turned out to be quite an enjoyable experience, Halo 3 shipped and sold millions and now I am hard at work on the next big thing to come out of the newly independent Bungie.

I had a blast working on Halo 3, specifically on the Forge which turned out to be a huge hit among the Halo fans. For the next project I am coming back to more familiar territory, working on singleplayer. I was featured in one of the Bungie video developer diaries, and I will post it here as soon as I find a low enough resolution version that will fit this beautiful frame.

Recently, I have been playing exclusively on the XBOX360 - I seem to be losing the stomach for PC games, and I hate to admit it but I find myself preferring a game controller to the mouse/keyboard combo.
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Started working for Bungie!
Sunday, 20 August 2006

Starting last week, I am now a full time employee of Bungie, and I have moved to Seattle (Kirkland to be more exact). As you may or may not know, Bungie is owned by Microsoft, so I am indirectly (and directly, I guess) a Microsoft employee. That's not bad at all, at least judging from what I have seen and heard so far. I am really excited to get to work on the next Halo and to help improve it any way I can. So far, the company looks great, a lot of talent, good work conditions, great work ethic. We will see what happens once they realize who they let through the door :) All jokes aside, so far so good.
I don't have much to say about my short stint at Spark Unlimited. I wish them all the best of luck in the future and I hope they can realize their full potential as a company - by using Microsoft products since realizing their potential is Microsoft's motto (I took that from the 2 day orientation at Microsoft).

So people, stay tuned and lets see what happens. I might get to do more reviews since I have only been on the job for 3 days and I have already scored 2 free games! Yipee.
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Started playing Oblivion...
Monday, 1 May 2006

After reading and hearing enough about Oblivion, I decided to shell out the $50 bucks to finally buy it and try it out. I was hoping it was not the same old plain vanilla RPG formula rehashed enough times that the critics had lost their edge and just collectively lowered their standards.

And so here I am about an hour and a half into the experience, and I find that that seems to be exactly what happened. The first hour was basically a tour of all the flaws of traditional RPG's:
1. You are thrust into a story that just throws a lot of names like Smerghoal and Khrzimir at you, expecting you to make a mental picture of the world and the places and people in it- without actually helping you at that.
2. It forces you to make decisions that affect your entire playing experience 10 minutes into the game (like what star you were born under, are you a Mage or Thief or whatever). I don't understand the people that make these games - how can you make an informed decision without being told anything?
...trust me the list goes on.

I also thought that the first hour of walking through what was essentially a sausage level layout (even though it curved around corners) was especially boring - the endless rat battles included. As in all RPG's, the player is woefully inept at using any sort of weapon this early in the game, but they usually give you one projectile spell (which is none too effective at anything beyond the space-filler enemies). The randomly placed chests (some of them randomly locked) completely shatter any sort of believability (at least for me) and at one occasion I had to lock-pick my way into the store that was selling horses and lock-pick my way out!! If that wasn't ridiculous enough, the guy who was selling horses did not find that at all weird, and even proceeded to lay on his bed AND SLEEP, while I - a perfect stranger that just lock-picked into his store - was standing RIGHT THERE next to the bed.

You may think these are details, but you would be wrong. I am the perfect casual gamer - I will recognize fun and innovation, but I will not wait around for hours waiting for it to begin. As this game goes, I would have dropped it 10 times so far if not for a strictly professional interest. Too many people have been telling me that this game is good, so I will hold my judgment. I will not give it more than 5-6 hours though, so it better get interesting pretty damn soon.

In the meantime lets repeat the mantra: YOU HAVE TO TRAP THE PLAYER'S INTEREST IN THE FIRST 15-30 MINUTES - they must be the best 15-30 minutes in your game; MAKE SURE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE MAKES SENSE IN YOUR GAME WORLD (case in point, the lock-pick store example). Rinse, repeat...
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