computer games
137 posts
There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a […]
Background Every Saturday, thousands of indie / hobbyist game developers publish screenshots of their in-progress games. Unlike most forms of marketing, this is: honest / genuinely representative (it’s actual content) interesting (show’s the dev’s intentions) exciting (pictures of games are usually more fun than words) i.e. … it’s an amazing […]
Ask 10 game developers if you should use more script code or less, and you will get 11 different answers. They are all correct: it’s very situation-specific. Use of scripting languages is highly dependent on the humans and the practical / project-management issues. Why?
This year, one of my goals was to build a sane, powerful, viable Entity System / Entity-Component System within Unity3D. Something I could build current and future games on, and save a lot of dev-time (both in ease-of-use and in easily adding missing features that I wish Unity had). @t_machine_org […]
Inspired by Markus / @notch, and how he got MineCraft going in the early days, I’m live-prototyping a game idea I’ve been thinking about for ages. It’s about exploring a landscape … where cities affect dungeons, and dungeons affect cities. (this is stress-relief for me, an “evenings and weekends” project. […]
In 2014, I’ll be making a new game in Unity that makes intensive use of an Entity System. This will give me lots of ammo for a new post exploring the pros and cons of Unity’s “partial” Entity System architecture. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the last […]
I skipped the first day (long week, needed a break), but here’s a crappy playable demo after my first day: Download links: Windows Mac OS X
Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
OK, a completely different approach this time (based on the “new technique for Render to Texture” that I mentioned last time). And it works a lot better – lighting, shaders, etc is all there for free (but something is wrong with the side-to-side)
A bunch of indie game devs (including various friends of mine) are doing an AMA right now on Reddit. Go have a look (and ask some questions) if interested. I found the answers this question a bit depressing though, given that the audience has increased 100-fold in the last 2 […]
“Magnetic by Nature” is using the C# version of Artemis, an Entity System based in part on my original ES posts. Go back it now (they only want $10k total!) …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_Experiment (unsubstantiated, but hilarious): “If the measurement is close enough to the surface, light rays can curve downward at a rate equal to the mean curvature of the Earth’s surface. In this case, the two effects of curvature and refraction cancel each other out and the Earth will appear flat […]
OMGWTFBBQ… http://uk.ign.com/videos/2013/03/28/activision-reveals-next-gen-tech IMHO this is one of those watersheds: for the people who still believe “I could tell” if video is fake … no, you can’t. Done properly, you really can’t. UPDATE: and the blog from one of the guys who did it
Ashelia/HellMode’s review of Tomb Raider 2013: “Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of […]
Carlo Delallana responds to the sensationalized report that “I think most game designers really just suck”: “One of biggest problems that game designers face in their path towards mastery is respect. It’s easy to respect an artist with a demonstrable skill, no average person assumes they can do what an […]
Background Last year, Pearson ran the first ever Innov8 competition, giving tech startups a chance to make their own innovative new product/project. The grand prize was £5,000 towards building the product. Most of the teams were adults (even: real companies), but a team of students from Blatchington Mill School won, […]
I noticed a few months back that Pat Wyatt has been blogging rgularly and in a lot of detail last year. This (IMHO) is big news: Pat is an awesome developer who held key positions in the teams behind many of the bestselling computer games (e.g.: Diablo 1 + 2, […]
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]