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, […]
games design
168 posts
How slow is making iPhone apps using native code? You have to write HTML5, right, if you want FAST app development on iPhone? Or Unity? Or cocos2d? Right? Or … write it in Objective-C … a beginner-friendly “native” language: 2 hrs and 15 mins to create the artwork, design the […]
Toribash is, simply, awesome. You need no knowledge, you work in bullet-time, deciding which limbs to bend or stiffen, and see a second-by-second preview of what each change would do. String them together, build jaw-dropping martial arts attacks. The build quality’s poor (no docs, no installer, poor handling for savefiles, […]
http://gigaom.com/europe/makie-future-doll-toy-funding/ “We’re making toys using game data and 3D printing,” explains Alice Taylor, Makielab co-founder and CEO. “We call ourselves a smart toy company, and for us that means there’s a digital side to it by default.” The company slogan is “the action doll you design”, and here’s the concept […]
(back to playing RotMG again) 1. the Oryx assault: make it more inclusive, more multi-player Background: sooner or later, players learn that it is impossible to gain anything from the (compulsory) assault except level-ups. The assult is grouped into 3 separate squads of players, each of which have their own […]
I’ve played many hundreds – probably over a thousand – games on Kongregate alone, now. On top of all the thousands I’ve played on console, PC, flash, handheld, mobile, etc. I feel pretty confident in analysing game mechanics, and success/fail reasons for given game-designs, based off my extensive experience. I […]
I can’t find this. NASA’s web presence (in their defence, they have a **** tonne of data) is damn hard to navigate for simple queries (i.e. anything that’s not highly-specific, PhD material). I’ve found the “12 months of the year blue marble” dataset that gives you: Earth, without clouds. And […]
One of the peculiar distinctions of Jack Vance’s writing is that he vomits obscure words onto the page as if he’d just eaten a dictionary that severely disagreed with him. Sometimes he seems to be parodying his characters – but other times he happily does it for himself. To be […]
Hume just posted his Lessons Learned from the warmup for Ludum Dare 23 (48 hours to write a game from scratch – starts this weekend!) – and his positive experience using an Entity System. In his epic comment (sparked by a different Adam – not me, honest), is this gem: […]
Thanks to Mike Leahy for spotting this: http://blog.gemserk.com/2012/02/02/how-we-use-box2d-with-artemis/ …a short blog post (with code) on how a team is integrating Box2D (a very well known open source physics lib) with Artemis (a java implementation of Entity Systems which starts from the same point as my Entity Systems posts, but fleshes […]
I’ve recently been playing the excellent Realm of the Mad God – a very fast-paced 2d co-operative shooter. My feeling is that it’s going to be one of the most important games of 2011/2012, as it continues to grow in popularity. Typical experience of this game is that within 30 […]
TheChaosEngine – private forums hangout for games-industry professionals. There’s an epic thread on there where people post projects they / their team / their employer has published on iPhone. It’s currently 40 pages long, so I went through and pulled out the links to the iTunes pages for each game. […]
In the ongoing, epic comments (300+ and counting!) for my Entity Systems posts, one of the recurring questions is: What makes a good Component? How should I split my conceptual model into Entities and Components? How should I split my algorithms and methods into Systems? It’s often difficult to answer […]
http://www.gamepitches.com/ (just discovered this, via TCE): The repository for video game pitches and design documents This site serves to be a free resource to game designers offering them the web’s largest single collection of game design documents and game pitches. It says “resource got game designers”, but … pitch documents […]
Looks like a “normal” KickStarter project for a new Tower Defence game. Halfway through the demo video, it switches to “here’s how I’ve been using GA to detect game-design flaws, and to test ideas in tweaking game design”. Something I’ve wanted to do for more than a decade, but could […]
As a free-time project, I’ve been writing a Risk clone (*) for iPad. One of the bits I like best right now is that you can give it the URL of *any* SVG file on the web, and it automatically turns it into a Risk map. (e.g. all the maps […]
Against my own advice, I submitted an eleventh hour proposal for the 2012 GDC. I’ve fallen in love with San Francisco, but I’m in two minds about going next year, it seems to have too much of E3 about it. The simple beauty of a conference for games people, about […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Major changes: Enemies have health, and can be killed by touching them Performance is another 30% faster (should be running OK on most phones now?) Enemies have a direction indicator (not necessary right now, but it’ll become important […]
http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/lwjgl16k/25093/view.html “the LWJGL16k competition starts right here, right now.” – Cas The rules First deadline: 25th November 2011 First task: get a black screen running using LWJGL “you’ve got 7 days. All I’m looking for at this stage from you is a blank window opening up and maybe a rotating […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Three major changes: You have a health bar, and can die The trackball is now supported for movement Performance is literally 1.5x – 2x faster Download link Chess Quest-0.3.3 So, a friend of mine tried it out today, […]