Master of Mana was a great game – much better than Civ5, and from what we’ve seen of Civ6, Firaxis is still playing catch-up in a few areas :). The author has disappeared, and his website has been taken over by scammers (not even going to link it), but the […]
games design
168 posts
Current features commit 26eafb7865965fd5ef5ee3ad4863f00acf8d10a2 Generates hexes landscapes, with heights (Civ5 bored me by being flat-McFlat-in-flatland) Every hex is selectable, using custom fix for Unity’s broken mouse-click handler (see below) Any object sitting on landscape is selectable (ditto) Selected units move if you click any of the adjacent hexes (shown using […]
Some screenshots from today’s improvements. I’m moving gradually towards releasing version 2. Shortlist of changes/improvements below… From this mess … to this: Building some odd machines to test it works: Features and fixes recently added Use shaded, materialed meshes for in-editor handles, instead of flat ugly rectangles and tris Click/tap […]
Civilization was one of the best games ever designed and shipped. Civ5 is tragic. It’s one thing to launch a AAA title full of nerfed gameplay and obvious, in-your-face bugs, but quite another to leave them unfixed for years after. It’s one thing to officially fix your bugs only in […]
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 […]
Unity3D has a great core architecture – it’s easy to understand and use. However, it has some significant flaws. One of the recurring problems I run into is that Unity requirs you to have precisely one “Scene” at any one time, but often you need to have multiple scenes at […]
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 […]
How do you make good UX / GUI to present information to a mass-market audience with widely varying levels of education and attention-span? This is a problem faced all the time by game designers and developers. It’s one of the most under-appreciated skills of the profession: good game developers know […]
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]
Added a level-select screen: I say “level-select”, but … that background is a full 3D terrain, and the cities are procedurally generated/unlocked, so … it’ll hopefully become something a lot more, eventually.
When you first install Blender, DO THIS! Menu: File > User Preferences… > System When you look at objects in edit mode, they’ll look something like this: Why? Blender makes it very easy to get a face back-to-front. Or to have two faces overlapping. Or … any number of other […]
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?
I needed fast, efficient, … but powerful, adaptable … pathfinding for my hobby project. My minions have to fly, walk, crawl, teleport, tunnel their way across a procedural landscape. Getting to that point has been tricky, but the journey’s been interesting. We want something that intelligently routes creatures around obstacles, […]
Two things arrived in the post today, on the same day. (incidentally, one via FedEx, which was great, and one via UPS, which was dire – and gave my package to a stranger even though I was in the building WAITING for them to arrive). Here they are, side by […]
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. […]
Step 1: Do not buy the book with this title. Writing a book is tough, and I respect the time and effort that goes into it. But I don’t rate a book highly simply because it was hard to write: it has to fulfil it’s purpose, and help the reader. […]
This year I’m working on two different projects that need an Entity System (ES). One of them is a non-game app written natively on iOS + Android. The other is an FPS in Unity3D. There are good, basic Open-Source ES’s out there today (and c.f. the sidebar there). I tried […]
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 […]
Game Development Principles I’ve recently been working with a group of teenagers, helping them learn to program for themselves, and build their own iPhone/iPad/Android games. So, when Cengage offered me a review copy of this book, I thought it would be a good idea to have a look and see […]