New Game Update

BlueLid labs made another blog post about the next upcoming game about a cat named Nox. Check it out.

Nox Update

Game Design

I am always looking for “the better way”.  Today I discovered The Game Prodigy blog/site and am glad that I did.  In several of the posts, the author (Brice Morrison) discussions the Game Design Canvas. 

From his introductory post:

“Through analyzing countless independent and corporate titles over the course of the last several years, I’ve come to believe that there is a standard way of designing and studying games.  Changes in the industry don’t disrupt it.  New companies, new genres, and new controllers don’t change it.  Independent or corporate, these rules are the same.  These are systemic laws that are immutable.  Developers ignore them at their own risk.

This approach is called the Game Design Canvas.  It is made up of five different components: The Core Experience, Base Mechanics, Reward and Punishment Structures, Long Term Incentive, and Aesthetic Layout.  The Game Design Canvas’s goal is to provide a powerful analytical and planning tool for developers, independent and industry veterans alike.  All games have aspects that can be represented in the Canvas, and through it, it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of any game for the purposes of study and improvement on future projects.”⁽¹⁾

Right off the bat this approach has spoken to me.  Not an expert yet, but I will be using the Game Design Canvas in creating my games.  In fact, I have already started using it in designing my current game. 

I’ve started to define the Core Experience, which Brice says:

“This is the feeling that the game is trying to evoke, the .inner emotion that the player is going through as they play.”⁽¹⁾

It is fun to do this and very liberating and empowering.  It gives me direction, which gives my enormous confidence in the game.

I suggest you read the article and the subsequent ones on the topic of The Game Design Canvas.

⁽¹⁾The Game Design Canvas: An Introduction. 

More Game

I stayed up late into the night working on my game, and in it I want certain sprites, when touched by the player, to go to a certain spot in the HUD and stay there;  I apparently need to learn more about vectors and the math associated with them.  So for now, they are just going to magically appear there with no seeking.  Eventually I will.

 

The game is coming along well; I have a system using Tiled map editor to create the levels and actionscript code to put them on the screen.  Pretty slick.  I am using flixel, which makes it incredibly awesome and easy, and for the basic tile map import I am using code from this guy.  I have enemies in the game, some things to help you out, and (the best part so far) sound effects.

Coming along!

Push

I have started developing a new game using the Slick game library.  It’s a simple game of moving around blocks to put them into the correct spots.  I haven’t got very far, just a working example with two blocks, but I am pretty excited.  In the screen shot you simply move the red and green squares into the big yellow one.   When one of the smaller squares is fully inside the yellow square it shrinks and spins.  When both squares have been put in the yellow square, you win.  There is some collision detection.  You can’t go off the screen and you can’t go through any of the little squares.   No big deal.  Pretty simple.   I have plans of making it bigger though.

TicTacToe the Game

I finally finished a game!  This may seem like no big deal to most programmers, but for me it is, because I finally finished a game.  I have often started to write one but have always quickly become bogged down by the details.

So here it is in all of its glory!!  You can download it here.  Later, because now I have to get to work, I will go into the details of how I made it, and then everyone can give me tips on how to make it better.

Game Dev Focus

It’s been a very long time since I said I wanted to develop a game.  And I have been very busy since then.  Work, home, etc.  But I have been tinkering in the meantime.  I have experimented with Python using PyGame and Panda3D.  The trick to that is I don’t know Python (yet).  I have played around with java using  LWJGL, Slick, and a little bit of  jME.  I’ve even just did some accelrated graphics using Java2D thanks to the great tutorials on Coke And Code.

I am going to make a game; game development is fast becoming my software engineering passion.  I have decided to start with a simple Tic Tac Toe game using Java2D and accelerated graphics, which I have already begun to develop in the spare time I can spare.  If you are reading and are interested, keep coming back and see the results.

Thanks again for everyone in the world who creates game libraries, tutorials, etc.

Game Development

I, like many others, love computer games, and I, like many others, would like to create computer games, and since I have never made a computer game before, I am going to give it a go.  I will post my successes and failures here and share them with the world.  Maybe we can learn together.  Feel free to leave comments and subscribe to my feed.