Mar 16 2011

BALANCE

I’ll be honest: I haven’t got much done since Monday.

What I have got done isn’t very visible, either! I’ve been messing around with game balance and testing some major rules changes. Mostly, I tried making time less important, but it turned out that’s where a lot of the excitement comes from, so I’m making it more important and more visible. I’m also trying to figure out how to redesign the UI to make a bunch of things clearer (like your weapons overheating, and what the hell’s actually going on!).

So what’s next for the rest of this week?

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Mar 14 2011

40 HOURS

I’ve been having trouble with my work ethic, so last week I committed myself to doing 40 hours of proper work, no matter what. The idea was, everyone does a 40 hour week as normal, right? So it should be easy – the bare minimum. Shame on me if I can’t do it.

Given my tendency to muck about, this meant I ended up working pretty much solidly through the evenings of Monday-Friday, but I did it! And that 40 hours work led to a pretty solid start on my new game. There’s a new playable version beneath the jump.

Give it some time to load. It’s about a megabyte, and I haven’t written a preloader yet. You’ll hear the music when it starts 🙂

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Mar 11 2011

FIGHT BACK: CYCLES AND VARIATIONS

This week’s been crazily productive! I’ve actually just about hit that 40 hour target, which is mental, since I haven’t been counting all the time faffing on the Internet and dithering.

Back on Wednesday, I’d finished creating a rough experience that was fun for a few seconds but rapidly got old. Since then I’ve been setting up the longer-term things that will keep the game fresh.

I’m building the game up using what I’ve heard described as the ‘cycles within cycles’ concept. It’s what you get when there are multiple layers to the game, with larger cycles driven by the smaller cycles repeating inside them, and the smaller cycles given new context by progress through the larger cycles. In the case of Fight Back you’ll dash forwards and back repeatedly to kill enemy ships, you’ll kill enemy ships to clear waves, you’ll clear waves to reach bosses, you’ll defeat bosses to progress the game, you’ll play through the game repeatedly to unlock new stuff, and so on.

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Mar 07 2011

FIGHT BACK: CONTROLS

I set myself a goal for this week: I’d spend 40 hours actually working, no matter what! I’ve managed 8 hours on day 1, so I think I’m on target. 😀 And what have I been working on?

FIGHT BACK

Super early version below the jump, since it’s quite CPU intensive.
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Mar 04 2011

DAY OFF

I’ve been sticking to 5 blog posts a week, but it’s a tough schedule when you have unproductive days like today so have nothing to show for it. 😀 I’m going to shift down to three posts a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings – at least until the main projects I’m working on right now mature and I can start talking about them.

Here’s a consolation MP3 about sad things that are good things: little pieces.mp3

Mar 03 2011

2D CAMERAS

I touched on this in my last post, but I want to go into more detail. When I’m working on a 2D game, I really, really care about getting the camera right – so you can see everything you need to, but no screen space is wasted.

One game that got this awesomely right was Ted Lauterbach’s suteF. If you haven’t played it, do it, then come back! Spoilers ahead, even in the video:


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Mar 02 2011

THE VISUAL MOCKUP

The first thing I’ll do when starting a new game is to scribble down notes and ideas. Maybe I’ll draw little diagrams of how stuff works, but in general it’s just about getting how the game works down on paper. I have dozens of little text files full of notes for projects I’ll probably never get round to.

The second thing I do is work a visual mockup – a fake screenshot – and design the interface.

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Mar 01 2011

SNOW LEVEL.

EVERY GAME MUST HAVE ONE

I finally broke out of this brutal X-Com addiction of the last few days and got back to work. I’ve been doing more Flash. For fun, I’ve ported Beacon’s astro-guy over, and then SNOW LEVEL. New Flash experiment below:
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Feb 28 2011

X-COM

Totally unrelated – here’s a recent ambient track I did: Eclipse – enjoy!

Anyway. There was something about the mid 90s through to the turn of the millennium, when rapidly expanding budgets in game development and freedom to explore big ideas led to a run of mad, feature-rich, ambitious messes. Nowadays everyone knows to spend big budgets on polish, but back then there were just enough people crazy enough to throw money at great games like Terra Nova, System Shock, Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex, GTA 3 and Morrowind… and the one I want to talk about, UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka X-COM: UFO Defense), from 1994.

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