The best thing about making games is that you can play them, and the best thing about randomness in games is that it adds a little bit of nondeterminism, so even if you can theoretically know what to expect from it, you can't pinpoint exactly what's gonna happen, so overall it still has some playability even if it's your game.
So in other words yeah, I played AstroBite today and playing it made me realize that I really want to finish it and therefore I'm resuming development.
Posted on Saturday 24 July 2010 - 08:14:53 by kiwi
Everybody likes to collect weird stuff from time to time, be it phone cards, earrings, shoes, just so they can be there for their sentimental value rather than functionality. I for instance enjoy collecting operating systems (mostly on DVDs)
I wonder how many people like to collect operating systems
Posted on Thursday 22 July 2010 - 22:38:09 by kiwi
Well here's an interesting piece of news, apparently you can decide what happens to Carmine in the latest installment of the Gears of War series.
I found this interesting not because of the voting itself because steering a game's direction according to gamers' feedback is a pretty old practice, even though it's mostly present on the indie scene, no, what I found interesting is the voting method, you have to buy a t-shirt that shows your intentions, which is probably the most inventive usage of the networking effect ever, because if you think about it for a second, the fact that you bought the t-shirt will most likely determine you to wear it, at least in the first few days, which in turn is more than enough time for people to notice your acquisition and seeing as this is all happening in cyberspace, there's a high probability they will continue the process.
Posted on Wednesday 21 July 2010 - 22:19:05 by kiwi
Today I was about to talk about the design of Too Human, but then I found this cute browser game on the tigsource forums and I just had to write a review, not only because of the game itself, but because I found the story behind the actual version of the game highly intriguing.
Starting out as a project for a contest with a deadline of 2-3 weeks and the "Movies Inspired by Games" theme, I think this game turned out quite ok if you take into consideration the short development time. The first thing that caught my attention was the fact that they followed one of the most important rules of game development, they isolated the main idea behind the gameplay and implemented that first, leaving features that would spice up the game for later in case they had time.Building a game is a lot like building a house (sometimes even financially and time-wise), so let's say you'd have to build a house and your total budget would run out at 80%, it's kinda like making a house with all the necessary utilities like plumbing, centralized heating etc, only it doesn't have a roof, you'd be left with a theoretical house you can't live in. The same reasoning can be applied to games. Game development (and actually software development in general) follows the Pareto principle, which basically means that 80% of the required functionality will be finished in 20% of the time, focusing on the main idea of the game ensures that by the time the 80% is done, you're left with a playable demo rather than a possibly cool game that might be finished, so kudos for that.
However I found what comes next to be even more interesting, they're basically detailing the lessons they learned from the mistakes they made during this short timespan, you should definitely read them all, because they offer some very interesting insight related to publishing a game (I can say I actually learned something from there today, but that's a secret). I really want to talk about the 30 seconds gameplay experience though, because this is a rather new rule in game dev. This one has become a rule of thumb in indie gaming because indie studios don't have the budget to back up a project fit for hardcore gamers. Your best bet as a indie developer is the casual gamer, basically anyone that spends a few minutes every day mashing buttons to relax. When you're going for that kind of audience, you need to hook him up from the first 30 seconds, because if you don't, then your audience is gonna find another game that will. The mistake in this case was the fact that the game started basically from 0 and you had to work your way up. This is something developers kinda inherit from playing too many games fit for hardcore audiences, where the challenge is one of the decisive factors in the success of your game. A hardcore gamer meeting a challenge will reload his save, a casual gamer that meets a challenge will close the game. Therefore rather than starting from 0, the game should start from awesome and quickly go towards epic. In this case the developers rectified that by making the game start directly with swords as the main weapon (instead of rocks) and they also give two other weapons. They also changed the first wave of enemies to goblins instead of bats offering a higher sense of achievement.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is the input problem. It was mentioned on their blog that some people complained that they can't shoot or move. This is a direct consequence of the 30 second gameplay experience rule. Because people will only play a game for 30 seconds, they generally don't want to waste half that time to learn how to control the character. Therefore they expect games to have a standard control scheme and a standard look and feel depending on the genre, any different and they're most likely to close the game. The best thing to here is to give people what they expect, use the standard w,s,a,d control scheme and one (or even all) of the first buttons people usually think of when they try to shoot, ctrl and space are the most common, but just to be sure, you can give subtle hints if the gamer hasn't done anything in a given amount of time (make a sword appear in the upper right corner with a big space underneath for instance).
But anyway the game itself is a bit addictive, I must admit and the graphics are also nice and cute, so a big thumbs up and thank you for sharing your experience guys.
I'm guessing that by now some are trying to understand what I wanted to say with that title and the rest are thinking this is a rant about life or some nifty question with no obvious answer.
Well, it's not, this post is about the way science has evolved along the years, it's about the driving engine behind progress. Beyond the physical wish to achieve more by working less, all advances in science had had in their time a question as their basis and I can bet it almost always started with why. Probably one of the most dreaded questions ever thought into existence, why has always bee associated with advances in the field of science because in a time where everything was yet to be discovered, asking why had a high probability of ending in a theorem or a explanation for a phenomenon that was yet to be understood. However nowadays, I'm starting to feel like why is becoming outdated, it's like painting a house and leaving the bucket behind, you have go all the way back before you actually start to improve, or paint in this case. The problem here is not the question itself, but more the fact that the same why question has been asked and answered more than enough times for most cultures to assimilate it, more so now when access to information is starting to become ubiquitous, answering the same question, while good for learning purposes, can waste more time than it should.
I'm wondering if people would be a lot better off asking how instead of why, because if necessary it will lead to the why, it still filters bad ideas, but most importantly, it has a lesser impact on the other people. Asking why seems to make people uncomfortable, most likely because somewhere along the way it implies that we're wrong, asking how makes people present their ideas rather than prove they're right. The only problem that might arise is that for how to work the way it should, all the whys should already be answered which is usually true for more trivial tasks, but it's not always.
Who knows, maybe with time?
P.S: If a tree falls into the woods it still makes a sound.
It doesn't happen often for me to find a good freeware game for the PC, I think it's mostly because web applications have the biggest market share in that direction, which doesn't really come as a surprise if you take into consideration the reduced development time, ease of distribution and the numerous websites that can make your game very well known if it's any good, not to mention the auctions, but this post isn't about that.
This post is about Hydorah, a 2D side-scrolling shooter with some very nifty graphics and totally awesome gameplay. I usually keep 2D games that I like in very high regard because nowadays they are a lot more challenging to get right than their 3D counterparts. Making a 2D game requires not only great graphics, but also a very good game design and a truckload of balancing to make sure it appeals to hardcore gamers whilst not making casual gamers frustrated by just looking at it.
I believe this game managed at least a 8 / 10 if we take into consideration the above mentioned because it's exactly what you'd expect from a game in this genre, which is not actually a bad thing because usually when I play a game (and based on the success of the mario or final fantasy series, or even the failure of some mortal kombat games, I'd tend to say that most people think the same way) I like to find either exactly what I expect or better, so as far as the game design goes, the enemy diversity, availability of power-ups and so forth make this game worth playing. Graphics are actually pleasant to look at even though I'm not usually a big fan of retro/pixel art, so a thumbs up for that too. The one thing that could've been better is the balancing because even though right now I can easily play this game for a quick 20 minutes then just drop out and start over when I have some more time, it sometimes gets a bit too frustrating as my careless flight path brings my adventure to an early halt in the cave walls.
Posted on Saturday 17 July 2010 - 07:00:18 by kiwi
This year summer practice is all about making a game, so after deciding the teams, genre and other stuff like that we started the implementation. After careful consideration and so forth we thought the best idea would be to go for Ogre 3D, and it proved to be ok, documentation is nice enough, forums usually contain the answers to questions that might arise in the beginning. We've had some problems with collisions because seeing as we have only 18 days (now 14 including this one) to come up with a demo, we needed something that would handle collisions for us as painless as possible. After trying some physics libraries wrappers for Ogre, we settled on MOC which I fully recommend. The setup is comprised out of one single step, copying the two files in your project and afterwards the collision detection code is basically one line. I'm pretty much satisfied with the end result and because we don't actually need all the functionality of a physics library, I think we're going to stick to this one.
Posted on Thursday 15 July 2010 - 01:15:49 by kiwi
I love my Lenovo 3000 N200, it was a great laptop and it served me well, but unfortunately I have , but it's time to move on, I now have an Acer Aspire 3810T, installing stuff as we speak to make it suit my needs
I finally got around to installing the latest firefox and I am now regretting I did not do this sooner. Even if it's a beta, as far as the required functionality is concerned, everything seems to be in order, never had any trouble with any page, youtube seems to work and flash games/movies are behaving as always, so overall I'm happy enough with it to make it my default browser. On the other hand this browser has had a serious uplift. Nothing is too innovative though, the UI is the one all browsers seem to adopt lately, though I can't actually say that I'm disappointed by that because it's very minimalistic and nice, each tab is a separate process, but overall it's a big improvement over the last version (not to mention 10x as fast), so all I can say right now is great job guys.
BTW, you can download it here P.S: I keeps the browsing history and passwords from firefox 3, or at least it did for me.
Bad news, this year I have to work basically as an intern, good news, I'm making a game. Bad news won't have as much time for updates, good news, I'm going to try my best to stick to the one day one post policy.
Posted on Monday 26 July 2010 - 23:19:36 by 
