January 20, 2010 – 12:01 pm
My UDK project is not dead. However at the moment I don’t have anything crazy awesome to show as I’m working on “The Boring Bits”.
This includes the UI, Scoring and Online Scoreboards.
I find procrastination tends to set in at the end of my projects because of these boring bits and because I don’t have any [...]
December 21, 2009 – 10:54 am
Good morning! This is in danger of becoming a regularity but don’t worry! I’m away for the next 2 weeks so there is no danger of this becoming a regular feature just yet.
Lets start with the video:
The most notable addition this week is a new enemy called a “Bumble”. Bumbles are so named because they [...]
December 13, 2009 – 6:24 pm
I’ve been working on my UDK game a little bit at a time, mostly on weekends.
So to update: I decided to ditch my efforts to make a physics based puzzle game for two reasons:
The cap on angular velocity.
I wanted to make a game where you get to blow things up.
If I’m honest it was mostly [...]
November 19, 2009 – 1:29 pm
So a couple of weeks ago now Epic released the Unreal Development Kit and lots of people rushed to download it (some 50,000 apparently).
They all then rushed to the forums to ask how you make a game.
Fortunately I’m an old hand with Unreal, starting back in 2000 modding Deus Ex and then progressing pretty much [...]
In most MMO’s the idea of fixing a bug is a very simple thing. Bugs are bad and there to be squashed. However as soon as you have an economy that pushes roughly $450m a year around the world you start to get into all sorts of problems.
Normally it’s the other way around. You lay out a level and a concept artist will create an impression of what it might look like for the Enviroment artists to work from.
However Damnation are apparently going a different way and basing their Level Designs on Concept art.
This fanmade video representing a key part of Eve Onlines large backstory (essentially the start of the Caldari/Gallente war) is absolutely amazing. It was made possible by one very dedicated player and CCP’s immense support by allowing him access to their own machinma tools.
Day of Darkness II from Dire Lauthris on Vimeo.
It is a real [...]
There is a belief that a good game never punishes players and only rewards them.
It’s a belief that often causes debate amongst Designers because the phrase is usually reinterpreted to mean “The player must never fail.” and this couldn’t be more wrong. Failure does not equal Punishment and in fact Failure is an intrinsic feature [...]
March 20, 2009 – 10:44 am
This managed to pass me by when it first appeared but Andreas Zecher made a series of Flash Games called Understanding Games which try to explain the fundamentals of Game Design via Game Play. It is to Games as Understanding Comics is to Comics.
The games clearly take alot from Raph’s Theory of Fun and is a cool grounding for anybody unfamiliar [...]
March 18, 2009 – 11:05 am
I’m always keeping an eye out for good Level Design resources to recommend to people as I believe that it is a hideously under-documented topic and what documentation does exist is often buried deep in forums, wikis or blogs. The remainder I find isn’t actually useful documentation that Designers can learn from. A large part [...]
