atma:blog

Places to go

ahorner — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:13:56 +0000

It occurs to me that before I can talk meaningfully about any of the initial quest lines in Atma, I should give a bit of background involving the layout of the game’s world. There are seven capitals scattered around the map in which most of Atma’s character interactions take place. Due to the flow of [...]

Revised Office Hours, Volume II

ahorner — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:36:29 +0000

It should be immediately and painfully obvious to anybody checking up on this blog that I have not adhered to my aforementioned weekend posting schedule, this being the case for a bit over a month now. I don’t really have any excuses, aside from those I’ve already summarized in Volume I of this “series”: it’s [...]

Basic Instinct

ahorner — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:00:59 +0000

As promised, I’m here today to talk about the Instinct system that I glossed over at the end of yesterday’s post. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of exactly what the system does, I feel it’s beneficial to give a bit of background for comparison, as the final system (at least as far as I’ve [...]

Dancing with the details

ahorner — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:00:09 +0000

Emergence, the concept of several small systems interacting to form a complex system that is “larger than the sum of its parts” is something we’ve discussed briefly before, but which I’d like to bring up for discussion once again, today. I find emergence to be one of the most fundamental elements of game design theory; [...]

The many faces of battle

ahorner — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:05:38 +0000

There’s one thing (well, there are several, but one which I’ll talk about right now) that’s always bothered me a good deal about most MMO combat systems, which is that character position and movement are only very rarely an influential factor. There are a few games that do some interesting things: Aion takes into account [...]

Judge a book

ahorner — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:41:44 +0000

What strange alternate dimension have I wound up in, in which it is apparently unacceptable for a game reviewer to review an MMO based on their experience for the first 10 levels of play? There’s a problem that exists somewhere in the gulf between the game design philosophy for your standard MMO and the expectations [...]

Revised Office Hours

ahorner — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:52:14 +0000

It should be quite apparent by now that I’m no longer making daily posts. The reason? I’m actually working on the game. It might seem a bit ridiculous that I write less about the game development process when I’m doing more along the lines of actual, bona fide development, but there you have it. I’ve [...]

Order of the Draw

ahorner — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:58:49 +0000

I’ve decided to follow up yesterday’s rather unorganized post with one that has a bit more planning put into its presentation. Today, we’ll be taking a look at a very specific part of a spriting engine: draw orders. The draw order of your sprites is a crucial element in any spriting system, and optimizing draw [...]

Sprightly Sprites: Bringing game worlds to life

ahorner — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:40:56 +0000

Today we’ll be shifting gears a bit, and exploring some of the more technical aspects of creating and animating a two-dimensional world. At the heart of two-dimensional animation is the concept of a sprite, a graphic image which can move and change within a larger image. Assuming that your “larger image” might be something along [...]

Take your hands off the keyboard and step away from the computer

ahorner — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:25:23 +0000

No, this is not me continuing to wax philosophical on the merits of spending time out in the real world with real people doing real things. That was yesterday’s post, and I feel I’ve more than exhausted the topic for the time being. Rather, today’s discussion is a delightful inversion of my typical advocacy for [...]