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Will Wright donates to McCain

erathoniel — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:24:38 -0400

I can buy Spore after-all. Since it's the game making me boycott EA, and Will Wright makes it, and Will Wright donates to McCain, I can agree with Will Wright's politics. Will Wright, ergo, deserves my cash as much as any other developer, and I will give money to Will Wright by buying Spore. Even if I can't run it. Meh. Make it for DS/360, and I'll buy it.

Meet Carielf!

CariElf — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:28:48 -0400

So it's official, I'm a Guest at Dragon*Con 2008! I don't think that I mentioned that before, although I've known that I would be a Guest since about a week after I posted the first article mentioning Dragon*Con. I have been waiting to see what panels I'd end up doing, because they hadn't gotten back to me at all. I finally got an e-mail from the programming comittee with my tentative schedule today (they may still make minor changes to the schedule).

So her...

Mechanics 0: Thinking About Games

mittens — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:58:20 -0400

There are, as of my last counting, approximately a gazillion journalistic locales which offer game reviews on the internet or in print. There are not, to my knowledge, any columns which analyze a game mechanic within the context in which it appears along with detailing what is actually fun about the mechanic, and how it could be improved or exploited in the future. This particular edition of Mechanics will do none of that.

Majoring in English in college meant two things: I read a lot and I talked about what I read a lot. There is nothing more self-indulgent and pompous than a bunch of people sitting around a classroom talking about books in the setting of higher education. College students and, more to the point, English majors come up with some of the most absurd talking points based on their interpretations of a given text that it all becomes laughable at some points. I'm talking discussion matter along the lines of absurdity if I was to say that Clifford the Big Red Dog's existence merely served as a metaphor for the presence of communist Russia in the global sociopolitical scene and all of the people he comes in contact with in Norman Bridwell's line of children books are all analogous to various world political figures throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Of course such a theory is absolutely ridiculous, but when intellectuals are asked to find a deeper meaning in a classical text there are instances of such crackpot theories.

Level-5 Announcement!

kurtin — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:35:33 -0400

I was excited to discover that Level-5, the game franchise, will be holding a press conference and announcing something big on the 26th of September. My hopes are that this big news has something to do with building anticipations over the release of Dark Cloud 3. I've loved each installment of the classic Dark Cloud RPGs, so a third one has been on my wish list for a long time now. It will give me a major reason to purchase a PS3 system. However, I don't really want to jump to conclusions or cer...

WARNING: Video games may cause you to hunger for human flesh

Nequa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:10:30 -0400

It appears watch dogs groups have something else to bark about, it appears they now think that playing zombie vido games may make children canniblistac. They also talk about the usuall stuff,"Vidoe games are ful of sex, blah blah blah, the children are going to become murders, blah blah". I mean really? How often does this stuff they talk about actually happen?

Here is a link if you want to read the article http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,177090,00.html.

Activision and Vivendi combined to form ACTIVISION BLIZZAZZARD!

mentor07825 — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:04:05 -0400

Hot off the press, because it's a done deal now. Activision, the game developer that brought us Call Of Duty and Guitar Hero has now merged with Vivendi, the same company that owns Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment is recently famous for their MMORPG World Of Warcraft.

Vivendi is a company based in Paris and is a corporation, owning Universal Music Group, Canal & Group, SFR, Maroc Telecom and Vivendi Games. Vivendi Games also owns Blizzard Entertainment. Vividi Ga...

Polish and Bug Fixes

silolauncher — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:08:58 -0400

What is happening in the gaming world?

All games developer always tend to make better new games but they always forget about the most important factor of the game that is the polish and bug fixes. Gamers hate to play games that is not ready to be release and use. For an example, do you like to play a game that always crash eventhough it is a great game. Absolutely the answer is no.I hope the game developer will always remember about polishing the game to the best effects a...

Cubegasm's First Dev Journal Entry

mittens — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:33:47 -0400

In lieu of actually doing any development tonight I, instead, chose to write a gaming article (still no Metal Gear Story; I'm still thinking about that) and then a particularly-lengthy GameDev.net Daily. Now, since I've given up hope of getting work done tonight and have accepted the idea that Battlefield: Bad Company will dominate my nights for the next few days, I'll write about what I'm actually working on for the moment.

I've never worked on a project that had any sort of physics simulation occurring within it before; when I found out that Havok released their SDK that could be used by hobbyists and by any commercial product that retailed for less than $10, though, I retreated from my previous stay at Hotel XNA and back into C/C++ Direct3D9 Land. I didn't want to spend months writing a framework and a rendering engine, though, since I'm currently in the kind of mood where I want to put out a game every two-three months -- a timespan which is variable based on game release dates, occasional social interests and obligations, and work schedules. It is a direct result of this mindset which led me to using OGRE. I spent a few days configuring my project, the engine (and all of the modules for it which I planned on using), and Havok in Visual Studio and then got about implementing a basic Havok simulation and rendering aesthetic worked out.

Hello (have a spaceship)

rootdown — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:53:27 -0400

This is my first attempt at making a spaceship. It's not done yet, so don't nitpick too much.

I've been noodling with 3d software for about four years now (Started with some Maya classes in college, though these days I use Silo for the modeling stage) so it's sort of a wonder why I didn't try making one sooner; I am going to go ahead and blame my buddy Matt for putting me off taking a crack at it earlier: Spaceships, he says, are cheap. Without even addressing the qu...

Realmod v1.0 developer diary 2 (7/5/08)

Phazon88 — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:22:56 -0400

As the more attentive might notice, I have changed the version number of my mod from v0.3 to v1.0. This was a decision I made a while back (but I forgot my self-decided version change before writing the previous developer diary ).

Reason for the version change was simply because to reflect the fact that my mod releases aren't really beta (they are throughly tested for skirmish / online use) with the only potential beta area being the single-player campaign which is untested. Also, the mod an...

Realmod v0.3 developer diary 1 (5/5/08)

Phazon88 — Mon, 05 May 2008 06:44:27 -0400

Today marked the first day I spent on furthering development on my mod for World in Conflict for some time. I was forced to put it aside for some time because of university and lack of personal time in general. Now that I have some time to myself again I figured why not dedicate some of that to Realmod once again.

The World in Conflict mod kit. Its what makes it all happen. Since it was a while since I last worked on my mod, I decided to conduct a reevaluation of things and ideas I had i...

Asplode! v1.2 Release

mittens — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:38:11 -0400

For this update, my role in Asplode! was absolutely minimal. While I'm in the middle of a mild crunch for The Political Machine 2008 and then away at Rochester, New York for a Paramore concert, Josh was working asininely hard on version 1.2 of Asplode!. As started, my role in this update was purely peripheral as, in my spare time, I've been working on the start for Bipolar and taking some of Josh's code for his game and turning it into a more generic library that both of us can use in our curren...

An Asplosion! of a Release

mittens — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:50:06 -0400

Yeah, so, I'm releasing Asplode! now and such. And, along with the game, comes all of the source to the game.

I originally wasn't planning on releasing the source but as development winded down and I started to play the game for longer sessions I soon realized that the game became virtually unplayable on my machine after about seven-eight minutes. I thought this may have been a result of poorly-managed graphical assets so I took a couple days to optimize them (and, as a result, the VectorMod...

Chronicles of Cloud (and Bipolar)

mittens — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:42:10 -0400

I've been playing a very time-intensive game of musical chairs with various three-dee engines over the course of the last two-and-a-half weeks in an attempt to find the one that would be best suited to my particular development style and the kind of game I want to create. And I can safely say that, tonight, I have reached the ultimate solution. That's right, after toying around with things like TorqueX, Torque Game Engine Advanced, OGRE, Irrlicht, Nebula3, and, finally, PowerRender. The latter two of the list appeared to have the most potential, with PowerRender being the closest thing to what I was looking for, but the most recent iteration of the engine is still under heavy development and, what was the most troublesome, seems to be getting very infrequent updates. So, after all of the wasted time, I decided that I was going to dig out my old C++/D3D9/D3D10 framework and just rip out the D3D9 parts for use in a new framework which I could use in the future.

I got exactly an hour-and-a-half of work done on that last night before I realized that it felt way too much like the kind of engine work I do at my job every weekday. So now, and for realsies, I'm back with XNA. I'll be releasing Asplode! this weekend in its terribly-performing state (and open source) and, hopefully, everything I learned in the development of that will help me create a far more useful toolset this time around as far as memory management is concerned. The most important lesson I have with me that I learned from Asplode! is that the most important thing about memory within a managed environment isn't necessarily the allocation of memory so much as it is the deleting of it. Apparently the garbage collector is a wicked beast that must be appeased in order to maintain stable gameplay performance. I don't know. I'm still getting the hang of the intricacies of C#. When I was working on Asplode! -- and this will be readily apparent in the source if people peruse it -- I didn't know anything about C#. I simply coded as if I would code a game using C++ and, when code didn't compile, I read up on why the error occurred and what I needed to do/learn in order to fix it. Hopefully, this time around, I'm a bit more well-prepared. It also helps that Drilian and I are teaming up for some of the more game-independent stuff.

How important is the IGF?

relswick — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:38:24 -0400

Listening to the LinkBobby Blackwolf podcast show today, he mentions how Portal was submitted to the IGF and one of the judges worked for Valve, saw the game and said we need to hire this team!

So, then Portal gets signed and now is released on Steam (I don't subscribe to it) so you really should think about that a bit if your an indie developer!

On the Use of TorqueX

mittens — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:27:59 -0400

Last weekend as a result of being hungover after my first time drinking in over a year and waking up on a couch in the apartment of a gay nineteen-year-old friend of my friend's and the first thing I saw being a Hannah Montana poster on the ceiling above the couch where I was sleeping I bought a license to TorqueX Pro. I've used other GarageGames products in the past for various experiments and random fun, but I've never used one to make a full game. I thought I'd use TorqueX for my new game ide...

In Lieu Of Content

mittens — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:43:44 -0400

Asplode! Optimizations and Beta Status

mittens — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:43:46 -0400

At this point, I think that it's fairly safe to say that the meat of Asplode! is finished. All of the primary gameplay is in place, the enemies are all implemented and handled in a state that I'm fond of, and the player controls, responses, and such are all implemented. At this point any more features that I add to the gameplay portion of the game are either polish points or experimental ideas that I may or may not keep as part of the game (a few automatic weapon upgrades, various ideas as to ho...

Asplode! Screenshot Dump

mittens — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:14:04 -0400

Not that I spent recent nights playing stuff like Army of Two, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, Company of Heroes, Master of Magic, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Bully, Ratchet & Clank, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, or God of War: Chains of Olympus instead of actually updating my dev journal or anything... But, yeah. Pretty much did exactly that. I've still gotten a bit done on Asplode! every night but, by this point, I'm mostly making various optimi...

The Asplode! Mid-Project Hump

mittens_ — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:14:04 -0500

Former intern-turned-remote-worker Nick told me that I should start posting some of the development journal entries that I have been previously posting over at my GameDev.net dev journal here. So that's what I'm doing. If the idea of developing a top-down space shooter in the fashion of Robotron is an attractive one to you, then I'd recommend reading the backlog of posts as a form of "Previously on the Journal of Rawr" catch-up.

One of my design mantras -- and I use the word 'design' loosely -- is that while coding the game I keep things as simple, quick, and efficient as possible. As one might guess, this can become problematic at times. Less so in the implementation of routines and ideas so much as it is the necessity of shooting down some gameplay mechanics that, while fun, would defeat the purpose of such a simple Robotron/Geometry Wars knockoff. And, really, that's all I'm hoping to accomplish with Asplode!.

Gamer's Manifesto

relswick — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:06:30 -0500

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=1085

Well in our latest game, Street Smart Detroit, there are at least 2-3 of these that we fail against, but then again it is a very indie style game, plus there is a lot it is trying to adress, so this time, oh well.

I disagree with the AO game comment as well, since well, it just doesn't make much business sense... at least until the Porn Industry gets into it... perhaps we need a Porn Sim game... your the director and all... HA, that would b...

Electropy Released

Jonas Wills — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:33:20 -0500

So we finally went ahead and released our game, Electropy. It's been a long long process but it is so exciting to have created something and to start selling it. I've been handling a lot of the business aspect, registering the LLC, getting set up with the IRS, figuring out how to do the accounting. It's a lot of work but I've never had as much fun working 20 hour days. We entered the IGF student showcase competition back in October and the finalists are released tomorrow,...

States woo game developers...

relswick — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:52:51 -0400

You would think that with the depressed economy in Michigan that the government would woo game developers the way Georgia is... but noooo they won't. At least that was the attitude 2-3 years ago when they tried to pass a law making it illegal to sell M-rated games, a crime actually, to underaged kids.

Just sad really... no hope in the future... the Big 3 are getting pummeled by Honda and Toyota, so even that is going the way of the dodo bird.

Games As Art

mittens_ — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:28:19 -0400

I watched Saving Private Ryan over this past weekend, since I hadn't seen it in a few years (and had only previously seen it on VHS), and I had forgotten just how great the movie really is. I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it after watching Band of Brothers so many times due to the fact that Band of Brothers devoted so much more time to character development, as it had the luxury of a lengthy running-time as opposed to the time constraints placed on Ryan as a theatrical feature movie. The wo...

Electropy

Jonas Wills — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:42:55 -0400

Hello everyone!

Just thought I'd like to share a bit about the computer game I'm part of a team working on right now, Electropy.

To sum it up:
Electropy is a side scrolling action arcade title with a fundamental gameplay twist. Rather than directly moving your character, the idea is to grapple on to floating polygons in order to swing your way to the goal. The game features a wide selection of power-ups such as gravity change, invincibility, and flight thrusters to diversify gameplay. Th...