Aah, back to the game design topic! The thing I love most about game design is that you can create worlds full of life, intricacy, intrigue and interesting characters, experimenting with scenarios and situations (that would otherwise probably have negative  repercussions in RL™).

As a programmer you’d ever only write your code and if you are happy with it that’s fine but we one-man-game-developer types are more like Jack of all trades who want to create complete worlds … and stories. And then tell those stories by means of the game. And maybe throw a bit (or a large chunk) of dynamics in there again … as programmers.

One extremely satisfying aspect of game design (for games where narrative is important) is the development of characters that should act throughout the game. Creating characters is just as much fun as the other bases! If you do it right and create deep and sympathetic characters people will love them.

And even villains can be sympathetic. In fact they should be! Who likes an antagonist that is completely unsympathetic? Nobody, right? But why should you even like a villain, after all he’s the guy who needs to be defeated? The answer to this is that the guy who is the villain is so only in the context of our story. Maybe he’s not so bad after all in a different context. Or in short: Antagonists also have a life, feelings … but guess what? Now I totally digress! I actually wanted to show you my new and all fresh character template that I came up with to shape out characters for my game.

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Character Development"

I’ve been designing on a rather ambitious Role-Playing game project since a while now (in fact quite a long while but I’m not in hurry to finish it anytime soon) and while I’m in the process of working out the story, technical details like the combat mechanics, skill system etc. and creating interesting characters I still haven’t made a decision on the type of graphical projection for the game so far. I’ve been thinking about five kinds of projection from the most basic one (2D orthographic) up to full dynamic 3D which would be quite an effort. As my development platform of choice happens to be Flash, the resources in terms of 3D are limited.

So with that in mind I thought it would be good opportunity to introduce some of the most-used projections in computer and video role-playing games to get to know them a little better. This is by no means a complete list of all sorts of projection used in games but I believe these the ones most commonly used for role-playing games.

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Choosing the right Graphical Projection"

In this tutorial I will explain how to create a relatively realistic looking galaxy with Photoshop. I was searching the web up- and downwards to find any tutorials that could tell me how to get a similar fantastic result. There are like 100.000 planet tutorials out there and the few tutorials which were about creating a galaxy where either very basic or the result looked like everything but a realistic galaxy. The galaxy I wanted should have looked massive and intricate … just like the real ones but with a slightly more artistic touch. I’ve needed a galaxy that I could use as a star map for a space-themed roleplaying game design and the image you see above is a part of the result. Let’s go try to do such one …

>> Continue reading "Creating a Galaxy in Photoshop"

Filter Forge is a new software for Windows that allows creating Photoshop filters in a tree node based editor. Yep, thats right! You design filters by connecting components together with virtual wires. Imagine the possibilities! The application ships with a standalone tool as well as a Photoshop PlugIn and after you played around a bit with the trial version you might want to file this tool under “apps with that I could spend the whole day long, experimenting with it”!

>> Continue reading "Tools of the Trade Part 5: Filter Forge"

>> Continue reading "Photoshop Script: CenteredSelection"

After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.

>> Continue reading "Tools Of The Trade Part 2: Hi-Logic MainType"

I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.

>> Continue reading "Tools Of The Trade Part 1: Alias SketchBook Pro"

>> Continue reading "Graphical User Interfaces – When will they be normalized?"