26k

Ok, not the prettiest screenshot ever, but that blue line is a quadratic bezier curve created from the green and yellow cubes. The middle cube acts as the control point right now. Math!

The evil red tank

Couple of tanks for something new I’m working on.

A little work in progress render of one of the cars in my racing game. Been pretty slow lately, but I like the way this has come together.

I ended up with quite a haul from the most recent Steam sale. I picked up: Capsized, Gratuitous Space Battles, Bit.Trip.Runner, Aquaria, Gravitron 2, Future Wars, Saira, Frozen Synapse, Batman Arkham Asylum, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, and Jamestown. One AAA and 11 Indies, not bad. Haven’t had a chance to play them all yet, but got to put in some time with a few of them and so far it’s a fairly mixed bag. Bit Trip I really wanted to like, but couldn’t get into it. Gravitron is painfully hard, but there’s some potential there. Anomaly was an instant buy after playing through the demo. Looking forward to the rest.

However, out of the bunch the one I took the biggest blind leap with was Jamestown. I’m not huge into traditional shmups, I’m more a fan of arena shooters (Smash TV, the Mutant Storm series, Geometry Wars, etc.) but I was willing to look past my bullet hell inadequacies and take a chance on the game because, well, it was cheap and it looked amazing. Turns out the game is super fun too and perfectly portioned for someone like me who isn’t the hardest of hardcore. Two things that really appealed to me about the design of Jamestown are its short levels and forced difficulty. Out of context, those two hardly sound like positive descriptions a game’s design, so let me explain a bit what I mean.

Short levels are good? Yup, especially in a game like Jamestown which feels almost like a casual shmup more than anything else. Levels run about 2 minutes plus a boss fight (another couple minutes, depending on your skill of course). For me, it’s the perfect bite size of gaming bliss, short enough that I’m not getting burned out dodging wave after wave of bullet death spew, but long enough for the action to build and peak at all the right times.

Here’s where the forced difficulty actually fits in nicely. In any other game, I’d be the first one to fume about a game forcing you to replay previous portions in order to proceed as a cheap attempt to extend the life of a short campaign. And while that may actually be the case here, within the structure of this game it works perfectly by guiding the noob player (that’s me) along at a pace that both challenges and rewards you to keep playing.

The sections are short enough to inspire that ‘alright, one more level!’ feeling but the game forces you to challenge yourself to do it again and to do it better. In a game where you’re ultimately competing against your friends’ leaderboard rankings in the long run, this is an incredibly appealing way to make me return and fight once again. And since you can probably play through most of the game in about 15 minutes, all in all I think it’s an effective design.

Having played through and really enjoyed my time so far in Jamestown, a lot of my own design ideas I’ve been formulating feel somewhat more justified having seen them work in practice. Having short, tight bursts of really fun gameplay that can be replayed and honed towards mastery really excites me and is a large part of the racing game I’m working out now.

Ah yes, my blog. Let’s talk about some games, shall we?

First off, if you missed it, I made a game called Brigands as part of the TIGSource Versus Competition and actually ended up finishing fourth place, which considering how often I finish games is really nothing short of amazing. I’m pretty proud of how the game turned out and felt like I learned a great deal more about developing my own games than ever before. Plus, a lot of people had fun playing it:

Equally as important, after 8 years of using Blitz 3D for development, I decided to start learning Unity. It’s been slow going over the last couple months because of my work schedule, but now that I have a bit more free time at night again, I’m starting to build some momentum. It’s nice to work in a modern game engine now, even if I spend most of that time noobing it up as I familiarize myself with Unity Javascript.

Right now I’m working on a little racing game prototype that I had started a few years back but shelved for various reasons. I’ve simplified the design of the game down to it’s simplest parts and feel like it’s something I could definitely see through to completion. And that’s my goal: finishing games.

I’ll try and put some pictures to words once the game progresses beyond the gray box stage.

 

 

Ok, fresh install of WP, going to give this another go. As soon as I’m done with crunch