Me and Anders Psychofreud started putting together a messaging application today that i think is totally weird, but for certain reasons really compelling. First a little history.
If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, [...]
Posts under ‘Game dev & design’
Antisocial media
Unity book review forthcoming
Well look what dropped into my mailbox today! A review copy of Packt’s new Unity book; Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone. Just in time to break my inspirational drought!
I haven’t written anywhere near enough about Unity on this site yet, but i have a couple of large projects in the pipeline, and this [...]
Randomness in games
Greg Costikyan on the history and application of randomness in games
http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane
Fantastic read, heartily recommended if you’re a game designer
Key polling, part deux
Keith Peters put up a comprehensive blog post on why he disagrees with generic keyboard managers. It’s well worth reading. I have to admit, i couldn’t even conceive of input events directly altering the model without first passing through an input testing step in the game loop. It’s practically game dev heresy!
It apparently boils down [...]
Actionscript nerd-out: Bit-flagging
Working on games i often wind up in a situation where i need to validate a bunch of booleans quite often, and not always the same ones. Basically, a game entity state could be a mixture of many, such as ducking, jumping, attacking, burning etc, and i wanted a way to quantify that state with [...]
Steampunk in gaming
Great article up on Ars Technica about the use of steampunk imagery and concepts in video games. Those of you that know me know i’m a giant stupid fan of this stuff. Well worth the read.
Pretty amazing virtual life game
http://alterego.polemik.ch/
I’m pretty impressed something this simple can have such an impact. Really makes you think about some choices you’ve made in your life.
INEXCUSABLE
Today’s culprit: Cheap bosses in fighting games
Nothing screams “we couldn’t even bother” like a final boss fight that determinedly breaks the rules of the game up until then. It is well known that Namco have never even bothered balancing their Tekken franchise, with character matchups that aren’t just broken, but WILFULLY so. Want to put [...]
World of warcraft has issues
I know. Obvious to pretty much anyone who play the game regularly. However i’d like to discuss some issues with WoW’s infrastructure, and touch on why i can’t seem to get hooked on it at all.
Everyone’s familiar with the queuing issue, when realms started choking and Blizzard were forced to implement the population full status, [...]
The human interface
Another post on flashlounge that just kind of got out of hand Slightly edited to make it an ok read out of context. The subject of the interface came up when discussing wether the next gen of consoles was in fact pushing the envelope further, and Adary Wakefield brought up VR and how [...]