Games take a lot of time and money to create. Many companies can’t afford this ever increasing drain on their resources, particularly independent game developers. Developers need to become more pragmatic in the way they developer their games. This article describes the steps we’ve been taking to focus on releasing a good game, in the Read More
Does the title of this article make you cringe? People have mixed feelings when it comes to C# and the .NET framework. Just like many hardcore game developers 10 years ago swore that games should only be made in straight C, many developers today say that C++ is the only way to go. This article Read More
Have you ever thought about becoming an indie game developer? Has your game company just gone under, sick of working for publishers or do you just want to break into the games industry? Whatever the reason, one thing that rings true for all Indie developers is the goal of making a good game. A lot Read More
I’ve used a lot of scripting languages over the years when developing games. For my latest engine, I decided I’d use C# as the scripting language. I’ve been amazed by how well C# works as a scripting language so I thought I’d share my experiences. The technique I’m about to discuss gives game designers access to Read More
The Model View Controller (MVC) pattern has been used with great success in business software development for years. Despite this, it has never fully been picked up by the games industry. Today I’m going to discuss why the MVC pattern is perfect for game development.
Test Driven Development (TDD) has steadily grown in popularity among non-game programmers. Despite this, it has not been widely adopted in game development. Today I’m going to discuss why TDD is suited to games development and how it frees developers and designers to experiment with “finding the fun” without breaking core gampelay.
Sid Meier once said “A game is a series of interesting choices” [1]. By focussing on the choices made by the player, we can create better games through Choice Driven Design. This focus on player choice should happen both at design and implementation time for best results. I will discuss why the focus on choices Read More
Valve’s Gabe Newell was on Good Game recently and brought up a topic close to my heart; community funded games. This is where the community (gamers) all chip in small amounts of money to fund a game, rather than a single large publisher. The question is, will it work?
A bunch of my friends are working on Edge of Twilight at Fuzzyeyes (the first game studio I worked at). They have a new video out which is quite impressive. Check it out here. I’m hoping to have an interview with a couple of the developers in the coming months. Fuzzyeyes is one of the Read More
I’ve previously talk about creating a good game GUI design. Today I’d like to hear from you. I’m interested in what people are currently using to mock up their in-game GUI’s and what they would like to see from a product to help them. Please add a comment to this blog, or email me directly Read More
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