Morale and working under the hood
August 5th, 2009
When I sit down to work on Overgrowth, I have to decide whether I should implement new features, or whether I should work on under-the-hood improvements such as solidifying, cleaning up, commenting and debugging existing features. For my older projects I spent most of my time implementing new features, and very little time cleaning anything up. This allowed me to ...
What kind of trophy system is the best?
August 1st, 2009
In Overgrowth, we are going to have some sort of achievement / trophy system. This is necessary for our Steam release, but we're going to take it a step further and integrate it into Overgrowth itself so Mac, Linux, and non-Steam Windows players can all have an awesome trophy system. Iiro Jppinen made us this hot trophy icon I have ...
Games vs. Life -- Handguns
July 28th, 2009
Over the years I've played hundreds of games about shooting, and made a few myself, but had never fired a handgun in real life. As a game designer, I was interested to see how the games compared to reality. To find out, John, Phillip, and I went down to a local shooting range. Here is a picture of me ...
Experimental Games
July 25th, 2009
Mainstream video games these days are a huge investment. It's hard to put $60 million on the line for anything but a sure bet. So big video game companies tend to be risk averse, sticking with tried and true genres like the chain smoking space marine FPS and the steampunk fantasy RPG. But, all that pressure to conform has ...
Slow-motion video reference
July 13th, 2009
Whenever I am animating a movement or coding a new special effect, I like to find out as much as possible about what is actually going on. It is easy to capture the basic essence of any effect: lightning makes a forking flash in the sky, big water splashes are white and foamy, a gymnast rotates 360 degrees when she ...
Creating the illusion of accomplishment
July 8th, 2009
Many game developers are starting to find that games with illusory challenges sell better than those with real challenge. They believe that what gamers want most is an experience that conveys the feeling of accomplishing a difficult task, but without the difficulty. Games like this have spawned a new genre of simplified 'parody' games that highlight the techniques used to ...
Design principles from Magic
June 13th, 2009
This weekend, we'll be blogging from Sierra City, CA! We've all gone up together for some 'team building exercises'. Just kidding. Actually it's for fun. One of the things we've been doing is playing Magic: The Gathering. I've been playing Magic on and off since it first became popular around 1995. Each time I come ...