Gaming stories

Game Loop patterns (full guide)

System Shock 1 remaster (Official site)

Last day I ran into a very exciting game concept which is much more than a concept, it’s on air already. The introduction on the steam page says “Exanima is an important first step in our ambitious quest to create a new kind of RPG.”

When I see something like this that’s an instant click on the trailer because I was really interested in the HOW. The key is the physics and as I see based on the steam reviews and lets plays it’s works so far.

What about physics? Nothing more than there ARE simulation-style physics in the game which is fun when you drop pottery from a shelf or kick up a table or destroy your enviroment - we’ve seen those things before - but unbelieveable when it comes to FIGHT in a low-fantasy RPG.

I can’t tell you this, you have to check the trailer.

My first ever tilemap build from an awesome tileset gigapack which contains a lot of modern outdoor and indoor tileset. Sadly these aren’t open source tilesets and I respect the hard work was put in them by a LOT of people so I will use them only for prototyping and practicing building maps.

This map is a try for building a 2D zombie apocalypse city map.

I spent nearly 12+ hours to make this and it was a great experience. First I focused on the view I wanted this to look great but after some time I realized you cannot stop there. You need to plan “routes” and “obstacles” (challanges?) into the map for the player to force them to explore, stuck between enemies, look for sub-routes, etc. You need to design your level and that’s the harder part.

There are technical challanges too because if you use this much object and layer in your map you have to manage them carefully and plan for the future. I weren’t carefully simply because I didn’t know about it. It’s really important to use wisely the layers and object in Tiled if you want to use it well in you code and make collisions easy for yourself. I will make a new, way more simple map to practice the collision.

By the way of course there are many many bug on the map. For example my main asphalt texture isn’t good, it’s part of a bigger roof texture and it’s not consistent on repetative use. I have to focus more on the buildings. I have building tiles from 16 different tileset and they are very different in size and scale and it can ruin the view if they are too different. If a window on a building is bigger than 1,5 floor of the other that’s weird.

Another thing is the colors and the sharpness. I used 54 tileset in total and in this variety I had to use photoshop sometimes to equalize the colors, the hue and the lightness of the tiles. It’s more consistent now but I can’t do much about the sharpness - not more than I try not to use them mixed with the blurry ones.

I remember when I was 9 and played trough first Wolfeinstein3D. The day after that I decided to make a video game called “Bloody revenge”. I HAD TO after that experience. 20 year passed and I played tons of fun and even more than fun games but I never ever tried to make my own game. But I always wanted to. I think I couldn’t believe in that it’s possible for me, I couldn’t draw, I didn’t know anything about modern programming languages and I was terrible at math.

After 20 years I can say it was a huge bullshit. I needed this much time and a lot of working experience to wake up from this bullshit and face the truth: I learned everything I needed so far, and if I’m not lazy I can learn this too.

I decided to change my job to IT industry which will happen in weeks, and I decided to learn anything I need about programming and designing to make games of my dreams and find my place in the world of IT.

After the romantic part: we need to start from zero, so we are stick to 2D enviroment, and very-very simple games. Now I’m trying to make my first tiled-based game in Java8 with the help of the awesome open source map maker tool Tiled (official site). 1 months ago I collected a lot of (non commercial) sprite and tileset so I can use them as graphics placeholder or even more if I keep my prototype in house.

From now I will share updates of my learning steps, interesting articles about game development, links to assets, and of course stories about games - as I did before.

Last year I ran into a very atmoshperic trailer of Hyper Light Drifter which is an indie pixel-style exploration and action game with some rpg elements. It was a Kickstarter project which made with GameMaker by a small team. At the end of march the game finally released so let’s try it!

The next shot (after Dark Messiah) will be Super Hot. I played it as a unity browser game last year and I really liked the concept and I think the full game (people says it’s only 2 hours to finish) will be fun too.

I checked for some time a really special indie fps “management” game called Shoppe Keep. In this cartoon styled game you running a fantasy shop in a medieval town where heroes and other customers come to buy. It has some RPG elements and of course crafting, placing items on shelves, upgrading and some mini-adventure fighting. So after Super Hot the next shot will be the early access alpha Shoppe Keep!

In this episode we get rid of our temporary storage zone and make a brand new room in the mountains. Everyone sweating not just because of work but there's a heat wave on this side of the planet! By the way I never planted trees like this before, I'm excited how much wood will I have after the harvest.

Day 10

Dear Diary,