Keith Burgun's Blog - Indie Devs: Your Game is Your Baby. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. In the world of digital games, you generally have two ends of a spectrum. On one end, we have the AAA stuff - the stuff that has a standee at GameStop and that you might see television commercials for. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the indie stuff - stuff that you encounter simply browsing app stores or due to word of mouth. While I have a whole slew of problems with AAA games, I don't find it that interesting or worthwhile to criticize them. But I can't blame them for it. However, you can blame the indies for some of the problems they have. What I am going to hold indies accountable for is their generally poor, unsupportive attitude towards their own work.
The Costs of Experiencing A New Thing This entire process generally is uncomfortable, because of the risks involved. Introduction to Tiled Map Editor: A Great, Platform-Agnostic Tool for Making Level Maps. In this article I'll give you a basic introduction to the Tiled Map Editor and the design process that surrounds it, while outlining the reasons for using it. I'll also quickly show you how to actually create a map within Tiled. Tiled is a general purpose tile map editor. It functions as a free tool to allow the easy creation of map layouts. It is versatile enough to allow specifying more abstract things such as collision areas, enemy spawn positions, or power-up positions.
At its core, the design process of using Tiled to create maps works by following these steps: Choose your map size and base tile size.Add tilesets from image(s).Place the tilesets on the map.Add any additional objects to represent something abstract.Save the map as a tmx file.Import the tmx file and interpret it for your game. Having a standardized system and a powerful flexible tool already in place allows you to focus on more important things in your game. Tiles: Again, set the width and height to 32px. That's it! Creating Isometric Worlds: A Primer for Game Developers. In this tutorial, I’ll give you a broad overview of what you need to know to create isometric worlds.
You’ll learn what the isometric projection is, and how to represent isometric levels as 2D arrays. We’ll formulate relationships between the view and the logic, so that we can easily manipulate objects on screen and handle tile-based collision detection. We’ll also look at depth sorting and character animation. 1. The Isometric World Isometric view is a display method used to create an illusion of 3D for an otherwise 2D game – sometimes referred to as pseudo 3D or 2.5D . These images (taken from the original Diablo and Age of Empires games) illustrate what I mean: Implementing an isometric view can be done in many ways, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll focus on a tile-based approach, which is the most efficient and widely used method. 2.
In the tile-based approach, each visual element is broken down into smaller pieces, called tiles, of a standard size. 3. Placing Isometric Tiles 4. 5. Going Old School: Making Games With a Retro Aesthetic. Everything old is new again, and retro games are more popular than ever. Bolstered by nostalgia and the abundance of casual and arcade-style games on iOS and Android devices, old school games are making a comeback.
In this tutorial I'll give you some tips on creating a successful retro-themed game. Choosing a Retro Style What do we mean when we talk about 'retro' games? There's no concrete definition, but I typically think of games made before 1990. All of those examples use blocky, pixelated, bitmap (or 'raster') graphics. Raster Graphics: Pac Man (Arcade), Frogger (Atari 2600), Super Mario Bros. But the earliest video games actually used vector graphics. Vector Graphics: Battlezone (Arcade), Tempest (Arcade), MineStorm (Vectrex) Another type of game us old folks used to play were simple handheld games that used a monochrome LCD display and extremely simple game mechanics.
LCD Graphics: Donkey Kong Jr. Creating a Color Palette Choosing a Pixel Size Drawing Pixel Art Drawing & Animation Tools. Parsing and Rendering Tiled TMX Format Maps in Your Own Game Engine. In my previous article, we looked at Tiled Map Editor as a tool for making levels for your games. In this tutorial, I'll take you through the next step: parsing and rendering those maps in your engine. Note: Although this tutorial is written using Flash and AS3, you should be able to use the same techniques and concepts in almost any game development environment. Requirements Saving in XML Format Using the TMX specification we can store the data in a variety of ways.
If you made your own map you will need to tell Tiled to save it as XML. For the "Store tile layer data as:" dropdown box, select XML, as shown in the image below: Now when you save the map it will be stored in XML format. As you can see, it simply stores all the map information in this handy XML format. Before we move on, I would like to direct your attention to the objectgroup "Collision" element. Core Outline Now here's a brief rundown on how we will be getting our map into the game: Reading in the TMX File Understanding "gid"
Introduction to Tiled Map Editor: A Great, Platform-Agnostic Tool for Making Level Maps. Old Game, New Twist: A Great Way to Practice Your Gamedev Skills. So you're an aspiring new game developer, you've made a few simple programs, and you're itching to make an actual game. You probably have lots of ideas, but making games almost always takes more effort than you think it will, so you need to start off simple.
You need a small project to let you test your skills and whet your interest. In which case, what better idea than to remake a classic - but with a twist? Preview image: Space Invaders Extreme To The Max, Yo by Tom Carruthers. Why Remake an Old Game? There are a few advantages to remaking an old game. Firstly, games like Pong or Space Invaders are easy to code. Old games are well established. If you get stuck, there are often dozens of tutorials online. And lastly, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of old games to choose from. Finding Your Inspiration With the expansive history of gaming we have today, its fairly easy to find something which provides a good base for a remake.
Making a Game So, how do you actually make a game? Art Assets. The Saturday Paper: Dungeon Feng Shui | Games By Angelina. Level design is a tricky business. As you creep around Dunwall or drive through Liberty City, you’re influenced by the architecture, the passageways, the placement of other characters and the location of treasure. Handcrafted levels benefit from the attention and refinement of many human designers, while procedural systems sacrifice human intuition in exchange for limitless content and unpredictable outcome. It’s only natural to ask – can we have both? This week The Saturday Paper is about building procedural level designers that can work to the kinds of intelligent, flexible constraints that designers use every day.
We’re reading Fast Procedural Level Population With Playability Constraints, by Ian Horswill and Leif Foged. The paper describes a way of placing objects like enemies, items and treasure inside a level procedurally, using some clever programming and maths tricks to make sure certain rules are always followed.
First, a little background on constraint solving. Game Design Engine, Make Games for iPhone & Android - GameSalad. 20 best designs in video games | Video games. Anything you can possibly imagine can be realised in a video game, so why dedicate all your time to simply replicating the designs and patterns that we're used to in reality? But some designers get it right, playing to the strengths of the medium, and creating games that are visually striking and artistically inspiring.
Here, we pick our 20 favourite designs in games history and grab some leading games designer views. The hood - Assassin's Creed The stories of the Assassin's Creed heroes are separated by hundreds of years, but there's one stylish visual hallmark that ties them together: the hood. Fashion may change over the centuries, but hoods will always be around in some form, which makes Ubisoft's decision to incorporate it into their costume designs a stroke of genius. It also makes sense in the context of the game, as the secretive Assassins use it to conceal their identity. Designer view Master Chief's armour - Halo Halo's world can best be described as 'hard sci-fi'. Designer views. The Difference Between A Good Video Game and a Bad One.
Dissertation « The Dreaming Game Designer. This large post has the final version of my dissertation, be advised that the word count came in at 6585 words, it’s a long read but you should be able to just skip to the Further Issues & The Nature of Puzzles sections right at the end without losing out on too much content. The Challenge of Puzzle Solving in Games – Robert Farr Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of BA in Creative Computer Games Design at Swansea Metropolitan University (Formerly Swansea Institute of Higher Education) Table of Contents Word Count 6585 Chapter 1: Introduction What is a game?
In order to do the above it is first necessary to examine the definition of a game as this informs further discussion of the reasons for why adventure games have suffered recently. For simplicity we shall instead focus on a definition authored by game designer Greg Costikyan. What is a First Person Shooter? What is a Graphic Adventure Game? Chapter Summary Chapter 2: First Person Shooter Half-Life Far Cry 2. Motivate. Play. | A blog of theory and practice regarding motivation, other aspects of cognition, and games - Aurora. Welcome to Flow in Games. Abstract | Introduction | Foundation | Design Flow in Games | Implement Flow in Games | Conclusion | Bibliography “TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness...” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) Motivation In the last 30 years, as a form of entertainment, video games have evolved from confined arcade activities into a mature media. Video games have deeply infiltrated our daily life and our society.
As if toys expanded every child’s imagination, modern videogames take advantage of a player's active involvement to open more possibilities than any other existing mediums. [Wright 2006] More and more people grow up playing video games, treating them not only as an art form but also as serious media. However, video games are still recognized by the majority, who do not play video games, as shallow and aggression-provoking materials. Inspiration Overview of the Thesis The remainder of this thesis is organized into four chapters.
The Origins of Flow | Motivate. Play. - Aurora. As a reader of MP, there's a decent chance that you're already familiar with the concept of "flow" championed by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced like this, not this). If you aren't up to speed on it, fear not; I'll go into the details in just a moment. The notion is immensely popular among game designers and theorists, whether they want to leverage games' power to put us into a flow state to pursue social good, are using psychophysiological tools to quantify flow and keep players in it, or simply using it as the blueprint for good game design. But as much as the games community wants to take flow as its own, there's more to the story. I finally sat down and read Csikszentmihalyi's principal book on the topic, and the truth of the matter is that "flow" is much more than a gaming concept.
The key realization, and the one Csikszentmihalyi is famous for, is that there's a sweet spot where challenge and skill are well-matched that he dubbed the "flow channel". The Philosophy of Game Design (part 1) The Escapist Magazine. If you've ever said that a videogame was "bad" for any reason - is evil, is nothing new, is too hard, is pretentious, is inaccessible, is sexist - in the performance of your royal duties as Grand Arbiter of Good Taste, then you also have to define and articulate what is a "good" game for us simple-minded folk.
So, what makes a "good" game? Well, it all depends on whether you believe in absolute truth. (No, really!) For purposes of simplification, I will ignore all traditions of ancient philosophy that took place outside of Greece. Aristotle argued for a type of pluralism, where the purpose of a society was to ensure its individual citizens flourished (and by citizens, he meant only the small portion of Greek society that was the educated male land-owning military and gentry - sorry, women and slaves, no flourishing for you!)
So, an Aristotelian philosophy of game design would presume the existence of a "citizen" - the hardcore gamer. Game Player Motivations - Aurora. I included a simple way to break down the major categories of motivation for any game in my recent book, Game On. This can help you think about the different things that motivate players in almost any game: My goal with the four quadrants of player motivation draw upon prior work by Richard Bartle . Bartle broke player motivations down into explorers, socializers, killers and achievers. Subsequently, he expanded this into eight categories. My goal is to provide everyone with a new model of player motivations that have the simplicity of Bartle’s original formulation, yet which can apply to nearly any game that exists–not simply MUDs or MMORPGs.
In my formulation, there are two axes that define the environment the player is in: the horizontal axis is the number of players involved in an element of gameplay. According to these axes, the four quadrants are: Immersion: stories, roleplaying, exploration, imagination, and a sense of connectedness to the world of the game. GameDesign. Do Video Games Make Depression Worse? When I was in the height of my depression (or low, really) a few months ago/for the past year, I couldn't really play video games at all; they didn't make it worse. Interestingly, while overall I stagnated, my ability to engage with other media stayed the same. It was much like Brian Taylor discusses his issues with gaming and depression: "Playing games was a chore. “Of course it was!” You may say.
“Part of depression is not enjoying the things you used to!” Or maybe that I didn’t want to, or that I couldn’t, move. " I think framed that way, it makes a lot of sense. And now that I'm a bit better I can actually play games often. The Alien Hive team shares tips and concepts from the game's development. Alien Hive arrived on the App Store a little while ago, and I wrote it up as a Daily App a little bit after that. Since then, however, it's stuck in my brain, and I find myself coming back to it again and again. The developer is based overseas and named Appxplore -- they're also the team behind two games called Sporos and Lightopus, great-looking puzzle games with plenty of polish. But neither of those titles has caught my fancy the way Alien Hive has -- there's something about the game's relatively slow, thoughtful mix of match-three, tile-based gameplay that has me interested, and constantly trying to make more and better moves to keep from running out of energy before a new high score.
After I asked the team about the game's development, they kindly sent us some exclusive concept art to share with you. The robot art here is very interesting as well. Finally, Appxplore shared some tips with me about their various strategies behind playing the game. The Philosophy of Game Design (part 1) A Dictionary of Video Game Theory. Features - Tiled Terrain. Getting Started. Opinion: Indie Game Design Do-s and Don't-s: A Manifesto.
Indie-Resource.com. A New Economic Model For Massively Multiplayer Games - Programme. Game Development Wiki - GDWiki. Rules of play: game design fundamentals. Stamen design | big ideas worth pursuing. Game Design » #AltDevBlogADay.