Dirty Coding Tricks [When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that.] Programmers are often methodical and precise beasts who do their utmost to keep their code clean and pretty. But when the chips are down, the perfectly-planned schedule is shot, and the game needs to ship, "getting it done" can win out over elegance. In a case like this, a frazzled and overworked programmer is far more likely to ignore best practices, and hack in a less desirable solution to get the game out the door. - Brandon Sheffield [If any readers have any dirty coding tricks of their own to share, please email them to Brandon Sheffield at bsheffield@gdmag.com. Around four years ago I was working as a programmer on a multiplatform PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube release. - Mark Cooke "Ship it!"
Level Design A plethora of level-design related texts and pieces from my brain. Mapography I’ve made a bunch of maps in my time. Too many, really. Professional - everything that appeared on shelvesPersonal - everything that didn’t The Making Of… This series looks back into the making of my two most popular maps, Dust and Dust 2, and a look at how they did post-release. The Making Of: Dust, 5th November 2011The Making Of: Dust 2, 29th January 2003The Making Of: Sienna, 28th September 2004 My Blog (deceased) For over a year I maintained a blog devoted to various aspects of game and level design. Some of the more notable posts include: Map Walkthroughs These walkthroughs were written by Mike S. ETC Walkthrough, 15th January 2003ETC 2 Walkthrough, 15th January 2003 Images Textures - some textures and images
The Big List Of Game Making Tools Evolve Your Hierarchy Refactoring Game Entities with Components Up until fairly recent years, game programmers have consistently used a deep class hierarchy to represent game entities. The tide is beginning to shift from this use of deep hierarchies to a variety of methods that compose a game entity object as an aggregation of components. This article explains what this means, and explores some of the benefits and practical considerations of such an approach. I will describe my personal experience in implementing this system on a large code base, including how to sell the idea to other programmers and management. Different games have different requirements as to what is needed in a game entity, but in most games the concept of a game entity is quite similar. Some example entities: MissileCarTankGrenadeGunHeroPedestrianAlienJetpackMed-kitRock Entities can usually do various things. As development progresses, we usually need to add various points of functionality to the entities. Why so long? Resources
Learn Unity 2D | 2D game development in Unity Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types (And Why It Doesn’t Apply to Everything) Richard Bartle co-created MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), the text-based precursor to today's MMORPGs, while studying at Essex University. He ended up formulating the theory that all MUD players could be broken down into four main types: killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This theory has since been used in all sorts of game design situations where it doesn't apply - let's look at what exactly it does tell us. MUD is a text-based adventure game (no graphics at all, only text) that had the then-unique attribute of being able to be played alongside other human players. It's a simplified version of pen and paper role-playing games in that the player has to imagine the world according to the information the Game Master (the server and the writer of the game, in this case) provides. It might appear plain or even boring today, but MUD is significant as one of the first online games - it has been around for 30+ years. Summary of Bartle's player types. Bartle calls it a bandwagon.
www.steveswink.com Game UI By Example: A Crash Course in the Good and the Bad How easy is it for your player to put their intention into action, or to understand what's going on in your game? In this tutorial, you'll learn how to build a better game UI by examining both good and bad examples from existing games, and end up with a checklist of questions to guide you through designing them. As gamers and game developers we know that immersion is everything. When you're immersed you lose track of time and become involved in what the game is presenting. A major factor in what makes or breaks immersion is how easy it is for your player to convert an idea into an in-game action -- that is, how fluid your game's User Experience (UX) is and how well-designed its User Interface (UI) is. A game hurts itself by providing too little information or too much, requiring too many inputs, confusing the player with unhelpful prompts or making it hard for a new player to interact. A composited screenshot from Honey Bee Match 3. So what makes Oblivion's UI so bad? Really helpful.
underscorediscovery | independent game developer CompoHub Gamasutra - The Art & Business of Making Games Math for Game Developers Video Series I've launched a new Youtube series, Math for Game Developers. Each week I'll be showing how to solve a new problem in game development using math, and I'll be building up a math toolkit that you can use to solve any game dev problem. 1. Moving a character with vectors: 2. More moving characters: 3. 4. 5. This is very basic stuff, just showing the basics of vector maths, buteventually I'll be progressing to explaining the math behind moreadvanced things. I hope to help out people who are just starting their game dev career soplease let me know if I can improve the videos (other than the lowquality audio, a problem I'm working on) or if you didn't understandsomething
Art Assets – best practice guide Scale & Units Set your system and project units for your software to work consistently with Unity e.g. Metric. Working to scale can be important for both lighting and physics simulation;Be aware for example; Max system unit default is inches and Maya is centimetres.Unity has different scaling for FBX and 3D application files on import, check FBX import scale setting in Inspector.If in doubt export a metre cube with your scene to match in Unity.Animation frame rate defaults can be different in packages, is a good idea to set consistently across your pipeline – e.g. 30fps for example. Files & Objects Name objects in your scene sensibly and uniquely – this can help you locate and troubleshoot specific meshes in your project:Avoid special characters *()?” Sensibly named objects help you find stuff quickly Mesh Stairway to framerate heaven The method you use to construct objects can have a massive affect on the number of polygons, especially when not optimised. Textures Tiling textures ftw Materials