Designing a Boss Fight: Lessons Learned From Modern Games Boss battles have existed since practically the beginning of gaming and they have all followed a similar idea throughout the years: a big baddie that gets in the way of some major objective. In many cases they have had an overbearing role during the game's story, with ongoing hints of their existence or of the approaching fight with them. But there's more to boss fights than this. They serve as a way to change up the pace of the gameplay and often offer a break from any repetitive game mechanics throughout a game. They also help push forward the storyline in most modern games as well - but more often than not, they serve as a way to change what the player is doing. Music and Sound Design Music and sound during a boss fight play a huge role in determining whether the boss will get your players' adrenaline pumping. This may all seem obvious, but games still often get it wrong. The Side Boss Often in games you'll come across an unexpected, unannounced, or very sudden side boss. The Difficulty
Design a Video Game Interface Window in Photoshop One of the most important aspects of playing a video game is how information is presented. How the graphics are presented makes a major difference in how the players will perceive the game during play. In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to design a video game interface window. During the process we will show how to manually draw certain aspects, apply layer styles, textures, and even how to incorporate Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started! Tutorial Assets The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial. Step 1: Background Create new file with size 1152 px x 864 px. Step 2 Add a paper textures again, this time change its blend mode with Multiply. Step 3 Add adjustment layer Hue/Saturation to darken it. Step 4 Add a vintage book textures with blend mode Multiply and Opacity 48%. Step 5 Add old paper textures. Step 6 Add adjustment layer Black & White. Step 7 Create new layer. Step 8 Set its blend mode to Multiply and reduce its opacity to 8%. Step 9 Create new layer.
Animating With Asset Sheets: An Alternative to Blitting So you've got your awesome game in the works, it's got all sorts of complex physics, epic enemy AI or what-have-you. But it feels lifeless. You want some OOMPH, you want some animation! If you go and look up how to animate, the first answer you come across will most likely be a method using spritesheets and blitting. This method could be called animating with asset-sheets - or more technically, tweening with asset-sheets - as opposed to using sprite-sheets. What's Wrong With Blitting? Below are some reasons as to why you would not want to use blitting in certain cases. 1. Whether we're talking about RAM or disk space, sprite sheets can easily clog things up. 2. What happens when you want to speed up an animation? And what if you wanted something to happen when the player's arms reached some place? 3. What happens when the player is running and suddenly jumps? The Alternative This isn't even very new. So to summarize: Let's Dive Right In This is a character and his asset sheet. This is a door:
Game Development Tutorials – Networking for Game Programmers UDP vs. TCP What is the best way to send data between machines? Do you use TCP sockets, UDP sockets or a mixture of both? Sending and Receiving Packets This article shows how to send and receive UDP packets using BSD sockets, giving you source code that works across MacOS X, Windows and Unix. Virtual Connection over UDP Learn how to create your own virtual connection between two machines on top of UDP. Reliability and Flow Control Learn how to implement your own reliability system on top of UDP using sequence numbers and acks. Debugging Multiplayer Games Explains the techniques used by professional game developers to debug multiplayer games. What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking A brief overview of the history of PC multiplayer games. Floating Point Determinism Is it possible to get exactly the same floating point result (down to the bit-level) each time a program is run?
N Tutorial B - Broad-Phase Collision SECTION 3: Object Grid The grid structure described above can also double as a spatial database used to manage dynamic objects. Just as each cell contains information about the tile located in that cell, it can also contain information about each dynamic object currently located in the cell. Each cell contains a list of dynamic objects; as an object moves through the grid, we insert/remove it from each cell's list as appropriate. There are two approaches that can be taken when using a grid with dynamic objects: "normal" grid: each object is associated with all of the cells it touches. . pros: each object needs to look in at most 4 cells to find other objects it might collide with . cons: each object needs to be inserted/removed from up to 4 cells every time it moves; also, additional logic needs to be added to the collision code to deal with a case where, for instance, two objects touch the same two cells. In our implementation, each cell has: and each object has: --= more details =--
VideoTutorials Search public documentation: VideoTutorials 日本語訳中国翻译한국어 Interested in the Unreal Engine? Visit the Unreal Technology site. Looking for jobs and company info? Questions about support via UDN? UE3 Home > Unreal Engine 3 Video Tutorials Often there's no better way to learn a tool than to watch it being used. Accessing the Videos Each of the links below points to a tutorial, grouped by topic or specific feature. The video tutorials are linked to a media repository from this page. NOTE: These video tutorials were made using the Unreal Development Kit. Please right-click and save each file to your local storage space. Engine Tutorials The file format is Windows Media Video (.wmv). Skeletal Mesh Pipeline - Using UDK Jeremy Ernst, Technical Animator at Epic Games, takes you through the Unreal Engine Skeletal Mesh pipeline. Each compressed archive contains one video: Video Training Modules Often there's no better way to learn a tool than to watch it being used. Accessing the Videos Training Topics Eat3D
A* Pathfinding for Beginners By Patrick Lester (Updated July 18, 2005) This article has been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Finnish, German, Greek, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. Other translations are welcome. See email address at the bottom of this article. The A* (pronounced A-star) algorithm can be complicated for beginners. This article does not try to be the definitive work on the subject. Finally, this article is not program-specific. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Introduction: The Search Area Let’s assume that we have someone who wants to get from point A to point B. [Figure 1] The first thing you should notice is that we have divided our search area into a square grid. These center points are called “nodes”. Starting the Search Once we have simplified our search area into a manageable number of nodes, as we have done with the grid layout above, the next step is to conduct a search to find the shortest path. We begin the search by doing the following: where 1.
Creating a Game with Bonjour – Game Logic In the previous articles, we predominantly focused on the network aspect of the game. In this final installment, it is time to zoom in on the game itself. We will implement the game and leverage the foundation we laid in the previous articles to create a multiplayer game. Introduction In this article, we will discuss two topics, (1) creating the game and (2) leveraging the foundation that we created in the previous articles. 1. Let me start this article by briefly talking about the game, Four in a Row. This implies that we need to keep track of quite a few variables. I am not an expert in game development and the approach we use in this project is not the only solution to implement Four in a Row. While exploring Four in a Row, I stumbled upon a Stack Overflow answer that outlines an algorithm for Four in a Row using bitboards. As I said, we will be using an array of arrays as the data structure of the game. Step 1: Adding the Board View Let's start by creating the board view. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The Guide to Implementing 2D Platformers - Game Programming This article was written by Rodrigo Monteiro and originally published on his own blog at Higher-Order Fun and reprinted on our site (thanks to Rodrigo) in order to provide everyone with this great resource. Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details. The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments! Disclaimer: some of the information presented here comes from reverse engineering the behavior of the game, not from its code or programmers. I can think of four major ways in which a platform game can be implemented. Type #1: Tile-based (pure) Character movement is limited to tiles, so you can never stand halfway between two tiles.
Creating 2D Games With Unity3D Part 1 | Rocket 5 Studios One of my goals for 2011 is to write at least one new blog post every week. I’m going to kick off that goal this week by starting a multi-part series on creating 2D games with Unity3D. Please feel free to add comments below, especially if you have insight or questions about making 2D games with Unity3D. Part 2 of the series is now available here. Introduction There are tons of different ways to handle creating 2D games in Unity3D. Tools For sprites, I use Sprite Manager 2 which is a 3rd party Unity plugin – you can purchase SM2 on the Above and Beyond Software website or from the Unity Asset Store. There is also a free version of Sprite Manager which you can read about in this Unity Forum post. Be sure to watch the tutorial videos on the AndB website as they’re loaded with information on how to use SM2. Main Camera When making 2D games, you’ll typically want to set your Camera’s Projection to Orthographic rather than perspective, which will give you a flat 2D view of the scene. Collision