So you want to make a game...


When I was about 11 years old, I stumbled across another blogspot blog titled AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), and that set me off on a journey that lead to me learning game maker, making hundreds of small projects in it, realizing I hated doing pixel art, learning 3D design and Unreal Engine, before accepting I couldn't make a game that was as good as Call of Duty by myself, then finally abandoning all of it for the next year or so.

I have since worked on many small game design teams, trying my hand at almost everything, and have seen projects I have worked on both fail and "succeeded." I put succeeded in quotes because while some of the projects finished and put of for download, they never really became anything. That said, I haven't worked on a shipped project since Steam's Greenlight service was implemented, so people discovering our games and dealing with the often sketchy as all hell custom storefronts we used probably contributed to that problem a ton.


Trying to do my own games, and working for a colorful assortment of other people and team structures has taught me a lot about what works, and what doesn't and in the next part I will give you a list of some of the things to pay attention to in order to make sure your game isn't just another casualty in the world of indie development.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hacking Bitsy to run AI PT. 1: Getting to know Bitsy

Image
Click to play game I'm finishing out my last year of college and since I don't have any required courses left in my Comp Sci major, one of the classes I am taking is a game design course. It's an "Intro to game design," course, and as such it's focusing more on the "design," aspect, and less on technical skills. For example: Our last project was to make a non-digital version of a video game so we turned Mario Kart into a board game (which kicked major ass btw). It's a really fun course and I'm having a blast! Anyways, our current project is to design our own game. Since the course is mainly a freshman course and a lot of the other students haven't had any programming classes yet we are limited to really basic game creation tools. Introducing...(drumroll) BITSY! Enter Bitsy . Bitsy is a simple game engine and editor that allows you to make fun little games centered around conversations and picking up items. There's no
Read more

Hacking Bitsy to run AI PT. 2: Ghosts N Stuff

Image
Click to play game Welcome to the second part where I will be going over the actual AI / game programming, and how I got it to interface with Bitsy. If you haven't read the first part, you can find it here Communicating between Bitsy and our Code. This game uses the standard start/update function convention (named pStart() , and pUpdate() respectively in the code). I lodged the pStart() function call right after load_game() in the startExportedGame() function. so that it is called first thing, but also after all the game data has been initialized. It's job is to simply set up our own game variables and objects. Then I called the pUpdate() function in two places. Once at the end of pStart() in the form of a "setInterval" which is set to update every 300 miliseconds, and a special world.player.update() (more on this in a second) was forcefully stuffed into Bitsy's updateInput() function to update the player position every time a key is pres
Read more

Write Ups

Nobody but porn bots read this blog anyways, so I don't think they will mind if I change things up a bit. For my next few YouTube tutorials I am going to try to do a Write-up along side the video and see how much time that takes. If it takes too long, or not that many people are reading them, I will probably stop, however I'm interested to see how it turns out. I'll still probably finish up my Accountability posts this weekend with a really quick summary, and post a little more random stuff about freelance work and life. If you are an actual human, and read this blog, let me know XD
Read more