It's a time-honored television tradition: a holiday arrives or the budget dries up or the writing staff just can't be bothered to put together a new episode, so they write a few minutes of setup and run a clip show featuring bits and pieces from earlier episodes. In many ways, that's what this long-overdue SummerJammers (a Giant Bomb themed WindJammers homage) update feels like. About a month a...
In case you missed it, I'm working on a Giant Bomb game inspired by that old chestnut, Windjammers. And it needs your help! Yeah yeah yeah this update is a few days late. But oh man, is it worth it. Interestingly enough, this is the first time that I've ever written a program with time dependency. My other work has mainly been logical and computational stuff or tools for working with turn-based...
Well, maybe not lights, but certainly camera and action. It's been a good week for SummerJammers. I only put it in two days of work, but I managed to knock out something big each time, and here are the results: - Camera. The old render system drew things directly to the viewport, which would be a problem if I ever wanted to do things like zoom and pan. The new system is a 2D camera with a 3D po...
If you're new here, I'm working on a Giant Bomb themed version of the 1994 Neo Geo "classic," Windjammers. It's like pong with a frisbee. We're back. Here are some screenshots. Welcome to the world of placeholder art! The big circles are player avatars, the small red circle is the disc, and the little red bar in the upper right corner is a goal. The first shot shows a player holding the disc (I...
Having been awake for 24 hours, I was slumped over in a chair in a physical therapy office's waiting room while my friend was doing some work to recover from ACL surgery. The previous night, if it could be called that, was supposed to end at a somewhat reasonable 1 AM. I had finished setting up the file and asset structures for SummerJammers and decided to do a quick debug run to make sure that...
Party time! Thanksgiving threw me off a bit, hence the extra week between updates, but there's been some craziness happening in the world of SummerJammers. Let's start by seeing how those goals from last time went: - Fully implement Wall,Disc , and Goal classes Goal is coming along nicely, including logic to construct goals out of an arbitrary number of GoalSegments for drawing purposes. - Buil...
Monday's deadline has come and gone with no update, and there are two reasons for that. 1) Other life stresses. Bills, roommates, existentialism, unemployment and assorted career uncertainty, and a weird combination of choice paralysis and hopelessness. You know, the good stuff. My stress release is games, so I spent a lot of last week with Dark Souls and Rogue Legacy, both of which are great,...
(If you're not sure what subclasses and interfaces are, I've included some helpful definitions at the end of the post) Welcome back! I've had two weeks to work toward some milestones, so let's start by seeing how that went. - straight toss in player-determined direction Incomplete. Disc implementation was pushed back to the next deadline. - player "dash" Done! - basic player/disc hit detection...
Welcome to Update 1! On the agenda: 1) Design philosophy 2) Name suggestions (Open until 5PM PST on Wednesday, Nov. 13) 3) Status report 4) Looking ahead For those of you just joining us, last week I decided to get the ball rolling on making a Giant Bomb themed adaptation of WindJammers . The original plan was to have a design document posted today, but I've decided to heed the advice I've rece...
A new console generation looms, so who's holding the right cards? Or even knows what game they're playing? As an exclusively PC-based gamer, new generations of gaming consoles have always been life-affirming events. With no brand loyalty or need to justify one console purchase or another, I've always had the luxury of sitting back, grabbing a snack, and watching the internet become fucking awfu...
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy or anything, but it sure seems like god-game Reus and Firaxis' 2012 XCOM have a lot in common. They may even be... the same game! Oh, you're laughing? You call me crazy? Well, how crazy is this? 1) Neither one is really fun. I loved XCOM . I thought it was a brilliant reintroduction to a game that blew my mind as a kid. It was simultaneously tense and intense...
After a week or so away from it, I used the recent 1.03 patch as an excuse to get back into Diablo III. I grabbed my low-level Wizard and started breaking down skeletons for parts with my ice beam, but it wasn't long before I felt an emptiness inside. It had nothing to do with the patch, which is a benign piece of work; it's just that the Diablo III magic had faded in the 150+ hours I'd spent w...
Welcome back to Talkin' Shop, where we take a look at some of our favorite issues in the world of game design. This week, we're looking at a little system with big implications: lockpicking! I'm a huge fan of Bethesda Softworks, and can can think of no digital worlds I've been as happy to wander as the ones found in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. And while 2011's Skyrim represented a huge...
Welcome to Talkin' Shop, where we take a look at some of the big issues in game design. This week, we take a look at something called "anti-fun," check out a few examples of it in action, and talk about its roots in a game's design. The Hell IS Anti-Fun? The term "anti-fun" was popularized by Zileas, design director at Riot Games (of League of Legends fame). In a forum post Zileas said: "Anti-f...
It would be wrong to say that Guild Wars 2 doesn't have a resource mechanic. Tempting, but wrong. Sure, there's no real "cost" for using a skill (with a few class-specific exceptions like the Warrior's "Burst" skills), but there's a lot going on behind the scenes that you can easily miss. I know this because Arenanet's official forums are full of people missing the point. So get yourself educat...
I hate MMOs. Or at least, I hate what we think of of when we think of MMOs. The original Guild Wars drew me in because it was essentially a Collectible Card Game (CCG, like Magic: The Gathering) and eventually left me feeling cold as it became bloated and unbalanced and picked up more of the typical MMO trappings. So it might come as a surprise to hear that Guild Wars 2, which is technically a...
About two weeks back I spent some time with the Torchlight 2 beta. Let's break down the things that did, didn't, and might work, all while trying to avoid comparisons to Diablo 3 (spoiler alert: there will be comparisons to Diablo 3). Keep in mind that this is not a review or representative of the release product (since that's not really possible yet...) it's just a collection of the ups and do...
My time with the Torchlight 2 beta featured some incredible highs and some disappointing lows. A lot of things about the game felt carelessly designed, which can't be shrugged off with a “well, it's just a beta,” especially with the expected release date so quickly approaching. However, the Engineer class offered a glimpse into what the future could hold for Torchlight. The biggest problem I ha...