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Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: March 17th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 28 (current year) = 437.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 35 (current year) = 745 / 1000

I updated the graphics. Here is one of the first screen shots I took of this game, way back in December of 2006:

See that background? And the player’s ship? Yeah, those were supposed to be placeholder art. I’ve replaced them finally. The new art isn’t great, and it is still programmer art, but it isn’t horrible. The sky is just an exploded part of the title screen’s background, and the ground is…well, it is still a giant rectangle of green, only it is darker and has different shades of green sprayed around to give a bad illusion of grass. The ship is actually sci-fi looking instead of abstract.

Oh, and I should address this part. I can’t believe I’ve had this project on my plate since 2006! That’s over a year working on a clone! Granted, I’m going through the entire process of making, packaging, and distributing the game, and so it required more work and polish than my Pong clone. I had to make a menu system, for one thing. I also had to deal with figuring out license compliance issues since I am distributing certain libraries the game requires. Not having gone through these issues before, I had a lot of research to do and mistakes to make.

Now that I’m on the tail end of this project, I’m much more confident about tackling the next one. I have build scripts that are far and away much better than they were when I started, and those scripts and my know-how can come with me when I start a new project. It will be great to have the ability to create a distributable file from day one.

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]