GBGamesI liked the idea of the police strategically blocking certain roads so that the criminals can’t get away. Road Lockdown is my current name for the project, but it might change. B-)
From this mock-up, you can see the red getaway car of the criminals as well as the squad cars blocking the roads. I think I’ll keep the road images for the final game, and the cars seem to have come out fairly nice, I think.
I think I’ll go to sleep now. Tomorrow morning I have a lot of coding to do.
So the theme is Roads. According to the voting results, it was the only one with a positive number of votes overall, and yet the IRC channel is erupting with people surprised that it was the theme that won out.
What are some ideas?
– Building roads between cities to facilitate commerce.
– Managing traffic congestion.
– Planning/Acting on The Road Ahead for your life.
– Maintaining a small town’s roads.
– Transporting materials along a long road.
– Find your way without a map, searching for a lost road.
– Strategically shut down certain roads to guide a getaway car to the police.
There are plenty of ideas, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more.
Ludum Dare, the 48-hour solo game development competition, will start tonight at 10PM CST. You can check all of the action at the main competition blog.
The theme voting had been separated into four rounds. The winning theme will be announced at the start of the competition, and we’ll have 48 hours to make a game based on that theme. There are currently 16 themes in the running.
As always, I’ll be cross-posting between the official Ludum Dare blog and my own blog. I’m looking forward to this weekend. It’s always fun, and it is easy to learn new things when you are focused so intently for two days straight. Be sure to check out my tips for participating in Ludum Dare if you plan on participating!
Last time I barely managed to put some game play into my submission, and while I got compliments for my approach, I got a lot of comments like, “Too bad it wasn’t a game.” My goal for this competition is to have the game play established within the first 6 hours of work. I’ll probably go to sleep at the start of the competition, so Saturday should see the basic game play before I stop for dinner if all goes well.
Good luck to everyone who enters! Let’s make games!
[tags] game development, game competition, ludum dare, indie [/tags]
I thought I would pass this information along since it doesn’t seem like most people know about it.
From http://www.childsplaycharity.org/events.php:
December 9th 2008
Chicago, IL. (Plan B Chicago, 1635 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60647) Dawdle.com and Midway Games are sponsoring the first-ever Child’s Play fundraiser in Chicago! Join us for gaming, booze, and prizes! We’ll have a gaming contest (game TBA) and some other special items. Totally inspired by Funde Razor, we’re doing our part to raise the spirits of some very deserving kids.
To learn more, please go to http://www.dawdle.com/childsplay. To purchase your ticket, please visit to http://childsplay.eventbrite.com/
I’ll be attending, and so should you! Check http://www.childsplaycharity.org/events.php for Child’s Play events in your area.
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 130.5 (current year) = 539.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000
I spent a lot less time working on game development than I wanted to over my vacation, but I hope a daily routine will help. Also, by Friday, Ludum Dare #13 will begin, so I will be working a significant number of hours this weekend.
I’m still working on cross-compilation scripts. I want the ability to build GNU/Linux AND Win32 versions of a game without the need to reboot into Windows.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Just like last year, I want to take this opportunity to be thankful.
These days it is easy to focus on the negative. The bad news about the economy is constant, hate and violence seems to be erupting all over the world, and there are plenty of fingers pointing blame in every direction.
So it is good to take a step back and think about what’s good in your life. I’m thankful for the ability to focus on the positive. I have a warm home, great friends, two fantastic cats, and opportunities just waiting to be taken advantage of. I’m thankful for my readers, the people who have played my games and given me feedback, and the people who have made the games that I play.
To everyone who has made an impact on my life, you are my teachers, and I thank you for the opportunities to learn from you.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Last night I got back from over a week-long vacation. I visited friends in Des Moines, and it was very relaxing, aside from hurting my back and seeing the chiropractor four times. I walked around downtown Des Moines, visited the historic Capitol Building, went to a dueling pianos show, watched a couple of movies, danced at a nightclub, and otherwise had a great time.
Oh, and I learned how to play checkers.
I was in the library and passed the game section. There was a book on playing checkers. I thought, “Ok, I haven’t played that game since I was a kid, and I think I heard someone saying that it is as cerebral as chess. Let’s see why.” Did you know that the official rules of checkers REQUIRES you to jump your opponent’s piece if you can do so? I didn’t know this rule, and when I asked, it seems that most of my friends didn’t either! This one simple rule suddenly makes this otherwise child-friendly game really, really complicated.
Besides trying to figure out ways to make simple games more strategic by forcing moves the way checkers does, I spent a good amount of time figuring out my next move in life. I read a couple of books and articles on life purpose and business and wrote a bunch of notes. I took advantage of my time away from work obligations to think about what I want out of my life. I’ll have more to write about my decisions later, but suffice it to say that I don’t want life to force my hand because it might put me in a suboptimal situation.
It’s my move.
[tags] checkers, life purpose, business, game development [/tags]
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 126.5 (current year) = 535.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 63 (current year) = 773 / 1000
It’s been over a month since my last Thousander Club update. Yeesh. I’m still in crunch at the day job, although it is winding down quite a bit. I keep expecting it to be over, but there is always one more issue found that I need to fix.
In the past week I’ve worked quite a bit on trying to cross-compile a single .cpp file for both GNU/Linux and Windows. And I’ve succeeded! It seems easy once you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, good luck finding decent documentation on the topic. I keep finding information on building your own cross-compiler, even though most distros seem to have them available. I rarely find information on what you need to build an SDL app for Windows on your GNU/Linux system. The best documentation on the topic is currently at http://icculus.org/~dolson/sdl/, but even then I found most of the useful information is in the scripts rather than the documentation about the scripts.
As for testing it in Wine, I keep encountering problems, partly to do with the fact that I’m using an older version of Ubuntu and Wine. Wine still has some really weird issues. For example, there is a bug in Wine that prevents cout/cerr from being called more than once. WTF? This issue and the inability of the older version of Wine to work with SDL_mixer make it very hard to test my Win32 version of the app while I develop it.
And cross-compiling has its own issues. I found out that arguments to main() aren’t optional when cross-compiling with SDL. Otherwise, you get an undefined reference to SDL_main, which is a non-useful error message that is luckily easy to search for online.
Otherwise, I’ve been a little more productive in the past week. I also intend to learn to use mxmlc and other freely available Flash development tools. So far, ActionScript seems confusing. For instance, when you use the EMBED tag, you are telling it what resource to use. Let’s say you want to load an image called example.jpg. You would EMBED example.jpg, then create an Image object…but you never explicitly tell the Image object to use example.jpg. It just does. Weird.
For this coming week, I’m going to try to stay away from Flash/Flex, and try to get Walls closer to release. With what I’ve learned in my experiments with cross-compiling this past week, I think I should be able to release both GNU/Linux and Win32 binaries very soon. I’ll be writing up my own cross-compile documentation soon.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
It’s Halloween, and that means things that go bump in the night and candy and scary costumes. Or these days, sexy costumes. No complaints, though. B-)
Anyway, what’s your favorite scary video game?
I have to include Alien vs Predator 2 at the top of my list. The first few marine levels were really tense, and there were no enemies! It was just like being in one of the movies.
Resident Evil 4 was pretty scary as well, but I seem to have misplaced the first disc so I can’t play it.
And who can forget playing Eternal Darkness? Insanity is creepy!
ZombieGames.net has a collection of quality indie horror games. I enjoyed playing The Last Stand 2 and a few of the Boxhead series of games. The latest one is Boxhead Halloween, in which you need to save civilians from the zombies.
[tags] halloween, scary video games, indie [/tags]
Gregg Seelhoff announced that he attended Meaningful Play 2008, an academic conference ” that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways”, and he posted his notes.
I’ve been thinking about the kind of games I wanted to make, and rather than create short-term sales product that will be thrown away within a week, I’d like to make games that matter. Games that stick around long after you’ve played them, like a good book or a good movie. I really liked the idea of an entire conference dedicated to meaningful play, and I hope I can attend the next one. There were some good nuggets of information that Gregg managed to report, such as who plays games at Pogo.com and for how long, but I especially liked reading the following on what kinds of serious games received good reviews:
An acceptable game (threshold 1) succeeded in the areas of technical capacity and game design. A good game (threshold 2) passed threshold 1 and, additionally, succeeded with aesthetics, visual and acoustic. For a game to be great (threshold 3), it had to pass both previous thresholds and also succeed in the final two areas of social experience and storyline (“narrativity and character development” is too long). Few games reached the final threshold.
Look at that! A prioritized list of what makes up a good game!
It’s unfortunate when you can’t play games because they are made for specific platforms, especially when there is always this emphasis on the ubiquity of Flash. Many of the games Gregg links to were Windows-specific, and they wouldn’t run in Wine. When so many of these games aren’t even meant to be commercially viable, is it still a valid argument that providing a port to other platforms such as Mac and Gnu/Linux would be pointless since having access to a few hundred thousand more players wouldn’t be worth it?
I would have liked to know more about Ian Bogost’s keynote, but Gregg provided some good notes for most of the rest of the conference. I have more than a few PDFs to download and read through.
[tags] meaningful play, game design, game development, serious games, casual games, conference [/tags]