I watched a great documentary last night about the guys behind games such as “Fez” and “Super Meat Boy.” Now, I’m not a gamer in the least, though I do have a nostalgic spot for the days of the orignal “Super Mario Bros.” and “Legend of Zelda.” So this doc appealed to me on that level, but…
That’s right! While the Catarse was up, a publisher got in touch with me and told me they were willing to publish Dreaming Sarah. So, after some time and some contract signing, it’s all official now.
The publisher name is GameHouse, which is represented in Latin America as Atrativa. So pardon…
Congratz dude you deserve it
Finishing Games
The biggest hurdle when you try to finish video games is the definition of finished. When is your game finished? What’s missing to finish my game? I still need to add ……. to finish my game?
The definition of when you’re game is finished is the most important thing. Because you need to be on the same line across all development team members and you need to know what functionality definitely needs to be in your game to finish it.
After you have added all the core functionality you should test your game to remove all the major bugs. But there will always be tidbits you haven’t thought about before or bugs you couldn’t encounter because you yourself know everything about your game.
To truly finish a game you should still have some support for it after you get it finished and listen to bugs players may encounter. Or confusing situations that may arise while playing. After the game is at a state of playability where the player won’t encounter any bugs that might disrupt gameplay and have all the visual cue’s to find out what they need to do to continue in the game, your game will be finished.
But even then you still want to implement features but these could be implemented as an update, a new patch, DLC it doesn’t take away the fact that you have delivered a finished product.
One of the many things I heard this year at GDC that stuck with me goes something like “design your game for hardcore players first, then make it accessible for casual players.” I’m probably butchering it a little bit - I heard it from my friend Mark Johns, who attributes it to Blizzard. Who…
Dumbing down games definitely seems like a bad practice after this. Still a lot of game designers tend to do it.
After the first few releases of Spelunky, there was one player who began nagging me constantly to make the game easier. “Derek, I hate your fuckin’ game,” he said. “Because it’s the first roguelike/platformer implementation I’ve ever seen, which is totally awesome. But from this game…
Another post from the creatore of Spelunky but he drops some valid points so if you have the time, give it a try!
In the April 2011 issue of Edge magazine, From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki outlined the five key criteria by which his team is balancing the difficulty of Dark Souls:
1. Any player can clear any obstacle simply by learning from mistakes and paying close attention.
2. The reasons…
Some great game design tips
How to Tell When You Gave Artists Too Much Control Over Design
A half hour into Earthworm Jim on SNES, and three things became painfully clear to Andy (Hull) and me: 1. wow, Earthworm Jim is a worse game than we remembered, 2. Earthworm Jim was designed by visual artists with little experience in game design, and 3. modern studios haven’t learned from Earthworm Jim, because some of their games share a lot of its negative traits.
Ultimately, what we enjoyed about EWJ were its quirky characters, humor, and animation, which were unmatched at the time. But it’s because those elements came at such a premium that it pales in comparison to other run n’ guns and platformers of the era, like Contra or Mega Man. Though Jim and his cohorts are remembered fondly (and with good reason), it’s not likely to be a game we’ll come back to very often.
Before Spelunky I started a simple little roguelike game. Here’s the tilesheet I made for it - feel free to use these tiles in your own (non-commercial) projects, if you like. No credit necessary, although it would be appreciated!
Pixel Art Tutorial
Note: This tutorial was created in 2007 for my personal website. Some small tweaks have been made since then, but nothing too significant.
In this 10-step tutorial, I’ll teach you how to create a “sprite”, which is a stand-alone two-dimensional character or object. The term comes from video games, of course.Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became kinda handy with it, and started to see it more as actual art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular in game development and illustration.
This pixel tutorial was created many years ago to teach people the basic concepts behind pixel art, but I’ve streamlined it a lot since its first incarnation. There are other pixel tutorials around, but I find them to be overly-complicated and too wordy. Pixel art is not a science. You should never have to calculate a vector when doing pixel art.
