Links About Game Design That I Fully Intend To Read But Don't Currently Have The Time

http://critical-gaming.squarespace.com/blog/2009/7/7/for-the-scale-of-balance-pt4.html

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/slippery-slope-and-perpetual-comeback.html

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/game-theory-applied-to-game-design/

The Spectrum Got There First!

Did it? Well yes actually, it did. You name the genre and you're pretty much guaranteed that the first game of that genre was available on the Spectrum (or maybe ZX81). And here's a few examples to prove my point.

Let's start with the biggy, probably the greatest breakthrough in gaming this century (or maybe the end of the last one). I'm talking about GTA3 of course, what everyone thought was revolutionary.



That is, apart from me. I thought I was having a bout of terminal deja-vu when I saw it, and was nostalghically transported back to the mid 80's, when I was playing the classic Turbo Esprit:-



Next, Wolfenstein is held up as the start of the FPS genre. Frankly, I was hoping it was the end as I was already bored of FPS'ing.



The start for me was 3D Monster Maze, almost 15 years (count'em!) earlier:-

Detractors will say "It didn't have any shooting in it!". I reply "Well, that's pretty revolutionary in itself!".

Just like Wolfenstein, Dune II is held up as the first of the RTS genres. (I've no idea what happened to Dune I).



But RTS's had been around for years already - if you owned a Spectrum (and probably most of the other popular 8-bit machines). However, Stonkers came out on the Spectrum first, and for that reason we can gloat.


And before you ask, yes, it does have resource collecting!

Last but not least is genre that never quite goes away, it's the top-down dungeon crawling game. I could have included a picture of Diablo here, but let's be fair and show Gauntlet, what many people claim to be the first (apart from those who claim it was The Dandy).



Of course, both of those people are wrong. The first game was Maziacs, and it came out on the Spectrum first (as if you needed to ask).



So if you're a games programmer working for a large megacorporation with a massive marketing budget but precious few original ideas, why not plunder a few from the Speccy back-catologue and claim them as your own?

If you can think of any more, please let me know and I'll do a "part 2" or something.

Pushing the bounds of technology

Like all people, I wonder what will happen when I die. And being a programmer, I came to the obvious conclusion: store my consciousness in a program that will live on in cyberspace in perpetuity!

So, after literally minutes of messing about, may I present the "Me" applet:-



Now you will able to communicate with me forever through the power of Java. Now if I can just hook it up to Blogger, I can keep writing blog entries long after they stop being funny!

Tips on maintaining your own interest in your own project (#1 in a series)

If you are sure that the game will be a good, entertaining game, then try to complete as much of the programming as possible before actually playing the game*.

(* This entirely contradicts my previous advice of "get the game up and running as soon as possible so you have something to play". I've decided that once you have something to play, the remaining programming tasks consist of the boring tidying-up programming, which has very little reward since you already have a game to play. My new advice is to keep programming all the little bits and pieces first. In addition, doing it this way will mean your original vision will remain in your head, and not be replaced by interest-sapping the catastrophe with temporary-and-crap graphics that you have programmed**.)

(** I hope this makes sense.)

3D is hard!

During moments of niavity (sp?), I sometimes think that 3D should be easy and I'm just going about it the wrong way. Surely it's just like 2D, except you have to adjust for depth as well?

Unfortunately, it's nothing like as easy. For a start, with 2D, all your co-ordinates have a common origin, usually the bottom left, and you can tell whereabouts a sprite is in relation to the origin. With 3D, the origin could be anywhere, and usually each model seems to have it's own. In addition, working out where the origin is can be difficult, since it depends on where your camera is and what direction it is looking in.

You might have two 3D models, each facing zero degress (or radians, assuming you haven't got them mixed up again). But one is facing one way and one another. And their direction might change depending on the frame of animation they are in.

And why can't I see anything? Is the camera outside the scene looking outwards again? Or is it looking directly down, which seems to cause problems and make everything disappear? Or are the objects slightly too far away to see? Or maybe I need to add lighting to the scene. And why is one model approximatly 3 million times bigger than the other? Time to scale the models down a bit and then wteak their height so they are standing on the floor and not in it.

And why does my model move whenever I move the camera? Oh, I've forgotten that when I have a unit with a position of Vector vec, and I then do camera.setLocation(vec), it is using the same actual object (vec) for both the unit's location and the camera's location, so when one changes, so does the other. Grrr!