February 2011
1 post
3 tags
Feb 3rd
January 2011
11 posts
3 tags
Jan 31st
1 note
4 tags
The Battle System
I may not have explicitly said it yet, but this game I’m working on is an exploration into the turn based battle system. Rather than keeping the system tied to it’s typical RPG genre, I want to explore it on a battle-by-battle basis, which will hopefully reveal some interesting depth previously unseen in the system. One difficult aspect of designing battles given these restrictions is...
Jan 25th
2 notes
5 tags
Examples of Good Game Design: VVVVVV
VVVVVV takes the platforming genre and turns it on its head. Instead of jumping, players instead change the direction in which the main character falls. This makes getting across any gap or bump on a path an interesting endeavor, especially when the closest ceiling might be a few screens away. Not only is the very idea genius, but the execution is perfect as well. Each room is designed to be an...
Jan 19th
1 note
Jan 16th
3 tags
Adventures in Metaprogramming
Yesterday I spent a significant amount of time working on a cleaner way to access some of the data  I had stored in some classes. Here’s a quick example: class Character attr_reader :stats def initialize @stats ={:speed => 10, :power => 11, :bulk => 8 } end end This stats Hash would be a pretty standard way of storing all the stats, and...
Jan 15th
3 notes
6 tags
WatchWatch
This is the current standing of Wake Up. A few things aren’t mentioned in the video are how HP/MP is affected by the job of the character, but that’s stuff that will be a lot more apparent whenever I get around to creating the Menu Interface.
Jan 14th
2 tags
Jan 10th
2 tags
Chris Hecker Interview →
A lot of times game developers are people who enjoy playing the kind of adolescent power fantasy games that we have, so they just don’t think ‘I should do a game about two people who fall in love’ or whatever.  Yes, it’s hard to make games that way because we don’t know what we’re doing yet, but I think we need to start trying more.
Jan 9th
2 tags
Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft &... →
I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, “I learned so much today,” that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old.  Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image...
Jan 5th
2 tags
Jonathan Blow Discusses Braid →
The reason [Braid] is an exploration of time and space is because there are things that seem to be facts about time and space, that threaten our very existence. Or that at least raise questions about – if this is how things are, why would that be? And at the same time, as humans walking around in the world, there are all these things that feel very important to us. Like, the relationships that we...
Jan 5th
2 tags
Wake Up
A couple of weeks ago, I started work on a new game idea, which is tentatively titled “Wake Up.” It’s my take at stripping a genre down to its core mechanic, similar to what Gaijin Games has been doing with their Bit.Trip series. Hopefully it turns out fun, or at the very least interesting. I Hope You Like This will likely turn into Wake Up’s development blog of sorts for...
Jan 4th
December 2010
1 post
2 tags
Dec 31st