Why I Feel Double Fine Studios Are Taking The Piss
Disclaimer: The following is an opinion piece. People may not agree with what is being said, but I by all means encourage readers to engage in discussion about the following views and opinions. I originally wanted to write an article about the frustration I felt towards Double Fine when they announced that Broken Age would be split up into two pieces and the first part would be sold on Steam Early Access. I felt that Double Fine were taking advantage of their fanbase, and were gambling with fan’s money as if no risk is involved. Double Fine themselves had admitted that they had taken their idea to publishers before, only for publishers to turn them down, saying there wasn’t a market for adventure games. For all we know, Double Fine has that entire market already invested in its project, but are acting as if their sales for Broken Age…
Help and Advice from Reddit
So the other day I asked the great community of Reddit for help and advice on where I should go next in terms of optimisation for my current project; Project Dandelion. If you want to try the current build, click the link below and install the Unity web player: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/project%20dandelion.html I do apologise on the quality of the current build. There are 2 different types of level to be generated, one with trees and one a open field, but due to the frequency of the instantiating, it may take you a while to see both levels. Everything also needs to be tweaked, so try not to hit the booster too many times. The one great thing about this build though is that most of the core mechanics are there and working, they just need to be tweaked and expanded upon, so bare with me as I continue to progress in…
Shadows!
As you may or may not be aware, I’m using Unity to make my current project as I have experience with the platform from my university dissertation and it’s very easy and fast to get a working prototype up and running. It’s always been my thinking that once I get to a certain point in my game, I would pay for the pro version of Unity, to allow my game to take on a fidelity level similar to that of a PS3 or 360. It seems that’s no longer the case! With unity 4.2, they’ve included hard shadows for free! Take a look: This is fantastic, and allows for my game to finally start taking shape. Every day that I work on it, I get a little bit closer to what I want to produce. It’s amazing.
Screenshot Monday
So I’ve decided to show people what my game can do so far and what I’ve implemented, so here it is: The only problem I’ve ran into so far is working with the iPads accelerometer. When the app first loads up, it grabs the iPads current accelerometer speed on the y-axis, and subtracts that from all further movements. This works fine for allowing the user to keep the iPad in the initial orientation they had, but means moving down on the y-axis is very slow, as it has less room to choose from. This should be fixed soon.
Gaming Tutorials
So recently I’ve been working on gaming tutorials to get me back into game programming, which has been great. My recent project is below, it’s a space invaders clone, where you use z to fire and the directional buttons to move left and right. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/SpaceInvader.html It’s not much, but it’s definitely helping me find my way again when it comes to game development.
How Thomas Was Alone has changed my thinking on platformers and emotion in games.
Thomas was alone is a strange strange game that I’m falling in love with in a weird and wonderful way. Its a game about some programming errors (represented as squares and rectangles) that each have their own personalities, and are trying to find their way through this strange and confusing world. Each character has his/her own opinions on the others, and each have their own motives. It’s really quite crazy how much Mike Bithell has made me care about a mere set of squares and rectangles. He stripes away all of the pretty graphics, and shows that in order to care for a character you need a story/personality, not fancy art. This has really changed my mindset in regards to my own game, and has got me in turmoil at the moment as to what I want my game to look like. I mean, you don’t need a gorgeously realistic…
Expansion
I felt I needed to expand on my idea I put forward to other day, as I didn’t really put across any of the specifics of this project. (mainly because I don’t have specifics yet, just a bunch of ideas!) But here are some pics of what I have planned so far: So my initial idea was to switch between realities so that the world changed, and maybe the physics was different (so the character could jump further/higher). I liked this idea, so decided on 3 different worlds that you chose between; Normal, Future, and 3D. (Which for the moment, don’t have any different physics, but this may change in due time.) My thinking was that you could come across stumbling blocks in one dimension, that would be solved by jumping to another dimension. An example of which I’ve provided below: In this example, the character needs to get to…