Postmortem: Flight

Flight was created in June this year, in other words very recently. This wasn't as much as a game but rather a visual experiment.

If you have seen my previous postmortems, you will realise that my graphic skills are not good. The whole purpose of this project was to create something visually pleasing. To keep it simple, I believe I achieved this and expanded my knowledge in creating graphics in a short amount of time. This will assist me in future on rapid development projects.

The game itself was a very simple run-and-jump game. Due to it's limited complexity, the game "fun factor" was very short lived. I could have done more to improve this. However this was not the aim of the project.

Flight can be downloaded here.

Update on Youtube channel

Earlier this month, I announced that I would launch a lets play Youtube channel. Unfortunately there has been a change of the plans and I have scrapped the project. There were a few reasons for this; the main ones were that I was not motivated that much and that I did not have the time.

I did play and record a few games, such as Isra's Wings. I also did learn a lot about video editing, it is a useful skill to have.

Forever incomplete: Crappy RPG

In December 2011, I started this project with a friend. The game never had a name, but I kept referring to it as "crappy RPG." This is because the whole point of making this game was to make something, even if it was crap.

"Crappy RPG" was the first time I tried to use 3D in a game. In the beginning, this was more like a 3D engine rather than a game. Fun fact, the engine re-written numerous times, at least four from memory. In the end, it was actually reasonably good.

Whilst making the engine, my partner was designing more game related content, which was mainly the story. However, the game never got past the engine stage before it was scrapped. The reason being was due to a dispute between me and my partner, which was unrelated to "crappy RPG."

It is ironic that I have this game has been labeled as "forever incomplete," even after the dispute I intended to complete the project.

GMC Jam #6 winner and future Youtube channel

Its taken me over a month, but I finally played the winner entry from the most recent GMC Jam, being Isra's Wings by Joobs64. It was a very nice game. It's unbelievable what was achieved in the 72 hours in which this game was made.

I am also happy to announce that I will be setting up an personal youtube channel, in which I will be doing lets plays. I just finished recording and editing Isra's Wings, which will be the first lets play uploaded to the channel. I intend for this to be more of a hobby than anything else. However with that said I want it to have some structure, having a schedule for example.

Current plans are for the first video to be uploaded sometime in July.

Game Maker Studio

Yesterday, Game Maker Studio was finally released. I was originally not going to get it, but I decided otherwise.

I managed to spend to a couple hours last night using it (many assignments due soon and exams are not far off). In that short time, I spent looking at the IDE and I am impressed. There are many improvements to the Game Maker experience. The .exe files are complied rather than interpreted. Documentation has had a much needed overhaul. Extra data structures are always a boost.

I cannot wait until I have some extra time to make a game with it.

In other news, I have a twitter account, you can follow me now! Woo! @redoctober23

Fractal terrain generation

Back in March 2012, I received an assignment from my game design class. The assignment told me to design a game world map for any type of game. People who know me in real life would know that I'm not very artistic. So I took a lazy approach to this assignment; I generated it.

World generation is something that has always interested me; I blame Minecraft. I have spent countless nights reading about different ways of generating terrain. This assignment was the first time I ever used this knowledge. I decided to use the diamond-square algorithm (this is explained very well here), for the generation of the map. In short, the algorithm takes a flat map and moves the middle points up or down by a random amount.

It needs to said that the algorithm generates a height map. This height map was used to make an image. For my assignment, I used negative numbers as water and positive number for land. Here was one of the test results for the algorithm:

Of course the final generation was edited in photoshop; removing unnecessary green points and other minor changes.

Postmortem: Mystery Men

Mystery Men was made in January 2012 for the Game Maker Community Jam #5. It was made in 72 hours.

While this was my third GMC Jam entry, it was actually the first to be based around the theme. The theme was facade, which in a nutshell, means "an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality."

Mystery Men itself is a slightly altered version of the party game mafia, where you are tasked to identify and lynch mafia members. The main component of the game is the conversation system between the in-game characters. They are able to talk about a range of topics, from the jam itself to who they think are the mafia. This serves are the player's tool in determining who is apart of the mafia.

The game was mostly well received. Many people liked how the theme was used and how the conversation system turned out. A review by GMC user 11clock said, "...some of the comments that the people say are hilarious, and it's fun trying to figure out who's Mafia." On the other hand, disliked the limited graphics and non-existent sounds. In any case, youtube user raocow did make a video on Mystery Men:

Mystery Men tied 18th place out of 64 games and can be downloaded here.