Archive for March, 2010
Heartbeat
Posted by Black Lab Games in Star Hammer, Tactics on March 19th, 2010
…it’s not very strong yet, but it’s got one!
Photo of the screen of my devtool
Who knows, it may yet live…still lots of work to be done.
GDC is crazy times!
Posted by Black Lab Games in Game Development on March 10th, 2010
I couldn’t get to the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this year, so instead have to read about it.
In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen 3 huge announcements that directly relate to tools, platforms and technology that I use.
First, Unity Technology announced a new version of Unity3D with support for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Android coming soon. Next, Microsoft announce XNA 4.0, a significant upgrade to .NET based game framework. Finally, Sony announce that they are releasing PhyrEngine for the PSP!
Why do these announcements matter? Because I do contract work in Unity, original games for the Xbox 360 with XNA, and I’m currently building a technology “platform” to allow my games to run on the PSP/PS3 – so every platform/toolset I use is being upgraded.
So much craziness, I can’t keep up! And that’s just day one of a five day conference!!
Prototyping
Posted by Black Lab Games in Game Development on March 9th, 2010
OMG, nearly a full month without a blog post. What the?? Why the blog silence?
Amongst other things…prototyping! I’ve been exploring a game idea by working on a simple, potentially throw-away prototype.
In bygone days, game developers would write game design documents to describe a game they wanted to build. Once the document was complete, they’d build the game. The problem is, not all game ideas are created equal, and you don’t usually find whether the game will be any good or not until the game is built. Over the last few years, as game development tools and technology have improved and gotten easier to quickly build games, it’s become more common to bypass the design document, and build a rough prototype of the game to test our the ideas at the core of the game.
And that’s what I’ve been doing. I started with a small idea about a platformy action game, and I’m exploring that idea to see if their is potential for a full game.
Oh, and I entered Star Hammer Tactics in the 2010 DreamBuildPlay competition. It’s one of about 155 entries. Wow.