No Time To Play

When it comes to starting out with game development, people seem to be divided into three main categories. First, there are the kids who show up on forums with posts along the lines of:

I’m 13 years old, and I have this idea for the next big MMORPG that will topple WoW, but I don’t know any programming or 3D modeling. Where do I start? Would you like to work on it? Help!

Then there are those who will promptly and mercilessly mock the poor kid without offering one word of useful advice. And then there are those who will happily tell you how hard it is to make a MMORPG (hint: it’s really difficult). Or even an apparently simple game. Or just a single encounter. And they’d be right. But that misses the point.

Point is, it’s natural for gamers to want to make their own games. Especially nowadays that the means for doing it are cheap (often free) and information is so accessible. Why, then, are we making it so hard to get started for those who want to try?

In the next paragraphs, I will try to give a few pointers from my own experience. Hopefully you’ll find them useful. But first, a word.

(continue reading…)

Back when videogames were still new, there was no such thing as game genres; the very concept of a videogame was still taking shape. But we humans love putting labels on things, and once certain types of game mechanics proved popular, it wasn’t long before the market settled on a few easily identifiable genres which it exploited. Sure, new kinds of games continued to appear all along the 1980es and 1990es, but they were all promptly milked to death by an increasingly risk-averse gaming industry.

Luckily, nowadays the situation has been reversed again. Not only are indie game developers churning out an impressive array of innovative titles, but even established genres are going right back into the blender. RPGs are borrowing from shooters (Fallout 3, Mass Efect). Shooters are borrowing from strategy games (Team Fortress 2, Tremulous). And strategy games have had RPG elements since at least Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (for a modern example, see Battle for Wesnoth).

But even in the intervening years there were games that dared to break the mold and combine two existing kinds of gameplay into a coherent whole, or even do something entirely unique.

(continue reading…)

I’ve always been a sucker for the written text, ever since I’ve learn how to read (sometime between the ages of 4 and 5). Oh, I’d watch a movie or two with starry eyes, but then I’d always return to reading books. No wonder, then, that nowadays I am fascinated by text-based computer games. You know, those things many people believe to be a thing of the past. (Which isn’t exactly true: roguelikes are alive and well, interactive fiction is experiencing a revival, and even MUDs are doing fine.)

But I never realized just how important they were in the history of computer games until I tried to draw the diagram below. Count the bold items:

(continue reading…)

Programmers love to trash programming languages. The more successful a language, the more likely you are to find someone who will, happily and in excruciating detail, explain its many failings to you. One of the favorite victims nowadays appears to be Java. And while Java does have its bad points, most of the criticism appears to focus around a handful of old myths that should have been put to rest long ago.

Myth #1: Java is slow.

Um, no. For years now, the Java Virtual Machine has been using a technique known as JIT (Just In Time compilation). It is the same thing that makes Javascript in modern browsers rival the speed of native code. And if it works for Javascript… Besides, in a game, most of the work will be done by various library bindings, which are natively compiled code in the first place.

(continue reading…)

A long time ago, on a blog far, far away…

…I was pointing out that playing games a lot and playing a lot of games are different things. Turns out, this isn’t such an original idea; while preparing to revisit that topic, I ran across this Massively interview with Cory Doctorow, in which he makes the point that games are so ubiquitous nowadays, that many people have played lots of games without ever considering themselves gamers. That puts an even heavier burden on (would-be) game developers, who are supposed to know more about what’s out there than the average gamer, especially in their niche of choice. Well, I consider myself a developer (amateur, mind you), so it occurred to me to check a very simple thing: how many games do I keep around?

(continue reading…)

So, we’re up and running.

Why another gaming blog, you might ask?

Well, why not?

• To showcase our own work.
• To round up the news we care about.
• To share the things we find cool and useful

Who we are? Just a couple of guys who like games (video- or not) enough to try and make our own. Sometimes we even succeed. We’re doing this for ourselves and for people like us. We know you’re out there; hopefully we’ll find each other.

Enjoy!