No Time To Play

I’ve been working on a new game lately, with a nice pseudo-3D effect for the display. After a while, it dawned on me that what I was doing there essentially amounted to voxels. Which was strange, because while I had read about voxels before, my interest in the topic was academic at best. But now the connection was made, I decided to take a closer look, just to know what possibilities I might be overlooking.

But first, what exactly are voxels?

(continue reading…)

As living legend Chris Crawford points out in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, any game must revolve around a central concept. So when I started thinking of a new one, the first step was to figure out what the game was going to be about. I had already decided to make a first-person shooting game, simply because they’re so immersive, and it’s an uncommon perspective in 2D, so it wasn’t going to seem too unoriginal. For the same reason, it was also an easy decision to have projectiles with ballistic trajectories. And since martial games where you go around shooting stuff with guns are oh so common, why not simulate a snowball fight for a change?

But in order to do that, we first need to make those snowballs fly.

(continue reading…)

Ever since computers became capable of running actual videogames, developers were drawn to try and break free from the limitations of 2D graphics. This became possible with the advent of microcomputers, which were powerful enough to render wireframe 3D and even flat-shaded polygons. But for the most part they’d make do with tricks, simulating depth with the traditional sprites and some optical illusions.

How 2.5D works

Simply put, 2.5D is the generic name for faking 3D computer graphics with 2D. It usually comes in the form of isometric graphics. But there is another technique, that allows for perspective and even polygons, with extremely easy programming, as long as you accept a few limitations.

How easy? This easy:

(continue reading…)