One of the decisions I made when starting this blog was not to be a news site. Rather than headline lists and the current URL of the day I wanted to post only when I had something to say about the subject. Not to mention the fact that there are already some great news based sites and other […]
I was hoping that Bethesda’s Oblivion would be my escape route from WoW. It promised the immersion, the scale and the character rpg that I had enjoyed in Blizzards MMO. Initially my expectations were fulfilled, I was impressed, the forests were lush, the towns were bustling, the caves were cavernous. Wandering around the landscape, picking […]
With many games trying to represent larger and larger virtual spaces the creation of realistic and varied landscape terrain is an ongoing concern. Although ultimately most developers will have artists hand edit landscape meshes to account for level/mission design there is still great interest in using algorithms to generate terrain. The area of simulation and generative systems […]
The Long Now Foundation have posted a downloadable version of an interesting talk between Brian Eno and Will Wright (click here for a more direct link). The conversation mainly focuses on the use of generative, procedural and random processes to create evolving phenotype-like content. Some of the topics are basic introductions to procedural techniques; cellular automata, […]
I have just finished running a ‘game engine as art tool’ workshop with Alison Mealey at the Manchester based futuresonic festival. The sessions covered basic map making in UnrealEd, some unrealscripting and finally the use of Pure Data (pd) to process and interpret game produced data. Obviously some of the coding and manpulation was pretty ad-hoc, with […]
A player named Kung has produced an interesting speed run in WoW. Remeniscent of both Mike Jittlov’s Wizard of Speed and TIme and the Chemical Brothers ‘Star Guitar’ Video (Gondry Directed), it is a sped up recording of a horseback ride from Brill to STV. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking in the recording, but the sensation […]
“Wall of txt crits you for 5000dmg, you die!”-
After my recent post on endgame issues in mmorpgs and the role of content creation I stumbled across a number of other posts arguing similar points on the main WoW forums. I knew that the topic of endgame content has been done to death many times under the guise […]
The level cap gameplay of most popular mmorpgs has been an issue for both players and developers for some time now. Although some people like the incessant repetitive raiding that occurs at endgame in World of Warcraft, the majority of players who have enjoyed the ride to the level cap find life after 60 boring. […]
I have been toying with some simple simulation programs. Ive written some small prototype apps that generate and erode landscapes, that calculate and represent plant growth across terrains. Ive even been tinkering with some basic agent style AI. I’ve been thinking of how to tie these elements together into a game, but that is where […]
Recently I have left one of the servers and guilds that I frequent in World of Warcraft and although I have been through the same process several times before, it prompts me to wonder at how much personal and emotional attachment is involved in dealing with mmorpg guilds.
In a sense it isn’t suprising that the […]
Not only has gibbage developer Dan Marshall produced a fun indie game, he has also seen fit to write an extensive guide as to how he did it. This no-nonsense guide to ‘writing your own game’ contains invaluble tips on what to skip, what not to skip and how to maintain that bedroom coder chic. In […]
This article is a brief overview of game modification, from the history of modding through to the tools used and the range of mods created. Produced for the 2005 NTI Games conference at the NFT in London.
Introduction:
Game modification is now an accepted part of a games life cycle. Many games are now produced with the […]
An article discussing the development of the shmup from space invaders to ikaruga. This presentation explores the formal aspects of the shoot-em-up, the tradition of the high score and the range of innovation in the genre. Produced for the 2005 Screenplay Games Festival.
Introduction:
According to http://www.what-means.com/
“A scrolling shooter is, as the name suggests, a shoot ‘em […]
Like Pompom, Introversion are an established independent developer. After having commercially released Uplink, an intricate hacker sim (and also a candidate for this list), they switched direction to focus on Darwinia, a project based on an 3D environment and a more abstract/iconic aesthetic. Darwinia follows the RTS genre path, with each level comprising a landscape […]
Pompom have been making high quality games for some time. Space Tripper was their previous (defender themed) offering and proved how much polish an independent team (2 people) could work into a home coded game. Mutant Storm follows this template. With no apologies for story line (’if it shoots kill it, if it doesn’t shoot […]
ABA games have been producing vector based freeware shmup gems for several years now and it is difficult to pick out a single game to praise over the others. With a distinct minimal style each game works with a shared code engine to explore different aspects of the shoot-em-up game. RRootage offers an array of […]
N is a minimal masterpiece of home coding. Written entirely in Flash (an achievement in itself) it is ostensibly a loderunner clone with detailed physics handling and ingenious level design. The main character is a delicately animated stick figure whose interaction with the platform based environment is delightful, even to the ragdoll physics of occasional […]
Warning Forever is a simple twist on the format of video game ‘boss fights’. Taking the shmup template and rendering all objects in a green neon wireframe, the game pits you against an infinite series of boss encounters. The initial opponent starts as a small, fairly harmless core (a la Gradius) but from each subsequent […]
It is easy to criticize Rez from an artistic point of view; it is not as abstract as it suggests, some of the imagery is obvious and cliched, the music often dips into unremarkable trance loops, the audio to visual links are under explored. However this is only a case for criticism because of what […]
One evening, after a casual 2 hours playing an elven priest in World of Warcraft my mother phones me and asks what I’ve been up to…
“I dont know how you play those things. You’re wasting your time, those games will just rot your brain.”
This time it’s time to fight back. So I calmy relate to […]