Journal
I’ve been very busy recently so the dev diary has been the thing that takes a back seat (again). Also I have never liked releasing things this early in case people aren’t impressed/ interested, or simply because I don’t want negative feedback. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the whole point of doing the development publicly. So let’s get it over with…
Prototype 1
Ok - Prototypes. I’ve never bothered prototyping games before, and to tell the truth am not going to start now. The idea behind prototypes is to get all of the hard work (i.e. making the game fun) out of the way. Basically if the game isn’t fun as a quick and dirty demo, then it won’t be fun when it has all the graphics done, it’ll just look better.
In the commercial world, if the game isn’t fun at the prototype stage then it can …
Well - I got a little behind with my dev diary. First Regulus became rather more popular than I expected, and then EbayEd sunk without a trace (FWIW I never expected it to be popular - it IS rather limited in appeal), I got accepted into the 9rules collective, and then there was Christmas. Now all that’s out of the way I can get back to making games.
Hoorah!
Story
Part of the design doc demo I downloaded says to explain the environment and characters but I’m not entirely sure what they will be. Since the design document is a guide rather than a rule book I am going to explain what I have in my head - I can always edit it later as things become clearer.
To work out the environment and character designs I should really work out a story. I know how the game will flow …
Now that I have a rough game design worked out I need to start figuring out what features will be included in the game.
The feature should be thought of as a baseline to work towards. New things may be added, and items may be changed, but in general this is the guide to which the game will be made.
General Features
First things first - the general features. These are the things that will decide the programming language and the recommended specification computer for playing the game.
- 24 levels
- 2 Game modes, Story and Arcade
- Basic physics system – everything affects everything else, explosions move nearby objects, bullets force pushes objects, player bumps into and moves objects.
- 3D graphics
- 32-bit color
I must admit I already know what I will be using to program the game. I have used Blitz3d for all of my sale games so far and I will continue to use it …
Before working out what sort of game to make I need to find out what is in a design document. These are new to me so a quick Google threw up a handful of sites. The most likely was found at ihsoft which has a number of articles on game design and development. I downloaded the design document template (which can be found at the top of the page) and had a read. The document itself was pretty straight forward, if rather (incredibly) long. The ‘blank’ template is 22 pages long which but since I’m going to be using it as a roadmap for the game design rather than it’s original purpose of selling the game to a publisher I was able able to chop it down to 13 pages with little effort.
If you want to see what I’m working from you can download my new template …
Something I have wanted to do for a long time is create a development diary whilst making a video game. And when I say a diary I mean something public, like a blog, where people can post comments during the development so that, hopefully, the game will turn out much better.
Now that I have a blog, and I have an idea for a game, I have decided to give the development diary a go. I haven’t got a clue how interesting it will be for people to read but I’m going to try anyway.
It will start with a design document, something that is new to me. Before this I have always ‘freestyled’ my game development - everything has been made up as I go along. I figure if I’m gong to do everything publicly I should try and do it the proper way so the first thing is some sort …
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