Categories for Development

Taking Form

February 21, 2010 by

Ring Colours - v03Redesigned front-end from my Colours game

The new art design is coming along well and I am now working towards showing the player what has to be done as well as what he is able to do.

It’s becoming clear that I have several color matching directions (rows, columns and matching the central ring) and while these make the game interesting they are not merging together fluidly. The game mechanics are still somewhat complicated for anyone to just pick up and start playing.

I’ll have to address this before I can let anyone play this, but as soon as I have I will put up a playable demo of this.

Just before the change

January 18, 2010 by

Ring Colours - v02Updated version of the new colours gameThis is another screenshot from my colours game. I changed a couple of gameplay mechanics and noticed that not all additions improve the playability. I’ll have to change the graphical presentation of the game to improve the gameplay.

I therefore posted this screenshot just before changing everything (again).

The game will still look similair to it’s current form but I want to overhaul the 3D side of it so that I can also do something with the surroundings.

I’ll keep you posted… hopefully soon

New games underway

October 22, 2009 by

New variation of my Colours gameA simple Snakes game prototype

After finishing a game project for Capture in the beginning of the year I found that the game engine Unity3D, that we had decided on using, was also quite good realising game projects that I had been wanting to do at home.

I have purchased Unity3D some time ago and here are the first screenshots of two games that I have been fiddeling with.

Ring Colours - v01The first one is an evolution of my Colours game, that I had already done an early prototype of in Microsofts XNA, only to find out that making an installable version for distribution is quite a chore. Being a 3D game engine I did a couple of tests to find out how to use this new dimension for Colours and this is now the first variation where I have the feeling that it actually takes advantage of being in 3D. It does change the game slightly, but I already had several extensions for the original game idea. I therefore don’t think that it will be a less enjoyable game than the 1992 version.

Sector Defense - v01The second game is a Snakes variation which I started mainly to test a couple of game mechanics in Unity3D. Being a simple type of game I can very easily test aspects of Unity3D before using them in bigger games and it will also result in a little online browser game that should provide a little fun time on my sites (sometime in the future).

I already have several other ideas for games but, as always, work commitments and private stuff keep development moving at a slow pace.

ColoursXNA started

February 24, 2008 by

I have started to play around with Microsoft’s XNA Framework in C# and, as a first project, started porting my old puzzle game “Colours”. I created that game 1992 on my Amiga in AMOS Basic and have ported it successfully to HTML/JavaScript round about 2004. Several attempts to port it to the PC in Blitz Basic / DarkBasic Professional failed because the languages were a little bit to basic for my likeing (and because I accidently deleted a prototype version that was quite close to getting finished).

19920101_originalStarting with C# wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped because I am used to PHP and doing everything myself. C# has load of features for handling variable scopes and breaks pretty fast if you try to be smart and ignore all that, which is what you can do in PHP. Also, the XNA Framework is huge and does loads of stuff for you, but if don’t know what structure it expects then you’re a bit lost.

There is a very good list of tutorials and websites for XNA and the basic things are very easy to understand. But some of the more advanced examples work very differently and aren’t documented very well which leaves you out in the cold as soon as you have understood the basics. Maybe the Creators Club is better but I haven’t yet decided if I will manage to keep going long enough so that the 100$ membership fee won’t be wasted.

coloursxnaAt the moment I have the blocks, playfield, gravity, colour reactions, cursor movement and score counting running. I still need lots of graphical effects (such as exploding blocks, score overlays and the whole gui) on my todo list as well as everything outside of the actual game. I also have lots of ideas on how to extend the game from it’s 1992 feature set so that will be quite interesting to see those coming along.