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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! I often talk about things I'm working on and things I plan on doing. While I have my own schedule of tasks and when I hope to complete them, I rarely put my long term goals out there for others to see. So, I thought it might be a good idea to post what I hope to achieve over the course of next year. This way, it might act as an extra motivation to stay on top of these goals. #1 Reach Alpha/Early Beta On The New GameThe current game I'm working on is a much larger project than normal and as result is going to take some time. My main goal with the game over the next 12 months is to get it to a late alpha, maybe even very early beta stage.  #2 Announce The GameActually getting to the point where there is enough of the game there to finally announce it is a major goal. It's difficult working on something for a long period of time and not being able to talk about it. So, all going to plan on the development of this game would mean I could actually announce it by the end of 2019! You guys can wait, right?  #3 Make More Small Games!Working on a long term game project tends to mean not releasing anything else in that time. That doesn't sit well with me for a couple of reasons. The main one being that if you don't work on something else, it can drain you creatively. I also have a bunch of small ideas that I think would make fun little games. So, I aim to take the occasional weekend to make some game jam style games in order to keep that creative energy going!  #4 Read MoreI've gotten back into a good habit of reading more and despite how busy I'm going to be over the next year, I'm hoping to maintain that habit and read a lot more books in the next 12 months.  #5 Complete Year 2 Of CollegeOne of the most obvious goals for me as a mature student going into the coming year is to come out the other end having successfully completed the second year of my computer science degree.  Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
As some of you already know, I'm working on a game at the moment that's going to take much longer to make than my past games. As in a few years rather than a few months. While this is scary in a number of ways. Such as the risk of spending so much time on something and not knowing if it'll be any good and staying motivated for so long. I have noticed a surprising upside to this. Despite it being a much larger project, I feel more relaxed working on it. I've been so used to forcing myself to ridiculous deadlines in order to complete some games. I also think my project management skills have come a long way over the years and I'm now better able to manage my time on this project. I'm currently coming off of the pre-production phase of the game and moving onto actual development beyond that of prototyping aspects of the game. This comes at the same time that I'm returning as a mature student to college for my computer science degree. Juggling those two things is a challenge all by its self. That said, I think the other reason I'm enjoying working on this game so much is that it also is very different from my past games. I think even if we love making a particular style of game, we can end up placing ourselves in a creative rut of sorts. Staying close to the familiar formulas that worked before. I think it's important to break the mould from time to time. It keeps us creative and keeps us excited about actually making things. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! In this weeks blog, I'm going to be going trough five basic yet fundamental tips for writing better code. So, let's get right into it! #1 Be Mindful of Variables Keep in mind that every time you create a variable, you a reserving space in memory for that variable. Any time you leave unused variables in your code, you are wasting memory. And while this may not seem like a big deal given how powerful computers have become, it's still bad practice and to be avoided. This also raises the point about needing to think more carefully about your variable declarations. Look at your variables and ask yourself, do I really need that variable there? Can I achieve the same result in my code without the need to store something in that variable. #2 Comment Your Code While this may seem like an obvious one, even I still need to remind myself from time to time to comment my code. It's important from the obvious point of helping others you work with or someone who will have to manage your code at a later point to understand what your code is doing. Hell, even if you're the only one who will ever be looking at the code, it's important for you to remember what your code is doing. There's been plenty of times when I came back to old code I've wrote that I forgot to comment and the amount of time wasted in trying to understand what I did and why I did it. So, comment your code.Even if it's just for you. #3 Understand Your Code There's going to be times when you are faced with a problem with your code and you may need to seek out a solution online. You may get it working as you wanted but now you don't fully understand why it works. This becomes a short term solution to a long term problem. You won't always be able to do this. You may run into a similar problem later down the line but now, the code you used before doesn't work. You need to learn what your code is doing. If you don't understand a part of your code, take it and break that section down into the most basic example possible. Play around with it and understand what it's doing and more importantly why it does it that way. If you can understand what a line of code is actually doing, then you can better understand how to apply that to future problems. #4 Use Meaningful Names When naming your variables, try to make them as meaningful as possible. Having abstract or nonsensical variables is asking for trouble. As your code grows, you're going to have more variables and if you start to get confused as to what a particular variable is used for, then you're going to run into a lot of errors. Make your names clear to the purpose the variable serve. #5 Don't Reinvent The Wheel Programming has been around a while now. So, needless to say there are already good solutions to common coding problems you will encounter. Use them! There's is no need to create extra work for yourself by trying to think of another way of solving said problem. Unless you can come up with a better way, use the tried and tested method. The only thing you need to be sure of is that you understand the method and the logic behind it. Until next time!  Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! So, it's that time again. In a couple of weeks, I'll be returning to college for another year as a mature student. While admittedly it's not as daunting as last year, when everything was new and scary, it still means a big change once again for me and how I structure my work.  Luckily the summer has been quite a productive period of time for me.The current game which I still won't be talking about in detail for some time is slowly emerging from the pre-production phase and the pre-alpha stage has begun. It's going to take some trial and error to figure out my new schedule for fitting in development in the evenings but, I already have a fairly good balance struck from when I was working on Hide The Body last time. I'm lucky enough in the sense that I've done enough games at this point to know the way I've scoped this project means it's manageable during the college year.  As for the Game Dev book I'm writing. It's unfortunately taken a back seat for now. I've managed to get a good amount more done on it but, in order to do it properly, I need to allocate more time to it later. I'll continue to chip away at it over the course of the coming year and I hope to have it finished by the time I finish my degree  In terms of blog posts for the coming year, I'm hoping to do something similar to before and share some of what I'm studying as I go and maybe something along the lines of "A day in the life of a dev" kind of thing. I'm also planning on starting up some Unreal Engine tutorials since that was something that was asked for in the past. I'll most likely focus on doing Blueprint tutorials for starters. I'm also going to re-do my C# coding series in video format over on Youtube as I think it's a tutorial series that would benefit more from a more detailed approach through my channel.  That just about does it for now. As always, if you have any suggestions for content you would like to see on the blog, let me know.
Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! We've all played those games that give us the option of choosing what path we take in a game. Be it the good or evil path. Normally these choices are given to us a key moments in a games narrative and are represented my a dialogue option or a basic action at a specific moment. Now, while Vampyr does the exact same thing, it does one thing different that makes it stand out for me. As a newly turned vampire, you are encouraged to murder the citizens of London in order to evolve your powers. In fact, you pretty much have to if you want to get any of the stronger powers. But, here's the thing, Vampyer makes this less than a simple black and white game mechanic.  While you gain experience points from defeating the common vampire hunters and monsters of the world, you don't gain a great deal of XP from doing so. The game makes it very clear that if you want to really evolve your powers, you're going to have to take the life of an innocent citizen of London. Why should that be a big deal? Well, because the citizens of London don't feel like your typical npc prop. Each one has enough backstory and mystery to discover that I find myself unable to end the life of any of them. Even the roughest criminal characters have depth to them that drives me more to investigate than to murder.  So, what does that mean for me as the player? As a result, I now find myself roaming London in search of answers but, I'm faced with more difficult battles and dangers as my enemies are significantly stronger. I find myself grinding more with low level enemies in order to slowly gain the experience I need to evolve my powers. The game does make it much more difficult if you decide to be good and that's not a complaint. The games difficulty is a direct reflection on they type of person you decide to be. Like real life, being good is not always easy. The easiest way through the game would be to simply kill all those needed for you to become stronger. Yet, I can't bring myself to it. That's not simply a reflection of my own conviction but rather a testament to the quality of the games writing, character design and world building.
The fact that the game handles its difficulty in this way is a great example of game design done right. The game constantly teases at how I could so easily succeed if I simply kill but the depth of the character makes that choice one that is both difficult and punishing. If I decide to kill, I get stronger but I loose out on investigations that could tell me more about the world. The city will also plunge into chaos and ultimately be lost if I take too many lives. I've not yet finished the game and for now, I haven't taken a single citizens life. I aim to complete the game without doing so but, who knows.... Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! I was recently part of a panel at this years Dublin Comic Con called Crafting Fear. On the panel we discussed the evolution of horror throughout the years across literature, movies and games. I covered the section on games by comparing jump scare games and psychological horror games and how they scare us in different ways. I've decided to post my slides from the panel which provide some notes on what I was discussing. Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
So, a lot of the time when I hear about why people want to become game developers or designers, their main comment tends to be along the lines of "All I do is play games and make games". The "All" being the main problem. It's great that games are your passion and obviously you'll need that to be a good game developer. However, I think if you limit it yourself and your creative consumption purely to games, all you'll end up doing rehashing the games you've played in your own development. I think some of the best games come from people who expose themselves to a much wider range of creative and even technical mediums. What we make is the result of our experiences and inspirations. So, it stands to reason, a limited range of experiences and inspirations leads to a limited game. Whereas if you expose yourself to other mediums such as books, movies, music, art and so on, you widen the scope of your creative experiences and inspirations. Sure playing other games is important for getting ideas mechanically for a game but, if you want to make something different rather than making slightly different types of games than what you are already playing, you need to expose yourself to everything creative. I think it's very rare that something is ever truly original. Creatives borrow and what I mean by this is, when we create something we're going to pull from our own experiences and inspirations in order to create something that has our own mark on it. Again this comes down to how much you expose yourself to other mediums. If all you know is games, you have far less to be inspired by or "borrow" from. The wider the range of inspirations, the more you will borrow. Now, I know that saying creatives borrow can be a term most don't like as it implies a lack of originality. But, take a look at your favorite game, movie, book or whatever and think about it carefully for a moment. What do you think the creators inspirations were? Did they pluck it all purely from their mind with no inspiration? Possibly in some rare cases but unlikely. We're all inspired by works that have come before us and the only way to make anything worthwhile is to expose ourselves to as much inspiration as possible. So if you say to me that you have a passion for games and want to be a game developer, I say great! But,be more than games. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! When it comes to playing a game, we all know there's nothing worse than a game with poor performance. The last thing you want is a sudden frame rate of 10fps to break the immersion of the game. So, when it comes to making your own game, optimisation should be top of your list when it comes to building it for various systems. I'm going to go through five tips that will help to improve the overall performance of your game and keep that frame rate up. Tip #1 Reduce Poly CountThe first tip comes down to simple good work ethic when modeling your assets. It goes without saying that the fewer polys your models have, the better they are for performance. But what do you do when your model requires a lot of detail? Start off by making your base mesh and then creating the high poly version in your software package of choice. Once you have that high poly version, you can use a tool such as Maya to perform retopology on your model. In basic terms, retopology works by laying down a low poly mesh over your high poly mesh allowing you to bake the details from the high poly to the low poly. This will reduce your models poly count while still retaining a high level of detail. Tip #2 A Picture Says A Thousand WordsWith so many models in our game, we also have a lot of textures. If you create a texture atlas, you'll save on the number of draw calls which will in turn save on performance. A texture atlas is basically nothing more than a larger image that has all your models textures in it and the now all share the same UV island. You can set up a texture atlas using most modeling tools and even some third party Unity tools. Tip #3 Out Of Site. Out Of MindModels are obviously a drain on performance when they are on screen.They are also a drain when they are off camera. So why on earth would we want models that aren't even in view to be using resources? We don't! We can use the likes of occlusion culling to disable the renderers of objects that are outside of the cameras view. Basically, if it's not in sight, don't render it. Tip #4 Use LODsIt's one thing to not render something if it's not in view but what do you do if you can still see a model but it's very far away? There's no point in having a high poly detailed model rendering in the distance if we can't see any of that detail. We can use level of detail (LOD) meshes to produce various meshes that range from low poly to high poly depending on the distance the camera is from the object. So say we are very far away from a character model. We would have a low poly mesh appear as we can't make out detail, all we need to see is the very basic model. As we get closer, the mesh can change to another mesh of higher detail depending on our distance to the character. This way we can avoid wasting performance on details that can't even be seen. Tip #5 bake LightingLighting is a very important element of games. We use it so much to set the tone an atmosphere of certain scenes. But, if you're using a lot of lights, that can become a huge drain on resources very quickly. Think very carefully about the lighting you are using.Does every light need to be using realtime rendering? If not, you can bake the lighting detail of all lights that will not move. This will basically bake a snapshot of the lighting detail to a single txsture and make a huge saving on performance. Until next time! Hey Gamers and Game Makers! In this week's blog, I'm going to be talking you through five tips to help you refine your game idea. When we first get an idea for a game, our minds can be all over the place with ideas for design, mechanics, art, sound and more. It can be very hard to get a handle on the overall idea and keep track of what exactly it is you have in mind. For me, I use a few simple tricks that help me better layout my games idea and refine it into a core game idea that I can then begin building on. Tip #1 Brain Dump When you get that first spark of an idea fora new game, your mind is soon to be swimming with countless thoughts about the game and what it could be. Keeping all these ideas in your head is just not practical. The best thing to do is to get all the ideas and thoughts out of your head. Just start writing them down on paper or in a digital document. It's also best to keep this organized in some way. Use folders or headings. This way you can quickly sort through and update ideas as they change over time. The main objective with this is to get all our ideas out and recorded so it frees up your mind allowing you to form more structured ideas based on what you've already dumped. Tip #2 Make Note Of Key IdeasAs your dumping all your ideas or later on, you'll likely have those moments when a great or key idea for the game hits you. Take note of these ideas by jotting them down be it on paper or on your phone or whatever is at hand.You can then later add this idea to your brain dump folder and see how this new key idea changes the overall game idea. Tip #3 Find the Root Of Your InspirationNo matter how creative or new an idea feels, what we make is a product of our own experiences and inspirations. Look at your idea and try to identify what the inspiration behind it is. If it's a game or games, you can look at what you liked and disliked about those games. If you can identify what worked for that game and what didn't work, that information can be valuable to you when improving your own idea. Tip #4 Sit On It That original burst of ideas you have tend to be quite raw and are likely going to change quite a lot or evolve in some way. Rushing into any kind of actual development at this point would do more harm than good to your game. So, just sit on the idea for a while. Be it a few days or a couple of weeks. You'll find that if you just sit on an idea for a while, it tends to form a much better structure in your head. Not having to force yourself to think about it all the time is funny enough the best time for ideas to come. Tip #5 Make The Hard Cuts The idea stage of a game is always the most fun but it can create more problems down the line if you don't learn what ideas you should cut. Look closely at all of your brain dump ideas after a few days. You should be able to see more clearly what at the time you thought was a perfect game mechanic or design may not be as great as you thought and doesn't really benefit the games core design. The more willing you are to kill your babies at this stage, the better your games scope will be. Keeping a realistic scope to your game is key!
Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
In this week's blog, I'm going to talk a little bit about basic task management when it comes to making your game. Games take time to make and involve a lot of work. If like me, you're a one person studio, you know there's a lot to juggle between design, code, art, sound and more. It can be daunting at times trying to juggle everything or even to keep track of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. So, how do you effectively handle task management? Well, there are a bunch of methods to it but I'm going to talk about what I do as it's a basic method that while simple, is effective. My approach is essentially a scrum method. At all stages of development for a game I'm working on from pre-production up until final development, I start by identifying what needs to be done and set goals. Saw for example you want to make a game in a year. Then your first goal and overall goal is to have a finished game within twelve months. So, next thing you want to do is break that one big goal down into monthly goals. So lets say you want to have a playable prototype at the end of the first month to test the gameplay of the game. Then that's your monthly sprint. However, to achieve that, you're going to need to break that down into smaller weekly sprints. For this example the first weeks sprint could be do build the character controller and the second weeks sprint could be to work on the camera system and so on. You can then break each of those weekly sprints down into daily tasks as well. This is what I do to keep track of what I need to do and when. I can prioritise tasks more effectively this way as I can better judge how long something is likely to take. This also keeps a sense of order and control over your game. Since games require so much work, it can be easy to loose track of what you actually need to be working on and become frustrated with the project as a whole. There are plenty of apps and services out there that can help you with the task management of your project and some of them are very could. Depending on your project, one may be better suited to you than another so, be sure to do your research. I'm somewhat old fashioned when it comes to this. I don't tend to use and app or software for my task management. As I'm a one person studio, I have no real need. I instead use a whiteboard and post-its. My whiteboard is broken down into my overall goals, my monthly goals, my weekly sprints and daily tasks. It's easy for me to quickly look at the board and see what needs to be done and it's also a great visual feeling of satisfaction as you see progress being made every time you can remove a task from the board. This is my simple approach to task management with games and there are plenty of variations that may suit depending on your project. I think this one is a good starting point as it's an effective way of quickly getting your project in order right from the start and can help you plan long term. You can then adapt it to suit your needs. Until next time! |
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