Update

Long time no see. A lot has happened, I have some stuff I want to write about and in general I want to get back in to the habit of writing. I find that if I don't write for too long, my sentences start to lose non-essential words and everything reads like it was meant to be a series of bullet points.

I am currently working as an intern programmer at Born Ready Games! (nb, standard disclaimer about these being my views not those of BRG or any affiliates etc. etc.). As a small company, I have had the opportunity to try lots of different things. Our most recent game is Strike Suit Zero (Steam, GOG), which came out in January (I got my first hand experience of crunch).

Next year I will be entering my final year of my degree, and as such am required to do a 3rd year project. I have about a bazzilion ideas for this and all of them are too complicated to do in 5 years, but I am slowly zoning in on one (or more accurately, a linked pair). I plan to talk about these more at a later date and then when I start work on them, have my development diary up here too.

I've also developed a couple of games in some jams (eg, Global Game Jam). I am planning on setting up a basic site that'll support hosting of games since I've made now I have a few.

I'm going to blog about this TED talk by Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking later this week. I am going to address how I think it relates to games, specifically indie games & the current trend of Kick Starters.

Outlook of 2010 for Botworks

One of the main reasons I started this blog was as a way for me to keep track of my ideas and projects. So, in that context, this is more of a post for me, as it is a rough plan of what I plan to do this year.

Frozen Kangaroo, the real time strategy game I am making has been put on hold. This is for a number of reasons. The most important is simply that I have learnt so much since I have started that I have emerged on to the second stage of ignorance: aware of my failures (the step before being incompetent AND unaware). As a result, I can look at Frozen Kangaroo and say it is a lot more complicated than I thought and needs full planning.

I need to find you what works for me. My Computing coursework has helped me in this respect, but there is still much I need to learn. However, Frozen Kangaroo is too big for me to experiment with

Instead, I am planning a couple of much smaller projects. The first one I am allowing only a month to complete. I will have more details out soon, but I will briefly explain what I am trying with the planning. I am using a free piece of software called Freemind which allows me to create mind maps. Now, none of this is new, but I have never really done it properly. What I am going to do is break down each part of the game in to tiny little components that may be one algorithm or object.

The aim is, if I can make sure I know how to do each component, then theoretically I can make the whole game. The problem I had with Frozen Kangaroo, the nail in the coffin if you will, was that I needed to enhance an existing feature to include extra functionality. However, the feature was woven in to the very fabric of the game and when I changed it, everything broke. My hope is, with these tiny parts, each part will equate to one function that will have a fixed output and once they are done, they are done.

The second stage will be drawing up a schedule. I said that I would limit myself to one month. That means, that at the end of one month, I will publish everything I have made if it works, and if it doesn't, I move on with only a post mortem to remember it by (where I will try to decide what I did wrong)

I hope to start this one month project in February but I want to draw up a plan before I start and I have exams in January, so it may be more like half way through February. If all this goes to plan, I will begin planning a 6 month project. Hopefully, this will lay quite a lot of ground work for Frozen Kangaroo as it will have similar planning challenges as FK.

I also want to learn how to use Unity. I don't plan to make anything particularly noteworthy, my rough aim is to make a game set on an island where you must collect 8 items to help your escape. Hopefully, there should be just enough there for me to learn the basics of Unity.

The big thing for me this year is going to university. Don't ask me where I am going, I don't actually know (:S). Also, as it will be the last year at school I plan to go on holiday with my friends during the summer. None the less, I would still like to get the proper Bot website up and running, whilst maintaining Veteran Gamer, this blog, my school work, playing games and all of the above.

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Hopefully this time next year I will have 2 games to my name, an understanding of planning (and Unity 3D!) a place at a university and ready to restart Frozen Kangaroo. Bon Voyage!

Posting hiatus

Well you will have probably noticed posts seems to have dried up. To avoid the situation which happened last year on my other blog I am posting an official hiatus notice. Due to exams, posting on this blog, (and my game news site) will halt. Posting will resume on June 15th with a post about the resource model in Frozen Kangaroo.

In the mean time, I will leave you with some links.

I am really enjoying the Three Moves Ahead podcast from Flash of Steel. If you want a taster of what the podcast is like, my favourite one was about symettry and asymettry in games. The podcast is well worth a subscribe because it combines genuinely interesting discussion about games design with some funny personalities. Better yet, it doesn't just focus on the latest game release.

Finally, an odd link. I am linking to this site primarily so that it can be found by Google. It is a website I designed (email me @ thekileyenator@gmail.com if you fancy one for yourself) and so I need Google to index it. However, if you are looking for plants in your work place, and you are based the home counties, this is the site to go to - Renaissance Plants

Blender fun and a quick update

I have recently been using Blender. Here is my image that I created this afternoon. I was trying out a few things (transparency, multiple light sources and actually finishing an image). No, it isn't a hint as to any future project, it's just a ray gun of some sort.

Also, I found out how to make really quick games in Blender. I had always thought you needed to use Python and so didn't bother, I have enough to learn as it is!

However, what you can do is use the very simple "Behaviour Editor". While I haven't produced anything meaningful, indeed anything even resembling a game, it does some very cool stuff out of the box. Namely, it has a physics engine complete with rotation, bouncing and friction. Hooking up keyboard input is easy and you can quickly get to grips with the basics.

In the way of Frozen Kangaroo, the real time strategy game that Botworks is currently making (read the articles linked on the right under Frozen Kangaroo Concepts for an overview), progress has been made, but not huge progress. My exams are coming up, and so a lot of my time is devoted to revision etc. However, my laptop should be turning up within the next 2-5 working days. When that happens, I will hopefully be able to spend much more time working on it.

Probably the most signifcant improvement I have made is the terrain engine. Before, each province had an asocitated image file which had all the terrain features in it. However, I have now moved the actual features off the image and in to a seperate file. When I want to place down a clump of trees, I now create a new TerrainFeature, giving it width, height and type of terrain. The engine takes that, tiles the correct image the set number of times, adding some random spacing to give it that natural feeling. It also can be queried to see whether a unit is within it. This will allow for easy checking to allow for speed modification.

It also means it will be easier to update map designs without having to
a) go in to the image file and edit that and
b) recode it to hit test different areas of the map for movement modification (in the original, if I wanted units to slow down when travesering a ceartain type of terrain, I would have to manually set where the terrain was going to be and enter how much I wanted the unit to slow down by).

Finally, there may be a hiatus of posts during my exam period. Hopefully I will get one or two more posts in before, but if I don't, posting will resume on the 11th of June.