October 7th, 2008
Without giving too much away about our Design for Entertainment Systems intentions, I’ve decided to write a little about a topic that came up in our discussions today. Basically, my feelings are that if you want to help give a game that little bit more longevity, the environment or map or whatever should be flexible enough to change randomly every time a player uses it, so that there is never the element of repetativeness. And yet the player is still free to master techniques at achieving their objectives and the designer is still free to control what fundamental elements and challenges exist in the level.
Lots of the best Real-time Strategy games such as the Age of Empires series feature this ability in their multiplayer maps, where water, features and resources are placed at random but still form a coherent and playable map. But none of them utilise this concept quite as deeply as Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 4th, 2008
I’ve finally uploaded some pictures from Loddiswell including a 3 photo panoramic photo merged in photoshop:
October 3rd, 2008
It would seem that from 9am onwards, Nigel Barlow is taking every lecture and practical of my day.
Something I spotted in his second session (but only lecture of the day) was the reference to “Computers which don’t look like computers?” links that go to miniature computer motherboard PCBs that run some form of inbuilt operating system. I’d say something like this could have a lot of potential for the games module should we want to build some form of physical installation.
The examples given were Gumstix and Colibri Modules.
Uploads
I’ve also managed to upload a few more images of times gone onto Flickr. Generally they’re heading for the Traditional Artwork set.
October 1st, 2008
The introduction of two different modules was covered today, the 6,000 to 10,000 word Dissertation (PRID301) and the Programming for Entertainment Systems (SOFT 323).
Geoff Cox mentioned that keeping a blog for reflection on the process behind producing the dissertation was a good idea, so I think it is time to start creating a few new Categories and portfolio areas!
Additionally, I really ought to structure my portfolio a bit better so that I can hold a range of some of my industrial level work as well as continue showcasing i-Dat as this site was originally intended.
September 28th, 2008
So I’ve been playing through the current Half Life 2 series backwards, starting with Episode 2 and going back to the original. It is interesting to do this because you get to observe the subtle changes made to the overall visual quality of the game as DirectX and graphics card capabilities have improved.
But let’s face it, the original was so good the changes are pretty hard to spot so really all I was doing was enjoying a bit of classic gaming before heading back to university. But when I reached the Grab-the-Gravity-Gun and head for “Don’t go through Ra…” Ravenholm point, having completely played Episode 2 using mostly the Gravity Gun as a killing machine thanks to the Hunter’s resistance to bullets, I decided that keeping hold of Dog’s rollermine toy ball would be a fun experiment.
And what a BRILLIANT option it is!
Read the rest of this entry »
September 24th, 2008
I looked away from a page for a few seconds and when I looked back this was the rather disturbing message on my screen. As adverts go, it certainly got my attention.
It was only after it had looped once that I saw that this might be being directed at viruses.
September 16th, 2008
So for a few days I’ve been experimenting with various bits of code, using a Kirupa tutorial as a starting grounds, in order to create the effect of rendering 3D objects in Flash. It has been a bit hard trying to figure out how to do things but eventually I wrote a few functions that basically put a cube of cubes (the basis for my flash game idea) onto the screen and could be rotated in three dimensions.
This was all well and good but now I have been stumped by figuring out how to sort the z-order and making the drawing more efficient by ignoring parts that are hidden behind other parts.
September 13th, 2008
I felt like playing around with my camera by taking a few more long time exposures (ten to fifteen seconds) of dark scenes where the light source might be my glow brick or some other faint source.
Read the rest of this entry »
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.