Well blog, my dearest, Picnic Panic for the iPhone hit the App Store this morning.

After (I presume) another night of tooth-grinding, a morning of consequential jaw-ache, the gym, free hot chocolate, freezing cold weather, and all manner of fun, our humble game is sitting on the App Store.

While I’d been sending out the ad-hoc version of Picnic Panic ready for review, our promotional codes only became available when the App got approved this morning, so I’ve been frantically emailing as many people as I can with a promotional code. Most press seem keener on a code than fiddling around with ad-hoc, or prefer me to fill in submission forms, which managed to take up most of my day at work and disappointingly resulted in very little response. I conclude this is because:

a)      Picnic Panic/Receiving an email from me is boring,

b)      The gaming press are flooded with review requests for iPhone apps, or

c)      I’m boring, Picnic Panic is boring, and the gaming press are flooded with review requests for iPhone apps.

Imagining for a moment that A and C are true, this then begs the question, who would want to avoid corresponding with someone as mind-blowingly cool as this?

Never mind, blog. It’s been a long day, and I demand a shower and some form of gum shield to stop my face aching again tomorrow.

One last note, if you share my hatred for the repulsive and annoying Evony adverts swamping the internet, I’d urge you,  (My Lord) to read the blog of Bruce Everiss, whom it appears Evony would like to sue for telling us all about this mountain of turd.

Good day.

I’ve developed quite a few games in my days, none commercial (even now since Open Sector isn’t being sold yet) but some were rather feature rich. I started out with 2D on the C64, continued on the Amiga and eventually migrated to ms-dos, windows and linux.

Over the years I used, what felt like, more libraries than there are surnames in a phone book. SDL comes to mind in a favorable light. Libraries are in general designed to abstract the developer from the underlying technology which yields amazing bouts forward in productivity. For instance, the previously mentioned SDL abstracts the underlying graphics so you only have to learn one set of instructions, instead of learning directx for windows, X for linux and whatever ungodly routines os9 used. It’s good stuff.

However, if you wanted performance you had to go lower. While I did use directx / directdraw for my 2d games on occasion I never fiddled much with Direct3D. Instead I opted for OpenGL which was a feature rich and well established library while DirectX had only just been conceived. I’m quite fond of physics and math in general so the 3D topography was always rather entertaining to me. Just being able to generate an object and then manipulate it felt more like an adventure than a coding exercise. So then why did I stop using 3D and went back to 2D?

Despite what the title of this post might imply I have nothing against 3D itself, it’s everything associated with 3D that wrecks my harmony. With 2D you create images, these are usually raster in one out of a handful of formats. Be it png, jpg, tiff or whatever else your engine prefers. You create it in an app, you export it, you use the asset in your engine. Theoretically it should work the same for 3D engines, but it just doesn’t.

The sheer number of inconsistencies, errors, bugs and intentional caveats associated with 3D formats and tools is mindnumbing. I’m currently switching my development to 3D via the Unity engine, as I’ve previously mentioned on this blog. It’s an outright fantastic piece of software. Well designed, fast (even on lower end computers), richly documented and designed with productivity in mind. But when you switch to 3D you have to abandon most of your existing toolset.

Sure, I still use photoshop elements for textures and touchups but overall I had to replace just about all of the tools I use to create assets. Fortunately there was a lot to choose between. Well, not fortunately actually. In the last two weeks I’ve put roughly a dozen modeling tools on trial and every single one has come up wanting. Sixteen tools to design textures, about five animation (IK / Skeleton) studios, a dozen or so conversion tools and a cornucopia of middleware.

Middleware. Ah yes, that lovely phrase. You see, you can’t just create an asset in your modeling tool and export it to your engine. That would be too easy. Unity, while it may look different from the feature page, really only supports the (autodesk) FBX format. At least if you want animation.

Most of the modeling software I tested doesn’t support FBX, if they did then they, without fail, had a buggy implementation of it. In comes the middleware. So, first I create my asset in my modeling app, then I procedurally generate textures appropriate for it and edit them in photoshop. The ones I can’t generate I buy since I can’t really draw worth a damn.

Next I export the model to a format the modeling software understands, import it in my animation studio, slap on a skeleton, do some animations, export it again to a format -that- tool understands and open it in your conversion tool of choice. This tool is then responsible for exporting it to FBX so unity can understand it. You just have to pray that all the textures, UV maps, animations and whatnot survive this hamfisted handling. Usually they don’t.

The fun part is when you’ve imported it into your engine and you notice a flaw. Just a matter of re-importing it to your modeling software? Hah, think again. Back to stage 1 you go and have to pass the asset through the entire bloody pipeline again. It got to the point where I was ignoring obvious flaws simply because it was so timeconsuming to fix something. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster I don’t know what is.

To be quite honest; I still haven’t found an asset pipeline that I’m satisfied with. The sheer volume of problems associated with previously proprietary and now open sourced (in the sense that everyone in their cat has their own implementation of it, and almost none are interoperable) formats and conversion between them has slowed my progress to a crawl. But hey, Unity is great, as is coding physics in 3D space again so on that end of the scale I’m happy.

Motivations are very important in understanding why people play Games and what value they may have to everyday life. The acronym below is one I created to mentally organize the main player motivations. The information came from a book titled ‘Game Development Essentials: 2nd edition’  It’s a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in entering the field of Game Development.

Those of you who are familiar with Game Art/Development know what a SPEC MAP is; short for specular map, it is a type of texture map that with decide the specularity or reflectivity of a given area. Such as an old wooden frame around a polished glass window. The polished glass will have a high specularity and the old wooden frame will have a very low specularity (if any).

To remember the player motivations, remember  “  M.A.K.E - S.P.E.C “

M – Mastery

A – Addiction

K – knowledge

E – Empowerment

S – Social Interaction

P – Physical Seclusion

E – Escapism

C – Competition

Hot…

Consistency is something i think is very important in games. With some gameplay exceptions, consistency should be something very important to game developers.

Consistency most applies in my opinion to the design and artistic side of games

You dont want a game that looks like you just copy and pasted from other games.

You want your games look and feel to flow perfectly from menu to menu, from level to level, from level to menu. There are many different ways of doing this.

You want your games menu’s to all have the same theme. They don’t necessarily have to look exactly alike, but they should have the same theme that matches your game. In short, all though you want your game to stand out to your player, you don’t want them being surprised at every different menu, that is unless thats part of your games theme and flow.

Example – Think about the halo 3 menu for those who are aware of it. For those who aren’t Google it and check out the image results or look it up on you tube. Each menu, matches the previous menu in theme and style, their not exactly the same, and the information they show is different, but they are all similar.

You want your games actual gameplay art to match the games menu art in some way.

Example - Again referring to halo 3, the menu matches the gameplay interface also. Their both blue, generic, and both go with the halo theme.

You want your gameplay art to all match in a similar design.Meaning you should have some sort of rule setup to go by when you make art. You dont have to make some detailed page of high protocol rules, but you should keep some things in mind like.

• What size to draw the art so you can scale it all correctly
• What line/brush size to use.
• What colors to use or what type of colors (Dull vs Bright,Gradients vs Solids)
• How to do shading ( How much? and how dark/light  )

When consistency isn’t as good… Gameplay Design

You don’t want gameplay to be consistent. While you may not be designing a seizure invoking fast paced shooter, still its my opinion that levels should be different from one another in pace/difficulty,creativity, and some other aspects. You generally want your later levels to be harder than your earlier levels. You don’t want each level to be the same setup where it can be completed just the same as other levels can, you want the user to have to complete each level in a unique manner, and be able to clearly distinguish each level from one another.

Due to the overwhelming ammount of project management and to finnalize a few things and polish the game, we are delaying the launch until after the new year. This moves A Stwalart’s Tale over into 2010, we have a finnalized launch date of 1/14/2010 . I feel this is best for both me as a developer and the player community as a whole. In terms of what still has to be done before launch I have compiled the jargon below.

Shop Database Reform
Vault Gameplay Development
Tier 2 Content
Re-Adjust Skill scripts for the new items database
Re-balance Whispering caverns
Fix Spell Bugs
Fix Item Stacking Sell bugs
Sellas Fringe Layering Check
Kobold Caverns Fringe layering Check
Finish the saludio ashlands zone

According to recent speculations, the well tried and well experienced skill tree is pretty much out of Blizzard Activision’s famous (or infamous) dungeon crawler. This comes from a twitter message posted by the game’s lead designer Jay Wilson himself, who states that the skill system revision is in full force. Trees begone! I think it might be a winner.

An action role playing game without a skill tree? That’s almost like eggs without bacon!

The wonderful thing about a traditional skill tree, is that it’s so simple to understand and get into. The intuitive way of presenting the possible character progression is eye candy to most players who don’t want to dig themselves into some complex manual.

Diablo pretty much set the standard for most role playing games with it’s skill tree system. It was further developed in World of Warcraft, which all must agree on has been quite a success, and adapted by most action RPG developers and many traditional RPG developers. Even the hardcore role playing game developer Bioware used this very traditional system in their latest RPG Dragon Age: Origins.

However, Dragon Age: Origins does draw a lot of inspiration from games like Diablo and World of Warcraft, although most harcore Bioware RPG fans probably will refuse to acknowledge this fact. There is a lot of World of Warcraft in Dragon Age: Origins gameplay.

Anyway, where is Blizzard going with this? Are they trying out a more way of dealing with skills, like the system in The Elder Scrolls games? Or have they invented some new incredible skill sytem that is even more intuitive and easy to understand? Final Fantasy XII had its chessboard stystem. Is that a possible source of inspiration?

At any rate, it ought to be something interesting, since the developers obviously had allready worked out a traditional skill tree system in Diablo 3. Maybe they actually found some kind of meat that actually goes better with eggs than bacon does!

Finnaly I can see the light at the end of the tunnel work is progressing nicely. This is such a large project to manage. The game contains over 300+Maps 100+ items and 200+ Npcs. There is so much data that is put into design docs to help keep track…thank god for spreadsheets.

I finished mapping most of the vault it only needs a little bit more, here is a preveiw of the great library that lies inside.

The Vault - Great Library

All the npc item drops have been readjusted now since the item database updates. It’s fantastic the game is running smoothly and stable. We’re not far from launch so stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about methods of game design for more interesting, simple flash games, and this is when I had a moment of inspiration after sitting around in the hot sun of a car par for an hour. I opened the back of a work book and decided to break the boredom ice by designing a game fundamentally simple in nature, in light of a lot of stuff I had played recently, but most of all, Noitu Love 2 by Joakim Sandberg. In a recent interview I watched with Sandberg, he discussed that his primary goal was to reduce the game down to its most basic, fun points, discarding extraneous features that he felt detracted from the ultimate goal of fun. In this instance, however, my goal wasn’t to create so much a game of the calibre of Noitu Love 2, but to reflect Sandberg’s principles of well implemented, integral features as a primary drive. My method proceeded thusly.

I limited myself to a single, ruled A4 page, not as a means to limit my creativity, but to reduce my design to its most important and central features. From there on I wrote whatever I felt was necessary, whether that be descriptions, lists or drawings; this should be whatever you consider important. I began with a brief statement of purpose since at this stage I hadn’t developed this style completely, but you may find some individual value in doing so. From there on I developed my ideas in a sort of systematic style where I took time to cement a central idea on paper, and then I worked out how it could be presented. My product was a sort of platformer where the character had a grappling hook that they could both use to swing on things, and to spring themselves off the ground, presumably there would be areas in which you were limited to either one of the abilities in an environment of perpetually increasing challenge, akin to that game where you played the stickman with the long, rope like arms that you swang off the jagged ceiling with, whatever it was called.

In hindsight, I don’t really have a lot to say about this particular technique since it is such a free, open style, all that must be involved is your ability to come up with a reasonable design brief on a single page. It will be rough at first, and you will often find yourself running out of space, but practice will be necessary, both for your ability to come up with an idea that will fit onto a page, and for the quality of the game idea itself.

In honour of this style, I didn’t write a blog entry longer than Atlas Shrugged this week.

Miles Newton – The Machination, creative director

I’ve taken on tons of game projects in my time. But haven’t finished anywhere near as much. I have found this to be common with alot of developers.  Im specifically gonna talk about the projects that have developed into good solid states.

Some things i would attribute with such:

• Level Design, especially if you have alot of levels.
• Primary Gameplay Art Creation if you already have like a working prototype or base engine working.
• Tweaking gameplay to be perfect, so its not too hard or not too easy.

Its troubling, because you look at what you currently have in a test run, and you say to yourself ‘ Okay, so i’m doing good, and have made some good progress.’ But mentally you say to yourself ‘ Dang, that means the easy part is out of the way and now finishing this game is gonna be a pain.’

The fun part of the project is done, you’ve made the key engine or whatever, now you have to manage the small (yet important), uninteresting ( yet necessary), lame (yet still part of that cool game idea) stuff, and tweak them accordingly.

So then what? How do you progress?

Put the Next Hit-Game on hold.

Well something all game developers must do, they must resist those tons of new ideas that always flood in their heads. Even if you think its gonna be a simple game just maybe to make a quick buck from scholarship, you have to resist that idea because:

• You’ve already got a project that is in a good state, that is unfinished.
• Starting a new project only increases the chance of doing such again in the future, and you want to create a habit of sticking with projects, or at least  kill the habit of not doing so.
• If you imagine the final release date of the project you had in a good state, starting another project, even if you actually get good on it, only pushes that date back an exponentially amount of time. Exponentially because that second project is gonna also reach a similar state, and what will you do then? Start that quick new idea you thought of the day before? Take a pseudo break (Where you make the smallest changes possible, and usually stare at code blankly for long periods of time; in order to convince yourself your still getting stuff done)?

Think positive about your progress

Try not to think about the hardships that you may need to face to finish the project, instead think of how you have progressed the current project more than others.

The more positive you think of your progress the more you are to stay interested in it.

Often a good way to keep positive is to get a good fanbase (depending on its scale) or maybe just some good feedback on it, like via FGL’s game feedback system.

Have good Contacts, to keep you focused

Finally having a fellow game developer to talk to, someone who knows the hardships of finishing projects; is a great asset. Whether its a friend from school, or some friends from a game development community, they can help keep you focused on getting your game done, and talk positive about project which will help you stick with it.

Finally you can challenge yourself.

Some times it will invoke a good streak of development if you mentally or verbally yell at yourself. I’m not saying you want to scold yourself or such. I mean say/think things like:

• Hey!! WTF!! This game wont get itself done!! So get busy!!!
• Man-Up and get this thing done!!
• (Take the Nike approach.) Just do it!!! Instead of whining about yada yada yada, Just do it!!!

Here is the talk I gave at GDC Europe this year, I hope you enjoy it.

~ Zacharius Zetch, 4th day of the 33rd year.

I have made it along with Balizi through the Shadowed Forest. He does not see the bounty of the land before him. I will make my capitol here upon this citadel before the greater mountains. Zamilidor, I will call it. Balizi will be leaving through the pass and into the desert in the morning. His disband from our group only leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

~ Illani Dan E’ri the first Stwalart

And so they met in the desert 10 years after their departure. Each had prospered on his own side of the valley, and each had conquest in their eyes. As they came together for their first meet in those ten long years,  Zacharius slew Balizi with a dagger. And so the bloody conflict engulfed the desert. And the two nations became mortal enemies. Before that battle in the desert each faction was left without a leader, for Zacharius died of thirst wandering the desert a misfortune of the gods some called it.

Shortly after two leaders emerged bearing new banners of war,  Queen Salth’iri of the Black Roses and Darmurian of The Sacred Swords. Salth’iri was a emmissary of the countries to the far east beyond the sea. She in the best interest of making Zamilidor and it’s countries colonies of the Taborean Empire began to lead under the banner of a Black Rose. A symbol of a darker time in the Taborean Empire.

Darmurian was one of the most loyal knights under Balizi and during the original conflict fought off Zacharius and his men. He emerged taking Balizi’s Sword and carrying it back to Kerotor garnering the respect of it’s citizens.

And both…met 12 years later, under different circumstances they met…me.

One of my favourite point and click adventures of all time has to be the completely brilliant The Day of the Tentacle from Lucas Arts. I cannot count the number of times I have played through this fantastic game.

As most people know, Day of the Tentacle was a sequal to the very first SCUMM adventure worked on by none other than the famous Ron Gilbert, first and foremost known for the Monkey Island games. Tim Schafer was also involved in both projects, and I am talking of course about none other than Maniac Mansion.

Some illuminated heads over at the AGS community has made it their task to remake Maniac Mansion in the style of the fabilous Day of the Tentacle. Maniac Mansion has been remade before, but not in the hilarious graphical style of its sequal.

From what has been released of the material, it looks like a crispy, yet classic looking version of the beloved masterpiece. The developers are wished the best of luck.

This ought to be good new for any nostalgic fan of the old school adventures. The developers are German, but they promise to create an English version once the production is finished. I, for one, can’t wait to play Maniac Mansion DOTT-style.

I would like to thank everyone that took part in the beta, you really helped out. I didn’t expect there to be quite as much to fix / change / touch-up as there was, shows you how important these tests are.

Based on feedback I’ve just wrapped up rc1 and let it hit the servers, you can download it from the (spruced up) product page. Please note that the game still cannot be bought, and it will not be available until january. The youtube promo / manual video is also locked pending a licensing issue that is taking longer than I expected (my own fault). It will go live shortly.

Time to thank people? Indeed it is. I would like to thank Lars Wikman for his extremely detailed feedback concerning almost every aspect of the game’s graphics and interface. Many thanks mate.

Hong Li and Bruce Downey were outright packrats when it came to tracking down obscure bugs (at least now I know the game will run decently in *some* versions of wine). Thanks guys.

Anders Carling gave me a fair share of tactile feedback of how the game felt, several changes were implemented due to it. Cheers mate.

Finally I would like to thank Lars-Eric Tonfeldt, Monica Tonfeldt, and the always lovely Rebecca Olsson, for helping me test the… somewhat lackluster alpha versions of the game (random blobs of color and a tad of gameplay interspersed between the bugs).

Phew. Tough part is over. Now, it’s quite possible that there are still bugs in the game, and I would appreciate some more feedback on the puzzle levels. Nobody has really commented on them, if this means the levels are fine as they are or if they’re so difficult that nobody has beat a single one is left to see. I’ll continue to tweak them until the launch officially hits in January so if you have any ideas, do send them in.

Thank you everyone.

So, it’s come to the junction where you’ve decided that you’d like to form and head up a project. It’s time to recruit a proper team and build something real. Should be no problem, right? Your idea is bloody brilliant, and you’re certain that people will be clamoring over each other to join when they hear your idea and see your logo.

Allow me to provide you with a reality check.

Nobody wants to join your project. Some people might very much like to see your project completed, but nobody really wants to join all that badly. We all have our own ideas and pet goals, so why on earth would anyone care about yours? But your idea is so much better, you might think. Nobody cares. If you want to start a project, you need to convince people that you have a lot to offer them, enough that they should work on your dream instead of their own.

So how do you convince people? Step one, have a real skill. Ideas are not a skill. Game design is a skill, but it’s usually not strong enough to stand on its own. (And I’m talking real design here, which means a hundred page game design that sounds fun on PAGE ONE.) Art and programming, those can do the trick as long as you’re good at it. And because you’re good at it, you will have no problem coming to the table with an existing demo. Or a serious, substantial portfolio that you’d be comfortable sending to a potential employer.

Let me reiterate. You need one of these three things:

• A real game design document which sounds fun from the first page.
• A working demo of a something that at least behaves like a game.
• A real portfolio of artwork, preferably artwork for this game.

If you don’t have at least one of those three, go home. You’re not properly equipped yet.

Okay, let’s say you’ve gotten your act together and one of these three is actually in your possession. The next big step in getting a team together is starting the other two. The more you do, the better.

• I don’t know how to design a game!
• I don’t know how to code!
• I can’t do artwork!

Once again, go home. In fact, stop and ask yourself this question: Can I do this project entirely by myself? If the answer is no, don’t start a team. It’s okay if you’d do an awful job, or if it would take you years upon years to finish. But if you don’t have the skills right now to actually complete this project on your own, you’ve got absolutely no business running a team. A team lead has to be aware of all the issues that the team is going to run into, on all fronts, and be able to assist and participate in the decision making process. Note: I’m not suggesting micromanagement, but you should be able to understand at least generally what your people are doing at any given point in time and what problems they’re facing. Otherwise you’re not a lead, you’re just another passenger.

By the way, it should be obvious at this point that recruiting a team comes several months into development. Project first, team second. That’s how successful online projects work.

Lastly, you need to be willing to lead. That probably sounds stupid and obvious, but it’s a critical point and people don’t consider what it entails. Leadership does not mean “I’m the forum admin and also have the best ideas.” It means being a manager and a boss. And make sure you understand what that really means.

Deadlines, milestones, and deliverables needs to be set and adjusted realistically. And this is especially for the teenagers — if you’ve never been on a software project, you don’t know anything about milestones. Sorry, but professional experience (not necessarily as a manager) is basically a prerequisite.

Be ready to fire people. In the real world, people’s livelihoods are on the line; there’s incentive to do a good job and there’s incentive not to fire people callously. Without the money involved, neither side is really bound by those rules. Now life happens, and nobody will really be able to dedicate their entire lives to side projects. But if somebody is consistently flaking out on you, you better have the spine to end their involvement and go find someone else.

Promotions and demotions can happen. If someone is way better or worse than expected, don’t be afraid to change the hierarchy. Some tact is called for when you’re telling someone they suck and have to follow another team member, but that’s part of running a project. And if they’re not willing to accept those decisions, see the previous point.

Last but oft-forgotten and maybe the most important — you are the lead, you are the manager, and in some sense you are a dictator. But communication between you and your team needs to be two way. Software projects tend to mutate and evolve drastically over their lifetime, and that’s not a top down progression. If you trust your people, you’ll give feedback and suggestions an honest chance, and be ready to pick their ideas over your own. And if you don’t trust them to provide that kind of support to the project, you’re not fit to be leading it.

If any of this makes you uncomfortable, it’s time to reconsider whether or not you’re really ready to lead a team. And remember that a lot of professional developers don’t want the hassle and will turn down a lead position. There’s no shame in helping to produce someone else’s project. Just remember this checklist when you’re picking a team to join. It could save you from joining a dead-end group, after all.

Very sad news earlier this week: Pandemic Studios was shut down by EA.

No point moping about although. What’s done is done. I choose to remember the good times not the bad: the friends I made and the colleagues I worked with at Pandemic and the shared experiences we went through. No matter how difficult and stressful they were, these experiences bind us together.

Here is my own personal Pandemic story: having worked for Irrational Games, and then Team Bondi – Pandemic flew me out from Sydney, Australia to work on Mercenaries 2 in Los Angeles. Obviously, this was a very significant event in my life, resulting in me settling in LA, meeting my wife, and eventually being hired by Sony. Along the way there were a lot of ups and downs: Getting acquired by EA, one week having an incredible demo and winning support from management, the next week struggling to get resources for the designers to test in COOP and fighting over stupid things like syncing debris and pausing in multiplayer. It was one hell of a rough ride!

In the last 6 months on Mercs2 – Andrew Goldman, CEO of Pandemic, donated his office to the multiplayer team so that we could all work closely together and make sure Mercs2 shipped with COOP. It’s a story of 8 friends working very closely together (literally!) under tight deadlines. Of persistence and determination in the face of tremendous odds, when many of us – myself included – were not even sure it was even *possible* to network an large open world game like Mercs2. We kept on and in the end, succeeded. Mercs2 became the first open world game to ship with drop-in / drop-out COOP throughout the entire singleplayer campaign.

So here, never before told – is the story of the Mercs2 Multiplayer Room and the men who made it what it was.

Holy crap, the largest source mod since the games inception…the largest source code mod in my entire game development career. It has been finished. This new system is one-hundred twenty-six million, thats 126.000.000 times more efficient. It will never de-synchronize either. The FPS of the game has been drastically improved to 64 making things so much more fluid. Special thanks to Scorpious2k for all his coding help.

I am going to be working straight on the games development now…only one more month to go.

I decided to make a bubble algorithm for Open Sector. It works sort of the same way as when you throw a stone in a pond, the impact represents the target and the concentric circles that “bubble” out from it is the pathfinding steps. It has several benefits but first I should answer the obvious question; Why didn’t I go with A* since it would obviously be superior for a game of this type?

A* is better since it always yields the perfect route. Bubble logic can occasionally take a step extra but it isn’t really noticible with boards as small as the ones in Open Sector. Let me be very clear about this; A* would be better than bubble logic in this game. Period. However, A* is designed to work for a single object, it does not map out a route that multiple objects can take. While irrelevant in this case I’ve found bubble logic to be more time efficient in the long run, thus ultimately reusable for more projects in the future. Now, there are multiple ways to extend A* but I didn’t feel like making a bastardized version of it when there were other routes available.

Let’s go through it step by step, with illustrations(!).

1. Locate the ORIGIN and the TARGET coordinates. It doesn’t really matter which one you start with if you’re bubbling for every move, but if you’re going to use the same bubble pattern for multiple pieces then you’ll want to start from the target. We’re going to start from the target since it is, in general, more versatile for a turn-based game.

2. Set (counter) to 0 and mark the TARGET hexagon with it in a 2-dimensional array.

3. Create a temporary bucket/array for each hexagon surrounding the TARGET hexagon. Mark all of these as (counter + 1).

4. Check all of the items in the bucket to make sure there are no unpassable objects occupying those hexagons, for instance a ship in my case, or an empty square. This is also where you would address the problem of walls, end of board, etc. If there is an unpassable object on the hexagon you are checking, then remove it from the bucket. You can make this check into a single “if” by parenting the hexagon to it’s child (be it a ship, wall, end of board, etc), thus making it extremely efficient.

5. While going through them, also check if there is an entry in (movementlist) that has the same coordinates as the hexagon you are checking, but with a lower (counter) value. If it does, then remove the hexagon you are checking from the bucket.

6. Add all the remaining hexagons from the bucket to the (movementlist) array. Increment (counter) by 1.

7. Loop 3-6 by using the (movementlist) as the TARGET positions, thus filling the temporary bucket with all the hexagons surrounding the hexagons available in the (movementlist), until one of your threads find the ORIGIN hexagon (the ship we originally clicked on).

8. Once you’ve found a way from the target to the origin you simply plot all of the coordinates in the (movementlist) along with their (counter) value to a 2d array, start at the ORIGIN (6 in this case) and move to the next hexagon with the lowest value. If there are multiple hexagons surrounding our case with an identical (counter) value then randomize which one you’ll go to. It doesn’t matter since the path will be equally long no matter which one it picks.

Simple, schmiple. Just make sure you create an efficient algorithm and make sure to optimize it whenever possible. My initial draft of it took about 8 A4 pages (handwritten). Optimizing it yielded about 2, which was my initial implementation. Now you know what’s going on whenever you click something in Open Sector.

It’s been a while since i’ve done a development update. Okay so, Implementation is what i’d like to call this stage. All the work I have been talking about on the item database the quest database it’s really paying off in organization and rebalancing the game. Everything is much friendlier and casual, but there are still hardcore features. Im also fixing bugs inside the engine…

Visual Basic Coding ...Fun

Right now I have all the tier 1 items entered into the game. Including quest items. However I have a lot of quests to re-do, which means that npc drops have to be redone. Plus I have additional quests that i’m adding into the older areas of the game.  The beta test contained 10 tier 1 quests. Version 1.0 will have 20 tier 1 quests. On top of that I will have 7 treasure finding side-quests. With the new item database I also have to re-write a lot of scripts and code with new variable numbers so it’s kind of annoying. Almost all quest dialogue has been changed.

The game will launch with tier 1 and 2 content. The tier 3 content is going to be released shortly after launch as an expansion. Shortly after launch we hope to have around 60 quests in the game.

On a look down at my blog, the last GDG I told you about was #1, so in my usual consistent and up-to-date bang-on-time-ness, I’m telling you that #4 is here, on Ready Up.

I’m currently so annoyed and frustrated at every aspect of my life that I’m desperately looking for something awful that I can poke fun at, in the same style as the Robin Hood Blog of Fail. My financial situation (and prospects) are worse than ever before, so I’m afraid I can’t afford to buy anything to laugh at. I expect to be scouring BBC iPlayer for something dreadful over the next few days before I find a suitable victim, so if anyone has any hot tips for something terrible please let me know.

In other news, I made a companion blue tack cube at work today, and drank approximately 6 hot chocolates, but neither of these activities were enough to rectify my mood.

Additional:

The logo for RU’s feature is a close up of a red blood cell I made for the absolutely terrifically named Bloodstream Raiders, which will be out soon for iPhone.

Tonight, i brought 3 disks, and 10 books/booklets on teaching yourself to use programming in formats such as PHP, HTML, Java, Vista, Linux and many, many more!

In order to become what some may call, “a succesful programmer” – many things will need to be done! To become a good programmer – i’ve follow Rasmus Ronn Nielsen as he is also a programmer; a very succesful one too!

I’m going to sit down with family and friends, and get their input on a project im looking at! Mainly to be something where i can test my game design knowledge over the next few months

I’m going to be using Dreamweaver as my main program – although i may decide to us many, many more as it’d offer so much more than just one program.

I will also like your feedback, and get YOUR ideas So please, leave comments, or email me and i may have time to get back to you!

What is the best way to monetize is not my question today. My question is how far do you have to go to make money?

Any game developer needs to make money whether doing it part time or full time. While this is a controversial thing to say it’s certainly not stupid. there’s got to be some fruits to your labour and even the starving artist needs to eat once in a while because once he’s dead he no longer starves. So how far will you go?

The best way to make money out of games isto either get a super hit or make a tonne of casual games all bringing in a small but worthwhile amount of money. The 1st is much harder but the second is much cheaper, but will the second be classed as ’selling out’? There’s no real art to the casual games market, it’s about money and a cheap but amusing play for the user. Surely if you desire your games as art then you will make something that’s true quality, but then you’re not going to make any money.

There is a rare balance though between art and money. Edmund Mcmillen would seem to have struck this balance with a regular flow of artistic games. He makes enough to support both him and his wife. But if has kids will he sell out or retire?

So will you ’sell out’ or starve?

Or can you find that rare balance in which you can make quality and money…?