No Name Games

Last night while some of my classmates were diligently finishing their computer graphics assignments, I was blissfully pissing time away playing a flash game on Kongregate called Sonny. A friend from class started up a conversation on GTalk regarding implementing multiple mouse object selection in GUIs. Digression ensued:

I nominate this guy:

Based on the lives that we live today, society has failed to deliver on many of the promises about the future (now the present) offered by the cultural media from the late 80s to early 90s. These promises included flying cars, cryo-preservation and reanimation, and possibly cohabitance with alien life forms. In fact, the only real revolutionary piece of technology between then and now is what we call the Internet…which wasn’t even close to what had been predicted. Although the projections were mostly disappointing, there is still hope!:

Earlier today, I met with Andy and Joe to discuss game design/development ideas at a Starbucks in Sacramento. I don’t normally like being That Guy who buys a coffee for $1.89 and decides that two dollars is a reasonable price of entitlement for your very own corner office at a coffee shop, but I got over it. Boy I’m glad I did since I had the pleasure to sit by a woman who was having a deep and involved conversation with her invisible friend.

Meanwhile ideas were formed, pictures were drawn, caffeine was consumed. Some of the more serious talk was about the use of non-traditional perspectives in 2D games. Some of the wackier ideas that were thrown on the table included steam-punk weapon-wielding ninja heroes fighting for humanity’s existence against an army of sentient future robots…yanno, since it’d be foolish to trust anything with a computer at that point.

Sometimes the hardest part about making a game is getting started. Have an idea for a great game? Awesome, that’s a great first step! Cool, let’s figure out the scope. We’re gonna need sprite sheets for animations, background and miscellaneous art, music, sound, a tailored game engine mostly from scratch, code up the game, make map and other editors, test, debug, refine/tune, and then spend countless hours on feature creep and polish. Got an idea for a great game that can be made within a reasonable time…say like 2 years or less? That’s a bit tougher to do. As one of my game dev friends likes to say, “embrace futility” and you’re well on your way down the road of game development!

In other news, Andy whipped up some possible concept art.

Made by Andy. Check out his site www.rezenstudio.com.

-GD

After many man hours, we’ve finally finished our first game/glorified demo.  Some of my roles on this project include:

1. General development

2. Collision detection

3. Token Asian

4. Minigame gameplay development

5. Catalyst for awesome

6. Math guy. (see #3)

7. Programmer artist (manipulation and desecration of Joey’s beautiful art assets)

Astromines was intended to be a low-key development test project to see how our new team worked with each other and to see what roles people were best at and I’d say that it turned out a couple of shades more awesome than I had expected going in.  Now it’s time to start something new and I won’t rest until I’ve successfully made each one of you shit your pants with fun…or until I get a real job.