Monthly Archives: January 2014

Global Game Jam Recap

By | GameJam, Journal | No Comments

I thought I’d write a few notes on this past weekends game jam… Firstly, I think it was a huge success!
Play it here and tell me what you think.

Going into the event I had never worked with anyone in the team. It was a lot more art heavy than I had previously worked with and this really showed up in the look and sound of the game.

As for programming it was great to work with someone that knew their way around Unity. We naturally divided the tasks without any real discussion. It was great to be able to rely on someone getting cool stuff into the game whilst I was working on something else. Ended up being quite productive for the short time we had.

What else can I say about the art guys…? Amazing art and animation and sounds/music! Didn’t really need to debug any art issues or help them out. They all knew their stuff really well.

The main thing we might have needed to improve on wouldĀ  be having a more solid design driver. One person making the design decisions to try and keep the concept solid in at least one persons head šŸ™‚

We didn’t get time to implement a few features that would have changed the game a fair amount but that’s to be expected with such a limited time.

Hopefully we get to do some more work on it and see where it goes.

Good fun! Looking forward to next time.

-Ryan

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VR DevLog 17

By | Journal, Super Mega Mega, VR | No Comments

Revisiting randomness

My recent work on SuperMegaMega has revolved around figuring out a lot of the desired game play and story.

Part of that process has led me back to considering procedural generation again.

I want to have a game that won’t require massive play sessions but is still appealing each time it’s played. The sense of progression is also important.

For examples of this I have been playing a lot of the recent roguelike evolutions that have become popular.

Some of them use random content in a way that is still very controlled. For example “The Binding of Isaac” uses a large set of hand made rooms (over 1000) that are chosen from as building blocks for the larger level layouts. “Rogue Legacy” does a similar thing too whilst Spelunky uses a more fine-grained version but it’s essentially the same idea.

So now SMM is using this pattern with its own twist. Pre made rooms and structures give more control over the player experience. Ā Ā The main restriction is all the rooms are based around a cylindrical structure.Ā As long as there are a shit load of variants to select from it will seem very random. Just need to make sure the quality level is maintained over the entireĀ  set of rooms.

The actual gaming loop is currently being experimented with. So far leaning towards using a permadeath system with unlockable weapons and events. Don’t really know what will work until I get some more play testing done!

Lots of enemies,weapons,items and levels to make!

Also, my new phone is awesome! Note3 ftw

-Ryan
 

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