User:Joshua Smyth/Journal
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The wiki is now hosted by GameDev.NET at wiki.gamedev.net. All gpwiki.org content has been moved to the new server. However, the GPWiki forums are still active! Come say hello. Articles 27th July 2006 I've decided to move my journal to my own site. The link is above. I'll be keeping what I have already written here for archive purposes. 28th February 2006 Uni University has started again, I've got a few minutes to waste before my next class, so I thought I'd post a new update. I've decided I'm going to keep a design journal for my new project. I'll host it at my own site and keep this journal more general and that one more specific. The new project is a 2D rpg, Originally I wanted to do a 3D one, as I mentioned earlier but with me in my third year at university now I have had to scale down the scope slightly, which is probably a good thing. 3rd February 2006 Inertia I think I have a problem with Inertia. I'm not talking about getting started, that I can do fine. I'm talking about actually making progress. Yesterday I was helping a friend out with her first year calculus assignment, something which I should have been able to do easily. However, I got blindly stuck, for like an hour, on this one question. Pretty much what happened is I made no less than three critical errors each of which I had to realise before I could work out the answer. I was persistant however and the bugger finally fell. I then tried another question, got it wrong, left it, went to another question, got it right (although I had to think about it for a while.) Later on when my friend left I was able to solve that question I missed in less than two minutes (I was just thinking about it in the wrong way it seems). What also surprised me is that later on that evening I decided I'd tackle a collision detection problem I was having in one of my projects, and something I laboured over for 3-4 hours a couple of days ago, I managed to solve(and implement) in around 10 minutes. Because I haven't done any maths over the summer, I've forgotten a large amount (particularly calculus) which is going to be a pain in the ass once uni goes back. But for some reason doing a couple of math problems put my brain into a problem solving mode, even though it was slow going at first, I managed to solve a couple of problems I was having with my programing project. I might just have to do a couple of intergrals each morning to get my brain warmed up. Wednesday 25th January 2006 - Happy New Year Summer is a bit of a double edged sword, as a university student I have pretty much all of summer off (even though I'm attending one class in summer school) which you'd think would give me ample time to work on programming projects, unfortunatly its also a particularly unproductive time, because its just too darn hot, and as enjoyable as programming is, its a bit of work. Going to the beach, reading, or socialising is much more fun in the summer. My experiments with 3D and DirectX resulted in me going wtf at 3D model animation. Creating 3D models is definately not my fortae. That RPG is just gonna have to wait - again. I've created a couple of demos for arcade games in the last month, just for myself, we'll see what these prototype demos produce. PS: I should be getting a new computer soon, I've been using an antiquted machine for far too long. PPS: Just finished reading 'Masters of Doom', good book about the rise of Id software and the two 'Johns' - Carmack and Romero. Wednesday 30th November 2005 Wow, a long time without an update. University classes took me by surprise and I've got almost no programming work done. But that's over for the summer and I'm really pleased with the grades I got. I'm not going to be working on the text adventure interpreter anymore. (Well I might do a little, depends how I'm feeling) I haven't found a way to make lua user friendly enough to give to non-programmers to use to create the games. I'd really like to invest some time into learning how to create my own scripting language from scratch and that way I can create a custom debugger and compiler but it's such a large task that I don't think I'll be attempting it. When I get a copy of MS VC++ I'll clean up my code and post the work that I've done. Been playing around with more 3D stuff, more specifically DirectX and C++, I've got some ideas for an RPG we'll see how this goes. Saturday 8th July 2005 - Going Fullscreen I've managed to get a complete demo of my text adventure interpreter working, it's small. What you can do is limited and the prose isn't very good, you also can't finish it. But it's a text adventure game, and it works. Which is pretty cool. I would upload a demo for my fellow gpwiki'ers but unfortuantly I only have an introductoy version of MS VC++ so I can't distribute my projects until I get the full version. I'm now working on the GUI side of things. I'm going to have a skinnable fullscreen gui placed ontop of the game, so that the player can view some pretty pictures while they type in stuff and use the mouse to navigate instead of having to type 'Go north' all the time. For this I'm going with SDL (crossplatform here I come!). Lucky has done a nice job with the GUI for his game, and I'd like to pick his brain, but he's on holiday at the moment, so I might just have to experiment without him. First up is getting the input box and output box, so the player can type some stuff in and instead of cout into the console window itgets displayed in my gui. Monday 27th June 2005 - Progress report Alright, now that I'm on holiday I've got approximately two weeks to myself and my text adventure interpreter, so I thought I'd briefly list what I work on each day. That way I'll have a nice little progess indicator. - Added Inventory, The player can pick up and drop items. - Moved the synomizer and ignorizer from a binary file struct into LUA scripts for easy customization. - Savegame / Loadgame functions avalible - Added score system and a turn counter - Added ability to name locations Friday 24th June 2005 - Interactive Fiction Rocks OK! A month or two ago I was playing with C++ and LUA and the other day I repicked up my work and I now have a working prototype for an interactive fiction (aka Text Adventure) interpreter. The interpreter has a parser (processes player input), A synonomizer, which is a list of synonoms that treats a group of words as the same word, 'get', 'take' and 'grab' for example all mean the same thing, and an Ignorizer, which ignores little words such as, 'the' and 'at'. This way if the player typed in 'Give the cheese to the farmer' the interpreter would treat this the same as if the player typed 'give cheese to man' fancy huh? The whole of the games logic is written in LUA script files, so someone could pretty much code away a game very similar to the early text adventure games of the 80s using my system. There are a few additional features that it needs to be more flexible (such as a players inventory) but the basics are in place. Thursday 21st April 2005 - Starcars Update + New Project I've just released the new version of Starcars, which includes a Level Editor and I've fixed some compatibility problems with some graphics cards. Mainly the Nvidia Geforce series. Hopefully some crafty people will come up with some cool levels. Uni is just about to get real busy. So development will take a small rest for a while, but I have decided on a new project. I've opened up my copy of C++ and have been mucking about with LUA, so far, I like what I see. I'm going to build an interactive fiction engine similar to Legend Entertainments, using LUA for the scripting. Now I'm no C++ expert. It's been awhile so it might take some time. I will probably use SDL for the graphics also. The next test after that is to make it cross platform. Does LUA work on the Mac? I might have to go look that up. Thursday 17th March 2005 - The Cyclic Nature of things Ok, As I've mentioned before I'm still working on the level editor + upgrade to starcars. But I've been thinking about my next project and I've come up with the following list of ideas I'd like to attempt. 1. A scrolling Space Shooter These games are fun, I've always like playing them in the arcades. Programming wise and design wise it's quite easy. However the art requirements are rather high. It'd be top down, use 3D models, DirectX for special effects and rendering and Visual Basic for the game engine. Unfortunatly I fear that this market might become saturated soon enough, there are at least half a dozen good shareware shooters out there, and many more not so good ones, I might add. 2. Action Adventure Game Ok, this is a game that I actually want to create, if not next at a later date. If anyone has played LandStalker on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis then they'd know this is one hell-ov-a good game. Basicly an RPG/Action/Adventure in 3D isometric style. Unfortunatly it would take me at least two years to make such a game (as I don't have a storyline) even with a full time artist. I'd need to create production tools before hand to handle art, engine and scripting requirements and research AI. (of which I haven't done any of before.) The description above is fairly generic, all I can say is go play landstalker. 3. Rouge Clone A graphical dungeon crawler. Turn based combat. Heavy on the RPG stats. Creates random dungeons everytime you play (Think diablo) and randomises side quests into the game. (Think diablo) Simple 2D graphics. (Thats all you need) C++, LUA for scripting and hopefully cross compatibility for the Mac and Linux markets. Again problem with the art, but that could probably be solved as I could build the entire game with place holder art easy enough. The minimum system requirements would be way low (again only 2D art) so the potential market is large. There aren't any good modern-ish rouge clones out there inmho. 4. Interactive Fiction Ok, don't laugh... I think that there could be a market for interactive fiction if done correctly, funny and or immersive storyline, cleaver puzzles, parser that isn't stupid as well as graphics representing whats in the room around you. I mean, there are still books around when we have movies? Surely there must be people around willing to fork out money for a good IF game. I know if there were games as good as 'Eric the Unready' or 'Gateway' and I could play them on my computer I'd buy them. I also believe that if working full time, with a team of three or so (Writer, Artist, Programer) you could do turn-arounds of 3-4 months. I might just setup a sister company if I find others with the same frame of mind. Also, make the engine run on windows, linux and mac. I'm guessing that the Mac/linux markets might be more enticed with this kind of genre. 5. 3D Point and Click Adventure Game I don't have the resources to pull off such a game, but I think Gabriel Knight 3 was only scratching the surface of using all three dimensions in an adventure game. I propose a horror/who dunnit set in a dark scary house. I think 3D (especially 3d sound for suspense) would be good for such a game as it would allow one to explore more than any 2D adventure. Thursday 3rd March 2005 - What's the next project gonna be? I've been thinking about the next game I want to create. I'll ramble a few ideas down and post them at a later date: As well as my reasoning behind considering each one, and the choice I end up making. Tuesday 1st March 2005 - Starcars Update?
I've also decided to include the level editor in the demo. Saving your tracks will not be avalible, but the playtest mode will be, lets see if enough people have fun with the editor to warrant a purchase of the game. Community created content has worked well for other games, Quake, Duke, Doom, Command and Conquer, The Sims, Total Annihilation etc.. so here's to giving it a shot. I should have a beta out in a couple of weeks. February 23rd 2005 - The Designer, The Businessman and The Programmer
But it's still early days. I am begining to learn all about the differences between being a programmer, a businessman and a designer. Each personality type tends to either be dominant or passive. Currently, I'm in the process of registering my business, setting it up as a tax-paying entity and working on marketing and promoting my game. All this - so I can sell it and earn some dollars. So the businessman side of me is becoming more developed and will make more progress these next few months. Most programmers dont think of themselves as businessmen, often leaving it up to others, or discounting it all togeather. But I attest, the business side is very important, because it gets you paid. Which means you can work with bigger budgets on later titles. The programmer in me is the one who wants Starcars to run on every system at the most efficent rate possible, He wants to include new technology x and buzzword y. And he's had to take a couple of ego checks in the run up to the release of Starcars. For example - With the shipping of v1.0 there have been a couple of problems reported from a few graphics cards. I've been unable to find the source of these problems and have just decided to ship it anyway, hopefully the solution will surface and I can fix it in a later version. The Designer is the one who wants to include as many features as possible, and, if left to his own devices, can sometimes call on the programmer to do the impossible, or, at least tasks outside of his or her current knowledge base. It's largely been the designers fault in the past when I have been unable to finish my numourous attempts at fame. As much fun as a full scale RPG would be, it'd be a nightmare to implement. Each of these personality types have been required in order to turn Starcars into a product. But they all have to work togeather synergisticly. If the businessman was in full charge, you might accidentally suck the personality out of the product and only make what's likely to sell and not a work of art. If the programmer got full reign, I'd just end up making some nice looking tech demo (Although Quake did sell quite a few copies.) If the Designer was in sole charge, all my games would either be on paper, in my head, or they would just never get finished because there is always just one more good idea around the corner. |
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