Archive for August, 2009

Painting

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

I’m about to go back to university to finish my degree in Computer Science. But before I go my mother had offered to make me a painting of anything I want, anything of my choosing. I very quickly knew I’d want to have the painting from a game, but which? Then it hit me, I’d take the image from one of my favourite all time games.

Here is the resulting painting along side the original image:

original

original


Click to see full sized version

Click to see full sized version

I think it’s a very good job, especially considering how difficult a dark image like that is to copy. Can you tell which game it’s from?

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Incomming!

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Over at 2BeeGames.com they are running their 2nd Indie Game Development competition, which I am planning to enter. A quick look at the entries in their first competition and you can see the standard is very high, so I don’t expect to be coming very high up. But I do intend to make my most complete, fun and advanced game yet.

So what am I planning to build? Like the rest of my games so far it’ll be another clone, this time it’s based on Missile Command. The difference I’m making is to make it more of a shoot-em-up with different types of weapons to use and enemies to destroy. I’ve settled on a few but unique weapons;

weapons

and some enemies:

enemies

Although there are three types of missiles they all work completely differently. For example the smart missiles target the remaining people on the ground and travel horizontally to avoid bullets. The trident missile explodes into a spray of miniature missiles before impact.

So far the whole game is comming along nicely. The game mechanics, levels, graphics and background are all built. The only big job left is sound which requires rewriting all my sound library code. Currently all sound and music must be fully downloaded with the game before it can be played, which is bad for one that will be running in the browser. Instead I want the music to be streamed in real-time which will allow a much faster start up time.

Joe.

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Testing… Testing…

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Welcome to my new blog: \o/ WOOOOOOOO! \o/

This is going to be a place where I will post various articles, thoughts, plans and general tid-bits that I write in conjunction with my site, StudioFortress.com.

To start I’m going to talk about ‘what is the point of StudioFortress?’. For a very long time I’ve been interested in game development but like many indie developers I have awesome ideas that get partly implemented and then just get passed around to a couple of friends (at most). I’ve always offered lots of advice on making games, but this is hard if you have nothing of your own to back it up (or more that you have nothing online to back it up). So the sites first aim is to be a place to host all my finished content. By building up a place with regular visitors exclusively showcasing my material; it helps to motivate me to show off all my work at a complete standard.

Note that last phrase ‘complete standard’. With StudioFortress setup and in place this is my second goal, to get projects finished. Not just so that the main gameplay is built and they don’t crash, but to a basic standard expected of any game. This is the 80% of the work that goes on top of the game to polish the graphics, sound, music, titles, endings, credits, splash screen, banners, instructions, high-scores, saving, multiplayer, player progression and much much more. Admittedly I haven’t added all the features listed in the previous sentence, but I intend to eventually add most of them as standard to all my titles.

Finally I intend one day (hopefully not too far away) to be producing games commercially. StudioFortress is my CV, resume and demo reel to show off my work so far: “You want examples? StudioFortress.com!” A ground work I can use to start building my own career or business on top.

But most of all, I hope people enjoy the games!

Joe.

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