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The Game Developer's Kitchen

21 weeks 16 hours ago

Survey of (Implicit) Game Design Choices

It's useful to write down certain choices when they seem to be mutually exclusive. This is an list of certain choices you can make, in particular choices that might be implicit.

What I mean by implicit is that when you have "an idea for a game" you might have already made these choices without realizing it.

They are all likely false dichotomies in some sense, but hopefully they are useful "design axes" to think about where your game sits.

Sorry no pictures today, I have bike riding to do!

1. Mechanical vs. Narrative

 

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21 weeks 6 days ago

Vector Field Rivers, Tangerine Skies, Blah Blah Blah Marmalade Eyes

So, what's a vector field?

I know you were burning with desire to know this, actually probably (if I'm able to re-enable comments without being spammed into oblivion, er, please don't sue me bethesda) I will get a lot of comments telling me that I don't know what a vector field is or that I'm slightly wrong. Whatever!

Picture of a grid, each grid point has an arrow drawn on it, of varying length and direction, somewhat flowing together. Some are blank and I made a joke about not wanting to draw any more arrows!

 

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23 weeks 4 days ago

How to Make a Videogame Trailer on the Cheap

You don't have either Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, or whatever other software that real movie people use, or video capture hardware.

You also don't have the skills or experience of a real movie person.

But you want to make a trailer for your game. Well, sounds like this guide is for you.

This is a long detailed post, because I'm like that. But the jist of it is:

  • Plan it out in cuts, to a certain tune, and try to keep the overall length in mind.

 

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33 weeks 4 days ago

A new kind of loop: the P-loop!

So this almost definitely isn't a new kind of loop, except maybe to me and a few people that will read this. But I think it's cool! I'm sure somebody somewhere has thought of this, but in 15+ years of programming this technique has never occurred to me, and I've never seen it. It's legitimately neat-o!

Complicated-looking diagram showing a space ship and a lazer beam, and a lazer beam bubbles, with many labels.

Say You're Adding Particles...

 

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34 weeks 1 day ago

Save Game Transactions in RPGS

Picture of an evil looking statue with a magnetic field emanating from it.

MONEY

Imagine for a second that you made a database for great big evil Bank of America and part of it needed to transfer money between accounts. You write this code:


x = moneyAmount (10, 'USD') // x represent TEN U.S. DOLLARS
 
if (account1.hasAtLeast (x)) then
 
   account1.subtractAmount (x)
   // NO MANS LAND
   account2.addAmount (x)
else
 

 

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