Whew.

I just finished playing The Real Texas from start to finish for the first time.

Flood

About a week ago, I moved into my apartment which has new carpet. It has new carpet, because about a month ago during a -30'C cold snap, the pipes in the apartment two floors up burst and flooded us (and the units above and below us.)

So since I posted "DONE" on twitter I really have only had about a week of proper dev time with it, as I've been living out of a hotel. Adventures!! And a lesson in backups, if you don't make them (I do.)

Time Budget Saved My Life

There is a common idea with artistic development that you will go through a period of experimentation and immitation, finally settling into a style of your own.

I'm not going to pretend that I have settled into my own "style" but certainly my technique has become fairly standard. It's just based on what appeals to me:

The Human Touch.

Awwww...

Tartan Blanket

Today, after maybe 4 years of solid development, I reached the first "finish line" for The Real Texas.

December 7 I started work on the final boss mechanics. Today, 20 days later, it's basically complete. I will still need to do some major tweaking and add a few minor-ish things, but there you have it. And oh, dear friends, have I been slogging.

I put a really cool enemy into The Real Texas yesterday, he's a bandit who smacks the hell out of you with his mop. Skip ahead in the video below to about 1 minute in for some nice gameplay video!

Or, listen to me ramble on about game design. We're all about choice here at K-L and once more, the choice is yours!

See also: this amazing video of Kate Beaton Drawing (opens in new window)

The Real Texas is coming together great, I am working incredibly hard on it and feel pretty proud.

Recently, I added these rats, which I find sort of amusing:

Just to be clear, the stone in this picture is a Faery Stone which you can use to warp from place to place. There won't normally be rats at this location, but when I create a new creature I need to put them somewhere while I work on them.

Most games have what's called an "update cycle". One way or another, there are a bunch of entities/objects with an update () function, which is called periodically (usually every frame.) These might control enemy logic, particle positions, animations, etc.

Here is something that I have found to be incredibly helpful in reducing bugs.

Things are full tilt ahead on Texas these days, though I'm not blogging about it too much. I'm really just too busy!

Here Sam is hanging out at the beach, near a Faery Stone. These stones have the ability to warp you around the map, once you've visited them.

It's all pretty standard stuff, if you ask me... =)

First, to everybody in Canada and the USA: Happy Canada Day and Happy America Day; we're somewhere between them (July 2) right now. I had a great day yesterday riding with some friends, one who is visiting from the USA.

I had a special four part blog series prepared but, really, it was boring and not my style. I'd rather just blog about what I'm doing at the moment or whatever strikes my fancy.

Drones

Finally comes the magic: drones. Where my preferred design differs at least a little from other designers is that my objects do not have per-frame logic. Instead, objects are essentially static, and respond only to events (such as clicking).

Drones are essentially entities that only have per-frame update logic. They are not tied to a specific object, and do not have a physical or visible representation.

La Tour Part I: World Elements

I recently got a question from a friend about the basics of how I do game development (how am I doing 3D, how does my engine work, tc.), so that seemed as good a reason as any to get back on it with my blog (this blog has been inactive for I think a month or more!)

So it begins! A four part tour of how I do game development...

World vs. Play