This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 27, released in November 2006
The Game.Dev Comps evolved considerably since they started, with sponsors and prizes being obtained, and a larger, more experienced (and larger) community facilitating the creation of even more advanced games. We take a look at all the competitions held since August 2006, 10 competitions over 2 years.
Semi-procedurally generated music, beautiful visuals, and 8 levels of bullet-hell-like mayhem; this is Everyday Shooter, and it’s not ordinary.
Are you sick of hearing the now clichéd ‘Adventures games are dead’ whenever fond memories of LucasArts and Sierra classics are shared? Even worse, are you sick of saying it? Because, like all overused maxims, this one also has that shred of truth that led to its conception, but it also led to a whole bunch of developers striving to prove it false.
The original version of this game spent some time at the top of Konkregate‘s most popular games list, looking very smugly at all the other games below it who scrabbled for the lower podium positions; it held a similar accolade for even longer under the strategy subcategory. Then the 1.5 update of the game traipsed onto Kongregate and managed to retain and refresh interest in the game, and, in fact, in the flash tower defence genre, for far longer than most people expected, racking up nearly 6 and a halfmillion plays on Kongregate alone, the third highest on the site. This is, of course, the very same site that hosts incredibly well polished games such as Sonny, as well as personal favourites, Fancy Pants Adventures and The Last Stand.
Nandrew: Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present to you our second Dev.Mag Collaborative Review Thing™, partially because the first one was so fun and mostly because Rock, Paper, Shotgun have not yet sued us for stealing their idea.
Chippit: … and because the Wolfire guys were nice enough to unexpectedly drop a copy of Lugaru in our inboxes. Lugaru being, of course, the predecessor of Wolfire’s current project, Overgrowth.
Nandrew: Right, so, here we are with a review of Trino. Made by a bunch of guys that call themselvesTrinoTeam. Let’s kick off by mentioning that we’re going to try a new review scheme for this particular game.
Chippit: Yeah, something different for the guys who were nice enough to toss a copy of the game into our mailbox.
The tone of the Sagrario’s Room Escape is cleverly set upon finding a plain manila folder containing nothing more than a simple page on which is printed – in friendly letters and with an accompanying smiley face – the words ‘good luck’. This cheeky challenge warns you that the game is going to be a struggle. In fact, it’s likely that most players will start it without ever completing it, ever being aware of their goals, or, in fact, ever reaching this point. This is in contrast the apparently simplicity of the setting: a small, spartan room with only a Vitruvian Man hanging on one wall, a small briefcase lying on the floor, and a chair blocking the only obvious exit. The later discovery that the aforementioned, apparently insignificant note is also a very subtle clue for one of the later puzzles is a testament to the game’s devious design: nothing is as simple as it looks.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 27, released in November 2008.
Ultimate Quest is one of two Game.Dev DreamBuildPlay 2008 entries. It is an expansion of a ASCII-styled text adventure that was originally entered into a Game.Dev competition, polished and completed for Microsoft’s annual competition. The following is a discussion by one of the game’s two creators about the process of creating the game.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 29, released in February 2009.
Last month we covered some of the very basic ways of testing whether object A hits object B. But, while the techniques we covered could quite likely take you very far, you’ll inevitably encounter a time when they simply aren’t enough. So this month we’ll go a little further.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 28, released in January 2009.
Almost every video game needs to respond to objects touching each other in some sense, a practice commonly known as collision detection. Whether it’s simply to prevent the player character from walking through the walls of your maze with a simple collision grid array, or if it’s to test if any of the hundreds of projectiles fired by a boss character in a top-down shoot-’em-up have struck the player’s ship, your game will likely require a collision detection system of one sort or another.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 29, released in February 2009.
Oh dear, what’s happened here?
New site? No PDF-format magazines? Hyperlinks? Comments? The horror. Or is that progress? I’d like to lean towards the latter, but the few weeks of nearly dedicated effort that it took to achieve this result tends to force my opinion; I might be biased in this regard, of course. Feel free to judge for yourself and let us know.
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 20, released in February 2008.
A stunning setting, an involved story, and a gargantuan world to explore. This is the promise of Aquaria, an indie title nearly 2 years in the making, and winner of last year’s IGF grand prize. Diving into this action-adventure styled game is thus an exciting prospect.
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