9 Text files can be messy when logging events from games. In this article, Herman Tulleken shows you how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build visually informative logs that make debugging easier.
Development
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42 This article gives handy tips for designing and building a platformer. There are tips for designing the interface, handling jumping and collision boundaries of goodies and baddies, implementing AI, and other ways to make a fun game.
11 Tips for making a fun platformer
Two things are key to becoming a great game designer: making games, and playing games. In this article, Rodain Joubert extracts and explains three game design lessons from playing Dungeon Crawl that revolves around difficulty, providing meaningful decisions, and removing tedium from the game interface.
What I Learned from Dungeon Crawl
I have a weak spot for cool game development tools. Not the IDE, or art or sound tools – I mean the level editors, AI construction tools – those that developers develop specifically for their games. Those that you know could help you multiply your content, and craft your game […]
Guerrilla Tool Development
When you sit down to write a book, one of the most important things to bear in mind is the shaping and formation of your expression: if you can elegantly express in a single sentence what a lesser writer would need a paragraph to evoke, then you’ve got yourself a […]
Minimised game design for indies
This tutorial covers basic algorithms with vectors.
Basic Vector Recipes
Welcome to the Starting Small series. The aim of this series is to take a programming language that you hopefully know a bit about (enough to feel comfortable using) or that you want to try out and show you how to use it to make games. The language that this […]
Starting Small – Python and Pygame
Geometry plays a central role in game programming, underlying not only graphics, but also physics and spatial AI. A lot has happened since geometry was first formalised by the Greeks more than two thousand years ago, most notably the invention of coordinates and vectors. These inventions are indispensible for doing […]
Vector Fundamentals
This article originally appeared on NAG Online. Code in Python, go to outer space. A simple process, really. Do you really, really want to become a game programmer? Do you really, really have no idea how to start? Try some Python! This easy and simple programming language is not just […]
Easy Programming with Python
With the recent surfacing of the Game Maker 8 open beta, I felt duty-bound to download the tool and give it a whirl to see what’s improved over previous versions. It turns out that there’re quite a lot of tweaks in the new release: some of them are purely aesthetic, […]
First impressions: Game Maker 8
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 26, released in October 2008 Interested in making your own sound effects for videogames? This month we’ll be looking at Audacity and a few of the common effects that can be used to turn your humble blink-blonks into fantastic kaphwooms.
Let’s look at Audacity effects!
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 24, released in August 2008. One aspect of game creation that constantly seems to stump the average hobbyist developer is the matter of sound creation. Nowadays, experienced players can go onto the Internet, download a few indie games and easily pick up on […]
Mouth and microphone – The viability of home-brewed sound effects
In this, the final part of the series, we’ll cover the long-awaited subject of 3D models, as well as highlighting some of the possible problems you may have as you attempt your own 3D games.
3D graphics with Game Maker Part 4
Last Issue Well this is it folks; if you’ve been following this guide up until now, you should have in front of you a workable story to use as the basis for the game you’ve had working in your head. If not, well, at least you have the basic toolset […]
Narrative: Part 6 – The final countdown
In the game development world, a lot of beginners have a rather intense hatred for game prototyping. After all, it usually produces a rushed product that’s full of bugs and crappy graphics – a far cry from the uber-sweet, kill-yo-kitten-with-an-axe MMORPG system that they had in mind with all the […]