Game design again
Posted on September 24, 2006
| Sascha
I’ve been doing some game design on PjW the last few days and still work a bit on it. That’s why I prefer doing games over other stuff (techdemos, engines), because it includes a lot of different things to do. It’s coding, game design, creating content (3D models and such) and much more. So if you’re tired of one part you just to something different that’s still related to the project.
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Coding under the hood
Posted on September 20, 2006
| Sascha
And another post without screenshots. That’s because I’ve mainly done stuff under the hood, so there isn’t really much to show with a screenshot this time.
First I implemented save games. You may think that it’s not the best idea to implement such a feature at this early stage, but for this type of game it’s really necessary. To make it concrete I’ll use army feature of the game as an example : If I want to test this part of the game I would have to open up the army management dialogue, create a new army, assign it to a region and thest e.
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GUI, sciences and stuff
Posted on September 16, 2006
| Sascha
Over the last days I have put some more work into the user interface, so in addition to the overhauled control center I showed you last time I now also have a (small) system toolbar in the top left of the screen which currently has buttons for saving, loading and quitting the game. But more important is the addition of the most important informations to the control center, so the player is always uptodate on the most important values concerning his nation.
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New control center
Posted on September 13, 2006
| Sascha
After thinking a bit more about the control center, I came to the conclusion that the four buttons I initially had in mind (and more or less implemented) were not enough, which in the end would mean that the player would have to press more than just one button to get to some of the important parts of the game. And since this was something I really wanted to avoid in my current game, I had to redo the buttons and now there are six buttons on the control center.
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Staff and Espionage
Posted on September 12, 2006
| Sascha
As opposed to what I planned in my last blog entry, I didn’t do any buildings at all cause I haven’t had much time to do work on the game over the weekend. But that doesn’t mean I did nothing!
First thing I did was to flesh out the espionage (and sabotage) part of the game in my design document. At first I wanted this to be a minor part of the game with not many options, but after thinking about the whole espionage and sabotage thing, I decided to give it more importance throughout the game.
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Buildings
Posted on September 8, 2006
| Sascha
Yesterday I took the next step on the stairway to finishing my current game. As you could see from the last postings, I implemented the army feature first, and now I also implemented buildings. And after starting on implementing the feature yesterday night I did a “runthrough” and implemented the whole feature, not step-by-step as with the army feature. So I made my WeldEdit export buildinginformation to XML and ingame you can now build them in a region.
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Update
Posted on September 5, 2006
| Sascha
Sadly there are no screenshots to show off this time. But this is mainly due to the fact that I’ve spent the most time on coding the game mechanics, so on the surface nothing has changed but the game is still on it’s track (actually I’m rather surprised at how fast I advance with all the things I have planned). And besides this due to a personal loss in my family I haven’t had that much time to code since my last update.
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Armies and Units
Posted on September 1, 2006
| Sascha
As I already told at some point, armies will play a great role in my current game, especially since it could get a bit hard trying to take over the world without any armies. So I decided this part to be the first one that I’ll try to get playable before getting to the other parts. After having my WeltEdit so far finished that I was able to create the units that’ll be in the final game, I finished the army building window in the game (see the screenshot) and the player is now able to qeue units which will then be build and transfered into a global unit pool (contrary to my first design draft, units will be managed global, not regional anymore), from which the player can assign them to an army later on.
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Ingame Hexfield and more Gamedesign
Posted on August 29, 2006
| Sascha
Coding on the game is fun, doing game design is fun, but coding boring tools to create content isn’t. So I usually switch between those three things on the fly, so that the boring part of creating tools doesn’t overweight the fun of doing the creative stuff for my current project.
And therefore, after coding some hours on “WeltEdit”, the editor to create all content for my current project I went on to implement the three-dimensional hex battlefield into the game, and now have it up and running in it’s own window, nicely implemented into the GUI.
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Some infos about gamedesign
Posted on August 26, 2006
| Sascha
Maybe some of you want to know how I do the design for my games, so I thought to write down something on this. Note : I’m no game designer and I never worked on commercial titles (though my freeware games and apps are rather successfull), so take the following stuff as my personal view on this matter, don’t cite me on this in a fiery discussion or so.
Most important notice about gamedesign :
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