Blow Up Blocks - Level 4 completed.

I have begun a new game. I am well into it actually at this stage. Lots of nice colors and good level design. That thing I just said, that would be my dream review if someone were to ever review the game. I hope that they would say "The colors look amazing. The world is well realised. The game play is gripping and the level design is awesome!". Yes I would go to sleep that night with the thought in my head that I have made a great game. 

You see, for all my blabbing up top there, that is really what I am trying to do. I am actually trying to make a game that will be brilliant. I want you to play the game and go, "that game was worth every cent that I paid for it! I must tell one of my friends to buy it."

Whether or not you will do that is really not too much of an issue right now, right now I just want to design 30 levels of a game that you will have played in a few hours. I have completed level 4 just last night. I got my Sophie to test the game this evening and she said that she liked Level 4 alright but I do not think that she liked it as much as the other levels. The initial 3 levels are more fun, fun, fun based. Level 5 will be fun for the player as a reward for completing level 4. Anyway... I would say remember the name of the game but that might be counter intuitive as I am still coming up with the name that suits the game the best at this point.

Lets say that for now, the code name is BlowUpBlocks. The final name of the game might of course be BlowUpBlocks, we will see. I'm off to begin work on some particle explosions :)

Making A Game! - Part 2

So today I went over to a friends house and we looked at some Unity 5 stuff. I have made a main menu screen that is going to go with the main game that another person has made. More on that later on in the weeks to follow. I am looking forward to this other person to finish the bit he is working on so that I can finally just something on the Google Play Store at last. It will cost $25... around €20 I think.

So on my own game, the teddy bear game I think that I have a clearer picture of what I want to do. It is becoming clearer in my mind what has to happen. I must do some drawings and post them up here so we can see if my vision right now matches the finished version.

In Unity 5 there are sample bits of code available in the form of Sample Projects. One of them is a side scroller. I will have a look carefully at the code and simply copy as much as I possibly can. My aim here is not to reinvent the wheel at all, or to come up with beautiful code at all. No, my aim is to make a game, get it out there. If things go as planned with my friend that I am working with, I should have that game up on the Google Play store in around 2 weeks.

That would be progress.

Making A Game! - Part 1

I am going to make a game in Unity, a simple game. Really simple! I have to have something done and finished. I will make this game on the PC only, I am not worried about phone or pads or Linux or anything. I will get it finished on my PC.

AND I will set a time limit. Lets say... 2 weeks? That is reasonable. Two weeks. So today is the 2 June 2015. I have to have it finished on 16 June.

How many parts will be in this? I do not know but I do know what I want to from the game and they are as follows:

1. Game must have at least 3 levels. Why? Well it will give me practice moving from one level to the other and there is a whole progression etc etc for the player. 
2. Game must have pretty graphics... but all graphics that I have made myself. Why? This will give me practice in using blender. 
3. Game must have sound... like various well placed sounds and a sound track. I am not doing this myself, why? Because working with sound is a whole other thing. For this thing I have a person who is going to help me, even if he does know it! (ahem brother in law Mark Smith). I will also use the plethora of websites out there that offer free sound mp3's. 
4. Game must have some kind of story, you have to care about what is happening in the game! I am not even going to ask why in this one. It is obvious. 

So the question is now, what kinda game will I make? A vertical side scrolled? A top down game? A first person shooter? A car racing game? If I do not pick out the type of game I want to make literally nothing will happen. I like the whole side scroller idea. Wouldn't it be cute if I had a teddy bear trying to get home! Fantastic! It is cute, touching (who hasn't loved and lost a teddy bear) and there is definitely a story there. 

Okay, side scrolling teddy bear adventure it is then... 

Stairs I made in Counter Strike Global Offensive

A few months ago I finished off this map that I was working on. Find the map here.. take a moment and look at it :

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=265113640

But in the map I made a stairway, you can see it below:

My Counter Strike Global Offensive stairway

Now, this weekend I was up in Belfast and right there beside the Titanic museum I spied a building with this stairway as a fire escape going up the side of it. I was quite chuffed with myself. The stairway I designed above was from my imagination of what a good stairway should be.

My stairway is wider than this one because in game mechanics I want the player to have plenty of space to run up and down without getting stuck. Of course, when I look at it, a real play would get stuck on this stairway too, look at the barrier at the bottom of the stairway!

One Direction is the best in the world.

(Now the band one direction that is - I mean my new one aim!)

Hi there, I am back after how long? Look, I meant to keep writing this blog all the time, every day but I find that pretty difficult. Anyway, in the mean time what have I been up to? Well I have lost my job, not my fault, the company I was in had to downsize and I ended up on the street as it were. What else, I don't know. I'm fine though.

game, computer game, development, computer, design, free, paid

I have been thinking. What is the new direction that I want my blog to go into? The I figured out what everyone else knows that is successful at writing anything, write what you know about. I guess that to a point I was already doing this in that I was writing my blog about my day and that is what I know best, me. Anyway, gotta stay on topic here. Basically, I am going to write about me make a game!

Yeah! Me making a game!I am going to make a computer game and attempt to get anyone that I do not know do download it. That is my aim. Get anyone to download it. Do I want to get money for it? Of course! Will I get money for it... hmm, I do not think so. I am not negabombing myself or anything it is just that I know what my first game is going to be and I know that there is no way that I could free right about charging people for it.

So that is my new aim.

2012 - Day 57 - Monday - Alpha07

I was not at work today, but I tried to do some work at home, but you know what, the day just flew.. I was at karate though which is always cool. But the big karate news was that there is a grading on April 7th! A mere what, 6 or 7 weeks away! But if I get it I will be up to a green belt. W00t.

You know, it is funny. I have been learning a programming language on and off called PHP. I have been learning or dabbling rather with programming languages on and off all the time since I was a (late) teen. But anyway, it is one thing to mess with a language and a whole other thing to do something with it. So in an effort to learn PHP I began making a game based on the browser based game idea of "Torn City" or "OGame". Remember Torn City? How big were we into that at the time!

Anyway my game is called Alpha07 and it is based on this idea where you have a planet, you can build space ships, fight other players, there will be an economy in it where if you need titanium to build your space ship but your enemy knows that you need lots of titanium then the enemy can buy up the titanium and increase the price of said titanium... therefore fighting you economically before flying his ship over to your planet and blasting it to pieces.

Screen Shot 1 - Login Screen

Screen Shot 2 - Complete with naff pics I drew myself....

Yeah... I have put a few screen shots together to show you that this is not actually a dream in my head.. I have actually been working on the game for a good while.

My point about all this is that I have actually begun working on the game again, hopefully I will get to launch it properly as a playable game! I will keep you posted.

2012 - Day 4 - Colin McRae

I actually loved watching Colin McRae drive. You know who he is? He was/is a World Rally Championship legend. Years ago, and I mean alot of years, like 10.. or Jesus, could it be around 15 years ago a Colin McRae game was released. I loved it. You could set the kind of tyres you wanted, the gearbox ratio, basically everything that would make the car go faster and better on the kind of road you were on. So if I was racing in England with lots of tarmac I would have a set up that would give me slower acceleration but more speed with certain tyres but if I was on the twisty dust roads of Africa I would have a quick acceleration but with less speed... you get the idea. Fast forward to today, Dirt 2 is the great great great grandchild of Colin McRae. I can say that definitely it is no where near as fun as the first one was. Sure the graphics are photo realistic, the car damage is incredible, and I can play my friends anywhere in the world - but it simply not as fun as the first one was.

Colin McRae - Legend!

It always happens. I remember my brother learning to play poker from an encyclopedia - not wikipedia - a book! We played it, it was good fun. Then after a while I played it a different bunch of people who changed their personalities when the cards were brought out. Seriously, the turned into men. Their expressions changed. They spoke differently. Basically they turned into tossers.

This is what success does to things. Not always, but in alot of cases success turns people and things into tossers. Colin McRae was class, fun, cool. A while later the franchise needed a facelift. It lost the fun element and turned very serious. Thats why also I laughed my ass off when I was looking at my daughter play Dirt 2. She was not taking it really seriously at all, she was crashing into everything, going over the edge of the road, playing it very not correct. And it was hilarious. It brought the fun back.

Colin McRae died in a helicopter crash in 2007. I was sad when he died. It was the end of an era or racing around the same time that I stopped really watching Formula 1.

Living In Oblivion

My favorite PC computer game is definitely the Half Life series. I have played all of the half life games, well all of the official ones. There might be some mods that some HL fans think are a part of the game, but I am satisfied I played all the game so far... btw, word around the camp fire is that Half Life 3 is in development!!!!! :)



But onto my point. I just finished the technically brilliant Crysis. Now, while it was good, I found myself kinda just playing it, like, as a pass time. With Half Life I was engrossed in the whole game, the story, the characters. All brilliant. Would I find that ever again?

Enter Oblivion. I think that I have just played something like 0.5% of the game or something so far, but how brilliant. To me a very good game is when I am doing something, anything, in the day and I find myself thinking of the game I am playing. To me if the game you are not playing is not like that, then leave the game, there are plenty games out there that will do that to you. But Oblivion is definitely like that. I wish I could take a week off and ONLY play it. At least with Half life you could play a little chunk and you would feel like you did something. But with Oblivion, I feel like I have to play a few hours in a row to get proper satisfaction.

Now, I have to get to work, so I can finish, so I can come back here again and play some Oblivion. To those that do not know Half Life or Oblivion I have added links below, take a look at them, they will give you a good idea of what I am talking about.

Link to Oblivion on Gamespot:
http://www.gamespot.com/search.html?type=11&stype=all&tag=search%3Bbutton&om_act=convert&om_clk=search&qs=oblivion&x=61&y=7

Link to Half Life 2 on Gamespot:
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/halflife2/index.html?tag=result;title;1