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Jan. 3rd, 2011 @ 06:58 pm 2010 Game Roundup
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Grid of game thumbnails

2010 has been a really great year for me. I've met a ton of new and exciting people, made a bunch of games that I've enjoyed working on, and I feel I've vastly improved as a game designer over the course of the year.

I wanted to round up a list of each of the games I've worked on this year and talk a little about each one. Took me a little longer to do than I anticipated but here we are:

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Dec. 19th, 2009 @ 09:57 pm Topsy Turvy
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Last weekend I made the game Topsy Turvy for Ludum Dare 16. It's a one-button platformer with gravity switching, and it's HARD. Here's the post-mortem:

What went right:

* The concept. I've had the idea in my head for a while, and I'm very glad that I used the competition as an excuse to make it rather than forcing myself to think of a game idea inspired by the theme. And the game ended up pretty much how I imagined, so that's good too.
* Inkscape as level editor. AS3 has some rather lovely XML-parsing abilities, so reading the SVG file was surprisingly simple. It's very much hard-coded to the specific output that (my copy of?) Inkscape generates, but it should be fairly easy to fix if it ever stops working.
* Abstract graphics. I am not an artist, so I decided to save time and just draw everything out of lines. I think the results fit the game fairly well, even if they're not actually good.

What went wrong:

* The goal. I added the collectables to provide an incentive to get to the more difficult areas and also as extra landmarks for getting your bearings. Unfortunately, with time running out and no win conditions implemented, I made the decision that you would win if you could collect all of them. In hindsight, I should probably have added a level exit instead.
* Difficulty. The game is ridiculously hard. I knew I wanted to have some areas which would be tricky to get to, as a challenge, but when the goal became "collect everything", those areas suddenly became non-optional.
* First day motivation. I wanted to have all the basic game mechanics done by the halfway point, but I was just procrastinating like crazy. I'd come to the conclusion that it just wasn't technically interesting enough to hold my attention, but then on Sunday morning I added death and respawning. Suddenly my game idea was in front of me and I could start constructing devious routes through the level, and I spent the rest of the day excited by it.
* The name. It actually changed name twice between starting and submitting, and I'm still not really happy. Currently thinking about maybe renaming it "Jump-Zap-Flip".

Lessons learnt:

* Get death/respawn implemented earlier in future
* Think of a win condition as part of the design process
* Don't make ridiculously hard challenges required to complete the game
Jan. 16th, 2009 @ 05:52 pm (no subject)
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I have a problem, which is that if I don't write things down I forget them. Be they amusing, meaningful or important, before long I struggle to remember details and soon after that they're gone.

I also have a secondary problem, which is that I don't have the time to write things down.

Put together, these might seem like an insurmountable obstacle, but I am of course equal to all things. Solution: I shall use Twitter to post messages summarising my day. Call it a two-weeks-into-the-new-year resolution if you like (personally I wouldn't).

Events requiring more than 140 characters will be typed up to a blog entry, but they will be short blog entries, such that they can still be written before sleeping. If Twitter's character limit annoys me too much, I may post everything in blog format, but I'm unsure about that.

I have tried this a couple of times before (originally prompted by the film Into the Wild) but I hope that by posting daily rather than saving the entries up for one large (and mostly boring) post in the future, I will manage to keep it going for longer.

For completeness, here are some entries for 2009 up until this point:

Dec 31: Saw Yes Man with Gnus; played Monopoly until the new year then tried to play Cheat with a confusing pack of cards.
Jan 1: Spent all day not packing but somehow got to bed before 2:00.
Jan 2: Up at stupid o'clock to get to the train station; travelling to skiing with a four hour stop-off in Paris.
Jan 3: Arrived in Val Cenis around 9:00 am and spent the day teaching Mairead and Hennell to ski.
Jan 4: Skiing.
Jan 5: Skiing.
Jan 6: Spent all day in the apartment writing an essay.
Jan 7: Skiing.
Jan 8: Skiing.
Jan 9: Last day of skiing.
Jan 10: Travelling home. Missed our flight due to Italian train doors that wouldn't open (twice!).
Jan 11: Spent all day on internet. [Amusing read]
Jan 12: First day back at uni.
Jan 13: Six straight hours of lectures followed by a project meeting.
Jan 14: Slept through an exec meeting and was generally unproductive. Played Perudo in the late evening. [Game]
Jan 15: Joined RememberTheMilk.com. Started doing Rob's coding challenge, which is to create a C++ program without being able to compile it.

Let the daily dullness commence.
Oct. 31st, 2008 @ 06:44 pm Jailbreak
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No money. 36 hours. As far away as possible.

It starts tomorrow morning: where will we end up? Well in the best of all worlds we would smash all previous records and find our way to New Zealand somehow, and I see no reason not to work under that assumption...

You may or may not be able to follow updates at Twitter and/or my Facebook profile, depending on what Orange decides to charge me for texting from abroad and whether I decide that's worth it.

If you wanted to sponsor us you could do so here.
Sep. 27th, 2008 @ 03:58 pm Backdated post
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Sep 11: American Beauty
Sep 12: Comedy
Sep 13: Chris & Pete's 10th year anniversary
Sep 14: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Sep 15: Judge Dredd
Sep 16: Coventry
Sep 17: Failed to apply common sense and needed help turning the oven on and when resetting the circuit breaker
Sep 18: Went round to Jen's house and met Amanda
Sep 19: Hanging out watching Red Dwarf and Youtube
Sep 20: Warwick Game Design stall at Open Day
Sep 21: Joey cooked a large meal for everyone
Sep 22: Met with Blitz -- went pretty well
Sep 25: Played Mao
Sep 26: Did WGD website stuff that I should have been doing all week
Sep 27: Assassins' Guild; met Phil & parents
Aug. 4th, 2008 @ 07:54 pm Things I have learnt this past weekend
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Church of Fools had some gaping wide security holes that no one ever discovered.

You can write a webserver in XSLT (if you're crazy enough to want to).

Southport doesn't have a beach, just some sand, a pier and no sea.

21 seems an awful lot older when an 8 year old child asks your age.
Jul. 21st, 2008 @ 03:26 am Observations
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Current Location: New York, duh
Three things have struck me on arriving in New York:

1) It's very hot
2) Everything's very tall
3) None of the phone numbers start with 555.
Jul. 20th, 2008 @ 03:57 pm Backdated post
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June 4: Larked around in Maths late at night
June 5: Last exam
June 6: Found that ASCII strings are unlikely to appear in the hexadecimal representation of pi and watched http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8FfMBYCkk
June 7: BBQ and tree climbing; http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
June 8: Cycled to and from Kenilworth for a picnic and tree climbing.
June 9: Met up with Louise; watched the Bourne Identity
June 10: Juggling in the sun; http://www.empireonline.com/features/posterletters/
June 11: Talked about fourth year project, looked into physics determinism, solved billing issues for Z-I, and thought about (and decided not to) installing Trac.
June 12: Playtesting at Blitz. Also started writing my talk on physics and collision detection.
June 13: Worked on draknek.org.
June 14: Jon's stag do - frisbee, tree-climbing, go-karting, BBQ
June 17: Set up a Redmine installation for the fourth year project. Lots of discussion about same; no conclusions.
June 18: Spent most of the day in the Learning Grid but did practically nothing. Console social.
June 20: My talk on physics and collision detection
June 23: Power tools at Ellie's house
June 24: Drove to the east coast, swam in the sea and watched the sunrise
June 25:
June 26: WSAF game showcase; Sylvia's house in the evening
June 28: Jon and Ellie's wedding
June 30: Clearing Jon's room and moving his massive amounts of stuff to his house for him
July 3: Last minute packing and cleaning; came home
July 4: Made a cake; played Brawl; read http://www.nodignity.com/freaks/nqm/nqm1.html
July 5: Went to Guildford to see David Race and the Prydes
July 7: Birthday
July 9: Tidying and sorting
July 10: Worked on Mindbender
July 11: Bowling with Gnus
July 12: Starting work on a new flash game
July 13: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 http://www.esquire.com/fiction/fiction/nathan-englander-0708
July 14: Hair cut; physics
July 15: Grandparents in Newbury
July 16: Read http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/074.htm and realised this problem existed in my physics engine
July 18: To London on train, watched Octopussy for some reason
July 19: Back to Bristol to get Dad's wallet; then back to London after Chris's house-warming party
July 20: Plane to New York
May. 22nd, 2008 @ 10:24 pm Revision strategies
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May 17: Silly little Flash game day
May 18: Video watching day
May 19: Exam day
May 20: Hangover day
May 21: Procrastination day
May 22: Excessive procrastination day

Things are looking good for my exam tomorrow morning...
May. 16th, 2008 @ 11:06 pm Today
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April 24: Today I completed my project report.
April 25: Today I helped write and record a short audiodrama.
April 26: Today I went round David's with James W and played Worms.
April 27: Today Hennell told me how he accidentally got the internet to send someone thousands of dollars worth of flowers.
April 28: Today I learnt how to write games in Flash.
April 29: Today I mocked Tanya for playing Minesweeper for hours, and then even more when she displayed a total lack of understanding of the basic game mechanics.
April 30: Today I spent hours looking for one stupid little bug.
May 1: Today I watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico with Tanya and she loved it.
May 2: Today Jon and Ellie came round for a games night.
May 3: Today I started making a very simple Flash game.
May 4: Today our house was invaded by Christians.
May 5: Today I did not much of anything.
May 6: Today I juggled in the beautiful weather.
May 7: Today I was busy with revision lectures, discussing fourth year project ideas, a strange film and a console social. But none of it was memorable enough to mention here.
May 8: Today I went to the IGDA meeting in Leamington, where there was cheap alcohol.
May 9: Today I began making yet another physics-based game.
May 10: Today the game began to vaguely look like a game.
May 11: Today the WGD library conspired against us in every way imaginable, and Jen had her birthday party.
May 12: Today Leigh and I decided that we needed to just pick a project idea for our fourth year group project, and that as we were the ones doing the picking, we should do an awesome 3D physics engine with pluggable components.
May 13: Today we found some more people for our group, who unsurprisingly weren't that keen on the idea of doing a hardcore physics engine.
May 14: Today the internet went down and it made everything sad.
May 15: Today I began revision.
May 16: Today I updated this for the first time in almost 5 months.

Vaguely inspired by a scene from Into the Wild, which I found to be an amazing and beautiful film.