Awesome | Gamedev Brain

Proof of Concept (POC) Everything

Posted on November 4, 2015 by magicrat_larry

There is a good quote that always strikes me and I believe it is a good call to action for POCs.

Our approach to making games is to find the fun first and then use the technology to enhance the fun

-Sid Meier

If you just start coding your game from idea and start throwing stuff in you are not necessarily finding the fun first. What I like to do is to figure out a cool concept, as few neat sounding game-play elements and code up some quick little programs to show off those game-play elements.

The key here is speed. Do not spend time designing an awesome architecture. Do not spend time making sure it is pretty. Get the game-play in to your own hands and see if you still think it is fun. For example, for Violent Sol Worlds we started off with the idea we wanted a top-down shooter. So I started to create a POC of a guy shooting.

This POC at first looked terrible, with borrowed graphics but I could walk around and shoot one immobile cow. It turned out that it was fun to shoot an walk around, but the addition of blood from the cow made it more fun. The feedback was the true start of fun. At that point I thought the cow was detracting from the fun because it was an innocent cow. What would it be like to shoot something that moved, and shoot stuff like a building etc?

So I quickly threw in a wall and animated a bug creature I had been drawing. It was a lot more fun to shoot something moving. But the feedback was all wrong now for the bugs. They would need to die. So I coded in hit points and had them disappear when it hit 0. This still broke the experience and the fun.

When I added blood and body parts from the bugs being shot and killed it changed the world. It turned from something that I would launch and stop in seconds to something I found myself playing for minutes and it was just a POC.

You see without the POC I would not have noticed so many subtle things that make the action game-play fun. It is about moving around and shooting, but it was more about what you were shooting and how it felt to shoot them than anything else. This process did not take weeks, it took hours and the learning experience it was, was worth every minute. It changes designs, it effects decisions, and best of all it’s a quick process and adds value.

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You, Yes You, Never Stop Amazing Me

Posted on August 3, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I used to get up as an indie game developer and start coding my game. Now I get up and start marketing my game. When did that happen? When did marketing win as the leading task of the day? Seems like it was a smooth transition because I did not notice it until now. I think the community might have fueled the move though.

Let me explain. I get some awesome responses from people about our game that is in development – Violent Sol Worlds. I think that feeds the want for my brain to get more, so I have slowly turned into a marketer first and a programmer second. Never in a million years would I have seen that coming. It is wonderful though.

Before now, my interactions with people over the internet has been basically them yelling at me about my mother. You know, the XBOX live crowd. But now that we are building a community around a title we all love and want to see built the interactions are much more loving. I truly hope we keep this up and you all keep motivation high for me to keep engaging on this level.

All your praises, follows, and general encouragement have been amazing. You all blow me away, and make me feel like I can do anything, even knock out a shark.

If you have not seen our game – Violent Sol Worlds check it out.

Let Me Tell You Where to Go – ViolentSol.com

Posted on August 1, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Don’t get me wrong there are many places I would like to tell many people to go, but ViolentSol.com just launched. What is it you ask? It’s the web site for the game I am a part of. We are proudly moving forward with a site dedicated to it. You can see a nice little blurb about our team, and get a great description of our game.

We started off thinking our IndieDB site was good enough. But, we rethought that and created our own cool little place on the internet. I hope you enjoy it and please do comment about the game and the team. We are a very interactive team once you give us a try. Anything you want to know about the game or our team we will freely share.

Enjoy the site and I am going to go get back to working on the game. It is nearly 6am. 🙂

What’s Your Game Development Dream?

Posted on July 28, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I had a nice conversation of Twitter yesterday with @berit_anderson, yeah I’m calling you out. In that conversation I was asked the following questions, “What is my gamedev dream?”, and “What would be an ideal setup for you?” Let me attack each one of those this morning.

What is my gamedev Dream?

Well to begin with, it is on my bucket list, actually the final item on it, to create a game and sell it to at least one person I do not know. Sounds dumb, but it’s a dream. Starting with that I think it has evolved from there. I am a computer programmer by trade, so I spend my days coding to save companies money. It’s not terrible, it is kind of fun usually. In the end though I am working for companies and providing value to an entity that is not a living breathing person, so I am changing the lives of people through proxy of the company I happen to be coding for.

What I believe games are is a means for me to directly change peoples lives without a proxy. In games people feel emotions, and generally get happier. What a better way to spend the last portion of my career, fulfilling my bucket list and making the world a happier place, one game at a time.

What is my ideal setup?

I have already done business before, so I really don’t want to do it again. What I want is my current job to turn into game development. I work for an amazing company OST and they have showed interest in creating games after Aaron, my partner in crime, and I told them “They have a game development company, they just don’t know it yet.”

So Ideally, we work for OST full-time on games. Right now we are in the attempt to prove to them that we are not nuts, that there is money in it, and we are the right people to attract that money by making great games.

Conclusion

I want to make games, to make peoples lives better. I do not want to be the accountant of a games company. I want to concentrate on making high quality games that people will enjoy for years. So I work my butt off trying to make that happen, daily.

If you have not seem our project on IndieDB yet, here is my shameless plug – Violent Sol – Worlds

Our Game Project – Top down, survival, Action, Shooter with vehicles, crafting, and an AI overlord.

Posted on July 24, 2015 by magicrat_larry

We are so close to explaining our title and unleashing it on the world. We have been painstakingly putting together the feature list and starting to commit to what we will develop for the title. It is fun, but it is a process I cannot wait to be done with.

I wanna tell you that our game vehicles are amazing physics modeled action joys to drive, and our character runs around and shoots laser guns at enemies. I want to tell you that We will have an AI overlord that will continually keep your game interesting. I want to tell you that you will be able to do all of this with your friends. There is so much I want to tell you, but can’t.

Well, the truth is all of this is speculation and rumor, but it would be cool if I could tell you. What if I could tell you tht you could craft weapons, cars, and possibly even planes? What if I could tell you about the game and start to get you fired up? That would be awesome wouldn’t it?

I wish I could tell you something about it, but I hope you will stay tuned to hear more from me about it in the future. I wish I could say building too.

Take care.

If You Aren’t Doing the Happy Dance, Do Something Else

Posted on July 21, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Life is not easy, being a creator makes it harder. Make sure that you are happy with what you are doing. Game development is creation, you take nothing but an idea of an experience and start typing code that to a normal human being would be unrelated and, BOOM, experience comes out. If that doesn’t make you do the happy dance, do something else.

I mean it, if you are not jumping out of your chair and dancing, or at least holding your hands in the air wanting to shout…

I’m the greatest programmer alive!!!

If it doesn’t, then maybe you have the wrong hobby. It gets rough, it gets terrible even. You will think you cannot do it. You are wrong, but only if success makes you do this…

See the only reason game development is so rewarding is because there are times where things all fall apart. It crushes you, and makes you feel very small.

The thing is, directly after that, if you make it through, you hit the highest of highs. You defeat that crushing moment and feel like king of the world. You take down what seems like a dream killer, and you elevate yourself to seemingly one of the best in the world at problem solving. You stand up on the mountain and you simply dance, mostly alone, but you dance none the less. For a moment you are in game developer heaven.

So if you are in it for anything other than this, get a different goal. You won’t make money here, unless you love it. You need to understand the highs and lows, the crushing defeats, and the elevation of the successes. Really think about game development, do you love the lows? Can you get through to the highs? When you get there will you dance?

If the answer is no, get out. 🙂

Feeling Like Awesome Is Coming

Posted on July 19, 2015 by magicrat_larry

So I am sitting here today, feeling like awesome is coming. I’ve been working very hard on this project and putting a lot into it and it does feel like it could pay off with a load of awesome soon. I have no idea what that will look like, but that feeling is cool none the less.

We have a lot of things building up to a moment where we put our idea out to the world in a larger cohesive manner. Where people can be brought into the fold of what is truly being built. It will be both amazing and scary to ask the world, hey is this great or what? Not sure what’ll happen, but it does feel like a giant delivery of awesome is about to arrive.

What I learned along the way though, is help others promote their projects so there is a vibrant community for yours to live in. So I do take time every morning to find something that deserves a delivery of awesome and do my part by giving them feedback. It is rewarding for me and them because we are all better for it. It keeps projects moving, it fuels greatness, and makes passion thrive.

So all you game developers out there, or others with great projects, keep it up. People are watching you. If you bring it to the world, eventually the world will bring the awesome to you. In the beginning you push your project, your passion, after a while it pushes you.