Game Design | Gamedev Brain

Once You start You Just Can’t Stop

Posted on August 10, 2015 by magicrat_larry

You know you are having fun when you cannot stop. I’ve been going at game development for over 2 years now every day. I’ve worked probably 50-60 hours a week for that time, combining my day job and my game development “hobby”. That is a long time to have that work load.

I’m starting to feel it now, but I just can’t stop. It’s the, “just one more thing”, problem with an addictive thing you love to do. The Civilization of life. I love developing games, and I am seeing that I love developing a game studio just as much. Seeing something come out of nothing is a great experience and you all are making it that much easier.

There are awesome things coming from us in the near future so stay tuned and enjoy it as much as I am.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook 🙂

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

Do You Love Me?

Posted on August 8, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’m throwing it out there…

Do you love me? lol, This is crazy, we just met. Making this game is fun. It’s like you are falling in love every day, but just with a product, a dream, a vision, and the people who enjoy it. What a journey this has been.

OST Indie Games started off by making a game-play demo for a space agency tycoon game. It should be a cool game whenever we get to it. We then made a twist to a game called “Goobers”. It was a light game with a shallow story about an alien guy. We worked on a game engine for a long time and finished that up relatively recently. We had a few more twists and turns and ended up shelving that project and started looking at a project we called “Worlds End”.

That project was ambitious, so we narrowed it down to a top-down survival sci-fi game. It was not too exciting until the time when I was writing the proof of concept for the shooting mechanic and was throwing together art, but could not get a head to look right for the character. So I just threw on a cowboy hat. From then on I was in love. We switched his gun to be a laser pistol and even more love was there.

To me the cowboy hat, made me love the game you are seeing today, Violent Sol Worlds, It turned it from a crash landing survival game on a planet, to you are an early settler on a distant planet helping spread the human race across the galaxy. We all started to run with it. It was amazing how quickly things came together from that point on when love was involved.

Love makes everything easier, marketing flows, work just gets done, and magic seems to happen. I hope you love Violent Sol Worlds even a portion as much as we do. It is a great game to work on and we cannot wait to get it in your hands to play. It will be an even longer journey to get there but our team is ready for it. When you love what you do, you can’t help but do it.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

So Little Time, So Much To Do

Posted on August 6, 2015 by magicrat_larry

You know those people that say I am so busy? We all do. Most of the time you look at them and smile and say, I know you watch reruns of “That Seventy Show” every day. Well I am here to day to tell you I am so busy. I truly am. I am exhausted, and pushing even harder today than before.

I am really making things happen. Right now, I am not sure how well, or if they are good, or great things, but things none the less. I really have no time to write this out because I feel like I should be working. So here I go off into the sunset with all those other busy people that don’t really exist.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook 🙂

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

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. 🙂

One of Those Days

Posted on July 27, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I got up late today, and everything is taking a lot longer than it normally feels it does. So this will be a shorter one today I am sorry.

The past week has been fun though. We finally got the game announcement out the front door. Our hope is we can have some validation of the idea through a few means. Once we get validation then we will pour ever ounce of energy into it and knock it out. If you are interested in the game pleas do go check out one of these places and leave us feedback.

Violent Sol – Worlds Forums –

Game Features

Dev Forums

Violent Sol – Worlds Home –

OST Games Studio

Violent Sol – Worlds

I’m sorry this post is not more witty and interesting but it is kind of an off day.

How to be Better Than a Wild Monkey

Posted on July 26, 2015 by magicrat_larry

So, I am the king of saying things that make people cringe so here it goes, making a game is easy and takes just a small amount of talent. BOOM! Yup, just about anyone can throw down a game, game jams are a huge example of that. Don’t get me wrong, people who code games are some of the best programmers out there and anyone in business should hire them as coders. When it comes to problem solving a game programmer is tops, but it’s not that hard to make games.

So why isn’t there 5 billion different people throwing games out like wild monkeys? There are, the key is that you have never seen most of them. Yup, WILD MONKEYS! Truthfully, people throw down games like nobodies business, but hardly any of them take on the roles they need to from day one to get it out the door better than a wild monkey could.

Step 1: On your first day, define something and market it.

Step 2: On every other day, define more things and market them.

Step 3: When you hit problems market those too.

Step 4: When you take a break market that.

Step 5: When you mow your lawn market that.

Step 6: When you take a nap, market that.

Get the picture? Nobody buys games from an indie development studio. They buy the people behind it. Be alive, be engaged, be you, and tell everyone about it. Others are out there that believe in your dream so give them the information, from ground zero, on how it is you are perusing that dream. Market everything you do. Even if you don’t have a game idea yet, market the process to get one. Really, sooner or later you will be finished with something and find yourself in a sea of wild monkeys and wish you did.

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. 🙂

Twitter, the Best Mobile Game Ever!

Posted on July 17, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve said it to many people and I get the same response of laughter every time. “Twitter is the funnest mobile game ever! ” Why does everybody laugh? To me it is really true, Twitter is a very addictive and fun mobile game.

Why do I call Twitter a game? I think it has all the elements of a game. It has a large open world to explore, multiplayer, goals, rewards, and even disappointments. Twitter takes the game to the next level, where Facebook just touched the surface. Twitter made it fast paced, exciting, and very interactive in nearly real-time. Twitter turned the social networking experiment into a very huge Social MMO where everyone is attempting to contact everyone else and get as many interactions as possible in like 8 minutes or less, how exhilarating.

Let’s take all the game-play elements and explain them.

Open World

Twitter is a massive world, you can sit there and search many different areas of it and see nearly endless content that is quick, and entertaining. You can find anything and not have to read for hours, but just 140 characters at a time, or even just look at pictures. So this world is vast, diverse, and tailors to many kinds of peoples mindsets for gaming.

Goals

Twitter is very much goal oriented. You are motivated to create content, and try new things to reach the rewards that we detail in the next section. It is highly likely that you will end up putting a lot more thought into your 140 characters than you ever imagined.

Rewards

It will tell you in real-time when somebody noticed you and the part of the world you are creating. They can favorite you, which is like telling you that you rock. They can retweet you, which is like broadcasting your content to their part of the world. The holy grail though, is the follower. If they follow you your empire grows in power and strength.

Multiplayer

It is social, every bit of the world was created by another person. So every interaction you have in that world rewards another player, or disappoints them. There is not single player mode on Twitter. You cannot help but reward anotehr player with either a good interaction or a terrible one. You choose what you do to them and how. You can follow others, or gain a following yourself.

Disappointments

Twitter has its highs and its downs. This makes for a great story, not a conventional one, but a great one none the less. Followers bring you great joy. But the negative comments from some can hurt you. The posts that get no interaction what so ever really are a downer. Plus the dreaded unfollow. Oh man there is nothing worse than somebody leaving your tribe of followers.

Conclusion

When using Twitter make sure you see it for what it is. It truly is one of the greatest games created of all time. It is pure, simple, and genius. Play it and enjoy. Join me @magicrat_larry