game-play

Problem Solve, To the Extreme

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I do something nearly constantly every day that I think is just normal.  But, it occurred to me that maybe everyone else does not do this, or maybe they do, I don’t know.  I take stuff to an extreme to help put the reality into perspective.  What does that mean?  Do I go get a dirt bike and launch myself off ramps to understand game balance?  Nope.

What I do is this, if I have a simple thing like health of an enemy, what should it be?  Say it is 50 now, and he feels too weak.  If I just add 10 would that help?  how about 20 would that help?  this could go on for a long time, but I am searching for a cap where he is just right.  Instead of doing that, my first step is always to do something like this, what if it was 50,000,000 would that help?

What did I just do?  You say 50,000,000 is probably always too high.  Probably always too high isn’t good enough for me.  How about 50,000,000,000 would that help?  Now we are talking, the odds of that not being too high are very slim.  So what does this do to our thinking?  Now we have a range.  somewhere between 50 and 50,000,000,000 is the correct answer.  Now you can binary search for it at a faster pace than just trying to get it right by guessing.

I do this in every problem I am trying to solve, from business, to game development.  Try it out, take a situation to an extreme, then usually the correct answer is simple to find.

EXTREME!!!!  I had to yell it once.  🙂

What’s the Evil Plan?

Posted on by magicrat_larry

So yesterday I took the time to really get information written down.  We had a really good conversation about a week ago that, I think, laid down the ground work for how our game will progress, and needed to be in writing.

It is a very positive thing to start doing.  Take the time to write down everything about your title when making a game.  You will not remember everything.  So having the, ever evolving, reference to look at, and code from, is a powerful thing.  It also gives you a chance to see if a new idea matches anything, and where it fits in the design.

Take it to heart, planning is a good thing.  Your project will not be done in 30 days, so plan for the long haul.  If you don’t you will be just like everyone else that never finishes anything.

Here Kitty Kitty, Let Me Grab You

Posted on by magicrat_larry

So we added a pet element to our game.  Who doesn’t want a little kitty in a survival, action, top-down, simulation?Stand_Cat_000  You can have a pet, and if it is small enough you can pick it up.  So I have been making animations of every combination for our demo to demonstrate this.  So I have a shooting, standing, and walking animation.  That is a lot of tweaking animations to get get it with a cat and without a cat.

So in the actual game design we need to figure out a better way to add equipment and such to a player so that we do not have to animate every combination of stuff on a player.  For a game-play demo that is 1 step above a Proof Of Concept it is fine though.  I cannot wait to get back to designed code though.