Where I write words and that, instead of working
*In videogames Human-shaped polygonal surfaces in videogames are not people, no matter how well rendered, animated, and voice-acted. They are literal shells. They do not think, nor feel – they just react according to their programming. They are not Cylons where their programming is so complex that one could posit that they are alive, because…
I must admit, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Patreon – is it okay for me as a developer to fund a games writer who potentially in the future could write something about my game? I don’t know – you’re certainly not, in that simple act of Patronage, entering into a binding contract…
It’s not infrequently that I stumble upon forum posts on hobbiest game dev sites where someone proclaims in response to a question, “no – you can’t make normal / bump maps from textures”. The logic being that there is absolutely nothing in a texture map that would in any way yield useful depth information. This…
Videogame art always features angry, stern, or grumpy looking people because dark or something. I don’t know. Let’s change that, eh? So I present my Campaign for less stern videogame characters which began way way back in December last year, and then stopped because I got bored. So I’m presenting it again here and I’ll…
Before I start, I should probably preamble that I’m not talking about Zomboid here. We’ll probably never do DLC for Zomboid, but i use the word “probably” because it’s not inconceivable that way after we’ve released a 1.0 build, done a few patches and what-not, that we might do some sort of off-shoot extra entirely…
When I was a kid, you could pretty much ask me about any game, any developer, and I’d have had quite a lot to say on the matter. The number of games released was comparatively tiny and the number of people involved in production also comparatively tiny. On the C64, you could name a musician…
Original blog post on alpha-funding and Spacebase DF-9 here. You can’t seriously expect a company to relocate somewhere cheaper and still retain their staff! Well… no, probably not. That said, if that’s what it takes to produce an alpha-funded game in terms of “money it’ll likely (not hopefully) make” to “money it will definitely cost”,…
Please note: Throughout this piece, I am going to be referring to “Early Access” a lot. In the context of this blog post, by “Early Access” I refer to those games which follow the “alpha-funded” model whereby the first build available is pre (or very early) alpha. “Early Access” games which launch with an open beta are…
Yeah, I’m hugely late to the party on this one, but since I’m still seeing this discussed and argued on my Twitter feed I’m going to chime in. On the one hand you’ve got a load of gamers feeling like they were attacked and, on the other hand, a load of writers claiming bewilderment and saying, “geez,…
So, game development eh? What a flupping nightmare. Before I begin, I’d like to state that I can only talk about what I know as an indie developer based in the North-East of England, and I’m not going to comment on the really horrible comments/attacks since it’s flupping obvious that’s detestable and also utterly irrelevant to…