Where I write words and that, instead of working
Updated Thoughts: The following was written in the heat of the moment. There are three types of indie studios. There’s the independent studios, who are only really indie in-so-far as indie is sort of short for “independent”. But when you’re making a game for Sony or equivalent, it’s not quite the same line of business….
Note to Dave: I wrote this before we announced Project Zomboid. Such things are possible with computers – so don’t panic. So in previous posts I may have come across a little mean about designers. Evidently there are some amazing designers out there or else there wouldn’t be any good commercial games. But the trouble…
I left the commercial games industry in February 2009 after, in all honesty, probably the most miserable period of my life. I didn’t leave voluntarily because, in all honesty, even getting paid for something you’ve grown to despise trumps not getting paid at all so I had no intentions of jumping ship. I wasn’t exactly…
Werner and Walter Randelshofe have a website, part of which is dedicated to Deluxe Paint Animation (and equivalents across MS-DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST platforms). A whole heap of files are there to be browsed, sorted by platform and artist. It’s really quite the treasure-trove 🙂 But best of all, on their site they have…
Congratulations, you’re now in The Games Industry! Sort of. For a bit, at any rate. If you’re lucky the studio which has employed you may have multiple projects on the go so that when the game you’re working on is complete you won’t instantly be laid off. It is important to use this time to…
When it comes to graphics, everybody has an opinion – it doesn’t matter if you’re a coder, tester, designer, producer, or tea boy. It requires absolutely no qualifications to look at something and decide whether or not you like it. It requires slightly more skill to determine why you like or dislike something but we…
Aaah Producers, eh? What fun! Coming in multiple flavours and packaging, I have conveniently distilled them down to the following, so that you may know your enemy comrade. Alphabetty-Spaghetti Tasteless. Likes to absorb words they hear programmers and artists use and then spit them back out during meetings to sound clever. Usually uses the words…
Okay, so that game I mentioned before that sold about three copies in Germany? That was a bit of an understatement. Truth be told, I have absolutely no idea how well it did overall except to say that you’d be hard-pushed to find any real information about it on the Internet. However, the whole project…
I thought I’d share with you a couple of mockups I once did as part of my job. Having been given probably the World’s least inspiring briefs, and me probably at my most jaded in my entire career, this is all that remains of those that I produced: First up, “Super Bacterial Invaderoids” takes the…
It was the first program I ever used to do pixel animation, and it will probably be the last. Along the way, I’ve relied on it for GBA and DS game development and even a couple of times for the odd thing on console titles. So there’s no onion-skinning, no layers, a 256 colour limit,…