In this episode, we return to the enemy AI to revise how we do our clustering behavior, coming up with a much simpler and less processor intensive way of grouping the enemies that fly at the player. To avoid the processor-heavy calculation of each enemy x each enemy (n^n complexity), we instead relegate control to […]
Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 11 Read More »
In this episode, we take a break from the enemies to work on landing on islands and separating the ground controls from the air controls. This gives us the base for the later boomerang controls when we’re ready to add them. We started by changing the island behavior so that the player no longer changes
Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 10 Read More »
In this episode, we continue where we left off in episode 8 by making the enemy more dangerous to the player. The first step is to lay the groundwork for enemies to group up into larger, more difficult to surround formations. Although we need a “next nearest” script to get the functionality working, we do
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In this episode, we start making the enemy more aggressive by having them actively seek out the player or zip across the trail the player leaves behind. With the base control scheme in place, we need to make the enemies a threat to the player to put the circling mechanic to the test. We start
Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 8 Read More »
The business book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, and specifically the section on Company Building, sparked some thoughts related to the way game development teams seem to flounder as they move through the process of making a game the way businesses flounder as they grow larger. For building a company, Steve
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We have another double-header of Unplugged episodes this week: Costume Quest 2 and Tropico 5. In Costume Quest 2, Eric dons a few new outfits to gather up sweet candy and punish sour goblins who want to ruin Halloween in this trick-or-treating adventure game from Double Fine. And in the second game, Eric kicks his
Blue Tengu Unplugged Episodes: Costume Quest 2 and Tropico 5 Read More »
In this episode, we take what we’ve learned from the movement and circling mechanics we’ve implemented so far to find our base system for the game. For those of you who haven’t followed the show or this season so far, the core gameplay is circling around enemies to destroy them, while flying through an open
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We know it has been awhile since posting an Unplugged episode, so we’re going to fix that with a double-header. The first game is Vessel, a side-scrolling puzzle game where you have to find clever ways to get water under control (and water really doesn’t like being told what to do). The sound quality in
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In this episode, we add the last two candidates for the circling mechanic – one a semi-automatic version, where the player can control the radius of their circle attack with the input (locking the pivot to where they started the circle), and the other an automatic version which either generates a small circle for a
Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 6 Read More »
Gall’s Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from John Gall’s book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. In it, he states: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be
Gall’s Law and Game Design Read More »