A Hardy Developer's Journal

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Welcome back! Last time I bitched about old-school adventure game interfaces and tried to convince people to throw them out the window. Today I’m going to give an example of how I futzed around with the interface of my game, Resonance, adding a layer of potential complexity to the puzzles while keeping the interface simple, fast, and intuitive.

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The Falling Soldier by Robert Capa

Past, present, future. Of these three, the past is the one we have most affinity with. The present is just too volatile, it changes all the time. The future is endlessly interesting, a great source of speculation, but that speculation is inherently based on our current experiences. Experiences that come from – you’ve guessed it – the past. (more…)

Interfaces are important.  I love interfaces.  Forming an intuitive and fluid language that is used by the player to communicate with the game, and a way for the game to communicate back is fun.  But adventure games, even the commercial titles, rarely get much interface love.  Games in the genre tend to stick to one of the commonly used control schemes.  (more…)

Whilst Ben Chandler and the like are consistently getting game development just right, there is the rest of us, me included, getting it just about completely wrong – or are we? And are we that different from Mr Chandler?

This article, in short, will try to explain why trying to make your first project huge and exciting is indeed a bad idea, but why I’m sticking to it and why you should never give up.

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So, you’ve got a whole lot done on your game, graphics are looking how you want and you’ve got some puzzles you really like. But hang on a minute, how do you know when your game is done? There’s always going to be moments when you go “I could just add a bit more on here”, and sometimes this is very beneficial. But you have to stop working on the game somewhere, or it’ll never get done.

This could be something so much bigger: It’s a natural feeling to get near the end of your project and think “This could be so much bigger!”. Parts you could add, bits you could extend – in fact if you’re like most people you’ll probably have ‘realized’ that the story you wrote would work so much ‘better’ as the first part in a trilogy. (more…)

Oh yeah, here’s the hard part. Ask anyone who has ever built a game and I am sure they’ll agree that this is where it stops being exciting and starts requiring some real determination. The honeymoon is over, the initial glory of your incredible idea has worn off and you’re left looking at your ‘to do’ list which seems to have no end. Stuck for motivation? Aren’t we all…
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