The video games we play have advanced seemingly exponentially in terms of their technological complexity, and therefore the complexity necessary to create such advanced pieces of software. Why then hasn’t the immersion of these games, on average, advanced alongside of everything else? When I pick up a new game to play, I feel just as much outside of the game I’m playing as I did to games I played years ago; this fact disturbs me greatly. Why should I feel as little involvement and immersion with...

In the last decade, video games have become more and more like movies than their old-age makers could ever have even thought of. We have games like Halo 2 which are so big,expensive, and popular that it can generate more money in a single day than any blockbuster movie could ever hope to bring in on its opening day. One thing that is becoming really hard to do with modern games, though, is making a really “good” game; and, by good, I mean fun to play and experience . The actual source of this...

The lack of a comprehensive update in a few days may make a few of you disoriented in your travels, speech, and general being , but I promise, I had good cause. Kind of. Well, not really. But I bring pictures to compensate. Them pixels arrayed in an organized fashion represent the little room that I call home in a very slightly off-campus house with ten other people (all but two of whom I know on a friendly or friendly-ish basis). It's a pretty nice place, actually, and words cannot descr...

Searching through the reaches of the abyssal drawers of some of my nightstands and dressers in my room of ten years I came upon a number of buried remains of scratched-up CD-R discs which had previously served as reusable "diskettes" of a larger capacity for use in transferring data during the non-Internet days of my computing life. Amongst these compact treasure chests, I found a number of old pictures, as well as some old conversation logs and e-mails exchanged at key dramatic intervals over t...

I've spent the last two weeks of my time with Torque doing nothing except tweaking the GUI that I plan to use for my upcoming projects, and tonight I can finally say that I'm done with the damn thing. I created every image completely from scratch, which I'm still proud of, then tweaked and re-drew every texture about three or four times, then tweaked and re-wrote some of the GUI scripts and the inner GUI core code. And it's done. I would've had this done far sooner, but this weekend has been ...

2005 is a great year for gamers as a whole, with the release of the highly-touted Xbox 360 headlining the news (and, consequently, the temporally inferior PS3) for the brutes of the gaming crowd and new graphics card technology and big-name game titles for the intellectually elite [Ha.] PC gamers. Far and wide the most important event of 2005 is the release of Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege 2 , the sequel to the relatively under-appreciated original game of the same name, one of my top titl...

At this point, I think that it's fairly safe to say that the meat of Asplode! is finished. All of the primary gameplay is in place, the enemies are all implemented and handled in a state that I'm fond of, and the player controls, responses, and such are all implemented. At this point any more features that I add to the gameplay portion of the game are either polish points or experimental ideas that I may or may not keep as part of the game (a few automatic weapon upgrades, various ideas as to ...

Not that I spent recent nights playing stuff like Army of Two, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, Company of Heroes, Master of Magic, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Bully, Ratchet & Clank, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, or God of War: Chains of Olympus instead of actually updating my dev journal or anything... But, yeah. Pretty much did exactly that. I've still gotten a bit done on Asplode! every night but, by this point, I'm mostly making various opti...

Former intern-turned-remote-worker Nick told me that I should start posting some of the development journal entries that I have been previously posting over at my GameDev.net dev journal here. So that's what I'm doing. If the idea of developing a top-down space shooter in the fashion of Robotron is an attractive one to you, then I'd recommend reading the backlog of posts as a form of "Previously on the Journal of Rawr" catch-up.

One of my design mantras -- and I use the word 'design' loosely -- is that while coding the game I keep things as simple, quick, and efficient as possible. As one might guess, this can become problematic at times. Less so in the implementation of routines and ideas so much as it is the necessity of shooting down some gameplay mechanics that, while fun, would defeat the purpose of such a simple Robotron/Geometry Wars knockoff. And, really, that's all I'm hoping to accomplish with Asplode!.

I watched Saving Private Ryan over this past weekend, since I hadn't seen it in a few years (and had only previously seen it on VHS), and I had forgotten just how great the movie really is. I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it after watching Band of Brothers so many times due to the fact that Band of Brothers devoted so much more time to character development, as it had the luxury of a lengthy running-time as opposed to the time constraints placed on Ryan as a theatrical feature movie. Th...

Jump to: Introduction :: The First Day :: Three-Week Mark :: Personal Implications :: Conclusion Introduction As of now, I am officially a two-week-old intern programmer at the game development division of Stardock ; a company most likely best-known for their Object Desktop suite of Windows desktop customization software (of which I believe WindowBlinds and ObjectDock may be the most well-known). Within the game development scope of things, though, Stardock is famou...

After a very small and virtually unidentifiable break from the monolithic RTS series , I decided that it was time to put my completely empty wallet's worth of money where my ever-so-large mouth is and get to work on developing some sort of game. Yes, that's right. I am actually going to work on a project that doesn't (d)evolve into me getting obsessed with some component of the overall tech which I eventually spend months trying to perfect. I, this time, pinky-swear (cross my heart, etc.) t...

So, some of you may or may not have noticed the positively supertastic absence of rambling entries and gaming editorials that had been written in the recent weeks; all apologies for that. My first move to rectify this content depression was with my review of Titan Quest which was fairly well-received on one of the two locations which I publish material given that I didn't do my normal advertising spree across the realms of the wide, vast, and frightening Intarweb. So, hopefully this review...

As I indicated in my brief update last week, I did indeed get a Unity Indie license after some time with the free downloadable trial. I've never been good at constraining myself to the feature set found in a given game engine or game development toolset before but just a few hours with Unity made me a very strong believer in the power the engine had. On the Saturday of this past weekend I sat down on a couch while I was away at my parents' house with my MacBook, opened up the Unity trial, and spent some time while I was watching movies with my parents just playing around with the engine. I was so impressed with what I came up with purely through trial-and-error and experimentation (as I had no internet connection for research/help) that I got the Indie license within an hour of getting back to my apartment on Sunday afternoon.

My goal over the next few months is to come up with and develop one game every four-six weeks that I will upload to this site (Unity has a 3D web applet). The first of these projects is Magnetic Butterfly which is, essentially, a game of King of the Hill where the player controls a tiny butterfly who was born with a giant wrecking ball attached to his body. As a result of this, the butterfly will be a bit unwieldy for the player to control, but the player will need to find a way to knock any nearby enemies off a platform before they do the same to him/her. The "catch" is that the player will have the ability to activate his magnetic charge which will lock the butterfly to the ground and allow players to drastically modify the momentum of the wrecking ball and then aim it in the direction of a nearby enemy for increased force. I got a very, very basic prototype of the gameplay up and running on Sunday night and was actually pleasantly surprised with the results.

Since then I have been spending some additional time setting up the PC in my apartment to serve as my content/asset creation machine -- installing Paint Shop Pro, XSI Mod Tools, and Silo for the texture/modeling needs that I figured would arise over the course of the next couple months. I have also been redoing some of the basic aspects the butterfly/wrecking ball; for instance, I am currently in the process of redoing the chain/rope that binds the ball and the butterfly together to not only look better but to be a much more elastic solution. Here are some screenshots of my development environment over the last few hours while I was screwing around with joints to bind various chain links together (I have since decided to create the chain procedurally, which is where I left off for the night):

I can't even properly convey just how much fun I've been having with Unity since I downloaded the trial. Not having to worry about the finer details of programming for a platform and, instead, solely focusing on the game design, gameplay logic, and the player's interactions with the game world has just been a fantastic change of pace for me. The most annoying thing at the moment is the lack of postprocessing shader support in the Unity Indie license (it's a feature reserved for Unity Pro) but that's only a minor aesthetic design annoyance.

I'll try to write some more detailed development entries in the future; though, preferably, I'll write those at some time that is not an hour or so after I meant to go to sleep.