atomic monster

So I got a little side tracked the last few days and missed my original date for releasing my two week game.  The time was not spent on the game but with general life and family stuff so I'm not going to worry too much about it.  So without further ado I posted the game I have been working for my two week game project to itch.io you can see the link below.  I will do another post when I have more time as kind of a short postmortem about the experience because I found it really interesting.

Recently I posted about how I created a finished game loop right away for my side game project.  I have continued to work in the same way I talked about then and have had time to reflect on why this is working for me.  Simply put I solved my biggest problem first.  Everyone and every game has different problems, but sitting down and being honest with myself at the very start allowed me to address this right away. As progress moves forward I still maintain this reflective thought process.  I look at what is actually stopping or slowing down my progress and then I solve that problem, in the most simple way as I can.  That means I solve only that problem and not problems that I think will arise down the road.  These are also tending to be my workflow problems so completely unique to my current situation.  For example when I completed the finished game loop I had a few different game objects like triggers to enter new rooms, player spawners and dart t...

Okay so recently I decided to work on my game development and design skills.  I have a horde of unfinished projects on my hard drive.  I have learned so much from working on each and everyone of them, except how to get better at finishing the game.  I want to fix this so I decided to take a different approach than anything I had ever done before.  I decided to start by making a finished game. Let me explain what I mean.  On my current project I did something completely different than before.  I made the most simple version of the finished game as quickly as I could.  Not a prototype but an actual finished game...not a good game but a finished from start to end game.  You start at the main menu, enter the game, reach a goal get the win screen or die and get the game over screen.  It's simple but the from the point of view from the player it is a completable game.  All in all it took my 4 hours and gave me something I can look at and...

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly.  Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion.  One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out.  So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice.  I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas.  You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or  you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....

Aaaaaaaah the bitter sting of defeat! this is the first pass at the game over screen for This is Dungeon .  Enjoy!

The level generation system in This Is Dungeon  uses a few different ideas to produce the final levels but I'm just going to go over the first right now.  Levels are generated using the Dungeon-Building Algorithm by Mike Anderson .  This algorithm is very simple to implement and gives really good results.  The levels generate very quickly and the player is guaranteed to be able to reach every room of the level. random dungeon no choke point. After playing around with the generated levels in game I started wanting to be able to break the map up into multiple sections.  Since the features are built one at a time from a previously built room I realized I could just tell the generator how many sections I wanted to break the map up into and divide that by the number of rooms it was trying to generate.  The result being the number of rooms that should go into each section.  With that info you just keep track of the rooms already built and when tha...