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.

So my recent exploration of tackling my personal game projects in a different way has been paying off massive ways.  I have been far more productive and creative.  With that comes excitement for the project and even more excitement to show people the game because it is a constant state of completion.  I was digging around the internet more and watching programming talks and reading papers on software creation when I came across one that I had heard about but never read.  It is a paper called "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks .  It is a wonder paper and I was super excited when I came across this section towards the end because it turns out it is exactly the approach I have been taking and I have been experiencing the same results from a personal and production level. Incremental development --grow, don't build, software. I still remember the jolt I felt in 1958 when I first heard a friend talk about building a program, as opposed to writing one. In a f...

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 ....

Blast your way through hordes of venomous deadly snakes in this short and sweet low poly retro kick back to games like “Gun Smoke”.  While traveling to Red Rock Springs your horse finally succumbs to the heat after days in the blistering sun and dies of exhaustion.  With your trusty steed grazing the meadows of the afterlife you now must travel the dangerous grounds of Snake Bite Pass on foot. Features: Retro action Gorgeous low poly 3d visuals 3 challenging levels Simple controls and gameplay

Mockups of a Sci-Fi Adventure Game Idea Landing Party Lost, is an idea I have been slowly kicking around.  I was watching the latest Star Trek movie and loved the look of the set where the first Klingon encounter takes place.  Then it got me thinking about Another World, also known as Out of this World.  I loved that game and have always wanted to do a game similar to it. So sat down and quickly did a rough sketch and started to build out from there.  I wanted to combine the visuals from Pitfall on the Atari but use modern per-pixel lighting.  So I brought all of the spites and 2D images into Blender 3D and started to piece a few scenes together.  From there player movement was wired up with logic bricks and a couple of python scripts to handle room transitions and sprite animation. I don't know if I will keep building upon this idea mostly because I just don't have a clear enough idea of how the game will play.  It did get me thinking about ...

A few years ago a friend and I wanted to increase our productivity on our personal projects.  We liked the idea of game jams.  There some really good ones around now, but at the time needed to keep it a little more laid back and flexible with our work schedule. The  first and sadly only game to come out of this was a very small, very short climbing game.  The rules were simple.  We had one week to make a game that used only 1 button.  This made us really change our focus from our normal comfort zones of game design.  In the game the climber would spin a climbing hook around in a circle and when the player hit the space bar he would throw it in the direction it was currently facing.  The goal was to hit a floating platform and swing up to it.  Once on the platform it began to crumble away so you had to keep moving.  The higher you got the faster the platforms would crumble.  I made the game with Game Maker, I think it was...