Graphics Tablet

It's happened that I missed such a great game as Another World, and since I played its remake the last holidays and read about its history I understood I want to make games just by myself =) To be designer, programmer and artist at the same time. Ahem. I'm good at programming and getting better in design, but I'm going to test myself if I can be an artist.

I bought Wacom Bamboo Fun Small tablet and now I can say: it's amazing! It's totally another experience, it's much more convenient in many ways than mouse.

At first I played cool games such as Crayon Physics which gives totally awesome feelings using the tablet, and another experimental game called Chalk. I think, the best way to learn something is to play a thematic games so you can dive deeply in gameplay process to forget about what exactly you're doing.

Fate By Numbers

The work goes on as I've been developing level editor for Astralus. It's so cool that you can apply so much mathematics in games! My writing-book is full of some strange (sacral? =) geometry drawings, figures and numbers, so that sometimes when I overlook my writings I can't remember why on the earth I drew one or another thing =)

I looked through the next year's student entries for IGF festival and found an awesome noir adventure game "Fate By Numbers"! Just imagine a grim city that's set in the future with old cars flying around, prerendered black'n'white backgrounds with live actors playing and much much of blues! I experienced an hour of hurricane gameplay, but I made a mistake - I forced the game into the plot developing, so if you're going to try it - don't force it, just turn off the light, lock the door and play =)

Astralus

As I completed the second prototype, I played it for a whole hour! And you know what? I'm going to make a casual game based on it! Just as I found it to be very playable, I couldn't even get to sleep for long hours 'cause I thought and thought and though about the game. Unfortunately, I won't share the prototype until the game release which I plan to do in two monthes.

The project is called "Astralus." It's something like puzzle + arcade, a fresh breath of casual game experience, and as it's said "easy to start, hard to master". Of course, there's a lot of things to think about, not to mention it's my first commercial game experience. If there would be users to buy it, I'd say I'm on my way.

Another thing is that I was adviced to visit IndieGamer Forums, and it appeared to be that the community of the forum was moved from Steve Pavlina's Dexterity Software forum =)) The guy who saved me a lot of time by his motivation articles.

Prototype #2 - 2

A lot of code from the first prototype was reused, so this time I move forward much much faster. I program just in LUA, so this makes quite easy to extend the prototype with any functionality I'd like. A year ago I made a simple game engine to provide LUA machine with base render functions, so now, for example, I can easily render OpenGL commands just from scripts, or handle textures and fonts.

Prototype #2 - 1

I've made some crucial preparations to optimize my time usage, and thanks to my bosses I work 4 days a week now, yay! =) And I bet you didn't hear about Steve Pavlina? No? This guy works wonders by applying very effective time management, and he saved me a lot of time and nerves the last days. Just read his "Do It Now" article and change your life forever =)

I began to work on the next prototype, and this time it's a maze. It has no entrance, it's not a pacman.. though it's about gathering. And not gathering =)

Today I read a lot about maze generation. Just look here, isn't it amazing?

Newcomer? Greetings

This blog is devoted to my experiment in gameplay design. I started it 3 weeks ago, when a brilliant gameplay idea dawned upon me suddenly. Not that suddenly, actually, 'cause the last 3 monthes I played a lot of excellent indie games like those made by Introversion guys, so to some extent I was determined to think out something like that. And you know, I can't even tell you what the idea is, 'cause it would be a spoiler in itself!

Another thing is that I don't know how the game will look like in its final design. It can be equally platformer or rogue-like, so I've been studying which shell would be the best fit for the idea. Every several weeks I make a prototype that implements one of key gameplay features to elaborate into the final design.

By the moment I'm full-time gameplay programmer of Metro 2033: The Last Refuge game, but since the first prototype was completed I couldn't spend much time on anything that is not my project, so now I'm looking for a part-time job opportunity in the first place. The next step is finding a sponsor, but I should design the project into its final look before.

If you have something to comment, please do it - it's a great inspiration to see my efforts appreciated.

Prototype #1 - 4

It's the final version of the first prototype, 'cause it became too complicated to develop it further. I made important conclusions and got ideas for the next prototype, which will be built on icons and buttons rather than 2D graphics.


The world in the prototype appeared to be.. psychedelic a bit =) It looks similar to milkman's mind in "Psychonauts", which is my favourite episode. Don't force it, it's not an action-game =)

Download occam_proto_1_4.zip [0.9M]

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