Got this video from a post on FGL forums and took the whole 28 minutes to see it. I hope it is obvious for everyone involved in the game development industry that games are getting everywhere, but the way Jesse Schell explains what is going on and where he thinks it will go is just overwhelming.
A must see video from one of the most intelligent and visionary game designer and game design theorist out there.
http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the-future-of-games-dice-2010/
Hi all,
Just a heads up for a YouTube video we just uploaded that goes through the toolkit package of Bold Pixel Engine.
Remember to watch it in full-screen HD! 
Clicky!
Later!
Hey everyone, just a heads up. A quick yet well detailed tutorial on how to use Bold Pixel Engine’s LocalData toolkit class which manages your game’s shared objects.
But… we didn’t write it. The author is Rasmus Wriedt Larsen and he just let us know that he put it up in his gamedev blog.
Take a look.
A long time ago I read a thread on a gamedev forum where the opening poster asked what was ‘fun’ and how was it achievable in a way that would raise the ‘addiction’ factor. I found the question to be very interesting but the debate around it, considering that was a gamedev forum, extremely poor.
Most of the people that participated in the thread could not separate their development background from their playing background. Remember the Gamer != Game Designer post? It’s pretty much the same argument but on a later stage. Why is this important or relevant? Read on…
Copying formulas
I’m betting that a huge percentage of flash game developers/designers implement features in their games because they’ve seen it in sucessful games. If it is successful it is usually named: high-scores, achievements and so on are excellent examples of successful features.
Implementing it enhances a game, for sure, but does it increase the fun and entertainment value? I bet you’ll say YEAH! but can you explain why? We are just copying formulas, not really digging why we are doing it.
Categorizing
Well we keep doing it… When we do a certain game genre, we are categorizing our game. Again we are copying a formula but by doing it we are giving the player an opportunity to filter what he wants to play. Don’t take me wrong, this is more than fine. After all we do want players to play what they want or that will take the fun out of the experience. Why does it take the fun out of the experience?
Understanding the factors
By copying formulas we are adding factors such has re-playability and by categorizing we channeling that value. Both work if the game has value on its own and most don’t! It does not matter how many success formulas you include or how you categorize your game if you ultimately fail to understand why is a game fun and entertaining.
Some developers simply copy entire games and it works for them. I think they are convinced they have achieved a higher state of game design knowledge… well… I’d love to see them do something new under a different name, just to see what would the reaction of their fans be.
On the other hand, developers that understand the factors that create a great experience do wonders, they create new genres, make the gamedev theorists and journalist come up with new terms and I’m under the impression they don’t even think about it. The mob simply follows their lead.
So what are the factors?
That’s up to each one of us to find out I guess. Being a Raph Koster fan I believe that factors reside in the purest of forms, in understanding how the brain processes the experience. My personal view on it is that if you apply that basic processing to a target audience, it will work. Our talent and experience only makes it work more or less, but it will work! That’s the basis of how I design.
I bet other developers will have other ideas, but this whole post is a “think out of the box” kind of thing. What I’m trying to express is that if you don’t think in terms of your own gamer clichets. Don’t think that you like multiplayer, or that a certain game was cool because it had swords. Think on what will the reaction be to something you create. Think what is the typical player of the game you are creating. Think on how you’ll reach him or her individually. Stereotype your player, not you as a player.
I’ve been writing and re-writing a lot of code lately. Somewhere between the work to be done and the work I want to see done, there are dozens of thoughts and discoveries that are worth sharing. Some are puzzling, others are simply brain melting.
Behaviors
A long time goal: behaviors! What is it? How does it work? Well… imagine you write this line of code in a Bold Pixel Engine entity:
1
| entity.behaviors.face.mouse(); |
And from that moment on, the entity will always rotate to the mouse position. That’s a behavior.
Imagine that you could say that instead of facing you’d want it to rotate to the mouse position at a given speed, or with a tween, or that you want it to evade another entity or to find the path to a certain point. Now imagine that behaviors could applied to time… that you could tell your engine time would slow down so you could see all in slow motion…
Well… I wrote two behaviors and it works like a charm!
Flash Player is somewhat smart
I’ve noticed that if you copyPixels() or draw() outside the target bitmapData area, it won’t render anything. Having thousands of objects outside the rectangle area is absolutely meaningless, even if you apply a transformation matrix and draw.
I thought about the possibility of creating a camera object… suddenly this possibility became obviously closer since there will be no need to verify if an object is supposed to be rendered, Flash Player does that for me, I just have to pass the right rectangle… awesome! or at least I’m thinking it will be!
Filters
I really needed a rest a couple of nights ago… so nothing better than writing some new functionalities! My goal was to write filters to apply in layers. After noticing that most flash filters need a BlurFilter applied on top of it, I decided to make it simple and just work with one BlurFilter and one ColorTransform in each layer.
BlurFilter is a huge performance killer, so I played around with only applying the filter to whatever the area the filter needed to be applied to and it works great! The bigger the area, the bigger the performance impact that’s for sure!
ColorTransform seems to have no impact. I’m betting that the pixel color is calculated directly when drawing… if this is true… it’s quite smart!
All in all and since I didn’t want to use any other filters for performance issues, I noticed that with just a little tiny bit of patience, blur and color transform can do most of the cute effects we might need, from shadows to glows to motion blur.
Brain melting the possibilities
A camera with behaviors, like moving to an area with tweening. Flames coming out of a structure and then exploding in thousands of particles flying around with fire trails. Zillions of projectiles flying around in a huge map… wow… this weekend really caused a brain melt.
Need to finish the tutorials to Bold Pixel Engine v1 because v2 is already shaping.
