January 10th, 2010
Since receiving Forza Motorsport 3 for Christmas, I’ve been hooked! I’m steadily working my way through the achievements and have several more to achieve as yet. This game, combined with Modern Warfare 2 and FIFA 10 have basically been my gaming titles over the holiday period.
The game that myself and Nick are developing has crept along at a slower-than-usual pace, due largely to the holidays, but nevertheless a SkyBox has been developed, integrated into our game solution as a content pipeline processor. This means that we have the ability to interpret game resources in a custom manner, meaning that it will be “wrapped” around our skybox. This will allow us to process things such as sky and other backdrops, visible and changing depending on the camera rotation etc. More on this when we have a suitable backdrop implemented.
The next month is a very exciting time for AllportGreenhillGames, with a set strategy being developed on how myself and Nick can take our pet project and turn it into something real.
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November 22nd, 2009
When it comes to building games, frameworks are what provide the tools for developers to do their job easier, without having to re-build every game component from the ground up, and also negate the developer from having to develop device drivers and the like. This not only saves time, but allows developers of games to concentrate on getting to the “nitty gritty” of games development, such as the way in which units behave, creating terrain, etc.
When embarking on the creation of an RTS Game, such as the game being developed by myself and Nick, the first question asked is “do we use an existing RTS Game engine (either written in our preferred language or ported), or do we create our own from scratch?”
We decided that given my lack of prior XNA knowledge, it would be best for my game development skills to create an engine from scratch. Not only would this allow our coding skills to become better, but this would allow us to create the logic for our game from the ground up, giving us full control of what the engine does and possibly give us a seperate product we can use to create further games. The only downside is, this approach inevitably takes much more time. This has probably been the single biggest contributing factor to the slippage in the development timescale of our game.
I remember talking to Nick about this subject during my recent visit to Birmingham and we eventually settled on an answer of whilst it is always down to the preference of the developer/development team, generally speaking by going straight into game development using an existing engine, developers will not get an appreciation for how the engine works at a code level (i.e. there may be things that could be improved or perhaps certain operations perform badly on a PS3). New developers entering game development should at least make a simple prototype game engine that demonstrates a grasp of key concepts, such as loading terrain, unit loading and maipulation, pathfinding for AI, etc. This means that when they come to use an existing RTS engine solution as a base for their games, they know what it does and the concepts behind the things it can do.
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November 8th, 2009
The past two weeks have seen me visit Nick in Birmingham, catch his cold, return to work too early and now I’m unable to shift a cough. Even several sessions in the steam room at my local gym hasn’t helped. Luckily I have the next two days off to enjoy some quality time with my better half, although this coming Saturday I’ll be on a plane in the name of work.
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October 13th, 2009
Just as I’m getting so busy with work to spend any time on my Xbox 360, there seem to be a few great titles either already released or about to be released this autumn in time for the Christmas shopping season. I’ve been getting stuck in to Colin McRae: DiRT 2, and have recently acquired FIFA 10 (which I’m currently gaming through a Manager Mode season with my beloved Colchester United FC). In the pipeline are Forza Motorsport 3 and Modern Warfare 2, which will no doubt see me spending yet more money on gaming very soon. I’m still yet to finish Gears of War 2 on “insane” difficulty with my best buddy Nick, which I’ll be giving some focus to before I make more game purchases. We’re Nick is also continuing with some fascinating work on Blender, so we’re hopefully going to have some killer screenshots on show soon!
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October 4th, 2009
In case you thought we’d dropped off the face of the earth since our last blog post, Nick has been grafting away doing some magic with Blender. He’s put up the latest post in the AllportGreenhillGames adventure, so be sure to give that a read. Whilst I’ve been making the libraries interface-driven and more readable, Nick has been getting his 3D skills put through their paces. In short, we should have some screenshots of a game world with a few custom units on it within the next month. I’m personally very excited, as it means we’ve finally turned the corner of finishing the preparation work of the game engine. We’re now able to turn or focus to getting some 3D models in our game world and start manipulating them.
Whilst I can see Nick getting increasingly good at Blender and me continuing to work on manipulation of units, we’ll have to have a think soon about the actual unit strengths/weaknesses and of course the storyline in our game.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know, our game is going to be Real-Time Strategy.
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September 20th, 2009
I’ve finally decided on a colour swatch to use for this site (thats step 2: adding colour). Check it out at Kuler.
Expect to see it take shape on here soon. I’m now off to enjoy the rest of my weekend before heading into the office tomorrow.
Tags: kuler, web design
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September 20th, 2009
Guess that not only is it the default title for the default Word Press post included out of the box, but it seems a rather fitting title to the first post of my “re-invigorated” blog. Keep your eyes peeled for posts coming to this blog very soon.
For now, I get to play around with Word Press, choose some colours, decide on my layout, and generally make it all look pretty!
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