Sorry about the lack of posts during the Xmas break, I had work to do and games to play.

Speaking of which, lets talk some game design. I generally tend to go for more mechanically heavy games, it gives variation to my approach to the problem and generally gets rid of the possibility of repetition within the game. Thing is, games like this take time to make and can be generally be buggy as Hell because it’s damn near impossible to test every possible combination of mechanics for every single problem. But you probably know this.

I’ve been thinking about this and the best solution I can think of is to break up everything even more than it is, and put in place the systems that would allow them to react naturally to each other. I’ll step back for a second and explain. When I was looking at the design document for a future game, I noticed I had planned a lot of systems and ideas that would have to react to each other. Essentially, there would be a whole bunch of weapons than have different abilities and purposes, along with a bunch of elemental effects that would cause special attacks. Enemies would also react to the different weapons and certain elemental attacks. It’s a confusing system.

How I’m thinking of breaking it up is defining all the elements as their own objects, and they affect everything else, then define how everything else acts depending on each element. Sort of like “When this weapon is given this element it works like this” or “This enemy is weak to this” and so on. Then all I have to worry about is the collision and the ridiculous multi-tier animation structure.

So remember that game I said I was working on with 4 others? Well one of the guys bailed and ended up talking the main programmer into putting the project on hold till later in the year. So it won’t happen until further notice and we still need an artist. Great… This is the exact same shit I have dealt with over and over again. People constantly undermining themselves to the point of turning away from a project, and generally screwing everyone else they were working with. As soon as I can get my head around the basis of programming and move on to XNA and such, I’ll probably end up making it myself. It’s not the same game I was talking about earlier in the post by the way, it’s a mobile project, much smaller in scope.

So yeah, that’s what has been kicking around in my brain the past few weeks. There’s quite I few games I wish to play in the next couple of weeks, so don’t be surprised if I don’t post for a while. Later.

-Adam