Fledgling Videogame Developer

As most of you may know, Unity3D is a kind of "industry standard" game creation tool at the moment. I have the impression that it is versatile, reliable and generally works for people making games. And there seems to be very large and active user base for that.  But on the other hand it seems more complex to use than most of the 2D game creation tools I have tried so far. So there might be a little bit higher threshold for starting gamedev activities with Unity than with some simpler development platform. However, My own experience on Unity3D is very limited: I have implemented just few demos for almost two years ago. At that time my gamedev efforts were just starting and I had no clear idea what I was doing. But somehow I managed to get something game-like up and running with Unity. :) So far Stencyl has been my number one tool for developing games. All my released titles have been relatively small and simple, and the target platform has been flash (just to keep things s...

It is hard to know without prototyping how game concept would work. So during the past week I have built several prototypes to find out if I have something useful in my mind. This process takes some time, but at least for me it is important to get some kind of a visualization how things work on the screen. Static modeling with paper models, sketch drawing, or even using Lego bricks may also help to visualize game mechanics or rules, but I need to have something more dynamic to see the full picture. At this point, few ideas seem to be better than others, so they probably are worth further development. Although we are planning to move gradually out from flash games, it seems that we will still create at least one new game for that domain. The reason for this is that we know the tool (Stencyl) quite well and we are also familiar publishing flash games through Newgrounds and Kongregate. Publishing games to mobile and/or HTML5 is mostly unknown territory to us, so why not try to sta...

Ok. After lots of debugging, fixing, and other hassling we finally got Turbomole Trial Run flash game reproduction published at Newgrounds. Although to-do list was quite short for the day (only 3 items left), it took surprising amount of time to sort everything without breaking anything. The judgement phase was passed quite fast, and during the first 7 hours there were over 300 views. Average rating is currently around 3/5 stars (about the level I was originally expecting). Gameplay seems to be working and major flaws have not been found (yet). Also the level design is quite ok at least from our own perspective. It seems that sounds share opinions, but the current solution is about as good I was able to arrange within this schedule. For background music I was using "Fun in a Bottle" downloaded from Kevin McLeod's " Royalty Free Music " pages. All sound effects were created using the laptop microphone and Audacity software, so there might be some strange ...

As defined in the "roadmap", we decided to make updated versions from our two flash games. Because the plan was made and the work seemed to be quite straightforward, I started evaluating and updating "Turbomole Trial Run"  flash game.  Game was originally created with Stencyl and published using the Mochimedia distribution network. I had no intention to do everything again from the scratch, so I dug out the latest development version from my backup disk and started to explore how game was implemented about half an year ago. I have to admit that my old "code" (i.e. Stencyl blocks) is not too easy to understand, mostly because of the bad "coding" style and missing commment blocks. But anyways I got an idea what I've done before, and started planning the modifications.  First task was to remove Mochimedia API blocks out from the game, and replace them with corresponding Newgrounds stuff (leaderboard mainly). I also started new game pro...

First part of my summer vacations is over, and tomorrow it is time go back to work. Luckily, I have still one week vacation left in the beginning of August. :) My game development activities have also been quite minimal for last couple of weeks. However, there is a small exception: I've been discussing with my brother how our gamedev activities should be continued for the rest of the year. And as a part of this process we have tried to sketch a roadmap for upcoming game releases. I work full-time in large telecommunications company and all my game development is done in leisure time, so there is a clear need for some kind of a rough plan to keep things progressing smoothly. First of all, we have a plan to release three html5 games in the next six months: Two smaller ones and one large one. Smaller games are planned to have relatively simple graphics and gameplay, so we are able to finish them ourselves quite smoothly. There are already technology demos up and running for both ...