Planning and prototyping

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 stay within our comfort zone for a while? :)

Anyways, I think we have to take a leap to unknown at some point and start to explore other platforms in near future. At the moment HTML5 sounds most promising for us: There are available several game creation softwares that can export your game in HTML5, and exported games will run on several platforms (mobile and desktop). For example, according to the FGL's developer earning stats HTML5 is fastest growing segment for FGL. So there are also commercial aspects supporting that.

We had plans to make new versions of couple of our previously released flash games, and this process was started bit over an week ago. Unexpectedly, that was a good decision: Turbomole Trial Run flash game has got surprisingly large number of players during the first week, especially on 7k7k.com. At the moment, the total number of views is bit over 12000 and it is still growing steadily. But let's see how long this lasts. We had initially some discussion on creating new levels to the Turbomole, but we have decided nothing yet. Another option would be create a sequel with much more levels, improved graphics and so on. But that would be a bigger project then.

-Jussi

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unity3D mirror using camera and RenderTexture

Image
There are several ways to create mirror in Unity3D. Some of them require more scripting than others, but I will now present an easy way using just one extra camera and RenderTexture.  In this solution you will use RenderTexture on an object and place camera behind that object. This is easy option that does not require scripting. Alternatively you can use reflective shader, but it requires some more work. Seven small steps to create object with mirror RenderTexture: Create new Unity project. It is recommended to use latest LTS version (Long Term Support).I was using Unity 2020.1.3f1 version for this example.   Create plane object for ground and Cube for the mirror object. Scale both objects to match your needs.  Create new camera for attaching the RenderTexture. Position it inside recently created cube and adjust direction so that it is pointing out to the direction where mirror should be reflecting the image.  Create RenderTexture. Name it as you wish. No need t...
Read more

Construct 2: if-then-elseif-else statement

Image
Do you have an idea how to implement IF-THEN-ELSEIF-ELSE statement with Construct 2? At least I had to think for a while how to do it. It seems that this basic structure is not so straightforward to implement in C2. I was creating a very simple game where boxes were moving from left to right. See example below: The color of each box is chosen randomly, so it required the usage of random() function and if-then-else statement. There are probably several ways to do this, but I wanted to make this as simple as possible inside one single event and action box.  Normally I would create a if-then-elseif-else structure like this to select color for the box (pseudo-code just for an example): if randomNumber == 0       set colorOfBox = "red" else if randomNumber == 1       set colorOfBox = "yellow" else if randomNumber == 2       set colorOfBox = "green" else       set colorOfBox = "blue" end if But ...
Read more

Unity3D: Convert Seconds to hh:mm:ss Format

Image
Update 17.8.2021: Replaced obsolete Monodevelop with Visual Studio where applicable.  I have gradually started to use Unity3D for game development. So far I have been doing very small and simple test codes just to learn how certain things should be done with Unity. But now I have an example that might be of interest for other wannabe-Unity3D users, at least those who are struggling with converting seconds to HH:MM:SS format. :) So lets begin with this example. First of all, start Unity3D and create new project. This example uses the console only for outputting result, so project can be either 2D or 3D. Whichever you prefer. Create empty object to your scene ( ctrl+shift+N ), or use pulldown menu ( GameObject->Create Empty ). Select empty object and rename it e.g. to " Timer ". Add new C# script component to empty object and name it as " TimerActions " ( Add Component->New Script->write name and select Csharp as script type ): Open TimerAction...
Read more