Happy Holidays
Sorry, no posts for a while! I’m on holiday for Christmas, although I will be spending some time working on finishing up Icefall, I probably won’t be posting that much. See you in the new year!
Month: December 2009
Game Golden Rule #2: Settings & Controls
This is the second entry in my set of “10 Game Development Golden Rules”. Hopefully, this one is less contentious than the first! The rule is: Provide gamma and volume controls, and separate music from sound. Pretty simple. But essential! The good news is, the AAA titles pretty much universally support this now. And it’s
Assets as Text Files!
OK, this trick is probably universally known, but I’ve only just discovered it (by the classic programmer method of reinventing it), so on the chance there are others who are unfamiliar with this technique, it’s worth describing. Any sufficiently complex game is going to have “assets”: data external to the main program that the game
The quest for an intuitive interface
One of the hardest bits about creating Icefall was getting the User Interface (UI) just right. Icefall’s chief inspirations are “old-school” role-playing games like Angband (aka Roguelikes: Nethack, Moria, Omega, ADOM all fall into this category). But these old-school games all rely on essentially a text-mode interface with a myriad of hotkeys. I want to