I could go on and make this project an oldschool-style game with 2D graphics like some other indie devs are doing but I feel that going 3D would be the best bet to convey atmosphere and tactical gameplay at the same time (you could use switchable first-person and third-person views). This makes me think if ActionScript is actually sufficient for this but the experience of some of my recent coding tests with Away3D which already start to bog down the CPU with a few hundred polygons on the screen tend to say “no!” to my ambitious plans.

Since this is a desktop game my platform choice is AIR which offers more freedom that the Web Player but there are still many let-downs that make you grind your teeth …

>> Continue reading "Flash for big Games?"

I’ve been designing on a rather ambitious Role-Playing game project since a while now (in fact quite a long while but I’m not in hurry to finish it anytime soon) and while I’m in the process of working out the story, technical details like the combat mechanics, skill system etc. and creating interesting characters I still haven’t made a decision on the type of graphical projection for the game so far. I’ve been thinking about five kinds of projection from the most basic one (2D orthographic) up to full dynamic 3D which would be quite an effort. As my development platform of choice happens to be Flash, the resources in terms of 3D are limited.

So with that in mind I thought it would be good opportunity to introduce some of the most-used projections in computer and video role-playing games to get to know them a little better. This is by no means a complete list of all sorts of projection used in games but I believe these the ones most commonly used for role-playing games.

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Choosing the right Graphical Projection"

“…and a component system which lets you easily package game functionality into reusable modules. The component system draws on nearly a decade of game development history…”

This looks very promising indeed and the component structure makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been working on the hexagonLib on and off but time is sparse currently and so it seems I would never get it into a decent release state. I Might as well see how the pb engine works out for me. Let’s see how this engine fits for my current role-playing game project!

In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.

>> Continue reading "ActionScript3 Dice Class"

>> Continue reading "Animated Bitmap Class"

So what makes this game so addictive that people are coming back en masse? First and foremost it’s simple and straightforward. No long introduction, no necessity to read instructions, you get into the game quickly. Then there is the addiction factor … Maybe its just me but the reason why it is fun to play is because you try to make your defense perfect to stop the intruding enemies. Another factor is that you can shoot and destroy something. Sounds dumb? I know, but I can imagine that many people’s ‘hunting’ instinct is triggered by that. After all many popular games follow the same scheme. In fact you don’t even need to do the shooting as that is what your towers are doing for you. You just have to place them in a strategically good position and watch how well it works out. The author sure made a good choice by picking a Tower Defense game for this!

Now there are hundreds of other well proven addictive games out there. Make your choice and don’t forget to improve it by adding something that makes it even more fun to play! Meanwhile excuse me … I have to dig through my old games collection and do some searching …

>> Continue reading "Hexagon Framework Effects Demo"

A valuable resource for everyone who is thinking/planning to write a roleplaying game … Indie developer Planewalker Games who are currently making their debut RPG The Broken Hourglass are publishing precious bits of insider information about their game engine called WeiNGINE. The Broken Hourglass is a computer roleplaying game with a strong visual relation to late nineties RPG pearls like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment (who all were based on the Infinity Engine).
Some examples of their articles: Inside the Engine – Introduction to Items, Inside the Engine – Introduction to Sprites, Rules and Mechanics – Group Skills … and there’s a whole lot more when navigating through the links at the bottom of the pages. I kind of soak up such detailed information on game/RPG design as such things are sparsely seeded on the web (you will not see such information leaking from commercial developers!)

You can click the image to see a full screenshot of the tool. In case you’re wondering … no, I’m not working on a Flash version of Uridium 2 (would be an idea though). The tileset is only for testing purposes.

Introversion
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
BoneBroke
They Came from Hollywood
gusmueller

I’m currently developing a role-playing game in AS3.0 (non-fantasy themed!!) in my spare time. This has been and still is in the design phase since a while and I’m pondering whether to use isometric graphics or an orthogonal view (that has a slight tilt but still is fully orthogonal. If you remember Jagged Alliance you get the idea). Though orthogonal view would make things easier I feel that isometric view gives more visual freedom so I will probably end up with that.

>> Continue reading "Isometric Game Development with Flash"

You can lay out all imaginal hierarchical structures, be it your shopping list, you time plan or the story concept for your next game. After creating a new document with FreeMind, it has one root node. From now on you can add child nodes with the Insert Key, add sibling nodes below with the Enter key or above with Shift+Enter. This way it becomes a breeze to create a large tree structure of your project.
You can assign different color and font styles to your nodes. Another useful feature is the ability to link two nodes together with a bezier line. The tool has a MinMap and a Browse Mode and you can even browse your harddisks file structure with it if you want. You can also link files to nodes.

This is the number one tool I would recommend for brainstorming but it is very useful to lay out projects in more detail as well. There is also a FreeMind Document Reader that has been written with Flash, though I’m not sure if it can be downloaded and used offline.