By Alexander Presthus, Co-Founder at Lumi Games AS.
This post will hopefully be the first in many about the programming side of developing a game. This post is meant to be somewhat of a general overview of the process we go through when coding a game. In the future we hope to post about more specific techniques or concepts that people would find interesting.
Prototype stage:
First of all I get some specifications (usually from Erik) on what the game or concept is supposed to be about, what the most core mechanics are , and what we think is essential to see if works or not.
Then I start to think about how I would like to implement the core mechanics in a more technical fashion. I also try to follow a design pattern when setting up the prototype, keeping in mind what would make it the most flexible and easier to tweak for the game designer. I often use traditional pen and paper to sketch out the class layout and game structure, or even the structure that make up a game mechanic.
I'll use PAX HD! as an example since its a fairly simple game in terms of required functionality and structure. What we needed for the functioning version of this was approximately:
*Moving background (in these types of games, the player usually doesn’t move much at all, its just an illusion created by moving the background and or other objects).
* Enemies that are randomly generated by the game whilst playing.
We quickly decided we did not want to do specific designed levels for this game, but rather spawn new enemies as the player progresses, always making the game experience slightly different for the player but also to save a lot of time in production.
* Increasing game speed (Difficulty). The game would quickly get boring if the player wasn’t challenged as the game progressed, so scaling up the game speed (or in this case the enemy speed) would be essential.
* Powerups that gives the player advantages. We wanted some other elements that the player would get some sort of boost from. This would also give the player something else to think about and not just avoiding obstacles.
Production / How we implemented this:
The moving background was simple enough to do, there are two backgrounds (1 on the screen, 1 just outside) The background on screen starts to move down and out of the screen, and the background outside of the screen moves with it, gradually coming into view. When the first background is completely outside the screen(and therefore the second background exactly where old background started), they reset back and do the same over again and again in a loop. A layer of moving particles where put on top of the background, moving at a faster speed to create the illusion of depth. This technique is reffered to as ”Parallaxing” or ”Paralax Scrolling” and is used in many 2D games.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
When tackling the enemies, we landed eventually on having only a single Enemy Class (they would all be identical except for looking visually different).
We accomplished this by creating internal functions to create shapes with multiple single blocks (1 block is the width of the players sprite) We made a number of shapes, and each time an enemy was created it chose one of these shapes after being assigned a number or integer at random from a given range each time.
In fact, there are at any given time only 3 enemies max present on the screen (one in each lane) and every time an enemy exited the screen it would give points to the player and reset its position and shape before moving forward again. We added a nice particle effect when a shape exited the screen to add in the sense of achievement and progression in the game.
http://s2.n4g.com/media/11/...
Lanes
Each enemy has a property called ”speed” which denotes how many pixels per frame it should move towards the bottom of the screen, for every 30 enemies that exited the screen the global game speed (and therefore speed of all enemies) increased by a factor we had set.
As for the powerups, these were separate classes (sprite objects) and manipulated the global game variables when activated (The warp increased the game speed for a certain time and activated ”God mode” (turning off collision detection), the health icon simply added 1 health point to the players health). We originally experimented with things like “bullet time powerups “for example, but found that this didn’t make for very fun game play in the end since the game was about speed.
Polish:
After we had implemented all the functions and were happy with the gameplay and mechanics we spent some time adding some polish to the game. Like adding the aforementioned particle effects when enemies exit the screen. We also added animations when picking up powerups, color changing on the backgrounds based on how far the player was in the game. We also implemented an old school arcade style high score system and added music.
Of course this is a very general overview of the process and is void of technical specifics, but the concepts used here are used in a lot of games today, regardless of platform and framework they were developed with, so we hope this will interest for some of you. And we also look forward to writing more in depth and interesting posts in the future :)
Day 13 | Lumi Games
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
The Locust trilogy concluded with Gears of War 3. I don’t get how Gears 4 and 5 are “woke” .
Ah a little too much technical stuff for me.
omg coding is hard !!
it must be hard for you guys to do this
Me nd my friend are kinda tryin to make a game too... so i kinda get it
My brain hurts :-l
I've been watching tutorials on how to code on YouTube, the stuff goes right over my head.