Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

10,000 hours

Posted on June 24, 2009

Have you read Outliers? It’s a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Not his best book,  but it’s quite good. It’s basically a theory that assumes that really successful talented people get where they are because they just put the hours in. He looks at The Beatles, Bill Gates, Sports stars, all different areas of work and investigates peoples backgrounds.

The guess is that you need to do something for 10,000 hours to get good at it, which is roughly 10 years full time. The Beatles had performed for that length of time before they became an overnight success :D

I’m a strong believer in the idea that almost anyone can do anything if they just put the hours in and concentrate. I occasionally muck around playing a digital piano. I’m not very good. My limits are the intro to Fur Elise and the intro to Wait For Sleep by Dream Theater. That’s about it. But I *know* that if I spent 10 years full time really going for it in terms of practice I’d get bloody good at it.

They say that school isn’t about teaching you stuff ‘per-se’, but teaching you how to learn. That’s a valuable thing to know. If the thought of sitting down with a book and learning some new skill depresses you, it’s really worth beating that. It opens up so many possibilities.

I have absolutely zero natural aptitude for programming. my DNA is pretty similar to everyone else’s.  I went to a relatively good school (state-run) and my mother taught me to read very young. Everything else was hard work.

You can tell I have no actual talent, because I’ve probably done my 10,00 hours and I’m still not rich or famous. I started programming at age 11 on the ZX81. I’m 40 this year.

I’m still trying though :D

Damage Effects Editor

Posted on June 22, 2009

My editors and tools are always really bad. Something has to give when you are a lone developer and with me it’s tools. I’m slowly getting better at it. It’s just a time thing. Today I spent most of the day getting my feeble ship hull editor to let me graphically position and assign particle emitters to damage sprites. (Screenshot below).

basically when a ship gets hit a pre-defined chunk of a damage texture gets drawn at the impact point, and it comes with a number of attached particle emitters. they are only visible fairly close up. there is also an additional temporary emitter that’s much bigger, but these ones are the tiny sparks that flicker over the burning hull of the ship after the smoke and flames have died down.

It took much longer than it should have to get this in, but it’s good because previously I placed them by hand in paintshop pro, then noted the pixel position and copied it to a text file. (laborious eh?)

This way I can placed dozens a minute and thus there will be a lot more of them :D. Tomorrow I’m going to do nothing but set up fleets and play out battles to check everything works and that the range of weapons and defences is acceptable.

Motion Blur

Posted on June 19, 2009

After a few minutes playing Arm-A II today, it was obvious that camera-motion-blur is really cool, and I needed to get on with putting it into GSB. Half a day of monkeying around with poor documentation and I have it in and working, and togglable etc. It needs some fiddling to get it right still. The nice side effect is that when a big explosion makes the camera shake, the blur kicks in automatically. You can’t really tell with a small jpg, but it’s quite a nice effect in motion. Of course it does have a drawback, in that if you freeze the game in mid-shake-blur and then move the camera, everything is blurred, because you were near the explosion when it happened. I think thats quite acceptable tbh.

I also got some more optimising done today, which means I can consider adding in a few more gratuitous effects for peoples whose gaming PC’s are as good or better than mine, and want the game to look as gratuitous as possible :D

3D Starship Render

Posted on June 18, 2009

Some people have asked me if the GSB ships are sprites or 3D models. They are put together by an artist in a 3D modeller, then rendered out as sprites top-down, with some fairly neutral lighting. The game then draws them as sprites. There are additional ‘damage’ and ‘hulk’ sprites for damaged ships, and the turrets are drawn separately on top, and flashing lights and engine trails are done separately too.

As normal 3D models they look pretty good, like this in fact:

The problem is, these are VERY high poly models. You might be able to have a game with 4 or 5 of them, but not fity at once, and not with tons more going on, all on an older PC. I think space strategy games work better in 2D than 3D, unrealistic though that may be. I also think that using 3D models to do 2D sprites can give you a good compromise between high detail and decent performance.

Having real 3D models in the art pipeline opens up more possibilities for editing and doing variants of those ships too. I’ll probably do a few renders for the loading screens and the website as well.

Desktop Wallpaper for GSB

Posted on June 17, 2009

I think GSB will turn out to be a game that has some decent screenshots. This is the first one I’ve taken for use as a desktop wallpaper. I’ll get some better (more frantic) ones done at some point, but here is the first one:

Here are the links:

1920×1200 res

1680×1050 res

1280×1024 res

It’s more of an indicator of how much stuff fits onscreen at higher resolutions rather than any attempt at showing off the engine right now. I’ve toggled the UI off for this screenshot. Any thoughts?