Spinning Cubes

I have made my own little game canon list with games i need to play and games that i think other game developers should know about. Have a look and see what you have missed .

Seems like a good time to sort up my own personal projects now that I have some time to clean up and the fist step is to to write down some of the game ideas I have. So I don’t have to look for it in my head later . I think I will try to clean up one or two of them and put on this website so you all can have a look at them, steal them and make a great game that I can play .

One problem that face anyone working on a game engine or game project is where to keep the design of these. Not really a problem when you work on your own as you can keep all of it in your own head but when you get more people and form a team of any size beyond you and your imaginary friends its time to start looking for a better way. In Zero Point Gameplay we have chosen to use a wiki for the documentation. Well more then one wiki really as we will keep one for the ZeroFps engine and then one for each project.

The tech design will be used both as a reference wiki for the engine on how things work but also a way to plan out the future of the engine. When we get new great ideas on how to improve the engine we can write them down and design them in the wiki and then as development moves along pick up these things from the wiki and turn then into the reality of code. From that we will also get a history of the development of the engine and a way to see what has worked and what has not. It will really be an internal wiki for the people working on and with the engine but we are to lazy to run our own web server for that so we keep it on line for all to see. That way it’s easy for people to steal our great ideas but if they steal them they must be valuable and then we can almost call our selfs professional game developers .

For the projects we will use one wiki per project as I wish to avoid filling up a single wiki with to many things that might not be related to each other but with the same names. Unlike the tech design the game design wiki on for a project will be used the most by only these that focus on design and they will use it like a form of huge mind map thing on the game. Then portal sections are made in the wiki that merge all the important information aimed at the people that need to read them. For example a portal for all the programmers and another one for the character artists. No one besides the designers really need to read the whole wiki and know all parts of the project and rather then information overload anyone that needs to do something on the project it’s better with clear section that contain the information that they need. Everyone on the team still have access to the all parts of the project wiki and can look around if they like and things can easily be added and removed to each groups portal as needed.

I think this will be a nice setup that will work well, not that Zero Point Gameplay is a large team but it’s still nice with a easy way to show it for new people that join our team of brave souls that shall go where no game developer has gone before. The only change needed for a larger real team with publishers that creep around the hallways looking for blood is how to handle the presentation of the material to them. For that I would go for a more conventional approach by exporting the content of choice from the wiki and modify it’s form to fit the current delivery. The reason for that rather then giving them access to the wiki is that it is will contain many ideas and examples and not all of them will make it into the final game. Rather then trying to explain  why some ideas are good and some are not to someone that has only read a small amount of the wiki it is better to make it into one nice presentable package where you know exactly what they will see and what your side is saying. When these documents need to be done the chosen pages can be exported from the wiki and cleaned up into a nice and presentable document. Then when sent the documents be added back to the wiki for future reference and the ideas not used can be used in your next game .

Still writing on the Zpg Design Book as I get new ideas for it but so far it is so small that it’s not really a book yet but rather a small document with some steps to guide me so I don’t forget things when I’m in the zone of game design. Even if most books about game design seems to be written by ex producer that have no clue and get paid by number of pages there are still people online that say good things and today I found a fun post with the name The Long Road to Mordor. Good thing I live close to water when the Nazgûl try to hunt me down.

Been reading some books about game design and so far all the ones i have found are full of pointless gibberish. In most of them its obvious that the person writing it get paid by number of pages and not the content of the book. Every ten page must be filled with a made up case study used to prove the theory in the book and each time a reference to movies are made it must be followed with a statement that we are making games and not movies and games is the new and movies are old and so on. No point in reading books that spend chapters trying to define the genre system of games and writing idiotic case studies of why role playing games as not a genre at all.

So i think i will skip the books and focus on writing my own guide to game design to use for myself and the projects i work on with Zero Point Gameplay. I’ll make it as a simple text document that describes the work flow and useful terms and then anyone on a team can read it and at least share a common base when talking about the design .

I’m playing the game Drakan – Order of the flame now. Not that bad if you ignore the story. I also found a new thing to put on my top ten hate list in game design. We can call it the crusher room. Imagine that you are playing a nice game and at every new level you find something new and funny. And then, when you feeel good about yourself, the game, those that made it, their pets and almoste everthing then the level designer stab you in the back with the crusher room.  Is there some law that say that every game must have one, or as often is, to many in a row.

The first sign that you are close to the crusher room is the sound. BANG, BANG, BANG. The first is always the up/down hammers. Hmm you say. I’m in the temple of the gods, searching for holy sword to save the world from chaos and this place is filled with test to prove that i’m a worthy hero. Ok, well i guess to gods don’t want some fat pizza eating slob to do the hero thing. Lets run past the three hammer (always three hammers…). And you feel like a hero (almost) and walk away from the hammers. But still…

BANG, BANG, BANG.

You freeze in place and think Ohhh nooo. The game is about the crash. Damn it. My new supercomputer and the game is about to crash. This can’t be true but when you walk around the next corner you start to wish it was true. The game will not crash, it will more likely crush. You have arrived to (tada) the door like crushers. Like always there are three of them and they go at diffrent speed. And you think to yourself that some pizza slobs still manged to get past the last room and the gods need some real hero so they are doing this as a last test. You get past them also and run further into the temple of the gods. And the BANG, BANG, BANG goes away.

And you are happy.
Almost as good as before the crusher room.
You save the game…
Take a slice of pizza…
And walk on in…

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

Arghhhhhh… Can anyone say UnInstall .