Give mechanics the game they deserve

This year has involved me creating a whole host of projects in Unity. I have tended towards finding a mechanic I like and pushing it quite a distance without giving thought to how it might actually fit into the structure of a game. This work process has, at times, led to feelings of frustration for me as I do not have any playable demonstration of the mechanics I feel have great potential.

Thus, I now am giving conscious effort towards placing mechanics into a game structure or framework before polishing / developing each any further. I have found some immediate success with this approach which can be seen in these screenshots:

I have been having a great time with my house mate over the last few days actually playing this game and I look forward to sharing it with everyone very soon.

And Death: World Spinning

Money makes the world go round, completely false and besides, most of these people don’t even understand money, let alone gravity. These students, kids, shamelessly showing their faces in my first period Physics class. They play ball games at lunch, unknowingly applying the requisite force at the requisite time to gain another point in another round. They are quite dull, and I suspect are lacking in intellect. They don’t understand or comprehend, and think they want money so that they might make the world spin. They don’t even talk to me and ask questions. No one ever talks to me.

This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

The Future: Science Fiction

It was written, in the time of ink and paper, there might exist an impossible future.

Awakening to a South African morning, a young man excitedly prepares to speak with a woman struggling through the depths of a Canadian night. With each word, something new was learned. With expressions evolving on their faces, regard formed and just was.

The pair shared long conversations.

They argued on the feeling of warm and cold days. They laughed, sometimes.

Each had thoughts that requested to be hidden. They were aware of the impossible given the distance.

At least, they lived the impossible future.

This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

Of Life: Sweat

Sweat was never like this. It was a maligned representative of Dean’s sedentary life, birthed by his teenage habits. Sweat was dirty. Sweat was uncomfortable. Sweat had never been this.
Sweat would never highlight special moments such as it did now.
Dean looked over the figure lying naked, with and like him. Sweat was sliding, mingling and shifting between he and his partner, his partner and he. Sweat was not uncomfortable now. It was not the product of an unclean exertion. Sweat was the emblem of something worth that effort. Total acceptance partnered with an exposure of a naked self.

This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

The Future of Life and Death

The Future of Life is a book of short stories I have been working on since December of last year. The idea of this book came about when I began writing a series of short stories with the single constraint of a hundred words. This limitation that I placed on my writing has allowed me to experiment with different styles, voices and approaches very easily. I began to build up a collection of these stories and it was my desire to structure them within some larger narrative form that led to The Future of Life and Death.

The Future of Life and Death will be a book of one hundred stories of one hundred words each and will communicate through its three sections my thoughts on:

1. The Future
2. Of Life
3. And Death

Each of the one hundred stories is a new experiment with this story format and will be arranged into these sections so that they might provide comment and context to the other stories surrounding it.

I had planned to conclude the book by the end of 2013 but a recent burst of productivity on my part may see me finish it sooner. I hope to share a number of stories which I am considering for the book here in the weeks and months to come.

Official Space Kasparov

Play Online (Unity Web Player)

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This is a 2 player local strategy game I made with Unity this last week. My aim was to create opportunities for mind games between the players. I feel that having to input your next three moves and then watch them play out alongside your opponents increases the tension around the decision making process.

Music: Oxygen Garden by Chris Zabriskie
Used under a Creative Commons License.

Please send me feedback and keep loving video games.

Prototype

I love that I can say that the genesis for this prototype occurred in the shower yesterday.

What I have now in the prototype has shifted to focus on a multiplayer type concept but regardless I am happy with the result. I am planning to have something for people to play by weeks end. For now here are some screenshots.

Keep loving video games

Go go and more go

It has been a long time between posts. I have been busy with a holiday as well as getting back to game development.

Holiday:
Between mid-January and early March I was on quite a nice holiday throughout the Western side (mostly) of the United States. In short I had a great time, met great people and took some happy snaps.

Game Dev:
Unity:
I finally have myself organised and working within Unity. I now have 3 small projects on the go at the moment, one of them is an experimentation with storytelling and the other two are more twitchy mechanics driven games including bringing some Atron Duel ideas from that prototype. I am really liking the speed at which I have been able to be productive and get things built. The future looks bright!

Global Game Jam
I did a crazy thing during my time in San Francisco, I took the time off from being an utter tourist and participated in the SF Global Game Jam with only a Nexus tablet in hand. The whole experience was really fun and I fell in love with many of the games that other jammers churned out over the course of the weekend. The best in my opinion being an awesome cooperative experience:
Passing Fancy: http://globalgamejam.org/2013/passing-fancy

For my own part, I teamed up with a bunch of industry locals and made a game about a nervous developer who must try and get his game kickstarted. It came in with the name Jumpstarter.
Give it a play here: http://globalgamejam.org/2013/jumpstarter
(It is the build from the jam, there is the possibility of a more polished version being developed soon)

Student Project
I am working on my final year team project for my games development course. I am not sure what details I can divulge at this stage so I will lean towards caution and stay quiet. Hopefully I can share some stuff in the future because it is quite exciting.

My intention is to get involved much more regularly with this blog and on twitter as well (@verbvirus). Wish me luck! Happy gaming.

Screenshots from today

Yeah, pretty much. See below:

Consistency & Style

I continued my work on Atron Duel today. I spent the day working towards a more consistent visual style across the game. The whole structure is pretty simple at this stage with just enough moving parts - sprites, text, effects - for me to chip away at. I'm pretty happy with the changes I made today:

I spent some time cleaning up the code of the core state class of the game. This was so I can work on implementing a second type of duel with a different win condition tomorrow. Exciting stuff.

I also hope to make the collectible (center of screen) and the drop off point (living on the side of screen for the player doing the collecting) a bit more visually distinctive too but this seems to be the easy thing I keep ignoring.

New Home

Given my recent spike in productivity I've decided to find myself a new home to share what I am creating as well as other random pieces of my life. Therefore, welcome to Verb Virus Games!

My current project is a game I'm coding in Flash using the Flixel framework. The project is going by the name Atron Duel at this point in time but that may change in the future. I am making a local multiplayer game for two players that will progress at a frenetic pace. The main inspiration for Atron Duel is the wonderful Super Hexagon by Terry Cavanagh. 

Here are a couple of shots of where Atron Duel is right now, placeholders abound:

Here are the things I mentioned elsewhere in this post:

Flixel : http://flixel.org/

Super Hexagon: http://superhexagon.com/