Back in May, I went to Amsterdam for the Unite Europe conference, and whilst in the city, visited the Stedlijk design museum. It’s a weird collection of modern art and design, but well worth a visit if you’re into that sort of stuff. It’s also partly housed in a gigantic bathtub! Anyway, whilst there, I found a piece of art called Valkea Vuori by a lady called Rut Bryk (below). It had a really strong aesthetic that was vaguely reminiscent of old school isometric strategy games like Transport Tycoon. As a side project, I’m now attempting to procedurally generate a tiled world/map in video game form, which I then have…

Four years ago today I started out as a one-man-band indie game developer. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in that time which I don’t see discussed much or I think are worth highlighting: Production I’ve yet to find my ideal process for making games, despite having tried a bunch of different production methods. Some things I would recommend considering though: – Pay for art. Best results have usually come when I’ve hunted down a professional artist with the style and quality I want and straight up paid them. – If it takes longer than a week to implement a feature, drop it. It’s probably too complex, fragile…

Had a good time meeting gaming enthusiasts and other developers from around the UK this week at the Game City festival in Nottingham. It’s still on until the weekend, if you have time to get down there. Sadly today was the last day I could make it, so here is a roundup of some of the events I attended Big Tent Loads of indie games companies displayed their apps, pads and demos in the big tent, as well as exhibits from various other groups, including game jam entries from the local university, and a minecraft server complete with laptops for all the kids, big and small to have a go…

Guy Hasson has laid down an interesting design challenge at gamasutra . In summary, it is to create a ‘fork’ in the storyline of a game such that the art assets (animations, models etc) are all used on both paths the story subsequently takes (Note: this post has been migrated from the old site) Wild Spice To add a bit of spice, there is a prize for the design with the most wildly variant paths Sounds simple on the surface, but my first few ideas immediately hit problems. Say in one fork you are trying to protect the president and another trying to assasinate him. So the scene, scripts etc…