Games Industry
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Strategy Games and Violence
Strategy games go hand in hand with war and conflict. Why is this and what are the alternatives? The majority of strategy games revolve around conflict and war. It’s hard to even name a non-violent strategy game outside of abstract games like Go or Draughts. Even these games are arguably an abstraction of conflict, pitting two players in direct opposition. War and conflict are historic realities and sadly will continue to be in the future. So it’s right for games to explore this space. Without wanting to diminish the terrible impact of other wars, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has particular echoes of the kind of “big fish eats…
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Wearing Pixels
Coming from a video games background, the world of fashion appears otherworldly. A place full of lurid colours and fantastical designs springing off the pages of glossy magazines and posters. It often makes games look monochrome and unimaginative by comparison. But the fashion world is also distant and disconnected from games. So when the chance came up to attend a Digital Fashion workshop in Prague at the start of the summer, I was intrigued. Could technology provide a bridge between these worlds? How was technology changing and being used in this different, but highly creative industry? Here’s what I found. Hardcore Tech Soon after the workshop started, I was introduced…
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Fixed and Flexible
Last week, I went to Amaze Festival in Berlin. It was fun to meet up with lots of developers from around Europe, and the event’s focus on the more artistic side of game making was refreshing. In particular, I went to a talk by Jenny Jiao Hsia on prototyping her personal games. Interestingly, she had both a fixed art style and set theme (dieting) that she pursued throughout the many prototypes she made. Her aim in experimenting with different mechanics was thus to find how best to fit the theme and communicate her message, whilst still having a game that was fun, deep, intuitive etc. (this was the best logo…
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Inseparable Marketing
Recently read BadgerHammer’s blog on video game marketing. Like them, I’ve been pressing all the marketing buttons prescribed by industry “conventional wisdom”, yet getting nowhere. This spurred me to write down some ideas I’ve had mulling in my head for a while now about indie game marketing. Marketing is usually referred to as something game developers do during and/or after game development. As if it’s a parallel process to the nuts and bolts of making a game. It isn’t. Way back when I was at school, I did business studies and learned about the 4 P’s – Price, Promotion, Place and Product. They are all interconnected, but the focus of most…
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Wii U has all the toys!
The Wii U is reaching the end of its lifetime, soon we assume to be replaced by the as-still mysterious NX. I’ve spent nearly three years making games for Wii U in one way or another, and I plan to continue that for as long as Nintendo will let me. Why? The Wii U has all the toys a game designer could want. Both touchscreen and buttons. Motion control as well as more standard console controller setup. This range of choice when it comes to input methods means a much wider variety of genres become possible. I grew up as a PC gamer and I love strategy games like Civilisation…
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Why I’m making a motion control game in 2016
When I first started developing for the Wii U, it had already been struggling for the couple of years since its release. Nintendo were keen for more games to showcase the console’s GamePad, and being the bright-eye’d naive young developer I was, I arrogantly thought I could step up to that challenge! After spending a bit of time getting the devkit and tools up and running, I realised the Wii U also supported Wii Remotes as well. I wrote out a list of game concepts for both GamePad and Wii Remotes to prototype when my current project was completed. Well that project fell through, and added to that, I’d got…
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An OUYA Story
Adventures on the Ground Floor In the summer of 2012, I was down the pub after an Android meetup, talking to this guy who reckoned OUYA was a big deal. This was two or three weeks into their kickstarter campaign and whilst I’d read about it, it had kinda passed me by up till that point. Next day, I gave it a lot of thought, properly checked out their kickstarter campaign and decided to give it a shot. Back then, I’d already been an indie game developer for over a year, struggling away making a game for Android in my own home-built java/openGL engine. Yes you may laugh, but I’d…
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My Gaming Year
Inspired by this tweet from Edge magazine, I’m putting down my thoughts on video gaming in the last year. The last year has been a bit underwhelming. I’ve come to terms with not having enough time between work and social commitments to sink 30 hours into epic open world games. Even so, no game really grabbed me and said “you need to play this!” My job in the industry as an indie game developer, I’m probably more than a touch jaded at this point, but it was still disappointing to watch the various E3 presentations and think “none of this stuff is really aimed at me”. In contrast to last…
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f2p needn’t be all bad
Whether you like or dislike the way any particular game uses f2p, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept. For those not familiar, f2p stands for “free to play”, and is a shorthand for any monetisation system that gives the base game away for free, then seeks to make money through the purchase of additional stuff for the game. That stuff can come in two main forms: “Consumables” covers things that have a one-time use in game, such as power ups or in-game currency. “Unlockables” are thing that can be used repeatedly, such as new levels or game modes. Unlockables are the easier to understand from a consumer perspective. I…
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Technical: Unity to Android
This will be a semi-technical piece, in a departure from the normal things I write about. It was initially a reply to a facebook post, but having poured all my knowledge into a single, comprehensive reply, I discovered I’d misread the initial question posed. So instead I’m posting it here. The question I thought I was answering was “What should I know about putting my Unity game on Android” There are a few odd little technical things that can crop up when you first switch platform to Android in Unity. Mostly it’s solveable stuff though and no more than a couple of day’s work to get a build running on…