chrismingay.co.uk Me and my games

Perling progress and getting things done

Hi there,

while I've still barely scratched the surface, I've been making lots of progress with Perling. Until now I've been working on things with very little focus on planning and basically been messing around with things when and if I've wanted...

Usually this would be a problem. I've been here before with lots of games I've barely started. I've had ideas that I thought were (and probably still do think that are) potentially quite a lot of fun and got right up to the part where I actually make it a game and then stopped for one reason or another. I don't actually know what the reason specifically is, probably having ideas that exceed  my ability and determination, not that the ideas were ground breaking or anything.

But anyway, this time it's different. The system I use as described over the past 3 posts or so isn't ground breaking by any means, but it's definitely something I've not managed before and it allows me to do everything I want, absolutely everything, which is again quite new to me!

The List

I've got a design document which has details about the overall aspects of the game package, like how I wanted the screen manager to work, what things I want saved and the format in which they would be saved. These parts are all quite detailed and planned out, but then I have the list...

The list is a huge unsorted.. err list.. of things I've thought of that I'd like to add to the game. Anything at all, whether it's an enemy, a function, some music, whatever. I think I enjoyed adding to this list more than I did actually completing things on it, so as it stands the list is 228 items long. I highlight these items as completed, started, will start, probably won't start, definitely won't start and pending classification.

I counted up the completed items on this list the other day and it's 30... It was at this stage that I thought "ok this is a bit silly now" and so I've now decided to freeze the list. This is Round 1; I can add to another feature list when and if I think of things, but I am not allowed to work on Round 2 until I've finished Round 1. I have a separate list for bug fixes which I can work on when I wish, but not Round 2, no!

I'm not too disheartened by this because there are plenty of great things for Round 1 that I can do, but I know realistically I need to be finishing ideas quicker than I think of them now, else I will never finish.

I could really do with actually sorting the Round 1 list as well now too because it's a right mess. I think I've written "ENEMY: SPIDERS!!" 2 or 3 times now...

Animations

When using Klik and Play and the other WYSIWYG game makers, animation managers are handled for you in what I appreciate now is a really elegant way. When coding things myself, I've always struggled with managing animations. How do I manage a sprite trying to play 2 different animations at the same time? How do I elegantly manage deciding which has preference. How do I cut an animation short (e.g. a walking animation where the character stops moving mid way through the animation)? I've previously not been able to comprehend how I would do this, but I've managed to come up with what I consider quite a simple system to use.

I'll dedicate a proper post to this when I get some more time.

Proper Indie Developer Stuff

With Ninjah I licensed music and at the time doing so was literally the least amateur game development thing I've ever done.  I got thinking that it'd be cool for the quests in Perling to be described by an announcer. I reminded myself of Justin Smith's Realistic Summer Sports Simulator trailer and found out from Justin who the voice over work was done by and sent off an email to the man himself Wiggly. For no real reason apart from never really doing anything like this before, I didn't really expect it to go anywhere but it has!

I've just had my first batch of voice work through and it's amazing. I thought the whole licensing music thing was good, but this is completely different. Having assets, in this instance, voice samples, made specifically for me is just amazing, I'm so chuffed with them

Until next time

-Chris