Dan Donnan

I have shelved Halloween Game. There we go. Shock over. I suppose I have to explain why.

Last month, I said that I wanted to have the game flow done  by the end of the first week of this month. Did I actually get it done?

When writing about the dialogue system a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it was important to consider how translations would work at the beginning of the project. If every string has been hardcoded in English and there is now a demand to support a different language, then all of those strings need to be found, extracted and replaced with an ID before the translation can even begin. Depending on the size of the project, this can take weeks or even months to do it properly. So the best way to avoid that scenario is to setup the project as if it is going to be translated, even if it isn't.

If someone is looking down a corridor and sees another person move behind a wall, the moving person will disappear from view since they are now obscured by the wall. This is depth perception. In real life, depth, and vision in general, is based off light bouncing off objects before reaching the eyes. 3D games calculate this differently, but generally achieve the same effect. But what about 2D games?

When thinking about quitting my job to work on the football game, one of my concerns was money. I've got a mortage and bills to pay, and I need to buy food. So, where is the money going to come from? To begin with it was going to come from savings. I worked out that I had enough to keep me going for at least a year. But after that, then what?

Dialogue systems have been in games since the early days. While games like Pong didn't need dialogue, text based adventure games relied on it. That's also true of modern games - you won't find characters speaking to one another, or the player, in Mario Kart, but it is key in Dragon Age.

It's now been a month since I left the world of employment to work on making my own games. So, what progress have I made?

Just before I began working on Bird Game, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to work on now I'd ruled the football game out. It seemed like I was going to go and do a puzzle game, but then there are two ideas for games that would be ideal for releasing at Halloween, primarily because one is actually set then, and the other involves ghosts. So now I have to choose which of those I am going to do, because trying to develop multiple games at the same time doesn't seem like a good idea. Especially if both the ones I pick are the Halloween games because they will be releasing at the same time. But then a thought occurred.