I blog about my game projects and other stuff at http://csanyk.com/rants.
From Cleveland, OH. IGDA member and active member of Cleveland Game Developers. If you're in the NE Ohio area, and haven't been to one of our meetings, check us out!
http://www.meetup.com/clevelandgamedev/
I am a retrogamer, and my biggest influences are the late-70's/early-80's video arcade, 8-bit consoles and microcomputers (Atari, Coleco, Nintendo, Apple, Commodore). I like some modern games, as well but my heart will always be 8-bit.
2D > 3D
play mechanics and controls > story and graphics
simplicity > complexity
In 1981, I knew I wanted to be a game designer when I grew up. I spent a lot of time doing paper prototypes of games I would like to see made, from the age of 6 or 7 onward.
In 1994, I had no idea how I'd ever get into videogame development. I knew no one in the industry, and all the companies seemed to be very far away, and it was super competitive and the industry sucked the life out of people by working them too hard.
In 1995, I quit thinking about it because I couldn't figure out any way I could ever make money doing it, and because the industry seemed to be moving away from the type of games I wanted to make. Everything was 3d, a license of some established IP, or a sequel.
A few years ago, I discovered the Indie Games Blog and learned about Ludum Dare, played some of the games that had come out of them, and rekindled my interest in game development.
In 2010, I stopped caring if I ever made money doing it. I realized that not knowing how to make money at something I wanted to do was a bad reason for not doing it.
Today, I am a happy game designer, making games that I want to make. It'd be nice if they made money someday, but I don't care too much about that. Mainly I want to make a name for myself.
Monday, April 23rd, 2012 9:10 pm
Ran through the game again and noticed a few bugs, which are now fixed:
- Score: counting errors resulting in inaccurate Births, Deaths.
- Collision(enemy) bug resulting in every collision killing an enemy regardless of its health.
- Fixed a few minor bugs in the Player controls (I think for real this time)
If you’ve already downloaded it and played it before, it’s worth downloading again and trying it out with the fixes. Gameplay should be a good bit more challenging than in 1.0.
Monday, April 23rd, 2012 7:51 pm
play it!
I’ve written an extensive 3-part postmortem on my web site, narrating my thought process as I worked through the weekend on my compo project, and describing in detail some of my programming techniques (no code, download my source to see that).
Here’s the uber brief synopsis:
What went well:
- Really liked the bacteria behavior.
- Good use of translucent graphics.
- Very happy with the effects I achieved using stochastic functions.
- The controls ended up working out pretty well — this was the first time I’d done a game where the controls are so indirect, and you control hundreds of objects.
- Performance is good despite having a few thousand objects in play.
- <3 Game Maker for rapid development
What went wrong:
- Didn’t get to complete all the features I’d planned.
- Spent a lot more time debugging and tweaking the controls than I ever imagined I would need to.
- Game is short. <1min/play is pretty typical.
- Could be more depth to it, if I’d made it a little more complex by including some of the features I’d hoped to complete.
- h8 Game Maker for debugging.
What I’d like you to know:
- This is the second weekend in a row that I built a game! I’m taking a break next weekend:)
- I’m really happy that I participated and completed my project.
- I am looking forward to doing more of these.
- Can’t wait to see people’s comments, find out how I ranked, and try other people’s games out!
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 6:37 pm
Hi everyone! I just finished submitting my first Ludum Dare submission, for LD48-23: “Tiny World”.
I built my game, Bactarium, in Game Maker 8.1 Professional.
I blog about game maker, game design, programming, and my other projects over on my own site, csanyk.com. Drop me a comment if you played my game, and let me know what you thought!
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