Make Mac Games

Jeff Vogel, Spiderweb Softare (Avernum, Geneforge), shares more wisdom from his 10+ years of indie game development in View From the Bottom: Part 3. This time he discusses his experience with trying to innovate.

GBGames has a nice introduction to object oriented design for game development. GB does a nice job of summarizing some basic concepts that can be incredibly powerful for simplifying your object model as well as future-proofing your design. I’ve used these techniques extensively for application development in my day job as a C# developer. As [...]

For the past year or so I’ve been organically growing my RSS feed collection with a focus towards what other indie game developers have to say. My collection has grown to a pretty good size including game industry veterans and stalwarts to first-time designers and rookies. There is a lot to read, and many to [...]

Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel (Avernum, Geneforge) describes his View From the Bottom of the game industry over on RPG Vault. Or what Joe Indie calls the “anti-Pavlina” view of game development. What is the moral of this? The game industry is a highly competitive, scary place. It’s not hopeless, but it’s a tough road. And [...]

I’ve been steadily plugging away at my list of bugs and enhancements for the upcoming release and finally tackled one area that I had been avoiding: improving the AI of some of the bugs. Most of the bugs had a pretty random set of behaviors depending on how close to the edge of the screen [...]

The recent issue of The Escapist has a terrific article examining the protagonist in video games: Striding the Wasteland. There are plenty of items to take away and think about when you’re writing your next game’s story and trying to fill it with meaningful characters.

When iDevGames.com announced the 2005 OMG Cup in October I immediately considered entering. A contest was just the right motivation for me to actually start and hopefully finish a game project. Aside from needing an idea, there were a few hurdles to tackle. Not only was this my first game project in almost fifteen years, [...]

What’s involved in building a casual game these days? There is a lot more to making a casual game than most people realize. I learned this first hand recently, as I participated in the 2005 OMG Cup these past two months. I always believed casual games were simple and quick to develop. Compared to the [...]

GBGames has an interesting discussion going on about the importance of prototypes and design documents in game design, specifically casual games in direct reference to the Gamasutra article with James Gwetzman of Popcap Games. It seems that Popcap has an “extremely prototype heavy” development process. Some of GB’s reader comments focus on this importance of [...]

Brian Green has posted a nice bit of BSD licensed C++ code for handling random events in computer games in response to Terro Nova’s comments on the subject.