Do you start projects only to abandon them soon after? You might be fleeing. Don’t get me wrong, trying and failing is absolutely acceptable. How else could you learn, unless you make mistakes. But you have to allow yourself to make them. Sometimes it is difficult to decide, but a project that clearly is going nowhere is fine to abort. Don’t push through if it makes no sense. As long as a project will teach you something useful, it is probably worth pursuing. What is useful? That is a decision only you can make. Listen to others, but don’t let someone else make that decision for you. ...
A Rant on Software Development Bloat
In my opinion, software development has become rather bloated. If that is not the case for you, feel free to skip - or continue and enjoy some schadenfreude. This is just me ranting, don’t mind me. Much of this I experienced at some points in my career. Some of it I heard from friends. Some of it from social media. Disclaimer: As with most developers people, I am in a bubble. ...
GameDev Review: Star Renegades
I promised a review before. I did not start with it, oops. So let me catch up! What Came Before I was a bit surprised to find that the game was developed by Massive Damage, Inc.. They are the makers of Halcyon 6 - which gained some small hype 2017/2018. I bought the game and found it to be Okish. I played it a few hours and it seemed to lack focus. There were only a few updates, I’m not sure they “fixed” that. It could be a “me” problem. This however, is not a review of Halcyon. ...
Remnants of the Vanquished
Now, let me reveal the name of the Unnamed Game. This time, we will focus on some more technical aspects of the game. As a disclaimer: I use Bevy, which more or less enforces the use of an Entity Component System (ECS). ECS is kind of a hype (micro-services anyone?), of course it can be used for everything - but does it fit everything? Still, I am not yet turning my back on Bevy just yet, so I’ll have to make do. ...
Shogun Showdown Core Mechanics
As promised, in this post, we will take a look at the game Shogun Showdown. It is still in early access, but has very good review scores and a sizeable amount too. Its Steam page tells it’s “inspired by great games like Into the Breach, Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Slay the Spire and so much more”. That is similar to the inspirations behind my own game. As my in-development game shares some of these traits, this game certainly is one I need to take a closer look. ...
The Yet to be Named Game - Continued
In the last post, I showed some of the goals I want to achieve with my game. Including some early screen shots. I decided to replace the AI generated ships with some procedural generated ships - lets have a look: While not exactly beautiful, and not even in the style I want the game to be - it’s a better placeholder. It should not agitate people as much, as AI generated art would. ...
The Yet to be Named Game
Previously we took a birds eye view on the topic of the game development process. Or, to be more precise, the model in my mind. I plan on refining and correcting it as I go and learn. Current State of My Game I can actually show a screenshot of my prototype: ![Image](prototype-screenshot.png", alt=“Not much to see yet) It contains a background I made and some ships an AI model created (for the prototype only, I will create or commission the real art). To the left are the player ships, to the right the enemy ships (I did not even bother to make the “look” toward the player ships). ...
Game Development: A Personal Journey
Today, let’s take a peek at game development in general. Similar to what I already did a while ago. A few months ago I picked it up again and to flesh out the design more and do some prototyping. It was nice and all, but I made the classical mistake of having a scope that would take years to implement. Depending on what you want to achieve, that could be okay - or not. In my case, I want to learn the whole process: ...
Comments - Take 3 - On Zola
A while ago I added comments for my Jekyll base blog. Since then, I switched to zola. Its basically a Rust based “clone” of the static site generator (SSG) Hugo. Compared to Jekyll, it is a lot faster, and I found it to be a lot simpler. However, Zola has its own set of challenges. For instance, changing themes is nearly impossible and theme extension can get messy. That is the story for a future post. At some point I might consider creating my own SSG. Building a small one should be easy enough (and due to GitHub’s Actions it could be used immediately). ...
4X Game Loop
I think I don’t really need to explain what a 4X game is, maybe not even what the 4X stand for. But, I’ll do it anyway - the gameplay loop of a typical 4X game is: ![Image](4x_game.dot.png", alt=“The 4 Xs”, caption=“A loop of loops - that is 4X) eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate Much of the fun of this simple formula comes from the fact that none of those factors stands on its own. You usually cannot expand without exploring first. Sometimes to expand by exterminating an enemy at a location first. What is there to exploit, if you did not expand before? And how will you exterminate, if you lack the resources you ought to have exploited first. ...