I’m contributing my writing to a game! This is exciting news. I’ve written novels and short stories, worked on screenplays for short films, created my own comics and worked on audio drama scripts but games development has remained elusive. They’re the exciting new frontier but share a similarity with filmmaking, which is that they’re really difficult to do on your own. (more…)
Tonight I went along to my second Norfolk Indie Games Developers meet-up. As before, it was a gathering of passionate, interesting indie devs of varying skillsets (coders, artists, writers etc) chatting about all things gaming for three+ hours.
Unlike the first time I went, this evening I had something to share. I took along the hideously unfinished and untested build of Going Up, my Twine-based interactive conversation and decided to let a room full of far more experienced games devs Have At It. (more…)
A glance down this blog would lead to the reasonable conclusion that all I’ve been doing this year is writing A Day of Faces. I should probably try to be rather more varied in my blog output.
So, other things.
At work FXHOME just released HitFilm 4 Pro. It’s a great NLE/VFX product and it also has a snazzy new website to accompany it. In terms of copywriting I’m massively proud of the new site and feel like it’s my best work to date. Do check it out over at hitfilm.com. I’ll be writing a full-on copy and design deconstruction blog at some point in the near future. (more…)
I’ve written before about Twine, a game making tool aimed specifically at constructing choose-your-own-adventure style text games. If you heard about Depression Quest last year (probably for all the wrong reasons), then you’ll have encountered a Twine-built game.
Anyway, I’d previously been attempting to create an elaborate steampunk adventure based on an Arms Race comic script I’d written a few years back. It could have been quite fun but was far too enormous a project to be my first foray into making games. As you can see from my blog post about responsive characters, what I was really interested in was character interactions. (more…)
This is the blog post in which you can download and install A GAME WHAT I PROGRAMMED.
I’ve been following Tom ‘made GUNPOINT’ Francis’ GameMaker tutorials since the start of the year. The man has an uncanny ability to teach code in a way that makes sense to people who don’t code. I suspect he’s new enough to coding himself, relatively speaking, that he still remembers what it was like. (more…)
Back in November I mentioned I was working through FutureLearn’s game course. That never quite worked out, alas. It was an oddly pitched course, simultaneously focusing on complex and boring infrastructure stuff while being really basic in the creative areas. Lots of other people clearly loved it, but it didn’t click with me.
Despite this blog post’s lofty title, I’m not a game designer. I am, however, attempting to become one, pretty much from scratch (spot the noob programming joke!).
I’m currently taking Future Learn’s programming course, which is a mostly useful but very peculiarly structured introductory course. I suspect I’ll end up learning more by working my way through Unity tutorials, in the long run. (more…)
I’m currently dipping two tentative toes into the murky waters of programming. Games programming, to be precise. I suspect games programming is quite a bit like normal programming but with more guns at the end.
That image above is from a game called Schism which I’m currently writing, based in the IAT Arms Race universe. It’s created using Twine, an engine specifically designed for writing Choose Your Own Adventure-style games. (more…)