Biogem's Making

BioGems it's a really bejeweled-clone game with a twist: two pet creature (your on the left, and evil one on the right) fight using player and ai combination of pieces on board. A nice mix, enjoable at first, but later it's a difficulty nightmare because you need to think two or three moves after (chess anyone?).

I've really appreciated a nice article about how this game has be done: what iterations, what choices and so on. Here the article. I want to discuss some parte of it:

Polish the idea: what I've found impressive is the passion and the work behind this game. Even a casual player can "feel" that game is programmed with passion and time. This is done using the old "iteration design" approach. Play, play and play again the game until is perfect, but more important (and what I'm not doing right now with my games!) get player feedback as soon is possible!

Gems design: find right icons for a game like that is a surprising hard challenge. As game developer (hobbiest maybe!) it's hard to figure out what signs are okay or not, so another good point on this!

Difficulty: trap is set. Be gentle with new player, but go up with difficulty as soon all gameplay elements are on set!

I suggest this reading! :D

What make great games?

After all this years playing game a good question is "What make great games?". People have different answers about this topic but will exists some common core values that define a great game?
I've found a nice exploration of this topic using a mindMap, on this site.
There are some topic that doesn't have sense even in high successful games (like minecraft, but is an example) but if you want to build or just analyze a game, you can start from this list.


I think that gameplay part is too short so I want to contribuite with some ideas:

• gameplay
• different mechanics used together to build new mechanics: for example jump and fire
• don't steal what player achieved: if player have a weapon, steal it is not fair
• show don't tell: don't force player to follow story, let player follow it (just think about Valve's games)

What do you think?

Ludum Dare 21 Compo results!

Ludum Dare 21 results are out!

I've developed for this compo Escape in 60 Seconds (see the game here and post-mortem here) and the game didn't go so well, but hey, this it a Ludum Dare, my aim is to have fun and learn from my mistakes!

Next Ludum Dare I will do a great game! :D

Trystan's rougelike tutorials

On Trystan's blog you can find a nice and well done rougelike tutorials, using AsciiPanel (see Goblin Invasion as example).
My suggestion is to follow this tutorial because let you know one step at time how to build a rougelike in Java and offer nice explanation how to organize your code.
Please don't think only about bad graphic of rougelike: think as them like examples how to organize your project, code it, add gameplay and so on!

Java game development with MarteEngine/Android

yes, Android want you!

 This is a code story, so be ready :D

The story so far

On slick forum user ask me for an example project for MarteEngine (adding version 0.3 in development on Github, see dev branch) n Android and thanks of his efforts I was able to build and example project. To do this I've started from Slick-AE Template project (you can download it here).

You can download from here and import into your Eclipse workspace (tested with Eclipse Indigo and Helios, works fine )

Into zip file you can find two projects:

• MarteEngineDemo-Desktop: base project with desktop launcher and all your game files,

yes, Hello World on Android with MarteEngine, great programs start from here (Desktop screenshot)

• MarteEngineDemo-Android: just a wrapper project to launch your game on android phone ,

and the demo working on my phone

I want it too!

For make it work you need to setup your enviroment like every Android application and then download this example.

Be sure to change target android sdk for both projects, so it will compile on your enviroment too ( for me is api sdk 8, for android 2.2).

You can play a bit launching Desktop launcher, maybe following MarteEngine tutorials, but what you want is see action, so just launch Android project as Android application (don't try to use virtual device, try on a real Android phone, works better).

I've not tested everything, but integration is good and works fine on my Android 2.2 phone

Conclusion

Get working MarteEngine games on Android is possible and easy, if you start from a template project.
There are some flaws, like understanding how to use new input capabilities, but you can start from that.