Plan for Phil Carlisle

This last week I've really been delving into the karmic side of game development. Having been on somewhat of a downer for most part of the month. As usual with games and programming, things are struggling against me in a huge effort to thwart my best plans.

But given the inroads this month in terms of getting some student projects underway, plus getting some prototype time in on my GID, I thought I'd write a plan.

This last week has seen some interesting articles online. Firstly, I was thinking of my old mate Dan Cook, so I headed off to his website at www.lostgarden.com

Dan is one of the most talented designers and artists I've ever known. He's also one of the smartest people and one of the most productive. We crossed paths when we first got into the notion of game development and its great to hear his thoughts on game dev.

So his article on "Village Games" makes a great read, about the concept of smaller boutique style multiplayer online games of the kind I'm making in Air Ace gave me a lot to think about.

Dan also has a good grasp of the business side of things since he got his MBA, but its still unclear how to deliver the games to the people that can potentially play them (thats a different issue to address really).

So the other articles I've been reading are concerning prototyping and a sort of semi-side issue of using alternative input methods.


www.gamasutra.com/features/20040618/lloyd_02.shtml
www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_01.shtml

This all kind of gets the old noodle working and thinking of simple mechanics to play around with various controllers.

Is this really the way to go though? For instance, if you look at the typical "casual" game on the portals, what we get isnt really innovation but is polish. I spent a few hours the other day looking at some of the bigger casual games and what it points out to me is that games that sell well on the portals ARENT that innovative. They are actually usually just remakes of lesser known games with a LOT of polishing.

So, one of the things I want to look at the next few weeks as part of my prep for my classes in our design degree is the concept of polish to see how important polish (by polish, I mean things like feedback, style and attention to detail) is to the overall perception of a game.

So even though the main attribute of a good game is to have a great mechanic at its heart, the overall perception might be more formed by the actual polish of the delivery. This is something I honestly hadnt thought of in isolation before.

Anyhoo, this last weekend saw me coding up a spring simulation system for T2D so I could try something out, only to realise a spring WASNT what I wanted :) silly me.

Now some of you will jump in here and tell me that T2D already kind of does springs, which is true, but I had a specific need for joining two objects with a third object (hard to explain, but I specifically do NOT want one of the objects to own the connection. So I wrote a fxSpring2D class and tiddled about with that.. as it happens, to no avail :)

So I'll probably wait till Melv releases the newer T2D and then release this code for others to mess with (hey, it works, seems kinda fun to make up springy objects etc). So now I've thrown a weekend away making physics simulations and whatnot, I think I need to get on and finish the thing I actually wanted in the first place before getting side-tracked somewhat :)

Ok, so enough of the weekly ramble, time to go and get on with some code....