GID Entry from last week
by Phil Carlisle · 06/23/2007 (6:01 am) · 3 comments
Last weekend I spent a few hours messing with one of my old projects while the Game in a Day was on.
This project is somewhat strange, in that I'm doing it for an event called "Game City" in Nottingham, England during October. The event is going to celebrate indie development as part of a week long cultural games showcase.
Anyway, for the event, I wanted to showcase some prototype concepts as part of a way of showing people how games come about. After playing with TGB and the new behaviors for a while, I realised that it was the perfect platform to do some experiments and to show how they work.
So a few weeks back, I started looking at behaviors (as implemented in TGB beta 3) as a method of generating a bunch of games. But slightly more strangely, I was looking at actually then using those to video me creating a bunch of games "live" in that, well, not physically live, but video'd as they are created.
Now I've hit some snags in the behavior code as-is, so I'm not able to complete the video's just yet. But I thought I'd release these projects as I go (hey, Its kind of fun to experiment with behaviors). Soon enough I hope that some of the bigger issues causing problems for the behavior code will be addressed and I can show the other projects (I've got a few more "done" but they crash).
Here is the first game "behavior wars"
You can download it From here
Hope you find it entertaining. Keys are: wasd to move ship. Left mouse to shoot and mouse aims.
So the interesting bits to note are the "behaviors". If you have TGB, you can open the project (I've included the scripts) and inspect the behaviors. I've added a few of my own to the project, things like:
Count on Death
Counter
Flee
Seek
Arrive (not done yet)
Wander
So have a play with em. More will be added to the next build (I'm after a few more useful enemies because right now it doesnt feel like a game does it?).
This project is somewhat strange, in that I'm doing it for an event called "Game City" in Nottingham, England during October. The event is going to celebrate indie development as part of a week long cultural games showcase.
Anyway, for the event, I wanted to showcase some prototype concepts as part of a way of showing people how games come about. After playing with TGB and the new behaviors for a while, I realised that it was the perfect platform to do some experiments and to show how they work.
So a few weeks back, I started looking at behaviors (as implemented in TGB beta 3) as a method of generating a bunch of games. But slightly more strangely, I was looking at actually then using those to video me creating a bunch of games "live" in that, well, not physically live, but video'd as they are created.
Now I've hit some snags in the behavior code as-is, so I'm not able to complete the video's just yet. But I thought I'd release these projects as I go (hey, Its kind of fun to experiment with behaviors). Soon enough I hope that some of the bigger issues causing problems for the behavior code will be addressed and I can show the other projects (I've got a few more "done" but they crash).
Here is the first game "behavior wars"You can download it From here
Hope you find it entertaining. Keys are: wasd to move ship. Left mouse to shoot and mouse aims.
So the interesting bits to note are the "behaviors". If you have TGB, you can open the project (I've included the scripts) and inspect the behaviors. I've added a few of my own to the project, things like:
Count on Death
Counter
Flee
Seek
Arrive (not done yet)
Wander
So have a play with em. More will be added to the next build (I'm after a few more useful enemies because right now it doesnt feel like a game does it?).
About the author
#2
Hopefully over time we can build up a large collection of behaviors enough that there is room to build different types of games with them.
Did you do that? :) hahaha.. well, the blue guy is there to test seek, the yellow guy should flee too.
06/23/2007 (1:56 pm)
Yeah, I think the behaviors thing will turn into a really powerful mechanism for teaching game design. But its got a ways to go before it can really be used properly (a few bugs and kinks to clean up).Hopefully over time we can build up a large collection of behaviors enough that there is room to build different types of games with them.
Did you do that? :) hahaha.. well, the blue guy is there to test seek, the yellow guy should flee too.
#3
And yes, the blue guy is a piece from the checkers demo of T2D as it was then known. They were vague aztec/inca moon and sun designs.
06/23/2007 (4:12 pm)
A large library of sorts for behaviours would be a very very valuable resource for games designers, especially for quick protyping. In fact, I can quite easily picture content packs simply consisting of many behaviours being somewhat popular.And yes, the blue guy is a piece from the checkers demo of T2D as it was then known. They were vague aztec/inca moon and sun designs.
Associate Craig Fortune
The behaviours stuff is rather cool - great for new developers to get games made without having to spend years honing their skills to something useful. I'm looking forward to seeing the behaviours stuff expanded and extended to maybe include more complex things for the community to use en masse.
PS.
I was looking at the little blue icon thing in the game for a while, trying to figure out why it seemed familiar. Then I remembered... I made it, hehe. :)