Thoughts on game dev, design and music from a hobbyist
When I was very young I, like many kids, thought subjects like history were dull and impenetrable. A series of meaningless dates and events to memorise for the sake of writing history reports . But by the time I was a young adult my attitude had done a 180 - I was a full blown history nerd, thinking about empires , battles, revolutions and more. I was hooked. At the start of every obsession there…
This one’s a practical coding article, one that I haven’t done in quite a while . It’s something I’ve come across often over the years so I’ve always wanted to have an article to point people to, so here it is. Here’s the premise: you’re making a game (or really any program) that reads data, whether that’s game data, config files, save files and so on. When these files get extended (like adding…
The games industry is famously tough and insecure to be in, as it is hit-driven: rush the right game to market at the right moment and you can rake in the big bucks as your game becomes the current cultural phenomenon, or miss it and die in ignominy. This leads to a bunch of pathologies: the persistence of crunch , rushing to hit key sales dates, or to beat a competitor (or avoid being beaten) ,…
There are few experiences where the situation is so incongruent that you are left utterly speechless at the absurdity of it all, your mind incapable of processing what just happened, after feebly trying to search for an explanation. One of these is the soundtrack for Resident Evil: Director’s Cut DualShock ’s Mansion Basement : A survival horror game should have music that sets a creepy ambience,…
Back in the day I played a lot of online FPS games, but one really stuck with me and earned most of my devotion: Enemy Territory , the free (and now open source) team, class and objective-based game. I remember during a late night session, one of my clan-mates said: congusbongus always goes for the objectives eh? It was the first time I really thought about how people play the same game in…
Everyone loves game maps. Especially when it comes to large game worlds , there’s nothing quite like looking at a mesmerising map filled with awesome detail, and imagine (re)inhabiting parts of this virtual world. When studying a map of a game that I’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in, I often get a sense of both familiarity and strangeness. It’s not just that the map shows a different…
In the 2022 book Goldeneye 007 by Alyse Knorr , interviews with the dev team reveal the incredibly unlikely success of this groundbreaking game. An inexperienced hodgepodge team left to their own devices produced an industry-changing, record-breaking game, despite many odds going against them. It was truly a lightning-in-a-bottle story. One thing that stayed with me however was how insanely hard…
In the closing days of 1993, id Software released Doom , and the gaming world was changed forever. A landmark title that arguably established the first person shooter (FPS) genre, it was technically and artistically foundational, became one of the top selling and critically acclaimed games of all time, and even sparked a moral panic over its violence. And recently, as Doom turned 30, its cultural…
Having big and interesting game worlds has been a holy grail of games since the beginning. In the early years, technical constraints meant that big worlds were simply infeasible, without heavy use of procedural generation - Elite in 1984 for example boasted thousands of planets - but nowadays, the main constraint is dev effort. Put simply, to create lots of interesting content, you need to put in…
I love games and music, and one of my favourite game genres is RTS. I don’t know which led to the other, but one thing’s for sure: RTS music slaps . I would argue that it is one of the best genres for awesome, listenable music that you can put in your playlist. For example, RPGs have great music too but their soundtracks are too eclectic, as they are strongly themed to specific levels or…