Bubble Pack update - monetisation
It used to be the only question about monetising your game was how much to charge, and you could leave that decision until quite late in the development. But in this era of free-to-play we have to ask ourselves how we propose to charge for the game, and we have to ask early because the decision can have significant ramifications for the game. How to charge for your game is sometimes very simple and other times very hard. With Bubble Pack I have always known that I want the initial download to be free. There are two reasons for this Continue reading →
Collection: Freak Factory
Bubble Pack update - gameplay
I have been playing around with the gameplay for Bubble Pack, adjusting it to get the right difficulty balance. There are lots of small adjustments that can be made to make the game a little easier or a little harder and I also tried a couple of bigger changes. First I tried letting the player set the power at which the ball is thrown. Unfortunately, this made the game far too easy whilst also making the controls more complicated, so I ditched that idea. Continue reading →
Collection: Freak Factory
Bubble Pack - my first indie game
Wow, setting up a company is a lot of work. More than I remember from last time I did it (fourteen years ago!) but I'm getting there. All the admin has had a substantial impact on development of my first game, so progress is slow. I have also neglected to tell you about the game I'm making, which is remiss of me. That changes now. My first game is called Bubble Pack. It is a physics game - how many bubbles can you pack into the screen. You launch each bubble to bounce around the screen, and when it stops it expands until it touches the side wall or another bubble. You have to pack as many bubbles into the screen space as you can. Continue reading →
Collection: Freak Factory
Finite State Machines with Ash entity component system framework
Finite state machines are one of the staple constructs in game development. During the course of a game, game objects may pass through many states and managing those states effectively is important. The difficulty with finite state machines in an entity system framework like Ash can be summed up in one sentence - the state pattern doesn’t work with an entity system framework. Entity system frameworks use a data-oriented paradigm in which game objects are not self-contained OOP objects. So you can’t use the state pattern, or any variation of it. All the data is in the components, all the logic is in the systems. Continue reading →
Collection: Entity-Component-System architecture
try{harder} level-up
The first try{harder} took place last October and I was lucky enough to be one of the 16 attendee/speakers. The four-day conference was residential - we lived together in four "executive cabins" at Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. That means everyone had a double bedroom, an en-suite bathroom, and three new developer friends to have breakfast with. If you ask people who attend conferences why they do it, most of them will tell you it's for the networking. Some of the presentations will be good, but it's the conversations, over coffee, over beer, and over dinner, that make the conference worthwhile. Because the best thing you get from a conference is the opportunity to share experiences with other developers, to talk about code, to learn from each other. try{harder} has that in spades. try{harder} is about sixteen experienced developers teaching and learning. Seminars, code jams, pair programming, and of course conversations. Not shallow chats, but important debates, with depth and breadth, explored over a four day period. Sometimes lubricated with fine scotch whisky (thank you David). The experience is intense, exhausting, exhilirating, and absolutely wonderful. Continue reading →
Collection: Conferences
Why use an Entity Component System architecture for game development?
Following my previous post on entity systems for game development I received a number of good questions from developers. I answered many of them in the comments on that post, but one question stands out. It's all very well explaining what an entity component system framework is, and even building one, but why would you want to use one? In particular, why use the later component/system architecture I described and that I implement in Ash rather than the earlier object-oriented entity architecture as used, for example, in PushButton Engine. So, in this post I will look more at what the final architecture is, what it gives us that other architectures don't, and why I personally prefer this architecture. Continue reading →
Collection: Entity-Component-System architecture
What is an Entity Component System architecture for game development?
Last week I released Ash, an entity component system framework for Actionscript game development, and a number of people have asked me the question "What is an entity component system framework?". This is my rather long answer. Entity systems are growing in popularity, with well-known examples like Unity, and lesser known frameworks like Actionscript frameworks Ember2, Xember and my own Ash. There's a very good reason for this; they simplify game architecture, encourage clean separation of responsibilities in your code, and are fun to use. In this post I will walk you through how an entity based architecture evolves from the old fashioned game loop. This may take a while. The examples will be in Actionscript because that happens to be what I'm using at the moment, but the architecture applies to all programming languages. Continue reading →
Collection: Entity-Component-System architecture
Ash - a new entity system framework for Actionscript games
I've been doing a lot of stuff with entity systems recently. At try{harder} I gave a presentation about entity systems, which was warmly received and led to many interesting conversations. I also created example projects with the Ember and Xember frameworks and had fruitful conversations with Tom and Alec about their projects, even contributing a few minor bits of code to them. But now I've written an entity system framework of my own. It's called Ash and you can find it on Github. Continue reading →
Collection: Entity-Component-System architecture