On a whim, I’ve tried a new look for the terrain I’m drawing. This is substantially more expensive to draw, but it’s kind of cool-looking, I think. If I decide to go in this visual direction, I’ll need to find a faster way to get a similar effect. (Actually, this is hugely more expensive to…
Many years ago, a then-workmate of mine (are you reading this, Paul? We should have lunch!) put forward the conjecture that virtually any video game could at its essence be distilled down into a single meta-game; a game which he used to call “The Space Bar Game”. And no, it had nothing to do with…
Apologies; the following post is kind of technical. Those who are uninterested in this sort of fiddly technical stuff can safely ignore this post; it contains nothing at all relevant to game design. :) A bunch of work under the hood of the VectorStorm engine, the past few days. It’s mostly invisible from game code,…
So I’m a little baffled. With one very minor adjustment, suddenly my terrain rendering is flying at fantastic speeds. Here is a shot of the terrain. What you’re looking at here is approximately two square kilometers of land (the other two alluded to in the title are behind the camera). For those who play World…
One game design concept which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the interaction between gameplay (that is, what a player can do in a game), and the situations he finds himself in. Basic game theory tells us that in a properly designed game, there should not be a single dominant strategy which is…