Today I spent some time working on generating random character names for MMORPG characters. I was getting pretty tired of “Ujkige” and similar unpronounceable names which were just generated by randomly smashing letters together. So today I started working on a system which should do a better job of generating believable character names. My first…
For a few months, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around overarching trends in video game development, and fit them together with what’s going on right now; perhaps to provide a bit of insight into.. well.. into whatever’s about to happen next. I want to start with some big-picture background on the industry. Many…
I meant to mention this in the “Post-Mortem”, but forgot. So I’m mentioning it here: C4 Ten-Four used the “Loose, leading, ground-stabilised” camera that I showed off in the most recent “VGKnowHow” episode, with virtually no changes to the code. Made me smile to be able to just drop that code straight into a new…
An old-school simplistic definition would state that games are about choices; that “gameplay” consists solely of the set of choices which can be made by a player. You can see how someone who thought of games as being Chess or Backgammon or Go might define a game in this narrow way. A more modern definition…
As you’ll recall, the randomly selected theme sentence for C4 Ten-Four was the following sentence: ” ‘A hundred and four.’ I will confess that when I first saw that sentence, I seriously thought about ignoring it and selecting a different topic sentence. I suppose that by chance, I’ve actually been pretty lucky with topic sentences…