One great thing about working with version control (here at Gambrinous Towers we love Subversion – and so would you if you just gave it a chance) is that you can go back and look at snapshots of your game as it was in the PAST. And that's just what I've been doing recently, rebuilding older versions of the game prototype to look at all the delicious progress that's been made. And I've decided to share the screenshots with you! Enjoy!
Revision 11. It didn't do much more than you can see here.
Here's the oldest build saved into our SVN repository, from November 2008, representing the first few weeks of getting my head around Flex and tiling. There was no animation or smooth scrolling yet, the little guy just jumped around on screen as you clicked on a target space.
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Are you trying to make flash games for a living, but having a hard time making ends meet? Have you made an engaging & fun game, then spent months polishing and tweaking it to perfection before releasing it onto the world? Maybe you got it right and it's a hit – it's been played and enjoyed by literally millions of people! Well time to sit back and watch the pennies roll in, my friend, because that's all you're going to be getting. This may sound alarming, but it's what most flash game developers have experienced using what I call the 'Ad Model' of monetisation.
All this could be yours!
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We're building a fairly simple game featuring turn-based battles with fantasy units. This is the skeleton of the battle system I've devised – I'd love any feedback or comments anyone has to help me improve it.
Overview
The game is a turn-based tactics game where you start with a small warband of rookie units, then fight battles with them. Doing well in battles can improve your units, and give you money to expand your warband or improve the equipment of your existing units. It will be a single player game.
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In Part I, we announced the launch of our brand new game portal, GambrinousGames.com. I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to talk to you about how we launched our portal in record time, and how this same process can be quick and painless for you too. Gather 'round everyone and let me guide you through our journey to Game Portaldom.
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Are you interested in game development? Are you just starting to make games (like us) and want to find out as much as you can about how to design, build and promote your game? Well then it's time to put on your reading pants and get stuck in! Presenting my list of the very best game development blogs around:
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Er, not that game Portal
We've been busy beavers over here on Planet Gambrinous the past couple of months, and we're finally ready to announce the fruit of our labour! Our very own brand spanking new flash game portal, imaginatively titled: Gambrinous Games. Well, as some of our more attentive readers might attest, it's not that brand spanking new. It has been hanging around for a little while now, and has already gone through one iteration already, and we're working on a new design as we speak — but it's our little experiment and we finally feel ready to formally announce it. Read More »
A big thanks to our special guest writer Steve who's taken a look at the future of gaming. Enjoy!
Hello. With the world economy currently getting its head flushed in a toilet thanks to those bullies "Credit Crunch", "Sub-Prime" and "Collapse in World Trade", and the growing threat this poses to our gaming future, I thought I might suggest some possible alternatives that we may need to fall back on during the period that commentators will likely dub, "the lost years of gaming". By all means, smile and nod, but what will you do for fun when society as you know it has imploded, your only gaming challenge is avoiding the rape gangs, and you have to fight your former friends in mortal combat for breakfast in a can? So please join me as we look into the future with a list that should go some tiny way to preparing you for the dark age of gaming to come, and perhaps some eventualities you dared not contemplate.
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Unfortunately we're not over in San Francisco right now for the 2009 Game Developers Conference which is happening all this week – maybe next year! However we have been following the coverage – there's been some excellent talks, many of which you can enjoy even if you weren't there. Here's my pick of the most interesting ones so far:
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No matter how smart the AI, it's not the same as a human opponent!
As we design our first game we've been forced to look at the differences between how a single player game is played compared to a multiplayer (PvP) one. The goals of the player are often opposing, the rewards for playing are different, and how the player deals with setbacks is different. Since we are building a single player tactics game now but will later be expanding on it to deliver a multiplayer, PvP version this means we have to walk a difficult tightrope. We want the single player game to work and we want the gameplay to transition later on.
The Single Player Tactical Game
Our short term goal is to build a simple tactical turn-based game where you start with a team of rookies, and fight battles against the computer to progress. You can earn new skills for your units, and money to expand the team or buy better equipment in between battles. We also want to keep it as simple as possible so we can get a fully working game published and 'done'. Read More »
Flex is a free development framework from Adobe that can compile your work into both Flash movies (which run on any browser), or into AIR desktop applications that can run on any operating system. With Flash being almost universal on browsers it has always been a great way to deploy interactive or rich media applications online; Flex makes it much easier to do this, especially if – like us – you are from a programming rather than a design background (the traditional creators of Flash content). Flex has a lot of built-in components to help make what they call RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), which are basically spruced up web applications delivered via Flash. Here's a great example of a sweet-looking app built with Flex, twittervision 3D which shows live Twitter tweets on a 3D globe. Very nicey.
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Revision 11. It didn't do much more than you can see here.
