I recently finished playing through Jericho for the Xbox 360. The game certainly isn’t any good, but it had enough fresh ideas to motivate me to play through the game despite some pretty serious flaws with the level design and enemy AI. That being said, the greatest mistake I think this game made was in regards to the story telling. At some point in the game, I was walking through a river of blood, and I didn’t stop to even think about how that should make me feel. I had been numbed to the events that were occurring in the game around me. At that point, a crucifixion had become about as provoking as a spawning pokemon ball in Super Smash Brothers. Continue Reading »

Sound Effects and Music are two things that are easy to forget about when you’re marching like mad to complete a game on time. SFXR is an awesome little program you can play with to generate a lot of really great sounding sound effects, and its FREE. It won’t replace a good sound library, or a qualified sound contractor, but for a certain type of game, it could easily give you the majority of the sound effects you need to get started. Basically, by tweaking a bunch of sliders you can generate a wide variety of synthesized sounds. It is definitely worth spending some time with it to see if it can help you out in your development efforts. Visit the developer’s homepage to grab it.

Need some money for your game? Here’s a massive list of people who will pay you for it.

Thanks to the awesome Squize from Gaming Your Way for the heads up.

What exactly is the difference between a library, a framework and an engine? These terms get tossed around, sometimes interchangeably, which can obfuscate some of the fundamental technology we use when developing a game. Today’s brief article strives to clarify the relationship between these three important terms. Continue Reading »

It’s called the bleeding edge for a reason. In our hurry to target the latest and greatest features in the most up to date Flash Player version, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation where buggy, but “valid” Flash Players can create a less than enjoyable game playing experience. At best our games will not work, at worst, they will work only well enough to give someone an experience so craptistcally bad that they decide that not only does our game suck, but so does our development company, the website hosting our game, and anything ever that was related to Flash in any sort of way. Yikes. There are a few ways to make sure that the user is using a Flash Player version that jives with our game, and we’ll explore the most fool proof in today’s article.

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There are situations where it makes sense to code like a banshee. Perhaps you have a deadline in six hours, or you are prototyping some code that you’re going to throw away before starting on the final implementation. In these types of situations, you generally will hurt your progress by over engineering the task before you. Generally speaking, though, these are the exceptions not the norm. As you work on larger and larger projects that interface with more and more people, you will find that adapting certain fundamental approaches to software engineering will reinforce your project’s viability over the long term. In really massive projects, you’ll often find yourself going back to code you wrote over a year ago. With the right development habits in place, doing that should be as easy as if you’d written the code last week. Like consistent coding conventions, using the single responsibility principle is another step along the path to improving your development habit and writing maintainable code. Continue Reading »

“Design patterns” is probably the most used software engineering buzz word out there. This article will give a basic introduction into the concept of software design patterns, describe some of the design patterns that are most useful in game development, and point out some of the challenges when using design patterns. Continue Reading »

One of the most valuable tools available to a game developer is a reliable version control system. A good version control solution can be the cornerstone of any development environment, but especially so with a distributed team, like we have at Urbansquall. Getting a reliable version control system in place is one of the most important steps to supporting effortless development and is crucial for any team based development. In this article, we’ll explore some of the benefits of source control, and how best to leverage this to move us closer to effortless game development. Continue Reading »