Jamming Myself Out!

This past week has been an absolute blast--I've had so much free time I've managed to add some art to the blog, put some new posts up, update my YouTube channel, get in contact with some awesome people and arrange my trip next week to LA. In short, all the things that I've been meaning to get to for months have been got to, INCLUDING my very first game project, PEW!

Since Friday I've done nothing but eat, sleep, shower occasionally, go to the gym (before showering, obviously) and work on PEW, a-la mini game jam style. I'm proud to say I actually have three whole environments completely fleshed out. You can see the awesome finished products here:

You can see the separate layers here, each one is larger than the last so that they can easily parallax.

I can't believe how well they turned out--in little more than three days I pretty much gave myself a crash course in pixel environments, grit my teeth and bore through it. It helped immensely to start out with an organized file system, looking at the Game Design Document and writing down the screen resolutions and what my process would be. Having a strict plan is super useful and helped me work much faster, even though I'm not too familiar with that work style--compare these results to my hilarious attempt at an environment earlier this year, which I drew mainly for the GDD.

The horror!

There's a marked improvement, I'd say, and what's more the entire environments feel much stronger and connected thematically. These three environments represent the scenery changes within the first tutorial level of the game--I believe that busting these out this weekend will help keep me motivated as the year goes on; I've got a great foundation and now I can just keep building from there.

What's next? tomorrow I'm going to make everything that wasn't the agents or the environment: User Interface, enemies, special effects, bullets, explosions, and so on. In the meantime I've been passing the artwork on to my programmer, who should be able to turn them all into a little demo later on this month.

Keep tuned, because I did record my process for making these things, and I'll definitely put that stuff up on my channel.

Reading Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun (for game design)"

I'm actually rather pleased with myself for managing to post something recently. I've been so busy as of late, but I'm glad things are finally starting to wind down. I've had enough free time to actually read a whole book, which is a rare event in itself these days.

At my last game design club meeting, our adviser brought in Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun (for game design) for the group to take a look at. I was the second one to get her hands on the book, and I took it with me every morning to the gym to read on the treadmill. I still remember the adviser's remarks on the book; "This is the first book you should read as a game designer."

Theory of Fun is Raph Koster's take on the idea of fun and why it matters not only to game designers, but society as a whole--it proposes that games are a powerful tool for the use of educating and furthering the development of human behavior and thought, a tool perhaps not fully wielded correctly by game designers today. The book isn't too big, I think about 200 pages or so with each page having text and an accompanying illustration. I made sure to take note of my reactions as I read through the book for the specific purpose of writing my response on this blog--my very first thought being, "this ought to be the second book you should read as a game designer."