Game Development

So this was an “eventful” week in the game dev community. Unity, one of the most well know, and used game engines out there, after years of doing mostly good for the community, pulled a reverse card and broke years of trust the community had on them. Unity announced that they are retroactively charging (for example $0.2) for each game install, after developers hit a certain yearly revenue threshold, which sounds insane. ...

Decided to write a couple things I feel can help a game in the long run when it comes to porting it to other platforms. It’s always inevitable we have to change elements in a game when targeting a new console/device we never considered, but some considerations, if done from start can save a lot of time, headaches, porting budget, and equally important, avoiding introduction of new bugs due to code changing drastically. These are based on observations I made on a couple dozen projects that crossed my desk, I don’t expect this to be news for someone who’s been in the field for a while, and might even be “too basic” for many, but hopefully it can help someone, since I’ve seen these many times. ...

> Hey everyone, wow ok so first of all it’s been a long time since my last post, I keep telling myself I need to return to do more regular posts, but twitter kinda replaced it in many ways for my daily-rambles. However I’ve been trying to work on something new and gotta get back to more regular blogging, but more on that later. Second, but not least important, Vizati is turning 10 years old today (11 June 2010), feels only yesterday we (me coding and Rita with the art) were doing the first puzzles and trying to figure out the best way for making this a fun game. Things changed a lot over the years and the original team is no longer working together, also because of OS updates, like the iOS versions etc or hardware not being around anymore the game has mostly vanished from all stores. The other day I was thinking about game preservation and thought it would be a shame to leave this only in our computers, combined with the 10th anniversary we decided to make it free to everyone, the original game can now be downloaded and played even on the newest Windows versions (thank you XNA). ...

Hey, It’s been ages since my last post, feel like things keep getting in the way, also not much exciting stuff lately. But decided to take a break from my current project to participate in Ludum Dare 42, it’s been years since the last time, also I liked the theme “Running out of Space” so I decided to hack something. To try and get out of my comfort zone I made my first game in Unity, so that was a fun experiment. ...

As I’m starting to write this post I’m on my way to my home town for the holidays, so I may not post it in a couple days. It’s been a crazy year(s)(?) and I’m taking these near 4h of travel to write down some things. I’m sorry if it’s incoherent, this is mostly a dump of thoughts. For those who follow my work a bit more closely you probably know that for almost 4 years the project I dedicated more time was Quest of Dungeons, which started development in 2013. ...

Hey, it’s been a while. For the past few months I’ve been working on porting Quest of Dungeons to Xbox One, and I’m super happy that it’s finally out. It was released around a week ago, on September 4. This took some time but I’m happy of the way the game is played with a gamepad, after a lot of changes to the UI I really feel like it was worth all the effort I put into it. If you wanna read more about the new stuff on the XO version you can find the article here. ...

Standards are a lovely thing, but hard to achieve, it depends on one thing, everyone actually using it, otherwise it’s just a rule no one cares about. There is one thing that is very common to see in the “game sphere”: Where are [X] save games located? There are a couple of common directories used but I think as game developers we could do a bit better and using a common location. ...

So a lot has happened since my last post. Even before EGX I was already in talks with Microsoft for becoming a Xbox One developer and maybe get Quest of Dungeons to XO. I was extremely happy when they accepted both, so right now I’m working on porting the game to Xbox One. I don’t think this would have been possible without all the gamers that have played and are still playing the game, that’s what brought all the positive vibe surrounding the game, so a big thank you. ...

During Gamedev Camp 2014 in Lisbon I got to talk a bit about the development of Quest of Dungeons, and some of the problems that I had making it while still having a day job. Most indie developers don’t have enough money to work on their game full-time so they have to keep a day job in order to support it, so this is a bit of my own personal experience doing it, some of the problems that came with it and mistakes I did during the development and launch of the game. ...

Quest of Dungeons was made in C++ and OpenGL, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux in native code. iOS is not a problem either since I just have a thin layer of Objective-C to access some functionality like touch, accelerometer, etc and the rest of the code just runs. I never made anything for Android, in fact I never even used one before this, so when I decided to port QoD to it, I had no idea of what to expect. ...