New Site and new Game

I've not had much time for game development lately (as I have not had a break from study for almost a year now) but I've done a bit here and there.

I just changed my site URL and moniker to Diacritic Games. I've checked this time, and no one has the name already!

I'm currently working on a new game that I drew the main character for a while back.

Figure 1. BSide in it's current state

It's called BSide, and it's a sort of top down platformer/RPG. Now when I say RPG, I don't mean those games that you spend hours on to make a number go up, I mean a game where you get to play in the role of a character. I'm really excited about making this game, hopefully I can get it done before 'the slump' where you lose all inspiration. If not hopefully I can stay motivated during the 'slump'.

I gave up on Brim because I couldn't get tile-based platformer collisions to behave correctly. I know it sounds like something that someone who has been making flash games for as long as I have shouldn't get stuck on, but I've tried everything. I think I will keep the basic concept and story for Brim until I think of a better way to implement it.

As for Birdy, I've all but gave up trying to find a sponsor...

Game Art

I don't tend to post much about the art side of game making, probably because I don't consider myself very good at it. Nevertheless it's an important part of making games so I thought I'd make a post about it.

My favourite method of creating art at the moment is "pixel art". It's so named because it features no anti-aliasing (basically a fancy word for smoothing), and is often drawn one pixel at a time.

"Pixel art" images tend to look a lot like art from old computer games. In the past computers and game consoles had such small memory and processing power that only small pictures of game elements and characters could be stored and displayed.

Making games today we have enough memory to store huge images that are extremely detailed (comparatively at least), but because of the "retro" look of pixel art, you will see a lot of games using it.

Speaking of pixel art, here is a screenshot from my latest game, tentatively titled "Brim".

Unfortunately my blog and website need a new name, because another website has the name Ork Games.
Note to self: Always do a Google search before you name your website.

New Site Design and Imported Gamerator Posts

I imported all the old posts from the Gamerator blog I ran last year. Now my game development related posts are all in the one place. Sorry if you were subscribed to the RSS and got 10 new items at once!

On a related note I'm thinking of bringing a similar thing back where I regularly post game ideas on this blog, so stay tuned for that.

I've also updated this blog's design to use Blogger's new themes and, even though I do say so myself, it's looking much cooler now.

In other news, my study has gotten more time consuming of late as I was accepted into a course to do a Post Graduate Certificate in Business Administration during my under graduate studies. Long story short, I now have to study when I would usually have holidays.

This means I'll have even less spare time, but I'm going to try to make time for making games and posting about them.

Too many assignments

This semester of university has had far too many assignments and I have had very little breathing space for thinking up ideas. So unfortunately this blog will have to be put on hold until further notice.

It may in fact not start up again until February 2011, as I have assignments going back to back right up until the end of semester, and once semester ends I will be programming games again, not just thinking up ideas! Here's hoping next semester will have less assignments.

Thanks for reading!

How does this work?

It's rather simple really. I post (hopefully) awesome ideas for games during my university semester, and you readers vote on how much you like each one. (See the buttons below each post) The highest rated one will be created by me at the end of the holidays

If you like you can also comment on the ideas, saying what you like and don't like about them.

What's this?

Hey. I'm John. I'm studying Computer Science and Games Technology at university. Unfortunately university takes up a heap of my time so I don't have alot of spare time to do one of the things I enjoy the most: making games.

Yeah, I thought that studying Games Technology would be just making and playing games, too. But apparently not!

So to fulfill my need to make games during the semester, I'm be posting a game idea three days a week: Monday-Wednesday-Thursday. I'll be mainly focusing on gameplay rather than plots, but you may see some plots occasionally.

If I miss a day, go easy on me. It probably means I've got an assignment coming up.

This blog will launch on the 2nd of August 2010. If you would like a reminder when it launches, subscribe to the RSS feed.