December 12, 2011

On The Decline of FPS Games

Mr. Eriksson just sent me this link as a fitting video on my post on The Decline of FPS Games.

Oh How true!

November 20, 2011

The Decline of FPS Games

I read an article about the decline of FPS games and it made me think a bit. When was the last time I actually enjoyed an FPS game? I installed old Deus Ex a while ago but it's what 12 years old? Team Fortress was okay, the one or two times I tried it, but I can't say I truly enjoyed it, hell I never even played it apart from trying it at a friends pc. Well I bought Duke Nukem Forever but I haven't even completed it, it's best server collecting dust at the bookshelf now. No the truly last FPS I enjoyed was CSS. How is this possible?

CSS: my one favorite FPS game.

I am not a big FPS fan and I get sick of modern FPS almost directly. It feels like they are all the same, I don't even want to try them anymore. The biggest upset was actually Duke Nukem Forever lately. It had totally linear levels, you could only use two weapons at a time and it just felt boring and uninspiring. Why is it that FPS games are considered good if the graphics is good? Or have an advanced physics engine? It's good of course but there has to be more to a game than that. Games feel so shallow nowadays.

But I never did think about FPS games when I read the article no I thought about RTS and construction games. The main point the article wanted to put forward is that game designers today, especially big ones, don't want to take big risks so they do the same thing as everyone else. This is what happened a decade or go or something when we got a bunch of very similar RTS games. I remember that there were a lot of very similar construtor games before that too. But where are they now? I don't want a million similar titles, but the basic ideas behind those games were great - and I miss them.

Where is Evil Genius 2 for example? It's one of the best games ever but there's nothing similar, only a bunch of similar games trying to steal the popularity of other, probably better, games in the same style.

We need to stop imitating and start innovating, but we also need to bring back the ideas of the classics.

Anno 1602, one of many classic constructor games. But where are they now?

September 12, 2011

10 Games in 10 Languages

For school we have this programming course for Java. It isn't anything special really and it would be really boring if I don't like to program, it almost is anyway, if it weren't for the fact that we're to create a game! Just any game will do and we're in a group of two and we have about a month to complete it. Mmh I like.

Me and Li, my conspiring friend, have a pretty decent idea of something we can make. The only minor thing is that neither he nor I know anything about Java. Turns out I've done some gamemaking in mostly C++ and it's really not different so we'll see how the game finishes.

Now this game me a bit of an idea, or rather it resurfaces and older idea, namely to make a few games in a couple of different languages. I like to explore different languages and I like to make games so why not combine them?

I'll try to make 10 different games with 10 different languages, starting with this Java game. I won't make this one alone but that hardly matters I guess, there's plenty of time to code in solitude later.

These are some I had in mind:

1. Java
   This one is slated for release in the middle of October

2. C++
   I'm not sure if this one is considered cheating? I mean I've made a few already.

3. C
   I haven't done much pure C, and this looks like a nice time as any.

4. Lua
   I've used you to change values without compiling before, but do you have more to offer me?

5. Clojure
   I do love lisp and as it runs on the JVM it shouldn't be too different from Java.

6. Scala
   Scala is one of those languages you just got to try someday. Also a JVM, piece of cake right?

7. Perl
   Perhaps my current favorite language, it's just so fun to write you know?

8. Python
   When you're gonna do the Ludum Dare many are recommending you to use Python with PyGame, it's time to find out why.

9. Coffee-script + html 5
   One of the more hyped up web technologies right now and I haven't used them? Shame on me.

10. Haskell
    Oh Haskell, I've tried to get you down the last two summers but you won't quite let me. Enough is enough, you're going down!

I might change one or two later on if I find something better to try out (C++ is a bit lazy to include) and I certainly won't do them in this order. There's a big chance I won't do them once a month either, but that's the general goal I'm setting up.

Now it's time to do some other, more boring, school work...

May 2, 2011

I Made It!

It's been over a year, but I haven't lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I've completed a Ludum Dare! Not an easy feat and yet there are tons of games that look absolutely wonderful. I'm not there yet but now I have at least gotten back into game making again, long overdue.

I will make a formal post and all that jaz when I wake up tomorrow, or maybe I'll sleep the whole day... Nah not really, but at least a while.

Here's my entry btw, didn't turn out the way I wanted it to but in the end I'm quite satisfied. There are a ton of possibilities for it though.

Oh well. Nap time!

April 10, 2010

Widening the horizon

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives?

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo

January 24, 2010

Why is my file so huge?

My latest game was absolutely huge! And I'm not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.

It was 14,6mb!!

Now every way you look at it, that's incredibly huge. It's like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it's not.

Incredible I thought, what the heck did I do wrong? I mean my code isn't really good but I never knew it was this horrible. So today I was determined to find the cause of this obscene mutant ant.

I started out chopping off everything regarding exceptions, cause all c++ resources I've read say exceptions will take space like a mutant gremlin. Okay I thought and chopped away everything - but nothing happened.

Now that's weird, what happens if I scrap this.. and this.. It ended with me beginning a big revamp of my whole "engine", or rather collection of stuff - nothing inherently wrong as it was badly needed - but nothing happened with my exe file! It was still almost 2mb big with basically only a hello world...

Then it struck me! I had been using -g with gcc and without any optimizing at all. When I turned on size and speed optimizations and scrapped the debugging the change was quite extraordinary.

The mutant 14 637 kb was magically transformed to a more fitting ant size of 856 kb. I couldn't save much of the total file size (23 254 kb -> 20 768 kb) so while I apologize for hogging your bandwidth, time and harddrive space I'm hoping you won't be too mad at me.

September 28, 2009

Why make games

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon... Damn - when you count them like this you'll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of them has inspired me and made me wanna create something similar. No - something even better!

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?