But first, I've got my first (well... second, but first that I'll be sticking with) job at a game dev. It's pretty much as entry level as you can get, but that's fine since there hasn't been any other jobs locally all year for me to go for. I might talk about it a bit more in future after I've actually started. I'm actually looking forward to an hour each way on the train (rather than loathing it as I did during uni) as it'll give me a distraction free time to code.
ES Engine Development: Entity Component System
No screens this time cause there's nothing new to show visually.
Edit: Added random screen of spheres... yay!...
Unfortunately I've not managed to get any of the methods I've come up with over the past couple of weeks to motivate myself to get work done has worked. Having the Olympics going all day every day on my second monitor didn't help. What I did manage to do over the last few days wasn't what I'd first planned, but I decided that getting the Entity system worked out was an important step before getting into what I was planning on doing.
I've based my 'Entity Component System' on the Game Object Component System (GOCS) from Game Programming Gems 6 which is a fairly simple, but good system. Essentially base objects/entities have a collection of components which each have their own specific data and functions. So an entity might have a visual component, physics component, AI component, etc. I'll talk about it more once I've finished.
I also had an incredibly frustrating loss of code LUA Manager code that I forgot to mention in my last entry. Basically the loss of code happened 4 months ago or so from my estimation. For whatever reason, I must've accidentally saved the cpp file after deleting everything inside a binding function. It was about 1000 lines of binding functions and whatnot to LUA. Considering I'd forgotten how to do all this not long after first doing it, the idea of re-learning and rewriting it was not one easily entertained. So I pretty much scoured every folder on my PC to no avail. Every backup was after the deletion. Thankfully I found the code on my laptop and all was well.
Lesson Learned: I'm an idiot... Or perhaps something about doing better backups or whatever...
Braid
So after the reviews started coming in on Braid, I thought I should check it out. So a week or two ago I downloaded the demo, played through it and then proceeded to buy the game.
I don't really want to talk too much about Braid since it's been covered everywhere, but it's an amazing game. As an indie game it is exactly the type of thing that all indie games should be aspiring to be. It's artistic and different. It offers a unique experience that people haven't seen before.
I'm not the biggest fan of the story. I like how it's told, but I prefer stories that are sort of weird and ambiguous to ultimately have a sort of brain explosion "oh snap" moment where everything suddenly comes into focus and retrospectively now makes sense. The ending to Braid, which was one of the best things ever in any game, did that somewhat, but still remained ambiguous and open to interpretation. While this mightn't be the case for Braid, it's sort of like a movie like Southland Tales where stuff makes a sort of sense, but remains open to interpretation to the point where the writer doesn't have 1 ultimate "this is what it is" answer to give. Although my reasons for why I don't like this don't apply to Braid as much since it's not really story heavy enough for any resolution to mean too much to the player.
Stolen Ideas
Obviously this is mainly faux frustration, but now that we're going to make another game based on our 'Outworlder' concept which revolves around jetpack equipped soldiers going to worlds and fighting bad guys (woah!), I'm more attentive to all those out there ripping us off.
Eg #1: ">Outlander
- Basically the same name.
- Features an alien guy coming to a planet to battle bad guys.
- Replaces jetpack (or does it...) with Vikings
Eg #2 - Dark Void (Yes, Jeff Gerstmann's GiantBomb.com. Awesome site. Hilarious videos & weekly podcast)
- Jetpack game... nuff said
Now okay, so perhaps both of these were being made before I started making the original Outworlder, but that's hardly an excuse.
Also just a something else I remembered when writing about Dark Void at E3, there was a game at E3 that probably was probably overshadowed by a lot of games and might've seemed to just another generic title. Darksiders: Wrath of War is the game and while initially I just saw the cinematic trailer which I thought was solid and well directed, it was once I heard the developers talking about the game that I decided it could be something good. Basically they just describe the game as being like a Zelda game. I'm hoping for a sleeper hit.
