RotM - Nearing the end of a great journey

It's been a while since my last blog post so to sum up, I've been putting the finishing touches to map by adding meshes to the area.  The hardest thing that I am finding is locating appropriate assets provided with the game that suit the style of my map.

I also realise that although I spent a lot of time researching the look of my pyramid, I didn't fully look into what should be within the corridors.  So the last of my time is being spent populating the corridors of the pyramid and the tomb before I do the exterior and interior lighting before the final playtest. Well...that's the plan anyway.

One-Page Designs

As I'm trying to diligently create a lot of content for my portfolio it is important for me to not only create a lot of high quality designed games and levels but also to show that I can document my ideas and levels to a high standard.  Unfortunately, creating comprehensive design documents takes a lot of time and (as I'm working to a deadline) this will eat away at my time to actually develop these games considerably.

I do want to demonstrate that I can create great documents that support the fantastic games that I make but alas what could I do?  The answer came to me in the form of a tweet by Matt Glanville (thanks so much!).  He'd read a blog post by Josh Sutphin, a Lead Game Designer at Lightbox Interactive, which talked about a great way to fully document games - One-Page Designs.  This idea was brought to Josh's attention by Stone LiBrande, Creative Director at EA/Maxis who did a talk on this subject this year at GDC.

Using this method the designer would fully document sections of the game i.e. the UI, game mechanics or map layout and encounters using diagrams, icons, story boards etc practically anything apart from  paragraphs of text.  Apparently this method is more appealing to readers and they are more likely to read the one page rather than a one hundred page document.  I'm not sure how true this is (although I'm sure that it's not far wrong) as I haven't used this method yet, but over the next few months I will be using this method to document the various small games and maps that I'll be creating as they will save me time and provide me with documentation for my portfolio.

If you've used this method of documentation before please let me know your thoughts.

Alchemy on Android!

The past few days I've been for lack of a better word obsessed with a game released on Android called Alchemy.  The basic idea is to combine different elements to create new things.  You start with the basic elements of earth, water, fire and air and away you go. You combine the secondary and tertiary products of these combinations to create even more new objects.   There are 300 items to unlock in total and so far I'm on 118.  So quite a lot more to go and it's starting to get really tough. 

But what I love about this game is that it's such a simple idea.  As I have an interest in science myself I was trying to think of an educational game using the periodic table elements but this has blown me away.  It's a much better idea than using elements from the periodic table as everyone will identify even the most basic elements of earth, air, fire and water. 

I also love the little easter eggs and quirky objects that I've unlocked so far.  I've found Yoshi, the 1 Up mushroom from Mario Bros, a Genie and a Zombie.  I can't wait to play some more later on.

So if you have an Android OS on your phone, download this game today.  Oh, didn't I mention.  It's totally free!  Here's a sneak peek at the game for those unfortunate enough not to have Android.

RotM: Step back to making a better map

So before I dived into starting to add static meshes and textures to my map I thought I'd get the opinion of one of my friends who is quite an avid FPS gamer.  Doing this dropped my hopes of nearly finishing my map to setting me back at least another 2 weeks.

RotM: The joy of Textures and Static Meshes

So I've finally finished the geometry for the map.  It still needs to be polished but its at a good standard for me to begin filling my map with textures and static meshes.  So over the next couple of weeks that's what I'll be doing.  I intend to apply the WoLD's technique and work systematically through the map section by section so each area is brought up to the same level of quality.

I'll post some new images soon!