n3wt0n!

So I started something yesterday.

It’s quite early, but I find motivation in sharing my progress. The goal? A retro-style space war inspired by Blendo Games’ Flotilla.

I’ve been reading a series of articles about a “Game Design Canvas”. The series focuses on game design, broken into 5 catagories. I recommend giving the articles a read.

There are currently three published, and presumably at least two more on the way.

• The Game Design Canvas: An Introduction
• “Feeling Powerful” as a Core Experience
• The Game Design Canvas: Base Mechanics

The following resources are of interest to me, and will be lacking in some areas. I write for myself, and as a side-effect I hope there are others who find my writing helpful as well. I believe knowledge is power so the following resources are geared toward resources to help you become a better game developer, as opposed to “free resources”. With that being said, the following is a list of resources for the enthusiast game developer.

Magazines

• Develop
• Dev.Mag
• The Gamer’s Quarter

Blogs

• Dev.Mag – South African independent game development blog.
• auntie pixelante – Read it for the breakdown of other games’ design.
• Lost Garden – In love with Flash, but covers a wide range of development topics.
• Applied Game Design – Blog of veteran game designer, Brenda Brathwaite.
• DPerry Wiki – An industry veteran, check out his wiki for a more comprehensive list than this.
• IndieGames: The Weblog – The latest and greatest indie games posted here. Check out the competition.
• The Independent Gaming Source – Like IndieGames, but maintained by Derek Yu, creator of Spelunky.

Tools

• Ubuntu – Free operating system, a particular flavor of Linux, alternative to Windows or Mac.
• Eclipse – Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
• Slick – Java game programming library.

I just read Part One of an upcoming series at Lost Garden.

It’s a good read that covers the concept of making money by providing premium content within your video game(s). Now, I’ll disagree with the focus on Flash as I feel Flash is something that should not be relied on. I feel that a developer who programs for Flash is agreeing to lock himself in to a proprietary development environment… blah blah blah. My point of view.

I digress. Whether you program in C, C#, Flash or Java, this article is still relevant to you.

I’ve been building up a 2D Game “Engine” in my head over the last few months. I’m writing it in Java and am using the Slick framework. I’ve got an information page set up and of course I’ll be posting here with the progress.