I take inspiration from Speedball, Syndicate and UFO - where cash management and building up the characters was a big part of the fun.

To get back to the thread's original topic - I think Strategy/Tactics games need to be a lot more mature in the prototype stage to get a feel for how the game is doing + to begin polishing the 'fun' aspects. Much more so than an action game as all the different mechanics have to work well together in the mix.

[world map]

Thanks Ed - I would appreciate some playtesting later Personally I have found detailed notes to be as useful as over the shoulder watching, but it does take a certain kind of person to note all the relevant info - so over the shoulder is useful sometimes too.

I am fairly confident that the combat system will be fun, and suitably challenging to fit it's place in the overall game. In any case as you said it will be easy to develop this part separately to the larger game as some skirmish battles.

So I am focused on getting the trading game working first, as that is more distinctive to the play and all the other gameplay mechanics should really build around this central core.

Since I started using rough-out graphics instead of finished artwork the game's GUI has sped ahead and I am working on the all important trading screen. I figure I need world map and trade screen working, and some time flow and profit targets then I will have a playable trade game.

Then I can see about adding some events during travelling, I see dialog with interesting encounters being as much fun as when the encounters turn into a bloody firefight, so I want to get the dialog gameplay working soon too.

Thanks for the link

This is a good week for dev kits! Unreal Dev Kit is now free to eval and has licenses for $99 with royalties and $2500 per seat without royalties.

For the first time I think the Unreal engine is in the reach of a hobbyist game dev :D

http://www.udk.com/

Aha - if you are a Mac lover that would seem strange. Most of my friends would prefer to dev in plain old C++ on a PC in Visual Studio, rather than Apple's own c variant.

There is a Mac version of Airplay in the pipeline, and lots of other phones to target than iPhone.

I am happy to say that my 1st game-mechanic is fairly fun (Just camera control around an AI town watching some soldiers walk around), and I am going to plow on adding more mechanics/layers as quickly as possible without slowing down to do any more graphics for a while so I can see how they play when put together. I am expecting to do a fair bit of refining, and changing my original plans as I lock down on my gameplay.

I loved that gameplay video and it makes absolute sense when applied to games like FinalFantasy where the bottom layer mechanics are quite simple but there are loads of layers on top stacking up to a game that gives 10's hours of gameplay as you want to explore all of it.

As to reviews - it strikes me that a well polished simple game in traditional genres will often score much more highly than a game with a lot of innovative mechanics but a slightly lower level of polish - so I am going to try and be fairly traditional with the core mechanics, and add novelty in the higher level gameplay layers. That way it should be accessible to starting players, but stay interesting as they progress.

New application and games software development kit for mobile devices, just launched a free eval version.

Airplay SDK - More info + Free registration

[can]

When the core mechanics "aren't fun" isn't that more to do with the skill of the designer than just having the wrong mechanics? I'm thinking a lot of games share the same mechanics, but some are fun while others are boring. Case in point - "Dungeon Seige" - this game felt like it just picked a handful of generic mechanics off the shelf, and could have turned out awfully, but they polished each mechanic into a streamlined gem and the game is fun.

I think a game could be very close to being fun, with all the right mechanics, graphics etc but just be say 10% off being balanced correctly, or with a couple of usability issues that turn it into a not-fun prototype.

I guess it comes down to how much persistence you have to refine a game before making the decision to scrap it and start again. Over the years I think I have written too many games that ended up on the discard pile for want of a couple of extra months refining.

Then again - if you can make a minimal version of the same game that is fun in the early days it should be much easier to keep it fun for the duration of development. I'm going to pick a shortlist of mechanics and make that into a fun proto-prototype 

I had some GUI, 3D and landscape engines/models from previous projects so they have given me a head start to the prototype - I don't want to make any more art till the gameplay is more mature.

The gameplay as I have it sketched out on paper is a trading game between towns, with encounters and skirmish combat on the routes between the towns. I have some town and caravan management with the emphasis on attracting, upgrading, and retaining good soldiers and artisans by running a good town. There are several sub-game mechanics I would like to add to this core gameplay, but as said above - best to get the core working and fun first.

Horror games require the most imagination. I have played Flash games, just walking around an 'empty' virtual house - but making myself so scared I had to shut it off because I was imagining the shocks and frights that might be around the next corner.
If you don't have any imagination (or you feel like laughing at the frights) the game has zero value.

The value of high-production value games with ultra-realism is in the excitement and ideas they can give children who will go away and play with those ideas in RL play.

RPG and other games suffer for imagination when the story is weak and it turns into a munchkin number crunching game - with no care to the characters of setting. But apart from those cases a lot of the satisfaction of a game comes from identifying with the chars and their actions - even is that is just a marine shooting down aliens imagination is required to get past the 'this is all just pixels and bits' disbelief.

[look like]

So, you have hand picked some cool game mechanics, added a great backstory and setting - coded GUIs, locations, inventories... at what point does it turn from a big heap of code and graphics into a game?

I know it can look like a game from a very early stage, screenshots and mockups are easy - but how far through to you have to get before the gameplay gets fun?

I have seen quite a few people use zero-graphics mockups for platform games, but I am working on more of a sim - how complete does it need to get before I can test whether the game mechanics are working, and decide if the mechanics are the problem, or it is just not enough polish.

I guess it is a lot easier if you are working in existing genres and cloning existing gameplay/mechanics quite closely.

[Spice Road]

I've done my first press announcement on this game, and in the end I dropped 'Tycoon' and went for the much shorter title Spice Road

Otherwise I have been marching through building lots of meshes to populate the towns, and have begun translating my GUI mockups into actual code. I have dropped from 3000 to 1000 polies on the town models - but hope to get more detail and variety in the textures later.


View Full Size

Now I feel like I am going to get deep down into the coding forest - building tables and forms, buttons and panels, maps and inventories - and it may be a while before I come to a place where I can catch sight of the gameplay again. Apparently this is quite normal in game dev, a long doldrum of building before it really gets playable. Ah well, lots to get on with

Do many C++ lovers prefer to write large parts of gameplay logic in Lua/Python ect? If so - why are these better than C++ for that?

I thought scripting languages were only useful to let non-technical designers take on some of the coding tasks - but I am interested in replacing some parts of my next C++ game with lua to make it more extensible.

Question. How many of you taking a "strong position" in here are employed in IT as programmers/software engineers/whatever?

Ouch, IT is a dirty word in my mind. I work as a software engineer in a tech + games company as a day job, our IT guy just dusts the server and replaces routers!

There must be a reason all console + the majority of PC gaming uses C++, it is fast and scales well to large teams of programmers. I have nothing against any other language for hobby, web, business or scientific purposes - indeed it is fun to learn several - but nothing beats C++ in the games industry.

Now on the other hand, it is a painful and frustrating language to learn, work with, and debug. It will eat up less able programmers and will punish smart coders endlessly. It is very hard to dip into as you need a lot of code just to start a tiny game - it is a fair commitment to get into, but the end results are well worth it... eventually.

Lovely fog effect

It looks like a custom perspective transform - in Flash you would just rewrite the bit of code that takes model-space vertices and transforms them to screenspace. Normally this would be something like:
 (ModelVertPos+WorldPos-CameraPos)*1/z

In this case you would still need the first bit but the 1/z becomes something lik:
ScreenPos.y += 1-1/z

This would put near verts at the bottom of the screen, and push far verts to the top with a rolling effect.

To get the right roll effect and objects rotating over the horizon, try substituting a different function for 'z', perhaps a parabola so the furthest objects dip entirely out of sight.

Anyways it is a cute effect so I hope you can get it working

Learn C++, it is a great career choice It might be a hard road, but after that other languages will be easy to pick up - and employers will love you compared to the crowd of Java graduates who are worthless to mainstream games industry (I've interviewed enough of them...)

I ended up writing my own keyframed animation editor. Blender was just too flakey and difficult to learn for my needs, and I can't afford Max/Maya (I use these to export anims in my day job).

If you are collaborating/hiring people to do the animation it is probably best to use whatever software they have experience with and knock together an exporter.

I like C++ but only when written in a very strict coding style, with a limited use of the feature set and regular refactoring. It is very easy to write a massive pile of code that is impossible to work with if you are not clean with it (Sadly I know this from repeated experience).

Most of the time it seems that I use C++ to write engines to process simpler script/data type languages that actually do the bulk of the game and graphics. My perfect engine would be a thin layer of C++ and nice clean data/scripts - hmm not unlike Flash methinks.

Then again I don't think I have much choice - once you have a code base of several 100k lines of C++ spread over several large projects there is no way you would migrate to another language, you're stuck.

I like the non-hero, pointless quest, deluded into thinking he is on a grand mission bits. I like movies when the deluded-hero accidentally manages to save the day despite being up against real dangers. The odds&ends gadget superpowers are cool too.

I think this could be fun if you can keep the gameplay moving along quickly without having to slow down too much for backstory/gags. If you could mix it up with a wacky art style and wrap up the gags in optional popups, info-boards, speach bubble conversations that could help.