i read it, but it was mostly about engine design, choosing a 3d engine, making one yourself, and so on -- technical aspects.
What? Seriously?
You can't have read it, there is nothing technical or about engine design. It's about how to choose the right tool for the job you want. In fact when I was originally asked to do this, I was asked to not do a technical article, but an abstract more theoretical article that would help new developers. In fact in this article I even
discourage creating an engine if your goal is to make a game. Because and I quote from the article:
The more time you have to focus on your game, the more time you have to polish it and really make your true vision. If your time is divided, your project will suffer. Any time you are not working on something that is directly related to your project, then your project is put in second place. Try to avoid this as much as possible.These are white papers on technical design so that you can see the difference
http://shadow.krabbit.com/varmint/KDBFS.dochttp://shadow.krabbit.com/varmint/KSQLite3.docinteresting for those who want to make 3d games,
It's not just about 3D games, in fact I don't even say what type of game. I do mention Tomb Raider as an example as it's one of my favorite games. But the methodology of choosing the right tool for your job still applies.
Even though in the section
An editor is key. I do talk about how a
3D modeling program is not a game engine and this still applies to a paint program is not a game engine. If you have a choice of engines, look for an editor, it will save you time. You need to see the end result.
From 96 to 98 I ran my own little multiplayer 2D game
http://www.varmint.net/index2.html Forgive me I'm not an artist
and back then 256 colour palette was essential for speed on computers. Especially when using WinG API. I had to make my own tile editor which took some time, unfortunately tools for independent developers were few and rare.
From 2000 - 2002 we ran
http://korner.krabbit.com/viewtopic.php?t=1944 (scroll down to 4th post for some screenshots) So we have a lot of experience with 2D games and now 3D.
I guess in the article I focused more on 3D from our involvement in the irrlicht community
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/author.html where I've contributed things to the engine and helped by trying to maintain the Mac OSX port as time permitted.
but not especially related to what we were talking about here, which is why i wonder why it was put in the 'breaking into the industry' category.
Breaking into the industry was the category
http://www.thirteen1.com/ put it in this month's magazine. This section in their magazine is aimed at new, independents and start ups, with an average age group from 18 - 26. Perhaps your interpretation of that category is different, that's fine. Perhaps you can suggest a title which better fits.
i didn't see that much about dreams, even though its title was small team big dreams -- it seemed mainly to be a history of your team's development of krabbit world origins, and had the feel of a postmortem: what went bad, what went good, etc.
Not true at all.
This has been my dream to make games since I was 6 years old. I even start off the article with
first thing you should ask yourself is, what do you want to get out of this, this is not something you would see in a postmortem. If this was a postmortem, I'd be specific about tools we used, pitfalls, etc. This also would have been posted on Gamasutra were postmortems are posted, plus I would not have waited till the end of the article to talk about our experience.
On page 3 of 4 about 2/4 down the section that starts with
How does all this apply to the path we took? is the only part about how everything that had been written before that applied to what we did. This was to back up one of my earlier statements about asking people for a portfolio of their work when they give you advice on the path to your dream.
After all who are we to be giving all this advice, so this shows who we are.
And in that section I talk about
We did present to many non-game industry investors .. At least once a week I see a number of independent developers go down this path, get discouraged and give up. Even we felt like giving up going though these things, wasting a year with investors who really just wanted to change the dream. Which returns to my previous statement.
If your time is divided, your project will suffer. And because of this we lost our momentum we had gained and our community dwindled and fell silent.
i definitely agree about not giving up and sticking to a project though -- one of the big differences w/ the mainstream games industry is that nobody is there looking over your shoulder getting you to work on your game, so indie devs need to learn self-discipline and learn how not to give up on projects and such
Yes I definitely agree with you here. In today's world of noise and distractions it's hard to keep focused on your goals. Which is why I talk about this in the Garbage To Gold.
Try to put together at least one level first. Just use place holder art (square blocks). You will find it much more inspiring to have a level you can run and jump through, even if it's just a bunch of square blocks. And it's very true, having something that works in front of you, on your screen certainly kept us focused in the face of adversity.
Which brings me to my closing comments, the quotes I live my life by
Henry Ford: "Obstacles are those scary things you see when you take your eyes off the goal."
Walt Disney "The best way to get started is to stop talking and start doing!".