game development and casual madness

There was quite some useful information in the answers to the last few e-mails I’ve received – or I hope so, at least. That’s for you to decide. Time for another mail bag posting!

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Sometimes, there are questions. And sometimes they happen to be in e-mails I receive through this blog. I usually take the time to answer them if I’m not too busy and occasionally, these answers can get very long. This time it’s about Civilization and referencing content in Duality. Read more

Do you know that famous Game Designer Peter Molydeux? No, not Molyneux, silly. The oher one. He’s constantly posting game design ideas on Twitter. Most of them appear to be some kind of hilarious intellectual fall-out, but in all this crazyness, there is a creative genius hidden somewhere. If you haven’t yet, you should definitely read his tweets. Doing so for quite a while now has inspired me to write down some thoughts myself. I’d love to experiment with them, but it seems like I’m pretty occupied with Duality now, so I guess the best thing I can still do is share them. Read more

After weeks of putting more working hours into Duality than I could reasonably afford it’s finally done: The big user experience update for Dualitor.

(Download links below) Read more

Videoblog #3:

You can download the Asteroids Demo here. Read more

After releasing a first demo of Duality I’m planning to approach creating a simple game using framework and editor myself. Since I’m not pretending most of the gaming community being deaf, the biggest thing still missing in Duality is any kind of sound. Until now. Read more

During my time at Limbic Entertainment I mostly worked on a project that was using the Unity game engine. In my eyes, Unity is a great piece of game authoring software, but nobody’s perfect; there still were some missing or imperfect features. Take the Prefab system: Its great to have something like this and it works flawlessly in most cases. Want to use a specific enemy type over and over again? Just make it a Prefab and re-using it boils down to a single dragdrop operation. When changing the Prefab later on, all instances are affected properly. But here’s the imperfect part: Read more

My work on the Duality Editor continues. Not very exciting stuff, though. Here’s a screenshot anyway. Object Selection is now pretty much finished, along with some related editor framework drafts. Read more

An interesting idea occured to me last evening. I was thinking about how to split the engines logic into multiple threads to fit better into the modern multi-core environment. Of course I would stream audio data in separate threads as usual. But that’s not at all an equal workload divide. Where else are there opportunities of parallelism? The rendering optimizer (automated batching, culling, ..) maybe? Again, I don’t think it would pay off. So I thought about what the video card’s secret of parallelism might be: Data independency. Read more