Post GGC-thoughts

So GGC is now finally over. Despite technical issues and that the demo ghost was present for me during GGC, I was still able to show of what I made during this course.

Feedback on my game
I couple of people came over and tried my game at the Gotland Game Conference. One thing that many people said was that the game needed more polish and that the player should have gotten more feedback, but it is a good base to keep developing the game further with. And If I'm going to be honest, that's all fair feedback, these are certainly things that could improve with my game.

Beyond that, this GGC proved to me once again that you cannot satisfy everyone all the time, some people liked the game more then others. But overall, I get the feeling that the game is something that could be developed further.

Future plans
Because of what I got to hear about the game at GGC, I'm going to keep developing the game. I can't currently give an exact timeframe for all of this, but here are a couple of things that will happen with the game in the future.

• More feedback to the players. This was the thing that I got to hear the most of at GGC, and as a result this is something that will have high priority going forward with this project.
• Add the missing mechanics. The GGC prototype does not contain all mechanics that i want to have in my game and I will keep developing 
• More units to the game. As of right now, you only have one unit that deals randomized damage values. This will change in the future, more units will be added to the game as time goes on.
• Improvements to the back-end code. Towards the end of this project, more and more of the code was done in a way that only enabled it to work at GGC, while not providing the possibility to expand the game later on. With new code, I will hopefully be able to add...
• ...Network Support. It's not an RTS game if you can't play it against another human player. I will work on adding network support to the game in order to make this happen. I will write another blog post later about my plans on this front are.

Warbreaking Point Weekly Round-up - April 18-25th

After a deserved Easter break together with my family, I'm now back on track with new mental energy for the Big Game Project. First of all, I have decided on a proper title for my game, which is "Warbreaking Point". This was just something that I came up in my head while I was getting back from the Easter holiday.

Then, I'll talk about what has also happened since the last post. Since that time, I've been looking into the Unity Asset Store for assets and useful technology for my game. So far I've found 2 technologies and 1 asset  pack that I will use for this project:

• Tile Based Map and Nav is a scripting tool that allows the creation of tiled grids (both square- and hexagon-based tiles), and some useful functionality that comes along with it; like simple path-finding for moving from one square to another. After looking into the source code and a couple of examples that was included with the purchase, I think this is going to work out great for my game. I will need to make some adaptations to the code that was included with this pack, but I don't think that it is going to be too big of an issue, as it already has a good foundation of what I need going forward with my project.

• GoogleFu is an Unity editor extension that allows you to export data from Google Spreadsheets into Unity and access the data from there, with no need for internet connection once the spreadsheet is exported. This was the daily deal and the Unity Asset Store a few days back and I bought it because it could come in handy when I (hopefully) develop this game with a full team next year; as Google Spreadsheets are a good way of collaborating when several people are working on something together.

• Even when working alone, GoogleFu is also useful because it allows you to extract game variables (like a unit's health, speed, attack damage and so forth) into an external file rather than hard-coding it into the game. As a general rule, you should never hard-code numbers into a game's code, as you might want to use that number in several places in the code and if you had hard-coded it into the game, you'd had to change it in several places if you every decide to change it and you might very well miss one variables because of this. This also allows people to understand your code better, as the number 100 does not really tell what it is used for; while a variable named Unit_Infantry_Health is very informative, even for those how are not directly involved with your project.

• 300+ 2D Projectiles, Icons, and Items is a collection of various icons for usage in games. I bought this because it's made by an Indie Developer whom I am personally a big fan of, and it had some useful stuff that I could use for the GUI in my game.

Overall, it feels really good that I've now started looking into how to make my game. I feel that I can accomplish a vertical slice to show at Gotland Game Conference. It may not be a full game, but my teachers want to see what I can do of the concept

In the relatively near future, I'm planning on making my concept/design document publicly available for everyone to watch and submit feedback on. 

Preparing for year 3 already now.

Right now, the Big Game project course has started. Some groups are already well underway with their projects, others who lacks groups will pitch their game ideas tomorrow (Friday 4th April) and try and find the members they need.

I talked to two teachers at Campus Gotland, Håkan Mattsson and Adam Mayes, about the idea I had for big game project. And they really liked my idea. But the scope was to big for the time that is left on the Big Game course, in combination with some personal reasons affecting my life (It's nothing serious though,  you do not need to worry). But they encourage me to keep the idea alive and try to make during year three. Which I will do.

As much as my summer schedule will work, I will keep polishing the ideas that I had and try to code simple prototypes of the game. And we'll see what'll become of it.

My programming journey at Gotland.

Lets write a blog post about programming as a variation to all my writings about game design.

Before I started studying at Gotland University (which was merged into Uppsala University earlier this summer), I had programmed in high-school for two years in Java. Among the things I wrote there was an Asteroids game, a game of the Swedish card game Vändåtta with network code (although you had to know the IP for that, so no MMO game) and a game where you where moving a ball towards your mouse and the primary goal was to kill other balls with it.

However at Gotland University, we was going to work with C++. Even though I know that Java is based on C++, I was still unsure of how things were going to go for me programming in C++. And it went a lot better than I expected. Aside from dynamic memory allocation and pointers, both languages are essentially the same with a few syntax differences and different names for methods.

At the end of my first semester, I had not only managed to learn a new programming language (C++), a new Integrated Development Environment (Visual Studio) and a new multimedia library (SDL), I had also managed to use those things to re-create the ball game I wrote in high-school (although with less features, as I had more time to do the initial game in high-school). By the end of next semester, I had managed to program in another new multimedia library (SFML) and learned lots of new things on the way there (mostly things that only programmers can appriciate, but that's another discussion).

There is two important reasons to as of why I learned so much so quickly. The first one is my motivation, I want to learn to program. There is always something to learn and there are always a million and one ways to improve the code that you've already written. The Game Design and Programming program was the best programming program I could find in Sweden (although Game Design is very interesting as well).

The second factor is that I had two really awesome teachers at Gotland University; Rikard Jaksch and Ted Wikman. Both of them where really good and helpful to me when I had those as teachers. Long story short, I don't think I could've asked for any better teachers to have during my first year at University. Once again big thanks to both of you.

So the next time you question that think among the lines of "I will never be able to learn something that quickly" I want to say this for you. You can achieve a lot more in short time than you might think as long as you are motivated to learn it. And it doesn't apply to just programming either, it applies to art, game design, music creation, cooking or just about anything else in life.