Game Development Resources @game-dev-resources - Tumblr Blog

There's a lot of great educational resources out there that can help you refine your game development skills -- the trouble is knowing where to look.

A long list of books and websites that have helped game developers.

#gamasutra

Gallery of Disney animation principles.

#animation

Do you struggle to make your code hang together into a cohesive whole?

Find it harder to make changes as your codebase grows?

Feel like your game is a giant hairball where everything is intertwined with everything else?

Wonder if and how design patterns apply to games?

Hear things like “cache coherency” and “object pools”, but don’t know how to use them to make your game faster?

#programming #game development

In this classic Game Developer magazine column, industry veteran Noah Falstein examines when it's appropriate to invest your time in telling a good story, and when it's better to leave well enough alone.

Story vs game, or story + game?

#story #game design advice

One step beyond the anti-hero, there's the amoral or morally challenged main character. Sometimes, a protagonist is so dark, you can't even use the term "hero" to describe him or her. But how do you get your audience to root for a character who might throw an old lady under a bus? Here are 10 ways.

#characterization

Wall of text with links to procedural narrative-related stuff.

#procedural narrative #automated storytelling

If the process of narrative is automated, can players in a role-playing game (“RPG”) be given greater autonomy to shape the course of the game? The question implies three things. First, that it could be possible to automate the process of dramatic narration. Second, that players would somehow be more empowered to change the course of a narrative if left to their own devices. And third, that player autonomy is something to be desired. None of these assumptions are necessarily correct, but if it is possible to create procedural narrative, (either for a tabletop RPG, or for a computer-mediated multi-player experience) a number of benefits would ensue.

Gamist vs narrativist vs simulationist play

Ways to think about procedural narrative

#procedural narrative #automated storytelling

Think about every story you have read and every movie you have watched. Most of them will stretch and shrink time by omitting or elaborating various details.

We want to do this in many types of games.

In a game that directly tells a story, you can follow the technique used by storytellers. But what about more open ended games?

If you can’t stretch and shrink time, try to stretch and shrink space.

On manipulating time and space to minimize boring stuff.

#game design

The problem of terrain transitioning grows out of the need for a single type of terrain to be able to mesh with itself and still look good when placed next to another terrain. A forest tile should fit together with other forest tiles so that the forest proceeds seamlessly from one map cell to the next. But what happens when the forest tile is placed next to another type of terrain, such as mountains or grassland? Without some form "transitioning" the map looks very blocky and artificial.

Prettifying tile-based terrain.

#tiles #game development

Game Developer magazine issues from 1994 to 2013. Don't get lost trying to read it all!

#game developer

Where do I start is the most common type of question I get. I feel like starting is the biggest hurdle for a lot of people because they don’t realize that everything, even the crazy AAA game you see out there,started out as nothing and built upon itself until it became what it was destined to be. When your dream game is sitting in your head and you take that first step towards creating it, it can be very overwhelming to go from a state of imagination to implementation. For someone who has never made a game, something as simple as making a character move can be something that just seem like a huge impossible hurtle and can quickly become a huge discouraging defeat. It doesn’t have to be like this, the key is to start small.

Advice on getting started, by Tommy Refenes, co-creator of Super Meat Boy.

#tommy refenes #super meat boy #getting started #video game development

Advice on how to deal with long games and players' forgetfulness.

#nier #drakengard #story

YoYo Games is the home of GameMaker: Studio, the fastest and easiest to use cross-platform game development technology, allowing developers to create games in a single code base and then publish them to run natively across an unprecedented number of mobile, desktop and web platforms.

Genres don't have to be comfortable old pairs of socks. Genre storytelling can be thrilling and unexpected — and one major way to seize the element of surprise is to bust out of genre boundaries, like a rocket sled crashing through the walls of dreamland. Drop some nanotech into that literary story. Nuke the fairy kingdom. Or screw mash-ups — just create something that nobody can taxonomize.

A whole lot of details on how to get into the business.

#game industry

7. Give your character an obsession.

Obsession is interesting. It just is. An obsessed character wants something – or someone – in a way that creates drive, urgency, potential conflict, story. An obsession also reveals a lot about character.

Characterization, not necessarily for games.

#character design #characterization

Game design document explanation from the National STEM Video Game Challenge.

#game design document

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