So apologies for the lack of posts this past week or so, i have been very busy, just not on this title…
It has been nice to have a week or so working on other things and now i can continue development of Retro Fusion with a clearer mind and more objective goals.
What i’ve been doing:
Games Britannia!
https://twitter.com/gamesbritannia
This great educational event has been running for 3 years now, and i’ve enjoyed being involved everytime, especially in the schools game jam.
Monday:
Oh the joys and stress of turning a schools design into an almost complete game.
We use Game Maker for this. Very fun, and very stressful if you get into it as much as i do.
Tuesday:
With the help of the kids who designed your entry you finish the game in about 4 and a half hours for it to then be judged.
You then try to not freak out too much about bugs and errors ’cause at the end of the day the judging is based on the kids’ designs rather than the “finished” game.
Sadly the entry i worked on didn’t win this year (the design i developed for last year won! it was such a good design and im proud of the win, especially for the team that came up with it)
I loved the idea the kids had, as an idea i personally think it was best, but as with the real world and idea isnt enough, you also need a good design, and this year the competition was stronger in that regard.
Wednesday:
The workshops begin, many many workshops for school groups covering well… everything
You can see the list here.
I took this as an actual day off… spent abit of time working on designs for my own game and sleeping
Thursday:
The second and last day of workshops
This time i was involved in helping with the Game Maker workshop, a great introduction to the making of games created by Griffin Warner and Tom Sampson of Sumo Digital, both graduates of my course here at Sheffield Hallam
http://outbreak2013.wix.com/home
I helped out with this workshop in particular as i have a background in game maker and in 2 weeks i will be taking over the running of this workshop for Games Britannia Live!
Friday/weekend:
Family, party, chilling.
Probably the closest to a holiday i’m going to have, made the most of it and now to focus on my game ’til release.
Now:
Back to business!
First thing i’m working on is fixing the long lost of minor problems i’ve been picking up as i worked.
Stuff like…
- The score not being central in the score box;
- Shield drones not looking like they are going towards the player ship;
- Some enemies ignoring the respawn pushback;
Just minor things like that, nothing game breaking.
And while working on these issues i’m also going through the code and tidying up a lot of messy code, pushing segments into their own functions and moving towards a more data driven structure.
More frequent updates will be coming again now that GB is out of the way, stay tuned.
RETRO FUSION - Video Game Dev Blog 