Global High Score Lists
Games have had high score lists for a very long time. In fact, for many past games high score lists were the main reason to keep playing. While this idea worked well for arcade games where strangers could compete asynchronously against each-other it didn't initially translate to console and other single player games. Clearly, it's not as much fun to beat your past high score as it is to beat someone else's. That's where the idea of a global high score list comes in; The high score list lives on a server instead of next to the game code. This ...
Read morePhysical Queries for the Math Challenged: Real-time Shadows
Recently I've been working on a new game whose gameplay is centered around shadows. This meant that I needed to implement a shadow system which could:...
Read moreGame Design and Iterative Development
I recently started developing my next game, Shade. The fundamental gameplay was outlined by Lost Garden but there are still a lot of unknowns. The truth is, for any game there are a lot of problems which will not be fully understood until further in the development process. For instance, in Shade the player moves around obstacles to collect mushrooms. The mushrooms only grow in shade cast by the obstacles. What should the obstacles look like? What makes collecting mushrooms fun? Where is the challenge? Sure, you can take a shot at answering these questions on paper, but it's ...
Read morePhysical Queries for the Math Challenged: Ray Casting
Hopefully, you've read my previous article on setting up the basic grid data structure and peforming collision detection. If not quickly go read the section on the grid since we'll be leveraging that data structure to perform ray casting. Ray casting is a powerful and reasonably simple technique which can be used to answer several questions about the environment....
Read morePhysical Queries for the Math Challenged: Collision Detection and Response
Following developing Forte I thought I would share some of the challenges I encountered and more importantly how I overcame them. I am what you might call a design nut more than a number wonk, so some aspects of game programming are more challenging for me. Specifically, I ran into trouble when I needed to implement collision detection and ray casting for my tile based game. If you find yourself needing a collision detection scheme to fit your game or just want a way to easily support ray casting then you've come to the right spot. In this post I'm ...
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