A Different Entity Component System

When programming Rabbit Wars back in 2007, I ended up with huge objects for each of my game entities. They handled player input, AI, moving, shooting, health points and rendering. I didn’t like it, it drove me mad. But then I came across this Evolve Your Hierarchy article. Since I was still in the middle of programming, I refactored my game entity code to use components instead of multiple inheritance (just like the article described). It worked great, my code was readable again.

Rabbit Wars for PocketPC

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How to make a Zelda like game

Are you one of those people with fond memories of playing The Legend of Zelda? The whole action-adventure game genre was defined by that game, and it was the inspiration for many other action role playing games that followed it.

 

Even today, many game developers are inspired by Zelda, and base their games on similar game play. Examples are Anodyne, Midora, Hyper Light Drifter, Delver’s Drop, Across Age, The Binding of Isaac and many more.

PS4 France] - Hyper Light Drifter bientôt disponible sur PS4 et PS ...

Hyper Light Drifter

Creating such a game seems daunting, but it really isn’t. As a matter of fact, there are many options available on how to create your own Zelda-like game. I will give you the complete overview here.

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RPG Playground 0.13: Conversations

Finally, the new version of RPG Playground is available at http://rpgplayground.com! First of all, this release took waaaay too long. The previous version was released 1 year back, which is definitely a very long time ago. I don’t want any of my next releases to take this long ever again. The plan is to make a new release every few months, or even faster.

A lot of you were asking, poking and bugging me when this release will be out, and what features it will contain. So thanks for your patience! I hope you will stick around while I keep adding new features.

So, why did it take so long? Well, a lot of work was done both on visible features and framework improvements. I will explain everything in this post (so yeah, this is going to take a while). I will handle the most important features first, so feel free to quit reading and start designing your game.

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Scripting in RPG Playground

My RPG creation software will allow you to create an entire online role playing game, but as you probably know, it is still in early development. Currently you can let characters say something, but this is of course not enough. You want the player to have entire conversations with characters, and to have cut-scenes that reveal a part of the story.

My first thought on allowing you to create this extra functionality is by using ‘screenplays’. These screenplays would allow you to define conversations and animations in an easy, straight forward way. Screenplays are created entirely by using a point-and-click GUI. You basically can’t do anything wrong.

screenplay02 (more…)

Game designers need instant feedback

When I started programming games, I had the same workflow as most game developers: Program the game logic in a programming language, compile it, and then playtest the game. Once you stumble upon an issue, the whole cycle starts again.

I did the same for resources. So when a graphic needed updating, you stop the game, edit the resource, and start the game to test it.

This process seems fast and easy on paper, but most of the time it’s pretty tedious. The part you want to see might be at end of a level, so you first need to reach that point (again). You can work with cheat codes, but it still remains pretty annoying. (more…)