Ever won­dered what exactly goes into the process of get­ting a game approved by a pub­lisher? Want an exclu­sive behind the scenes view of the devel­op­ment process, includ­ing get­ting con­sole approval, detailed infor­ma­tion about mile­stones and much, much more?

Well the awe­some guys over at Intro­ver­sion have pub­lished just that — a com­plete in-depth look at the entire devel­op­ment process behind Dar­winia, includ­ing never-before details about the Xbox Live Arcade approval process, their actual mile­stone sched­ule and many other details that are very dif­fi­cult to come across if you are just start­ing out.

If you are inter­ested in game devel­op­ment or are try­ing to break into the indus­try — this is a ‘must see’ site:

http://www.introversion.co.uk/darwiniaplus/

For the past few weeks, in order to help nar­row my focus, I’ve been con­cen­trat­ing on a sin­gle playable map set in an urban ware­house dis­trict. All of the maps in C:SO will serve dual pur­pose as sin­gle and mul­ti­player mis­sion zones, and this one in par­tic­u­lar is a good show­case of the game­play ele­ments that have been imple­mented so far.

Things like inter­act­ing with the envi­ron­ment (climb­ing lad­ders, scal­ing walls, fences etc), dynamic light­ing (flash­lights, etc), stealth ele­ments (cover game­play, sneak & silent attacks) as well as the more ‘vis­ceral’ ele­ments of game­play — ie com­bat. (con­tinue reading…)

As promised, here’s a quick sneak peak at the improved instanc­ing / spawn­ing sys­tem. Granted this is a VERY quickly pro­duced envi­ron­ment (done in about 10 min­utes), and only includes a sin­gle tree type and very sim­ple ‘pla­nar’ grass (which looks pretty bad), but you can get the gist of the idea I think…

So while I’ve been work­ing on the game­play and higher-level details about the game, the pro­gram­ming team here at Helios Inter­ac­tive have been work­ing hard (as always) on the tech (ie GameCore) that makes it all possible.

While we are always focus­ing on get­ting fre­quent releases out to the GameCore com­mu­nity, we always have a few white­boards full of ‘wish­list’ type items that we are deter­mined to imple­ment in the engine at some point. Some of these items are dri­ven by the lat­est and great­est games that come out the door, and oth­ers are our inter­nal delu­sions of grandeur, but a sur­pris­ingly fre­quent amount of these fea­tures get imple­mented at some point in the tech.

While we have done a ‘soft-launch’ of GameCore 2.0, there are still a few nig­gly details and fea­tures that we are deter­mined to get into the engine before we can offi­cially call it ‘done’ from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. The white­board and task tracker have been locked down for ver­sion 2.0 and 2.1 (aim­ing for late summer-ish), and we’re on a mad crunch to get them implemented.

(con­tinue reading…)

Don’t know if any­one out there has heard of Inter­stel­lar Marines, but it is an Indie game being devel­oped by Zero Point Soft­ware. If you have had an idea about cre­at­ing some­thing and wanted some inspi­ra­tion to kick it into high gear, these guys are some­thing to see.

Cou­ple of videos that are worth watching:

(con­tinue reading…)