Now that I have the basics of the game struc­ture in place (how I want to han­dle the base inter­face notwith­stand­ing), I’m knee deep in stats. Stats like how much each item that you can pur­chase will cost. Stats to deter­mine how much each type of sol­dier will cost to recruit. Stats to han­dle how much it will cost to trans­fer equip­ment, sol­diers and vehi­cles from one base to another. Stats to han­dle when / how often Ter­ror alerts should be spawned. Stats, stats every­where, yet nor a map to play.

(con­tinue reading…)

Been awol for a few days, which I’m blam­ing entirely on Fallen Earth, the first MMO that I’ve played that is ACTUALLY FUN — what a nov­elty. Any­ways, you can read more about that on my alter-ego site, Geki­dosLair. Back to business ;}

I’ve writ­ten a bit about the work that I’ve been doing on C:SO’s high-level game struc­ture and what­not, so I feel that it’s time that I give a bit more detailed ‘under the hood’ glimpse at what exactly this means.

One of the bet­ter / cooler fea­tures of GameCore is that it allows you to get in and start get­ting your con­tent into a world and playable very quickly. How­ever, not much has been writ­ten about the high-level game struc­ture and orga­ni­za­tional side of devel­op­ing games with GameCore.

(con­tinue reading…)

Doing a fairly large house­clean­ing pass on the web­site — things are get­ting a bit out of con­trol, so I’m work­ing on break­ing the ‘game site’ sec­tion apart from the blog areas to clean things up. Apolo­gies if things look a lit­tle wierd along the way, but hope­fully it will be worth the effort ;}

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion going on over at ‘The Sell­ing Game’ blog dis­cussing the Six Days game that was can­celled recently and the larger issue of whether games should tackle seri­ous top­ics like war and politics.

(con­tinue reading…)

Now that I have the high-level struc­ture for the game imple­mented, it is very easy for me to add the addi­tional ‘modes’ and screens that the player will go through in the game. Case in point — Weapon Cus­tomiza­tion. Tech­ni­cally it’s not appear­ing where I want it to yet, but the nice part is that I can just add it as a mis­sion in the cam­paign, wher­ever I want it to appear, and the game will auto­mat­i­cally load & exe­cute the mis­sion — almost as a self-contained mod­ule of sorts. This lets me bun­dle together pieces of func­tion­al­ity (for exam­ple, the cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem) and then re-use them as nec­es­sary by essen­tially trig­ger­ing them as mini-missions that the player has to com­plete in order to continue.

Mis­sion in this con­text is more a self-contained mod­ule that gets exe­cuted — mis­sions can load cus­tom worlds (or not), exe­cute cus­tom scripts ( like the cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem) or not, launch cin­e­mat­ics (or not) and all kinds of fun stuff. In this man­ner, every­thing from the Base man­age­ment sys­tem, to the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion, to the indi­vid­ual ‘real game­play’ seg­ments (ie the deploy­ment of sol­diers into the field) can all be man­aged the exact same way with­out need­ing a billino spe­cial case flags and sce­nar­ios that need to be taken into account.

Not only that but it also imple­ments the full User Pro­file sys­tem that GameCore sup­ports as well as SaveG­ames, so as I flesh this out fur­ther, all I need to do is set a few vari­ables, call ‘save game’ and the results of that par­tic­u­lar mod­ule (whether it’s a weapon cus­tomiza­tion screen, base man­age­ment or actual ‘Mis­sion Pro­file’ against the badguys) are acces­si­ble from the rest of the game.

Mod­u­lar design == good.