Prompted my a news story back in September that Halfbrick had laid off the last of its designers, I chatted on Twitter about some of the challenges in being a designer. I’ve been updating the site and realized I hadn’t posted it yet, so here’s a belated update.
Category: Game Design
Example of FSM Building: Combat
A past side project included building Wizardry-style combat. That’s a very specific kind of turn-based combat, best displayed in Wizardry VI and Wizardry VII. I call this phased combat. The player enters orders for each of her party members in turn, shown in the screen shot. Each party member can make choices like Fight, Parry, cast […]
Segmenting (and not repeating) FSMs
I’ve been talking a lot on Twitter lately about creating my solo game, and I’m going to start saving them here as well. Today, I talked about why you often want FSMs on stand-alone gameobjects, and a beginning look at how/why you would segment them. [View the story “Reasons to segment FSMs” on Storify]
Use broad strokes to define basic ideas
I usually start my UI layout with blocks of color. The blocks are named in the PSD file so I can tell by browsing what bit performs what function. By keeping it this simple, I don’t get stuck on details that don’t matter right now. I also get a better understanding of flow, shapes and space.