Ever wonder what a game developer does in his free time? In my case, I make more games. Once I make those games, I go around posting them on message boards with cryptic messages. Then I chuckle a bit to myself at my cleverness then pass out due to sleep deprivation.
You can play the game now by installing Löve (real cool Lua-based game framework) and downloading and running hello.love. You can also continue reading.
One of our commenters asked me how I made my little videos, and I figured the answer would merit more than another comment. I’m still perfecting my process, so take this post with a grain of salt.
Making videologs is a very fun and rewarding process that usually create more interest than post text and screenshots. The first step is to get the game to a state where whatever is going to be shown looks awesome. The build I used for the first video I released was full of jank bugs and would freak out often; however, I knew what was going on and chose to only show the parts of the game that were bug free. While bugs are often funny and understood by other developers, my target audience is the people who are going to eventually purchase my product, and it’s always best to show them something stable and fun.
One of the biggest problems when working on a game (or any project that is constantly changing) is trying to predict the future. From the start, we knew we wanted to have multiple maps with different layouts in each; however, upon implementation, many unknowns appeared. Will we ever change gravity on a map? What about the map radius? How about friction, lighting, run speed, jump height… the list continues ad nauseum.
As a developer, I’ve got to constantly ask these questions (and often times, come up with my own answers). While working on the map editor, one question came up that had never really been addressed before: Will our towers have different radii? The official answer: “I dunno’.” The programmer’s answer: “They can.”
Warning: The following post contains math. To make up for it, I’ve also included screenshots with captions consisting of mostly smaller words.
Edited: The final bit of math is now actual math and not made up wrong math.
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