Darwinian Diversion

After beating my brains for a week, I finally reached the point on Saturday that I looked at what I created but realized that I was running on empty.   While the code may have been a bit better built through practice, the game I created was even less interesting than my previous versions.  My [...]

The Drawing Board Never Rests

Thanks to my “keep it simple” focus, I have finalized a somewhat powerful mechanism of open-ended interaction in my BYOND game, which is indeed turning out to be quite the Roguelike.  I’ve successfully streamlined the concepts of traditional inventory management with a mechanism that provides a much more direct conduit to providing the players with [...]

Maybe

My BYOND work continues pretty much as I said it would be just a few days ago.  If any new development has come about in my BYOND work, it’s been that I’ve been taking it back to the drawing board for yet more complete refinements.  As I said before, it’s a cycle thing: design, code, [...]

Beating the brains for a week

Thanksgiving Vacation is here: I’ve 8 days off, and with them an opportunity to do some serious BYOND game development.
For me, it seems that Original Game Development is very much a cyclical thing: I decide on what I want to do, code a bit, test it, and then decide on what I want to do [...]

Our Douchebag Economy

Hurray, Thanksgiving Vacation is just around the corner.  If we can still eat as a result of this tanking economy, we’ll have something to be Thankful for.
I’d like to write a little about that, but I’m not sure what I’d say.  What I want to say is something along the lines of, “Douchebaggery: You Reap [...]

Making the greatest game that ever was… or not.

Partly out of the sheer heavy practice I’ve been dedicating towards BYOND lately, my project has taken an ambitious turn.  The other day, I came under the realization that if I can make a suitcase you can drop which releases a bunch of nanites which then assemble a base (and I did) then I can [...]

Fixing Fallout 3, Left4Dead, and BYOND

How to Fix Fallout 3
It’s interesting how many hits I received on how much Fallout 3’s ending sucks.   I thought my Warhammer Online PvP Guide was popular, and part of that was because I bandied that about some forums.  However, I’m getting three times the hits from Google searches specifically looking for “Fallout 3 [...]

Left4Dead: The Virtual GM Goes Mainstream

A concept I came up with awhile back (and I’m not saying Valve copied me or even know who I am) is the idea of, instead of having a Roleplaying Game made up of static quests that are played out, you make a game where the computer behaves as a virtual Game Master who works [...]

Grinding Gears In The Idea Factory

I know I’m a fellow who enjoys thinking, but I often like to do something as well, even if that something is program or play a game. As resolved as I am to see a BYOND project through, I regret to say that a lot of my time has been spent thinking in the [...]

Learning BYOND #11: The Power Of Modular Programming

Though I think of it as being a couple weeks off, this is in mostly counting minor dabbling: the actual amount of time I spent away from hardcore BYOND development is more like a month.  I’ve spent the pretty much the entire weekend (in which I had four days) hammering BYOND, and I think I’ve [...]