Merry Christmas :)

This time I will not write about anything game related (mostly because I don't have any news in this filed ), so.. have a merry Christmas folks:). I hope everyone will have a true family atmosphere and a rich Santa ;).

Next milestones of Dwarfs King

Latest news from my battle front ;). Units have their needs : hunger, rest, happiness. Something ala the sims. Also if unit feels hungry it will automatically seek "dining hall" and proceed to it to replenish its food resources :). Neatly.

Besides today at 9 pm I have flight to my home at Poland and I will return to Denmark in the mid of January :). I'm longing for my TV series :).

Dwarfs King : Idea

In my previous post I told you that I will introduce my new game a bit more. So, here is some info:

Dwarfs King
This is working title of my game. Actually if someone can came up with better name, I would be grateful.

Idea :
The idea is a mix between Evil Genius game(or Dungeon Keeper), Settlers and a bit of Majesty. Basically you are the king of dwarfs, you build your kingdom inside a mountain (Think of Tolkien's Moria), taking care of your subjects. You need to gather resources and maintain economy of your kingdom, while fighting with thieves or demons from the depth.
Your subjects are autonomic just like in Majesty. You can assign them professions but they will decide if it is time to work or to go to eat something (every unit has it's needs : hunger, rest etc).

What's already done :
As I said in previous post, I'm more concentrating on gameplay mechanics then graphics, so all graphics now are placeholders. I already have map of the dungeon displayed on screen. Worker unit which can find automatically it's way from point A to point B in the dungeon. Building of corridors is also implemented. Simple resource system is also there. Right now I'm working on simple unit's needs system. It would be nice someone could instruct me how to make a video from my app and send it to youtube. You would be able to see what I'm talking about now:).

Prototyping with MVC pattern

Recently I had some free time and I happily spent it on developing my new game. As always before coding I spent some time with pen and paper designing the implementation I know that it will be a big project and I know that if I will try to make it with the same "production process" which I used previously, it could easily end up unfinished. I mean, previously when I added a new feature which required graphics, always this graphics was almost at finished state. I didn't use placeholder to just get going with the code. Now with my most recent project I took a different approach. I want this game to be 3D, but I known that going in this direction from the very begging would require much work from me. For example when I would implement units in game, I will probably end up doing animations and modeling stuff instead of polishing gameplay features. To prevent this I decided to write my code in more prototyping way. Right now I have a dungeon on screen, I have units in it, and I have the ability to build building inside the dungeon, but.. the dungeon is just a 2D top down representation made of mono colored titles. Also my unit is just a blue dot. All at I'm focusing right now are game features and gameplay mechanics. This way I will know if my game is actually super playable idea or it will get you bored in few seconds. Also it will makes me more motivated because I will see the results of my work much faster. And at some point I will switch to 3D graphics :), and the best thing is that this time I would be able to post on the forum "I have written a game with placeholder graphics and I'm seeking an art person to make models for it" instead of "I want to write a game and I'm seeking someone to help with graphics", which is a big difference, trust me.
Okay, enough with the introduction part, lets talk about the meat ;). When I read that I'm actually planing at some point to switch from 2D to 3D you probably thought: "What? Isn't it more work when writing for 3D from the beginning?". Well not exactly. You see, I've designed every part of my code with Model View Controller pattern in mind. Sometimes 3D and 2D differ only in presentation of the game world, but model part, I mean how you store your units, dungeon data and so on, are the same either it is for 3D or not. And now I can only switch the view part to have a 3D representation of my game, and use 2D part as a minimap of the area :) (fully functional by the way because you can actually play whole game in the map view;) ).
I didn't write much implementation details, because I don't know if you people are interested in it. If you want me to give more details on this, just left me a note in comments. Oh, and I think that my next post will be about idea of my new game itself, so you will know exactly on what I'm working on. And no it is not an RTS game ;).

Time passes by.. and some sales stats.

You may wonder why I'm not updating my blog lately.. Well, the reason is quite simple : I don't have time as we are approaching our project deadline at the university. All next week I will probably write project documentation and stuff.


Few weeks earlier I was making a "research" about game ideas which I would want to make. I have written all pros and cons for few different games among which was Project GAWIN, tactical game like UFO:Enemy Unknown, and few others. I've picked one, cool enough to make me wanted to play it when I was designing this game. Also I have sent some of this ideas to few people and they also have chosen the same game idea:). So, now I have a nice idea to work on, but I don't have time to do it.. Oh, one more thing, this time the game will be not for mobile, so if anyone of you wait for my next mobile game...sorry, not this time folks.

If you ask why I'm not so eager to work on next mobile game, or why I'm not making next version of Sigmore Mines (ok this one maybe I will make in the future)?

Here are sales stats from my site for 1 Dec 2007 :
Sigmore Mines total sales : 38 (plimus) + 5 (paypal)
Treasure Digger total sales : 5 + 3(paypal)
Block Logic : 0

I started selling SM from January in 2006, so as you can see it's not much. Ok I admit I made this games for my joy and portfolio. Money never was something what I was counting for, but still it's nice to get some cash from your hobby. So if this is for my enjoyment then I want to make something what I would like to make, and that means PC game ;). Besides if I would make it properly I could price it at 20$ instead of 5$ :P.