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Looking Back At Bob’s Space Crusade

Bob’s Space Crusade was the first game I ever published, it was released on Kongregate, on the 30th of December 2011. It was my first project using Unity3D and it served as a great learning experience in actually getting something out there to be played by the world. It was by no means a masterpiece but the character (who I still have plans to resurrect in future projects) and core mechanic was great. This post will talk about how Bob was originally brought to life and the process that was behind that.

Going into this project I had a single focus, keep things simple. I didn’t want a spiralling list of features that could never be achieved, I just wanted a core mechanic that was fun and simple. This was for a couple of reasons, the main being I didn’t have enough experience to actually finish a large expansive project. The main goal of the project was to finish it, which I did. In hindsight, I would say the scope was too restrictive, the project in its initial state didn’t play particularly well and would have benefitted greatly from an increased development time.

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Classic Game Design: Resident Evil

One of the greatest games to have ever been produced is, without doubt, the original Resident Evil, it pioneered the survival horror genre and became a must have hit on the PS1. The series may have strayed far away from these humble beginnings but there are a lot of lessons that modern game developers could learn from taking a step back and reanalyzing it, or rather the remake that was released on the GameCube. The remake is the version of the game that has been modernized with HD textures for current generation consoles and for good reason, it has aged fantastically well.

Whilst the visuals may have received a few upgrades the core mechanics at the heart of the game remain the same, the central plot is unchanged and even the sometimes shaky dialogue is all still there, for better or for worse. This article will try to look at 3 of the great design decisions they made to really help amplify this game into a true horror experience and how game designers could learn from these features.

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Microcosm Twitter Bot

I set a goal for #30DayDev January to create a Twitter bot, there weren’t many requirements beyond that it had to retweet people using the hashtag. I can say that after the first week of January I have achieved that goal and released DevMicrocosm into the wild. It followed my rough plan for the project, using Python and Tweepy. This combination of language and library reaffirmed my expectation that it would be quick to develop and deploy.

Due to the Python being able to test commands directly in the terminal, it led to some fantastic opportunities to rapidly prototype some ideas, one of these was to use fully fledged configurations for multiple hashtags. This means that there is no need to redeploy the application every time you want to update what hashtags are being retweeted, you can simply change the config file and the next time the python file is run it’ll use the updated settings.

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#30DayDev January

Sometime during 2016, I helped my friend Liam Twose found the hashtag #30DayDev and push it to become of the most widely used game development hashtags on Twitter with a huge number of people actively taking part and even more people seeing the content being developed by the hashtags ever-increasing reach. However, throughout 2017 activity wained as algorithms on hashtags were changed and focus was directed elsewhere into other endeavours. We decided it would be a good thing for the game development community at large to try and revive the hashtag going into the new year and this is what this post will cover, my plan of action for the first #30DayDev of 2018.

This month will be the first month I’ve gone into with a solid plan of how to tackle #30DayDev pretty much since its inception. I’m not solely focusing on game development this month with some time being dedicated to trying to help revive the hashtag as well. I’m essentially splitting my 30 days into 3 tasks; Twitter Bot, Super Blasty Blasty V2 and knowledge sharing. Between these 3 tasks, I think I should be able to learn a fair few new things as well as produce some quality content.

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My Top Games of 2017

During 2017 I managed to get a fair few hours playing games compared to some other years, I even had the added benefit of having an extra platform to play them on with my purchase of a PS4. I won’t bother doing an arbitrary number of games for each platform but instead, I’ll do my favourite game of each and a runner-up. The platforms I’ll be commenting on are; PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mobile (Android). These games might not have been released in 2017 but they are ones I played in 2017 so they fit the criteria.

PS4 – Doom (2016)

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The game I played and enjoyed the most on PS4 this year was actually a smash hit title from 2016, that I never got around to playing. Doom was the reboot that the first person genre needed. It was an absolute spectacle from start to finish with its flashy push forward combat feeling like the original games and yet still seeming surprisingly fresh. The graphics were outstanding and the framerate was solid on PS4 leaving nothing to be desired. The customization elements it had were great accents to an already excellent set of weapons that really catered to a few different playstyles. Doom is a game I’d confidently recommend to anybody who is a fan of games, even if they usually aren’t big on FPS games.

My runner-up this year on PS4 would have to be The Last Guardian, I never played Ico or Shadow of the Colossus but after playing this they are definitely on my list to play for 2018.

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