A couple of weeks ago I made a game for the Global Game Jam as part of a two man team, in the course of 48 hours. This was interesting for me since it's my first time in a jam making a 3D game, working in Unreal rather than GameMaker, and working as part of a team!

The Global Game Jam page for our game with download link can be found here.

Since starting this blog, there have been a few times when I've started working on a game and considered writing a post about it. Perfectly fine in itself of course, but if there's no finished product to link to on the Games page, I wonder if it's really worth doing. My art skills leave much to be desired, and particularly early on during the creation of a game things are going to look extremely ugly and bare bones. In a few previous posts (here and here) discussing some WIP games, I also brought in other games, using screenshots from those for the title image and hiding my own stuff further in.

It's got me thinking as to when a game really becomes interesting, both for me as the creator, and potentially for other people. Fair warning: this turned out to be a bit of a rambling post really, maybe serving more as a place to collect my thoughts than anything else, but perhaps it offers some insight into my 'creative process', such as it is. And hey, it's written now, so up it goes :)

While looking through some old GameMaker projects, I came across a fun little coop game I made some time ago. It's a tough tactical side scroller, where death comes easily if you make a wrong move. You've got good equipment and the enemies aren't smart, but they are quick to launch ambushes and have numbers on their side.

NOTE: I am aware the game is not in fact 8 Bit in any sense of the term, but I still think it's a cool name. You can download it from the Games page.

In my spare time lately I've been working on a game inspired (in a sense) by the rather addictive Compact Conflict. I love the simplicity of the game, the satisfaction in switching chunks of the map to your colour, the replayability of the random maps and the limited actions mechanic - here used to restrict army movement, but it's something I like in board games as well when used to make every action interesting and keep the game moving at the same time. But what really keeps me coming back is the interaction of the AI players.

A few weeks back I wrote a post about my attempt to build a game around being a higher level commander who has to work from limited and sometimes erroneous information from his subordinate officers. In that post I also described some big problems with the game as it was, along with some thoughts about possible improvements. I actually made these changes earlier, but haven't got round to writing about them until now.

To briefly sum up the previous post, the player was too disconnected from the outcome and their role was unsatisfying, the enemy force and distribution of their units was random and too much to deal with, and the combat system was poor. I came up with three changes I hoped would improve things.

The competition ended last weekend. I hoped to have something done since I managed to produce stuff I was fairly happy with for the last two I entered, but this time it just didn't happen. I think the biggest reason was just a lack of motivation - I just wasn't feeling the contest this time round. That said, I think I also made some mistakes in terms of my ideas.

The information we receive in strategy games about the enemy and our own units tends towards a very limited set of different states in most cases. The fog of war is usually present as a binary state where we either have no information about an area or perfect information, based on the sight ranges of our units or the utilization of special powers which will clear the fog of war. Sometimes there will be units with 'stealth', rendering them invisible until they attack, get too close to enemies, or within the range of certain detector units which can uncover them. These units tend to be fairly rare though, and still only occupy either a completely hidden state or a completely known one.

Made for Ludum Dare 31 (with a theme of  'Entire Game on One Screen'), I'm quite pleased with the end result here. It's a stealth game where you have escaped a prison execution and now have to hide from the guards people hunting you for the titular 12 hours, at which point the resistance will arrive and liberate the area. More info and other thoughts about the development below, or try it from the Games page.