How My New Year’s Resolution Is Helping My Indie Game Development

For all of 2017, and even part of 2016, I’ve had a serious problem focusing on making games. Most of my time was spent making a living like a proper adult, but that was no excuse. I think this can be attributed to just generally poor time-management on my part: instead of spending every waking available moment I could on my games, I found myself exhausted at the end of each day, defaulting to TV or Internet, or else going straight to bed.

So I made a serious resolution for the New Year’s of 2018: to better organize my time and work more on my games. It’s February now, and so far, it’s working.

Keeping a timesheet and sticking to it can be a great motivator.

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“True King” Development – Optimizing 3D Cel Animation and Raycasting

The last blog post I made on development of my game “True King” mentioned how the frame rate was unplayable when there was more than one character on the screen. I said that was worth another blog post to explain how I fixed it. That was four months ago. I’m sorry it took so long, but here it the explanation of why my game was so inefficient, and how I got around it.

My new 2D character in 3D... may not represent final gameplay.

60 fps if one character on screen… < 1 fps if 3-4 characters…

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#canada150game – “The Great Canadian Game Jam” Post-Mortem

Happy Canada Day!

The last six months have been busy, but fun. It’s the first time I took a major role in co-organizing a local game jam, aiming to bring the country together in celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday. It finished on July 1, and while I’m proud of it, it’s also clear that some major things went wrong, and lessons were learned.

canada150_businesscard_v02

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E3 2017 : An Indie Developer’s Review

I’ve talked about E3 every year since this site started, and I wonder if I should stop the tradition. It’s fun to talk about the new announcements, but I can’t help but feel that I repeat myself, and that it’s just adding to the thousands of other opinions that came out this week (never mind that this article is a few days after everything is over). That being said, I have something to say about how indie games were represented this year.

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“True King” Development – If A Tree Falls In A Forest…

I hoped I would be finished with trees sooner rather than later for “True King,” but as I continued to place trees by hand, I realized my frame rate for this large open world was dropping bad before I had placed all of the forest. I noticed that the scene had a few million polygons, which is a big no-no (some sources online claim to target under 1 million polygons in Unity3D to avoid bad performance on most hardware). So I had to fix it…

Trees don't need high-polygons...

Trees don’t need high-polygons…

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