Tag Archives: future

2019 Before I Knew It

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As I write this hours before New Year’s Day, it’s raining outside. Weather has been unusual this season: snow came much earlier (cumulating on the ground in November), but then went away during a warm spell, making this the first non-White Christmas I can recall near Windsor, Ontario. 2018 has come and gone.

Around this time last year, I remember writing I would have a playable version of my indie game “True King” by the end of 2018, no matter what. I’m actually not far off from that goal… sort of. While the game is far from finished, it IS playable, at least for the first few minutes of gameplay. And I owe a lot to keeping my New Year’s resolution from last year.

Juggling so many things… well, it’s never boring!

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Online Stores to Sell Indie Games in 2019 – Revenue Splits and Audience Reach

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In December 2018, Epic Games announced the “Epic Games Store,” a direct competitor to Steam to sell digital PC games. To help entice developers, they advertise a 88/12 cut in favor to developers, and a full 100% of profits to games that use Epic’s Unreal Engine. To entice gamers, they made several announcements of exclusive indie titles for the platform. Steam tried to counteract this by offering a new profit-split deal, and Discord’s Game Store announced they would beat Epic’s revenue split (90/10) sometime in 2019. For the first time in nearly a decade, there is genuine competition in the space.

That escalated quickly in just a few weeks, didn’t it?

Just a handful of stores to sell your indie game in 2019…

 

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How To Showcase Your Game: Is E3 Obsolete?

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This week, Sony made a startling announcement: in addition to not having its’ usual “PlayStation” event at the end of 2018, it would not be attending the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2019. This would be the first time in the event’s 24-year history that Sony wouldn’t be present.

There are some reasons why this could be a good move, or at least, a necessary one. But as a developer, it makes me question how games are revealed to the mass public in the first place.

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“True King” Development – Strategy Board Game AI

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While I’ve procrastinated on this for some time, I finally got around to implementing a game feature this month. A big part of my game “True King” will be a turn-based strategy mode, held on a map grid between two armies, like “Fire Emblem” or “Final Fantasy – Tactics.” Or, more generally, like Chess or Checkers. I had already made a prototype where the enemy character AI moved randomly (see that article here from… 18 months ago?!?). Now, the enemy AI knows where your players are, and knows to move towards you, to create the illusion of a somewhat tactical army.

How does one create artificial intelligence for this type of thing? It’s a basic concept, and I’ll talk about how I did it.

Trust me, you can’t hide from the AI.

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Nvidia RTX – Ray Tracing and its Relevance To “3D Cel Animation”

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Ever since its reveal last month in August 2018, and likely for months following its release later in September 2018, the tech industry has been abuzz about Nvidia’s newest line of high-end graphics cards. Titled “RTX” instead of “GTX,” the “RTX” line is capable of better “ray tracing” performance than even specialized industry-level cards from only a year ago. But what is “ray tracing?” And more importantly, to answer the question everyone’s been talking about: how does the RTX line effect the viability of “3D Cel Animation?”

No one is asking about that? Oh… well, I’ll talk about what I understand ray tracing to be, anyway. Complete with hand-made diagrams of irregular quality.

How light works in the real world.

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