Building the Wolfenstein 3D Engine
As a designer, I of course have a desire to make games, but one of my stumbling blocks is programming. Since I never had any formal education in Computer Science (my degree was a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Games Design) this has always been a bit of a hurdle for me when trying to…
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Space Rocks
Imaginatively Titled… Following on from my exercise in creating as small a game as possible, I graduated to creating another arcade classic but adding a few twists and graphical enhancements and essentially making it a little bit of a remaster. ‘Space Rocks’ is basically Asteroids on steroids. Like a lot of remasters it has switchable…
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I made Pong
Play my version of Pong on itch.io here One of those old discussions about scope came up recently at work, so I was interested to see how long it would take to make something in as small a scope as possible. So I made Pong, you can play it via the link above. It probably…
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Midwinter
Here’s a thing I bought recently. I’ve never been a collector, but recently felt a strange urge to acquire something for myself (and shelf) that had plenty of influence and meaning for me from my childhood, as well as having an influence on my career. Mike Singleton’s Midwinter feels like the culmination of the innovative…
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Modelling in Game Design
No, not 3D modelling, and no not catwalk modelling either. But rather the way in which we represent intellectual property, narrative themes, and real world roles in games. Modelling therefore, in the context of game design from here-on refers to how a game implements the themes and actions of the original narrative or real world…
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Starcraft II – A Study in Balancing Asymmetrical Design
There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game. Or at least so I’ve heard, from various sources. Thinking about it makes sense though; Chess, Go, and even Noughts and Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe) for example, both rely on one player starting first, despite each player having precisely the same tools at their disposal, being restricted…
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Quadratic Bezier Curve Demo
I’m enjoying some of the maths that goes in to scripting and thought I’d branch out a bit by trying my hand at mathematically formed curves. I made this in GameMaker and you can play a demo of it here: https://pyman.itch.io/quadratic-bezier-curve-demo The code’s not actually too tricky once you can visualise the inner workings of…
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Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
J.R.R. Tolkien never liked the idea of his books making the transition to the world of screen. You would hope then, that Peter Jackson’s trilogy would have dissuaded him from this line of thinking. It breathed life in to an already well-loved set of books and fascinatingly detailed world through the entirely different medium of…
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Meditative Gaming
With the slew of modern games mostly revolving around beating ten tonnes of shite out of something, someone or even each other, it’s refreshing to know that we do have a few alternatives. The kind of games for those off-days where we feel like slipping in to a hypnotic coma and waking up to a…
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The Future of Virtual Economies and MMORPGs
It’s worth pointing out that this article was originally written in 2007 for an essay as part of my Computer Game Design degree at Teesside University, and so obviously it’s a little dated now. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see where virtual economies have actually come since then. In 2006, a self-proclaimed investment banker walked away…
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Simon Halliday 