Joseph Burchett

At my last game development meetup, the topic of discussion was social games, the room was filled with about five people.  As the discussion progressed deeper into Farmville, and “why is Zynga making so much money” talk, a lot of us began to throw around a lot of different technologies that could be used to make social games and just games in general. I must say there were a lot of options discussed, UDK, Flash/Action Script 3.0, Objective-C, C#,  and Unity.

Even though the topic of the night was about social games the conversations kept leading into “why exactly learn C and C++”, this was also brought up because one of the people at the meetup was saying he wanted to go back to school and do computer science, but we all managed to convince him other wise simply because there were so many technologies out there that could do what he wanted without having to learn all the nitty gritty. We also told him that if the theory is what he was after, the magical powers of the internets could help him.

Soon everyone in the room had come to the conclusion that really it all depends on where you want to be in the game industry.  If you want to do the “indie” thing then you don’t necessarily have to learn C/C++ hardcore, getting into all that crazy Open GL/Direct X madness. There are so many other ways you can make games (and faster) without even touching that stuff. But if you want to get into the mainstream game development world meaning working with Epic, EA, Nintendo, etc,  then yes, you do indeed need to learn C/C++ like the back of your hand.

I have noticed that just about every new person who comes to my meet ups, wanting to get into the game industry as a programmer always assume that they have to learn C/C++ this is so far from truth these days, the world of game development has become very diverse giving lots of options to up and coming developers. Sure there are very good reasons why C++ was (and still is) used for really hardcore game development, but these days a game doesn’t have to be a graphical powerhouse to succeed.

One of the first things any new game developer should stop and ask themselves is “where do I actually want to be in the game industry”? Very often these days new developers will come from the world of just playing those super high quality games thinking that is all that is out there. Possibly looking down upon any other type of gaming; browser, mobile, etc. These areas are booming, and to some extent making more then the “mainstream”. These type of, dare I say “casual” games also allow for more innovation and provide more creative freedom the developer.

This entire industry is a huge gamble, developers come and go, people get laid off all the time! It’s better to have a focus, know what your good at… Trying to be a jack of all trades can be good, but it’s not easy and I would say specializing in an area of game development would be more helpful in the long run. “Find yourself” before you journey into the big bad world and get involved in the community.  I honestly can’t stress that enough, getting involved in the game development community and networking will open a ton of opportunities for you.

I suppose the point that I was attempting to make is that these are crazy times for the game industry right now, tons of radical changes are happening and things are moving extremely fast.  I am not saying to go with the next hot thing, but for up and coming game developers to not always assume that you have to spend four to six years learning hardcore computer science, thinking that you have to start building your own game engine and learning every single possible detail of C/C++, you have options now, use them.

I am really curious to hear what others think about this topic, so by all means tell me how wrong I am! Ha.

I do believe I have reached some sort of podcasting mile stone or something,  for I have reached ten episodes!!!  Yay!  And I couldn’t be more pleased with the tenth episode of The Game Developers Radio.   In this some what long episode (well worth it though), I interview Manuel Saint-Victor, the creator and owner of the popular Unity content site infiniteunity3d.com.

The topics we cover in this very excellent episode are all the different techniques, strategies, and tools you should utilize when it comes to marketing your game.  It’s pretty insane how much we manage to cover, from how to approach a blog, Twitter, Facebook, was to approach networking…  And so much more!

Seriously people,  if you are an indie game developer just starting out on your game and wondering how you can expose it to the world this is something you need to listen to!

Although the game isn’t really out of beta yet I thought id talk a it about a really nice little flash game that a fellow Flash developer of mine has been working on. The flash game is called Polyn, which can be found at http://playpolyn.com/, it’s a very cute little and very much educational game, where you play as a little bee that pollinates words that you have created by clicking on different letters. But you know… It probably be best to just really break it all down, so lets get right to it!

After playing the game it seems rather clear that the purpose of this game was to help teach a much younger audience how to create words. So assuming that was the purpose I tested the game out on my 9 year old sister, things didn’t go as well as I thought they would. In the opening screen of the game you are presented with three choices for the game difficulty… That was clear enough for her, she just choice easy. But then once she got right into the game she seemed pretty lost into what she had to do.

When the game play begins you are presented with a large list of letters that you have to pick from, you are then suppose to click on a few letters until you create a word. I had to point out to her that this was indeed what you had to do. After she started creating a few more words, she began to enjoy it, but then she encountered a mistake! She was very unclear on how to remove the letter, being there was nothing clearly marked showing how to do so. I then showed her that she had to click on it to remove it, and yeah.

As all of this was happening at the top a small horizontal bar of what looked to be honey was slowly going down, so basically you were being timed to see how many words you could create with in a certain amount of time, which I thought was a nice way to progress the game. After the timer had run out she then put in her name into a score board so she could be compared against others. That was a pretty clever idea to incorporate competition into this sort of game, keeps it fun.

What I would say would probably be the best way to make these types of games very clear is to embed the tutorial into the game play, so that it teaches you how to play as you go. It may be a lot more work and effort, but this way the user doesn’t have to wave through the “how to” (most people won’t, especially with web games they just want to play, not read how to play). The first time I booted up the game the first thing I did was click “easy” and tried to start playing, clueless with in the first few seconds I immediately closed the game. So if you can make your game easier to understand right on start up then you will pull the person in a lot faster and keep their attention.

When I tried to press the “Esc” key to make an option screen pop up nothing happen. Always want to have some sort of option screen. The user needs some way of going back to the main screen, adjusting the quality, or just pausing the game. I wouldn’t say all of these are essential but it would really help to be able to go back to the main screen and change the difficulty.

As for the game play itself, I found it to be pretty fun, very relaxing and simple. Create the words, click the bee and he flies around all happy and eliminates the words I just used, it put a nice little smile on my face like I had just accomplished something. Although I did find it a bit odd when I started putting in words like “we” and it did not recognize it… But when I put in words like “mes” it did, id assume it’s because it’s all still just buggy considering it’s in beta.

The graphics are very colorful, and very appealing! Love the cheerful music to, as soon as the game started up it caught my attention! Not enough flash games have animations, it really makes things stick out! I like how the bee flies around and sparkles follow him when he pollinates the flowers and all that good stuff.

The controls were pretty responsive, and straight forward for this type of game… You just move the mouse over and click on a letter or button on the screen… Nothing really to complex, pretty to the point. Would like to point out a few bugs though… For one when I clicked on the “hard” difficulty every once in a while two bees would just show up and float around. Also after the game is over and you are asked to “pollinate again” clicking that button actually locked up both of my browsers! Latest FireFox and IE8, I am on Vista Home edition… Don’t think that matters, but that was a big one.

All and all id say the game is pretty nice! Needs a bit of work, but for a beta it’s pretty well done. This would defiantly be an excellent game for teaching young people how to create words, it really does have that sort of appeal! Really look forward to playing the final build and seeing what you come up with to further improve this already great game!

When it comes to making a game the only thing I am decent at is programming, everything else, well, I just suck at! Luckily I found a bunch a links to free audio/art assets that you can use to make games

http://pushbuttonengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=90
http://wiki.freegamedev.net/index.php/Free_3D_and_2D_art_and_audio_resources#Pixel_art
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/
http://tsgk.captainn.net/
http://www.idevgames.com/news/textures-brushes-models-free-game-assets
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?genre=Rock
http://www.flashkit.com/loops/
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/
http://forum.freegamedev.net/
http://www.flashsandy.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=683&p=4022&hilit=free+models#p4022
http://charas-project.net/resources.php?wa=0%E2%8C%A9=fr&area=Charasets&offset=85&howmany=10&fsearch=
http://www.videogamesprites.net/
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-excellent-free-3d-model-websites/
http://www.findsounds.com/types.html