July, 2018

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Kickstarter Math: How to Deliver Your Board Game On-Time and Within Your Budget

Brand Game Development

In 2012, as many as 84% Kickstarter projects were fulfilled late. While I suspect that figure has dropped since then, it’s still a running joke that Kickstarter projects always fulfill late. Behind the scenes, a lot of projects also tend to run well over-budget, too. So what’s happening and how can we prevent you from suffering the same fate?

Art 130
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What Works And Why: Emergence

Tom Francis

I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’ If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’ I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of course they’re not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like: Multiple solutions: you can overcome most problems in more than one way – the minimum

Sandbox 52
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Maintenance release: Godot 2.1.5

Mircosoft Game Dev

At long last, Godot 2.1.5 is ready and comes packed with new features and bug fixes! It's the result of 11 months of work ( since 2.1.4 ) from many contributors who care about supporting our previous stable branch (the current one and main focus being Godot 3.0.x ). Download it now from our repositories if you are still using Godot 2.1.x for some projects.

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Octopath

Grumpy Gamer

I'm quite enjoying Octopath Traveler. I'm not a big fan of other Square games and generally don't enjoy the JRPG format, but for some reason, this game has stuck with me for hours and hours. I've just hit the first boss I can't defeat (to avoid any embarrassment, I'm not saying which one). I've beat my head against this boss for quite a while and I'm about ready to just quit.

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Iceland Vacation 2018

The Astronauts

Hello! End of June & start of July we were traveling in Iceland, so here’s some photos and stuff. I’ve heard that some folks somehow don’t know that Iceland is absolutely beautiful. How?! Here’s my attempt at helping the situation by dumping a whole bunch of photos into the series of tubes. Planning We’ve been to Iceland before; what we did differently this time was: Almost 2x longer trip (11 days), Our kids are 5 years older (15 and 9yo), which makes it easier!

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GenoTerra - The finished prototype.

Mnenad

Prototype is ready! Watch the new trailer for GenoTerra right here: 96. Normal. 0. 21. false. false. false. DE. X-NONE. X-NONE. I know it has been a long time since the last blog post to this project. But I can now proudly announce that a playable prototype for the video game GenoTerra is finished (and I graduated with the Master in Design *yay*). I changed plenty of things from the last time I posted about coherent creature design in April, I did a play testing with a couple of people and witho

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Why & How to Make Press Releases for Your Board Game

Brand Game Development

Press releases sound really fancy and formal. The phrase “press release” comes with a sort of gravitas that conjures up images of very official sounding businesspeople doing very official sounding business tasks. Extra, extra – read all about it! In reality, press releases are well-crafted emails that you send to bloggers and journalists – in our case, those in the board game industry.

Games 130

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An Inside Look at the Board Game Review Process

Brand Game Development

Having your board game reviewed for the first time can be nervewracking. It’s difficult to send your brainchild to a critic who can influence the way your game is seen when it comes time to Kickstart or publish it. Much of the anxiety that new game developers experience when sending their games off to reviewers comes from the opaqueness of the process.

Writing 130
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Maintenance release: Godot 3.0.6

Mircosoft Game Dev

Godot has had its first public security issue. This has been an. interesting experience for our team. The issue in question affects people that try to deserialize untrusted native Godot data. For the most part this only affects people running as a networking server but people serializing savegame data may also be affected. This last case for the most part would allow people to cheat in their local games.

Data 52
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GSoC 2018 progress report #1

Mircosoft Game Dev

For the first time this year, Godot participates in the Google Summer of Code ( GSoC ). We have five students working on some great projects to add new features to the engine, either via C++ modules, GDNative plugins or external plugins. See our previous announcement for a quick presentation of each topic. I've asked all students to write a short progress report about their projects, which are all in the last stages of development for the GSoC internship.

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Why we broke your PR

Mircosoft Game Dev

As some of you probably noticed a lot of PRs on the backlog now need a rebase because of PR 20137. This post is to explain why. Godot has a copy on write or 'CoW' feature for a lot of its data structures. What this means in practice is basically that: Vector vec1; for (int i = 0; i vec2 = vec1; Is basically free, vec1 and vec2 will share memory and this basically takes no time.

Writing 52
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Optional typing in GDScript

Mircosoft Game Dev

While GDScript is made with the ease-of-use in mind, many people wanted to add type information into their scripts. This helps avoiding potential bugs and also allows a better code completion. We're now introducing an additional syntax to add type hints to your GDScript code. It is completely optional and old scripts will work as they always did. Note: This is a new feature in the master branch, and will be available in Godot 3.1.

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GLES2 and GDNative, progress report #7

Mircosoft Game Dev

Introduction. After all the light types are implemented, the next step is to implement shadow mapping, with all its frustrating implementation details ;). Roadmap. Done June 2018. finish lights. implement shadow atlas. depth rendering for shadow mapping. spot light shadows. omni light shadows. billboard support in shaders and editor fixes. BlendSpace1D.

Render 52
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Dev snapshot: Godot 2.1.5 RC2

Mircosoft Game Dev

Yes, you read correctly: Godot 2.1.5 is still being worked on, four months after the previous release candidate and close to one year after the 2.1.4 stable release ! I planned to release it much sooner, but 3.0 and its subsequent maintenance releases happened, and I could only dedicate a few hours every now and then to the old stable branch. On top of that, I decided to wait for this RC2 to have a proper fix for the Android placeholder permissions issue that crept up on Google Play in May and a

Dev 52
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Godot 3.1 will get many improvements to KinematicBody

Mircosoft Game Dev

KinematicBody. One of the features that make Godot stand out is how easy it is to use the physics engine for non-physics games. KinematicBody allows controlling a character entity around with a single function ( move_and_slide ). Simply pass a linear velocity, and it will be returned back adjusted while the player moves around the level. velocity = move_and_slide(velocity).

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Visual Shader Editor is back

Mircosoft Game Dev

After some weeks of work, the new visual shader editor is ready for testing! What is a visual shader editor? This editor allows creating shaders using nodes and connections, instead of typing code. It provides a simple and fool-proof way for those not confident in writing shader code to create complex shaders. Why was it gone in the first place? This editor compiles to shader code.

Shaders 52
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Maintenance release: Godot 3.0.5

Mircosoft Game Dev

Oh hello, I didn't see you there. Come in and join us at the dinner table with Godot 3.0.5. This is another relatively small release but many people were bitten by the Google Play privacy policy issue. This is why we decided to release sooner rather than later. In this release the placeholder permissions are gone and exported APKs are clean. If you use any of the following permissions: CALENDAR, CAMERA, CONTACTS, LOCATION, MICROPHONE, PHONE, SENSORS, SMS, STORAGE you must add a privacy policy to

Build 52
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Results of the Godot Jam - June 2018

Mircosoft Game Dev

After three days of intensive game development and two weeks of playtesting and rating (over 3,500 ratings!), we now have the results for our June 2018 Godot Community Game Jam ! 110 participants developed games with Godot Engine on the theme TEMPERATURE. There were ton of great ideas, and it has been a lot of fun to play them all and give the authors some feedback.

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Git Question

Grumpy Gamer

I have a Git question. I kind of know how to do this but in a horrible brut forced way and I'd like to know if there is a "better" or more "elegant" way to do it. The letters A-I are misleading. The actual repository has around 600 commits (and close to 1000 files/directories). I have a master branch (A-F) and I created a new branch (G,H,I) and have been actively working on it.

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Why are you making this so hard Microsoft?

Grumpy Gamer

All I want to do is pass a #define on the command line to msbuild. Why does MS make this so hard? Why not have a simple /DFOOBAR option? This kind of pointless complexity drives me crazy. I'm sure some nerd at MS was super pleased with their wicked powerful solution. fine. but provide a simple solution for the thing 90% of people want to do. Sorry, I just needed to vent.

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MISSING

Grumpy Gamer

Yeah, but does it run GraphicsBASIC

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