Grumpy Gamer
AUGUST 10, 2014
In part 1 of 1 in my series of articles on games design, let's delve into one of the (if not THE) most useful tool for designing adventure games: The Puzzle Dependency Chart. Don't confuse it with a flow chart, it's not a flow chart and the subtle distinctions will hopefully become clear, for they are the key to it's usefulness and raw pulsing design power.
Mircosoft Game Dev
OCTOBER 19, 2014
As you know, Okam Studio, the company that develops Godot Engine, also makes games. One of our oldest projects is The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizza Boy , a 2D point & click graphic adventure that we’ve been developing in-house as a side-project, and we’ve launched a Kickstarter to raise the funds to finish it. You can find it here: [link].
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Sirlin
DECEMBER 30, 2014
Guilty Gear Xrd is great. I'd like to talk about the design behind it, but we really have to start with the art. Artwork Gameplay is what should matter. Starting by telling you about the art may seem superficial, and maybe it is, but the art in this game is so notable—such a breakthrough—that I think it deserves special attention. Guilty Gear Xrd is far and away the #1 best use of 3D that looks like 2D I have ever seen in a video game.
Mircosoft Game Dev
DECEMBER 14, 2014
10 months of hard work. After 10 months of hard work following the open sourcing of Godot, we are proud to release our first stable version, Godot 1.0! Several hundred issues were fixed, and dozens of contributions from the community were merged. In the meanwhile and in the absence of any publicity or mention in the developer press, the user community has silently grown a few orders of magnitude, via just word of mouth.
Grumpy Gamer
DECEMBER 2, 2014
The C64 version of Maniac Mansion didn't use a mouse, it used one of these: A year later we did the IBM PC version and it had keyboard support for moving the cursor because most PCs didn't have a mouse. Monkey Island also had cursor key support because not everyone had a mouse. Use the above facts to impress people at cocktail parties.
Grumpy Gamer
OCTOBER 18, 2014
Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah!!! Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah?
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Grumpy Gamer
JULY 24, 2014
An email sent to me from LucasArts Marketing/Support letting me know they "finally" found some people who liked the ending to Monkey Island 2.
Grumpy Gamer
JULY 20, 2014
Even more crap from my Seattle storage unit! Here is the original pitch document Gary and I used for Maniac Mansion. Gary had done some quick concepts, but we didn't have a real design, screen shots or any code. This was before I realized coding the whole game in 6502 was nuts and began working on the SCUMM system. There was no official pitch process or "green lighting" at Lucasfilm Games.
Grumpy Gamer
JULY 15, 2014
While cleaning out my storage unit in Seattle, I came across a treasure trove of original documents and backup disks from the early days of Lucasfilm Games and Humongous Entertainment. I hadn't been to the unit in over 10 years and had no idea what was waiting for me. Here is the first batch. get ready for a week of retro. Grumpy Gamer style. First up.
Grumpy Gamer
APRIL 29, 2014
This has always bugged me. Now that I've pointed it out, it's going to bug you too.
Grumpy Gamer
APRIL 6, 2014
More scans from the Monkey Island Design Notebook. I'm glad I kept these notebooks, it's a good reminder of how ideas don't come out fully formed. Creation is a messy process with lots of twisty turns and dead ends. It's a little sad that so much is done digitally these days. Most of my design notes for The Cave were in Google Docs and I edited them as I went, so the process lost.
Grumpy Gamer
MARCH 30, 2014
I am not going to throw these out! That was a joke! Several years ago they got water damaged, so now they are sealed in water proof wrapping and kept safe and insured for $1,000,000. Also, this is not the "design document", they are just notes and ideas I'd jotted down. There wasn't a formal design document for the game, just the large complete puzzle dependency chart I keep on my wall.
Grumpy Gamer
MARCH 27, 2014
Very early brainstorming about ideas and story. First pass at some puzzles on Monkey Island. Just writing ideas down. I'm surprised "get milk and bread" doesn't appear on this. Map when ship sailing was more top-down and direct controlled.
Grumpy Gamer
MARCH 26, 2014
I'm doing some house cleaning and I came across my Monkey Island 1 and 2 design notebooks. It's interesting to see what changed and what remained the same. I'll post more. If I don't throw them out. They are smelling kind of musty and I'm running out of space. My first sketch of Monkey Island. Early puzzle diagram for Largo (before he was named Largo LaGrande).
Mircosoft Game Dev
JANUARY 14, 2014
A trip down Godot Memory Lane. Godot was not always called Godot, it went through many (horrible) names, in the following order: Larvotor. Legacy. NG3D. Larvita. Larvita2. Larvita3. Godot. In fact, Godot was just a code-name for what would be something else, a more general purpose engine with a proper UI instead of a set of assorted tools. We knew it would take a long time, so we used a name based on a play by Samuel Becket to represent that feeling.
Sirlin
DECEMBER 22, 2014
We discuss the Street Fighter 5 trailer as well as the games we're playing now: Super Mario 3D World, Smash Bros. 4, Transistor, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Sirlin gives an award for worst menus in a game while Aphotix gushes about a shooter. Hosts: David Sirlin, Matt "Aphotix" DeMasi, and Sean "MrGPhantome" Washington. We discuss the Street Fighter 5 trailer as well as the games we're playing now: Super Mario 3D World, Smash Bros. 4, Transistor, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Mircosoft Game Dev
DECEMBER 21, 2014
Smart completion. It has only been a week since the stable release and development is moving on to other new cool features! This week has been pushed to GitHub a new code completion for the built-in editor. Godot previously only supported limited code completion (only symbols) in the editor. As GDScript is a dynamically typed scripted language, variables are not necessarily typed, which means at run time the value of a variable can be anything.
Sirlin
DECEMBER 12, 2014
In this episode, we discuss the kind of things that go wrong when creating rules for a tournament. The rules for high profile tournaments are sometimes surprisingly bad, yet even when we avoid the obvious problems, it's still very difficult to make completely fair rules. Sirlin explains the rules he chose for his own games as well. Special guest Garcia1000 and Sirlin discuss the curious case of Nintendo.
Mircosoft Game Dev
DECEMBER 8, 2014
GamingPenguin from the forum is organizing a Winter Holidays Godot Game Jam! (Summer Holidays Game Jam for us in the southern hemisphere). The rules seem to be (copied from the forum): The game must be made with Godot. The game should have a Winter Holiday theme. You must enter using the entry thread here: (Coming Soon). You must open source the full project, code and assets, Binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are not required but would be very welcome.
Mircosoft Game Dev
DECEMBER 1, 2014
Edit: Release Candidate 2 is now up. A long time in the baking, but the first release candidate is here. This does not mean Godot is now without bugs, but that nothing should be too serious to affect your productivity. After stable release, we’ll keep fixing issues and then head over to 1.1 (see roadmap !). If nothing too serious is found in this build this week, it will become 1.0 stable, so make sure to test well with your projects!
Mircosoft Game Dev
NOVEMBER 30, 2014
Godot website is back, and with a slight redesign. To say truth we were unsure about how long it was going to last after being hacked a few times, but it seems the latest changes, security patches and overall maintenance worked. We are engine developers, not web developers, so securing hosted sites is definitely not our strong point. After being open sourced back in February, Godot development went under.
Grumpy Gamer
AUGUST 3, 2014
I'm looking for some good recommendations on modern 2D point-and-click adventure game engines. These should be complete engines, not just advice to use Lua or Pascal (it's making a comeback). I want to look at the whole engine, not just the scripting language. PC based is required. Mobile is a ok. HTML5 is not necessary. Screw JavaScript. Screw Lua too, but not as hard as JavaScript.
Grumpy Gamer
JULY 14, 2014
Time flies. The gaming and internet institution known as the Grumpy Gamer Blog has been around for just over ten years. My first story was posted in May of 2004. Two thousand and four. I'll let that date sink in. Ten years. The old Grumpy Gamer website was feeling "long in the tooth" and it was starting to bug me that Grumpy Gamer was still using a CRT monitor.
Grumpy Gamer
APRIL 17, 2014
What makes a developer "indie"? I'm not going to answer that question, instead, I'm just going to ask a lot more questions, mostly because I'm irritated and asking questions rather than answering them irritates people and as the saying goes: irritation makes great bedfellows. What irritates me is this almost "snobbery" that seems to exist in some dev circles about what an "indie" is.
Mircosoft Game Dev
JANUARY 13, 2014
Writing a game engine is a really difficult process which takes a long time and we realize a life is not enough to add every single feature we’d like to it. Godot has been an in-house engine for a long time and the priority of new features were always linked to what was needed for each game and the priorities of our clients. Because of this we are opening the engine to the community so anyone can develop games using Godot and benefit from it’s amazing workflow design.
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