I was actually planning on writing this post a couple of weeks ago, but got sidetracked by the Game Awards business.
On the Game Awards front (sorry, probably gonna keep mentioning these until after they are over) we’re just trying to work out who is going to travel over to LA to represent us at the ceremony. Looks like we should be able to have at least one team member attend, which is great!
Due to budget and work commitments it isn’t going to be me, but not all of us can fly across the world at the drop of a hat. *shrug emoji*
So – what else is going on?
I’m planning to use my summer uni hiatus to try to beef up my games portfolio. I’m aiming to make one game a month over the course of the break, so should have four new games to add to the portfolio by the time uni goes back in March.
I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, there’s a whole heck of a lot about game creation that I still don’t know, and doing this will allow me to explore some areas that I haven’t had the opportunity to work with yet, and in a way that’s pretty low risk.
Second, I get to make a few new games that can go into the portfolio, which will help when looking for jobs.
And finally: making games is pretty fun, you know?
The more perceptive of you will have noticed that it’s the second last day of the month as I post this, so it’s gonna take a fair effort to get a game done, right? Well, good news, I’ve been working all month already!
And, in fact, tonight have a playable prototype of a grid searching game.
It’s a simple game where the player is presented with an 8×8 grid with a hidden path underneath the grid. The player enters an X and a Y coordinate to reveal a square of the grid and has to reveal the entire path before a timer runs out.
As you can see, it’s pretty rough and ready at the moment, but I have managed to work out how to do some things that I didn’t know previously, like building and comparing lists and creating a random path generator.
My ultimate plan for this is to have the game controlled by a rotary telephone. So the player will enter the two coordinate digits by dialing the corresponding number on the telephone. I have a old phone that I’m going to pull apart and rebuild using an Arduino to send messages from the phone to the computer.
But so far, I’m pretty happy with how this is all going.
Next month I’m going to be learning to use Unreal4 so that should be all kinds of fun!