How to get inspiration
January 16, 2008 at 11:25 pm | In Game development, Game idea's | 2 CommentsTags: Game idea's, ideas, inspiration, library, prototyping
Lacking inspiration?
Recently there have been some threads about ‘how to get inspiration’ on the Gamedev.net forums. Sometimes it feels as if every good idea is already taken, and that every addition or twist you come up with turns out wrong.
That was written in a game design board, but I’ve also seen it come up many times on level-design forums. Take Counter-Strike for example: so many custom maps have been created that there’s virtually no original setting left. Or Half-Life 2: try to come up with an original physics-based puzzle for once. That’s harder than it looks.
Here’s how I handle it
Surprizes and tools
January 4, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In Flash games, Game development, Game idea's, Programming | Leave a CommentTags: flash, games, puzzle, surprizes, tools
Here’s a small image hinting at the surprize I wrote about in my last post. It’s a puzzle game, it’s almost completely finished and it includes an editor. I’ll post more info about it later, once it’s fully playable and polished.
Meanwhile, I’m finishing up AI Wars – it’s almost done now, except for a few communication issues. I’ve also written a few additional Python tools. Since I’m painting quite a few tilemaps for Aural Fighter, I figured a few tools wouldn’t hurt. Today I added one that takes an image, asks for the desired tilesize, and outputs a serie of unique tiles as separate images. It’s using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to load, compare and save the images. It then optimizes them, using PngOptimizerCL, the command line version of PngOptimizer. The tool took me about an hour or two to create, and it’s less than 100 lines of code. And, except for the optimization phase, it’s quite fast, too. 
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