Strides Interactive

There aren’t such thing as a Free Lunch! Part #2Filed Under: Weekly Tuesday Dose of goodness

Hi all,

Continued from my previous post, today I’m going to talk about more examples of how people try to be lazy and even worse, being a jerk by influencing others to be just as lazy.

Now, the topic is still the same; there aren’t such thing as a free lunch. The same goes for game development.

How so?
Read on…

Compared to software testing in my previous post, game development is probably a different topic altogether.

But both share the same requirements, that is - the requirement for people who are working on it to put in the right amount of efforts.

Many a time have I tried to promote my game editors. I know they’re not as popular or user-friendly as the popular GameMaker, but it certainly has the capabilities that can stretch further than what the popular ones can offer.

However, the reaction I’ve gotten from most of the people is:
1) It’s not a graphical editor so I don’t know to use it
2) I don’t understand logical flows or your scripts and therefore don’t know how to use it
3) It’s too troublesome and requires too much effort to write a simple game

To be fair, yeah, as many of you might know, my documentations are still not up yet for Strides Octopus, but that alone doesn’t mean that it’s not usable.

Strides Octopus is a graphical user interface editor. It’s not a scene-based editor therefore you won’t be able to see a preview of the game visually.

Granted, without a scene-based editor, you won’t be able to see certain critical parts of the game, such as level design, unit placement, stragetic placements, etc…

However, Strides Octopus’ initial usage or main usage is to orchestrate game logic and not place units even though there’re instructions to do so.

Now, screaming and shouting for a scene-based editor doesn’t remove the fact that whoever who write games will need hell a lot of efforts to even do it up.

There’s no such thing as “free”.

Orchestration of game logic require a deeper understanding on what you want the game to be. It requires proper storyboarding, state charts and flow charts. All these can’t be presented properly on a scene-based visual editor even if I had a visual editing flow chart tool!

It’s probably mind-bogging to understand why some game developers wannabe who want to create games can’t even bother to mess around with the demo project.

Yes, I have a demo project that’s included with every Strides Octopus release. With some efforts, some cut and paste, anyone can create a reasonable amount of game development work without the need for documentations.

Then again, who really reads the the documentation without first trying out the tool itself?

Therefore, in my priority list, the first order of priority is to create the API documentation.

Why? Because if there’re any problems understanding or using the instructions, the API documentations will really come in handy since it describes what each parameter does, its direction and what it expects.

But has anyone really start to wonder, after all the fuss, there’s still a lot left to be done. Let me just drop a checklist:

1) Basic Game Assets
a) Artwork
b) Sound effects
c) Music
d) Collision Data
e) Particle Emitter Data
2) Level Design
a) Sequence
b) Bonuses (if applicable)
c) Special Sequences
d) Paths and Conditions
3) Specials
a) Game effects
b) Game mechanics
c) Special conditions that affect gameplay

The list goes on, so, there’re many things that has to be done on paper (or whatever tools prefered, I prefer paper though).

Conclusion

So, finally in conclusion, I’d like to reiterate the importance of knowing the bells and whistles of whatever you intend to achieve. Knowing them allows you to plan and manage your projects properly, game dev or not alike.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Whether you use a 3rd party engine, open source libaries or propietary frameworks, you’ll still need to do the groundwork yourself.

There’re game engines, editors or makers but there’s certainly no game creation tool that can predict what you want to create. These tools alleviate the pain and reduce the amount of efforts required, but they do not remove the need to put in effort altogether.

By saying this, I’m not discouraging anyone who aspires to be a game developer. Rather, I’m leaving a reminder as stated in the title.

With this, I’m announcing a temporary break in this series to concentrate on Strides Octopus and Jedi Wing 2 Beta. I’ll resume my slew of articles (or nonsense) once I’m done with either one.

Thanks for your time and patience reading through my rants and I do sincerely hope that you’ve benefited more or less from my articles.

Signing off for now,
Jeremy