A Writer's journey into game development

Not too much programming lately. I have spent some time finishing my third novel, fixing the text I received from my first printed book, and planning/starting my fourth novel. The second one has proven to be a boring and long task. The problem is that according to my editor, the publisher doesnt deliver the corrected text, design, etc, to the author. After insisting, I got a weird formatted PDF with the text and the illustration markers. Converting the PDF to an editable format was almost impossible, and the final result was an ugly mess. Also, it took about 12 mb when saved as doc. The solution? Copy and paste as plain text, save again, and then reapply styles, fix lot of splitted words (in spanish, books are justified and cut words in the page edge).  I decided to finish third novel, so I could spend start working on the fourth as soon as possible. An advice to novice writers: you learn to write by writing. Through the first three novels, I have learned a few things about cr...

On december 17th of 1903, the Flyer , built Wright brothers, took of in Kitty Hawk. The process that resulted in the flight, took serious investigations, including the use of an aerodynamic tunnel, technique we still use to test planes. Also, the brothers had to design a method to control the plane: the three axis control, which is standard in all fixed wing planes. Learn to fly it doesnt lacks merit, as the aircraft has proven to be quite hard to fly, even for experienced pilots. Yet, the honor of the first flight is not undisputed, as some consider that it really belongs to a brasilian engineer: Alberto Santos Dumont, who followed a pre-established circuit in october of 1906 totalling 60 metres, certified by the Aéro Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Dumont repeated the flight a month later, this time setting a world record of 220 metres.  Also, the 14-bis took off by his own means, and the Flyer required a catapult. A curious detail: according to...

Congratulations to Underrail team! The game is now in closed beta, and the release date has been announced: December 21st. Read the original post here .

 A couple of days ago I read this curious statement at Gamespot forums, and even when I have no doubts that Fallout 4 is an RPG, I agree with most of the points. What Im not so sure is that Fallout 4 is Fallout at all. I have been playing the game for a week, but from the very first minutes I knew something: Im dissapointed. It is not that Bethesda killed most of the original game spirit when the went the FPS path, thats old story. The problem is that they are killing the few Fallout elements left, so, dont be surprised if for Fallout 5 we dont have even the SPECIAL. The Fallout skills system have been with us since the first title, and it worked, but seems that somebody decided that I would be better to simplify it. Im usually a peaceful people that dislikes hurting living beings, but Im utterly sure that the author of such unfortunate idea should be hanged by the balls. There is a trend of changing gameplay in each franchise iteration, even when it is proven and fun, just f...

You would expect that a mature commercial engine had all the tools you need to develop whatever game you can imagine. After all, the have legions of engineers working all day producing code. But sometimes happens that what you need isnt there. For example, Unity3d added an UI layout editor relatively recent: in version 4.6. And will have a tilemap editing features in 5.5, scheduled for next year. That's right, no tilemap editor yet. Tilemaps is what you use for 2d games like mazes, and happens that I need to develop a maze game. I seriously thought about using Godot, but then found that it doenst builds for iOS and that the tilemap tool documentation wasnt very helpful. So, the solution was to use Unity3d and find a workaround to the lack of native tilemap support. Lucky me, there are Unity alpha builds available and seems that I will be able to use one of them to create my game.

The last days, or weeks, maybe months, I have been fighting with the problem of storing several game element definitions, like NPCs, their inventorys, items, skills and abilities. Lets say you want to have an NPC named Frolo the Habbat at point X. In Unity3d editor you can place the mesh, adjust it, etc, but, how do you specify that Frolo has a Big Stick of quality 3, his attributes are 4,5,4,6 (whatever that means), and has a Magic skill level 5? My first approach was to use XML. When you have a hammer, all problems will look like nails to you, and in this case, XML is the hammer I have been using in all my previous iterations of this project. It is flexible enough to let you put any number of different stuff inside. The drawback is that you cant edit it inside Unity3d editor. The Unity3d solution is to use ScriptableObject and asset files. An asset file can store the definition of an ScriptableObject, and its properties can be edited in the editor inspector. The asset files are...

After a short, but intense course, Im now game designer. Perhaps, to say that I have some formal training is more accurate. I spent the last week in Havana, where professor Salvador Gómez, from Spain, imparted an interesting course for people of many different specializations: from actual game developers to writers. The last day we took some time to show our projects, from both indie developers and government institutions, like ICAIC (the cinema organization). Unity3d seems the engine of choice, and the casual, simple games are the rule. Even a 3rd person game presented there took more from platformers than from complex RPGs. With great pleasure, our team received several good opinions about the project. I really didnt expected that, considering the quality of the titles we saw. There were a couple of artists interested in the project, but still no programmer. Now, lets hope I can make good use of what I learned.