Videogame Discovery

Hello! I'm back to programming after my short holiday in the 3D modeling world with Blender. Today, I'll show you a gameplay video from my Java prototype: This is a sample level with random spawned enemies of all kind. It shows how you can approach enemies in different ways, trying to avoid them, moving to their same cell to destroy them, or deploying a mine for the most annoying ones. Also, resources management can be done with different strategies: you can repair as soon as you get hit, or decide to continue playing damaged, hoping to reach the end of the level. In advanced levels, you could be asked to complete it after collecting at least N resources, or killing X enemies, and so on. These constraints will constantly change the way you play, and (hopefully) keep you interested in the game. Next: I'll finally move to Unreal Engine and see how hard it is to implement all these ideas in that environment. I expect many challenges, but I'm sure it will be a...

Even though game balancing will come a lot later in the developement, I had to think about a kind of progression in my game levels, not only increasing difficulty but designing a sort of new elements that come into play as you progress in the levels, forcing you to change the way you play to prevent it from becoming boring. Here are the elements that will change: maps: the maps will get bigger, so it's more difficult and time consuming to explore all cells. enemies: there will be different kind of enemies, each with peculiar behaviour. resources: the resources will become more scarse, so you'll have to decide when to use them. First of all, interaction with the enemies. At the moment all enemies have 1 health point, so if you occupy a cell where there is an enemy (or if it occupies your cell, in his turn), it will die while you lose a health point. For now there's no way to "shoot" them, you can both destroy them at cost of your health, or try to avoi...

For my first game I wanted a very simple idea, so I wouldn't have to deal with complex mechanics, animations, rigging etc. My goal was to have a working, finished game, not a breathtaking revolutionary multiplayer game I had no chance to manage; I had many big ideas in the past, but every time I got stuck after spending days and days on details, losing interest while complexity grew too much. So, this time I decided to try and focus on the bigger plan first, and make it beautiful later. My first idea was a simple top-down space shooter, maybe with the rotating capabilities of  the classic Asteroids . After some days, I thought I could go even more simple, and make it a turn-based puzzle game. I decided for a hexagonal pattern grid, and I started prototyping it in Java. Java is my daily bread at work, so it was the ideal choice for me to have something working in no time... and so it was. I created a fast graphic framework using base Swing and AWT functions, and aft...

Hi everybody! My name is Davide and I work as software developer. My passion is to create art in every form, be it digital painting or music, and after taking a couple of nice online courses about 3D modeling and game design with Unreal Editor (I'm going to talk about them later), I finally decided to create my own videogame. And I thought "why not start a blog, to keep track of my trial-and-error process? Maybe my struggle will help some other fellow game designers!" So, welcome to this page and I hope I can show you a finished, successfull and worldwide known game in some months! (Okay, a finished one will be my goal for now). I'll be working mainly in Blender, Unreal Editor 4 and C++, with an initial fast prototype for game mechanics in Java.  Game you next time!