Of all the fun, interesting, exciting game development topics I could write about, I chose: testing.
Why?
Because testing is essential to shipping your game without bugs and without hours upon hours of manual effort. As we'll see shortly, there are well-known patterns and practices you can apply …
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This blog post includes a discussion about AABB collision resolution: what it is and isn't, it's strengths and weaknesses, some common pitfalls, and how you can (hopefully) implement it in your low-level gaming tool of choice, if needed.
I learned all this (the second time) as part of adding fast …
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I recently engaged in a conversation with someone about religion and games; specifically, about me showing, explaining, and playing the audio of verses of the Qur'an in my games. This discussion lead me to think about, question, evaluate, and eventually understand (at a deeper level) why I do this, and …
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Welcome to the rather large retrospective on Eman Quest. Eman Quest, if you haven't heard about it, is a "procedurally-generated mini-RPG with memory mechanics." You can try the full game, for free, on Itch.
This retrospective covers two parts: first, the overall idea (what did I plan to achieve? What …
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Godot allows you to capture in-game screen-shots, without the use of any plugins/addons. However, I couldn't find a complete, step-by-step guide to do this, without relying on any specific nodes being instantiated in your scene.
You can follow these steps. I tested these on Godot 3.0.6. Some …
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(Image credit: Godot blog)
Godot affords the possibility of unit and integration testing gdscript code via the GUT extension. If you're getting started with unit/integrated testing (collectively "automated testing") or Godot, and interested in what automated testing can do for you, read on.
I recently rebuilt a small app/game using Godot. For reference, the game contained one core loop, and took about four hours to build (from scratch). I reused all of the assets from the previous version of the game (audio and graphics), which took the bulk of development time on …
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Recently, I was tasked with learning ReactJS (or just "React"). So, I made the most obvious choice possible: I decided to write an ASCII roguelike, which uses React as the front-end.
Why? For several, obvious reasons:
Godot's tile editor provides you with the ability to quickly make 2D tile-maps, similar to RPG Maker. This makes it easy to design and tweak maps. But can we take it a step further? Can we, in fact, use the tilemap editor to create functioning entities -- making it a domain-specific …
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This month, I set out with a very specific goal: create a 2D procedurally-generated RPG; something I've never heard of (or done before). Although I ran out of time, I plan to devote another month to the game. This retrospective discusses the good, the bad, and the work ahead of …
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Godot provides a way to separate the presentation part of game entities from their underlying data. You can think of this as something akin to the Model-View-Controller design pattern, where scripts (classes/code) respresent the model and instanced scenes (sprite, animation, etc.) represent the presentation and control (eg. collision …
read moreJuly brought a lot of challenges. @Chemical_Ink's internet went down for several days. I ran into a very busy work schedule. All of this meant less time for Abu Hamid X; but walhamdulillah, we still managed to ship a lot of changes.
Perhaps most importantly, we decided to drop the …
read moreWith the end of Ramadan cutting through the first half of June, we made little progress in the first two weeks. That makes it even more exciting that we completed the prototype of our new game, tentatively titled "Abu Hamid!"
Every prototype aims to answer a question. This prototype answers …
read moreOne of our main goals at Deen Games is to represent the views of Islam and Muslims in games. Muslims have something of a negative image in games. To paraphrase one video from Extra Credits: "Enemies in FPS games have gradually changed from Nazis to Arabs [Muslims]." One of the …
read moreThis month, we spent quite a lot of time planning and articulating our next project. It's a big one! Unlike previous projects, we decided to bite on something large and ambitous.
We're in the early stages of prototyping, so I can't share too many details right now (as things are …
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In RPGs (especially those of the 90s and early 2000s), game designers typically increase difficulty by creating increasingly powerful enemies (and more dangerous groups). To balance this, player characters engage in combat, gain experience points, and level up. Obviously, you want the game should increase in challenge/difficulty over time …
read moreAccording to many, open-world is fun. Perhaps it's the sense of freedom, progression, or influence upon the world which tickles a player's funny bone. Whichever it is, if there's anything we game designers know, it's that it's hard to pull off.
Firstly, what is …
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Most games never reach completion. Most of us know this -- especially programmers, who typically leave a trail of dead projects in their wake. Well-intentioned projects, but incomplete projects none-the-less.
What steps can you take to increase the chances of actually finishing, and get your game to that glorified "done" state …
read moreAfter a few months of stagnation on the blogging/marketing side, we're finally back! We hope, inshaAllah (God willing) to publish regular (or at least semi-regular) updates to our blog and our current maintainer's Twitter account.
Accordingly, we also ditched our old, homebrew-coded blog for something sleek and production-grade (built …
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The last couple of weeks mostly entailed playtesting and game-balancing tweaks. As a result, we made a few visible changes:
This week, we implemented the final feature work (seals and sharks). We left out one item (squids) due to a lack of time. You can see both seals and squids in the GIF above.
As well, our artist finished the main character sprite, and it gives a game a very …
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