From the developer at MadSkillzArts
La-Mulana is a great game. But what does it mean exactly in terms of mechanics? Style is fresh, beautiful(more so for the new game) and satisfies me 100%. Story premise is interesting - it’s kind of like Tomb Raider’s archeological story which poses questions about history of some ruin or artifact.
What about gameplay? That’s where it gets interesting. Gameplay is very hard. But not in a good way hard. It’s hard in a way that you have to look at wiki or die trying to figure out some stuff. Remake gives you a lot of gameplay tips which is better. At first I thought it was cheap but then I kind of liked Xelpud’s childish behavior(he is like a comic relief character). The game on one hand tries to tell you this extremely serious story. On the other hand says: do not worry, just try to have fun and experiment with the game, nobody will judge you. Sometimes I wish devs would just make up there mind. But it’s pretty common in japanese culture I guess. Comic relief characters are now in every serious anime(usually some plushes, comical toys etc).
Read more here.
(Source: gmechanic.blogspot.com)
My first game for facebook.
I’ve been working on this game for the last 3 month as my first project on Unity3d. It is called l33t pool and it’s a facebook game. It was designed for p2p multiplayer. It uses system where you represent client and server at the same time and try to connect to other people on the net.
It is completely free and I encourage you to check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/leet_pool/
Tell me what you think. Thanks!
I use Unity3d as my main game engine for my current project. I tried to instantiate many blocks(Object.Instantiate()) and Unity does that relatively slow. So I wanted to try out another engine with better performance.
During the week I rebooted to linux and made myself familiar with Ogre. It’s a crossplatform rendering engine developed on c++. And it can do almost everything that Unity can do if you take your time and develop all tools for your game from the ground up. Of course you can export meshes from Blender and there is one cool tool to fill your scenes - ogitor. But you can only depend on your coding skills when you use ogre because any available tool is supported usually by one person(basically community effort). The main plus of Ogre is its support of modern graphics features(directx 10). Using Ogre you’re more likely to produce good looking game. And it is a very fast rendering engine.
So I researched a little bit further. What rendering engine is fast and has good supported tools ? Irrlicht seems to the answer. It’s programmed in c++. It’s more straightforward than Ogre. It has tools backed by Ambiera company:
Providing powerful software development tools and libraries such as irrKlang, irrFuscator, irrEdit and irrXML, some of them are free or even open source, to simplify the development of multimedia and game software.
I did not try to make a big scene with many objects in Irrlicht yet. So I cannot compare it’s performance for my task.
I also noticed another engine - Panda3D. It’s based on python so it’s easy to pick up. There is interesting performance comparison which suggests that Panda3D is more capable engine in OpenGL than irrlicht:) I did not take it seriously though. Panda also features supported scene editor. I think it’s a very good game engine.
So choose game/rendering engine carefully depending on the game that you want to develop. You might want some graphics features which are supported only by Ogre. Or you might want better tools like those in Irrlicht. Or maybe easy dynamic language like in Panda3D. Use Unity3D if you think that every feature it provides is essential for you. if you want to know how scene manager and geometry batching work you should try more lower level engines like ogre.
I recently started listening to podcasts whenever I have free time. Wanted to share with everyone links to those podcasts that I especially like.