Since finishing up Defuse I’ve spent a lot of my time not developing games. Instead I’ve been enjoying summer: reading, playing games, making beer, hanging out and just relaxing. I’ve also been putting some thought into my game making process, some of which you can read in my post mortem for Defuse, some more of which I’m going to outline here.
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I believe one of the best ways to learn is by doing and measuring that way Defuse was an unqualified success. Measured in other ways Defuse is less of a success. In this post mortem I collect and share my thoughts on the successes and failures of making Defuse.
Then here’s the fix.
Like many others, I’ve been bitten by the Minecraft bug. It’s such a refreshing game that even in alpha I’m finding that I prefer it to my backlog of much prettier games.
I’ve been running my own server that I play on with some friends and, with no enemies, the game really feels like videogame Legos. The lo-fi aesthetic and wonderful sense of exploration combined with some excellent cooperative and creative gameplay just scratches a nostalgic itch for me. Like Legos, Minecraft provides you with the building blocks and lets you just run with that. And for some reason I can’t help but be reminded of the pixellated textures and primitive 3D graphics of another favorite from my childhood: Descent.
Another obsession of mine has been the idea of observing things change over time, like watching the leaves on a tree over the course of a year. As if Minecraft wasn’t already compelling enough for me, enter Cartograph. Cartograph is a .NET (Windows only, though there are similar tools for other platforms) based tool for producing maps of your Minecraft world. Simply point it at the folder containing your world and let it go to work. Check out the results.
Since I’m being particularly obsessive about all of this I’ve written some batch scripts that run as scheduled tasks to do mapping at certain times each day. These task then upload the maps to my web server. I’ve zipped all these up so others can use them too.
To use the scripts you’ll need to set a few variables in each script point to Cartograph and your Minecraft world (should be around line 14 or so). Then, if you want to upload maps to a web server there are some FTP variables to set (around line 30 or so). The settings for Cartograph can have spaces, the settings for FTP cannot. The scripts are set up to chain, starting with cart-normal.bat, which calls cart-isometric.bat, which calls cart-isometric-rotated.bat. This just the order I prefer, each script stands on its own so you can run them in any order or leave any of them out. If you have any problems leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help out.
I’ve been using Flash Builder 4 (the plugin with Eclipse Galileo) on Mac OS 10.5 for awhile now and everything has gone smoothly. Yesterday I upgraded to Mac OS 10.6 and this was not a smooth as I would have liked. First I noticed that Eclipse is super slow now, then my breakpoints wouldn’t appear correctly or at all, and finally my Ant build script always stalled with a Java heap space out of memory exception. All of these things set me back about a day and half so I thought I’d post about how I overcame each so I can save some other people a few hours of frustration.
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As an aspiring game designer and developer I find myself reading tons of interviews with other developers, articles by devs and game postmortems. All of these things give wonderful insight into the process of making games and how games evolve over their development cycles. Having recently completed my first game that I’ve put out into the world I thought I’d also contribute an article detailing my initial plans and the process that got me to the finished product. Read on for the full details.
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