I’ve been drawing in the evening again as a good way to wind down from the brain rigors of game development all day.  Now don’t get me wrong–I have an absolute blast making games but doing anything that intense for so long can cook you by the end of the day and I need a way to stretch out a little mentally.

I think I’ve been getting pretty cooked because most of my time these past few weeks has been spent learning all about various performance optimizations and graphical rendering methods in an effort to get Flash to run better on the iPhone via CS5 Beta.  I’ve learned a virtual truckload of information though and it will help to improve my games both in the browser on older computers and on mobile devices for sure.  This is information I’ll be sharing in a different post at a later date though.

As another way to wind down I’ve also been watching a good bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately as a few of my friends have been cranking through episode after episode–season after season.  I watched it back when it had originally aired but it has been fun to see it again years later.  The themes, scenes, and stories have rubbed off on my subconscious though and clearly inspired the above drawing from last night:

This drawing is from a week or two ago.  Just one of those drawings that is stream of conscious style.  You just let the pen flow and move and you try to figure out what you want to draw as you see it.  I find that is the kind of state I like to draw in when I am just trying to relax and day dream a little.

Spent the week creating a new Flash game for a November Mochi Media contest where the theme was “60 Seconds”.  Power Vacuum is the result:

Concept:

Help the atom on each level recover its lost electrons! You only have 60 seconds total to collect all 100 missing electrons from the different levels.

The screenshot above shows 4 of the 20 available levels.  10 levels are picked at random each time you play.  The entire game only lasts 60 seconds (as per the contest rules.)

I created the background textures by cropping and filtering some lovely watercolor textures made by Hillary Luetkemeyer.  The artist released them for use and remix under a CC Attribution license.

Feel free to leave any feedback below in the comments.

Play Power Vacuum

I’ve spent some time over the last week helping my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P Bushnell compile a list of historically important video games.

Jeremy has been teaching a Writing course at Boston University on the topic of “Playing Games: How Video Games Work and What They Mean.”

In his discussions with the students about the concept of historical analysis: analyzing video games based on how they “fit” into the context of a developing timeline of games, he had a chance to create an initial list of about 40 games.

This list was then passed around between our friends and associates as well as being shared with his two classes of about forty students total.  Jeremy encouraged his students to confront and challenge the games on this list as well as suggest ones they felt should be included.  They even got to write persuasive papers as an assignment to get a game included on the list.  If the argument was convincing enough they even received some extra credit for making the list.

Jeremy and I discussed some of the more convincing papers and kicked our thoughts back and forth on what made these games historically significant. It was a lot of fun and very interesting to get to consider where videos games have come from (with Spacewar in 1961) up through to the present day.  It was a challenge to pick games not for being good or popular necessarily but for their historical significance.

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This is a little demo I made this morning as a way to get a viewport concept working for the latest game I am developing.  I’ve done a few viewport type projects in other languages but had not implemented one in Flash AS3 yet.

This demo creates 300 random balls and sets them in motion inside the world.  The world’s dimensions are four times larger than the viewport above.

You can click in the window above and use the arrow keys to move the viewport around the world.  The source files for this tutorial are available at the end of the article.

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I like to use concept art as an alternative way to think up game design ideas.  Here is a quick illustration I came up with today for a game I am creating.

I have done a few illustrations for this game working through various game mechanics, styles, and ideas.

This is a useful creative tool for me to rapidly try out different concepts and see what they might look like before I even write a single line of code or start creating any game assets.

Creating concept art becomes a way I can immerse myself in the world and atmosphere of the game ahead of time because as I am drawing these illustrations I am imagining the various aspects of the gameplay occurring.  This can even include me making hand gestures and sound effects without me realizing it as I try out the game in my mind’s eye.  As embarrassing as that might sound for some people it has been something I’ve done unashamedly since I first started drawing as a child.  It makes the experience that much more involved and creatively useful for me.

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