Gamers want realism, but we also want enemy AI to respect our need for fun, meaning we don’t want our enemies to be super smart. We need our inept guards to eat discarded poisoned rice balls. We need our machine gun-toting soldiers to ignore a conspicuous cardboard box. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t be fun. A truly intelligent enemy NPC is not what we want. We don’t even want artificial intelligence. We want scripted behaviors based on shortcut heuristics with game balance--not realism--being the end goal.
Category Archives Caleb’s Game Devlog
Thoughts on Game Development and Game Design. Expect quick-thought blog posts, scripted videos, and even podcasts. If you want to learn my philosophy on video game development, this is a great place to start (and end).
For those of you who know me as a wanna-be video game developer, you may know that I have been documenting my journey learning various game engines and coding languages at my Game Dev Log page. For the rest of you, well, I guess I'm sorry you weren't let in to that part of my life. But in my defense, you could have asked. I mean, how much do you really care about me if you don't even ask about my passions. What a jerk you are.
Nostalgia does good work for humans, mainly by highlighting positive moments of our youth. It’s bittersweet sure, as we can be tricked into thinking things will never be as good as they once were, but the net effect is that life feels more meaningful and, by proxy, death feels less frightening. Nostalgia smooths over the rough parts of childhood, so we aren’t emotionally weighed down by how awkward we were as kids.
Walking Simulator is the one genre that resists being absorbed into a hyphenate. Its mechanics are defined by exclusion. You wouldn't have an infinite runner walking sim, for example, because the genre conventions are polar opposites. Endless runner = go fast, avoid objects. Walking Sim = go slow, explore objects. But even less absurd pairings aren't really possible. You couldn’t have an RPG walking sim or an action adventure walking sim, and this is the case primarily because a defining characteristic of a waking sim is the absence of a lose condition. The only option is completing the game.
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When I was growing up, meeting people on the internet was simultaneously a social death wish and a real life death wish.
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Please don’t hate me for my lack of new episodes lately. Before you judge, please hear me out...I was playing a video game. Normally, that would not be a great excuse, but it kinda makes sense here, right?
In this week’s episode I start off by apologizing for this not being a weekly podcast. Oops. But then I quickly(ish) get into my progress with Unity, with C#, an update on my newest game project, and I even have time to talk a bit about what a game engine is (see, the title of this episode isn’t just a trick). Subscribe via RSS or iTunes. Highlights: I’ve finished the C# Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners course! I just finished lecture 80 in the Learn to Code by Making Games Unity course on Udemy! The importance of a game design document What is a Game Engine? My game dev roadmap Mentionables: Microsoft Virtual Academy.com C# Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners by Robert Tabor Learn To Code by Making Games – The Complete Unity Developer by Ben Tristem and Brice Fernandes My Number Wizard game (doesn’t work on Chrome) Game Maker Studio What…