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Spell-Caster Update #1

  By Gavin Hayler • June 19, 2015

Just a quick update on what’s been going on in Spell-Caster.

Been doing a bunch of different stuff lately. I’ve moved some of my UI into an actual spellbook type thing (more to follow).

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I’ve changed my battles so that they take place in the map instead of in a separate plane of existence which I think has brought a unity to the game, so it all feels part of the same game now.

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I’ve also implemented an idea I had for teaching players the basic battle mechanics in a low pressure environment before they get into any actual danger. The idea is that the player has to brute force their way through a barred door using their spells.
Here’s a video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-H4HB-o7Olo

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That’s it for now. Back to work! Zoom zoom zoom!!!

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A new year, a new game

  By Gavin Hayler • May 6, 2015

This is a very belated post, but here it is anyway.

Due to time constraints of other team members, our last game has had to be put on hold for now :(

It has been replaced by a new game I’m working on that I’m calling:

Spell-Caster

Spell-Caster Battle

Spell-Caster is a light/casual top-down RPG with a spelling based combat system.

As the player navigates the environments they’ll encounter enemies which they’ll battle by forming words from a (mostly) random grid of letters. The battles take place in real-time which puts pressure on the player to make words as fast as possible. The levels will probably be procedurally generated (if I can figure out how to make that fun) and I’m not sure what the meta-game is going to be at the moment. Different enemies will have different attacks and abilities which may alter the board state. The player will also find new abilities as they progress. A lot of this may change, but that’s the general direction anyway.

Much of the art is placeholder (as you can see) since I’m still trying out ideas and working out exactly … Continue reading →

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Movement and Game Feel

  By Gavin Hayler • August 31, 2014

Instead of talking about what I said I would talk about in the last post, I’m going to talk about what has been consuming my nights and days recently – Game Feel. Especially game feel with regards to input and controls.

Controls. Like few other things in game creation, bad controls can render your game nigh unplayable if not at least unpleasant to play. It’s because of this that I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently investing into the controls of Reborn. Whether that’s paid off remains to be seen, but intent has to count for something… right?

I’m currently reading a book called Game Feel which tries to more clearly articulate how a game feels to play and assign metrics and explanations to why different games feel the way they do. It’s been a really interesting read so far and gave me an idea on how to analyse my game and improve the feel of the controls. Using an idea mentioned in the book, I created a system which enables me to graph various values in my game and see how input changes those values.

Continue reading →

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Character Movement

  By Gavin Hayler • August 24, 2014

I have been super busy with freelancing work and working on Reborn (that’s the working title of the platformer game I’m making with Filip Orekhov), but I thought I’d take some time to write a blog about the progress so far.

I’ve been mainly working on the character movement and the weapons systems and combat. I’ve been trying to get a good base together that I can start adding other features on top of.

I’m just going to talk about the character movement for now. I’m writing a platformer framework code base that can be reused under a large number of circumstances and game types (within reason, obviously) and is highly tweakable to be able to easily create very different feeling characters and motion. I’ve also been trying to wrap Unity’s 2D and 3D physics systems up behind a facade so that the core movement code can be used regardless of whether I’m using 2D or 3D collision. I’m taking things I’ve learnt from doing Tom Sparks (top down shooter/platformer), Neon Shadow (FPS) and my own 2D platformers and making the system generic enough to be able to support any of those types … Continue reading →