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Written by Bullshock
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Monday, 15 February 2010 03:51 |
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There are many, many engines out there that are more then capable of making a great looking game, but from my experience, the majority of this power at our finger tips goes untapped. There are are those games we look at and we absolutely love how they look, sometimes we don't even know why, and we strive to make something look similar, but cant seem to get it just right.
From experience, I can tell you that aside from level design itself, lighting is the most important thing in designing any 3D environment. Take the shot below as an example; the lighting in this shot takes an otherwise dull room and invokes a feeling of emptiness, even abandonment and completely changes the aura of the room.
The shot above was taken from the FPS Creator engine. What I found was that despite the complaints and limitations from some users, the engine is highly capable of creating a fantastic looking game. Now its obvious the above shot isn't the greatest looking in the world, but I had it laying around and it illustrated my point.
I think that it is also worth mentioning that to reproduce realistic lighting, sometimes multiple lights at multiple angles are required. I'm sure we'd all love if we could simply place 3D lights at the actual representations of the 3D light models and have it look perfect, but that is not always the case.
Now with all of this in mind, we have been having discussions and debates whether or not to add shadows and lighting into our current 2D project, Echo One. Although I do believe lighting is extremely important, it needs to be done right, if it isn't, it can have quite the opposite effect. As I mentioned before, I am new to the whole 2D aspect of game creation, so even simple things like lighting are taking some learning to get it right. We will be sure to keep you all updated on the status of the project though!
Moral of the story? Plan those lights out! And be sure to let us see your screenshots!
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 00:00 |
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Written by Bullshock
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Saturday, 06 February 2010 04:05 |
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As some of you may have noticed over the past few days, the site has been acting a bit weird. We are using a dynamic content management system to simplify the features we want out of our site, but in the last few days it has been more then a headache.
The most notable change is the name change from SEQOIA (without a "U") to SEQUOIA games. I had started "Seqoia" games quite a long time ago with the aim to differentiate myself from the other sequoia's of the world...the park, the Toyota truck, ETC. As it turns out, spelling it incorrectly seems to have done more harm then good. I found myself constantly spelling it out for people, many would tell me I had spelled it wrong, some would still spell it the right way and not find me...It was just not worth the trouble anymore.
Now that Ive gotten both URLs, I have officially decided to change the name to "Sequoia Games". After changing over the logo on the site, I wanted the new name to be the main URL, and have the old "Seqoia" URL forward to this one, so I moved the entire dynamic site over to the new URL, and that is where all of the problems started.
Some users experienced a "Process Query" text instead of a button, others purchased a product and could not download immediately, and many similar experiences. Good news though! All of these problems are now fixed. The thing is the buttons and queries still had the old URL in their database, and as a result they were not working properly.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anyone.
-BULLSHOCK, AKA Timothy Ruswick
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Last Updated on Saturday, 06 February 2010 04:19 |
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Written by Bullshock
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Wednesday, 03 February 2010 16:08 |
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Like most of you I'm sure, I like to just dive into projects sometimes. I get a great idea for a game, or game dynamic, and jump in and try and make it work. Now as fun and as "Open Ended" as that can be, there really is no advantage to doing things this way. Sure you can amuse yourself and program exactly what you want, when you want, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't get you anywhere.
Planning a game or project is not only essential to completing anything that is decent in size, but it is also necessary to make sure you don't work in circles. I cant tell you how many times I have re-written hours of code or spent time modifying things that should have worked in the first place, all because I failed to plan my project completely, which brings me to my next point.
Planning a game doesn't mean creating a storyline, it means getting every tiny detail of the game onto paper. Now there are multiple avenues of planning...Some like to simply do a game design document, which outlines the dynamics of the game and how it should function. Others take it a step further and create a full-on technical design document, outlining every minor detail of everything in the game, including the specifics of how it should be programmed. For bigger projects, the latter is usually essential.
Overall, Planning is an extremely important part of game design, the better you plan, the faster and more efficient the game-making process becomes...So plan your stuff!
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 03 February 2010 16:34 |
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