Thursday, August 13, 2009

Tools and Introductions

Hello everyone!

Welcome to our dev blog, make yourself at home. My name's Jonathan, and I am the Producer and Tools Programmer on this team (titles will be added as responsibilities pile up, haha). I'm very excited to see that we're getting everything up and running. We have five people on our team so far. At the moment, our Game Director, Silliman, is putting together the vision for our newest game, which will be called CA Resistance for now. At the same time, our Programmer and Game Designer, Kimmy, is planning our HL2 mod, so far unnamed. Emery and Nathan are on standby until we get more of this together. Great things cannot happen without great ambition and great passion, and of that, we have plenty!

As for me, I am currently doing everything I can to make development easier and more streamlined. My first step has been to make a Level Editor. It took me a while, and it still has a few bugs, but it's usable. It is a 2D tile-based editor, complete with:

  • The ability to create, save, and edit tilesets.
  • The ability to create, save, and edit levels or maps.
  • Each map may have any number of layers, to allow the user to organize the map as he/she sees fit (background layer, ground, sky, etc.)
  • All maps in a particular folder can be displayed on the left-hand side of the screen, for easy access to all the maps in a world or game.
  • It has an Event Editor, which allows the user to place events on the map, and use a script to specify what exactly that particular event does.
  • The script itself can hold the following information: what type of event it is (cutscene, item, enemy, or npc), what kind of AI it should use, item drops, item acquiring (automatically added to the player's inventory), and messages. The script was done in XML format.
  • Also, the script is organized into pages. This means that a script can be used for a map at the beginning of the game, and then any user-defined event can change the page at a later time, allowing entirely new things to happen on the same map.
I think that should about cover it for my first post. I will keep you all updated as things happen. And with that, I shall leave you with this concept art, by Silliman.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Hello my little minions!

I personally would like to reminisce on just everything that has gone wrong within the last year or so when it came to creating games:
1) Large teams
2) No one around to kick anyone's asses

So, just gonna throw this out there now.
1) I am quite content with the number of people on the project right now. I really like the number 4. The number sounds magnificent in Chinese and Japanese, and furthermore, it also sounds like how you say "death" in Chinese or Japanese. Hehe.
2) If you are afraid to say "no" to whoever wants to be a part of it, I will do it.

Anywho, so I've been working with Source SDK, and in addition to the RPG, I would like to create an FPS game. I'm aiming for multiplayer, but just to get used to the shenanigans and become more accustomed to C++, I may play around and work on a single-player game first.

Another decision we may need to make: Name of our group. So, good ol' Jonathan came up with BRB Games. I'm personally quite content with it, but if people have a better name or are against it, TOUGH!

Er...I mean...feel free to pitch in a new name.

-Kimmy

Saturday, August 1, 2009

hellz yes bitches!!!

Told you I would get it done! Now that we have a temporary space for crap...I shall make this prettier later.

-Kimmy