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[Archives] How to Manage your Game’s Scope

Archives, Game Development

Creating a game involves combining a variety of different components – from programming to art to sound – and it can be difficult to manage all of it at once. Especially in a game jam setting, where you need to create a game from scratch in a short amount of time, it’s easy to get caught up implementing features you want, while accidentally ignoring other things that really need to be done first.  So how do you manage all of that?

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Current – a platformer made for Global Game Jam while at SCAD

Read how I manage scope when designing my games below.

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[Archives] AutoTileGen Review – Automatic Tilemap Generation for Games

Archives, Art, Game Development, Review

I’m a pixel artist and a game developer, but I hate making tilemaps.  To me, it’s just tedium – making the same image over and over with little tweaks for corners and edges.  And SO many combinations of corners and edges.
So when I heard there was a tool that would automatically create an entire tilemap from as little as just three images, I knew I had to try it.

AutoTileGen lets you create a game-ready tilemap from just three images.

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All you need is a single tileable texture, a “cap and bottom” image, and a “sides” image.  If you want a background included in your tilemap, that’s a very simple forth image.  AutoTileGen then does all the tedious work for you!

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[Archives] 5 Indie Game Expos you should Check Out

Archives, Game Development

E3 is well under way, and as excited as I am for some of the titles shown, a lot of things looked very same-y this year from the main press events.  Gaming is so vast, and even last year’s E3 seemed to have a wider variety of game genres shown.
Here’s a list of a few smaller festivals and expos, where you can find the types of games not normally shown in a large industry event.

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[Archives] Construct 2 Minimap Tutorial

Archives, Game Development

Part One: The Setup

A few years ago, I wrote a blog tutorial detailing how to create a minimap HUD in Construct 2.  Since then I’ve changed web hosts and that blog post has been lost, and (more importantly) Construct 2 has since then added the Tilemap object, which changes everything. (Yeah, the previous post was way old.)
Anyway, it’s long overdue that I rewrite that blog post.
Let’s get started!

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[Archives] Four Ways to Project Manage as a Solo Game Developer

Archives, Game Development

It’s so easy, when you’re the only person developing your game, to just start creating things without having an idea of future milestones.  I’m super guilty of it too, but it’s so important to have a roadmap.  It gives you an idea of how long things will take, when you can anticipate hitting certain milestones, and exactly what you need to work on next to finish your game without taking years to do so.

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Here’s how I handle project management for my upcoming game, Visual Out.

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