Game development *

In this article I will explain a texture splatting algorithm which allows you to create more natural terrain. This algorithm may be used in shaders of 3D games as well as in 2D games.

If not to take into account releases for Android and a dozen of abandoned projects just before they were ready, then yes, it is our first game appropriate for more than one platform. How did it all start? Very simply. We worked on another project, let’s call it “project A”, and we’d been working on it for a long time when we decided to make a game during a couple of months and use it to train our marketing skills, and then immediately release our “project A” when we would be more experienced in the promotion of games. But the plan failed and “project A” was kept untouched for the whole year. But this story isn’t about “project A”, it’s about a logical game called «Cubicity: Slide puzzle».

RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.

Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.

These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.


→ Text and video in Russian

If you ever created a game, you probably ran into the same problem as a lot of game developers before you: nobody knows about your game. In the article, I will tell you how to promote an incremental** game for free, fast and somehow effective.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PF:K for short) is a role-playing video game created by Owlcat Games, released in Fall 2018 on Steam and GoG. Inspired by classic Bioware games, this project uses a popular board game system ruleset, combat takes place in Real-Time with Pause, follows an isometric camera, and has a non-linear story with multiple unique endings.

In this article, I will share a little about how we worked on designing the audio throughout the game’s development including task management, the search for inspiration, and troubleshooting. An experienced specialist may not find anything particularly groundbreaking in this recap, but beginners and enthusiasts will definitely discover some points of interest.

Every year there are a lot of articles dedicated to Valentine's Day. I also decided to get involved in this topic and create something original and unusual. The idea was to create a simple Android application with hearts that would have their physical models and interact with each other. Then I added text, sounds, particles and some other effects. The resulting app was working and quite original! In this article I will describe the creation process, as well as the capabilities and pitfalls of the libgdx library.

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In video games, enemies are one of the key figures, without which a game might lose its meaning, and when it’s not only enemies, but terrifying monsters, they often create the chilling atmosphere intended by the developers. It’s impossible to imagine Silent Hill without the Pyramid Head, or Outlast without Chris Walker, and so on, you get the idea. Monsters are a cumulative image of a video game enemy, and it’s not necessarily an ugly demon or a giant spider: even an angry neighbor, like in Hello Neighbor, is a monster despite his human appearance.

This is where the reader probably asks:

what’s the point of this article?

Hi. My name is Michael Kapelko. I've been developing software professionally for more than 10 years. Recent years were dedicated to iOS. I develop games and game development tools in my spare time.

Overview

Today I want to share my experience of teaching kids to program. I'm going to discuss the following topics:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans

In the end of January Global Game Jam 2019 will be hosted. 26 and 27 of January will be hottest days of the month! GGJ is annual event about creating games (for those who don't know what Game Jame is). This is onsite event lasting 48h.

StarCraft: Brood War. This game means so much to me! And to many of you, I guess. So much, that I wonder if I should even give a link to its page on Wikipedia or not.

Once Halt sent me PM and offered to learn Rust. Like any ordinary people, we decided to start with hello world writing a dynamic library for Windows that could be loaded into StarCraft's address space and manage units.

The following article will describe the process of finding solutions and using technologies and techniques that will allow you to learn new things about Rust and its ecosystem. You may also be inspired to implement a bot using your favorite language, whether it be C, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.

It's a story on how to write a plugin for Unity Asset Store, take a crack at solving the well-known isometric problems in games, and make a little coffee money from that, and also to understand how expandable Unity editor is. Pictures, code, graphs and thoughts inside.

A few years ago I had a feeling that Oleg Chumakov (then working at the game studio Nival) was the most famous programmer in the game development industry. He was giving speeches, hosted Gamesjams and frequently showed up on the podcast How games are made.

When VR hit the market, Oleg was chosen to lead the company’s new department — NivalVR. But, as you probably know, VR didn’t quite take off as much as people expected.

I kind of moved to other to other things in life and stopped keeping up with game development for a while, but after getting into it again I noticed that things were looking up for Oleg’s team. Now it’s called Luden.io, and their machine learning expert simulator, while True: learn() became a huge hit in its admittedly small niche. Lots of cool stories are happening around the game and the team.

We decided to do an interview with Oleg, but I couldn’t stick to one topic — his life up to this moment has been, for the lack of a better word, “interesting”. He’s seen it all. And, to ensure that a programmer could talk about programming without fear of looking too “nerdy”, the interview was conducted by my friend, colleague and an experienced developer of its own fillpackart.

Author of the original post in Russian: HotWaterMusic

The history of the world's gamedev knows quite a few curious bugs that had to be tackled by developers. In fact, judging from the story that Media Molecule's CTO Alex Evans shared on his Twitter page this past weekend, many legends are still waiting to be heard. Evans is famous for his part in a demoscene performance of late 1990s and his work on the LittleBigPlanet game series and on Rag Doll Kung Fu.

The case I am referring to in this article took place ten years ago, in 2008. While working on the first part of LittleBigPlanet — an original puzzle platform video game that was to be released exclusively for PlayStation 3 — the company's developers came across a really hard-to-catch bug.

Normally, for a game to get the green light to be released for consoles, it needs to pass a certification process, i.e. meet a set of requirements predefined by the platform owner. The certification may also include more specific requirements, such as the game running smoothly without crashing for 24 hours.

The development of LittleBigPlanet was at its last stage, with just two weeks to final deployment and distribution. Suddenly a tester from the company's QA in Japan reported that the game was consistently crashing when left overnight. Now the release was evidently out of question unless the bug was fixed.