Indie space battle game

Stumbled across a really neat space-battle game, Gratuitous Space Battles. Lots a fun!

Duke Nukem Never?

News is floating around the 'Net that the long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever's studio, 3D Realms, has shut down (or been shut down) due to a lack of funding. Their website, which was up-and-running last time I looked (less than a week ago), is now coming up with a "This webpage is not available" message, though the forums still seem to be up.

DNF has been in development hell for the past 12 years, and has become the poster boy of vapourware, and the gaming world's longest running jokes (for example, linking the games initials with the status of a race car that fails to complete a race). 3D Realms has long stated (rather petulantly, I thought) its release date as "when it's done". Aside from some screenshots in the early days, the only news was a trailer released in late 2007 (which was also the topic of the first post in this blog).

Part of the problem has been the chopping and changing of technology midstream. Starting with the Quake II engine, 3D Realms switched to the Unreal engine in 1998, a newer version of the Unreal engine in 1999, Unreal 2.0 in 2001. The physics engine changed from Karma to Meqon. There was a very public spat between 3D Realms and their publisher, Take Two, and repeated no-shows at various tradeshows.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? With its long development cycle, DNF would have to have been something awesome, otherwise it would have been one of the most pilloried video games in history (though maybe not as much as Daikatana...). Duke Nukem 3D is widely considered a landmark game in the FPS genre, and much was expected of its successor, especially from its early screenshots. It's entirely possible that the game would have been released to poor reviews, which would have spelt the death knell of 3DR anyway.

But it could have been a good game, too. It looks like we'll never know.

Update: The 3D Realms website is back up, only to say goodbye (complete with staff photo).

New blog

I've decided to create a second blog for all my game dev stuff.

SWCCG -- the madness resumes

As I said a week ago, Forge's MTG: Forge, errr, Card Warrior, has inspired me to actually start work on a similar project based around Decipher's Star Wars Customizable Card Game which gobbled more time and money than I care to think about from about 1995 onwards.

As a good little Comp205 graduate, I'm going to do a bit of design work before I start putting code in IDE. A bit of work here can save a lot of heartache (and retyping and refactoring) later -- and I'm talking from experience here. Just try doing a group project where everybody goes and does their little part, but come integration day, nothing integrates -- because there was no overall design, there was no agreement on how the parts would work together. I fondly (NOT!) remember the night before integration day (when we had to show our progress to a tutor), a pair of us staying in the labs until well past 1am getting four people's code to cooperate. My wife wasn't too impressed, but the tutor was...

Magic: The Gathering

I never really got into Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering card game. I think I bought a sum total of one booster pack. But GameDev.net recently had a thread pop up on the forums about a blog called "Computer Programming and Magic: The Gathering".

It's a good read, especially if you're interested in the AI (which, by the way, has beaten me more times than I care to say -- but I'm putting that down to inexperience with M:TG). I've yet to go through the source code (it's done in Java): that'll probably have to wait until after my last exam of the semester (on 21 June), which is coincidentally on AI.

I may never become a great Magic player, but it's inspired me to restart a project I'd briefly looked at over the (southern hemisphere) summer, making a single-player (that is, player vs. computer) version of the old Decipher game, Star Wars Customizable Card Game. That's the only CCG I really got into (although I dabbled briefly with Middle-Earth: The Wizards, Bablyon 5, Aliens vs. Predator, and Lord of the Rings), but finding anyone to play against is next to impossible. Ages ago, I found a mirror of the old Decipher website that had the images of all the cards, so I have all the card images, and getting the basic game up and running shouldn't be too much of an issue (that is, basic mechanics with none of the cards' special rules implemented).

I'll keep you posted.

Nifty game

Thanks to ...on pampers, programming & pitching manure, I've stumbled across a neat (though slightly bizarre) game from indie developers Dejobaan Games, called The Wonderful End of the World. Give it a go, and support indie developers!