Fracterebus

  • Keys and Locks

    Keys and Locks

    In game design, at least the way I do it, there is the concept of keys and locks. These control what I call objective planning. Essentially, the flow from one place or task to the next. Sometimes the keys and locks are literal, like find the red key to enter…

  • Good Company

    Good Company

    I’ve been working on Fracterebus for almost a year now. I’m still impressed with the work I’m putting in and the fact that I’m still working on it all the time. I’m also actually still enjoying working on it, which is always awesome. This project has started to seem larger…

  • Black Triangle

    Black Triangle

    There is a story I remember reading from years and years ago that really resonated with me as a developer. In this story, which was from the original PlayStation era, a bunch of developers started cheering excitedly while crowded around a TV. Someone that isn’t a developer wanders over to…

  • Work Zone

    Work Zone

    I have been working on Fracterebus and entirely forgetting to blog about it. This post is a little bit of a catch up. It’s been a busy few months of getting all sorts of things figured out and making progress on various underpinning systems that I need for the game…

  • Game Engine Versioning

    Game Engine Versioning

    Games that generate their worlds randomly have the problem that the generation should probably be deterministic. Meaning, using the same random seed value should always make the same world. This means seed codes can be shared with friends and they would all get to play the same world together. This…

  • Language Performance

    Language Performance

    I had previously said I was going to code Fracterebus in Godot using GDScript for the flexibility of export targets it offers, but then I noticed three things. The first one wasn’t really a surprise for me. I just really don’t like GDScript. It’s very Python-like and I have never…

  • Pixels

    Pixels

    In any pixel art game, you need to do a bit of planning to make sure your pixels make sense. First, I spent a fair amount of time researching how other games did it. It’s probably not a huge surprise to anyone reading this that there are a ton of…

  • Research and Skills

    Research and Skills

    One of the parts about game development that you learn pretty quickly when you are trying to make one by yourself is that you probably don’t know how to do all of the things needed to make it, by yourself. I started by going with the things I’m already good…

  • Learning Everything

    Learning Everything

    The first problem with any new thing you try to do is that you not only don’t know how to do it, you also don’t know enough about it to know which things you don’t know about yet. In this particular example, I know I want to make a game,…

  • Project Phases

    Project Phases

    I’ve been a software engineer professionally for over 25 years. I’ve always wanted to make a game and even went to college for a computer science degree with a game development focus. The trick is actually doing it. Using a game engine (Godot) will almost undoubtedly make it way easier…