Bookworms

Hello everyone!  It's Jamie O again, and I've got to talk about one of my favorite things in the world:  reading.  Now that we've figured out the gist of the game, the team is researching the "how" component.  After a few meetings of saying "yeah, this is cool," and "wouldn't it be amazing if..." we have to sit down and reconcile cool ideas with hard practice.  While we are professionals in our attitude, we are college students in our experience level.  None of us, as far as I know, has delivered a full-featured game to the public before.  And we want to do it well.  This means research.

At the moment, I am reading Beginning Android Games, 2nd Edition, which was recommended to us by our professor.  While it is a seven hundred page book, I don't anticipate having to read the whole thing.  Our project is in two-dimensional space, so the references to 3D programming can be avoided for now.  Anything having to do with more complex graphics, like learning OpenGL ES, can probably be postponed as well.  That said, there will likely be some additional reading that I will want to do on things like enemy behavior, side-scroller physics, and collision detection before I feel confident about implementing those skillfully.

I'm also doing a bit of game playing in order to see some of the things we're thinking about in action.  I haven't played a lot of games where the game window's unreliability is a major feature of the game, but I have found an example I like.  Most people remember Hotline Miami for its ultraviolence and psychotic characterization.  But what you may also remember is the way that the overhead camera "sways" as the player moves.  You can argue that this suggests a sort of dissociation from reality, which serves the game well, but it also demonstrates the wobble effect that we want to capture.

Notice the building is displayed at a slight angle; the "wobbly camera" effect of Hotline Miami is similar to the drunkenness effect we want to capture.

When I talk with the development team more tomorrow, we will be throwing around a few ideas from our reading.  This weekend I anticipate some prototyping of game features to prove concepts.  That's all for now!