Lets say you’re designing a game where, in order to determine the success of an action, you roll a d20 (a dice with 20 sides). Even if you’re making a digital game without dice, this can be a useful tool for contextualizing probabilities. Most of us have rolled dice before, so most of us intuitively know how this kind of random chance feels.
Now lets say you want to make a character “lucky”. Instead of rolling one d20, you roll two and take the highest result. You now have a twice(ish) as much chance of rolling a 20! But you…
Every year I do a little wrap up of all the games I played over the last year and post a few thoughts on each one. This year, the list is in the order I played them (not the order they released), and not in a ranking order. If you want rankings, my top 3 this year are 1. Baba is You, 2. Sekiro, and 3. Outer Wilds.
RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN
Yeah this one came out in 2018 but I didn’t get around to playing it until 2019. It’s one of the most interesting and original games I’ve…
Here’s the deal. You got a game, and you want to run it at 60 fps on a 60hz monitor. Your computer is fast enough that both rendering and updating take a negligible amount of time, so you enable vsync and write your game loop like this:
while(running) {
update();
render();
display();
}Easy! Your game now runs at 60fps and is smooth as butter. Done. Thanks for reading this post, you can follow me on twitter for more hot gamedev tips.
Ok obviously this isn’t good enough. What if someone is running on a lower spec computer that can’t…
Hey it’s been a yearly tradition for me to write a few words on every game I played over the past year, so here’s what I played this year. This is in rough chronological order instead of a ranking this year since it’s hard to order them, but if you made me decide at gunpoint then #3 is Celeste, #2 is Smash Ultimate, and #1 is Slay the Spire.
CELESTE
Celeste was pretty great overall. It’s just a solidly good platformer with some brutal levels later on. There’s some nitpicks with the controls (aiming the dash with analog is annoying but…
Recently a new method of estimating sales data for games on steam showed up on the site barter.vg. They were looking at achievement data and extrapolating how many users would be necessary to get the percents shown. For example, if an achievement had “50%” of players achieving it, that would imply at least 2 players. “33%” implies at least 3. If a game has both of those, it implies at least 6 players (3/6 for the 50%, 2/6 for the 33%).
This was super intriguing to me because I had thought about the same thing in the past when looking…
