Recent content by Richard Kain

Okay, how about a board, that IS a video game? What if you had coffee-table, that had a screen built into it, say under a sheet of plexi-glass. And it was set up to run a video game, that basically served as a board game. Players would download an app for their smartphones to store data for...

There's actually a lot interesting about this system from a design perspective. The style of the controller is very different from what you normally see from other consoles, which can both help and hinder its chances in the market. The biggest drawback to the new Intellivision is that its...

Just a little note. I was playing around with Tilengine, and I managed to integrate it with PyGame. PyGame is a library that essentially gives you SDL bindings for Python. (Simple Directmedia Layer) I was able to hook Tilengine up so that it handled the majority of the rendering, and then PyGame...

The easy answer is interest. Money you have now is better than money you get later. You can do whatever you want with money you have now, including investing it and earning interest off of it. Money that you get later you don't have access to until later, which means that you can't exploit it...

There are a lot of context-sensitive controls in Blender which often depend on what "mode" you are currently in. I recommend learning some of the keyboard short-cuts, as these often allow you to quickly switch to the mode or type of change that you want quickly. The space-bar is used to pull up...

Special Mention Just a quick shout-out to a few efforts that don't fall into a particular category, but that I felt warrant attention. Tilengine [http://www.tilengine.org/] A project that has been in development for a few years, and was recently made open-source. This is not a game engine...

External Tools GIMP [https://www.gimp.org/] While a few games can be made without graphics, the majority of modern titles involve some sort of images. Pixel manipulation is a pretty basic standard for creating and optimizing visuals for games. The usual program that professional designers...

Game-style Specific Engines RPG Maker MV [http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/products/programs/rpg-maker-mv] RPG Maker is a long-running series of game-making applications from a Japanese developer. It has been ported to various different platforms, including ports to some gaming platforms. (there...

Frameworks and Libraries This category is going to be a bit larger. There are a fairly large number of frameworks and libraries that are commonly used for video games. Dont' be surprised if I miss a few. I'm mainly going to be listing the bigger and more commonly used entries. Monogame...

Point and click games lived and died on the quality of their content. The engines behind them rarely changed, so everything hung on the art, animation, puzzle design, and especially the writing. All of my fondest point-and-click games had really great writing. Many of them also had really great...

Full-Featured Game Engines Unity 3D [https://unity3d.com/] This is one of the biggest engines in terms of reach. Over the past decade, it has grown to dominate the indie gaming scene, and is even regularly used by major studios for projects both large and small. The Asset Store that Unity...

The loot-box issue raises a point that I have made numerous times. How you charge for a game inherently affects the design of the game. This also ties into the arcade-game example from The Big Picture. The quarter-munching nature of arcade games inherently affected how arcade games were...

This is a good point. The Escapist is currently struggling to come back to some form of relevance after an extended period of decline and relative inactivity. With regular content updates, I believe that a decent number of fans will start trickling back, and perhaps even some new fans will join...

There's a lot less reason to get one if you already have a solid PC gaming rig. There's a fair amount of overlap for the titles that get released on each of those platforms. And for platform exclusives, the PS4 and Switch are honestly better platforms. There is the backwards compatibility to...

One of the elements that I felt held back the original contest a bit was the dearth of game-ready graphical assets. The Escapist at the time supplied a very basic kit that had a few extremely boilerplate graphical elements, mainly a ZP-themed background graphic and a decent cut-out logo. But...