Development Diary #4

Topics:

• the continuing development of FastBlocks

Yeeeaaah, my first project makes good progress!!
The most important basics of the Tetris-Gameplay are set and just a few points lack to write of a complete thing:

• one round should have a stop criterion
• then a new round should be started
• a GUI, at least at the start
• Sound ?
• an animation, when a complete line gets deleted

here's a screenshot of the actual visual state:

The background-images are quite dark and were created with photoshops' basic functions, but I think the style goes into the right direction! :)

Development Diary #3

Topics:

• first project: FastBlocks
• first experiences with pygame

After I got myself a bit tangled in version control systems in the last post, we will now come to the planning and implementation.
For now, I don't want to prepare full-featured tutorials for my projects, because there are so many in the internet and you can watch the code in my git-repository to learn what's up.
Here I just want to present some special occurrences during my programming and reading articles.

Development Diary #2

Topics:

• Python and Eclipse
• version control

You know from my last posting, that I wanted to start my career in the gaming industry with the Python script language and the PyGame library. You really should use a 2D engine if you want to create a 2D game and not try to fit it into a 3D engine. ^^
The installation of these two tools is pretty easy under windows and mac. I currently use the python version 2.6 and the appropriate pygame version. I want to recommend Eclipse as an IDE, for which you can get the addon PyDev from the official page or the Eclipse Marketplace (available in all Eclipse versions except "Classic") to comfortably write python scripts ;). The next Eclipse Addons, which I use are a better XML-editor (e.g. Rhinzo XML editor) and eGit.

Development Diary #1

Topics:

• How to Start Game Development
• The "right" programming language
• The "right" engine

How great, I am a game developer!
And you can become one too in a few minutes!! ;)

I found the first steps and arguments, how to start gamedevelopment, written in a nice form in this article:
How Do I Make Games ?

Tetris -> Breakout -> Pacman -> Super Mario -> Ferrari
This way sounds very promising to learn some important parts of gamedevelopment, which won't loose validity in future.

Some other ressources i want to recommend:

• gdmag.com - very cool magazine for (wannabe) gamedevelopers, good articles and a reasonably priced digital download
• gamedev.net - Interesting articles and a very broad board with many members
• gamasutra.com - Business-News about games
• makinggames.de - Perhaps the most important german magazine with a great "job offer" category and a free test issue
  
• gameinformer.com - Great US-magazine with some exclusive news from the games industry