Blog

Theme 

When the themes came out I took the opportunity to watch the "Dr Strangelove" movie. I knew about it but had never seen it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and really wanted to try to incorporate that tightly into my game. This turned out to be double edged. Some ideas came easily from that theme but it also felt a bit constraining as well. 

Gameplay 

The Name

“The Gödel Sentence” is a true but unprovable statement. It comes from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that says that in any closed system there are things that are true but you can never prove them. The Gödel sentence is such a truth.

My game was about making decisions with incomplete data. There are truths about the world and the people that you cannot prove and yet you still need to make a decision; you have to decide who gets water, you have to decide who lives and who dies.

I created an account on Newsgrounds to try out that site for getting feedback on my Unity games. 

The site is quite nice overall and has the ability for you to upload a Unity game directly so people can play it without downloading. There is a nice "under review" period for each game which induces people to rate the game and give feedback, so I think this will result in getting some fairly quick feedback.

I have finally updated the serge online documentation to version 0.5.1. It was quite out of date and was missing the documentation of some of the more recent blocks. 

I created a new area on the site, call The Laboratory. I'm going to use this area to share experiments, projects that aren't completed or projects that have been abandoned.

Water Logic

The first version of the documentation for the serge engine has gone live.

This is the documentation of the core engine only and covers just the main classes and structure. I also need to document the blocks and the tutorial. 

I used the Sphinx documentation system, which seems very powerful and easy to use.  You can quickly generate useful documentation with a nice look and feel. I would like to change the overall template to look more like the rest of the site but for the moment it works well.

There were a couple of technical challenges I had to overcome in m

From a very early stage I had included an overheating mechanic in QANAT. My thinking was that I wanted to dissuade the player from just continuously firing a wall a bullets up at the aliens. As you fired the gun it heated up and if you allowed it to reach a critical temperature then it would shut down for a few seconds. 

Over the weekend I sat down to add some new features to QANAT. I started trying to create some new alien types and was struggling to come up with some interesting behaviour. While working on this I got to thinking about what the core mechanic of the game is. It struck me that the core of QANAT is the realism of the alien movement.