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Production FTW

Here at the Abbey we achieve greatness with our customized development method. When we applied this super awesome development method, our production efforts doubled, NO TRIPLED! Quadrupled?.. tl;dr: Scrum but not really. Team divided in two; production and pre-production. It works great for us.

Bas Zalmstra
businessCodingGame Design

Game Design: The Designer Class – What skills does he use?

A few weeks ago, I started with a series of blogposts about what it’s like and what it takes to be a game designer. Because we’re talking games here, I’m approaching these posts as an RPG character creation guide. The series consists of the following chapters: Role: What are the tasks of a game designer? […]

Adriaan Jansen
Game Design

How to become a good developer

I absolutely love smelling the sweet odor of code in the morning. I almost like that scent more than an amazing cup of coffee. I am a developer and as many others it is my goal to thrive and excel. I want my colleagues to gaze upon my code with awe, wondering which of the seven […]

Bas Zalmstra
Coding

Curve interpolation

This week I struggled with creating a function of a certain shape. I want to position the camera in our game depending on the zoom level. To make this look smooth I was looking for a function that gave me a good looking trajectory based on the zoom level. The zoom level increases in a […]

Bas Zalmstra
Coding

Animations Part 2 – Animations from code

So for this next post I will be talking about animations from code. This system allows programmers to apply very basic (but also complex) animations to manipulate data over time. The system is mostly used for simple fading, moving and stuff like that. The system is loosely based on the animation system in WPF and the animation system from […]

Bas Zalmstra
Coding

Animations Part 1 – Sprite-sheets

Our engine supports 3 types of animations: animations from code, sprite-sheet animations and skeletal animations. The idea of the first system is to allows programmers to define simple animations like changing a value over time. Sprite-sheet animations are simple animations that show a different image every so many milliseconds. This type of animations allows artists to paint each […]

Bas Zalmstra
ArtCoding

Particles

Nowadays almost all games feature some form of particle systems. Particle systems are simple effects that add enormous detail to a game. Particle systems are used to model effects that are otherwise very hard to model. Think of things like explosions, fire, portals, sparks, etc. Ronimo’s upcomming game Awesomenauts is packed with particle effects and it really adds to the […]

Bas Zalmstra
Coding

Concept Art: Why?!?!

Making a game is a lot of work. We work hard to get as much content in a game as possible. So why would we waste our time making stuff that isn’t going to end up in the game? What’s their purpose except for looking pretty on the wall of the work-environment?

Adriaan Jansen
Concept Art