Greetings
Let me introduce myself. I'm Steven Gabriel. I'm a programmer, and I make video games. I programmed my first game 20 years ago, on an Atari 800 at age 8, and I've been hooked ever since. After bumping around academia for a while I've ended up in LA, where I've been lead programmer for several cell phone games developed by a company called Sennari.
The purpose of this blog is to be a place for me to play around with ideas and hone my skills as a programmer and a designer of gamers. Being a rank amateur photographer and an only slightly better writer, I've noticed that you just have to take a lot of photos or write a lot before you get a few good pictures or stories. I think the same applies to making games. A lot of ideas sound really great on paper. And I think a lot of people expect their first great idea to strike gold. But having gone through the process a few times, I think I can say that there is a whole lot of change between first concepts and the actual game after development. And I'd like to explore that area and maybe find some decent ideas along the way.
I'm going to try to come up with fairly simple, casual ideas for games, prototype/develop at ludicrous speed, and just see how they come out. The emphasis will be on speed, coming up with ideas and spitting them out, and not on production quality or art (unless I happen to be interested in a certain graphical effect). My goal with any project will be to document where the idea came from, how development went, and how good the final product was. If the idea works, then great! If not, then hopefully I can learn just as much or more from why it didn't. I'd like to add games at a fairly regular rate, probably bi-weekly or so. At the beginning I may be trying out a few different development platforms which will take some time.
And I welcome feedback. As long as it's clear that these aren't supposed to be finished products or even necessarily good. :)
To start things off, I'll post in a bit about a clone of the popular PSP game Lumines that I've been working on in order to evaluate the SDL platform.
The purpose of this blog is to be a place for me to play around with ideas and hone my skills as a programmer and a designer of gamers. Being a rank amateur photographer and an only slightly better writer, I've noticed that you just have to take a lot of photos or write a lot before you get a few good pictures or stories. I think the same applies to making games. A lot of ideas sound really great on paper. And I think a lot of people expect their first great idea to strike gold. But having gone through the process a few times, I think I can say that there is a whole lot of change between first concepts and the actual game after development. And I'd like to explore that area and maybe find some decent ideas along the way.
I'm going to try to come up with fairly simple, casual ideas for games, prototype/develop at ludicrous speed, and just see how they come out. The emphasis will be on speed, coming up with ideas and spitting them out, and not on production quality or art (unless I happen to be interested in a certain graphical effect). My goal with any project will be to document where the idea came from, how development went, and how good the final product was. If the idea works, then great! If not, then hopefully I can learn just as much or more from why it didn't. I'd like to add games at a fairly regular rate, probably bi-weekly or so. At the beginning I may be trying out a few different development platforms which will take some time.
And I welcome feedback. As long as it's clear that these aren't supposed to be finished products or even necessarily good. :)
To start things off, I'll post in a bit about a clone of the popular PSP game Lumines that I've been working on in order to evaluate the SDL platform.
posted by StGabe at 7:40 AM
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