M64’s Games Blog

Just a quick update on what is going on. I am having hard time at work, so I probably will not post any longer update until weekend. The shared world idea has been named “commundo” from latin “commūnis mundus”, or shared world. There is an ongoing discussion about possible settings for the first commundos at FGD forums if you have not already joined it, you might consider doing so. Now some may worry that such discussions with dozens of ideas going into different directions can disperse the effort that should be focused on the creation of the first commundo, but I would never call a discussion harmful. We need to consider all the options before making a decision. Another thing – if you have not noticed some time ago I have added a Creative Commons license widget to the blog – all published materials are covered by CC-BY-SA.

And now an important announcement – we are getting a spam flood in the comments. Therefore I am introducing some more strict filtering rules and this may go as far as manually moderating some of them, so don’t be surprised if yours is not published immediately.

A short update on my progress with drawing. I’ve made a drawing of a part of my flat.

Perspective drawing of some doors in my flat

That’s my first “big” picture drawn by sight (and not from a reproduction). I have messed up some proportions so I had to change the chair and cupboard slightly and the plant greatly to make the picture come together. I’ve also got quite upset and have not finished it. Now I think it’s not that bad – the central part looks pretty good and even the improvised parts are not that bad. I also think it would be dishonest not to show you some of my failures. (continue reading…)

Hello there fellow Free gamers and game devs!

After the initial spike of interest in the blog I got overly ambitious and wanted to write a huge, serious article to satisfy the taste of my highly sophisticated readers. Of course I’ve overestimated my capabilities and the result was an unreadable blob of text. This morning, while taking a train to work, I started pondering about an old idea, that suddenly started making more and more sense. So I have ditched the whole previous draft and now proudly present to you the “Common content revisited”.

It looks like the most of the Open Source game devs much prefer to work on bigger, commercial-like games than to grab some low hanging fruits like the abstract or casual games. Even if a game dev decides to go with the “retro” technology like a 2d isometric engine with pixel-art sprites, he usually still wants to create an epic RPG rather than a Pacman clone. Reasons for that are numerous and I don’t wish to discuss them at this time.

What is important, is that such games require huge effort, no matter what their technology is. That effort includes coding and art creation. Also world design if somebody is ambitious enough to make something like a RPG. The coding effort can be reduced by using a game engine. The art creation effort can be reduced by using content from some common media repository. Still, there is not much to help with the design and the folk wisdom about common media pools is that although their content is useful as props and placeholders, it can’t be used as the game defining elements because these have to be unique. My proposition could help with these two drawbacks and it would be fun too. I don’t claim it’s anything original – I just have not seen it executed successfully in the Free Games community before. (continue reading…)

I’ve scanned some drawings that I’ve managed to do so far. There are two “benchmark” drawings that I’ve made a little more then a month ago that document my drawing abilities at the begining of my learning process. Please don’t laugh to much. Then there are three drawings I’ve made more recently. The drawings can be viewed at “drawings” page also accessible from the links at the top of the page. All drawings have been made in pencil and scanned – no further retouch besides tweaking the scanner parameters, so I’m sorry about the poor quality, especially of the benchmark pictures.

I would like to express my gratitude towards everyone who has visited this blog so far. Frankly I was expecting that I will be posting into a void for a few months before the blog catches on. I have been surprised and honored to see so many FGD regulars commenting on my first articles. Thank you, you are keeping me very motivated.

One of the curses of the Free Software Games movement is art, known locally as the content – pictures, 3d models, animations and sounds used to present the gameplay. The curse is that even when we have good code, we can’t acquire enough content and thus many of the Open Source games look if not outright ugly, then at least like something from previous decade or more. If you are involved in the Free Games community, you know why it is so – although art can constitute as much as 80% of the workload of creating a modern game, artists constitute only something like 20% of the community of open source game developers, the other 80% being programmers. (continue reading…)

Before I’ll start posting more original content I would like to elaborate a bit more about what I will hopefully be doing on this blog, why and how. I am a man of many interests, perhaps even of many passions. I think it’s good to be able to connect your passions. Some time ago I’ve managed to connect my passions for computer games and for programming by becoming a game developer. Now I would like to add another passion to that duo – a passion for freedom and for Free Software. This blog will be a chronicle of my attempts on doing so. (continue reading…)

Hi there and welcome to my blog. I am m64, a frequent poster on the freegamedev.net forum. I have created this blog to publish my thoughts on games in general and especially on Free Software games. I have quite a few ideas on the subject and I feel that publishing them all on FGD forum would constitute spamming and attention whoring. At times I also like to write longer articles and these are not well suited for publication on a forum.

So this blog will be used to publish things that for some reason don’t belong in forums. Possible topics include: game design ideas, development and financing models for open source games, my general opinions about Free Games scene and perhaps some reflecions about games I’ve played lately. I encourage everyone to take part in the discussion. Last thing: it will probably take me a few days to set up the wordpress correctly, so don’t be surprised by sudden changes on the site.