The Second Peripheral games vlog!
God can you believe one week has past! Time flies, anyways here you can enjoy the second vlog were I rant on about my dreams of making a game engine and how I intend to do t!
UDK Standalone Exe Tutorial!
So here it is! Some of you were asking how to make a standalone exe for UDK made games. It not fully standalone but it doesn’t have the installer which is the important part! Enjoy, like, comment!
The Peripheral Games Vlog #1: UDK
Hello there, welcome to my new series of videos which aims to be a weekly vlog rather than a post. This is so you can sit back and enjoy a video rather than read. So without further ado here you go!
Vlogs, And Art!
Well hello! Again I apologise for the lack of post’s but life is getting busy, not with other things now just I have been working on stuff and learning new things, which keep in mind is the whole reason I am here.
I have decided that you might enjoy vlogs more than text, because I know myself that I would prefer watching a video than reading a whole bunch of text, so this is what I intend to do. Tomorrow I will release the first PG vlog with some cool info about UDK, but thats for tomorrow.
For today, I have entered the BlenderGuru.com’s competition because I thought why not? The theme was “perfect holiday” and so I wanted to do something about not going to school because for me that is a holiday but I didn’t want to be to literal so this is what I came up with:
Any ways lets hope I do well and I will see you tomorrow!
PG’s First Birthday!
Yea, I managed to miss it due to me being sick and all the other madness going on at the moment. It was actually on the 23rd of April which was a few days ago but better late than never hey!
So I started this company one year ago on a wordpress.com blog and since then I have learnt more than I have ever learnt in all the years I have spent in school! Since then I have made this site just for Peripheral games and released a few mediocre games while learning the art of game development.
Despite the difficulties I have faced I am committed to it completely. Finally I have to say thanks to my 1,400 odd twitter followers because they have kept this company going over the last year. Most of the amazing people I have met during the last year where met through twitter and so thank you to all of you and let the next year be just as amazing!
Back From Holiday
Hello, its been a while. I don’t have a lot to talk about but I am back from holiday and I have been very sick and so was unable to take part in Ludum Dare, much to my annoyance.
In the game development world nothing has been done on the Human Cannon but I have decided that achievements will be added in the next update and the game will be ported onto IndieCity before the summer. Over the summer I will be working on our first commercial game, which again I will say nothing about.
I have also been learning XNA simply because my experience in C# means I am able to pick it up super quickly and I think having experience in other forms of game development is really important.
Anyways thanks for reading and I shall be here again in a few more days with another update!
The Human Cannon v1.0
Yea! version 1.0!
I have now completed all of the planned game elements for final release and so this is now version 1.0. I would like anyone reading this to know that that does not mean this is the end of development, I will still be adding things in the future it’s just the original design of the game is complete.
For the next release I will be adding achievements and releasing on IndieCity for free. For now though this is what has changed
- Desert level added, featuring heat-seeking missiles that attempt to blow you up. You loose 50 dollars if a missile hits you.
- Flares have been added to the shop for use in level 2, this are used by right clicking your mouse while a missile is following you
- The controls have been changed so you don’t have to mash your space bar to play, now you can just hold it down.
- Explosions have been made more expensive to balance the game better
- Having to buy the ability to aim has been removed so you are always able to aim
- I increased the bonus for getting electrocuted in level 1
- Various minor bug fixes
A small note on the missiles, 6 per level launch at random times during a run. They only follow flares if a flare is within a certain radius of them.
Here are some screen shots of the new level:
The game can be played, as always for free, here on our website.
Third time lucky with learning C++
I now know Unity quite well, that’s to say I can make pretty much anything I dream up in Unity. As an Indie developer I feel I should know a decent amount about all the different aspects of making a game, and I nearly do except one thing, core systems programming.
That is things like making my own rendering engine or even making my own game engine! As I have learnt, for this I need to know C++, well I don’t need to know but it would be of great help as pretty much all game engine are written in C++ including Unity.
I actually tried to learn C++ a long while ago when I didn’t have a clue about computers or game development, it didn’t go well I can tell you! Then I tried it about a month or two ago and I got overwhelmed and left it.
Now third time lucky, I have bought a book on C++ development for games and I am reading it and doing all the exercises as per the book, and guess what? I’m getting the hang of it!
Anyways that’s my story, I will have more on it on twitter and through other posts, but for now I have to say PG’s first birthday is in under a month and to celebrate I am going to release a finished(ish) version of the Human Cannon. Not all the features have made it but please be aware that I will continue development of it in the future, as in adding new features now and then, but I need to call it finished because of the big commercial project we have coming up!
Android Developing, New 2D in Unity Tutorial
So its been a few days since my last post so here is the latest news over here at PG!
Well it has been spoken about but I am starting to develop for Android, not iPhones as I don’t have a Mac. I will not speak about the game but I will reveal it will be our first fully commercial project for Android phones and tablets.
Don’t worry I will still be working on the Human Cannon until somewhere in May when I will finish it up and release the full version. Development on our new game will be in full swing in the summer an so don’t expect any more details until then, also I may be a bit quite during the summer while I work on it but please keep coming back! Or follow on twitter for the latest news.
On another note I have made a follow up tutorial on doing 2D in Unity by using Owlchemy Labs’ fancy script which makes planes the same aspect ratio as a texture! Yea that sounds pretty cool watch here for the quick tip on game development.
I don’t get along with Unreal
As stated last week I decided to go and have an adventure in UDK and well I wasn’t completely impressed.
For starters I hate the way it ships with Unreal Tournament built into the engine. Some people don’t mind this but I do, especially with larger commercial stuff being worked on. Also everything is extremely over complicated and difficult to learn. My biggest issue with it was when you compile your game it makes an installer with it, rather than a standalone. This is a bad thing because a lot of people don’t like installers and worse than that games submitted to IndieCity have to be give as a standalone so they can compile into their own installers.
So basically if I make a game I would not be able to submit to IndieCity (my plans). The only way to change this, as far as I know is to modify the source code. For that you need a fancy license coming in at a rather cheap 450, 000 dollars.
Okay my rant is over. Sorry about that, the thing that attracted me to UDK was the graphics capability. To rectify my needs I decided at some point in the near future I would do a small side project of doing a Unity Indie tech demo. What I plan to do is push Unity Indie as far as it will go to make a some graphical demo with some really, really nice graphics.
So at some point I will make this tech demo but for now goodbye!