Because screenshots are always interesting, here is a screenshot of the “Character Creation” part of Icefall. This is one of the very first screens new players will see, as they opt to begin a new adventure the first thing to do is decide who they’re going to be. (I deliberately replaced the description text with
I took a few days’ break from Icefall to develop a quickfire helper application for myself (a simple media-centre type program to organise, search and filter the various videos and music I have lurking around, with a few handy unique features like automatic IMDB-Lookup for descriptions, saves me typing them off the DVD cover). After
Taking a break from coding topics, today’s post explores how Icefall’s dialog User Interface (UI) has evolved over the course of it’s development. My automatic-backup tool keeps every version of Icefall available, so I fired up a few old versions and took some screenshots to illustrate the process. Original Design This screenshot is actually from the
Icefall uses literally dozens of textures… (and it will probably be ‘hundreds’ by the time the game is completed). Textures are used for everything, from the mouse cursor, menus, fonts, buttons, to the game world itself, spells/action icons, monsters, equipment… everything. Although my own main PC has 512MB of video (texture) RAM, not everyone does!
I’m currently reading a book about the evolution of Windows. One of the most interesting things I keep finding is how stupid some 3rd party application developers must have been…. for example, it seems to have been common practice that if you wanted your app to grab a particular Windows setting (let’s say the Fonts
I thought I’d cover this rule first, because I listed it as number one and also because it’s probably one of the most controversial. Let’s begin: a simple Why/Why Not argument should suffice for this one: Why Allow Windowed-mode: It’s more convenient for your users. Some users multitask (gasp!), even while playing games. This is
In Windows (like every operating system), when you’re writing an application or game there are certain things that your application is responsible for handling: some of them are easy, some of them take a little bit more effort. On his excellent blog, Microsoft’s Raymond Chen calls these responsibilities “Taxes”, and there are good reasons why
Class balance. In the RPG sense, class balance means that the various different character types (wizard, warrior, druid etc) are “balanced” in the sense that the difficulty of the game, and your character’s ability, remain approximately the same regardless of your choice of class. (and Race: Humans, Elf, Dwarf etc) Obviously, in an online-, or
What’s a reasonable minimum spec to aim for these days? With Icefall, I’ve already taken the decision to target Direct3D9 – I get a lot of extra capabilities compared to DirectX8, and it still works with Windows XP unlike 10 or 11… a pretty simple decision. But what about in terms of video memory? And
Should Icefall come with an Installer/Setup program? My previous games (like the Five Hundred card game) didn’t require any installation at all: it assumed you had DirectX7 (the game just failed if you didn’t), and all of the files it needed were in the same directory as the EXE itself. You just unzipped it to