A Hardy Developer's Journal – as written by indie adventure game developers

Interfaces are important.  I love interfaces.  Forming an intuitive and fluid language that is used by the player to communicate with the game, and a way for the game to communicate back is fun.  But adventure games, even the commercial titles, rarely get much interface love.  Games in the genre tend to stick to one of the commonly used control schemes.  (more…)

Review by Drew Wellman, aka ddq5

Note: Download Full Game Here

Whilst Ben Chandler and the like are consistently getting game development just right, there is the rest of us, me included, getting it just about completely wrong – or are we? And are we that different from Mr Chandler?

This article, in short, will try to explain why trying to make your first project huge and exciting is indeed a bad idea, but why I’m sticking to it and why you should never give up.

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Everyone knows robots are the coolest thing possible to appear in a cartoon or elsewhere. And in our latest interview we talk about them with Erin Robinson – the inventor of various types of Puzzle Bots and Nanobots. (more…)

So, you’ve got a whole lot done on your game, graphics are looking how you want and you’ve got some puzzles you really like. But hang on a minute, how do you know when your game is done? There’s always going to be moments when you go “I could just add a bit more on here”, and sometimes this is very beneficial. But you have to stop working on the game somewhere, or it’ll never get done.

This could be something so much bigger: It’s a natural feeling to get near the end of your project and think “This could be so much bigger!”. Parts you could add, bits you could extend – in fact if you’re like most people you’ll probably have ‘realized’ that the story you wrote would work so much ‘better’ as the first part in a trilogy. (more…)

Oh yeah, here’s the hard part. Ask anyone who has ever built a game and I am sure they’ll agree that this is where it stops being exciting and starts requiring some real determination. The honeymoon is over, the initial glory of your incredible idea has worn off and you’re left looking at your ‘to do’ list which seems to have no end. Stuck for motivation? Aren’t we all…
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Starting a game is easy. It’s really easy – so easy that we often jump in before we’ve thought about it. But we’ve already covered thinking about it beforehand, so assuming you paid some attention back there, we’re ready to look at the next step. (more…)