Playing Games, Making Games

http://boardgameserver.com/magnite.php Expect a longer post about it some time later - for now, just play the game.

Magnite. Coming soon to www.nagnazul.com.

A new awesome game will come out in 4 weeks!

Whenever I get bored, I try to do some sort of mental exercise. Today was one of these days. I spent about 45 minutes waiting for a bus, and during that time I went back to a certain problem I wanted to solve: making a card game which can be played with nothing but the regular 52 playing cards and lasts a very long time, meaning that a single game can take several hours. Games like poker do not count, because playing poker usually requires some other material: chips, real money or something to keep score. I couldn't solve that problem, but I did end up with a game I think is neat. Give it a shot some time, and tell me how you feel about it. Card Duel Needs: 2 players, 1 deck of playing cards Setup: Take a regular deck of 52 cards (no jokers), shuffle it and deal each player 26 cards, face down. These 26 cards are the player's card pool . From this card pool, each player must construct a hand and a deck . To construct a hand, take a number of cards from your card pool whose valu

1st exam of the semester is down. This one was for the hardest class, by far, so I'm damn glad to have that over with. Time to pop 3ds max open and start making crap for the big project.

It is hard. But man, I can't remember the last game that made me spend an entire weekend playing it. I got it last saturday and had accumulated 15+ hours of playtime when monday rolled around. I wish I hadn't. It's going to make this exam week harder than it should be... But yeah, Demon's Souls. A weird and somewhat awkward name, hard to pronounce. A weird control scheme (square to use a potion? Really?). A ruthless difficulty level, possibly amplified because I was dumb enough to pick "Magician" as a class and pick up EVERY SINGLE ITEM, even those guarded by dragons. The combat is hard to get used to and very skill-focused for an action RPG. This is the kind of fighting system you'd expect from, say, God Hand. I ended up falling into the playstyle where I constantly hide behind a huge shield, using only quick jabs with a rapier to do damage and retreating at the first sign of danger to throw fireballs. I was absolutely terrible at the game when I started

Time for a rant about game design. Every once in a while, someone in a game development team jokes about adding something silly to the game. Maybe a unit with an unpronounceable name, or a gun that fires teapots, or an enemy that kills you and deletes your saved game. That's funny! It's a joke. A funny proposition. And yet far too often, someone adds "you know, we should actually put that into the game." and the designer says "yeah, this isn't a serious game, it'll be a joke". There's something profoundly wrong here. Having a game that doesn't take itself seriously and has less-than-serious dialog in it is perfectly fine. But those games are designed in an extremely serious and rigorous fashion. Take Plants vs Zombies, whose premise is fairly ridiculous and has you planting exploding potatoes. It's a silly game. But its design isn't silly - a ton of work has gone into making every plant interesting and unique in their own way, with th

So the week is over, and I haven't posted a new demo. I guess this makes me a liar. I'm sorry? Don't expect a new demo this week, or next week, or the week after that, or the week after any other week (induction applied to release dates?). School work just caught up with me, and I've realized the idiocy of taking seven classes in one semester. I'm still going to go through with it (because I'm an idiot, you see) but I don't expect to have time to do anything that isn't mandatory schoolwork or playing Left 4 Dead in between exams to relax. On the bright side, I have no intention to give up on the game, and hopefully my artist partner will be able to nag me into doing some work on the game.

Still alive and kicking - I haven't given up on Dokunibi, and there should be a new version out soon-ish: probably next week. I've worked on it a lot and it's got some pretty cool new features. I also got an artist on my team now to help out, which is really nice. Assuming Visual Studio cooperates (and it has a history of being uncooperative) the next demo will have some cool new features. Right now I'm working to add some interesting mechanics that force cooperation between Doku and Nibi beyond the basic "jump on her head".

You can get the new demo here . The core gameplay is finally in there, with 15 levels to show it off. The game will take care of explaining the controls. It's a cooperative platformer. You can play it alone or with a friend - try both, and tell me which one you find harder. Have fun!

Hello Internet, allow me to introduce myself. I am 21-year old professional flipper of bits (or as some call it, a programmer), currently studying to acquire a bachelor's degree in bit-flipping (also known as computer science). My interest in bit-flipping was born from an interest in games - I was told that to make games, one had to become very very good at flipping bits. So there I am. I care a lot about about games, and spend ridiculously large amounts of time making them. I've worked in games industry as a programmer, and I want to eventually work as a game designer. This blog will talk about games - sometimes I will talk about my own games, sometimes I will talk about other people's games. --- As of late, I've been working on this game: There's a rough demo version out there somewhere. That's all for this first post. If you care about games as much as I do, you can tell me by e-mailing me: nagnazul (at) gmail.com. If you'd like to help me make games, th