This blog will cover something very near and dear to my heart: player expression through gameplay. Basically, players being able to play how they want to play and not always exactly how the game or the designer wants them to play.

I’ve created dozens of card game prototypes and am working on numerous card-based projects I plan to release in the future. From working on these projects, I’ve noted some common elements that tend to make or break a digital card game’s design.

In this post I’ll go through some basics on digital audio and the tools available to shape and refine that audio. In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about how to ultimately combine those elements into a cohesive mix with some audio examples. I will list any important jargon at the end for reference.

Missile Cards isn’t my first commercial project, but it’s one of the weirdest, most ambitious, and most successful games I’ve created to date. For me, learning is an important part of the process and each project brings new challenges, victories, and opportunities to share my experience with others.

As someone who has primarily made multiplayer games, playtesting has been an extremely important part of development. However it can be tricky to get helpful feedback under certain circumstances.

In part one of this article series, we created our database and used it to display the values of each variable on the GUI. We only covered how to add basic data types as well as enums and other objects. This time, we will do some modifications to the original database.

Due to the overwhelming response from the hitbox and hurtbox tutorial I posted, and due to a lot of questions from you folks about how to do this particular thing, I’m going to show you how to set up a basic combo system.

This is a guest post by Ling Shi, principal software development lead at Hulu, originally published on the Hulu Tech Blog. 

It's easy to create basic game art. The next step is to add proper lighting, textures, and details. Whether you want to draw rocks, some foliage, or a giant robot, there’s a trick for every effect. Let's dive right in and have a look at different shapes, colors, textures, and other details!

I’d like to share some of the insight I gained from writing the score for Crypt of the Necrodancer.

In this entry, I will go over how to write your own timers and how to use them.

Object introspection (also called metadata or reflection) is a cool feature that gives users information about their objects and data types at run time. This means you can use information about an object in your favor to perform cool tricks.

Today, I would like to go over how to create effects in your games. We will be creating an effect object, controlling its behavior with a state machine, and using scripts to streamline the creation of these objects in game.

Each new game release features even more realistic graphics and incredible detail, but there’s also a resurgence of low-poly art and flat design. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using this style? Let’s dive right in!

I will show you some simple AI concepts and how to set up different behaviors for your games. It may be better to stop thinking about AI as “intelligence” and start to think of it as a series of behaviors.