Hi ya'll, I'm Sam. Sometimes I work on games, though I never get as far as to release a title. Been digging Giant Bomb's style for a while now, I come here just to chillout, so I thought this would make for a good place to post my informal thoughts on game development. The laid back community is really nice, people don't seem to take themselves too seriously around here, that's rad. Also I find writing about game dev stuff some what cathartic. I need to look into seeing if markdown is a thing on giant bomb.

Guess I should talk about making games, it is mah jam after all. Currently I'm running a Unity setup for my projects, it's simplicity lets me do quick prototyping and junking what I don't like. I use Visual Sudio and UnityVS, because although Xamarin Studio has come a long way, Visual Studio is just what I'm familiar with and can work the fastest in. Also it's hard to beat it's C++ prowess. I version all my stuff with git, using sourcetree as a gui cuz lazy.

On Saturday I went to a little game jam for retro style games. I am a paragon of creativity, so I decided to rip off bomberman. Actually I walked in thinking about a gauntlet or zelda style rouge game (like a proper rouge game, like stone soup). Then I just listed some games I thought were cool, picked bomberman because of the simplicity.

It looks like this right now, dead simple (did I mention I'm a programmer, not an artist? :b). I tracked my hours spent on this and all in I spent a little over 5 hours, also I put this sweet music track in. Red stuff is an explosion that went off, yellow guy is a bad guy, green guy is the player. Currently the movement is total shit, I'm hoping to get it more locked to the rails of the grid so you can control the game super tight like PacMan CE DX+. I got it working with an Xbox One controller, I'm guessing that it'll work fine with a 360 pad as well. And it sort of works with a PS4 pad. I might have to look into some kinda controller detection thing. Keyboard is totally aced.

Tried getting a build up on my website for download, but it looks like I'll have to configure my website so that I can host static files and that's just more work than I'm willing to put it at 4 in the morning. I'll try to get that working so that I can share some cooler / less shit builds of the game later on.

My next main thing is movement and getting the bad guy to choose more directions than left and right to move in. I'm not really sure where I'm going with the project at the moment. I might just do a true to source bomberman clone, but I'm more interested in seeing what I can do to the game to give it a slick twist.

Cheers