DECONSTRUCTING #006: How Resogun made the visual mayhem work?

INTRO

I believe it’s very clear to everyone who has played Housemarque’s Resogun, that is has a lot of huge explosions, tons of effects, mobs of enemies, all kinds of particles flying in every direction, humans to rescue and massive amount of bullets, sometimes all of them on the screen at the same time. I also believe, that the same crowd feels, that it is a game that, despite all of this mayhem thrown on our retinas, super-rarely suffers from an un-clear presentation – it is always clear where the projectiles are, where the enemies are and where your ship is. But how was this achieved?

NOTE: I do work at Housemarque, BUT I was not part of the Resogun team. At that time I was 100% bound to Alienation, which was developed at the same time. This little fact made this article quite an interesting, if not a bit intimidating one to write, as I’m actually analyzing my colleagues’ work here, without consulting any of the people involved in the development at the time I was studying the subject. I hope this is as interesting one to read as it was to write and study.

DECONSTRUCTING #005: A Study On Modern Gamepad Controls

INTRO

Gamepads have been around for ages. The basic concept, directional control for the left thumb and action control or secondary movement  for the right thumb, a convention, that is pretty much still being the standard, was nailed already back in 1982 by Nintendo (more specifically by a gentleman called Gunpei Yokoi) with its Game & Watch game, Donkey Kong (bragging alert: a game system I actually happen to own, bought back in 1985 or something, still in working condition! J ).

It's amazing how far ahead of its time this little device was and how influential standards it set.

DECONSTRUCTING #004: Interconnected core design in ADOM and Rocket League, PART 2 of 2

DECONSTRUCTING: Interconnected core design in ADOM and Rocket League, part 2 of 2

Here's the second part of my two piece interconnected design article. Without further ado, let's dive right into the business.

CASE ROCKET LEAGUE

The more I’ve thought about Rocket League’s design, the more I’ve started to think, that it is simply a design masterpiece. I personally think huge part of the reason for this lies, like the title suggests, in the interconnections: it’s a sum of many different core design features, that ALL compliment, one way or another, the end result and some or all the other features. But Rocket League is a bit more complicated in its interconnections than ADOM (part 1 of this article duo), though the principle is still the same. Rocket League is just more like a spider’s web, where the end result (the actual game) is the spider feeling all the threads in its legs. It is unbelievably well balanced in this sense, how all the elements live together in a complex beautiful harmony, helping each other to reach out their full potential.

And just like in spider’s web, in Rocket League’s case the features aren’t as strictly dependent of each other as in ADOM’s case – remove one thread and the game would probably still work, although depending of a feature, more or less likely not as well as it could, if the “web” would be whole.

DECONSTRUCTING #003: Interconnected core design in ADOM and Rocket League, PART 1 of 2

DECONSTRUCTING: Interconnected core design in ADOM and Rocket League, part 1 of 2

INTRO

This time I wrote about a one solution to a meaningful hi-level design – interconnecting core design features. I’ll use two games as examples, which are very current at the moment AND which I’ve been, “surprise, surprise” playing a LOT, and thus once again thinking a lot of. These two games are ADOM (aka Ancient Domains of Mystery), which just recently debuted in Steam, and a “little” phenomena called Rocket League. But there is also a bigger reason for choosing these exact two games: they both share, even though representing a whole different style of games, one distinct feature. They both have executed masterfully the interconnection of their main core design features, which all perfectly contribute to the end result as well as complimenting other core features, creating a very meaningful design.

In sake of pure reading pleasure and my limited free time, I decided to chop the article in two parts, this being naturally the first part.