• The Lazy Designer

    The Next Game

    Yes, “The Next Game” is the title of my second Lazy Designer book but today I actually want to talk about the next Unity prototype-game that I am actually working on. While building a technical framework to help me get Unity projects up and running faster I also started to think about what might be a fun game concept to explore for my next prototype. I decided upon a simple grid-based area editor. While this does not sound overly exciting it has been an interesting challenge. I’ve gotten it to the point where I can place buildings from an list and rotate them. It ensures no buildings overlap and all…

  • Video Game Design

    Game Hauler Version 4 (Part 5 / ?)

    If you want to play the latest build before reading the commentary then scroll down to the end of this post. PROTOTYPE 4 (BUILD# 0.0.5.0) This time around I’m lumping a couple releases and discussing them together. In the previous post I highlighted a few issues that I wanted to address next. These included a better feedback system for picking up and depositing energy and improved level design. However, as I hinted in that post, I changed my mind (though I partly address the latter issue still). Mainly, I ended up increasing the number of players from two to four and putting in the rudiments of a proper “player/control” selection…

  • Writing Resources

    2014 Year in Review

    I sold three stories this year. (The first two can be read online, for free, if you are so inclined.) “Some We Eat and Some We Keep” to Robot and Raygun “Her Robot Babies” to Perihelion “Red Means Go” to On Spec Magazine (forthcoming) Recently I also learned that my short story ‘Digital Rights’, which was published several years ago after winning the Writers of the Future contest, now has an audio version courtesy of StarShipSofa! You can listen here (the story is towards the end of the podcast). Word Count I set a goal to write 130 000 words in 2014 (which was quite low compared to past years…