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Lazy Designer – Changing Designer Data
Overview This post is a bit of an addendum for an earlier post (Data and Resource Generation) which talked about ways to organize the data needs for a game. Role-playing games are data intensive. In my career I’ve worked at two different extremes, in regards to how game data is organized and edited by designers. Both have their benefits and their disadvantages. Everything is Unique In this scenario if the designer needs to place a creature, for example, they would create the creature from scratch or reuse one from a library. Benefits Full Control. This scenario allows for maximum customization, the full particulars of each creature can be tweaked until…
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Data and Resource Generation
There are many ways to organize game data. This section discusses some that have worked well for me in the past. Warning – technical game post. If you’re here for writing stuff only, run now. Overview Games are made of many things. There is the data — creature 3d models, textures, area maps, dialog files, and so on. And then there is metadata — lists that control which creature uses which 3d model, texture, dialog file and so on. The more complicated the game, the more metadata. Roleplaying games with hundreds of abilities, items, and creatures require an ‘insane’ amount of metadata. The simplest way to organize this data is…
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Backing up your data
I have a somewhat elaborate backup system that I use to make sure my writing, code and photographs are backed up regularly but I realized my process is fairly specific to my workflow and a bit complicated. So I decided against posting. So, simply consider this as a reminder to make sure you have a process to back up your work regularly — people lose stuff, important stuff all the time and I’ll be honest it wasn’t until a few months ago that I got myself on a regular backup routine… after losing most of a story I had written. I’ll leave you with a couple links to other bloggers…
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Best Mouse Ever
So a couple posts ago I talked about going back to being ‘wired’ and loving it and I just discovered a secondary benefit of my ‘great technological push backwards’… my new (cheap) mouse doesn’t have a back button. I am delighted. I can’t count the number of times I accidentally pressed the back button on my mouse and had it navigate to a previous webpage I didn’t want to go, or worse, lose work. I’ve always hated the little suckers and on a couple mice I actually removed or taped over the button. When you’re working with content generation in a web-based environment an accidental ‘back’ can cost you at…
