Peter Harries

Unplanned features, a concept that doesn't sit well with most game developers (producers I'm looking at you), and rightly so! Additional cost and bugs means they can be risky. After all, they are the very definition of feature creep. However, making games is a creative process. Things change during the course of development, inspiration strikes or something you've been experimenting with turns out to be a huge value add. Not all features are born equal, some are much more suited to being a last minute addition than others. What are the attributes of the perfect unplanned feature? How can we spot them and take advantage? Makes use of what's readily available If the feature can be created with elements from existing systems and assets it's immediately something that's worth at least considering. It's a "modder" approach, taking elements of the games that were created to do one thing and repurposing them to create a variation of a feature or even som...

10 years ago I started working in the games industry. Along the way I've picked up a few things that I wanted to record (for my own sake!) and share with you. 1. Understand the problem before chasing a solution Don't be tempted to start designing a solution when the problem is not fully explored and understood, take the time to focus on what you're trying to resolve. Make sure you understand what the solution needs to accomplish then formalize your findings, write them down. Develop goals. Present these to other team members, discuss and amend them as required. It's always better to debate the purpose of a feature than to debate a feature with no obvious purpose. 2. Don't pop an idea before it's fully inflated When a new idea or feature is proposed it's tempting to start immediately identifying flaws or concerns. Avoid writing ideas off or designing fixes based on these assumptions. Although these concerns are likely valid it's worthwhile giving the peop...

I have always been fascinated by long running multiplayer games that have strong communities form around them. Games like Counter Strike, WoW, Minecraft and more recently Fortnite. What follows is the first in a series of notes I have on how we can facilitate this as designers.  Unique Water Cooler Moments Why is this important? In these types of games we want to offer something new every play session. This keeps the experience fresh and exciting over a long period of time. For example; "I was almost dead AND out of ammo, but I snuck around the back and disarmed the bomb with only a few seconds left! - the other team had no idea, it was amazing!" This is a unique moment for that player. Similar situations may play out but it's unlikely to be identical. This is very different to single player games, where every players experience will be almost the same.  Water cooler moments are usually exciting and rewarding by virtue - you probably wouldn't tell somebody about somet...

A few days ago I agreed to take part in a DnD game. So this is a documentation of, well, how it went and whether I learn anything related to game design from the experience! I've heard stories of many a game developer participating in DnD (The id teams lengthy game mentioned in the book " Masters of doom " for example!) so I hope participating will give me an opportunity to participate in a different style of gaming that may even result in learning about game design from a different angle. So I grabbed my battleaxe and dove right in! The basics The first meeting was pretty light the GM (a seasoned DnD veteran and experienced game designer) gave us the run down of how things work, expanding on the details he had given to us on the Facebook event page. Our IRL (in real life) party consists of myself, a game development tools QA tester with zero experience points in my DnD stat. A producer who also has zero experience. A lead QA tester with previous DnD experience...

Last night Jase got in touch with me with some finished tree models, we decided to get the textures on and get them in engine. A maya shot, complete with texturing problem! No Alpha :( Alpha with dodgy edge :( wahd out textur and no lighting built :( Lighting built, almost there! And some grass! ------------------------------------------------------ and done :D Let us know what you think we love to get feedback! oh and we also have a website (although I've been told by my good friend Max Jensch that a single page with a couple of links on is not a website) sorry max! www.fatpancake.com

I've been busy doing lots of level design, kismet and documentation for this game I've suddenly found myself making. Then I got distracted by environment art which led me to making some snow. It's a particle affect in UDk set to spread quite a distance and I've doubled up a few of them. Hopefully it won't be too taxing on resources! I am pretty happy with it. Check out this video and have a look for yourself! There is a few of us making this game now and we decided we need some sort of name to go by, I've had the name "fat pancake" floating about in my head for a while and decided to go with that. Jase put together a logo and here we are! We even managed to get a website sorted, nothing much there yet but you can find it at www.fatpancake.com

adding more props, decided to stick with the snow theme, also some shots of what the 2 Ollies have been up to! Preliminary character concepts by Ollie E Ollie L's modular archway ( @ OllieLudgrove ) Me experimenting with the archway! and some shots of how stuffs looking.

Adding more assets and playing with colours. Spent most of today working on foliage! (and watching game of thrones!) I think I prefer the snowy version.

I'm quite tired so no big description. This is what I've been doing today! Early days yet. With  Ollie L  Making rocks.

So here's a video of what I've done so far on my little puzzle / adventure game. There's are a few game play bugs that need working out, especially the checkpoint system. I also need to get some characters in there but as I suck at character modelling. The environment needs fleshing out as well, more models, textures, better lighting, particle affects and interactive items. wow just realised that's a lot to do! Anyway aiming to get this section of the game playable so people can have a go at it and maybe even enjoy it! also start working on DoubleX again on Monday! wwooop!

A shot from the deck of the ship. Started to add weather effects, the rain is a bit big, but it works, want to play around with it a bit but not a priority. Also not quite nailed the particle effects yet, want to have rain hammering down on the deck, I may do this through a post process volume that makes the camera look wet instead. Hopefully get a video of this up soon. Also need to do the textures. So UV unwrapping, which is the bane of my existence.

So doing some tests with a ship model I made. When I'm done modelling it I'm going to smash it up :) at the moment though it's in UDK, you can walk around it, it has 5 floors and 2 crows nests, still needs a lot of modelling work. It also rocks about in the wind. Been trying to put rain battering the ship in but hasn't been very successful. It also needs textures doing. Just added this texture for now to stop the normal's going invisible on me. If you want a clue to where the smahed up version will end up look at the right hand side of the picture in my last post ;)  Update! added this lil pic, you can see an earlier version of the ship on the right.

Another one!

A screenshot from a little side project I'm messing aound with at the moment. Models & textures are placeholders. But I do like the super simple style.

First post in a while! Been crazy busy recently, but with loads of interesting stuff!! So on March 10th 2011 I got the opportunity to visit blitz games in Leamington spa!! I thought I would do a write up of what it was like to give anyone else thinking of applying an idea of what to expect. (If you're thinking of going already, do it! it's well worth it!) I arrived in Leamington spa on the 9th and stayed overnight in Buckland Lodge , the hotel it self was a bit dated but overall it was ok. Run by a guy called John who seemed nice and it was cheaper than the travel lodge! Also got breakfast in the morning, always good :) Next day I was up at 7:30 got breakfast had a bath (no shower in my room! gutted!) and got up to Blitz just before 9. At which point I waited for Rhys (One of the programmers we worked with in the 2nd year, also from Newport uni). But Rhys managed to get himself lost so I just went inside and I was cold. Once I was inside we got directed through to a ...

After the presentation last week (that I think went quite well!) it's back into production. Over the next few weeks I feel we need to really focus on a couple of things. #1 - Getting a working prototype out the door. This is so, so important and thus far we haven't managed to do it. I wouldn't say it's any of our fault that this has happened. But we have such a nice mechanic and at the moment we don't have the technical abilities to pull it off. In short we need someone familiar with programming and is possible scripting for UDK. Now we have two options, hunt for someone who can do this or one of us learn to do it ourselves, possibly sacrificing other areas of the project. So I'm stumped. We have a meeting tomorrow so hopefully we can discuss a solution then. #2 - Having a defined art style in engine. By this I mean something within UDK that shows how are game is going to look. At everything apart from the actual static meshes is out of the box UDK (textur...

First off I would like to introduce my new website! http://www.peterharries.co.uk/ It's still under construction but there are a few interesting bits on there to have a look at. Including a development diary and post mortem of the pre production stage of Double cross. Here's a direct link to the preproduction development diary and post mortem. So please have a look and let me know what you think :) Since my last post I've mainly been working on those documents but I have done a bit of modelling, you can check out below: I'm realy tired so I'm going to go and play minecraft some more, then maybe sleep.

So this is what it's looking like! I want to use this in a submission for the Blitz open day and the deadline is the 10th. My disertation is needing a bit of work too :( So may leave it as it is for now. I will however keep working on this after the Blitz submission. The things I want to change are: - re-do the main body and tower textures, change them to 1024 maps. - add more geometrical detail to the edge of the roof of the main body, tower, porch and both extensions - tweak the geom on the edges of the pine end of the roof and the tower to get a better silhouette - create emissive textures for lamps and windows - create a smoke particle affect for the chimneys - work further into the roof textures, especially the edges. Get all the walls and roof. - add some weathering to the roof tiles.

So I've been trying to get textures down just to cover stuff. It's messy and not finished and still needs tweaking but at least I can get an overall picture of where it's going. Getting a bit sick of texturing now, have 2 days to go before I want it done so just trying to get stuff done.