Making games more fun without changing the gameplay

By jlnr (dev) Date 2012-11-25 08:04

Just a Gosu-unrelated recommendation, this talk is awesome.

I know that most of it is easily possible with Gosu because I've done it...I just never put it all into one huge game of awesomeness. :( translate() makes earthquakes soooo easy.

http://indiegames.com/2012/10/video_is_your_game_juicy_enoug.html

By Spooner Date 2012-11-25 15:46

That indie game, Zombies!!! (where you run around an office shooting zombies) uses a light earthquake effect to make its static cut-scene images look less flat. Sadly, it forgot that when doing this you need to draw more than the full screen, so you see the background as the screen gets translated, which makes it look really terrible :D

By jlnr (dev) Date 2012-11-26 02:44

Good point! Maybe one could just scale() everything a little at the same time to avoid this problem. I actually forgot why I didn't run into this problem, I think I was doing it wrong too :)

By Spooner Date 2012-11-26 03:06

Oh no, it is easy to deal with. Just draw into an area at least slightly larger than the screen and you have no problem with moving the view-port around. I think I had the same issue with Wrath's earthquakes, which is why it was so obvious to me in Zombies.

Incidentally, nice video - I think I watched it a long time ago, though you could equally argue that gilding a turd doesn't make it a good game (c.f. Wrath :$), so I think the argument to "juice up" a game is a two-edged sword.

By ml Date 2013-09-24 07:07

I just watched the video. Very cool. Those are definitely all things that can be done on Gosu.