Rebound

As a first game, Rebound has taught me many valuable lessons.

The first lesson is that everyone is right when they say don't spend too much time on your first game. I guess I had to learn it by experience.


The second lesson was practical experience with my toolset. Rebound was doubly useful for this purpose, since after creating the game in Game Maker I decided to port it to Construct 2. Besides allowing me to get used to how each program functions, recreating the same game allowed for a closer comparison between the two.

I'm going to stick with both. I really like C2's work flow, its power, efficiency and user-friendliness. But I also like being able to mix code with drag and drop as seamlessly as GM allows. This act of writing code feels like I'm expanding my skillset (and indeed, my little experience with GML has already given me a valuable leg-up with learning C).

Although wrappers are available to turn a C2 project into a native application, C2's focus is on HTML5, and HTML5 right now is experiencing some growing pains and operates differently in different browsers. Rebound plays perfectly in Chrome, is jerky in Firefox and downright sluggish in Internet Explorer. These are the browsers I've tested myself. In Safari, running on Mac OSx, the game crashes the browser every time, so I'm informed.

This won't stop me developing HTML5 games - I'm glad to be gaining valuable experience in this growing area when it's at such a young stage - but if I have more ambitious projects, designed from the outset to be a native application, then I'll take them to Game Maker.

Before Rebound made the leap from exe to browser I made some design changes, most important being a change to the pace of the game. For the curious, the GM version can be downloaded here (press escape to skip the title screen).


The third lesson I learnt from Rebound was about the entire process of uploading my game to my web host, and then integrating the game from there into various game portals supporting HTML5 via iframe. Now I feel pretty comfortable being able to distribute a game to the relevant channels.

In all, I consider Rebound an extremely useful practice run, but one I wish I'd spent less time on, and one I'm ready to put to bed with this blog post.

Blog making

Why blog?

To offer a parallel to others venturing down the path of games design. If others can take something away from my experiences, to be inspired by my successes, to avoid repeating my failures, then so much the better.

But mainly I blog for myself. Sometimes it's good and healthy to pluck out a thought from the swirling mass and try to fix and give a more solid shape to it in the form of the written, published word.

Why make games?

Feeling the creative impulse - a desire to share an idea, feeling or experience I've had - the different mediums come up one after another offering themselves to this process. With each having its own strengths, it'd be a shame to close myself off to one avenue of expression. With game design I don't have to do that. Designing a game is a synthesizing process whereby the different mediums might come together under one banner, reinforcing and inspiring each other in the process.

Games are recent things, and questions about the artistic potential of games are more recent still. Whereas a new painter, writer, musician or filmmaker is faced with a daunting archive, filled floor to ceiling with past masterpieces that set the bar in their art, the game maker is faced with something more akin to an open field of boundless potential, expanding as far as the eye can see. At a time when this potential is being increasingly recognised and explored, it's exciting to be starting down this path.