A couple of days ago I officially announced Infliction to the world. Infliction is currently slated to release in early 2018 on steam with console versions to follow. Announcing the game was a nail biting experience for me. I did a lot on the day and I'll write an article about my experiences announcing the game in my development diary in the coming days. If you haven't seen it yet, you can check out the announcement trailer below. For all things related to the games developm

Infliction is a mixture between dynamic AI and scripted events. Scripted events take time to craft. But I can craft them! Add the sound of a fast beating heart, some lights flickering, you get the idea. The problem I was having was when the dynamic AI is in the world, she currently has a creepy ambience that plays on a loop and that's it. You'd be surprised how far that simple solution can take you. But, its not very dynamic and it gets old. Enter the Dynamic Fear System. So

As a solo indie game dev, I can't stress enough how many times I've played my game during development. If I was to try to put a number to this, I't be in the thousands. Mostly because every time something has been implemented I play test to ensure it works correctly. I try every scenario I can think of when I'm play testing too. I'm fairly comfortable with knowing where my bugs are and knowing that I'll get around to fixing them later. Major bugs I find, I fix right away but

First impressions are so important. If I start up a game, I don't usually judge it by the main menu. In most cases this is a static screen with a few options. So okay, a regular main menu doesn't usually make me feel one way or another, but what if the menu itself was awesome? Every now and then you play a game that has a 3D menu. I immediately think of the last of us. And what if that menu was dynamic with things going on? And what if that menu contained clues about the game

Maybe I've just played this game thousands of times during development. In-fact I know that's true. Every time I implement anything at all, I play test for at least 20 mins to make sure it works as intended. I was play testing something and I picked up one of the books in the game. It flips open to a page and you can rotate the book. It was okay but it didn't feel very natural, engaging or interesting to look at. That's right around the time I decided to make it a little more

Easily, by far, getting mirrors working has set me back more than anything else. I've never implemented AI before and I found that easier. So after much grief and optimisation I get something working fairly well on my machine. There was a significant frame rate dip but it was within acceptable range on my machine. I had my fingers crossed that it would be acceptable on machines of a lower spec. Boy was I wrong. Real time planner reflection mirror pictured above, apologies for

Whats better? A dynamic AI or an orchestrated scripted event? Both have their pros and cons. Lets examine the difference between the two before we look at their pros and cons. Scripted Events are a linear, predetermined series of events that unfold on cue. They're usually triggered by some kind of collision or trigger volume. An example of a scripted event might be something like "when the player enters the hallway, play scary music and make all the doors slam shut". AI (Arti

So I've finally implemented a real time mirror that doesn't totally crash the game. I must say though, its a performance hog. I have a fairly high end PC and I consistency get around 60fps (frames per second) which I'm happy with. I'm targeting 30fps as this isn't exactly a twitch shooter. The problem is that this mirror, the one you can see in the screen shot. Causes my machine to dip to around 40FPS while in front of it. While that is somewhat acceptable the frame dip is no