Piron Games Insider

I think it’s time for a refactoring (production code from a commercial Nintendo DS game).

The method had over 2000 lines. Yes…2k lines!

It’s a discontinued project that we ran at Piron almost 10 years ago and was supposed to be a real-time tactics game, close to the design of Fallout Tactics, Gorky 17 or Incubation games. I find it funny to watch the work we did very long time ago, so here’s the former site and a postmortem of the project (in Romanian language only).

The game engine source and part of the assets live on under LGPL as Pure Power Tactical Engine (with the informal page located here).

FlashGameLicense have recently crafted a nifty add-on to their already rich roster of services: previewer accounts. That is, gamers may sign up and preview (what else?) the latest Flash games. It’s quite cool since, relying on the gamers experience, we can now have better feedback on the games we develop and have the opportunity to address issues before the public release.

The program requires you to be at least 18 years-old as you have to agree to a Non-Disclosure Agreement and is invite-only. I have 15 invitations, so if you’re interested drop me an email to “karg at pirongames.com”

…Orbital Decay made it in the top ten browser shooters of 2009. Thanks for the votes! Hooray!

Don’t ever mess with a lead programmer! (production code from a game for Nintendo DS )

Here it is!

Here’s the king making a lonely stand against the armies of hell.

The skill icons are placeholders, they will be replaced in the final version. While not much to do on the programming aside from fixing occasional bugs, there is still a hell with over 30 maps to lay out, 4 hero classes totaling 40 skills and 9 monsters classes to balance the game with. But there is hope,  in the end, heroes go to heaven

So, here goes 3 months and no update.  Luckily, Born of Fire is still going on (it was a huge undertaking, programming & design wise) and things are right now in the phase “add one feature and nine bugs happily pop-up”. Hope to post some screens and maybe a gameplay movie by the next week.

A bit of showing off the art style from “Born of Fire” – the upcoming tower-defense game  – so here are mugshots of some of the characters. The artist in charge is Robert Gonzales.

…or how to make the graphics (when you’re not an artist).

I planned Orbital Decay as a solo enterprise and making the graphics took most of the time: out of the 5 months it took for the project to finish, 3.5 were allocated for the graphics. I opted out for a retro-pixel art-”16 bit graphics” style, as a homage to that gaming era and because I wanted total  control for the details on the assets, a thing pixel art is good at for this small resolution (e.g. ports, turrets, hatches, etc).

For each ship, I followed, more or less, a routine: researching for a design (this included the general shape and the details, big and small), 3D modeled the shape and the rough details with Truespace, rendering a side view of the ship, then start editing at the pixel-level in Photoshop. The whole process usually took about a couple of days to a week, intricate ships like the Radiant Star or the Aru Destroyer took even more.

Here’s how this worked, in visually comprehensive but not exhaustive way:

Perspective View

Making of, frame by frame

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