GameDev

Mr. Rakesh Raju from CodeWalla… The talk was primarily on why casual games and why it would definitely benefit more to make a casual game than a serious game like a fps or an rpg…

Concoles are opening up, Web 2.0 is happening as a social computing aspect (Second Life)…

Why gamedev in India, why not???,

Casual games or serious ones – Decision

Gaming is not actually engineering… We’re in the engineering space… There is a culture behind developing a game…  There have to be people who can do a lot of board design, balace entertainment with the challenges from technology.  We have a lot of technically capable crowd… But even with the knowledge of a complex topic such as computer graphics, there are not many people that actually spend time with graphic libraries, game graphic renderers and things like that….

Because of the complexity and challenges involved in the development of games and the risk of competition involved, the best option to choose in game development is to make a casual game… And it would cost around 25k $ in developing the game in India.

A game which is as simple of tetris sells more copies than any popular fps game… The reason??? Simple gameplay, no learning curve, etc.

The technical approach behind the development of these simple and casual games is to not reinvent of the wheel…. In terms of using a game engine…

As far as art / design approaches are concerned, we need to decide between the 2d / 3d perspective… Look at the detail involved.  ALWAYS HAVE GOOD MUSIC!!!

Saw a demo of a simple game called Diamond Mine.  And another game which was created exactly on the lines of Diamond mine using a game engine called “Torque”.

The issues on using a thirdparty game engine is that the documentation is very crappy.  THe learning curve is usually steep and the talent pool that can use a game engine is pretty rare coz every game engine usually has a language of it’s own and everything is from the ground up…

Game on…