Essays about game development, thinking and books

Places to discuss Feeds Fun

I continue developing my news reader: feeds.fun. To gather information and people together, I created several resources where you can discuss the project and find useful information:

So far, there is no one and nothing there, but over time, there will definitely be news and people.

If you are interested in this project, join! I'll be glad to see you and will try to respond quickly to all questions.

Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.

At the end of this post, we will have:

  • A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
  • A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
  • A composition of the team we need to assemble.
  • A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
  • An outline of our marketing strategy.
  • A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
  • A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
  • Jokes and I hope witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

Read more

Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters

How it all looks from the ground.

How it all looks from the ground.

For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D

In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.

What's there:

  • The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
  • There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
  • A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
  • A huge number of trails for hiking.
  • A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
  • Restaurants with beer.
  • Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).

This is briefly, and now in detail.

Read more

Concept document for a space exploration MMO

The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E

The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E

As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.

One more concept for The Tale 2.0.

Title

Lords Captains MMO

Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.

One-liner

Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.

Platforms

Browsers, mobile.

Genre

Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.

Closest analogs

EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.

Read more

Dungeon generation — from simple to complex

What we should get.

What we should get.

This is a translation of a post from 2020

This is a step-by-step guide to generating dungeons in Python. If you are not a programmer, you may be interested in reading how to design a dungeon [ru].

I spent a few evenings testing the idea of generating space bases.. The space base didn't work out, but the result looks like a good dungeon. Since I went from simple to complex and didn't use rocket science, I converted the code into a tutorial on generating dungeons in Python.

By the end of this tutorial, we will have a dungeon generator with the following features:

  • The rooms will be connected by corridors.
  • The dungeon will have the shape of a tree. Adding cycles will be elementary, but I'll leave it as homework.
  • The number of rooms, their size, and the "branching level" will be configurable.
  • The dungeon will be placed on a grid and consist of square cells.

The entire code can be found on github.

There won't be any code in the post — all the approaches used can be easily described in words. At least, I think so.

Each development stage has a corresponding tag in the repository, containing the code at the end of the stage.

The aim of this tutorial is not only to teach how to generate dungeons but to demonstrate that seemingly complex tasks can be simple when properly broken down into subtasks.

Read more