Well… I may not have posted much around here recently, but I’ve actually been writing all over the place. Mostly recently I posted two essays over at Game Design Aspect of the Month after the excellent Mark “Danger” Chen suggested that I might be a nice match for the August blogging topic. That particular topic centered around “game design” infused game development. There ended up being two essays that I managed to complete, but there is a third that is still rattling around in my head. The first, “The Console, Debug Menu, and Gaming Development,” is a first shot of thinking historically about the rise of more interactive tools for game developers. The second, “The Rise of the Technical Artist and Tools Engineer,” is more contemporary, looking at the recent ascendancy of the sub-disciplines of Tools Engineer and Technical artist. Each is one part of a broader question I’ve had with regard to “interactive” videogame development. Neither displays my usual critical stance and was instead intended to be informative. Of course, they each feed into broader conversations and thinking I’ve been doing with regard to tools and tool development.
A couple of weeks ago now I finished and finally posted a long running examination of several prototyping tools that I’d been investigating for various classes and personal use. The real punchline is somewhat hidden in the middle there (“Bad Casey!”):
Ultimately, what I found interesting about each engine was its approach to pipelines. Getting art assets and design data into an engine becomes the crucial component. Image libraries, text file parsing, and supported scripting languages quickly become the focus for engineering problems on these engines. All except AngelXNA that is. The real plusses and minuses for each engine seem to come down to file support, preferences toward coding conventions, and supported platforms. While AngelXNA is great for prototyping and does an excellent job of using XNA’s asset pipelines, it creates Windows only binaries, and while it may allow you to prototype on your Xbox, taking it other platforms will provide not an insignificant amount of work.
Now I just need to determine how all of this additional writing fits into all of my other academic activities.