T+63

I got home from work and eventually ended up doing the health/ammo -powerups on the Tanksalot. You can see the red and blue placeholder boxes in the background. I also put some touches on the missile. There is now a shiny billboard texture to respresent bright light from the afterburn + some more flash with the same texture when it explodes. It made the missiles much more visible which is excellent. It was kind of disturbing when you couldn't get any feedback behind those sexy smoke particles. I also added a little more ground texture to see where the ground is, since there aren't much shadows or other artifacts lying around.

I have one informational bit to share with you who are planning to make a split-screen game: It is a very hard to determine if your split-screen game is fun. You can't test it with your friends over the internet (unless you make support for it) and testing it alone is just a waste of time. Sure you find the bugs, but the actual gameplay needs two players on one machine. Period. When I played a prototype of Tanksalot with our team for the first time, I felt like a utter retard. I just had some kind of false expectation, that two tanks fighting against each other, on plain ground with unlimited ammo, would be fun. It worked for the Rocket Arena-mod in Quakeworld, so why not here too? Well all I can say that it was a very very sad five seconds for me personally.

I took some lessons from my disapointment and even found some deeper insight later: I noticed how my pattern of doing gamedev has always been the visuals and the engine beneath the game. I just end up using huge amount of time to get some textures or bloom (oh I just love the bloom) for some early prototype, where no one else gives a s**t how it looks. Or maybe try to optimize some part of the code to give me +0.23 frames per second. The truth is that I have never really paid too much attention to what is (or could be) really fun for the player. I was just too busy having fun myself with building stuff out from nothing and making it look extra nice. One of my friends nailed it down in a simple slogan: "You have to decide if you are making games or game engines". The right way to make great games is just the opposite of what I was doing. You need to prototype your idea without the glitter and make it fun. You can paint it with pretty colors afterwards. Well, I'm still a new kid on the block, and there is a lot to learn, so mistakes are bound to happen.

That's it. Now it's time for this new kid to get some sleep. Ciao!