By Cyrris , 3rd May 9:49 pm
These days violence in games is getting considerable negative attention from those not in the know. So, I thought now would be a good opportunity to look over some of my favourite weapons that I have used in games over the years. They are weapons which have been creative, satisfying to use and just plain well-made. They’re weapons that I would love to have - though of course I wouldn’t go around using them on people… that’s not the point.
I’m not talking about weapons which help me rack up the most kills in my FPS matches, nor are they likely ones I used a lot. Here I am looking for that cool factor - the thing that makes you nod your head in approval whenever a spectacular kill is made while using one. In some cases, they are weapons which have become defining items of their respective games. In all cases, I want one.
» Read all of “The Finest in Gaming Weaponry“…
By Cyrris , 7th April 7:55 pm
When I first launched Aelon’s last design, version 9, I noted that the 12 months between it and it’s predecessor was the longest I had ever gone without redesigning one of my own sites - twice as long in fact. Since that day it has now been 15 months, and frankly the need for a design wasn’t actually critical - it was just something I wanted to do. The fact is, v9 was a good design, and deserved to last as long as it did. Maybe even a little longer.
As such, this latest redesign comes with no real functional changes over the old. The way everything works and is laid out is much the same. What I was really aiming for was something a little sleeker, rather than the simple boxes and rectangles that were here before. The end result you see here before you: Aelon vX.
» Read all of “Time for a Redesign“…
By Cyrris , 17th March 9:26 pm
Back in 2001 when I first started making appearances on GameSpy’s community forums, my restricted internet connection meant that I was never really able to play games online with anyone who I met there. Quite often I’d have to just sit back and read about the fun which other members had while teaming up to play Tribes 2 or StarCraft or a bunch of other games. While most people at the time had meager 56k connections, which were sufficient, I didn’t quite have that. At my house we had our 56k modem shared on the home LAN between 2-4 computers depending on who was around, and usage was restricted to just a couple of hours a day.
So, it comes as no surprise that the first gaming experience I had online was with the text-based browser game Mech Wars, with NukeZone following soon after. Being websites, they didn’t require much in the way of bandwidth or time - although after getting deeper in, I began to realise that time was actually something that was more important than I first thought. After a while, in both games, a pretty clear gap was evident between players who could log in at any time, and those who had severely restricted access like myself. Some of the focus behind the development of The Project has been to see if this gap is still a problem, and if so, if it can be minimised.
» Read all of “Game Development - The Gap“…
By Cyrris , 2nd March 8:06 pm
Aside from a few heretics who prefer the Red Alert series over Command and Conquer’s Tiberium universe, most people seemed pretty pleased when CnC 3: Tiberium Wars was announced. I was rather neutral to the whole thing. I like the universe, and I liked the first game a lot, but the second game of the series, Tiberian Sun, left a very sour taste in my mouth with its slow gameplay and generally poor… everything. They did much the opposite in CnC Generals - a rather poor game universe but with pretty solid gameplay. The Generals experience was always a tad lacklustre for me though due to the poor performance of the game engine, and terrible patching support from EA. Its main weakness was just bugs.
So upon hearing that CnC 3 was to be built using the same SAGE game engine, I was a bit skeptical - though I heard they improved it a lot for the Battle for Middle Earth games. On top of this, the screenshots and interviews I’d seen online all showed how the game would return to the classic CnC everyone knew - both in terms of gameplay and interface (and cut scenes, of course). To be honest I wasn’t sure if this was necessarily a good thing, and now that Vermouth and I have played the demo, we’d like to outline why.
» Read all of “Command and Conquer 3 Demo“…
By Cyrris , 19th February 11:01 am
When it comes to making a game that has no non-player characters, no artificial intelligence, no missions or campaigns, and no actual visible game world, the question must be asked as to what actually drives the game forward. As I said previously, the game is, at it’s core, database manipulation through a web interface. While that may sound rather hopeless, the fact is that the simple website and database has been proven time and time again to be a very entertaining medium, namely in the form of blogs and forum systems.
As if Aelon isn’t proof enough that a blog is entertaining, a good forum system (coupled with a private messaging system and perhaps IRC channels) is really the key behind making a text based browser game work. Just the other day I finished coding the forums for The Project, marking the first major facet of the game to be completed. While they weren’t the trickiest things to program for the game, they are certainly among the most important.
» Read all of “Game Development - Communities“…
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