Game Expo and a day of Magic

Been down to EuroGamer Expo down at Earls Court in London on the 27/28th which went well didn't find the Indie stall till 3 hours before i left though, which was the best part for me really. After so much traveling followed by a whole day of Magic Draft for the new set, i can finally sit down and rest and get back to reading more of the UDN.

I met some pretty interesting indie devs down at EuroGamer, whilst play-testing a game called Proteus i recognized from a website a friend had sent me. The programmer for Proteus  spoke to me whilst i was discussing the game with another play tester who was insistent on finding a meaning/goal to the game trying to follow the stars. We got talking about the game, sprites and programming in general and i mentioned that i've been working on my voxel art game in unreal with growing entities and that I've been trying to find resources to help me learn algorithms for growing patterns and other theory. He told me to just drop him an email and he'd quickly try gather some links of the resources he used which is pretty awesome, so I'm going to send a email later today. Been practicing and writing notes on all the UnrealScript state commands and syntax and practicing compiling some really basic test entities with demo states.


I met a few other indie devs one working a relaxing puzzle/exploration game in Unity called Kairo which i quite liked, it reminded me of TFC(Team Fortress Classic) and CS (Counter Strike) Jump/Explore Maps with more music. Another 2 were making a side scrolling jumping/rhythm game similar to the likes of Bit Trip Runner with some smoothly animated vector graphics, which caught my attention for the wrong reasons at first but i got into them. Names slipped my mind so I'll update it with the name later, i also quite liked a game called Barbariball i think.

Been thinking about setting up a Specular sheet for  my terrain pixels since specular maps show so much properties for a material and i don't feel the need to keep the lighting style too retro may as well make use of the unreal engines visuals. Considering normal maps also and maybe even different geometry meshes for blocks done it a voxel style of course like my gun meshes.

Went to a place in Liverpool to play a Magic the Gathering draft with friends and my best friends family which was quite good, minus the occasional stuck up rule nerd. Always like doing drafts for Magic since they always introduce small new mechanics which completely change how the game plays. Its like a endless resource for game mechanic ideas and some of my best mod and game ideas stem from them in some way or another. Also love reading the art since they're on small cards they usually always have a stronger focus on thumbnail composition and silhouette.

Got a nice shiny Slime Molding Card and another normal and a lot of populate cards a new mechanic which allows you to make a copy of a token card you own on the battlefield. So my deck was centered around that. Put a larger emphasis on the difference between normal and token creatures which was normally quite a subtle part of the game in most Magic I've played previously.