Designing Adlib’s Gameplay
Today I thought I’d take a look at the development process behind Adlib, specifically how I came up with Adlib’s gameplay. Needless to say the game has gone through a number of iterations since its inception. Below I’ll explain how I made my choice at each fork in the road. To help motivate you I’m even going to share an early build of the game which features gameplay elements that I subsequently removed!
Elements of Progression in Games
As I’ve been working on Adlib I’ve been thinking a lot about how to keep the player motivated and playing my game. This issue has become even more important as I’ve started beta testing the game (thanks guys!). Currently, Adlib plays a lot like a traditional arcade game; you start at a lower level of difficulty and play to reach high levels of difficulty and earn points. There’s nothing wrong with a progression mechanic like this — obviously games such as Tetris and Bookworm use it successfully — but in today’s competitive market I think players are expecting more. So I thought I’d share some ruminations on the subject of game progression mechanics and see what ideas or thoughts you have. How can we make games that keep the player’s interest?
Snippets File for Actionscript 3
I recently discovered the Snipmate plug-in for Vim. It basically lets you “auto-complete” large blocks of code. For instance, you can type “for” then press a key to generate the entire for-loop, or you could type “html” then press a key to generate the entire HTML skeleton. In fact the whole thing is much more clever than that but you have to see it to believe it. Check out a video showing off the plug-in after the fold as well as a custom snippets file targeting Actionscript 3. With this new snippets file you can quickly churn out common code patterns such as for-loops, classes, getters and setters, and much more.
Adlib’s Story
Hey guys sorry I haven’t updated in a little while I’ve been busy working on Adlib. So far things are coming along well, thanks to everyone who’s signed up to beta test the game — your help has been invaluable! Anyway, today I thought I’d share some additional artwork from the game and talk about the simple story that it tells.
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Find It
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See Also
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What I'm working on
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Screenshots and Mock-ups
