There are WAY too many First Person Shooters under development right now. The solution? Make even MORE shooters. Sounds silly? It isn’t. It’s the first ever 7DFPS — making an FPS in 7 days.
“First Persoon Shooters could be so much more”, according to indie dev Jan Willem Nijman (half of indie duo Vlambeer, we’re still not sure if he’s the ‘Vlam’ or the ‘Beer’). “We want to revitalize the genre.”
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am.
9:15 PM The clowns are members of another team at this year’s Global Game Jam, here in Breda, the Netherlands. Like most participants, they’re students, and a particular loud breed of students. With their feet firmly on the desks and the speakers at ‘11’, it’s hard to imagine this group working at any other studio than the one they might start for themselves – talented as they may be.
[epic_dropcap style="dark_ball"]E[/epic_dropcap]very game has bugs. That’s a fact of life. Sometimes they’re big and fat and hard to miss, but sometimes they’re nasty little buggers that hide inside lines and lines of code and nibble away at your game (and sanity). Joost van Dongen, Tech Lead at Ronimo Games, had his fair share of bugs, but this was by far ‘the lamest’ he ever encountered while working on Awesomenauts.
“In the past half-year we encountered a really rare bug in the PS3 build of Awesomenauts about once a month. The game would freeze for anywhere between 10 to 100 seconds, and then continue normally as if nothing had happened. We always have a PC connected to collect logs from the game. However, the log printed nothing interesting and showed simply the frame rate, which is printed once per second:
13:48:13 60 fps
13:48:14 60 fps
13:49:21 1 fps
13:49:22 60 fps
[epic_dropcap style="dark_ball"]T[/epic_dropcap]he Brain is the biggest untapped resource in video gaming. Sure, everything you play, see and hear is being processed by it, but your grey matter doesn’t play an active role in controlling the on-screen action. It receives input through your eyes and ears (and hands if you are holding a feedback controller) and tells your body what to do. But what if we cut out the middle man, so to speak, and let the brain control the game directly? No more use for your hands holding complicated controllers or getting cramps from mouse and keyboard. Just you sitting comfy in a chair thinking your way through hordes of baddies.
[epic_quote style="quotation_1"]
300 milliseconds. That’s how long it takes for the computer to react to your thoughts.
[/epic_quote]
According to extensive studies in the Netherlands brain-controlled navigation is feasible. Yeah! Wait… what happened to killing bad guys left and right by the mere thought of it? Apparently THAT is a loooong way off.
