One small change Nintendo recently made to their eShop interface highlights one of the growing issues with the platform: a simple indicator of how many games are listed in the "Great Deals" section showed us that this week alone there were over 1000 titles on sale. When Piczle Lines DX was launched there were around … Continue reading Designing shareable moments
Score Studios’ 11th Anniversary
Score Studios was founded on June 11th 2009, 11 years ago this week! This month we'll see a series of Piczle sales, the release of the Piczle Cross Adventure demo (featuring a unique area and puzzles) and a few features to celebrate. Coincidentally it is also the 10th anniversary of Piczle, with Piczle Lines, the … Continue reading Score Studios’ 11th Anniversary
Materials: Preview texture
Piczle Colors was in need of a material that dynamically built a texture for the puzzle "solution reveal", considering there was an option that players could unlock to play randomly generated puzzles. What this post is not about is how I achieved this in Piczle Colors because, lordy...that was...special. I dread to even think about … Continue reading Materials: Preview texture
Materials: Clue numbers
For a change I thought I'd write about a hypothetical, and one of the things I usually do to avoid extra work. Or rather, not just to avoid extra work but to keep it easy to change things on a whim. Let's create a texture for Piczle Cross clue numbers with the minimum amount of … Continue reading Materials: Clue numbers
Supporting indie devs
Being an independent developer is as rewarding as it is challenging! Being able to be creative on your own terms is something to be envied, for sure, but with that comes a lot of responsibility and struggle that, as a contracted developer, you usually don't have to worry about. Or rather, somebody's job is to … Continue reading Supporting indie devs
Further tips for working in Unreal Engine 4
Following on from a previous post that gave some tips on working in UE4 I thought I'd expand a little with a few more tips and tricks. Especially with the recent announcement of UE5 and a new royalty scheme, Unreal Engine is looking more and more like the go-to engine for gamedevs! Everybody has their … Continue reading Further tips for working in Unreal Engine 4
Creating patches (v.1.0.1)
Though every attempt is made to ensure a game is as bug-free on release as possible, it is almost guaranteed some errors will slip through the net. Testing by various parties, myself, QA teams, publishers and eventually users will throw up all manner of little quirks nobody else had noticed. Luckily in these days of … Continue reading Creating patches (v.1.0.1)
In-editor tool design
When using a powerful set of tools like those provided within Unreal Engine 4 it's not a bad idea to keep any bespoke tools you may need to use within the engine as well. The idea being that when you're creating your game and, say, you need to add or adjust a new puzzle, in … Continue reading In-editor tool design
Piczle Cross Adventure post-mortem
After every project is "finished", so far as they ever are, I like to look back on the development process and see what I learned, what mistakes I made and what I did well. Though Piczle Cross Adventure has barely been released I thought I'd do a post-mortem on it already, even though at this … Continue reading Piczle Cross Adventure post-mortem
BluePrints: dynamic button graphics
Future-planning when I make my projects mostly revolves around doing a little work right off the bat to avoid tedious work later on. One example I'll give here is for those little buttons you see in the margins of the game that tell you what buttons do what. You'll have seen them in Piczle games. … Continue reading BluePrints: dynamic button graphics
