video games

Grand Theft Auto 4 and robust design

Grand Theft Auto 4 Final mission

Have you ever tried playing GTA 4 final mission on a slow computer? I did! I managed almost to finish it. There is a bug in the final mission. You are riding a boat and you must catch up with a helicopter. At the time, I wasn’t able to catch up with a helicopter. No matter how many times I tried, I could not catch up with it. GTA 4, being a port from console to PC, the performance wasn’t quite there yet, even with fairly good hardware. Not too old compared to the release date.

How to save money buying computer software and video games

Computer enthusiasts get to buy a lot more computer equipment and video games than any other people.

Most difficult thing in videogame development

I’m writing this post mostly as a reminder to me and my coworkers at Studiofreya that we are not alone at struggling with video game development. Today I’ve noticed a tweet by famous Hobby Game Dev that was just about this topic. I’m gonna take answers to his question as a ground stone for this post.

Debug triangles in Bullet Physics

In our game “Burnt Islands” that is a heavy physics based game in a dynamic world we needed to make physics shapes of the objects in the scene. We use Irrlicht graphics engine in the game with “Bullet physics” as a physics engine. In a previous post “From Irrlicht mesh to Bullet Physics mesh” we described how to make a physics mesh from a graphics mesh.

Video game animation

It was time to implement some animations in our game “Burnt Islands“. The task was to add a catapult that was going to throw stones at enemies from the distance. A catapult needs to rotate towards the goal and to throw stones in the right direction. The whole thing without animation would look really weird.

Mechanics behind a game engine

We’ve worked on our own game engine (“Monster game engine”) for almost three years. It is this engine we were using to make “Burnt Islands“.