An interview with the lovely folks at Gamedev.in about how I learned game development, my experiences at school and college, and some advice to future game developers.
Visit their website and give it a listen:
The source code for (almost all of) the games I talked about in the podcast is available on Github.
I hope you find the discussion informative/inspiring/interesting!
It’s been 11 years since I first thought about making my own indie games. That thought let to Pyrodactyl Games and 9 years of working with very talented people.
To celebrate, I’ve made the source code for our games public on Github. These games were made in C++ using SDL and OpenGL in a custom engine that evolved throughout the years. Here’s the individual links:
Will Fight for Food: SAS: GOTH
I’m eternally grateful for everyone who worked on these games (check the About page for full credits), this wouldn’t be possible without them.
While Pyrodactyl lies dormant, our games and hopefully the memories they gave you live on! We might even meet again someday đ
This is a bittersweet post to write. For the past decade, Pyrodactyl has been not just what I do, but who I am. Things were roughly the same throughout, but that changed about six months ago. In short:
In the backdrop of all this, I was working on The Red Stone as much as I could. Unfortunately, a couple months ago, I entered a stage where I was working but not really making any progress on The Red Stone. I tried pushing through the rut, but that only made things worse. Having read approximately fifteen thousand indie game postmortems, I realized what was happening. After a lot of pondering, brainstorming and thinking twice, I decided to step away from Pyrodactyl for the near future.
While this is not goodbye forever, this is a goodbye for now. I hope the games we made had a positive impact on you, even if it was just making you smile for half a second. Perhaps we’ll meet again!
As for the future, I have a great opportunity to join the team at Ubisoft Abu Dhabi. I’m really excited to be working on I’M NOT SURE IF I CAN REVEAL THIS INFO SO I WON’T SAY IT and I can’t wait to get started!
Before I sign off, it must be said: Pyrodactyl and I won’t be where we are today without the help of a lot of kind and amazing people. My family, friends and colleagues have given me way more love, support and patience than I deserve. I can’t thank you all enough.
P.S. Special shout out to my students for being the best performing better than expected! (jk I love you all)
A Mysterious Stone?
I delivered a talk at the NASSCOM Game Developer Conference 2017 about some techniques that can help developers finish their game. It’s fairly fun and accessible, and I talk about my experience releasing several games in the past decade.
If you’re thinking about making games, I recommend you check it out!
(And yes, the moustache is gone. It will be remembered fondly.)
The last blog post ended on a slightly depressing note, so I thought I’d share something more positive.
(Warning: This article may contain rants about the Indian education system and coaching institutes.)
Even though I had been into programming and game design for the better part of my life, a part of me had always felt that I could be a good teacher if I wanted to. When I realized I needed a break from Pyrodactyl, I thought the time was right for me to dive into this new line of work and see what I could contribute.
I’m very lucky that I got a faculty position at a university that allowed me freedom to experiment with the curriculum. So far, this has been a surprise in a very pleasant way.
Adaptive Curriculum
My biggest peeve with my education was that it was 100%, Ambuja Cement style rigid. The curriculum was decided in advance and nothing you (or the teacher) could do would change that.I’ve been trying a more flexible curriculum that changes based on the strengths and weaknesses of the students, and while it is very early to definitively tell, I think it is having positive results. (More on these findings as the semester progresses).
Showing (not just telling) students how they will use this knowledge in the future helps a ton.
In my case, first I got freshman students to analyze their own favorite games, and then I slowly explained how the games in question use the game design techniques that I taught them. While I am still figuring out how to improve my speech and ability to explain things, I think most of them became very interested when they realized they could learn how their favorite games worked – even though I was conducting a dry flowcharts and game states lecture.
Subject (and self) Discovery
I’m learning a lot more about my subjects and myself as I give more classes. Even the games that I made appear in a different light with some of the things that I learned while researching my topics.This is exciting – like Eat Pray Love except someone pays me a salary to do it.
I hope this different style of article is cool with the usual readers of Pyrodactyl. I’ll share more as I finish my first semester of teaching!
If there’s any teachers out there in the comments, what did you learn when you started teaching? Any tips to help out a new guy? đ
Hi everyone, Arvind here.
Ten years ago, I opened up Google and started looking for tutorials on programming video games. While some folks on the Steam forums might argue otherwise, I think it’s fair to say that I have learned a lot in these ten years. I have worked with some incredibly talented people, traveled across the world, met some of my heroes and most importantly – had thousands of people tell me they liked my games.
Left: My hostel room, picture taken on a Nokia brick.
Right: My home office, picture taken on a slightly better brick.
Both: Bad fashion sense.
Due to being busy with real life, I completely forgot the four-part Good Robot postmortem (which I contributed to) on Twenty Sided.
If you’re interested in learning how we made Good Robot and the fallout after its launch, visit the links below to learn it first hand from me, Ross and Shamus.
The Good Robot team has been working to update and improve the game. The update is currently live on the public beta branch and will go out to all users probably in the next day or so.
I have to say, I loved coming back to Good Robot. There gets to be a point in a long-running project where youâre sick of the whole thing and just want it to be done. Than you get the post-release feedback and you start thinking about all the ways you could have made it better.
I may not like what Lucas did to the original Star Wars movies, but I can certainly understand the temptation to keep âpolishingâ something forever. Hopefully these are net improvements for people.
Partial list of changes:
The new Refrigeration Unit in action.
