Cape Guy

Choosing a Game to Develop

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I’d set up Cape Guy, finished the 80 Days PC and Mac port and arranged a 6 month contract at Microsoft Lift to bring in the funds to cover a 6 month project.

I was ready to make a game of my own…

But Which Game Should I Make?

Deciding which game to make is essentially a blank sheet of paper problem. It’s a huge decision because it affects the entire project and decides what you’ll be doing for the duration of it. Getting it ‘wrong’ could also hinder a project before it has even really started. Though the paper isn’t really blank, it’s actually swimming with little proto-ideas (often inspired by playing other games) jostling to be the one you think is worth making!Continue Reading

Get Cape, Wear Cape, Ski (Three)

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When I set up Cape Guy (October 2014), the main goal was to allow me to make my own games. It took a while to get here but I have now released Ski Three. It’s a fairly simple free-to-play casual game but it’s one which I designed, developed and released from scratch and I’m super proud of that.

So You Made a Game, How Hard Can it be?

Good question, thanks for asking! It’s not always obvious how much effort went into developing a game just from playing the end product, so I’d like to spend a few posts discussing the things I had to do/learn to create Ski Three and get it into peoples’ hands. Here’s a general brain-dump of what I’ve been up to.Continue Reading

A* for All

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A while back, I found myself looking for a simple C# implementation of the A* (pronounced ‘A Star’) path-finding algorithm to use in 80 Days for finding routes between cities from the raw map route data used by the game.

If you’re not sure what the A* algorithm is or how it works then there’s a good introduction to it here. Alternatively, there are or some pretty nifty video tutorials about implementing it in Unity here.

I did find a few available implementations out there but wasn’t really happy with any of them. Some had a lot more code than I thought the algorithm justified – which I generally consider to be a warning sign. Some of the them required the graph to be specified ‘up front’ meaning that you couldn’t use lazy evaluation techniques to allow searching of non-finite graphs or to get good performance where there is a large overhead of looking up graph information. Others relied on an underlying grid pattern to the graph, which isn’t very useful for a lot of situations.

In the end I decided to implement my own and thought I would share it in case anyone else could benefit from it.Continue Reading

Porting 80 Days from Native-iOS to Unity

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While first getting started with Cape Guy, I also discovered 80 Days on my iPad. I absolutely loved it and, after a surprising response to a tweet, discovered that Inkle were also based in Cambridge. I already had plans for a first project but, having recently read The Lean Startup, was willing to pivot early, in this case before even actually starting in the first direction! Now THAT’s what I call being agile!

I’d always planned on building up a series of increasingly ambitious projects using Unity, which I’m still doing, but saw an opportunity for both Inkle and Cape Guy. I emailed them and we met up in the pub a few days later. It turns out that Jon and Joe are both really great guys and we got on straight away. An hour or so later we were discussing me doing a PC and Mac port of 80 Days, using Unity. Inkle could release a game to the PC market – which they’d been considering doing for a while – and I could get comfortable using Unity while not having to worry too much about game design (one step at a time!)Continue Reading