FarNiche

 Indie Video Game Design & Development 

"This is a game builders wiki, and for as much as I would like to say that this is '  my  '  wiki, I must acknowledge that a wiki is, by definition, a 'Wiki', or so says the concept developer of 'WikiWikiWeb'."

'''I have laid out the Main Menu up top in a way that should initially give more than enough leeway for examples, to build arguments, resolve definitions and prove points thereby testing theories. All, of course, these, leaning towards the art of indie game design & development. But while these interactions may result in conflicted resolutions, remember this, as a wiki, it is to retain its assemblance of decorum. So please do your best to play, i.e. ( "  fight  " ) nicely, or like my Mom would say, " I'll bang both of your heads together ". Those were the days, I'm glad they're over now. As it stands, within this rough and tumble world of Ham-fisted Numbskullery, the point is, keeping the focus on discussions and commentation aligned with anything pertaining to indie video game design & development. With that, I invite you to peruse and examine this bill of fare, add to it, remark on what you like, explain what you don't, deal with the good and work through the bad. In so doing, the take is to ascribe maturation as the next phase of this wiki, allowing it to evolve into an Indie Game Creation Wiki. '''

because here ... "It's All About the Game, and ..." FarNiché : is where I am an Indie Game Creator.

 Here at this Wikia Wiki I leave an open door  for myself and others, as a continuing policy trained on  ''' ideas about game creation and gamification. '''

''' At FarNiché I build art assets, where they, at times, coalesce to become video games.   This wiki is designed to aid in that facilitation and to consolidate these efforts into a library of works. '''
 * (Any extracurricular additions remain the property of their respective contributors.)

''' When making addendum or revisions send a tweet Twitter.   My production pipeline milestones reside at tumblr.   While my asset library showcase resides at WiX.   Any questions or conversations can be initiated or sustained in this sites Forum.   Further conversations can be taken up at my Home Page DISQUS. '''

Once I stepped wholeheartedly into this, my initial game and gamification endeavor, and agreed to recognize this as my primary persistence, I began to chronicle my trials and tribulations on WordPress. I found it a far better thing to be able to recall what I have learned from all of my learning. I have also come to realize how this might better enable me to grow my knowledge in video game creation processes. Building games from scratch and then realizing that I can't carry all of my wisdom, about everything I have learned, around in my head, always, has become the impetus to tend to this wiki. My hope is that this wiki will faithfully keep track of and grow these many things, ill and well, and remind me long beforehand as I know many other things can and do tend to go awry.

Previously, while looking to build games for the Xbox, the first of my two best games were SpaceWar II with a damage allocation chart built like none other. (Really, I could only run one ship with its full array of deflectors on at a time while fraps captured the video on my i5 quad-core). So, yes, "Thick as a Brick". But even as fraps takes up some CPU/GPU cycles, and as the game was being built for the Xbox, and even though it could run on the PC, it was found, to my dismay, back on the Xbox 360, that it got more than a little dicey, actually it would skip frames, up to two seconds apart, as it chugged along within my fat logic.

I will get to my second Xbox game in a second.

My next little bout of inspiration was luckily brought to life via One Game A Month, as you can see here already in progress. But just prior to this chance meeting, I found myself hard pressed in keeping up my morale and being truly inspired by any, every and all achievements within each of my Xbox game research escapades. I was reading as much as I could about everything from XML data structures to save game files to how to animate soft body characters. And then, by chance, or luck, or design I came across this odd book, that, in some strange way, seemed to promote some potentially redeeming features that would show itself to be of greater assistance, unbeknownst to me at the time, but much sooner than later.

The book, The Game Jam Survival Guide, is about a bunch of people who would make games, for any reason, using the whole gamut of available tools to build every type of game possible, within a set, usually very short, relatively speaking, time frame.

Yeah, it sounded like some fun was going on, Ludum Dare 21 Keynote by McFunkypants, and a year and a half later it's still fun, and funny.

But there are lots of things to do as I find myself moving closer to that mystic title of "Indie Game Dev" like being able to, with some vague but stalwart candor, tell myself that I can read more and more computer languages and believe it to be so, without breaking into a grin. Even within all of these computer languages, coded in some flavor or other that will do something ever so slightly better but always being different enough to force other changes, I still need to find time for some audio and to be able to tuck it away in my Sound Cloud, and into my games. One other thing I can do, or think I can still do is play some music in my Music Studio(Drums), along with a little bit of guitar, here, in a roguelike.

This is all fine and should fill in the corners in a pinch, but I have found something else very useful and which I am currently bringing to my aid, a Tumblr page to showcase my efforts in 3D model mesh creation, which is the true meat and bones, literally, well figuratively literally, within a figurative state of literalness, kind of, sort of, maybe, just a little ... bit.

And this brings me full circle back to my second Xbox 360 game, HUD-On. This game came from a bunch of tutorial game stubs found in XBOX LIVE indie games. None of the tutorial game snippets ever really built directly on each other but they did hold some commonality between them, and each did enough so that a small bread crumb trail could be found running between each tutorial. One would show how to have a ship fly where the camera would follow behind realistically. The next would show how to build a landscape and have a generated heightmap build a terrain using preprocessors. Another would show how collision detection was used and from that, infer how the terrain and the ship and the camera would or could react with each other. Then there was how scoring took place and how to save game data. Then there was game states and menus. Each tutorial had its own heart subject but feathered off enough to be able to merge into the next tutorial, both theoretically and mechanically.

So this gets me back to where I am now, still trying to build for the Xbox, but this time around I have banked on some power tools to get me through some sticky situations. One Game A Month is enough to keep the pilot light on and it doesn't detract from all of the wandering that needs to take place while trying to figure out what needs to be learned next.

That should bring everything up to date. This wiki, as I had mentioned before is to become a living index for the library of works that I intend to produce. Tweet if you feel so inclined to knock around some ideas, Far_Niche.

''' Further Help can be found in Help. '''