Feature: 'Indie Postmortem: Gibbage'

In another of today's main Gamasutra features, first-time developer Dan Marshall pens an indie postmortem to tell his tale of learning how to program while concurrently self-developing and self-publishing his first indie title, Gibbage. In the following passage, he explains the basic idea of Gibbage: "Gibbage is a cartoon Deathmatch game between two opposing teams. Each team spawns in a Power Booth with a Power count that is perpetually ticking down. Your goal is to run around collecting randomly-spawned Power Cubes and returning them to your base. This increases your Power count and reduces your opponent's. Once the other player's Power reaches zero, it's 'game over'." Marshall then goes on to list some of the issues he encountered in development, including environmental ones: "The environments fell somewhat short of my original vision. I was always really keen on the idea of trashing the arenas- I love the way they're bloody, littered with corpses and ruined after a few minutes' play. Originally, I wanted to fill them with destructible objects; floors that gave way, bricks flying about under the force of explosions, cave-ins, that sort of thing. As far as I'm concerned, the more random elements you chuck into a game like Gibbage, the greater the potential for hilarious unscripted moments of fun. Unfortunately, when I started Gibbage, I knew that sort of coding was way beyond me, and I had to limit myself. As it is, the gameworld itself is in fact entirely constructed using a rigid Tilemap. Freebie map-making utility “Mappy” was used to construct the levels and then pasted over with a single graphic wallpaper to try and reduce the repetitive patterns and ugly tiling traditionally inherent in tile-based environments. Gibbage's major strength, replayability, suffers only in the inflexible nature of its gameworld." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including things to keep in mind for budding developers taking up the task of game development (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).