Author Archives: Will Swannack

3DS Max Exporter and Character Animation

By Will Swannack | Published: July 13, 2010
I wrote an exporter for 3DS Max that exports it to my own file type. To test that it was working, I had to add character animating to my DirectX engine (aka skinning). Unfortunately, the actual exporting process is rather dull to look at, so I’ve instead posted a video showing the finished product of [...]
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Roguelikes: An introduction

By Will Swannack | Published: June 20, 2010
If you know anyone who is fanatically into roguelikes or you’ve always wanted to try them yourself but have been intimidated by the insane control schemes and ascii graphics, this is a guide for you. The intent for this article is to provide a series of games ramping up towards the more esoteric roguelikes. Anyone [...]
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Dice and Storytelling

By Will Swannack | Published: June 13, 2010
When I play board games I tend to get a bit… competitive. More so than I would like to admit. Consequently, I tend to be pretty irked when randomness gets in the way of a good competition. I prefer something like Puerto Rico to Race for the Galaxy (but love both). It’s rare to find [...]
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Ra

By Will Swannack | Published: May 25, 2010
Ra is an exceptionally simple and elegant board game. Players typically can only choose between two options on their turn. The first option is to draw a tile from a bag and add it to an increasing pile of tiles on the game board. The second is to declare Ra which starts an auction for [...]
Posted in Game Design, Play | 1 Comment

Cowgirl and the Mushroom Men Genocide v1.1

By Will Swannack | Published: May 18, 2010
I’ve been working on improving the game I made for the tigsource Assemblee competition recently, and I think the game has become a lot more fun. You can download the game here. I used CamStudio and Windows Movie Maker to make a simple trailer, but I had trouble getting decent a decent quality image. Still, [...]
Posted in Development | 1 Comment

Genre Strengths – Dungeon Crawl

By Will Swannack | Published: May 5, 2010
Example games - Etrian Odyssey (DS), Shiren the Wanderer (Wii/DS), Diablo 2 (PC), SMT: Strange Journey (DS) This is a quick look at some strengths of the genre with examples from games that use them well. This isn't intended to be comprehensive, just a quick glance of stuff I would try and utilize if I were making a game in this genre. Exploration: One of the strongest pulls of a dungeon crawl is wanting to see what's around the corner. Typically a level of a dungeon crawl begins with exploration and ends when the map is fully uncovered (or at least proceeds to a boss fight). Click to read more.
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New Webpage

By Will Swannack | Published: March 20, 2010
I have decided to revamp my webpage using WordPress for ease of editing and formatting. I am toying with themes right now, but even this starkly basic one looks better than my previous website. Using WordPress will allow me to treat this website like a blog as well. I plan to try to add content [...]
Posted in General | 1 Comment