Casual Gaming Programming, News and Tutorials.
News
The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around
Nov 14th
James Turner from O’Relly Radar made this great interview with Jason Kapalka, the creative mind behind many of PopCap’s success games.
The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around
If you’ve wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!
The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma.PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.
Forum Online
Aug 17th
Wagenheimer’s Game Development Blog forum is now online!
There you can ask any question about the Asphyre, Phoenix Engine or about any of the Games done by me. Please make a visit and feel free to make any question!
http://www.wagenheimer.com/forum
About – Wagenheimer´s Game Development Blog
Nov 5th
This blog objective´s is to be a center of news about the development of casual games, where constantly you will find news, articles and tutoriais on the development and programming of casual games. I am also developing several additional tools for Asphyre Engine, which very soon i will post more information, and once they are finished, I will post one by one all this tolls that improve even more, in my opinion, the best engine for casual game development of all times, the Asphyre Engine.
My name is Cezar Wagenheimer, I’m from Londrina-Paraná-Brasil, I’m a Delphi programmer for more than 10 years, since the begining, I always been interested in game development, even I always been working with Database Systems Programming, in my free time, I always studied the art of game development, where within this 10 years, I learned a lot of useful tricks and gained a big amount of experience.
In this time period, I tried and learned several game development engines, including the famous but outdated DelphiX Engine, but i never did found none that attended all the requirements of resources and performance that I hoped to find. Until I met the Asphyre Engine, that at the time was in its third version, where for the first time I found an engine of everything that is needed to make a game, and that did let me happy with their resources and perfomance.
With this, in 2006, after some months of hard work and development in partnership with my friend Mario Russo (that have very high artistic skills) , I finished my first commercial casual game, Druids Battle of Magic, where we have close contracts with 3 international publishers, BigFishGames, Reflexive Arcade and Trymedia. After this, we had two more games developed in paternership with BigFishStudios, and which were published internationally, Abra Academy and Abra Academy – Returning Cast, these two having a great emphasis, being a great success in the world until today, with versions in English, German, Spanish, French and more recently, a Japanese version. Soon I will talk more about each game, with an exclusive topic for each one with more details and information about it’s development.
