Olaban

Games, philosophy, code, logic, and other nonsense

Tuesday, 16/6/2020

I was just finishing Fallout: New Vegas for the second time while I was looking for my next game to play. The choice became easy when I knew that Obsidian, the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas has released a new sci-fi RPG: The Outer Worlds. As a person who would pick Dragon Age over Mass Effect and Lord of the Rings over Star Wars, I was quite skeptic about playing an in-space futuristic RPG, yet my skepticism soon faded when I got immersed in The Outer Worlds.

Remaking Olaban with Vuepress

Thursday, 21/5/2020

In 2015, I decided to lunch my blog Olaban. I wanted to have a place where I can talk about my interests, specifically games and game design. At the time, I had very basic web development experience (I still do, but I picked up a few tricks :D), and I wanted to have a blog in the fastest way possible. In the same time, I loved trying new web technologies and to my delight a new blogging platform just appeared: Ghost

Kastle: Dungeon Generation Using L-Systems

Saturday, 26/8/2017

In the senior year of my Software Engineering degree, I was excited to take on the challenge of making a large-scale game application. After hours of brainstorming, we came up with a very interesting game idea, but little we knew about the opportunities for learning this project is going offer. After eight months of hard working with a team of five talented students, we didn't only finish the project with a very high grade, but we also ended up being introduced to a variety of interesting problems in computer science. In this post, I am going to discuss how we used L-Systems to generate the dungeons of our 3D Roguelike game: Kastle.

Game Design Heuristics: Reflection Distance

Saturday, 1/7/2017

By heuristics, I mean those guidelines that help us find a solution to a given problem. Moreover, if we define the problem as finding an interesting game design for a puzzle game, we could then evaluate the given solutions or designs by using these heuristics. In this article, I intend to introduce one of the game design heuristics that I came up with after playing many good and bad puzzle games. However, before I continue, I would like to highlight an important fact. Following game design heuristics is in no way an absolute measure of a design, however, it can be a good indicator of a good design.