Year: 2011

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Four indie things you should be playing

in addition to Minecraft.  There’s a whole bunch of really cool indie stuff that’s coming out.  Here’s four alpha/beta state games that are available for play now.  These are all fairly early in development (Terraria and SP&Z being the most polished) and if you’re interested in watching something awesome come out of the development process and getting to watch things turn into a finished game, warts and all, then these are all excellent examples and well worth your time.

Project Zomboid

 

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/ Isometric Zombie Apocalypse survival game.  As in, really surviving.  Health, hunger, exhaustion & boarding up the windows while scavenging for supplies in a neighborhood infested with the undead.  Really this is going to be very very tense.  The initial version available is still early alpha and manages to do so many things right.

Space Pirates & Zombies

 

http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/ Aims to go back to classic space combat and exploration with gameplay like Star Control 2.  You fly around various sectors and perform missions between rival factions to gain favor and unlock blueprints for new ships and weapons.  And then there’s the zombies and an overall massive plot and stuff. Available on impulse only for now.. but Steam is coming as well.

 

Terraria

http://www.terrariaonline.com It’s superficially like a 2D minecraft.. however once you spend a while with it it opens up to be much more.  It has a much higher emphasis on exploring the world, fighting monsters, summoning boss monsters and crafting all sorts of weaponry.  Oh and it has multiplayer support.

Starfarer

http://fractalsoftworks.com/ On the surface it might remind you of SP&Z above.. however gameplay is much slower and strategic. Feeling more like you’re flying large capital ships. At this point it’s a collection of fleet battles but the promise of an open universish campaign mode has lots of promise.  oh and it’s absolutely beautiful and has incredible ships.

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Enchanting Cadence post launch retrospective

What went right?

Well… lots of stuff really.

I managed to turn a paper prototype  into a fully functional game in two months.  Overall, game play grew and changed organically through the development process as low hanging fruit features were revealed.  Taking a project from A-Z in Slick was very educational (which was the primary reason for the whole thing).

The facebook integration worked (albeit their documentation leaves something to be desired) for the most part seamlessly.

The back-end level creation and management web tools worked and the general process of back and forth data between the webpage and applet worked as anticipated..

The multi threaded stuff to send and catch javascript communications works and once the basic process was understood was easy to implement.

Graphics and Music. Visually the game managed to capture the look and feel that I wanted.  I was able to work out an efficient workflow to take concept /programmy placeholder art and iterate it to the final art.  No assets were lost and not a lot of dead ends or un-used art was created.   Overall the music worked nicely as well.

It was a nice first version, however not something I’d call mainstream release ready yet.

What went wrong?

The first three weeks were spent having the enchantment process be based off of what visually was happening on the board, this caused massive issues as framerates turned out to be really unsteady once the game was in an applet form.  The fix was to have a logical representation of the game board where the simulation was run and then just have the rendering update it’s assets from the virtual model.

It turned out that applets have a massive overhead when instantiating any sprite as they check the applet’s remote filesystem path for the files.  This lead to the implementation of a boltManager object which pre-creates 500 bolts and tosses them to the game logic as needed and returns them to the source pool when taken off the board.  This fixed the issue .. until I added particles.

Particle systems create an image loading hiccup as above even if it’s pre-created on their first .render call.  The fix was to change the applet call to isolate the applet from the webpage with <param name=”codebase_lookup” value=”false”> .. The downside is.. this effectively killed the idea of loading level specific assets from the website.. so suddenly everything needed to be included in the jar file.

Java <–> Javascript communications are paaainfully slow.

Gameplay wise, it reaaaally needs a tutorial level, ease of use features, and a better dialog box system.

Level design really did not lend itself to the whole 1-3 stars for each level completion.  Usually there was just ONE solution.

Not enough time to build good levels.  By the time I’d gotten enough features to behave stably enough, I had to cut several features and wound up with still only a week and a half to build all the 10 levels. (remember there’s a fulltime job, consulting work and family with baby who all come first)   As a result several of the levels are pretty shoddy.

Applet communications don’t work in Safari on mac, and the game rendering doesn’t work in other browser on mac (but the communications do)

Considerations general thoughts?

The primary reason for making this was essentially a way to motivate myself to finish a project and learn a crash course in SLICK and java.  In this sense, this was a roaring success.

Perhaps it was a bit much to take on as my first real Java application… naaah.. just because I spent 2 days wondering why my string comparisons never worked. (even went as far as building enums and value catalogs to avoid having to compare strings)  … then I discovered   ‘string1.equals(string2)’ … sigh..

Applets are too restrictive to be viable.  Pretty much every benefit of having a web program work in java (other than the openGL) is overshadowed by a downside.  Heck just getting it up on the user’s screen means they’ve clicked through several very scary warning prompts.  And if you want to do any kind of network communications behind the scenes (bypassing javascript comms) means asking people to punch holes in their firewall rules.   All of which make applets un-usable for general mass consumption.  JNLP’s seem better but they’re not very user friendly.. (they don’t ask you where you want to install.. let you know you need to un-install etc..)

In the future I’m leaning towards wrapped jars into exe files for Slick and java applications.

Thank goodness this was a 2 month test project, eh?

SLICK is a lovely codebase and java really is a dream to work with.  Any concerns I had about java being slow or whatnot really have been blown away.  If I un-meter Enchanting Cadence it easily runs at several thousand FPS.  Actually it runs so fast that the math behind the simulation can’t measure the time between cycles correctly and it all falls apart. (that’s pretty cool)

The SLICK community and the java-gaming.org guys are really helpful and there is a wealth of tutorials and training out there.

The future?

For Enchanting Cadence

  • facebook integration will go away, hell, the whole applet thing was a mistake
  • it will be a standalone application
  • the first level in each levelgroup will get a real tutorial. (introducing mirrors, introducing prisms…etc)
  • there will be help indicators showing the path and time bolts travel when hovering over a launcher
  • the enchantment track will show what bolts hit and failed on the last attempted enchant.  This will help you find out what went wrong
  • infinite loops will not be allowed
  • the dialog engine will be changed for better and prettier dialog boxes allowing for more narrative and flavor text to come through
  • more levels and assets etc.

In General

  • I’m building a group of tools to use in the standalone EC version that will also be useful in other projects
  • Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! is coming.  Much as I love TGB it looks like you always wind up needing to do some core C++ tweaks and thats beyond what I’ve been able to wrap my head around.. so I’m exploring basic things and techniques to get the new isometric view working in slick… (repeat after me… I will not try and go 3d… I Will not try and go 3d!… )
  • Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! need some loving too…
  • Swiftthought Consulting work, of course, trumps all of the above.  🙂
So, lots of projects to keep the summer interesting.  Lets see how it goes.


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Crunch Time

Full on crunch mode.

Progress was excellent this weekend and the core gameplay , saving scores, dialogs and all the ajaxy interactions are working.  Bugs… however… bugs and edge cases  abound..

Other than that, I’ve got a pile of assets to generate.

  • tons of level objectives (2 img each per level)
  • Bolt particles and effects and images
  • tutorial images
  • levels
  • better sounds… more bg music..

Add to that a bunch of actual gameplay tweaks..  It’s a bit too hard… and way too hard to determine what went wrong when you mess up the formula.  I’m still not sure how to fix that yet…

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Screenshot Saturday Delayed.

Well Friday the 15th was the halfway mark in the Slick contest.

I was hoping to have a glorious screenshot bonanza after a few more hours of work showing the completion of the core mechanics.  I’m  that close to having the functional workings of the gameplay.

Then mother nature decided to throw a hissy fit and bounce the power to the house 20-30 times in about an hour.  This, it turns out,  is bad for hard drives.  The surge protector did its job and the only damage was an irretrievably messed up FAT table on the primary drive.

So, time to re-install Vista…  followed by 2 days of patching and re-installing applications and now I’m basically back to where I was before..

On the upside, it was a wonderful weekend of just chilling with the family and going to bed early, and I know for sure now that my Backups are working.

So here’s the short list of things for basic feature completeness:

  • smooth interpolation of the tick based movement.. there’s hiccup in it currently
  • add dialogs for succeeding and failing enchants
  • get the ‘record’ mode of the solution to not mis time the first bolts
  • add splitters
Time to get to work!  well.. after work work that is..
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Screenshot Saturday

Managed to get the web editor exporting tileframe data nicely, and with a few modifications was able to get TGB to import the new map data and render the maps in the existing tilemaps.  🙂 yaay.

New tilemaps in Game Engine.

Now if I can only find out what makes it crash when you touch the mouse……

*scratch head*.. well at least it’s progress..

Oh and we have new and very awesome epic in-game music now from www.indiegraphics.net

So it’s  been a good week overall.

[Edit::]  Found the Crash.  it was to do with the checks for various player positions on the tilemap for shooting.  Which is totally obsolete, due to the new tilemap, so it was crashing.

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Milestones

Pardon me while I ramble..   if you get bored you can pop over to the map editor and play around and let me know how it performs for you (IE users, don’t bother), and saving is disabled.   This is essentially me trying to externalize the process of development that seems to work for me.

It’s easy to get lost, sidetracked, disillusioned, or just plain worn out when embarking on a massive self guided project.

Even when you feel like you can just keep working on a project forever because you have so many ideas you risk it all if you don’t know what the final product is going to be.  For example, the megahit Minecraft was in development for over a year and sold close to a million copies before the guys at Mojang finally sat down and decided what they were actually making.   I’d wager if it hadn’t been for it going viral, it would have wound up just another of the tons of  half finished abandoned indie projects that litter the web because they didn’t know what they were making.

On the other extreme, there are just as many abandoned overdesigned, super perfectly detailed design documents for games that will never be created, scattered all over the internet as well.  Potential games that were literally designed to death, go dig around on sourceforge and you’ll find hundreds of em in ‘planning’.

So what’s an indie developer to do?

Frankly, I’m not sure.  I know what seems to work for me  (so far), and that’s self imposed milestones.

Now let me clarify a bit.  I’m not talking about your usual development project, spec sheet loaded, time and budget allocated, cut your funding if  you don’t make it milestone.  That’s for a different type of development, not a creative endeavor.  It has it’s place, but not here.

What kind of milestones?

I’m talking more of a softer, moldable, flexible type of milestone.  You take one, you work on it, do whatever you want withing the parameters specified, and when you’re done you have real tangible progress.  Then you pick another one that mirrors what you’re in the mood for.    That’s key for me.   When I get to the point in a project where I don’t have a choice in what I need to do next and don’t want to do it , I get distracted. (see the Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth!, game… it’s pretty much stalled because I’ve worked myself into a corner where there’s nothing exiting left and I’ve gotten totally de-motivated  (psst it’s not dead.. just hibernating in my subconscious.. I have plans percolating.))

For example, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have wrapped up my latest milestone for BSDDoD! which was ‘Build a web based editor to let me edit game elements and export them into a flatfile for use in the game in 20 days.’

Flexible task definition

That’s it for the definition of it.  I didn’t have any other notes or plans other than I knew the map size has to be 20×20 due to memory constraints of the final 10×10 grid of 20×20 maps that the game will happen in.  I could go as feature rich and as crazy as I wanted to, but I always kept a mental track of trying to hit the date or at least get as close as I possibly can.   I didn’t even know what I was going to write it in (jquery, cakephp and custom javascript if you’re interested, it almost wound up a desktop based Python application or java applet)  I didn’t pre-plan features other than the map size.  This let me actually create and explore while working on it.

I really try no to make too many choices that will force me to wind up in a position of having to determine things for future milestones.  Now of course it’s inevitable that there will be some overlap, but striving to make each milestone into it’s own creative endeavor keeps me interested in the long run.

Know how long you can stay focuse… ooh look shiny!

I know how long my attention span is, and how long I can proceed with certain types of tasks before getting bored and I make the milestones accordingly, and I try to have a couple of milestone choices available to choose from, so if I’m in the mood for more coding I can do that, or if I need a break and switch to art asset creation, planning, music etc those options are available for me.

So my next choices for BSDDoD! milestones are:

  • Coding, Import map data and generate levels in the Torque Game Builder engine that alpha 4 was working in, 7 days
  • Art, Create Door, wizard (basic wand and arm) and basic creeper art assets, 14 days.
  • Design, come up with different enemies and concept art and various powerups available in the witch’s shop, 14 days.

Time is relative

Now you’ll notice that my ‘days’ have very very very little relevance to normal time, this comes with having a 1 year old, and a fulltime job, an art site and business to help launch  and some awesome swiftthought.com development work that all take priority.

That’s ok.  I’m fully aware that this 6 month project is already in it’s second year and I’m ok with that.

I can see progress being made.

I can see what  I need to do, to get there.

I still have to make up how to do it.

I can see the milestones all the way to the end.

I have no idea of  what all the things I will have created by the time I get there will look like.

That’s damn exciting.

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IrisEdit Screenshot Saturday

In an attempt to keep updating this on a more regular basis here’s the first of (hopefully) many Screenshot Saturday.

a screenshot of the almost complete level editorThis is a screenshot of the irisEdit map editor on my dev box.  At this point it’s 90% complete.  There’s a glitch in the saving/reloading that needs tweaking but other than that it’s ready to start building levels in.   At which point I’ll move to the live databse over at editor.irismel.com

Unfortunately this week was full of all sorts of fun freelance stuff and prep for the baby’s 1st birthday party (in roughly 11 hrs from now)  so I didn’t get the editor wrapped up.. but hopefully I can get it knocked out Sunday if I’m lucky.  Next week promises to be full of more and maybe even some new paying client work, which of course takes precedence over BSDDoD! progress.

What I’m Playing:

  • http://insideastarfilledsky.net/ A recursive, larger than the Galaxy  shooter.  From the guy who made Sleep is Death (more coverage of that over on RPS) which was a lot of fun to play with P.
  • Bejeweled 3... because it’s like sparkly snappy happy crack…. especially some of the new gamemodes.
  • X3 Terran Conflict – the last, best, biggest, entry in the X series of intergalactic space trader conquer the galaxy games (available on steam)
  • But with a new Minecraft patch hitting tuesday… all bets are off for the next week.
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Editor Work

So what do you do if you have an unexpected 3 days of vacation.  Well if you’re like me you get a chance to dig into some new fun tech and wind up making a new version of the tile editor to support your game.   As I mentioned in the last post, I’m in the process of moving to a front face Isometic camera for BSDDoD! (like the original zelda).   Which is going to necessitate a new tile editor to do all the hard work.

The old editor is still online at http://irismel.com/tileEditor/ and functioning in it’s primitive state.  However the new editor, is slowly coming online at http://editor.irismel.com with the real magic happening on the editor pages ( http://editor.irismel.com/maps/editMapTiles/12 )  There’s still a bunch of fun stuff to do, like detecting and placing the  front facing tiles and being able to place and edit objects, not to mention being able to export this and get it into the primary game engine files.    But, overall, this has been an excellent week’s worth of progress.  Cake PHP is proving to be a fast and flexible framwork to be able to create complex data driven applications.  I really hope to get many more chances to dig into it and do fun web-app stuff..

The new editor does everything that BSDDoD! needs and then some, in fact it’s pretty close to being a whole generic level editor for all sorts of tile based games… but one step at a time eh?    I have a short list of to-do items left for the editor and then I can pop back into the main TGB code and start to implement the new map style (should be simple since the editor will generate complete maps) and start updating the player, adding new creatures, and adding the equipment shop…

What I’m Playing:

Revenge of the Titans: This is an addictive, just incredible take on the tower defense genre, and the latest version just simply does so many things right.

Space Chem: This is probably the puzzle game of the decade.  Build chemical compounds with an assortment of commands given to waldos… oh hell I can’t describe it.. just go get the damn thing or read Rock Paper Shotgun’s coverage...

X3: Terran Conflict :  the last entry into the X3 universe by EgoSoft.  It’s got a steep learning curve but leads right into the heart of one of the best space trading/combat/strategy games of the last 15 years.

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Updating the look.

As mentioned in the last post, GarageGames.com is back and that brings with it a chance to kick the development of BSDDoD! back into full gear.    (well that and finally having the motivation and (hopefully) time to work on it).

So I spent a bit of time this weekend trying to actually get SOMETHING finished on the game and I’ve got the basic Map tiles all knocked out.  Along with it came a change to a 30 degree Zelda like viewpoint which is going to provide some challenges later on, but the straight down view really wasn’t working and an increase in tile resolution to 128×128.  Also floor tiles got some subtle shading changes etc meaning I’ve got to rewrite my web based level generator (which I was wanting to do, it’s really way too inflexible).   So that’s the next task at hand.  So here’s a mockup of a screenshot using the new tileset complete with scribbled wizard for size testing.

The new Tilesets Used in a Mock scene
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Back To Torque

It has been a few months of crazy development environment ping-pong around here, but things are beginning to settle down.

Back in November the guys over at GarageGames.com announced they were shuttering the InstantAction team and that generally the outlook for all of Torque seemed really bleak.

So with the future of my development tools up in the air I did some research and started switching over to DarkBasicPro and then in tandem, the day job necessitated a crash course in Java.. which lead me to Slick2d for Java, which I’ve also done some poking around in now.

The problem is that they both (Slick and DarkBasic) seem to magnify the deficiencies of the other.

DarkBasicPro is EASY, and Fast to get prototypes up and running in. It’s also Basic, that means no objects, no event handlers, and scoping variables is fast and loose, ex arrays are always Globals.  And no garbage collection, premade main loop or GUI tools, so you’ve got to write that yourself.  However the community is FULL of snippets and other pieces of code so you can cobble together a nice utility library in a couple of days.  Oh and it supports 3d and shaders etc.. for that reason I may come back some day.

Slick2d, on the other hand, is 100% object driven, with all sorts of good things that come with that.  Tightly scoped variables and inheritance etc etc also make it really powerful and clean to code in.  It is, however, not easy or fast to throw together a prototype.  Especially since there isn’t much of documentation other than the auto-generated API docs.  Throw in some of Java’s memory limits and stuff and it gets pretty cumbersome fast. It’s got a nice state-based game core and main loop that works really well… once you find it.

I wasted too much time on both of those only to realize that I miss Torque Game Builder.  It’s not perfect, but it is very much a nice place between the two.

So, I’m really happy for the guys at GarageGames.com when they announced they’re Back! And T2D is still alive and kicking.

Now it is time to install the latest version, get tweaking on the Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! and get this whole thing back on track!

I’m still doing the whole Java Android development stuff, and that’s been making good progress as well.  Hope to have more details and maybe a screenshot or two by the end of the month. *cross fingers*

Oh and Wenderflonia is going to be getting a minor facelift and its own Online Shop by Mid Feb and a couple more freelance projects should be wrapping up and I hope to be able to refocus my energies a bit more on development.

And to wrap it up I’m going to try and end every post from here on out with….

What I’m Playing:

  • Minecraft – indie game, sandbox phenomenon.  If you ever wanted to play with legos, build anything, explore a world this is the game for it.  We’re documenting our latest travels here http://blocklandtravels.tumblr.com/
  • SpaceChem – puzzle game of the year  all time.  It’s fiendish and guides you into an extensive set and before you  know it you’re inventing solutions like this (my you tube video of a solution) The stats comparison lets you know how you stack up to everyone else and is absolutely addictive to optimize your solutions.
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New [Year, Goals, Work]

Wow, did that holiday season just fly by or what?

Well 2011 is here and has hit the ground running!

Already have the first several consulting projects up an in progress and have been doing some fun development stuff.

As the little green android above may have hinted at,  there’s a new platform of goodies in development.   I’m currently coming up to speed with Java and Android development… The first tiny title is coming along…. albeit it’s a lot of trial and error and research into getting things working properly.  Additionally, I’ve discovered Slick for Java and it’s seeming to be a nice and easy framework for LWJGL applications (ie .. games) …

Other than that.. it’s been a bonanza of games and fun.  Most notably  Minecraft.

We’ve got a mini server running on the laptop nearby and a couple of us have been building and exploring.  Hands down 2010’s game of the year for me.

A shot of the spawn area on our minecraft Server.

Anyway.. no new years post would be complete without some resolutions…

1 – Paint more.. I will finish my 2 oils, finish the 2 images in the elementelves series and at least two more pictures this year.. that’s one per every 2 months.

2- Finish the art on the Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! game and get  a handful of decks out to testers.

3 – Launch an Android title on the marketplace

4 – Loose 25 lbs

5 – Enjoy the baby and cherish the family.