Wednesday, September 30, 2009

LoL

Tuition for a semester at university: $9,000.

Gas money per week: $25.

Using DosBox to play Lands of Lore on the university laptop while waiting for class:

Priceless.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Still working...

I'm at school so I can't post a substantial update until later in the week. However, I can still tell you what I've been working on.

Care to guess?

Yup! More map editor. I've had a substantial breakthrough, through, and I should have a near complete map editor to show off shortly.

But working on the map editor so long got to be a bit tedious for me. With that in mind, as a break I decided to make some music for the game. Using Musagi I came up with something that I am kind of proud of. I'll put up a link to it in a couple of days.

Later days.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

More Map Editing Woes

I have heard it said before from another indie game designer that he always makes his tools first. Now I know why. This map editor is becoming much more of a challenge than I had initially figured it to be. I have had to change the way I was going to implement the level editor, and because of that I now have to change the way I will import the levels into the game, which effects some fundamental design choices I made early on.

But at least I am making progress. On the down side, I still can't show you it. Maybe, just maybe, you will see something by the end of the week.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Our Boy Jack Update

Okay, so I had originally planned on having the level editor finished by now...


Yeah, that didn't happen. The level editor turned out to be a lot more involved than I had originally thought, and now, after having scrapped the thing and started again from the ground up, I am in position to be finished with it by the week's end. Over the weekend my bro took a look at the project and gave me a load of good input, so I am finally on the right track towards victory. Unfortunately, this means no in-game screenshots, but that doesn't mean no screenshots at all.


During all of my time spent not doing the level editor last week I managed to get in some spriting. Behold the protagonist, Jack:
He will run, he will jump, he will slice and dice... But at the moment all he can actually do is idle. Jack is a bmp, but his source is a fully layered png image for ease of editing. I'm rather pleased with myself.

More tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Spriting!

Is a PAIN!

But I am making headway, little by little. Because of my lack of art talent I'm going for a fairly simple style. I've settled on a half stick figure, sort of Don Hertzfeldt-y thing. All I can say is huzzah for tablet PCs and Paint.Net.

Screens VERY soon, I promise.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Ultima 7 Review (example)

Britannia is in trouble. You are whisked away from your home on Earth via mysterious teleporter and arrive back to a familiar fantasy land that you last visited a couple hundred years ago (their calendar). An old friend from many years and adventures past greets you, and then immediately elicits your help in solving a mysterious murder case. In solving the case you will uncover a massive plot involving two-faced cults and an evil deity. The journey will take you from lowly village to kingly castle, from deep dungeons to dense forest, from sprawling desert to raging ocean, and everywhere in between. You are the Avatar, a person who lives by a strict code of ethics called the Virtues, and who is charged with defending Britannia from evil whenever it may strike and in whatever form.

This is Ultima 7, an overhead open-world RPG made by Origin Systems in 1992. You can choose to play out the adventure by yourself or with up to 7 additional party members with varying strengths, weaknesses, and even temperaments fighting by your side. The masterful story, extreme open ended gameplay, and unprecedentedly living game world all contribute to the PC game being now often considered one of the better games ever made.

Reviewing older games can be tough. As a reviewer it is easy to run into issues of anachronisms when trying to compare an older game with newer conventions in game design. I will try my best to keep the modern game comparisons to a minimum, only making them when I feel it is important to make a game design point. That being said, this is a review of a classic game, and for a game to be classic it must be able to compete in entertainment value with more recent material. Ultima 7 will have to meet that same criteria for it to be able to keep the title of classic game.

The Story

You just can't talk about Ultima 7 without mentioning the story. The story to the game is incredibly engaging, and likely the single most important feature that keeps the game a blast to play all these years later. The story twists and turns appropriately, like a good book would. The characters are plentiful, but time and care was taken with enough of them to make them also quite rich and interesting. You don't need to know about the back story of some tavern keeper, but after meeting him briefly you might just find yourself wanting to know. The game stays in true Ultima form by having quite a bit of self-referential humor, but it generally keeps it a little bit more subtle than the past games. In this way you can appreciate the joke when you come upon a town inhabited by medieval variants of the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, but there is no overt fourth wall breaking that sucks you out of the world (it may not sound possible to put a ST:TNG reference that doesn't kill the game world into a medieval fantasy game, but they figured it out). You genuinely want to help people out when they come to you with their problems. Likewise, you genuinely get to know and like your co-adventurers as they come under your employ during the course of the game... Except when they ask for food, but more on that later.

The Open World Gameplay

You think that your game is open ended? You just can't touch the open-endedness in Ultima 7. At any given point the entire world of Britannia is yours to explore. There is no zone unreachable without the right key or magic spell. While you can follow the story wherever it leads you, you are never actually forced to do so. Thus, you can take your time and explore the world at your leisure. The world is huge and filled to the brim with people who need your help with all sorts of problems, besides the big world-destruction problem that most of them don't even know about. Herein the game runs into a bit of a design problem. The world is so huge that it can become a little daunting if you stray from the main story too much. It is all too easy to lose track of where the story left off and find yourself stuck and unable to figure out who that one NPC you are supposed to talk to is, and where on the huge map they are located. Even if you keep to the story you can run into problems. While the main quest mostly leads you along in a specific manner there are a few times where it just kind of points you in a super general direction and says "you figure it out", which is frustrating.

The Interactive World

On to the point that so many people love so much about the game, the living game world and your ability to interact with it. When you hear people talking about their time with Ultima 7 you are destined to listen to countless stories about filling homes with explosive barrels and setting them off, dumping buckets of blood on sleeping wizards, and throwing dirty diapers at peasants. Only in Ultima 7 can you find a game world so interactable that you can bake bread yourself and feed it to a hungry dragon with a side of sleeping potion. Simply put, if you want to do something here you probably can. This feature really lends itself both to deep roleplaying (I am Phiz, Avatar and savior - and world class baker), and deeper shenanigans. Worth noting is how NPCs have detailed schedules: They all work, play, eat and sleep at specific times during their day. It all comes together to make the game world very rich and real. The downside to this realism is that when everyone needs to eat including yourself and your party, that means that everyone in your party needs to be fed. Unfortunately, they aren't quite smart enough to know how to feed themselves, so it is up to you to feed them when they get hungry and start complaining. If you have a full party of 8 adventurers you will never hear the end of the pleas for nourishment.

The Gameplay

So for all these glowing things I've had to say, can I possibly come up with anything negative? Well, yes. The worst thing about the game of Ultima 7 ends up being the actual gameplay itself. While it is endlessly fun to muck about in the interactive game world, solve detailed quests and unravel a good story, the bread and butter RPG stuff you have to do in between all that is less than stellar.

Take the combat, for instance. The combat is completely hands off and non-engaging. You just flick the on-switch and watch. Whether you succeed in battle or get totally trounced is completely up to your stats and equipment and has nearly nothing to do with you. If you find yourself unable to win a fight you have no choice but to leave and come back later when your stats are high enough.

Another point worth mentioning is the nature of the puzzles. Some of the puzzles you come up against border on ridiculous. Silly invisible walls and invisible passages are all things you have to come to terms with in navigating throughout the course of the game. Usually it means walking your adventurers into every wall possible to see if you can pass through whenever you hit any dead ends. Also, you will have to contend with the art of crate stacking before the end of the game. Crate stacking is the insanely awkward process of stacking crates on top of each other to create makeshift stairways. You are required to do this at least once during the course of the game. Crate stacking may not sound all that difficult, but due to the isometric view that the game uses it can be really hard to get the crates to line up correctly, and even harder to get your character to move in a straight enough line so that he mounts the containers the way you want him to. It is one of those puzzles where the solution (to stack crates) is obvious, but the execution of the solution is so tedious that the puzzle instantly becomes hard.

The Graphics and Sound

Graphically speaking, the game doesn't look at all hot by today's standards, but you can't expect it from a 1992 game. It may be a bit pixelated, but you can tell who is who and what is what. The paper dolls look pretty neat as well, although they don't reflect the equipment of the party member you are viewing.

As for the sound, it doesn't hold up so well. The music for the game isn't exactly plentiful, but what you hear is pretty good. Unfortunately, the sound effects are fairly poor and sometimes they never stop. For example, the firesword is worth having equipped because it lights your way in the dark, however you may end up unequipping it to save your ears from a constant static crackling noise that the sword emits all too loudly whenever it is in use.

The Interface

The interface is decent. The game can be played entirely with the mouse, with the keyboard just there to provide time saving shortcuts. The only hiccups come from inventory management. Instead of using a grid for inventory ala Diablo, Ultima 7 just has a container screen with all of the contents of the bag just sort of piled in there. It can become quite frustrating at times when you are looking for a single item that is buried somewhere in the clutter of graphics. Even if you try to organize by grouping similar items into smaller bags within your backpack things can get tricky. Just try finding that one particular key you need in the bag full of slightly different looking keys.


Leveling, Stat Building, and Other RPG Necessities

Unlike Ultima Online which uses a skills based stat system, Ultima 7 uses a somewhat more traditional level system. You earn experience points for slaying foes and completing quests, and after a certain amount of experience accumulates you level up. However, the similarity with more traditional RPG leveling systems ends there. Upon leveling up you are given training points that you can spend, along with gold, to raise the different stats of you and your party members at various different trainer NPCs throughout the world. In theory, a system like this should allow you to custom tailor each one of your party members to a specific task. In practice, however, it isn't really so. The main issue is that nobody can use a spellbook aside from the Avatar, so there is no point in raising a party member's intelligence. This renders certain potential party members who start with low strength and dexterity but high intelligence completely useless.

Now, a word on gold and shops. Basically, you have little need for either of them. You can not sell items in Ultima 7, so any gear that you don't use might as well just be left on the ground somewhere. This is not to say that gold is scarce. You can earn quite a bit of it by turning in items like narcotics and raw gold nuggets, but then you run into a problem when trying to spend it. There are numerous shops throughout Britannia, but you will be hard pressed to find anything in any of them worth buying. The only things you ever really want to buy in the game are certain spells, spell reagents, and training.

A Classic?

So the game has its flaws. Does it then deserve to be known as one of the best games ever made? Absolutely, and it is just as worth playing now as it was the day after its release. The game is great in spite of the boring combat and occasionally annoying puzzles. It works by overcoming these weaknesses with amazing strengths in the area of storytelling and having an open, believable world. There are frustrations to be found within Ultima 7 to be sure, but nothing that should stop anyone from experiencing this true classic.

Welcome

Welcome to the Stingy Hat Games blog, future site of all game design and development screeds from me, Handshakes.

Coming in the near future will be previews and updates on my in-development 2D Puzzle/Platformer game "Our Boy Jack", made with the Allegro game programming library (with screenshots, I promise).

For posts pertaining specifically to politics in the gaming world I will still be updating Conservative Gamer Bloke.

Now sit back and enjoy the show.