Saturday, October 29, 2011

Dwarves all up in your mine, laying trapses.

This is just a quick update to let people know what I'm working on.

I'm in the process of adding dwarfy goodness to the game. Dwarves are tricky because, unlike other units, they have no direct attacks. Instead dwarves will try and predict what sections of the map the player is likely to pass through and set traps there.

The tricky part for getting these dwarves working, then, is obviously getting them to lay their traps in the right spots. This is as complicated as it sounds, and probably much more so.

The one bright side to this is that with enough dwarves running around it won't matter if some of them lay traps in bad positions. As long as a few dwarves get their traps in good spots, the player won't know the difference.

Other new stuff to expect in the open beta: Overhauled AI and pathfinding, drunken dwarves, graveyards (a new building type that is beneficial towards for the player), and *MAYBE* the first boss unit for the player to summon (more on him later).

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Update! Open beta & other news

Yeah, it has been awhile. School has been extremely rough, and I've had *a lot* of trouble getting any kind of coding done in my spare time.

What have done at all recently? Well, I have managed to overhaul the AI and movement in the game to use velocity vectors. This means that the player can now shoot in 360 degrees (instead of in 8 directions, which was the case before). This also means that instead of doing a lot of resource hogging A* path finds, the AI can now use target vectors to smoothly traverse the battlefield on its own initiative. The AI still does an occasional A*, but only for more complicated paths over larger distances.

While this isn't new content, it does change the way the game plays significantly. Elves, for instance, are 100% bigger pains in the ass now that they can run away intelligently. Now they will run away before you can close in on them and will keep their distance as they rain arrowy death down on you. Luckily, your own Phantoms will do the same. I've had some trouble making Phantoms useful, and while they aren't quite there yet, they are getting there quick.

Did you say Open Beta?

Why yes, yes I did. I've given up on any kind of release schedule, as my time is just too tight. I'm not very happy with this, but that's how it goes. At any rate, I want to save the open beta for when I've ironed out a few niggling environment collision issues with the AI and have Dwarves functioning and in game. When can you expect this?

Hell if I know!

But really, I'm hoping against hope that I can get this out by next week, but we'll see.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

First Necrofrenzy beta shots!

Check out my website for the first of many new Necrofrenzy ingame screen grabs.

LINKAGE

Monday, August 22, 2011

Beta delay

Blame this one on the IRS and FAFSA.

I'm pushing the start of the Necrofrenzy beta out for another week. That means I'll send invites out on the 26th, and the beta will start on the 29th.

Sorry for the delay, but these things happen I suppose.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Beta blues

The beta of Necrofrenzy is coming up fast, and I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I'm really excited about being able to show off my game to outside eyes for the first time. On the other hand, I'm really worried about the game's stability and playability.

What if they hate it?
What if it crashes every ten minutes?

Going beta feels like sending my kid off to preschool. I'm excited that my kid is growing up, but still... That's my baby out there!

Such is game development.

In other news, I'm coding like nuts to get the beta ready for next week. I've run into some interesting bugs that I had never even thought about, that brought into view things like memory limits for the first time in my game development life. I've learned a lot.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Necrofrenzy Update: BETA

I've been working hard to make the new website less assy. The results so far have been mixed. I can't get the news page to work at all, so I might just link it to here. I like to cut corners that way.

On the game dev front: I need beta testers, and I need them soon. The Necrofrenzy beta should be out and ready to go by the week of the 21st (or sooner), so I desperately need to get my act together with a beta tester forum as well as just recruiting my 20 testers. Needless to say, if you are reading this then you are qualified for the beta. Leave a comment if you want in.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Monday, August 1, 2011

mini update 2

I still haven't pulled the trigger on a website, but I will soon. I'm thinking either tonight or tomorrow.

In other news, I've got sound and a working camera into the game. I'm going to work on putting in a HUD and then I'm moving on to the level editor.

Things are chugging along. Stick around.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

First shot of Necrofrenzy Pre-Alpha



Just to prove to you that I wasn't fibbing about the pre-alpha thing. The dudes in orange are peasants, who spawn from that gigantic farmhouse in the center of the screen (which will be made smaller soon). Our necromancing hero is in the bottom right, being chased by said peasants with scyths (who always find their target, due to brilliant pathfinding). Never fear, he has spawned a zombie helper minion near the bottom center of the screen.


I tried to get a fireball in the picture, but it is hard to avoid peasants, shoot at them, and rush for the print screen button all within a fraction of a second.


I'm expanding this pre-alpha work to include my sound system and camera system, so I'm going to continue working on those before I get to the level editor.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Newsly

Big stuff coming on the jump. More of an update soon. Class if over. More time. Website?

Monday, July 11, 2011

Pathfinding Success!

I have successfully implemented A* pathfinding into my game! So far this has been my biggest challenge, and it feels damn good to have it in there and working.

With A* in the game I am extremely close to a working pre-alpha prototybe build. All that stands before me and that prototype is:


  • Collision detection.

  • The player's zombie minions (both the art asset and the elementary code to make them work.

Really, that's it! So the good news is:


Expect pre-alpha build screenshots by Friday :).

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

State of the Game: Necrofrenzy

I'm going to try to make these updates at least once a week. We'll see how that goes.

I really wanted to have a prototype to show before I bothered to do an update, but it is looking like that prototype is an increasingly harder to reach goal. Don't get me wrong, I am really, really close. All I need to do is finish implementing a path finding algorithm and a playable prototype is go.

Therein is one of the funny things about game development: Few things are as easy as they seem like they should be. The path finding, on its own, isn't very hard to implement at all. The problem is that in order to get path finding to work I have to be able to feed my little minions data points, and the only way I can do that is if I can do collision detection, and the only way I can do collision detection is if I can blah blah blah blah blah. In the course of implementing this one little system I have to worry about the implementation of a dozen of other little systems, and all of a sudden my project is very hard to test and is feeling rather daunting.

The real problem, though, is lack of motivation. Being broke has been a great motivator up until now, but I've even ridden that wave to exhaustion. Another wave will come, as they always do, but I really need it to be sooner rather than later. One of the problems is that I've had to write large essays for a class, which requires me to completely switch my brain from thinking about code stuff to thinking about writing stuff. It isn't easy to jump from one to the other. I'm also hunting for a web host, and that is a whole headache that I'd rather not have to deal with.

But I will. And for all my grousing here the beta will actually be coming pretty soon, I should think. Stay tuned.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Prepare for the Raaagh...

Hiya folks. Long time no see. I apologize for that.

But hey, I've been busy.

Introducing RAAAGH!



RAAGH (or RAAAGH, or RAGH, or whatever I choose to call it) is best described as an 80's arcade game. You play to get your personal high score. And like all good 80's arcade games, RAAGH features bullets, carnage, and an AI squad at your command.

What 80's arcade game featured an AI squad at your command? Well, uhh...

Shut up, you.

Anywho, a typical round of RAAAGH starts like this:



But it quickly devolves to this:



Sold yet? Get it HERE. I'll update this later when I can host the file myself, but for now go ahead and use the excellent (and free) filefront gamefront servers.

But Handshakes, what about Necrofrenzy?

Necrofrenzy is still very much on the way. RAAAGH was just a little project to stretch my muscles, so to speak. For RAAAGH, I used and got to know a new game engine as well as a new sound API, so now I've worked out a lot of the kinks and quirks of the development process.

And boy, were there ever some big ass quirks. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth involved in getting the sound API to function, I'll say that much.

Anywho, expect some big updates and news in the coming weeks.

Caio.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Spitballing...

I know I've whined about money before, but here I am again, broker than ever. 2011 looks to be a big year for games, and it also looks like I am going to have to sit a lot of it out (and be very choosey when it comes time to throw down my dough), and that totally sucks. Worse still, gas prices are absolutely killing me. It's bad enough that the university is robbing me blind, but now with gas the way it is I am losing money faster than ever.

For the first time ever in my entire life, money is getting to be a real issue. Like, not just my gaming fudge-money, but the money-to-make-my-car-go money. Scary.

So I was coming home from university the other day, a many miles long journey, and as I passed one of the many gas stations I routinely pass a thought occurred to me.

What if I robbed a gas station?

Nah.

And then I thought: Why exactly do I set out to make games so much? I thought about it a lot, and I don't really know.

A lot of my (douchey) game dev peers (or really, game dev betters) would be quick to explain that they do it for the artistic merit of the games they create. But honestly, that isn't it for me at all. I barely buy the whole "games as art" schtick anyway, and generally speaking the more a game touts its artistic merits the bigger piece of garbage it is (*cough* Dinner Date *cough*). I do think there is a kind of art to game design, but it is the art of making something as fun as possible, and not at all about telling a profound story or any such nonsense as that. The 'art' part begins and ends with the fun.

Again then, why do I try to make games? I guess the biggest reason is because I'm bored, and I want to make a game that I personally can play and have fun with. I also like the experience, and whether the project fails miserably (which is 98% of the time) or not I always learn TONS about programming and project management along the way.

Back to that gas station and its greedy pilfering of the beautiful green stuffings of my wallet, what if I tried to make money from my games? Is there anything stopping me? As it turns out, kind of.

The first problem that immediately arises is that I actually need a game to sell in the first place. Now, I have unbridled confidence that my latest undertaking will in fact see the light of day (and feel semiprofessional, to boot), but then my track record kind of blows. Plus, even if I get it to a releasable state, could I possibly feel confident enough to ask someone to pay money to play it?

No, I couldn't. However, I wouldn't be adverse to the idea of asking for donations if people like what they play (and, presumably, want to see more of).

The next problem is obvious, then: How do I go about doing that sort of thing?

Honestly, I don't really know. Viridian, the GameDevDad has used an organization called 8-Bit Funding to get some start-up funds for his (soon to be award winning, no doubt) iPhone game Inaria. And he has had a darn good amount of success with it. Still, I don't think it exactly suits my purposes. I don't want start-up money - Lord knows I don't need that kind of pressure.

The way I want to get money is more along the lines of how a street performer gets his. I want to pass around a virtual hat, as it were, for people to throw a buck or two into after my performance (likely a mime, feigning box entrapment).

How? I have no clue. I'm hoping there is another organization out there that suits this purpose exactly, but I doubt it. I could just set up a PayPal account tied to this blog, and direct people to here or the account after they play my game, but that brings up a monumental challenge of its own: How do I get people to even find my game in the first place?

I've always had a sort of "if you build it, they will come" attitude towards releasing my games, but then I was never worrying about making a buck at that point. Now that I am, I know that I'm going to need some attention. How? Well, Fileplanet seems pretty cool about giving front page blog space to free indie games, so that could be a start. Otherwise, I'm not really sure. ModDB recently launched IndieDB, a place to show off/recruit for/otherwise manage your game. I could do that, but I'd need to get a little more professional first... As in an actual website... Which costs money... Which I don't have... Aaaaagh!

I've got it! What if I robbed a gas station?

... It is just craziest enough to work... Lock and load.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What I've Been Doing...

A new semester at school means new classes to bog me down and keep me from making games... Or does it?


NO! Of course not.


Lucky for me, one of those classes bogging me down is Game Development, wherein a team, armed to the teeth with ME, makes a game for a grade. The down side is that I don't have much say in the game design side of things. As such, this game will have a noticible lack of boobs and blood. The up side is that I get to do a lot of core systems coding, and that's pretty fun too.


The game is a tactical rpg ala Ogre Battle Tactics, and it has been coming along nicely. You can check out our project's SourceForge page here. I recommend that you do so. We haven't quite hit Alpha yet, but we are on target for getting there fairly soon.


This is my first time working on a game with a team (or any significant code project, for that matter). On the one hand, it blows having to go with somebody else's design. I mean it really sucks. It is totally killing me on the inside and bothers me to no end. On the other hand, it sure is great to have competant, talented artists on hand churning out content. For the first time ever, I don't have to worry about art assets at all. I can ask for a bit of art as needed, and a couple of days later I'll get it. Sweet.


The other good part about somebody else heading up the project is that there is some serious planning going on. Our team leader is a planning and documenting machine, which isn't 100% a great thing. In my experience, overplanning can be a waste of time; both because every minute you spend documenting is a minute you aren't spending on actually getting stuff implemented, and because on big projects like this things change ALL the time. Every time you hit a wall and it becomes clear that an idea isn't going to work well, all the stuff you planned that has anything to do with that idea has to be completely retooled. Me, I am more oriented towards just jumping in and getting dirty/getting stuff done, so if I was in charge there probably wouldn't be much of any planning at all.


In the end, I honestly think there is a kind of happy medium-ground between the two extremes, where stuff gets done in a practical sense according to some loose and flexible plan. Since I am the one implementing many of the big systems (and I approach the plans more as guides than as rules, pirates of the caribbean style), this is kind of happening naturally.


Other news: I've also started a new project of my own using a full fledged game framework (instead of starting from scratch with bare bones SDL or OpenGL). What this means is a lot less time monkeying around with stuff like timing and sprite animations, and a lot more time doing actual game code.

Miraculously, that project too is coming along quite briskly. I've mustered the will power to pump quite a few hours into it in just a week, and it'll hit something resembling a game with another 8 hours (hopeful programmer estimate which may be off by a factor of 10 hours or less).

Unfortunately, art is a problem as always. After about two hours of absolutely painstaking work, here is part of what I was able to pump out as the hero's sprite.

Meet your hero, the Necromancer:



What do you think? Usable, or no?