Stingy Hat Games

Dwarves all up in your mine, laying trapses.

2011-10-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

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).

Update! Open beta & other news

2011-10-26T12:29:00.001-07:00

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.

First Necrofrenzy beta shots!

2011-08-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

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

LINKAGE

Beta delay

2011-08-22T07:51:00.001-07:00

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.

Beta blues

2011-08-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Necrofrenzy Update: BETA

2011-08-10T12:15:00.001-07:00

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.

Hey look, a map editor.

2011-08-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

First shot.

mini update 2

2011-08-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

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.

First shot of Necrofrenzy Pre-Alpha

2011-07-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Newsly

2011-07-22T09:30:00.001-07:00

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

Pathfinding Success!

2011-07-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

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 :).

State of the Game: Necrofrenzy

2011-06-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Prepare for the Raaagh...

2011-06-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Spitballing...

2011-03-03T19:25:00.000-08:00

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.

What I've Been Doing...

2011-03-01T10:31:00.001-08:00

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?

updates

2010-12-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

Well my semester is finally over, and my hair is just starting to de-gray itself. This was one crazy semester, and I'm not kidding when I say that I am still having nightmares about due dates and things.

But now it is all over and I have all sorts of time to muck about with my code! Kind of.

First I need to detox for a few days. Nothing but a steady diet of my favorite games and sleep. I've been playing coop Dawn of War II with my bro, coop Halo: Reach with a buddy of mine, the incredibly simple and charming Killing Floor (one of my favorite mindless shooters of all time), and a little Battle For Middle Earth (1) for nostalgia.

I got the urge to write a bit after playing the latter again. Battle for Middle Earth (BFME) is such a bold and unique RTS, I am amazed it came out of EA (by the team that used to be Westwood). There are so many cool design decisions, I don't know where to start.

I guess I'll start with this: To be fair, the game is flawed. The balance is pretty wonky, with archers, for some reason, being the end-all-be-all unit of warfare perfection. It is jarring, even maddening, to see your incredibly expensive yet deliciously menacing and massive Mummakil get put down in 5 seconds flat by two units of upgraded archers. Eww.

But I don't want to talk about that. I want to praise this game, after all. So I'll talk about how this game is so different from any RTS you've played. Mainly, this game is a siege centric RTS, like Stronghold but without any of the medieval simulation bits and instead focusing exclusively on fighting. The siege theme really makes sense when you think of it. I mean, think of the coolest, most video game worthy moments from the films. What were they? The sieges of Helms Deep and Minas Tirith, naturally. And the game does a pretty decent job of bring those epic film quality sieges to the player.

The game also does something else that I've never seen, before or since, in an RTS. It gave the AI natural emotions and behaviors. This impacts the game on both a cosmetic and gameplay level.

Cosmetically, these AI behaviors mean that your little army dudes will never just be standing around looking stiff and silly like in any other RTS. For example, if you leave your orks alone for a while they will form a ring and two of them will start sparring at the center of it. Your trolls will push and shove eachother around. If your men see a regular sized enemy from across the battlefield they will start clanging their weapons together and cheering, psyching up for the coming battle. It does a lot to make the game feel more alive.

On the gameplay side of things, units having realistic behavior can have quite an impact. Put your soldiers up against a rampaging troll and they will act afraid, and won't fight very well. Your men always do end up following your orders, but if your order is a clear suicide march then they will be a little sluggish in following your command. Set an ent on fire and he will freak out and run around to find water to put himself out in. Set a Mummakil on fire and he will go on a rampage, trying to shake off the flaming archer tent on his back.

All in all, the game is really something unique, and the design would have been worth exploring. Unfortunately, they decided that the design wasn't worth exploring at all when they made the sequel. In BFME II gone are the sieges, the behavioral AI, the everything that made BFME I fun except for the Lord of the Rings theme. BFME only got decent but not great reviews, maybe that is what prompted the developers to make BFME II a more conventional RTS in every way. Whatever the reason, if you are looking to buy the better game of the series then buy the first.

By the bye, on the code side of things: I will have an update on my Dating Sim very soon. I'm also not done with Quake - I just can't quit it.

The Quake News

2010-11-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Quake project: Dead.

Well, here I am. Again.

After getting to a mostly playable state, I found that my game just wasn't all that different or fun. I blame a lack of vision, and too much focus on Quakey details like fucking around with Blender to get models in, fucking around with Worldcraft, and AI wankery. My original plan of having a running-away focused game ala Penumbra got muddied somewhere along the way, and instead I came out with a very run-of-the-mill shooter with baddies that can climb walls and stuff. Correction, an extremely fugly run-of-the-mill shooter with baddies that can climb walls and stuff.

When it became clear that I really needed to refocus on a new gameplay point, and shift the game into a more doable direction artistically, once again Blender stood in my way and kicked me in the balls.

I can't express my hate for Blender quite enough. I explored changing model formats from Quake's native and throughly awful and archaic mdls to something more like Half-Life's skeletal animation driven mdls. This requires exporting into an .smd format from Blender. My pain started here.

After much searching I found a user-made smd exporter for Blender. My only problem? It didn't work for my version of Blender. "Easy solution!" I thought, "I'll just upgrade to the newer, and therefore better version of Blender!"... WRONG! The newest version of Blender completely changes the bloody interface into something new and remarkably unintuitive, rendering most of what I learned about getting around old Blender's remarkably unintuitive interface completely moot. Still, I fought on.

I then struggled with the fan made smd exporter, which struggled back at me even more. Still, I fought through the pain for several hours and exported a nice little test model.

The next part? Getting the thing into the game. Now, the format is fully supported, keep that in mind. Anywho, hours of googling and looking for a way to get my new format into the game reveal... Nothing. It appears that nobody has any light to shed on the matter. It has been done before, so I know that it is at least theoretically possible, but I sure as hell can't figure it out. Not that I gave all that much effort into trying. The Blender-to-dpm pipeline sucks shit, I have to run my model through two different exporters to get my dpm, so by then I have no idea where the problem lies.

Bottom line, I'm done. I'm pretty sure that if I bashed my head against the wall a bit more I really could figure it out and get it in game, but I'm just not up for it anymore. I'm tuckered out, and when the fun little project that I could add little bits onto here and there turned into a monster of a project that required serious effort to tackle, I knew it was time to call it quits.

I've learned a lot, but now it is about time to shoot this baby in the crib.

*bang*

ung!

2010-11-12T14:09:00.000-08:00

.Blarngh.
!Ack!

SDL Game Ahoy!

2010-11-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

It is time to talk about the new SDL game I've been working on it. I'll break it down with just the facts, Dragnet style.

Name: Charmquest.
Genre: Fantasy RPG Dating Sim
Crimes: Being insufferably cute and nerdy as hell.

That's right, folks! My next SDL game is going to be of the dating sim variety. And this isn't just going to be an engine for dating sims, like Verily was for top down RPGs. No, this is going to be a fully loaded, fully playable game.

Its (planned) features are going to be including but not necessarily limited to:
*: Many different locations!
*: Three different gals to hit on and harass, each with a different personality!
*: Three different difficulty levels!
*: RPG style stats and character progression!
*: A combat system (type of which is undetermined, but likely turn based and Japanese)!
*: Items!
*: Witty dialogue!
*: NPCS with schedules!

I've chosen to do a dating sim because I wanted to make something that I figured wouldn't take too long to develope, and frankly/somewhat shamefully, I just plain enjoy the genre.

For those of you who aren't still virgins and have never played a dating sim or know how they really work, it goes like this:

Basically, you have a character with a couple of different stats that correspond to specific things. Intelligence governs how much money you can make on a job, strength determines your hitpoints and maybe your damage output, etc...

Every in-game day you have a set number of turns to do stuff (work for money, train, whatever), and you only have so many days before it is game over. To win you have to woo one of the ladies enough before you run out of days.

How does the wooing work? There are a number of ways of going about doing this, but the core idea is more or less the same. That is, by talking to the chicks you learn a little something about their personality (likes/dislikes, that sort of stuff), and later on down the line you will have to make decisions using a little deductive reasoning based on what you learned from talking to them, and your success during these little puzzles will determine how much more they like you.

So basically, the game is a turn based RPG with some puzzle elements thrown in when it comes to engaging with the gals and managing your time.

More fun than it sounds, I promise.

So anyways, I'm really coming along with the game.

Some technical talk that may or may not bore you:

I've broken the game down into different Zones. Each Zone has a sort of inventory of things I'm calling Entities. Entities are things that get drawn into the scene and can be anything from an item, to an NPC, to a sign that says "click here to go to the kitchen". The zones themselves are loaded into a Zone Manager that figures out which Zone I want to be in and loads it dynamically. I feel this solution is efficient and elegant, and I'm quite proud.

Anyway, the assets for this game are going to be a real bitch. A dating sim isn't necessarily art asset heavy (as almost everything is just a still picture), but one requirement is that you pretty much have to have hot chicks to hit on. I can't draw anything resembling any kind of chick, let alone a hot chick. I don't exactly have a solution for this, but I'm thinking that maybe I can get a bunch of anime hot chick reference images, and sort of trace out my own leggy-ladies from those. Maybe. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, though.

As for Quake Thursday: It is on this week for sure. Blame last week on Fable 3. Also, expect updates for this SDL game every Tuesday from now on.

UPDATE: Changes are a-comin'.

2010-10-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah. It has been awhile and all that. I won't bother throwing any excuses your way, I've mostly just been lazy. I've also been incredibly busy with school, sick, and working on a new SDL game that I haven't told you about.

So I guess I will bother throwing excuses your way. Whatevs.

Work on the Quake game has been nonexistant. There is a reason for this: I'm so bored with it! One of the little truths you discovier about game development is that the hardest part (and there are plenty of hard parts) is the very end, when all major development is done.

All of the major coding is done, the asset work is all done, and the map is finished. What remains is testing and tweaking, and MAN is it a drag. This last stage of development consists of tweaking some little value in the code or piece of the map, and then testing it out. Rinse and repeat a billion times. The only challenge is to your patience, and I guess lately I've been losing that battle.

That said, I really do want to get this game out and soon. With that in mind, I'm instituting something called "Quake Thursdays" around here.

Yes, every Thursday is now "Quake Thursday". I promise to work on the Quake game for at least a couple hours, at the end of which I'll post a bunch of screenshots here on the blog to show you what I'm doing. Hopefully this will see the game to a fairly quick release.

In other news, as I stated earlier I have started work on a new SDL game. I'll give more details soon, but for now I can say that it will be a little game that should be quick and easy to produce (coding wise, the assets are scaring me a bit), and will hopefully pretty fun. I'm toying with the idea of actually selling this one, so I'm pretty excited about it.

Hmm, what else? A gaming news site called Ultima Aiera has made its way into my list of daily must-visit sites. Specifically, it has news about the Ultima series of games and about the creators who had a hand in bringing the games to life.

'How much news could there be about a series that has been dead for a decade?', I hear you ask. Well as it turns out, a pretty good amount of news can be generated about a series that has been dead for a decade. Dick. There are tons of remakes and updates to the series to be reported on, as well as hopeful (though ultimately futile) rumors of the series being continued or restarted again. But more important and interesting are the articles that showcase the old design documents and artwork from the venerable games. It makes for some good game design reading, if you are into that sort of thing.

Other cool things: In Por Ylem 2 has gone into beta, marking yet another experiment with unrestricted PVP in an MMO environment. These experiments always prove interesting. You get to see just how much crap regular players, who make up the bulk of the playerbase, can take from unabashed a-hole players, who exist for no other reason than to ruin the game experience of those regular players, before the regular players give up and leave. Once the normal players leave, the a-holes, having nobody else to torment other than eachother, themselves leave and the game collapses.

We've seen this countless times (the original UO, the original In Por Ylem, Shadowbane, Darkfall) before. Yet there is always some designer who wants to try the experiment again, I guess thinking that this time it will be different. Who can blame him? On paper the concept of near-completely unrestricted PVP is brilliant. Sadly, it just never works, mostly because there are too many players who will take advantage of the loose ruleset and use it to ruin the game for the other players.

Anywho, I don't want to get into that. So many other, better and more experienced than me, designers have gone into it before.

All I want to say is that Azaroth is taking another crack at In Por Ylem. He has brought some interesting design decisions with him, and hopefully some lessons learned from the original In Por Ylem. If anybody can get open pvp right, it's Azaroth with IPY2.

Oh, and I beat Ultima 8: Pagan. I've been playing this thing for over 15 years! Everybody will tell you about much much crap Ultima 8 was, and it does have its annoyances and plot holes. Still, it was always be my favorite (and first) Ultima, and one of the games that originally made me want to make games myself. Cheers, Pagan.

Warning: Game Design Philosphy Screed Imminent!

2010-09-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

I'm getting close to finishing my Quake mod (the alpha version, anyway), and I'm really excited about returning to formal C++ game development. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what my first new game is going to be, and about what statements I want to make about game design in general through my games. Well, since I'm not here to talk about what my next game is going to be that means I must be about to unload some heavy game design philosophy crap on you. I apologize in advance.

To understand what I have to say about the state of game design, first I have to walk you through a hypothetical game experiment.

Let's say that you have a game. It is a 2D Metroidvania sidescroller: You attack baddies along the way, do some platforming, and when you reach the right hand side of the screen you go on to the next level. Next, let's say that at the very beginning of each level there is a switch on the wall that you have to hit by pressing the 'up' button. There is no obstacle to the switch, and it is in the same spot in every level just two steps forward from where you spawn, but you can't beat a level without first having activated the switch. Thus, at the start of every level the first thing you have to do is ALWAYS to take two steps forward and press 'up' to flick the switch.

Ah hah! I hear you all cry out that this is bad game design! And it is! Why? Well, the switch doesn't add anything to the game, it is just something you do at the start of every single level. You could cut it right out of the game without losing anything. The lesson here is clear: Any time a game has you doing something robotically just for the sake of doing it, it is bad game design. It is essentially putting a non-game obstacle in your way that you have to get past in order to actually play the game portion of the game.

Now let's take a look at a popular playing guide to the critically and commercially uber-successful Blizzard game Starcraft 2 (this is from a Terran build order):

(1)Start out with 9 SCVs, then build a (2)Supply Depot. (3)Make two more SCVs and (4) another Supply Depot when the resources become available. After the second Supply Depot is done, have the (5)SCV start building a Barracks. (6)Build the Barracks in such a way that it helps block the entrance ramp into your base. Once another (7) SCV gets built, have them build another (8) Supply Depot to further block your ramp. After your 14th SCV (9) you should start work on your (10)Refinery and save to upgrade your base to an Orbital Command Center (11).

*(Thanks to http://www.articlesbase.com/computer-games-articles/starcraft-2-terran-build-order-the-best-terran-build-orders-to-dominate-your-enemies-with-ease-3071016.html for the build order example)*

As you can see, without even counting every single SCV build you have at least 11 different things to do. You do these things at the very start of every single level you play, without variation, and that is only in the first third or so of the guide! In terms of our hypothetical sidescroller, that is 11 different switches you have to turn on before you can start playing the game. So why is it so obviously bad in our nonexistant sidescroller situation, but totally accepted when Blizzard does it in their AAA rts?

Partly because of shitty game reviewers who are too blinded by hype trains to even begin to think objectively about the games they are critiquing, sure, but I think there is more to it. I think that something that happens far too often in modern game design is a misunderstanding of what makes a game genre.

16 years ago Warcraft: Orcs & Humans came out and defined the rts genre. Sure, it was mostly a ripoff of Dune, but Warcraft really refined the core mechanics of Dune and made a hugely successful game out of them. From then on if any game designer thought rts, he was really thinking Warcraft. Nearly every rts after Warcraft took Warcraft as a base and went from there.

The base was something like "Base building > Peasant resource management > Army Building", and a new game would come and do something like "Base building > Peasant resource management > Army Building > Hero units", or "Base building > Peasant resource management > Army Building > Rock Paper Scissors combat system". Everybody just takes it for granted that rts means "Base building > Peasant resource management > Army Building". But I demonstrated earlier that this design structure breeds build orders, which is awful game design.

Furthermore, this design de-emphasizes the combat, because there is an inherent focus on the rapid continual building of your base/pumping out of units. You almost never watch a fight in these games because you are too busy jamming the hotkeys on your keyboard to keep base expansion and unit production going. Instead you just grab a mess of your units and lob them at your enemy's general direction. This is a staple of the rts genre because of Warcraft, but why?

Think about it: The reason the rts genre seemed appealing to us in the first place was because we wanted to be generals leading big armies to crushing, violent victories on our screen. We don't play because we want to facilitate a bunch of peasants and organize the most efficient building plans while our troops do something cool and fun off screen.

Now, I don't want to make an rts game, that isn't my point. The genre is largely dead to me now, and it doesn't excite any passion or imagination in me at all. I just bring up that example because what I want to do is to really examine genres in my games. I want to boil genres down to their TRUE essential attributes and then build from there. Only when a genre is deconstructed to its primal ingredients can the genre then be moved forward in a meaningful way.

That is why I want to take a sort of minimalist approach to my games. I want to take the games back to the late 1980's, the golden age of PC gaming, and then go from there.

DISCLAIMER: This doesn't mean that every single one of my games is going to be a minimalist and completely original idea. As a matter of fact, my next SDL game is likely going to be extremely conventional. Besides, boiling games down to their essentials is tough work! Still, this is what I want to do, and it definitely will be a theme of mine going into the future when I get more comfortable taking on somewhat ambitious projects.

Here is a *link* to the article that really got me fired up enough to write this today. Once again it is Ultima that gets me feeling motivated about game design.

Stay on target...

2010-09-25T14:24:00.001-07:00

Content is locked in and ready to move.

Time for some testing, where I can tweak the code (especially the AI stuff) to where it does everything I want it to. I also have to figure out and finalize entity placement in the level, which will also be sorted out during the test runs.

This shouldn't be heavy lifting, but you know how that goes. At any rate, a release shouldn't be very far off now. A week or two tops. I'll do a little advertising on the QuakeDB group before I release so that somebody - anybody - gives a shit and plays it a bit. Screenshots will come pouring in very soon, I promise.

Checking in.

2010-09-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

I'm looking to be 100% on all content by the end of the weekend. From there it is just a matter of testing and finalizing. The home stretch is finally here. Screens soon.

I'm still looking for a way to ditch Blender 3D, and really the entire Quake .mdl format. The thing about Quake .mdl models is that they don't use any bone information, they purely save vertex coordinates from frame to frame. This is... Unfortunate. It inherently means wonky animation, and eliminates the possibility for decent hitbox support and sockets on the model (for muzzle flashes, storing weapons, and other cool shit like that).

Worse, getting your .mdl animations into the game is a painstaking process. As I said, the .mdl saves vertex coordinate information, which means to get it in game I have to write a script to tell the game what animation is going on frame by effing frame. For example, when I want to code my death animation I have to look at the model itself and find out what frame the death animation I want starts at, say 46. From there I tell the game that frame 46 is death animation A's frame 1. Then I tell it that frame 47 is death animation A's frame 2. This goes on until the animation is finished. What. A. Nightmare. It gets really confusing when you are 120 frames in and have to remember that you are really on frame 13 of shoot animation c. And of course Blender is kicking you in the ass the whole time.

I miss the good old days of Half-Life's .mdl format modeling. Half-Life .mdls were a compilation of vertex info, texture info, and bone info. This made animating and getting a model in game an absolute dream. Any animations you did were self contained pieces of information, meaning you didn't have to get down and dirty and worry about frame numbers. You just made an animation called "shoot", and told the game to do "shoot" at the appropriate time and voila. And the tool of choice was Milkshape 3D. Ahh, Milkshape, how I loved you and miss you. Unlike Blender, Milkshape is incredibly easy to use, never crashes, and has beautiful pipelines to all of the major low poly model formats that used to be relevant at the time.

I think a good analogy for what Blender is to Milkshape is to think about what GIMP is to Paint.Net. GIMP tries to do all of the things that the big expensive retail product Photoshop does while Paint.Net just tries to keep the usability of Paint while adding some professional type features. GIMP ends up being an unintuitive, barely functional mess while trying to do all those fancy things. Meanwhile, Paint.Net does everything a shitty programmer-artist like me needs, and it does it painlessly and easily. In the same way, Blender 3D tries to do everything that Maya, 3D Studio Max, and Softimage XSI do, but does it all shitty while maintaining an obtuse user interface. Milkshape 3D just tries to be a super usable low poly modeling program for games like Quake and Half-Life, and it absolutely succeeds.

So, since Blender 3D has been making me weep so much in the last couple months, I've recently really been trying to find a solution in a new model format, preferably Half-Life's .mdls. So far the best I've been able to come up with it the Darkplaces engine's .DPM format. It uses .smds to separate vertex and bone information, like Half-Life, but is specific to Darkplaces. The only real problem is that few people use it, and even fewer know exactly how to use it. Still, I'm going to experiment with it in the future and see if it is a possible solution for me.

At any rate, for the time being I am going to grit my teeth and fight through the unbearable darkness that is Blender 3D to push out the last model or two I need. I'm too close to being ready now. Perhaps in the future I'll use the .DPM model format which will enable me to bring back my toon shading, as well as generally make my life much easier on the 3D modeling side of things.

quickie update...

2010-09-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of touching up/redoing a lot of the modeling bits. For the time being I'm going to drop the fake toon shading. In the vertex grouping process Blender was being a real bastard about all the flipped faces, so I have decided to sacrifice the shading for more control over my animations. Oh well, such is life when you have to work with shitty open source tools. The toon shading will have to be something that I'll hard code in on the engine side at a later date, in an update.

Speaking of Blender, it continues to be a gigantic thorn in my side. I can't for the life of me find a decent way of rigging a model. Weight painting is SUCH a pain in the ass and is so damn inaccurate. I always end up painting vertices that I didn't intend, or missing some that I did intend. Why can't I just go vertex by vertex and assign them to the bones that I want? I was doing that in Milkshape 3D ten years ago for gosh sakes. But as far as I can tell, my only options for rigging in Blender are weight painting and the easy but wildly inaccurate enveloping. Aarrgh. I'll try googling around/forum diving to help me not hate weight painting.

In the mean time, here is a revised list of things that are going to be in the first release:

One semi-long level.
A pistol, smg, and screwdriver for weapons.
One baddy type with custom AI that can climb/jump around the environment.
A respawning baddy system that keeps the action flowing.

All of that will absolutely be in at release, and most of it is working already. As i said earlier, I am still finalizing some of the models for the weapons, but the coding for them is done already. The map is mostly done, but I may add on to it/change it around once I start really testing this thing.

Things that I'd love to have in the release but may or may not make it in time (they may still make it, but generally I'm not finished with them):

Buddy AI.
Two other baddy types; a shotty badguy and a pistol baddy.

Obviously, the Buddy AI was a big part of the game that I wanted from the beginning, and to probably not have it ready for the demo is pretty painful. The thing is though, this whole project has taken a lot longer than I ever wanted it, which is my own fault through a deadly combination of trying to do too much, having real life badness crop up in the middle of the summer and halt all development, and sheer laziness on my part. I am at the point now where I really need to just get this thing out of the door in one form or another. Rest assured, this is still my baby and with just a little bit of positive attention toward the demo from the community I will continue development and absolutely get those features in.

Things to think about for a future release:

More levels, obviously.
A shotty weapon for the player.
A stamina system for the running and jumping.
Reloading for the weapons.
Scripted sequences.

Later days.

That Starcraft 2 post...

2010-08-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Work continues...

For now. But Starcraft 2 has come out, and while I hate Blizzard and all they stand for when it comes to the RTS genre (and game design in general), EVERYBODY and their brother just won't shut up about how epic and great it is. I don't have a lot of will power when it comes to games, and the Starcraft 2 hype train is really doing a number on me. It may only be a matter of time before my shields break and I buy the game. And then hate myself for it two days later.

Level 1 is in the can!

2010-07-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

And it only took ~8 hours!

Everything works more or less how I want it to. Obviously, I don't know how to do a lot of the cool things I had in mind, so I had to tinker/find alternative ways of doing them, duct tape and bailing wire style.

At one point I had to duplicate a significant portion of the map. Worldcraft didn't like it at all and, while the map loads up and plays just fine, a big list of warnings fills the console before hand. I've looked it up and the answer seems to be "yeah, old versions of Worldcraft will do that. F##k you", so whatevs.

I'm going to look for a texture pack to use. Right now I am using Quake's stuff as a placeholder. I was intending to just go with it, but now looking back on the finished product it is just too ugly. Muddy dark browns don't translate well to modern office motifs. I could also stand to find some prefabs. Prefabs, for those who haven't dabbled in this sort of thing before, are self contained little models/textures for use in maps. Think computers, office chairs, desks, cars, that sort of thing.

Also, the scale in Quake is wonky. For the weird and wacky world that Quake is actually set in, this is fine and really barely noticeable. But when I try to bring things into the modern realistic realm everything either looks like it is made for giants, or midgets. I can't really find the sweet spot. Oh well. Better textures should hopefully help.

Worldcrafting

2010-07-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to really get into a groove with Worldcraft. My maps still look assy, but they are coming along.

I'd really love to add in my own textures at some point. My maps are set in an office/industrial theme, and Quake's default texture set doesn't really lend itself to that. Still, I am going to put off those kind of additions until after I have a basic release, and if people still care.

Slowly but surely this thing is coming together.

Also, I have come up with a name for the game. I am leaning towards calling it "The Mondays", because it is set in an office with tons of cubicles and really sterile fluorescent lighting.

Sometimes...

2010-07-23T13:45:00.001-07:00

I wish I had a team. I like the total control that comes with working on my own, but it would be nice if I could delegate all the tasks that I hate/suck at to team members who are more competent than me in those areas. Like mapping.

I found a workaround for my Worldcraft woes. It is ugly, but it works. Still, now that I can actually churn the maps out I am coming to a new realization: I suck at mapping. Fair enough, I knew that going in, but what I didn't know was just how much it is going to impact my game. It is bad enough that the game is going to be full of programmer art, but programmer level design? Yuck.

Oh well. Hopefully I can still hit the ugly but passably fun sweet spot.

expletives

2010-07-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Worldcraft was working just fine. And then it wasn't. Just like that.

A compile a map two seconds later and none of the geometry is lighting up properly. And I can't FUCKING fix it! Literally NOTHING has changed from one compile to the next. The piece of shit throws no errors. All I know is that I can't produce a map with working lights, and it has singlehandedly killed my damn game.

Once again, you'd think a program this stupid old would be documented like a motherfucker, but it isn't. All the googling in the world can't find me an answer. I'm going to try and enlist the help of some current Quake modders and see if they can't set me straight. Maybe there is a better program out there than this piece of shit old version of Worldcraft.

But until then, the game can never get released.

I am unbelievably pissed off right now. I put the mapping off to the end because I hate it and suck so bad at it anyway. But now to have mapping be the thing that I am forced to pay so much attention to and grind all my development to a halt... Infuriating.

Oops

2010-07-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Did I say this weekend? What I really meant was "when it's done".

Which will probably be either next weekend or the week after that.

Sorry. I thought that maybe being able to plow through my work on the game all week would help me take my mind off of things (family emergency), but instead I just couldn't get motivated to start.

The Feature List

2010-07-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Key:

Items in black indicate something that is already in the game and working acceptably.
Items in green indicate something that I've already started working on and is definitely going to be in the game at release.
Items in yellow indicate something that I haven't started working on but will hopefully be in the release.
Items in red indicate something that I would love to be in the game, but probably won't make it.

Here we go.

Mapping:

An intro map, with a tutorial for getting around. Characters get introduced, and the story started off.
The level where shat first starts to go down.
A middle level where the main button-hunt gameplay most comes into effect.
A finale level.
Custom cartoony textures for everything.

Modeling:

A main type of generic bad guy with an SMG.
A pistol, smg, and shotty for the player.
Another type of baddy with a shotgun.
A pistol baddy.
A boss.
An AI buddy.
Some friendly AI scientists.

Code:

AI that is generally enhanced for getting around and not getting stuck on the geometry.
A "dynamic" spawn system for pumping in enemies at least somewhat intelligently.
Buddy AI.
Some non-threatening scientist AI.
Some sort of system for allowing scripted dialogue/sequences.

Sounds:

My own sounds for the weapons.
Sounds for pain, death, jumping, etc... For the player, the baddy, and the AI buddy.
Some scripted Left-4-Dead-esq dialogue.

General:

Come up with a name for this thing.

I am aiming for a release day of the 17th of July. Testing? I don't need no stinking testing. Now, I realize that I put the custom sounds and textures in red, which means that they probably won't make the release. This means that my initial release will be as a mod and not a standalone game. I really want to see this as a standalone game, but digging out all of the original textures, sounds, and other game content is a load of work, and I'm only going to do it if I think it is worth the pay off. That is why I am going to release as a mod first, and then go standalone on a people-seem-to-give-a-shit-enough-basis. If nobody touches the mod then I won't bother going standalone, it is as simple as that.

What you will need to play the mod: You will need the two .PAK files from the original Quake game. If you don't have Quake you are out of luck. You can always buy the game, I think it is $10 on Steam or you can get it brand new and in a box from Amazon.com for less than $10. It is a classic as hell oldschool shooter and you owe it to yourself to own the thing anyways. I'll put all the relevant information on how to install the mod in a README file when I release the game.

AI woes...

2010-06-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

So I'm finding the base AI in Quake to be totally inadequate for my needs. The inadequacy comes from the fact that a major part of the Quake AI, the part where the monster decides where exactly on the map he wants to move (IE: his goal), is HARD CODED into the engine. That means I can't do any QC magic to change it. Why they decided to do this when the rest of the game relies so heavily on the QC scripts is beyond me.

This means that I have to gut the AI code and put in my own. My only problem? I don't know jack about AI! Sure, I've done the same basic tutorials on how to get an entity to intelligently (and efficiently) move towards a goal using a couple of different methods as everybody else... But now doing it in practice, as well as in 3D space... This is scary!

Luckily, the Quake modding community is there to rescue me. There is some super old code for simple, beautiful bots hanging around. The TutorBot, made by a (former?) community member named Coffee (I'd be hyperlinking the shit out of this, but it is all so old that Coffee's Quake site doesn't exist anymore except in Internet archives and the memories of appreciative Quake modders). It is exactly what I need as a nice base reference from which to build my new AI on top of.

What do I need my AI to do? Well, the base AI can find an enemy (usually the player) and intelligently(ish) move to it and attack it. This means pathing out a bunch of waypoints based on the level geometry so that the monster moves around walls, avoids falling off of cliffs, ect... My monsters, however, will not path around walls. I want my monsters to climb the damn walls.

Imagine having a Quake level in an office full of cubicles, desks, and chairs. Normally, the player would be bounding all over the environment while the monsters would have to awkwardly weave through the obstacles in a maze like fashion. I want my monsters to be able to climb just as well as the player can jump. Maybe even better.

We'll see.

Baddy!

2010-06-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

*cough*

Get ready to shoot lots of these. For reference, that is a terrorist looking guy and not an S&M enthusiast in a gimp suit. Although now that I am thinking of it, that would make a far cooler bad guy.

Quicky

2010-06-23T14:48:00.001-07:00

So I know what you are all saying. "Handshakes, you devilishly handsome, cunning, and all around sexy man, where is your progress on those bad guy models?"

Well, if I were to be completely honest with you, and I rarely am, I would have to admit that things like Ultima Online and internet porn have been eating into my time lately. But I would also add that this content stuff isn't a cake walk for me, and I'm trying my best to achieve an acceptable level of programmer-art suckery that I wouldn't mind showing off in the end product.

I've been spending a tremendous amount of time studying Blender3D, pouring through huge and oddly written English-as-second-language tutorials, and watching hours of low poly character modeling while taking notes. I want to get this right.

There is also a bit of extra pride on the line for me. I got my start in amateur game development on the 3D modeling side of things, doing low poly weapons and the occasional character in Milkshape 3D for various Half-Life mods that would never see the light of day. - In point of fact, I was only involved in two mods that ever saw the light of release day. One, I did some quicky and ugly-as-sin animations for some guy's proof-of-concept Counter-Strike zombie mod. For the other mod I just rigged a couple models as a favor to the mod leader, a coding child prodigy known as General Dodo, who got me started in 3D modeling for Half-Life working on his Predator themed HL mod which was a first mod for both of us. That mod (not Predator, but the one that saw release), known as General Dodo Coop was, despite the name, pretty special. It never really caught on, and it was accused of having stolen ideas from Sven Coop like the advanced physics and, well, the coop. But the fact is that, while it was a lot like Sven Coop, it was actually better in a number of ways, like the physics being better implemented (which was pretty special for the time), having more complex AI, and having drivable vehicles including airplanes (which made for an endlessly good time). - But, I digress. 3D modeling is dear to my heart, even if the skills have severely atrophied, and I want to make something I can be kind of proud of.

That said, hopefully I will have something to show pretty soon. Until then, more studying.

Quicky Update!

2010-06-17T12:43:00.001-07:00

Just a little update on my progress so far. Some shots of my patented fake cell-shading technique.

My Pistol

The SMG

I'm really just trying to get all the content nailed down at this point. Why? Because I suck at doing content (which is made obvious from the above screenshots), and I want to get that crap out of the way first so that I don't have to worry about it. The biggest monster I am going to have to tackle is when I try to get my, well, monsters into the game. Quake's animation system is archaic with a capital thissucks. It also doesn't help that Blender 3D is kicking me in the shins every step of the way.

Next thing to tackle: Getting baddies into the game.
Difficulty level: Oh crap!
In over my headedness: Drowning.

Stay tuned!

Thanks to the invaluable Tara for getting me to get off my ass and make this update.

EDIT: It might be hard to tell in the screens, but they weapons are indeed toon shaded with an outline around them. I made the screens quicky-like in the intro level of Quake, which is really dark and that unfortunately makes it hard to see the toonyness of the guns. Rest assured, my levels will be much more simply colored and brightly lit (and assily made).

Getting my dark on

2010-05-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

Did I just abandon a project before it began? The quick answer: Sorta.

See, since my home machine's hard drive got virus'd last year (and I've had to use this less than official version of Windows XP), my school laptop became my only Visual Studio coding machine. Well, I had to turn in my school laptop at the end of the semester and now I am without a machine with VS. Fair enough, I'm all of an hour's worth of work away from getting access to the MSDN and getting all the Windows 7 and Visual Studio I want for free - but the thought of going through a format and all that junk... Yuck.

For a while there I had been hard at work scoping out an engine to do a quick side project on. Not coding anything was making me crazy, I had to find something to do.

And then my old copy of Quake fell out of my dresser Wednesday of last week. Quake, I think to myself, is old enough that it must be documented like crazy, and be chalk full of sweet tools just ready for me to pick up and use. Genius!

It turns out I was mostly right.

Modifying the game logic in Quake is all about messing around with John Carmack's QuakeC script, a beautiful little C like language that is clean and easy to dive right into. I can modify a script, compile it, and be in game and testing it all in about 30 seconds time. As for the guts of the engine, I can let someone else do all the heavy lifting. The Darkplaces engine is a gussied up Quake engine with plenty of modern graphical additions like reflections, shadowing, and bump mapping.

Documentation? We have documentation. The Quake dev community is still alive and well after all this time. Inside3D is my main reference site so far.

But the best part about using the open source Quake-based Darkplaces engine is that it allows me to release the game not as a mod but as a stand alone game!

That sounds all well and good, but the downside to going stand alone is, of course, that I have to generate 100% of my own content to use with the thing. This is a pretty good knee cap to my progress, but I went on to see just how viable it would all be.

I already know that I'm solid on the coding/scripting front. What about mapping? Well, my logic that an old game must have some solid tools turned out to be right in this instance. A slightly old and modified version of Valve's ancient-but-effective Worldcraft editor (now Hammer) is an elegant solution. After downloading the thing it only took a bit of fiddling to get it in working order and I was compiling my own test map in five minutes. Perfect. And the package included a .wad packager, so I can make my own texture packs (which I'm going to have to do).

How about the models? Ah hah! My logic worked for mapping, so surely it would be pie to export MDL files from any modeling program I want, right? WRONG! The pipelines for modeling for Quake are kaaaarazy. I knew I was in trouble when I came across a tutorial that wanted me to export into Quake3's MD3 format, then run some converter to turn it into MDL, and then hope and pray it comes out the other side looking anything like the model I started with. Luckily, after many hours of searching, I came across a decent (if still buggy as hell) straight MDL exporter for Blender3d. It messes up the textures like crazy, but my textures are going to suck anyway, so who am I to complain?

So now I've got my own models into the game. That leaves sound, and I'm pretty sure I can find some public domain .wavs to use.

It has been an odd experience for me. When I normally enter this feeling out period of the project I very quickly find out the ceiling of my capabilities and pair back what I want to do as necessary. But this time, whenever I sent a feeler out to check out my limitations I actually found the ceiling to be much higher than what I need. For once it would seem that my own creativity will be my limit. Hooray for Quake and Id.

Now, before I get too excited, it is worth realizing that I still have a crap load of content to create, and I am nothing even close to resembling an artist. To combat this I am picking a simple boxy art style and, taking a cue from major crappy developers everywhere, adding in toon shading to cover up my shitty programmer art.

Anywho, more details on the actual game to come soon, as well as screens (which I can already show because the game is coming along so fast and furious).

The wheels in my head have been turning...

2010-03-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

A dangerous pastime, I know.

First of all, go play this: Digital: A Love Story from some amateur writer Christine Love. I've never heard of her or her stuff, but I saw Digital up on Fileplanet and I decided to give it a whirl.

Game changing.

Basically, D:ALS is just a short story. The gameplay consists of you putting together little clues in order to further progress the story. It is simple. It is kinda fun. But most importantly, it is damn effective at doing what it is trying to do.

As I finished my play through of the game it suddenly dawned on me: I want to make a game like this! Not that I want to make a game about posting to a BBS on an Amiga, but I want to make a game that is simple, fairly easy to knock together, at least kind of fun, and tells a story.

I haven't had much progress with my Gladiator remake, because I just can't muster the will power required to get my ass to the grindstone and make the thing. Now, my Gladiator game design is, I think, pretty unique. And it should be pretty fun. But it is going to be HELL putting the whole thing together. So, since I'm in the middle of a busy ass semester anyway, and since I'm still coming off of Verily, I think I'm going to go the D:ALS way and make something easy and fun.

I'm sick of making prototypes. This time I'm going to make a game.

A sappy, romantic comedy game.

Blame Ms. L.

Not too much to report

2010-02-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

I'm still not 100% on where I want to go with my next game. In the interest of getting something done I have started coding the generic stuff anyway. So far I've got a neat game state manager in and ready to go. I'm also going to start writing the base class for my animated sprites. Regardless of what game I am going to pick, I will have animated sprites.

I will definitely have a direction picked and a meatier update next week. Soz mates.

New Game!

2010-02-04T06:28:00.000-08:00

The time has come to pick a new game to start developing. The question is, what game?

As I see it I have three choices based on a combination of factors, mostly what I want to make and what I think that I actually can make. I can go with:

A humorous Point 'N Click Adventure ala Monkey Island.

An RPG cutesy Dating Sim (Don't laugh).

A simple but fun remake of arcade classic Gladiator.

The Point 'N Click Adventure is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. If I did it, it would star Jack from Our Boy Jack and have a supporting cast of naive Victorian Londoners that I think would lend themselves easily to humorous situations. The pros would be that the game logic seems pretty straight forward and easy. The big con is that these types of games are asset heavy, and I could be in a bind if I went that route.

As for the Date Sim, well... What can I say? I've always been a fan of the simple, yet addictive puzzle gameplay that they offer. The best part of doing this would be that at its heart it would be an RPG, which I've done before with Verily. The negatives would be a whole lot of new game dynamics that I don't have a lot of experience in. Stuff like finite state machines for somewhat complex schedule and task oriented AI. Sounds scary.

For the Gladiator remake, my biggest draw to it is that it seems to be a nice middle ground between going all out and making a unique fun game, and making another prototype. If I choose to go this route I will have the benefit of learning quite a bit more about developing, as well as being able to be fairly confident of a release within the semester. I'd still have to learn a bit about AI, sounds, game state managers, and so on. But none of seems too far out of my depth at the moment.

Can you tell what I am leaning towards? Yes, although it isn't official I do believe that the Gladiator remake is going to win the day. My apologies if you were rooting for something else. On top of all the other things going for the Gladiator remake, I've also been on an Errol Flynn kick lately so I've been watching a lot of rapier sword fighting, which kind of lends itself well to a Gladiator type game. Plus, who doesn't want to be a musketeer? I haven't decided on a proper motif yet. My dream art design would be something cartoony like Captain Claw (super great platformer that went under the radar, by the way), but that might be too hard for me to pull off.

We'll see shortly.

For those of you who have never played Gladiator and don't know what I am talking about: Basically it is a melee fighting game in which you and your opponents can strike in High, Middle, or Low. In order to not be killed you have to make sure your shield is blocking the area that your opponent is striking. It is simple, but it feels believable and satisfying.

Verily At Last

2010-01-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

http://www.filefront.com/15446983/Verily.zip

There it is. I didn't bother making a readme, so the instructions for running and playing are as follows:

Download Verily.zip from the FileFront link above.
Unzip it somewhere.
Run the Verily.exe to start the game.
Use the arrow keys to move around.
The Health symbol in the bottom right hand corner of the screen represents your hitpoints.
The Shield symbol, also in the lower right corner, is how much damage you do.
The Gold Coin symbol in the lower left corner is your money.
On the first map there is a Health and Shield symbol on the left wall of the level. These are shops. To use them just walk into it. If you have enough money your gold will automatically be deducted and whatever you are purchasing will be added.
Walk through levels by walking to the top or bottom of the screens.

There. I think that about covers it. The game is anything but complicated, but just in case something is puzzling you, there you have it.

Verily Tomorrow

2010-01-26T14:01:00.000-08:00

I have finished adding a HUD to the game, which incidentally turned out to be significantly more of a hard time than I had planned on.

Behold:

The HUD is composed of those icons in the corners that represent health, power, and gold. All that remains is for me to upload the beast to FileFront, which I will do tomorrow along with a simple explanation as to how to play.

Stay classy.

New Game Update: Verily

2010-01-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

No really, the game is called Verily. Verily is a totally bare bones Ultima IV-ish rpg I made as a term project last semester. To make it I used SDL (to hell with Allegro), and it turned out okay.

Verily features:

Easy map editing.
Shops for buying upgrades.
Monsters to fight.
A boss monster.
A goal to grab.
Player animations.

... And that is about it. Verily doesn't feature:

Inventory.

Text of any kind - No story.

Any sort of HUD.

Sounds.

Now, most of these I don't care about. The project wasn't for a game dev class, and what I did finish was more than enough to get me my grade. That said, before I release this beast to the eager grubby mits of the general public (all none of you), I want to add a little something to make this a might-bit more playable. Namely, I want to get a functioning HUD in there. I estimate this will take me a week or so, so stay tuned.

Our Boy Jack postponed

2009-11-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

It finally happened. My computer got murderized by a virus. I had to format the machine and lost everything. Luckily, my most important files were good and backed up. Unluckily, Our Boy Jack was not included in that list of important files. This actually happened a few weeks back, but I've been so busy with school projects in the mean time that I just don't have the time or the will left over to start Jack back up again.

I had Jack up to the point where I just had to plug in art content... But what a wall that is to hit! I am no artist, I need to remember that before I start projects.

I do, however, have another project coming down the pipe that I will announce soon. You better believe that I am going to pilfer all the sprite art I can for this one.

Stick around.

Major breakthrough

2009-10-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of progress. This is a big exam and paper month at school, so extra time has been scarce. When I do have extra time these days it is quite tough to want to do anything beyond sleeping. Hair greying game developing is hard to get motivated for at times like these.

That said, my map editor is nearly complete. It works by displaying a graphical image of the level (which is just a bitmap), and you use the mouse to paint 30x30 blocks wherever you want. The x and y position of these blocks is stored in a vector array, and from there is spit out into a text file. The text file is read into the game when the level loads and from there the game determines where collideable walls are and stuff like that. The only part of this procedure I haven't finished up yet is the spitting of the vector array into a text file, and then reading it back into the game.

Fun stuff. Screens soon.

LoL

2009-09-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Still working...

2009-09-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

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.

More Map Editing Woes

2009-09-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Our Boy Jack Update

2009-09-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Spriting!

2009-09-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Ultima 7 Review (example)

2009-09-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

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.