Getting my dark on

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...

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

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!

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:

1. A humorous Point 'N Click Adventure ala Monkey Island.


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


3. 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

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

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

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.


• AI.

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.