I’m kinda at the point of making a game where you don’t want to do any work.

I’m going to start working on it tomorrow again, after a break of two days. I just really need to fix these bugs.
I’m starting to think about working on a backup project so I have a least one game made by the end of the month, though its quite late now.

-bear

Progress has been a lot slower these past few days.  Sunday I has to do a bunch of stuff in the morning, had many interruptions  and distractions while I could have been working, and had other stuff to do that took a few hours in the evening.  Basically no progress.  Monday after work was pretty much the same, although a little bit of progress was made.  I now have the game connecting to a database, and sending information to it.  This will be used for best times, world records and that sort of tracking.  Tuesday not much progress was made by myself, but the website can now access the database and display a table of the laptimes, sorted to boot!

Today has been a slightly different story.  Progress isn’t blazing, but I have at least added a Message Box state, which will be used to tell the player that they are not connected to the database, and therefore any laptimes performed will not be shared, or rated.  Among many, many other uses.  The other day I didn’t put up screen shots of the main menu, but I will now – despite the same fugly look.

An extremely simple main menu. (*Multiplayer may be cut!)

This is likely what it will remain like for the Alpha build, although perhaps I am wrong.  I know that over the course of development when I come to polish this screen, I plan on it looking something like the next screenshot.  Forgive my concept art skills.  Well actually, forgive the complete lack of any art skills!

My hopes are to have this screen animated, so it looks like the car is moving along.  The plan would likely be just moving the trees and clouds from right to left, while adding a subtle vibration to the car, perhaps tire rotation…  Something simple but active.  Anyways, I’m still trying to refactor and put together some simple UI classes so I can create other screens quickly.  Also, before I go too far I will need to stop and consider localization support for any text that gets built into the game.  It is best to do that sort of thing early, although I am going to attempt finding “universal” symbols/icons, and use those instead of text whenever possible.

I do wish I didn’t have a day job.  It is really holding back my potential progress, and really hurting me as far as my schedule is concerned.  I’m hoping to release something by the end of October, but I am not overly confident it will happen.  But here’s to hoping!

I’ve been caught up the past few days with my game Smiles. Over the past month and a bit, quin and I ported the game to Windows Phone 7.

Aside from that, I finally came up with a name for my October game (which I’ll reveal soon), and had a bit of a business plan revelation too.

Then today ended up being a very weird day. I slept in until 6 PM (accidentally), and woke up to all kinds of good news in my e-mail box. To sort of celebrate, I decided to get some Chinese take-out for breakfast. As customary, it included a fortune cookie.

This accompanied a delicious plate of chicken fried rice (with big chunks of chicken in it)

The question is: who is the money maker? Smiles for WP7, or my October game?

Moonhelm is an indie game currently being put together by one programmer and one artist focusing on a small tight knit first person survival horror experience that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Ya, that’s a weird mix we know).

Below is a quick sketch of one of the baddies nicknamed ‘The Pig’.

Well, bad news first: Yesterday, I lost many hours to an old, nasty bug in my EEL scripting engine.

The good news: I cracked the bug! Turned out to be memory corruption due to the VM allocating one byte to few for a “stack” used for memory managing VM register variables. (EEL has an oddball automatic memory management solution, due to it being targeted at realtime applications. Reference counting with a few shortcuts, basically.) This had gone undetected as it only happens when you have a multiple of 16 register variables in a function.

Also, I now have an “Olofson Arcade presents” screen, a title screen with a nice, animated logo, and some nice code to play around with. So, now I can throw some game logic in the mix! I intend to take the Kobo Mk II for a first test flight some time today.

My October challenge entry is a game for the Windows Phone 7. That means I can’t sell a copy until Windows Phones are available.

At the start of October, Microsoft hadn’t even told us when they were going to tell us when the phones would be released. I was getting anxious.

On Monday, Microsoft announced the launch dates. In the US, the phones come out on November 8th

But in Europe and Asia, the launch date is October 21st. I’ll have nine days to sell a copy. I can still win this!

I did a little bit of work on the enemy spawn thingy. I ended up screwing up the game.

I’m going to look into it tomorrow night.

I need to speed up the progress i’m making, I’m taking to long to do simple things. I only have maybe a week or two to get it down and submit it to apple. This is why I hate homework.

The Contrasaurus launch was a big success yesterday, getting onto both the front page of Hacker News and the Programming Reddit. We even got 57 Facebook likes!

We received quite a bit of feedback, some positive, some negative, a lot of it useful. We also received a donation!

Something I wish I had done earlier would be to write down my expectations and try and guess what kinds of feedback we would receive, then compare that to the actual feedback and try and improve my intuition for what players care about. It is all too easy for ones mind to pretend it knew it all along once the evidence is in, so next time I’ll be sure to write down my hypotheses.

Another thing I learned is that not all feedback is equal. Some tells more about the player than the game. There will always be negative feedback and trying to modify the game too much to accommodate it may, in some cases, dilute the experience such that no one really loves it. On the flipside though, be sure that there is actual real positive feedback supporting the tradeoffs you are making. Our main one was that we chose to emphasize “being an awesome dinosaur, crushing your enemies” above “having balanced and tactical gameplay”. That’s not to say that there is no balance or tactics, just that “being an awesome dinosaur” came first in our priorities. In some cases it caused the gameplay to suffer and in an ideal world where we have infinite time the game would be extremely excellent in both regards.

The feedback we received often mirrored that choice. The players for whom “being an awesome dinosaur” was important really loved the experience. The more hardcore players who didn’t care about “being an awesome dinosaur” and wanted more complex and tactical gameplay were often disappointed. Some striking examples:

necromian

The gameplay literally consists of the character holding down the left mouse button and holding the right key. Once you get the jetpack you pretty much can’t die. The level design is non-existant, as every level (that I’ve played so far) is just a flat surface with enemies being constantly spawned on it. Overall, I think that you need to work on this game a lot. Currently, I’d say that it’s too boring, and few people will play it past the third level.

yummyfajitas

I can’t even begin to describe the awesomeness of controlling a jetpack powered dinosaur wielding twin chainsaws while fighting communists all to the midi-encoded tunes of Lady Gaga. The plotline was truly amazing, I totally didn’t see the ending coming.

Another interesting decision was that we chose to go the HTML5 route, rather than using an “established” platform like Flash. I think that, for us, it was the right decision. We don’t have much Flash experience, and if we’ll need to learn a new platform anyway we might as well go for one that appears to be rising rather than one that appears to have plateaued.

There are still tons of problems with HTML5 today, primarily cross browser audio, and crazy nearly impossible to reproduce crash bugs, as well as the standard cross browser web crap. The biggest pain was all the crash reports of running the game in Chrome, even though that’s the environment where for us, in development, it worked nearly perfectly. Additionally it was pretty much unplayable in FF, except on super-powerful computers, had control issues in Opera, only usable in IE via Chrome Tab, and crash reports on any of the browsers were not uncommon. This is the biggest issue right now with HTML5 but it is an issue that is currently being resolved and hopefully quickly.

In the end though the actual technology doesn’t matter at all to the player. The only thing that matters is that they can play the game reliably and enjoy the experience without issues.

Brian Gruening

the best flash game i have EVER seen play it http://contrasaur.us/

I’ve finished the basic gameplay and and starting to spruce up the graphics and doing fancy shader stuff. I’m planning on doing four different styles. Here’s concept art for three of them: a diagrammatic “lunar” style, a Chuck Close inspired “gas giant style”, and a stylized but somewhat realistic “jungle planet”.

This isn’t just a pure mockup, it’s a screenshot that I photoshopped to look like the shaders and stuff that I have in mind. The game looks pretty similar to the “lunar rocks” right now.

The first theme will be the default, and you’ll be able to unlock the others by playing. It shouldn’t be too hard to unlock all of them.

I’m also juggling some other projects so I’m not sure if this will be released by the end of the October challenge, but I’ll do my best.

Hi, I’ve been working on music lately. Practicing the keyboard, going through lessons with Cubase, playing with tons of instruments. Trying to learn how to score a video game.

Anyway, if anyone wants a song for their October Challenge game, I’ll be happy to do so at no cost. Credit in the game will be sufficient. You only have to use it if you like it.

I’d like to play the game or at least know as much about it as possible, including your thoughts on what kind of musical score you expect the game to have. I can do chip tunes, dramatic film scores, whatever fits the game.

Here is a sample of something I just finished. It is my rendition of the Ultima Wanderer song (from Ultima 3).
Ultima Wanderer MP3

If interested, let me know on this thread. Thanks.

(Cross posted from An RPG in a month.)

So, what’s happening at Psychoavatar? As I mentioned, we’re working on an RPG in a month for October. So, I figured I’d do a “developer’s diary” type entry. Won’t be daily, but I figure a few postings to give a glimpse at what an accelerated development schedule looks like might be interesting. Not that I shouldn’t be working on it instead….
(more…)

Update number two coming to you at 02:00 in the morning from a dark and (mostly) sleeping South Africa…

I’ve just finished my first pass at more advanced map generation and I’m very happy with the results (actually just very happy that it’s working at all – this is my first time trying random map generation)! Most of the credit must go to the writer of this article at the RogueBasin on generating cave maps with Cellular Automata… I was looking for inspiration and found that some of the caves generated could pass for outlines of islands, so I adopted the algorithm described there and then just added some additional custom passes to make things look a bit fancier . All in all I’m quite pleased with the results so far, but still need to add:

• Rivers
• Towns
• Maybe some more terrain types

I’ve also got a basic ship which can teleport around the screen (normal movement going gradually from point-to-point is a near-future todo).

Here’s my latest screenshot:

Cool looking randomly generated map and a semi-functional Airship!

I guess it’s high-time to join the fun. I’m a bit over my heads with the deadlines this month so it’s going to be a tough job getting through this.
Anyways, I recently got my hands on a Samsung Wave S8500 and it’s really a neat and underrated device. Wave guts match those of iPhone 4 closely (except internal storage) and I recommend the device to all you indie peoples. To emphasise on the matter, I’ll enumerate some Wave advantages:

• iPhone-ish guts (same CPU, GPU and RAM, 5Mp cam (+slowmotion recording), tons of cool sensors, multi touch etc)
• Bada OS – many people consider this a disadvantage, since Bada is a proprietary OS, and has AppStore roughly 0.1% size of Apples, but to us, indie guys this IS an advantage, since it’s a fresh market. Becoming a bada developer requires absolutely no fee. IDE is free to download and use on any windows system. bada is based on linux, and apps compile using gcc. Samsung did a great job creating the IDE. What is more, I assume Samsung won’t be as picky as Apple, since there’s few hundreds apps on bada store now. To sum up, once you get Wave and download the IDE, you’re ready to develop.
• Yada yada yada yada whatever, I start to miss the purpose of this post…

So, back to the point, bada games are scarce, and selling one (that’s not crap) won’t be that hard. Also you can integrate Samsung Apps into your application, so it can be a shareware that buys itself.

I need to put together a plan that will enable me to really finish by the end of october, so here it is (I assume):

I plan working 6 days, 3 full-time (8-12 hrs) and 3 short ones (2-3 hrs):

• Day 1 – short - do initial drafts, maybe some sketches, diagrams, and other cool-looking blueprints
• Day 2 – long - get the first sprite / model moving, hack some code, prepare a framework (I suppose I’ll be using Quake 3 BSP maps + OBJ models with custom shaders)
• Day 3 – short - do more drafts, make some levels, think of extra features and upgrades (everyone loves player upgrades)
• Day 4 – long – implement levels, check them out, tune and stress-test everything
• Day 5 – short - play through, and let some other peoples play through, prepare a package, do some business App store chores to be ready for submission
• Day 6 – long – fix them bugs (i hope not to have to do that one tho)

Altogether it gives me approx. 30 hrs. This is pretty sufficient to make a full-fledged game for selling. I plan to get on with the “day one” part tommorow, so stay tuned.

Its been a whole week of development now. My games transformed into a partly working arcade shooter, from nothing.
I haven’t done much work today because I was trying to get my homework done, but in the last half hour or so, I’ve started work on the spawn and its going pretty well, a bit of work tomorrow and maybe it’ll work. I’m also happy to see that somebody has finished a game already!

OK, update! Wohoo, finally got something done.
The game is fully playable now. The next step will be some sort of menu system to implement.

You can try it out on windows. Since it’s an iPhone game, the controls are a bit awkard, making the game loose it’s spirit a bit. Please try it – don’t judge it by the boring screen shot. It’s nicely animated.

download:
get it here

Originally posted on http://www.over00.com/?p=991

So my solo project for October’s challenge has been submitted to Flash Game License so it should be available soon for sponsorship.

The game is named Mad Scientist Defense and is a mix of action and a bit of tower defense. At the command of a blimp you must protect the lab of Dr. Altus from monsters while he is busy doing some secret experiment.

The game has 2 modes. First the traditional waves mode where you face waves of monsters with an increase difficulty level on each wave and blimp upgrades and then the robots invasion mode which is a survival mode. This last mode was added as a way to extend the length of the game and provide quick action to those not interested to make choices about the upgrades of their blimp. While the first mode only has 20 waves adding more just felt redundant. The tower defense aspect is much more a way to provide support to the action part so that’s why I kept the number of waves limited. It just wouldn’t be possible to play a complete game with only turrets. You’ll have to work on your skills instead.

Most of the development time was spent on balancing each waves which is not as easy as I thought it would be. I needed to make sure the game would provide a nice learning curve while making sure my skills were not interfering with my perception of the difficulty level. By now I have played this game so many times that I could probably beat it with my eyes closed. The danger however is raising the difficulty level too much that it might just become a frustrating experience to new players. Again the robots invasion mode provides a nice way to give a bit more to players who master the waves mode.

Here’s a trailer that sponsors on FGL will be able to see to get a quick glimpse of the game.

Mad Scientist Defense trailer

Moving on to the The Fae’s Wyrd

With Mad Scientist Defense completed I can now focus on the team project which you can read about here.

As I said previously my work on this project will be to take care of the stuff around game mechanics like interfaces, dungeon generation and save/load features.

I just got back on this project so I don’t have much to show beside the screenshots of random dungeons I previously posted so here’s just a tiny tiny tiny taste of the work done so far. Yeah there’s not much here but the code do save and load already. More will be posted later and hopefully Brian will be kind enough to expand on the subject

I’ve wanted to enter since I heard of this, and having suddenly got a simple, but pretty cool idea last night, I’m going for it! And to make me more likely to complete my game, I’m posting publicly about doing so. That way, I can be motivated by public humiliation!

Not sure I want to give away the idea yet, so I’ll just say I’m finally going to properly try Flash with Flashpunk, and Box2D. Should be very educational if nothing else!

I’ve made my XCode project and I’m trying to wrap my head around Box2D on the iPhone. I’m also debating on using my own game framework (that I made for Valet Hustle a year ago), or if I will go with Cocos2D. Because Cocos2D has Box2D bundled, I figured the solution was obvious, but looking further into it really all they appeared to do is include Box2D in the download. There are no actual connections with Cocos2D that I can see. And do I really want to learn another API? It’s debatable.

Either way, I’m happy that because A Lasting Impression was from an 84 hour project it has only around 15 source files. It’s in Java, so I’ll need to port it to Objective-C, but once I’ve got the physics and the rendering pathway all settled the rest should be quick and easy (Valet Hustle’s engine was one I originally made in Java and then ported over to Objective-C, so I’m already pretty good at the process).

My current target is to have the original Java game running on the iPhone by the end of the week. That will leave me about another week to add in some more entities and features, then I can submit it and hopefully get it approved just before the end of October. But that may be unrealistic – I may need to content myself with having it submitted by the 31st, but actually making a few bucks afterwards. Apple is notorious for taking forever.

The art style we’ve chosen to utilise within our Ludum Racer has been derived from our upcoming iPad title: Dead West.

It’s a limited yet fantastic looking colour pallete, designed to make full use of the amazing high contrast that suits the iPhone and iPad particularly well.

Below are several screenshots that show a styling screenshot from Dead West, through converting it to a ‘track’ to showing where lighting effects etc are, and finally to a finished product including a horse and trap contraption that will be used in the final finished product.

The drawn on notes indicate different obstacles etc to add a bit of variety and shape to the finished track.

To stop things looking too bland, some lighting paths were sketched on, darker parts showing shadow and lighter parts indicating, well, light. This further enhances the route of the track.

Finally, with some edges defining the sides properly and some nice lighting, we’re left with something that looks much more like a track.

Our game design is moving on, and we now have a working prototype with some fancy tracks, but still much, much more to do.

So this was part way through the first conceptual idea, the green markings are bits that’ll probably change and evolve as seen fit

And this is where the thing is up to currently.

Obviously this is still very early stages, but progress is fast (And needs to be!)

More updates as and when.

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Ludum Racer (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Not much to show today. I’ve been drawing, but I’m not really satisfied with the results.

What did work out was something I wanted to try: building textures and a texture atlas in Adobe Illustrator. I’m still new to Illustrator, but I *LOVE* the “Linked Files” feature (i.e. a reference to other files).

So with a new “generic grass”, I did this mockup testing what auto-outline code would look like (showing in front/collision tiles).

Mockup. Character shown roughly at size. Art from the old stuff. Will have to redo.

I also placed some old character art, just to see. As I can see, I’ll need to make it more “super deformed” so not to lose details.

Zoomed Mockup

Trying out a mockup with more zoom.

Zoomed in to more what the real zoom will be.

Depth Blur Mockup

Decided to try a mockup with the background blurred due to some sort of depth effect (in implementation, likely a render to a smaller framebuffer then scaled up).

Try to ignore the ghosting around edges... bad boy mr blur!