So yeah I’m gonna do this October Challenge thingie. Hopefully I’ll be able to complete this before the month is over.. Anyways I guess I’ll say a little about myself first, I’m a 16 year old kid that likes making iPhone games. So obviously, the platform I’ll be working for this on will be the iPhone ^_____^

So basically the project I’ll be working to complete will be a ragdoll sandbox game.. just spawn little stickfigures, boxes, weapons, and throw em around or shoot em at each other. Kind of like Pocket God but a bit more violent ahah. Still designing the thing out so if you have any ideas for this I would love you hear them(: Heres a pic of my current design for this ^_____^

I’ll keep this brief so it’s not too spammy for just one game.

I’m working with Over00 (and two lovely artists) to create a game for the October challenge. We’re making an RPG because we’re crazy. Well, my pseudonym is “Psychochild”, so it fits…

The game’s name is The Fae’s Wyrd; fae meaning faerie (fairy) or elfin, wyrd meaning fate or future. It’s also a pun on “the fae is weird”. Over00 challenged me to explain why it’s not a roguelike: it’s not because you’re going to be controlling a party, not a single character. The focus will be more on combat rather than solving neat puzzles, although that might come along in sequels that can be developed over more time.

This is also the first public project for a my new company, Psychoavatar. (I told you we were crazy!) Hopefully this first project won’t kill us.

Anyway, I’ll probably be posting a bit on my game development blog as we progress and I’ll post the game up on here when it’s done. Anyway, thanks to the fine folks here for giving a challenge to get us into motion.

Originally posted on http://www.over00.com/?p=910

I’m in for this October’s challenge of making a game and selling 1 copy (or making $1 out of it) before October 31st. Well in fact I’m in twice so that means the objective is bigger… $2…

Project #1 – Crazy Scientist Defense

This project is solo. I decided to stay around the theme of my MMO Golemizer as it’s a nice way to promote this indie MMO and after 2 years of existence there’s plenty of spin-off to make out of it.

This is a Flash game (using Flixel) that I started to work on a bit before the challenge was announced. The challenge is basically for me a way to put a deadline on the project which I consider a good thing. It’s far too easy to waste time so by announcing I’m participating to this challenge it puts some pressure on me to get something good that can make money soon.

I’m still relatively new to Flash but so far it’s an interesting experience. My experience with JavaScript made the transition to AS3 easy and there’s plenty of resources on the web so I never really hit some walls making me waste too much time.

Much of the code I’m using is based on my first “real” Flash game which is currently available for sponsorship on flashgamelicense.com. The games don’t have much in common but it’s always nice to have some code you can reuse. I try to keep most of my code as clean as possible so I can copy/paste a lot of it in new projects. That’s easier to say than to do but I try.

So this is an action game mixed with a feel of tower defense. Players are controlling a blimp that must protect Dr. Altus (a friendly but slightly crazy scientist) from monsters trying to invade his lab. While there are turrets the player can buy to help protect the lab I want the focus to be on the blimp action. Having turrets to help just add some strategy to the game instead of being just a big mess of monsters running around with the player not knowing which one he should kill first.

The basic mechanics were built in about a day. The game is fairly simple and it was intended this way. I wanted to make sure most of my time would be put on polishing and tweaking. Besides I also had to do some graphic work so the faster I could get to that the better. There was a quick try to get an artist involved but it didn’t work so I decided I’d deal with this stuff myself… (ouch…).

I’m quite proud of the result actually. Surely an artist could have done better but that’s still good I think.

Do I think I’ll make $1 with this game? Well I surely hope I do more than that. In fact my objective is at least $100 for this one. I already built a small game that made $3 in 2 weeks which some of you might recognize as the Shootorial from Kongregate. It was just a simple experiment for me but when I realized that a simple skinned version of a tutorial could make $3 I thought I could do much better with a “real” game. $100 is still not a lot but until I receive a check of $100 for a Flash game I built that shall be my current objective.

Project #2 – The Fae’s Wyrd

This one is a team project. You can read about our small team here (yay! also artists in there!). While we have completed 2 projects this one should be our first public release. And yes it’s an RPG. Of course what can be built in 1 month is limited so that will be a small simplified RPG. I guess you could say we’re building a roguelike but I’ll let the designer talk about that. If things look good we can probably think of expanding the concept a bit for a new version.

The twist for this game is the elemental advancement concept developed by Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green. So while we might not have enough time to build a full and complex RPG it will have something that makes it different from other RPGs.

My work for this project will be to take care of the programming surrounding gameplay rules. We’re talking about maps, movement, interface and that kind of stuff. Brian knows his design better than me so it will be faster if he takes care of it by himself while I make sure he doesn’t have to worry about other things. Again for this project we’re using Flash and Flixel. Note that using Flixel is simply a matter of using what I currently know. I’m sure the alternatives are also nice but to make it before the end of October it’s not the time to start learning something new.

So far I have taken out-of-the-way the map generation and character’s movement. That wasn’t much to do and it took about 2 days. The map generation is what took most of the time and the result is interesting. I based my work on this article from Adam Saltsman. Since the only directive I received for that was to have a way to create random maps I made sure that some parameters could be set to create different results based on what we might need later.

Here are some results of this code. Note that I used very small tiles for these pictures just to get a full view of the maps:

Again we are not aiming for something ultra-complex here but just something to showcase smart design and release our first public game. For motivation purpose I think that having some work you can show is important. Besides we have more projects in our mind so getting some attention can’t hurt.

Money?

Both of these games will be submitted to flashgamelicense.com meaning that it’s possible we don’t make $1 before the end of October because of the bidding system. There’s no way to predict when the bidding will end assuming bids are made at all. Also submitting a game there doesn’t mean you’ll receive bids the day after even if you end up making money with the game (2-3 weeks later or more). We could slap ads on them and then post the games without any sponsorship just to be sure we make $1 (my experiment with skinned tutorial proved me it’s quite easy) but then it would just be wasting possible opportunities. My solo project is nearly completed so it might make it but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t. I think our main goal is to RELEASE something before the end of October that WILL end up making at least $1. The challenge is a fun way for us to see how close we can get to the initial objective but even if we think it’s pretty sure our games could make $1 each there’s no way of knowing when for sure.

Enough talking and back to work now.

#1 at the prototyping phase for the october challenge, not much yet

This is my first game and my first entry for a LD contest. Annoyingly I was ill last weekend but since the contest is still open I thought I’d sneak this in now

Given the time restraints, I decided to focus on a very simple idea reasoning that I’d rather complete something small than fail to complete a more ambitious project. This turned out to be a good plan since the first version of the game was no fun at all and I was able to change it into something that I hope others might enjoy.

The code is written in python and uses pygame. It was developed on Ubuntu and has been tested on Windows XP. It lacks finesse, the graphics suck (!) and it has a number of rough edges not least the lack of Quit/Restart controls (just press escape to abort). Nonetheless I’ve had fun playing it and I hope others do too. (NB the zip file contains a credits file listing the sources of the sound effects.)

I suspect that part of the fun of playing it will be in deducing the best strategy so beware of potential spoilers in what follows. If you’re thinking of playing it please try it now then come back and read on when you’re ready.

One of my fears is that of losing my memory as I grow older.

I decided to write a simple game/puzzle that would evoke the frustration of memory loss.

I knocked together a very quick first version using some code built on top of the open sourced Memory Starter by John Eriksson.

The first version was based on a nasty trick: it would swap neighbouring tiles after a fixed lapse of time, forcing the player to make mistakes and think that they had failed to recall the exact position of the tile. This, it turned out, was no fun at all. (Not really a surprise in retrospect.)

Part of the problem was that even without the evil trickery behind the scenes, it was too hard to recall such a huge number of tiles but reducing the number of the tiles made it too obvious that the game was cheating you.

In the next iteration, I decided to split the grid into levels, each slightly larger and therefore harder than the other, starting with an inner ring that was easy to complete so the player got sucked into the game.

This played better but I no longer liked the trick of moving tiles and there was no real relationship between the levels. I didn’t like the fact that you could just forget about the ones you had already completed.

Therefore I decided to get rid of the trickery but instead to punish players when they failed to match a tile when they’d already seen its partner by removing already completed pairs from inner levels.

Obviously if it just removed one pair, then it would be trivial for the player to click the backs of the two turned cards and continue on so I decided to remove x pairs where x was the number of times the player had seen the matching card. This makes the game progressively harder the longer you play, with mistakes building on mistakes.

Play testing this proved a far more satisfying game and introduced the idea that the game itself had a memory of your past mistakes, meaning that it becomes progressively harder to complete if you get off to a bad start.

This could be said to be another fear: that we never get over our wrong beginnings in life.

I find it challenging to complete in less than 200 card clicks.  Perhaps my memory is already beginning to go…

Well I’ve decided to make my own engine/framework, choosing DirectX for visuals and DirectSound for audio.  I understand this limits the current implementation of the framework to Windows only.  I take this path because of future plans in 2011 with this framework.  Beside, if I do find the need to port my “OctNovDec” project to other platforms, the framework does encapsulate all details; FileIO, Input, Audio, Visual, and  Timing.

So after getting my framework up and running on an extremely basic level, with a lot of fun whoop-de-doos, I have a splash screen.  Something I said I could do in “10 minutes” ended up taking “40 minutes” because I also made a simple sprite class.  My time estimations seem to lack truth…  Here is the splash screen, at least in concept.

A bit simple, but my best piece of art.

With that I do need to change my logo.  “Presents” must be removed or replaced;  I’ve thought of Studios, but it is just me.  I’ve thought of Games but that could be limiting – even if it is what I am focused on at these times.  I could leave it just BlackBird, but I’m not sure.  In any case, when I have a Main Menu, this will fade nicely into it.  So, this is what I achieved as of last night, October 1st.

Today I’ve got some simple sprite based font system working, a finite-state machine for different Game States, and now progressing to work on the editor.  May come back to edit.  Yay for my first actual post!

I need tools to make my game, so we’re making tools.

That texture atlas I quipped about yesterday now exists.

Solid, In-front, Ladder, ?, Density/stickyness (x4), Top collision

Now to actually draw these icons on tiles to show their material properties.

Several Hours Later

Tile properties are now displaying.

A solid climb around a weird room

I’m not sure what comes next.

Hey… I know how to make it look cooler…

Yeah, here’s an idea.

Perspective == Advanced!

Whoo!

Some 4 hours later

After having cook a fancy meal (Tacos), I now have textures working!

Dirt Fortress

But as you can see, I don’t have any textures yet. Still, I can now assign them to tiles, and index in to a texture Atlas. Whee.

Even more hours later… 4:30 AM

Yes many hours have passed, but a major incremental milestone has been hit: Saving and Loading maps.

All developers should have a 5x3 font memorized

Between all kinds of “I’m tired” slacking, I finally got this done. It’s using my chunked file format used by my Smiles UI code. Hooray for re-use!

This is definitely it for the night. I have no idea where I’ll pick up tomorrow… I don’t even want to think about it. Brain is mush, proceed to bed. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Well the plan was to get started before October, but due to some big stuff going on, I had to delay my start.

Now, late late night October 1st, I’ve finally started.

Red boxes mean I've started

Building an editing interface, which you can see the foundation of in the shot above. The terrain renderer has nothing to do with what I’m doing, aside from verifying mixing my 2D and 3D code works. I don’t have any immediate plans to use any 3D content, but it might be cool for effects. We shall see.

Planning to do another hour or so of work, then sleep.

One Hour Later

Alright, it doesn’t look any different, but I made my editing a little more useful. Right click acts as an “erase” hotkey. Wow ‘eh?

As it turns out, my cross platform framework didn’t support multiple mouse buttons (it only supported 1 button). So I had to figure out why other buttons weren’t working. Added multiple button support, then found it wasn’t working (wuh!?). After some digging, it seems SDL button 1 is left click and 3 is right click (making 2 middle); I made the mistake of thinking right click would be 2. Oops!

So, be impressed! My crazy cross platform framework that builds for a dozen or so platforms now supports multiple mouse buttons!

… not impressed? Ah well.

Deja vu...

I wouldn’t normally make a post in the same post, but so little has changed that I am. I’ll be removing the terrain renderer now, so really, I just wanted to take at least 1 more pic of that.

I don't know what it is, but in tile editors I always want to draw H's

That’s probably it for tonight. Tomorrow I need to make a texture atlas of tile properties, and overlay those instead of my red boxes. Mike, you better do this within a few hours of waking up… otherwise I’ll yell at you!

In making Blaster Box, I discovered that it is true that all Flash made on Linux has sound latency.

I’ve decided instead to go with an old game idea of mine: Making an Alien Breed tribute.

I will be modding Sauerbraten to make my game.

In it, you will play as a Space Marine fighting their way to a communications room to signal for help. There will be multiple weapons that you can buy at terminals, terminals to buy weapons and supplies from, and lots of aliens to kill.

Though for today (As I slept in ’till noon and have pretty much just played games all day) I’m going to simply write a bit in the design document and maybe play games some more.

A bit of a rationale after the break.

(more…)

Alright, I’m in for the October challenge. I’m going to try and finish up a game I started for miniLD back in February. I’ve been messing with it here and there but haven’t really sat down and crunched on it because of other projects like The Brainstormer App and Still Pond for iPhone.

Fittingly for the start of the month, I just to First Playable just today. So technically I have a month to polish and add features. It’s already strangely addicting, to me at least, so I take that as a good sign. I’ve got a lot of crazy stuff planned graphically and bells-and-whistles wise, and want do add stuff like GameCenter, but we’ll see how it goes.

My other goal for October is to try and get my blog going. I’ve got it sort of set up now but there’s some little annoyances that have kept me from posting. So I aim to fix those and post a lot of info about iPhone dev and opengl and stuff like that.

So where would you move next?

So, I’m going for a roguelike arena shooter RPG with both witches, and crafting

to be honest, the ‘sell one copy’ target might not be suitable for me, I need to raise money for moving costs as well as living and other stuff, so hopefully this can be a decent game and not just a ‘made a game solda game’ novelty.

anyway, put a lot of thought into this whilst working on my Indie Kombat game, so Ima get to it!

Originally posted on http://www.36peas.com/blog

The guys over at http://www.ludumdare.com have started a competition for this month.

In very basic terms it boils down to:

You’ve got a month to build a game and try to sell at least 1 copy.

If you wish to get slightly more of an insight into the competition than I’ve explained – See here

This was particularly appealing due to a prototype Gareth put together some time ago but never had a place to really apply it – But an immense desire to get it used for something. This prototype was for a game called Retro Racer.

At the minute this is a fairly crude but fun little game with a couple of tracks, some basic dynamics and a simple control system thrown in. A screenshot has been thrown in for your enjoyment

The basic concept we’ve arrived at for it is to have some sort of non-traditional racer, possibly some sort of gate runner idea.

Anyway, that’s where we’re up to at the minute – we’ll be putting extra posts up as we develop ideas for this project some more.

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.