My first day on the Ludum Dare trail was bittersweet. I was quite happy with my progress at first, and then I had to spend several hours wrestling an errant graphics library. Stupid thing was working last week! *grumble*

Here’s what I have to show for my day’s toil.

I’ve still got time to make something of it. Hmm…

Earlier I presented a list that represents the internet’s idea of the Atari 2600′s 15 best games. This is a hard list make, because there were dozens of great games made for this system. Let’s see if we can figure out what made these games so good:

1. River Raid — The premise was simple: fly a plane through a canyon while shooting down targets, avoiding collisions, and keeping fueled up. But there were some terrific complications thrown into the mix as well. A small element of strategy was introduced with the fuel gauge: not only were you flying around shooting at things and avoiding getting shot, you had to think about how badly you needed that next fuel depot. Some of the enemies could shoot back, and a few of them would shoot at you from a safe distance outside of the canyon.

This game, like many others at the time, was big on innovation. It’s a scrolling shooter played from the top down. It featured a variety of enemy types plus the additional complication of managing your fuel level. The object of the game was basically “don’t crash”, and there were a lot of things in the game that could crash you.

2. Pitfall! — The legendary Pitfall Harry was an explorer and treasure hunter. He couldn’t fight worth anything, but he could do a decent Tarzan imitation. We could possibly describe this game as an early platform explorer, and it featured one of the scariest of all game bosses (no, not the giant scorpions, although those were scary too): a time limit! I hate time limits. Maybe that’s why I never managed to find all the treasures.

A very simple design based on beating the clock and avoiding obstacles. Look this one up; there’s some interesting reading on wikipedia.

3. Space Invaders — One of the icons of the early video game era, this space shooter features a fixed screen (no scrolling) and introduces barriers to provide cover for a small strategic element. It’s also a sort of a “goal defense” type of game, because if one of your enemies touches the ground you’re done. And all of this was played to the increasingly rapid sound of your enemy’s boot steps marching toward you…

4. Combat — This is where things got a little complicated. Players patrol a battleground (represented as a maze or sky field) and shoot each other into oblivion. Highest score wins.

The innovation here is the sheer number of variations you could set for this game. Need a more complicated maze? You could get that. Want bouncing bullets? No problem. Invisible tanks? Check. With 27 variations, it was a little crazy. And infinitely replayable.

How’d they solve problems like pathfinding A.I. back then? They didn’t. This was a two player game only, which was probably necessary considering hardware limitations, and is possibly the game’s only real drawback. Not really that big a deal, considering this game made #4 on the list. People remember it quite fondly.

5. Asteroids — Another fixed field space shooter fills out The Internet’s top five Atari 2600 console games. Notice a pattern here? These games are starting simple, and mixing two or three simple elements together to make the game interesting, grab the viewer’s attention, and then put it in a headlock. Maybe that’s why we look at the clock suddenly and wonder where all the time goes when we play games like this.

In the interest of brevity, I will shut up and save the rest of the list for later. I notice a few things looking at what we’ve got so far. Four out of these five games are shooters. But mindless shooting isn’t enough. Notice the elements included that make the player think: Fuel management. Strategic cover. Rebound angle. Force field and hyperspace options with their own inherent drawbacks. Players like to shoot, but not always mindlessly. They need variations on their field of play and their objectives. They want choices, and perhaps most importantly, consequences for those choices.

What else can we glean from this list of the five most popular games? What were your favorite Atari games?

Day One of Andrew’ s Eight Days of Game Design has ended in success! I thought about focusing on graphics today, but for the sake of other projects the first thing I need to figure out in FreeBASIC is networking. So, it made more sense to start with sockets.

I had to work off and on in between other tasks, and a lot of that time was spent reading and generally feeling like I wouldn’t get anywhere at all with it today. Most of the remainder was spent scratching my head wondering why the example worked but my modification wouldn’t compile and run… but after a bit of code voodoo and a lot of head scratching, I wound up with a bare bones (but working) TCP/IP socket server that will accept and snark at communicate with multiple clients. Yep. Typical day in the life for a programmer.

I’m not sure how useful this will be for the Ludum Dare, but it’s a huge step toward making that MUD codebase I’ve been wanting to build. I’ll have to add a lot to the mix in order to make it useful, but it’s a good start. I’m calling that a win for today.

Cheers!

Chess — it’s one of the most enduring games of all time. I enjoy playing, but I’m always better at it when I have plenty of time to think. If I have to play fast, my game falls apart. The people who play speed chess well are the ones who study the game when they have time to think and analyze. They know the lines they want to play, they’ve already explored the traps and pitfalls inherent in the positions that develop, and so when the clock starts ticking, they explode into action based on what they learned beforehand. They did their thinking off the clock; now they’re playing by rote and reflex, and it’s an impressive display.

 Competitions like the Ludum Dare remind me of speed chess. For those who choose to play, the clock starts in just a couple of weeks. It pays to be thinking about game design now, while we’re more or less off that clock. No panic inducing pressure now, just a day here and there to study the elements and see what we can glean.

 What exactly goes into making a good game? There are the obvious answers: proper game balance, interesting details, fun rule variations. But then there’s that nebulous… something… that’s harder to define. Some games take the world by storm, and we may not even know why they’re so fun to play. But we know one thing: we’re hooked. We can’t stop playing. And when we do manage that incredible feat, we find ourselves thinking about the game and looking forward to playing it again.

 So let’s think about this most elusive of qualities while we have the time to study our game design. We all know by now what kind of games we enjoy playing ourselves. But what kind of games make the biggest splash? To answer this, I went back to the days when video games were coming into our homes, before it was technically possible to have pixel perfect graphics with cinematic effects. I’m talking about the days of the Atari 2600. Sure, the pixels looked like bricks, but let’s face it: we game designers are still borrowing concepts from some of the awesome games made for this system. Why do you suppose that is?

 It all boils down to one thing: either a game is fun, and we waste hours of our lives playing it, or a game isn’t fun and we put it away and find something better to do. There’s a reason so many collective hours were spent playing on game systems that are technically inferior to our modern day calculators.

 To consider this in greater depth, I polled The Internet informally (scoured it for top ten lists and related commentary, mostly) to find out what a Top 15 Atari 2600 Games of All Time list would look like. It took longer than you might think to compile enough information to make one, but here it is:

The Internet’s Top 15 Atari 2600 Games of All Time

1.   River Raid
2.   Pitfall!
3.   Space Invaders
4.   Combat
5.   Asteroids
6.   Pac-Man
7.   Adventure
8.   Kaboom!
9.   Frogger
10. Breakout
11. Yars’ Revenge
12. Enduro
13. Spider Fighter
14. Missile Command
15. Demon Attack

Runners-up include Joust, Keystone Kapers, H.E.R.O., Dig-Dug, and Berzerk.

I’ll be taking a closer look at why each of these games was good enough to get on this list. But for now, read over it again and see if you can answer the questions: Why do people remember these games? What kinds of games do people enjoy the most?

I mentioned before that I’m quite rusty in the games programming department. To have a chance at producing something worthwhile in a 48 hour weekend cram, I’m going to have to practice. In the spirit of stretching my mental muscles, relearning old stuff I’ve forgotten, and learning the new stuff that QBASIC couldn’t do back in my high school days, here comes… Andrew’s Eight Days of Game Design!

Yeah, it needs a catchier title. And possibly a different number of days. The choice of eight was completely arbitrary. Each day will feature a focused effort to learn and develop the tools necessary to address a different game design issue. Most of these are interchangeable:

• The Graphics — most of my games were text based, but that’s not going to get me very far these days.
• The User Interface — explains itself, really. Heck, even Progress Quest had to include an interface!
• The Network — most any game I design will want to be a multiplayer game. It’s a pain, but it has to happen.
• The Audio — should be straightforward, but I haven’t messed with audio in my programming in many many years.
• The Engine — will depend largely on the particular game design but without a good idea of how to control, blend, and regulate all the other elements, I won’t have a game.

I’ve got about two weeks to get ready for my first Ludum Dare. Will it be enough? We’ll see.

Andrew here. I just discovered the Ludum Dare. By accident, no less. It’s been a long time since I seriously attempted to create a working game from start to finish. It’s kinda funny. My game building binges in high school using QuickBASIC largely resembled what I imagine a LD weekend looks like. Anyway, the timing fits. Things are coming full circle and I’m already in the process of returning to several old projects anyway, so I may as well take the plunge.

My weapon of choice is FreeBASIC. It basically claims to be the spiritual successor to the language I have the most experience in, so it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to pick it back up and rediscover the art of game building in BASIC. Go ahead and laugh if you want, but assuming the compiler isn’t broken (and it looks pretty solid so far), BASIC is a powerful general purpose language that lends itself to gaming as well as most languages, and probably a great deal more easily than some. Then again, maybe I’m just biased. Ah, nostalgia. I am a sucker for the retro games, come to think of it…

I hope to be up to speed for the next Ludum Dare. Even if I’m not, I plan to try, assuming I don’t find the theme objectionable somehow. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, including the need to rebuild some of the old tools that used to make my game programming life easier. But that’s okay. I have a plan.