Using-

FlashDevelop/FlexSDK

GiMP

I’d plan on using sfxr, but I want to play a little more with FlashPlayer 10′s on the fly sound generation… I haven’t decided yet whether to release/declare the sound & music managers from BW16 or write new & better ones from scratch. One way or another though, this will be my first LD with sound.

Next up… a building selector, placement of buildings, switching between players’ power plants, a thermodynamics model (!), and sabotage. Also sprites, sounds and music. And a context sensitive menu. And help popups. And an AI that can play the game.

Yeah. The likelyhood that I’ll finish this is pretty low. But I’ll keep working and get as far as I can. Hopefully I’ll be able to duplicate the bug I’m looking for.

I’m going to build some type of multiplayer industrial simulation. From scratch except:

- I’ll use the playerio multiplayer API

Basically I’m hoping that by being forced to quickly do a message handler from scratch, I’ll either not cause my bug (in which case I can compare the MLD game code to my main project code and fix it) or I’ll manifest the bug with more understandable symptoms because the message handler will be simpler (and then be able to compare to the project code and fix it).

(If the consensus is that this in unallowable middleware, I won’t enter the game for voting. It meets the criteria of LD16 for inclusion though (free, no NDA, I’m allowed to release my source, etc))

Regardless, watch this space for news on the development of Power Plant Operator vs Ninja! (Actually, I probably won’t do very many blog updates this time, since there’s quite a bit of work to do…)

My start time is 7:00PM Fri, AKDT (UTC -8). Current time is 9PM… Current status… the design document is done ‘enough’.

First: Thanks to everyone who played my game!

This is long, and possibly of little interest so I’ll hide it behind a read-more tag.

What went right/techniques learned…

- Hybrid blitting engine

I didn’t implement a full-redraw-each-frame blitting engine, so I’m calling it a hybrid. The main viewing area of the game consists of three “zoom” classes extending Flash’s native Sprite class, which in turn each have a terrain, flora, fauna, and artifact layer. Those layers are 500×480 transparent bitmaps to which I draw almost every frame. (The zoom class tracks a camera, and if it hasn’t been moved the terrain layer doesn’t refresh. The other layers get fed model data, and get cleared and repainted every frame.) At any given time, only one zoom class is visible, the others are .visible=false and aren’t fed model data.

Performance isn’t earth shattering, but up till now to do this project I would have added sprites to the display list for every movable object. Having a Flash display list several thousand items long just doesn’t really work well. So I was happy with this.

-Bitmaps for storing data

There are several cases in the game where I need to know if two things are in the same place. (A kiwi and a tree, a glomper and a kiwi, etc..) Since I had divorced the model from the view, I couldn’t do use either Gilbert’s bitmap collision class as I had planned , or Flash’s bitmap.hitTest[method]s. I was storing every objects locations in their own arrays. (Ie: Kiwi:Array, Glomper:Array, etc) Each object had it’s own class, but all of them had public GlobalX and GlobalY properties.) I’m sure there are faster ways of finding all intersections between two lists than a nested loop, but unfortunately I don’t know them (yet). In pseudo-code:

FOR EACH Kiwi:

FOR EACH Tree:

if the Kiwi's location == the Tree's location:

Do Stuff;

On the other hand, most of the objects weren’t colliding at any given time. So, rather than checking -every- Kiwi against -every- tree, I did the following (in pseudo-code):

PLOT EACH tree on an off screen bitmap

FOR EACH Kiwi:

Look at bitmap and see if there is a tree, IF there is a tree:

FOR EACH Tree:

IF the Kiwi's location == Tree's location:

Do Stuff;

Even though I added an if operation to the nest, and even though there’s an extra loop outside the nest (to do the plot), the second pseudo-code snippet runs faster because it cuts out a nested for loop in a large percentage of cases. Since in the cases of the Kiwi/Glomper interactions the arrays could have literally thousands of members, this made the game possible. (Though I think the second snippet is still O(n^2)? I don’t have enough of a CS background to assess that.)

I also used a bitmap for initially storing map information (to set terrain tiles during initialization). This worked beautifully vs using an xml, just in terms of my own convenience.

What went wrong:

The zoom wasn’t intuitive

I was pretty happy/comfortable with my pan and zoom, but i had written it in the first place and knew how it was going to operate. I -should- have provided mouse-wheel zoom, mouse-edge panning, etc. And the zoom levels I provided were poorly chosen; for my convenience, rather than the player’s. Several commenters noted this and they’re right.

- On the outermost level of zoom, animals should have been more than 1×1 pixel. And their colors could have been better.

It’s very hard to tell the difference between glompers and kiwis, because they’re represented at this level by single pixels– and those pixels are red and brown, two colors which don’t really show up well against the terrain. I think 2×2 pixels might have been more visible, and I could have given more thought to contrast. (Also noted by commenters)

- I spent most of my time on displaying a model, and didn’t spend time on gameplay or interface.

In the versions up to 0.6, walls stop glompers but don’t stop Kiwis. Since I cowardly shrank from the challenge of pathfinding several thousand animals at once, the movement is decided at random. As a result I was afraid there was no win condition. So at the last minute I changed it so that walls stop everything… this meant there was an easy but possibly tedious way to win, hurting the fun value of the game. I didn’t really tune things I should have, such as the number of kiwis each glomper needed to eat before reproducing. Ultimately, this comes down to me failing to test sufficiently.

Likewise, several commenters noted that it would have been nice to have click-drag to place walls (which after all, are useless if just single blocks!). They’re right.. in fact I knew this before I released it, but-

- Time management/motivation

I stopped with several hours left because I was dead tired, and probably should have tried to take a nap rather than calling it a day. The major casualty of this is a sound effects engine, but there were others.

For the present:

I had fun building the game, and I think I improved my technical skills by dealing with the movement of large numbers of objects– a task I just wouldn’t have attempted in my usual projects.

For the future:

- I’ve now done two LDs where I tried to pull off something with more complexity than I was able to do properly. Next time I’m going to try to do something small, and polish it until I gotta wear shades.

- The general setup seems ok, and I like the idea of doing a game about invasive species. I may revisit this and try to implement a better ecosystem model (along with the interface improvements), and come up with a better game. There are other projects I need to finish first though.

-TF

So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…

If I didn’t rate your game it was because:

Some stuff I want to say:

Don’t play 172 games in 2.5 days. They start to blend together, and there are some which I probably did not give the time they needed in order to be assessed. (Not -YOURS- dear reader, yours was unique and captivated me )

Everybody- Please DO indicate on your title screen how to get to the main menu. And if you include a line that says ‘Press the Any-Key to continue’, please make sure the left arrow works.

(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)

I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!

-TF

The start of a sound handling system is in the source code, but I’ve decided not to implement it. I’m starting to break code while tinkering, so I think it’s time to call it a wrap and get some sleep. From version 0.6, many bugfixes of varying severity. No major gameplay changes.

Good luck to everyone still working!
-TF

I now have a title screen, win/lose screens, and the game can reset itself nicely. Made a number of small changes for aesthetics (aligning text, cleaning up the intermediate zoom sand tiles, etc).

I’ve had enough play testing now, to decide that I needed to change the walls so they block both the glompers and the kiwis. So that’s done. I don’t want to make traps life-limited, so that means I’m getting close to done.

Quite a bit of CPU usage on my computer, but it seems stable and I don’t seem to be leaking memory (for once )

I just need to figure out what sound effects I need/can generate… Thumps and such when the player adds objects are easy enough, but if I add a sound when things get eaten, it will be getting played more or less continuously in midgame.

-TF

Player can now place objects, and the Glompers and Kiwis interact correctly with them. Screenie:

Playable build here.

It’s kind of funny– I originally planned for the glompers to only be visible 1% of the time. So part of the game, was to figure out where they were and build defenses to keep them away from the kiwis. But unless I slow everything down, that just doesn’t matter.

The other problem I’m seeing is that the Glompers reproduce just way too fast. So, instead of having them spawn every time they eat a kiwi, I’m going to require them to eat a specific number of kiwis. (I’ll define as a constant, and tune as I work on other stuff). This -might- give the player a chance.

Another thing that might be better, would be to have the walls stop both Glompers and Kiwis. This would let the player create a preserve of kiwis.

ToDo:

-TF

Decided to stick with the name Glompers for the invasive species, and Kiwis for the endangered species. Starting with 5 Glompers, the Kiwis all get eaten in about a minute.

So far I’m not doing any real pathfinding at all… The kiwis are choosing a direction randomly each frame (and getting stuck in the SE corners of each island for some reason I haven’t figured out yet), and the Glompers move in one direction until they hit an edge, at which point they change direction. I may change the Kiwis to have the same movement schema as the Glompers…

I think I’m going to need something which the Kiwis can run into that makes them spawn. That can be a player placeable object in addition to the not-yet-implemented traps and walls. Otherwise I think the game will be over before the player has a chance to do anything.

On the plus side, my engine seems to be handling a couple thousand kiwis pretty well! Rather than using Gilbert’s collision detection, I added a map-sized blank bitmap to my Fauna class (which holds all the animals). Since I don’t actually add that bitmap to the stage at any time, it doesn’t seem to be dragging down my rendering performance very much. When the kiwis move, they plot their location on that map as a single pixel, and when the glompers move, they check to see if they’re on a pixel that has the kiwi color. The glompers thus only have to check the entire kiwi list if they’re definately in collision with at least one kiwi. This can probably be optimized further, but it seems good enough for now.

-TF

Click here for my in-progress builds (Requires Flash Player)

Sticking the rest of this behind a read-more tag, since there’s a bunch of images.

So… the general idea of my game is that there’s a group of islands, populated by an endangered animal (currently, a striped kiwi). An invasive species (not yet finally named) has arrived, and the player’s job is to eradicate the invader.

No idea why it’s a kiwi. I drew it and the invader last night before falling asleep. I probably need to re-draw both.

The basic rules- untested as of yet.. are
- The player can place traps, and walls.
- Traps will kill any animal that steps on them (good or bad)
- Walls will permit movement of the kiwis, but not the invaders
- Player gets resource points every second which he/she spends on the traps/walls
- Animals can walk on shallow water, but not deep water

Anyway, to explore the ruleset, I need to be able to visualize what’s going on. So, thus far I’ve been working on getting a map working. Much as I’d love to have procedurally generated islands, I could see spending all of the remaining time trying to get an algorithm to work. So I just free-hand(ish) drew some:

I say free-handish, because I used the path and stroke tools in Gimp, to draw the islands, and then went back over the image with a pencil tool to ensure that the image only had 4 colors in it. More on that in a sec…

Now, I figured that map was too ugly to display to the player, so I screwed around with various filters and effects (mostly creating noise, and then using that noise as a bump map) to get a (slightly) more aesthetically pleasing map for player use.

(I’ll admit to having the artistic ability of a year old turnip, but I like this map a little better) Now I have a scale problem… my island fauna are tentatively 32×32 sprites, which would be too large for my islands. I need at least one, and probably more levels of zoom, right?

Going back to the original 4-color map, I read that map in pixel by pixel using getPixel32(). The returned color sets each tile’s type (Sand, Jungle, Deep Water, etc), which is stored in a 2d map array. When the map array is created, it also generates a random offset for that tile, which is used to pick a rectangle out of a base tile to represent the terrain. This, for example, provides 50, 20×20 Deep Water tiles:

This seems to work adaquately, though as you can see, I need to lighten some of the darker pixels in my first level of zoom:

However, at this point I’ve spent way too much time on aesthetics (and explaining(!!)) so it’s time to get to populate my islands and get some dynamics working!

-TF

I guess it’s time to declare tools, etc.

My Tools:
FlashDevelop + FlexSDK
Audacity + sfxr
GiMP

If I need collision detection, I’ll use Troy Gilbert’s 2007 Pixel Perfect Collision Detection class. (I think this is within the spirit of the competition.)

Anything else I need I’ll generate after the compo begins.

-TF

I’ve added a zip containing my project directory to my game’s page… it’s complete except that I had embedded the font ‘Arial’, and you’ll have to add your own copy of arial.ttf to the font’s directory in order to get it to build.

I. Genesis

(*** Note: Nothing in this section is meant as a disparaging remark about anyone elses entry, but is intended as a depiction of my thought process at the time, with respect to my entry only. ***)

When the theme came out, I really had no idea what to build. The first thing in flash space that comes to mind for me when you say ‘Caverns’ are the cave fliers, which I didn’t see much space for innovation in, or platformers where I knew I wasn’t going to be able to compete. I was pretty stuck for an idea.

Since I don’t know much about caverns I looked up cavern on wikipedia . The article calls a cave or cavern a natural void– which in my mind ruled out mines. I tried to come up with an idea that related to cave formation, but thought while I could write a neat simulation I wouldn’t have much of a game. The article also mentions sink holes… and at some point early in the compo someone twittered (I think) a comment like: ‘Make a board game!’

I remember playing a game as a kid, Cathedral where the idea is to place buildings on a grid to capture space. My idea stemmed from that– the buildings would have weight, and if too much weight was concentrated in a space, they would fall through to the cavern below. I guess it’s a reach to say this was connected to the theme, but it’s what I ran with. The size of the grid and being 4 players were arbitrary decisions for me.

II. Development

I knew roughly what I wanted to do, but didn’t know how the buildings would interact with each other in practice, so I needed to get an interface up and running fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I did not do much on-paper design work and just winged everything as I came to it. As a result, there are about 6 or 7 2-dimensional matricies which hold information about each cell. This isn’t an inherrent problem, but because I was making stuff up as I went, some of them are 40×40, some 41×41, some 42×42, and the grid which records stress is either 80×80 or 100×100-I think at one point I switched, but I’m scared to look now. To make matters worse, some of the grids are indexed [row][column] and some are [column][row]. As a result, the majority of my time in writing code for the game was spent trying to fix offset discrepencies. (Why is a house placed here, stressing something way on the other side of the board? Why is that building being displayed in the right place, but when it falls through it fell over there? Why didn’t my overlap checking prevent that placement?)

Another problem I had is that when I coded the interface originally, I tied all of the legal move validation to the mouse click… but when I came to the AI’s, I wasn’t sending mouse clicks I was sending cell coordinates. I was feeling a lot of time pressure by that point, so I just hacked in new validation methods.

Because I wasted too much time early on trying to get an application together which would let me place buildings, and see the stresses I never really got around to developing a game. My ‘first best guess’ for things like building weight, cost, rent became final constants. The only real gameplay decision I made were the points… I knew needed an incentive to place the smaller buildings and supports, so the player had to be penalized for losing a building, and that penalty had to increase with building size. But once I had that penalty, I then had to go back and give a reason to place the larged buildings. Again, ‘first best guess’ became a final and I was left with the system in place now.

II.a. If you don’t know how, fake it!

I’m sad to say, that cool as it looks, my stress map does not reflect actual physical stresses on a surface caused by weights being applied. Each building had a weight (supports had negative weights) and when the stress is calculated, if a cell had a weight it’s weight was added to all nearby cells by the incredibly complex formula: Weight = BuildingWeight/(Distance+1). This made pretty pictures, so I called it good enough. If I was going to take this to a ‘worthy of release into the internet flash game space’ I’d probably replace this with an actual stress calculation based on integrating moments or something like that.

Along the same lines, I didn’t have much time for AI. One of the players is totally random. The other mostly random player has a 25% chance of placing a random support. The green player queries the board to find the human player’s largest building and then places houses within 10 squares of that building. Eventually, unsupported that building will collapse and then the green player chooses another building. That’s the only behavior that’s the start of a bonafide computer player. Had I had another day, much time would have been spent creating more realistic behaviors. If the computer players appear to be thinking at all, that’s because I added a delay to their moves, because otherwise I’d have no idea what they were doing.

II.b Player Reaction

I think the general comment trend of ‘cool idea, but not very fun’ is pretty much correct. I think it could have been fun, but I didn’t pull it off.

II.c. Summary

The big major takeaway for me, is that once I get the urge to start hacking at code, I need to stop and figure out why what I’ve done so far can’t be extended the way I want. If I had used one consistant grid.. or heck, if I had used many grids, but they all had their origin at the same point and were all addressed by [row][col] life would have been easier and I think I would have produced a better game.

III. Other Cool Stuff I Learned (but which you probably already knew)

You wouldn’t know it, because I didn’t put any effort in gussying up my index of development versions, but Flash Develop has .html and .php templates, and functions as a html or php editor, with code completion! I’d been doing all my wordpress maintenance (on my site) via notepad. This will help me a lot.

I’d seen passing references to sfxr before, but seeing it used in other entries I finally got up off my butt and downloaded it. It’s great and will reduce my dependence somewhat on royalty free audio sites for my normal games.

GiMP can draw straight lines! You have no idea how many hours I’ve wasted placing lines pixel by pixel because I thought it couldn’t.

That’s it. I’m enjoying playing everyone else’s entry.
-TF

Of the things in my last post, the only thing I don’t think I really handled was a help system.. there are instructions, and slightly better instructions in the submission entry. A lot of the last minute stuff was a kludge though. This is my code in my Main class for handling a reset or restart:

case 8:
if (this.contains(GameOverScreen)) this.removeChild(GameOverScreen);
if (this.contains(CGame)) this.removeChild(CGame);
CGame = new CavernGame();
GameState = 5;
break;

Obviously that’s not an acceptable way to restart– CGame is a HUGE object by the time the game ends and restarting hangs my flash player for about 20 seconds. (I don’t have a profiler, but Windows Task Manager shows a 30Mb jump in flash players memory usage when that section of code is called) However– it does work. And it would take me more than the two hours and change left to find all the variables that need to be reset in CGame. I’m also tired, and I’m at the point where I’m afraid I might break something trying to add polish.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone elses work, but I’m going to get some rest first. I’ll leave you with a couple screen shots:

-TF

-TF

Haven’t touched the building selector yet, or recolored the buildings for the other players. No chance I’ll get to sound I think… I’ll be lucky if I finish a UI and have an AI which does more than place random moves. Here’s a current screenshot though.

-TF

Unroll your loops boys! We’ve got a milestone to hit!

-Joe Ludwig

Sadly, while I do have a milestone to hit, my brain is getting tired and not only did I realize I should have used a pretty simple loop here, but I also have too much left overall to do to refactor this section.

Screw it… I’m going to go get a coffee.
-TF

Anyway, screenshots below. Playable version history here. (If you play the draft, the preloader hangs between 95-98% complete. It does complete though, give it a few seconds. I’ll be working on that soon too.

-TF