Prototyping a Game

I love prototyping a new game. However the prototype is not where the development of the game really started. Heck I don't start coding till I already have a good idea of how all the gameplay and fun will be attained. So the prototyping in reality is the realization of the fun gameplay ideal I have in my head, or on paper. It is more the proof of concept than the idea itself, it is also not a full game.

So once I have the idea of the game in my head I tend to put it down onto paper. This is not always a set regimen either, it varies how much I write on the type of the game and most importantly my familiarity with the genre. Shooters for example I tend to write less, but platform games I will write more.

Once on paper I start deciding how I will code the game if I go ahead. This always leads me to start actually coding the game and therefore the prototype. The prototype can be simple as well, as I only really need to prove to myself that the game is viable. Sometimes the control will simply not come along nicely and I will then abandon the prototype. If as is usual the control scheme feels good, then I get all excited and need to move along as fast as possible.

This is when it is exciting as I code in the details of the game to expand the prototype and start in on making it a complete game.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Bit of Side on action

So I was busy last night. I was also quite strict with myself and only did about 15 minutes of programming and I was happy, because I proved to myself that what I wanted to do was gonna be fairly easy and pretty fast. Then in a rare show of mental fortitude I left the coding.. and turned off my PC.

Then I went back to the design, which I also carried on while at El Pollo Loco today at lunch time :)

I know, ya thinking HOW do I do the design work while my PC is turned off, and also ho at lunchtime while out. I'll bet ya even thinking I am using a Laptop, but I am not. In fact... I am using an age old technique I have used for more than 30 years designing games.

A Pen/Pencil and paper.

Shocking isn't it. Of course this does mean that all the stuff I have written so far will need to be typed in at some point. But I have a secret weapon that is my wife, and she types ten to the dozen i can tell ya. So no worries from me on that one. I also use paper as i tend to do a lot of simple drawings to flesh out what I am writing about. Those I sometimes scan in.

This is currently what I have for me code. Once agai using CombatEva and a very odd forward shuffling motion. In this picture I am showing our Hero moving forwards (except i cannot see any movement, cos i have no visual queues at the moment (SCOTT!), that was a shout out to my artist :). He is moving across the screen and the camera is following. Except in reality I will conveyor everthing to him instead of him moving forwards. That ball ya see on the floor is CombatEvas head texture on a ball that Scott made for me. It sort of rolls around at the moment and is boring. Though Eva looks like she is about to drill it with a big footy kick, yeah!

So the game obviously will have a bit of side on action, though it will also have otehr angles to play with.

well that's all for tonight. I am gonna write something else in the design now. Cos i am too excited to go to bed and sleep (Me and me mate are going Off roading on our off road bikes tomorrow, Yeah Baby!!).

G'night all,
Da Voodoochief

Dilemna for my Avatar game

One of the rules i set myself a while ago for use of such trappings as Avatars, is that they should fit into the game. Seems simple enough for sure. However my latest venture has met with a big Dilemna.

Simply put i have made 4 games (ok, one is a quiz). So 3 games that i believe play very well. My conversion number also seem to attest to not being too shabby. Now all this sounds great apart from the single fact that.. I get no downloads. Or virtually none. Or not enough (whatever that is).

So with my next title I really wanted to address the lack of downloads issue and hope that i could keep the same conversion rates of about 20%+. There are a couple of factors i was using to get these download numbers.
1. Avatar games appear to download the most. Even if they are crap, they get greater than 10K downloads. A Number i would love to have.
2. Zombie games also download a lot (ie, best selling game on Xblig). However some failed Zombie games do not download much at al (3K). So Zombies are not such a safe bet, but to be honest are generally more fun than an Avatar game.
3. Fact 3, yeah i said only two, haha! Wel Massagers get downloaded too, What a stinking pile of crap can do is amazing. I WILL NOT GO THERE!!

So the trick was to write a good Avatar game with a Zombie or two in it. Heck after discussing it with my kids they would love me to have Ninjas, Pirates, Robots and Vampires as well. Great, np then. All enemeies accounted for :)

So i have been working when i have time on making splatter for when ya hit/shoot enemies. I went and spent way too long egtting Avatars into my game. I have the main controlled character running around now shooting at the enemy (a shooter ships currently). Who also shoot back. This basic gameplay test worked really well. I have been designing a lot more enemies and levels to play on. Even powerups and character enhancements to buy. Only......

Since @Stegergames mentioned the gore and Avatars cannot be together, and then my following research. It seems Microsoft have made it impossible or very very dificult for me to have zombies and gore and Avatars exist together. Avatars you see cannot be mained or dismembered, that was ok with me. I was not gonna hurt the Avatars in any way at all. I thought this would allow me to still write the game i wanted to, in the style i wanted to write it. But Avatars must not also witness this violence or cause it. This last sentence is a real downer.

I wanted zombies, i wanted to splat them all over the place and have arms and heads falling off. this would sem to fit the demographic of a lot of Xblig buyers. My game would be solid whatever, but visceral feedback would be awesome. But now i cannot use my Avatar to main and kill them (are they alive?).

So i am at a crossroads....
Do i keep Avatars in my game and dumb down the action (make it comical for example).
Or
Do I keep the gore and Visceral mayhem and remove the Avatars from the game.

Of course i could have cheated and just put one on the title page like some Avatar games, only.. I cannot do that, as i explained right at the start of this article.

I am at a loss of what is the right choice.... BAH!

Laters

working that design

While i was busy today working on the design for my new game i realised i could include another major player in the game style, one where i could dig holes and fill them in after trapping aliens in them. I cannot off the top of my head remember the arcade game this comes from, but i do remember enjoying playing it. However it does not quite fit my current design criteria, but it may in a sequel.

One of the issues i have mentioned is the size of the players and aliens, and how hard it is to get truly connected to your charatcer if he was the size of a pacman. I also mentioned lokoing at bomberman and the way they did it. I loved it so much i skecthed it today. It was very succesful, they look great. So double tall characters it is, and double tall aliens as well. I will try to take another photo tomorrow night to show ya what i mean. I think it looks pretty smart.

I also set out today to work on some coding, but it seems i am in a design mood and not a coder mood. Arg! i waste so much time farting about and not actually doing any coding. I have 3 coding jobs and i have little inteerst in any of them. Though all are very important. But i know from being experienced with my moods that it is best left till another day. One of these days i will wake up in a coding mod and Whammo, one job down etc. Still today i worked on trying to get a new baseapp written. I have started and am about 30% through, i got stopped when i hit the code i really want to change.

We shall see what mood i'll be in tomorrow.
G'night

Name for the game is lacking

I love to name my game when i start it. So much character can come from naming a game. Especially if it is a name that i can relate too. So far i have two names, neither of which i really like. Avatar-Man and BombVatar-Man... So i will probably change that as soon as i get more design work done.

On the front of working on the design, i have been pondering an issue my new game faces. If you looked at my post with the design drawings you would have noticed how similar the game looks to Pacman. Now the maze is a bit pacman like for sure, but the issue isn't that. Well not totally that. It is in fact the issue of getting character into my game. Being too far away and rendering my avatar the size of pacman will be a bit of a let down. I have ben wondering how i can make everything bigger, but still retain my granularity of map.

so i decided i knew the answer, i would force everything to a new 45 degree angle and have everything that is in the game be twice as tall as the walls. This will give me double size characters to play with and people to look at. That should enable me to keep characters feeling good and fresh while not killing the gameplay elements i have lined up.

Laters

What do i do with an Idea?

I have game ideas all the time, some i just leave in my head for when they are ready for a more solid reference in the real world. Some ideas of course do not make it out of my head ever.

Once i have an idea i am ready to record for posterity, i usually make notes. I know i live in the computer age and all, but i love pencils and paper. The way it feels in my hand seems to draw out the information i need to divulge. I write stuff i didn't know i had decided upon.

Below are a couple of pages from my most recent notes on what might end up being my next game. See what ya think.

These notes on Note lined paper are where i start. I have one of these pads around me at all times.

This is where i go once i have written some notes on the note paper. The blank pages are wonderful, though never large enough for me. I hate to change paper half way through writing anything down.

This note taking isn't about quality, or even clarity. It is to see if i have enough ideas to actually make this game work. If it will work with all my criteria. YES, i write down my criteria for the game as one of it's first steps. I didn't take a photo of that, darn it. Anyway, this game has 9 criteria associated with it, and that is only single player!
 
g'night

Simulation = gameplay?

I would disagree with that statement above. Most programmers want to really simulate parts of their games like they are real world things. Mostly i find this to be a great starting point, but not usualy an end point. There are various reasons for that of course and i am sure i won't cover them all here, at least not in this post. Let me start by talking about one of the most obvious forms of simulation tried in a game, and then i will talk about it's effect on a player etc.

Jumping. Yup something as simple as jumping used to be the number one simulated physics type item. A programmer would start out with the usual gravity ad then input a vertical velocity for making them jump. The issues with this tended to be that in 60fps land that your initial jump would be quite a lot of pixels if you wanted to to jump anything useful. Now lets talk about useful. In games the layout of a level is a very important aspect, and making a real world jump severely restricts what kind of layouts you will see. Just imagine if you will how a platform game level would look if you had to get to the top of the screen, but could only jump about 3 feet at a time. There would have to be a very large number of platforms to jump upon to get to the top of the screen. It could could also be called boring as well as you have to make so many jumps. Oh dang, i forget what point i was working on making as my mind is filling up will all the other issues that this simulation represents. argh!

Also using gravity as a fall mechanic tends to make the falling speed rdiculous and then there are real bad collision isues. So we cap max velocity and know that will fix the issues of collision. It does not then lok like a simulation, as max faling velocity is usually way way less than real world terminal velocity. 60fps was a real handicap, snapshotting movement is always going to be an issue for fast moving objects. Now of course we can say that 30fps is much worse. In a way it is, but in another it is not. Fast moving objects do not realy need a cap of max velocity. The reason is that was can multi-sample the movement and therefore know that collision will still work. This is simply done by making the logical frame happen more often than the physical drawing frame. So by doing a double logical frame then you will get a movement distance of half what it was. The down side to this technique is that it
uses more processing power. One technique added to this in the past was to see how far you had travelled and then know how many movement control/detection logicals to chop it into to make it work accuratley. This again is great, epsecially when you have enough processor power to handle it.
But back to my original isue which is gameplay and desgn. If you restrict the designer to only have a mediocre jump at al times, then you are restricting what the designer can give you as far as challenges. For example if you can only jump a distance of say 5 feet across. Then to make that jump easy should be about a 4 foot gap. To make it hard it should be the maximum. But wth only 5 feet to work with it is hard to make a nice variety. Usually though the design issues become more apparent from the curve/arc of the jump than from the actual distances. The curve of a real jumper is very straight forward and really does not vary much (unless maybe you are an international class athlete). So it is again harder to get variety in gameplay.
Ok, i am done for now saying it is bad to simulate. In fact it is an excellent way to start, but know when you start what kind of layout you realy want. Don't let the simulation control your game. Control the simulation y your gameplay parameters. If you already have a level you want to make a character jump around, then go for it. Then once you have something you are happy with as fare as control and feel. Then go ahead and tweak the level to match what should be a great platform control.
Parting shot.. I do not think i have ever used real gravity for my platform games player control. I have sed it for lots of effects and enemy creatures however. The shaprness of the movement suits them much better.

I hope you fond this interesting, and as usual i invite comments to dicuss this.

Laters

Please check out my Kickstrarter project.Those rewards are coolio.

No Avatar? But Whyyyyy?

So a few days ago on Twitter there was an intersting discussion, although it was in tweeterez so it is not fully fledged sentences or anything sensible like that. I am also not gona copy any of it here, presuming of course i could actually go back that far in twitter land and copy it out. So what am i on about eh ?

One of the Developers that i am friends with said he wasn't gonna put Avatars in his latest game, and for that matter Zombies. This drew a few comments from other Xblig friends that we connect with and from there it sort of blossomed, or mushroomed or just grew for a while. There were a few things said, and i will re-say them, but in a sort of chinese whispers sort of way.

1. No compelling design reason to use Avatars, so out they go!
2. I have seen too many Avatar games where the Avatar is just standing around on the screen
3. Avatars are being overused and there are too many Avatar games, not all of them are selling well
4. Avatars can be a crutch to weak gameplay, i wanna make my game great on it's own merit

I have to say these sentiments are a breath of fresh air. Ok so i am picky about who i follow, so maybe it is more a reflection on the kind of mates i have in twitter than what i actualy going on in the general Xblig developers heads. Now i am not saying that Avatars should be avoided or dismissed. I believe they should be used at all times, all times that they feel like they would be missing, or all times when they actually enhance gameplay or the experience of playing a game.

Lets see what Avatar games the next few months brings us eh!

Thanks go to all my twitter buddies who i would like to mention, even though i know i will miss some, sorry to those i miss.
@Drmistry
@Clingermangw
@The_Zman
@theBigDaddio
@H3games
@QuimbyRBG
@Tehgrumpydude

I am sure there were more in the discussion, sorry bout that. I am sure i will mention folks in a future post or three :D

G'night

A Shooter Gamplay Trailer - Level 11

The Advanced Levels. This is where i start throwing more at the player. Make them move around more than before. Further down this article I will describe my design phylosophies to achieve this goal. Firstly though, there is the Video to show you the level. This will help anyone understand my waffle.

There ya go, I Hope you enjoyed Level 11.

Now onto some details. Let's start by getting around some basic facts...
1. I took a hit at the start. Yup, i should have been paying more attention, my excuse is that i was distratced by Fraps :D (always gotta have an excuse ready!)
2. I died on the end Boss. Yup i did. You didn't think i was spoil the Boss for ya now did ya ? I will some time int he future do a real EOLB video compilation. so people can get hints if they want to. Not today though. Or maybe he is just too good for me ?

Ok, let's get on with discussing my design goals here...
1. One goal i have is to make the Advanced levels distinctive. The previous 10 levels could get a bit forgetfull, and that was ok. They were really training, for what is to come.
2. Second goal was to make you move around more, any fool can sit still and shoot something. Though i did today toy with a boss you had to stay completely still to destroy him.
3. Was to make my test graphics as colorful as a set of Smarties :) (or M&Ms)

For the levels to be more Distinctive i am going to choose paterns, patterns of Aliens you will recognize and say 'Woah it's the Big Red Blocker level', or words to that effect. Though if you really say it out loud, people might start looking at you funny. This level is in fact the Big Red Blocker Alien level. They are there to make it harder to shoot the aliens that are your real enemy, the ones that are actively trying to shoot you down. as these blockers move around. It forces you to move around too, especially with all those bullets flying your way.

Making you move around is really part of the last paragraph. The blockers block you from annihilating the weak enemy ships, and therefore allow more bullets to come on screen. The best part is that the longer the small enemies are on screen the more angles they will be firing at you from. Therefore making you move around even more. This same effect can be achieved by putting aliens on the screen from the sides or back (as I have done in a previous level).

Pretty test graphics... Well, i had to be able to tell them apart. And why not make test graphics pretty. The color of the enemies or even their looks does not play in any part of the gameplay. The gameplay will be the same, and just as solid as it is now, when the graphics look beautiful. This is also the same for the boring backdrop. It is only boring for screenshots, cos anyone playing the game won't see anything but the aliens and their bullets, well only that .. if they want to survive.

I hope you can see these easy to use ideas for gameplay mechanics, as they are easy to implement and also can work for platformers and FPsers.

Laters

A Shooter Boss 11 - Advanced Boss Design

Here is a little picture of me Fighting (ok, dodging at this point) the Boss from level 11. Which is the start of the games Advanced levels.

End of Level Boss #11

Now that picture makes this boss look like a walk in the park doesn't it. Just let me tell you that looks can be deceiving though. This is one of those cases. I have not modified the picture in any way, you can even see the debug text on it still. So what makes him nasty, after all he doesn't even move. Yep, you heard that right, he doesn't even move a bit, once he is on.

So just how hard can it be to kill a stationary boss. Well that is one of the things that makes designing bosses interesting. Challenging the player to come up with on the fly decisions or skill to figure out what to do. Most bosses are about methods, even the simple ones. Shooter players know this, and it is an important skill to pickup and improve on. This shooter will teach you how to play shooters, no doubt in my mind at this point.

So lets move onto the main section of this article. What am i going to do with my next 10 bosses ?

Advanced Boss Design

The 11th - 20th bosses will be on what i am calling the advanced levels. This is where i will take what you have learn't and see how well you learn't it. The Bosses however are a completely new breed, yet seem very familiar in some ways.

1. First issue with the advanced bosses is that you can cycle around levels that contain them. This is done by beating all 20 levels, and then wrapping back to level 11 for the 21st etc. So these bosses had to be able to be expanded and made more difficult easily and fairly.

2. They needed to be evolved from the Simpler bosses found in the first 10 levels. I want players to feel advancement, even if my graphics do not loko incredibly new (or new at all :O)

3. These bosses needed to be a taste of new, and especially with boss 11, a view into the future and hopefully a view that will scare people into realizing the possibilities of what these bosses can become.

How do i do that ?
1.... These bosses contain an element that will be so easy to increase the difficulty on. Namely the spawn of the support aliens. If i spped up the spawn by a small amount (say 10%) each time you encounter this boss, it will get harder and harder by an approximately proportional amount. Simple, and yet sooo effective.
2... These bosses now have the power of Spawn. They no longer have to fight alone, and they themselves will also get more aggressive and manouverable as the Advanced levels progress. advancement in most every way. Some more obvious than others.
3... This new view and peek into the future advanced bosses should scare anyone with an imagination. Even though the Boss himself could just sit still, it is possible to spawn support aliens all over the screen, from every angle. Just think of your most hated alien from the previous levels(where they were introduced) and realise that they could be helping a voracious Boss.. I hope you can see my point.

So my Advanced Boss Design follows some simple elements, which is one reason i am confident they will work out. The only tip i can really give is, Complex aliens do not nescessarily make good aliens. Combinations however can be anything and are much easier to control and balance.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please take a moment to Digg the Site.

Thanks
g'night

A Shooter is really born

I was calling the shooting game sorcerygames is currently working on as 5th Moon. This was an awesome name, and i was gonna theme the game around this.

Now things have changed.

Originally i was going to actually call the game 'A Shooter'. But we liked 5th moon better. However one of the reasons fro using 'a Shooter' was to see just how important it could be to name the games, not something creative, but something obvious... I mean, REALLY Obvious. A lot of the games that get good downloads have obvious names. anything with a Zombie in it is a sort of good example, though not the best. Take Jonny platformer biscuit romp for example. And more if you go LOOK!

So now i am back to the original name. We shall see if this appears to make a difference to downloads. I also believe it do for the iphone apps. iShooter for example. so without more delay, here is the new title page. With more letters in the name it actually looks better too.

the letters bounce just the same way as they did when it had it's other name.

gnight.

An article on Game difficulty

I just read a very interesting article on game difficulty. Is so highlights my own feeling about the fact that computer games should not cheat etc that i thought i would highlight it here.

The Difficulty with Difficulty

When i have new teams mates and we are writing games, i always make it a point to tell them not to cheat. now they can make the AI as good as can be, which would mean perfect... Or at least perfect in the control scheme that is present. That is why they must also make AI's use the same controller inputs that the player uses. This usually helps stop them cheating speed etc. This kind of thing really helps keep players from feeling cheated.

laters

Method Boss Design... Issue

Here I am, having just completed two more bosses for my shooter. I am going with the evolutionary design if you haven't read my Blog before. Which means to evolve the Boss from one level to the next.

Evolving the boss does not mean that you play in the same way with him, and just get faster etc. In fact i am finding to my delight that small changes in the boss can make significant changes in your play tactics.

So what's the Issue i face?
Well it seems i have created a monster, a monster of a boss. He is only slightly evolved from the previous level boss, but this one does a firing sequence that makes you have to dodge his bullets in a rather unique way.. or DIE!

Questions..
Is this bad ?
I do view this as bad, because a player will come to this bos at the end of the levl and have no idea how to survive, as most if not all players will die on his third firing sequence. Nasty huh! Yet i know the secret to defeating him, and it is fairly easy...
Is this Good ?
I do view this as a good thing. It means you will have to think a bit more creatively. It means you will have to even go to video if you fail to figure it out yourself. Old school shooters and arcade shooters had learning curves and boss method learning in them.

Conclusions...
I love this, i dislike this. ARGH! some people will enjoy this challenge, but some will throw their controllers. Which pill should i take ? The red or the blue one ?

I would LOVE some input from the people that read this blog, but as you are all anonymous and also so very quiet i guess i shall have to figure it out myself.

One thing is for sure. I personally love this boss. My partner is gonna hate it, lol

Laters

Smartbomb effect #1 complete

Yes it is true. I believe i have completed the first Smart Bomb effect. Here is a picture.

I left the Boss in this picture (he is the source of all the bullets). As you can see i went with the size i previously discussed. I also added in the cardinal directions as filler or dummie lines. The only real difference between them and the real lines, is the fact they do not end in an enemy bullet.

I went with all i had previously written, but here are some highlights of this particular smart bomb.
1. It is instantly there but take a second to fully fade away. Looks pretty.
2. The bullets it hits are instantly stopped from moving.
3. The bullets that get smarted are still dangerous till they are gone (faded away).
The gameplay that is in this Smart bomb i believ to be unique in that smart bombs usualy remove enemy bullets immediatley. Not this one. You will still have to be careful for a very short time once they have been stopped. Also new bullets being launched are still dangerous. (this is boss #5)

This picture above was too pretty to ignore. As you can see, under your score you will see your available Smart bombs. Very simple and very obvious I hope. This boss is level #6 boss. He has a special method to play him. Or you die... I may need to keep him till later in the game. As he is a method boss, and not one i feel easy to discover.

This finishes up this smart Bomb. Onto the next in a few days. till then i hope to get anotehr level laid out, and two more bosses done, though it looks like i have done that now :O haha

laters