Finding Motivation and Inspiration February 23, 2009
Posted by jhuculak in Game Design.Tags: igamemaker
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The past week has been filled with great things in my life however progress on my game was not really one of them. I have been spending some more time playing games, watching movies and reading books in the last little while. Why? For me project motivation comes from many places but this week I have been reflecting on motivation from two perspectives: Positive motivating factors and negative motivating factors. Let me describe what I mean starting with the negative motivating factors.
Negative Motivating Factors
Negative motivating factors sounds like an oxymoron so let me be clear by giving an example. Part of why I started a side project was because I wasn’t not enjoying my day job and I wanted a plan B. I picked the “I, Game Maker” moniker for this site because that is what I really like doing; making games. My day job had somehow turned into managing the people and process and not focusing on making a product. This kind of motivational factor isn’t bad, it just stems from dissappointment rather than passion for an actual product. It got me started in the right direction but not for the right reasons. The good news is that my day job has been awesome in the last couple of weeks. Negative based motivation got this project started, but in order to keep it going I’m going to need positive motivating factors so I have been recharging the creative batteries with positive motivating factors.
Positive motivating factors
Making games is a creative process. I have made it to a point with my engine where I am now starting to actually make creative decisions. Creative decisions need inspiration so my search for motivating materials has been the priority over game progress. My research so far has been mostly in books, TV and playing games.
Books
If you like the Epic Space Opera genre, you are missing out if you haven’t read the Honor Harrington series. I just finished the 11th book in the series At All Cost and I loved it. I was surprised to see an add for a video game in the back of the book and went to the Honorverse site and it seems a little dead. If I’m ever doing a game like Stars! I may take a little inspiration from this series. Reading this reminded me to try out Sins of a Solar Empire which I haven’t really been able to get into yet.
The standard geek balance is between space and fantasy. I balanced out the space reading by picking up George RR Martin’s Hedge Knight 2 graphic novel. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first installment in the series, but it was still a great read. I don’t read nearly as much fantasy as I do science fiction but I am waiting as impatiently as everyone else for the next installment in the Song of Fire and Ice. Checking out Mount and Blade is also on my TODO list in this genre, or maybe Depths of Peril, both Indie titles.
Television
For some reason I missed out on Bablyon 5 back in the day and I have just finished the fourth season on DVD. This show was way ahead of its time! I’m hesitant to start the fifth season for two reasons: I have heard it isn’t as good as the rest of the season and Battlestar Galactica is back on! I have a fascination with story lines that have a planned interaction or over-arcing story for the duration of series. Diplomacy and space combat in this series is just amazing. On a game front this makes me want to try out Sins of a Solar Empire.
Battlestar Galactica is flat out the best thing I have watched on TV for years. I am still trying to think of how a game could capture the desparation and tension of this series and I haven’t figured that part out yet. I will choose watching BSG over working on my game any night of the week until the series is done! My wife enjoys the show as well and I probably know as many female fans as I do male. I am drawn to stories that put characters on the dramatic edge of survival where the fate of the human race lies in the balance. Star Control II, Wing Commander (1, 2 and 3), X-Wing/Tie-Fighter and X-Com are some of my favorite titles that “feel” like battlestar. I might need to dig up Homeworld and Freespace 2 since I missed those games and I believe they are classics.
Games
I have been a bit lighter on gaming in the past little while. My new trick is fitting in gaming time with my wife. We are currently trying to get all the rainbows in Pixeljunk Monsters. Hopefully I can do a break down of this game after a bit more play time. In the meantime I am trying to figure out what makes the game fun for my wife. Tower defence games are a favorite of mine and I think that Monsters brings both a cuteness and a cooperative rewards based experience that is good for everyone. Much like Battlestar Galactica, Monsters appeals to both a male and a female audience. If I’m interested in having the most people possible enjoy the games I make then I think there are some real lessons to learn. It also means that I don’t have to compromise the experience in anyway since I love this game. Does a space opera game exist that is a cooperative game? Perhaps there is a way to design that in…
Summary
I am thoroughly enjoying my space genre research and I am getting excited about the types of games that I can build. I think I am nearly at the point where I need to start an actual design and I believe my posts will be a combination of design and engine development in the coming weeks. If anyone has suggestions for other great space opera inspiration, please send it my way in the comments!
Dapple – Indie development in streaming colour February 16, 2009
Posted by jhuculak in Game Breakdowns.Tags: Dapple, Dapple Review, igamemaker
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1 : any of numerous usually cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background
My friend, Owen at Streaming Colour, has released his companies first game: Dapple. The game is now officially available on the Apple store and I highly recommend it! Am I biased? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a really good game. I’m going to do my best to give it an honest review and game play breakdown. To find out what Dapple is, the best way to find that out is from this video:
Puzzle Games and me
First of all I have to come clean and say that I am typically not a fan of puzzle games. Why bring this up? Well typically I feel that puzzle games don’t really have a purpose other than killing time. There are a few that I have played that I find step out of this mold: Tetris, Bejewelled, Lumines, Bookwork, Bookworm Adventures and now Dapple. To capture my attention a puzzle game needs the following ingredients: Polish, interesting decision space, sense of accomplishment and skill.
Polish
Dapple is a very polished experience. The art, audio, menu flow and above all the operation of the in game controls are very polished. There are the odd times that a tile I didn’t mean to gets selected, but the double tap mechanism protects this from causing issues. In the puzzle game world I prefer a solid core mechanic that is well done rather than a boat load of features. The polish also needs to have the right timing and reward feel for scoring well. Dapple does a great job of showing you your chained successes without having to long of a stop in game play.
Interesting Decision Space
I found the learning curve for Dapple a bit longer than a game like Bewjewelled. Changing paint colours is a bit of a different rule set to remember than just pairing up blocks of similar colors. Because I have to focus on getting a successful move in Dapple, I find I don’t have “as” much time to determine my long term chained results as I did in Bewjewelled. I would categorize Dapple as much harder than Bewjewelled to start, but finding a good combination before the hint icon shows up is more rewarding as a result. I’m hoping that as I play, the strategy space for the board will open up a bit to me so I can plan more move chains. The brown paint and special icons always factored into my paint selections and made me feel good about the long term planning.
Sense of Accomplishment
My favorite mode for accomplishment is the two player mode. This is a typical push the board in the other players direction. I think the first time I played this was in Lumines and I really loved it there as well. Having the competition plus colours coming in from both ends of the board is really exciting. During the regular course of the game you have a bonus meter and many animations and rewarding sounds for chained scoring paint matches. To me Dapple is on par with the high standards from PopCap games.
Skill
If I have one criticism for Dapple, it is that it takes a little while to “get”. I think this is because I’m a little slow on the colour matching. Every time I pick the game up I need about four to five selections before I really get back into the groove. Once the initial barrier is broken, I still find I’m spending my cranial power to find and evaluate the best initial move and that I find it a bit more difficult to plan out combos. However, when I am in the groove my brain slowly adjusts and then it is a blast. I think that game is actually training a little bit of the right/left brain rivalry. My logical side wants to find the best match but I really need to tune out in a way and let instinct kick in. When that happens it rolls really well.
Price
Owen has a great commentary on how he picked the price for Dapple. The apple store is an interesting place. It has bargain deals on lots of great products and basically makes game pricing on other platforms look atrocious. Console games go for $30-$60. Many Indie PC/Mac games go for $15-$20. Why does the apples store have so many products that are less than $5? I think that this is because people think of these as novelties or disposable content. Music you listen to a bunch for a little while and move onto the next song. Lots of people do that with games as well and at that price point you can try a lot of product for much less. In some ways I think Apple might be catering to the A.D.D. that seems to affect an entire generation. In that regard, I think that Dapple fits in an awkward spot. The game experience can be entertaining for hours but doesn’t have the first two minute hook. If you give a bit of time to learn Dapple $5 will be an absolute steal for this game but if you give it the 30 second unfair try, you might feel a bit burned at $5. If you do like games like Bewjewelled and don’t mind a bit more complicated version you should feel safe to pick this one up.
Summary
My wife and I have both put in a fair number of hours and are really happy with our Dapple purchase. Not only do I have a great game to play, but I can support someone who is out creating games that they love to play themselves. So many things on the apple store look like a money grab, Dapple stands out to me as a game with heart rather than as an attempt to get rich. That is the kind of product I want to support with my $$$.
Simple ship movement with Box2D (Part 3 – Trying to tune the force) February 9, 2009
Posted by jhuculak in Art, Technical.Tags: Box2D, igamemaker, Universe Image Creator
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Use the Force, Luke. – Obi-Wan
In the previous Part 1 and Part 2 I did what I would consider the easy stuff for tuning ship movement. This week was an attempt at getting a tuned ship movement experience while still using ApplyForce.
Goals
- Respect a top speed clamp when accelerating
- Provide a function that changes the force applied based on the current speed
- Have a method for damping when not accelerating
This weeks attempt
I realized this week that focusing more on management in my day job rather than coding has made me very rusty! I sat down for about an hour to work out how to do this and only a little bit of the dust wore off. I ended up with an experience I don’t mind the feel of but it isn’t “correct”.
Top speed
Originally I wanted to try to use damping to control the top speed and the deceleration. I wasn’t able to maintain a consistent top speed with damping enabled. I believe that damping is applied every frame and is applied as a percentage. This means that the faster you go the more speed is bled off. Rather than digging in to confirm this I decided to set damping to zero when the engines are on and to use a function (speed/top speed currently) to make sure that I’m not applying any additional force when I’m at top speed. This worked great and I thought I was done. Two problems, one my ship can go in reverse and when this happened the speed accelerated like crazy because the backwards top speed is different and two traveling at top speed if you turn the ship and attempt to accelerate no force is applied. Bummer dude.
I still don’t think I have found the correct way to account for this and if someone has a pointer to that I would be much obliged. What I am currently doing is using a dot product of the normalized velocity and the angle the ship is pointed at. If the value is less than zero I apply the full force since you are pointed in the opposite direction. That covers the backwards direction but I still haven’t found a good way to do the slightly off angle clamp. I’m going to work on that sometime in the next couple of weeks. The other thing I haven’t really covered is doing the same scale backwards. That is just a time limitation rather than not knowing how.
Function for top speed
Currently I am using speed/top speed as the force scalar and it is working fairly well so far. At a later time I’m going to make this exposed as a lua function that can be tuned per ship. For now this is functioning well enough.
Damping
Using damping to cause a deceleration has worked really well. I am currently using a value of 5 when above 1/4 of top speed and 20 when below 1/4. This lets me stop really fast and coast a little when “cruising”. Ideally when I rewrite all my ship code this will be a function as well.
Next Steps for Ship Movement
I really want to find a way to correctly control and map the top speed. This might go back to clamping the speed rather than scaling off the acceleration or actually taking into account the ship angle when scaling the force. I’ll those in the next couple of weeks. As it stands my ship can circle strafe and is actually feeling better as an experience so I am going to take a small break and design some game play or work on the look for the next couple weeks.
Sneaking in an update on art
When I get frustrated at not being able to solve something I take some advice from Micheal Abrash (Graphics Black Book – but I can’t find the chapter I mean!) and think about something else. In this weeks case I decided to fix my awful background image which was basically a noise texture. Space isn’t “space” without some nice stars and nebula’s. So I found this great old school space generation program. It took me about 5 minutes to download and create my own custom background. This is one of those pieces of software I am going to buy since it adds a ridiculous amount of “good space feel” to my game even if I’m not an artist!
I, Game Maker: Universe background
What am I thinking for this week
I think I need to take a break from physics and I may be doing one of the following:
- Re-writing all the game play classes and exposing them properly with Lua
- Adding in particle systems to make it really feel like a space game and be rewarding to shoot stuff
- Changing the shooting system to be aim with the mouse, steer with the keyboard
- Adding an enemy that is a ship to learn a bit about AI and OpenSteer
Any of the above is going to be fun to work on.
Layoffs, Writing References and Independent Development February 1, 2009
Posted by jhuculak in Uncategorized.Tags: igamemaker, indie, layoffs, recession, vancouver, writing references
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Layoffs drive the reality of recession home
This week has been fairly shocking week for me personally. Usually layoffs are a cold hard number I look at on a website and feel a little sorry for. This was my first time sitting through a day of layoffs where people I work with every day for the last few years are no longer at work the next day. These aren’t people that weren’t doing their jobs. Nothing has driven home the severity of the current recession more than seeing talented people let go and finding out there is a flood of HUNDREDS of talented workers in Vancouver when six months ago any of those people could have walked across the street and gotten a great job.
Writing References
Since I am focused on “doing” rather than talking about stuff this year, I decided to put my project aside this week and devote that time to writing references for my friends and coworkers in order to do my small part. Much like blog writing, I found that these are something you need practice at to make them sound good. What I like to see in references are specific examples. Many recommendations boil down to “this person was great to work with”. I prefer to try and put specific skill examples that are both relevant to that persons profession and also to my point of view reviewing them. Those simple rules help me picture what the person has done and give my own, hopefully more credible view, into the work that they have done and also highlight work or performance that might be out of the ordinary.
Independent Development
A part of me cannot help but wonder with that many talented people in the market, is it inevitable that we will have a flood of independent games in six months to two years? Had I been on the list at my company, I don’t think I would immediately look for a job. I think I would try and start something even if money is low. I have read an article or two that look into if casual games are “wrecking the games industry” and I actually wonder if the reverse is true from a development perspective. I think next generation development has it all wrong. It is like the freaking cold war where companies are doing an arms race with the number of staff that they have and forgetting about efficiencies. I do agree that the industry got itself into this position and I am interested it will either go back to independent contracted studios or if it will generate more of a contract business. If someone wanted to start an engineering or an art contract/outsourcing business in Vancouver, the timing is ripe.
Conclusion
So in the end, I think we are either going to see independent start ups or some contract houses that shrink the gap between foreign outsourcing and local contracts. I hope to see many of my friends among this growth.
