Jun 29 2011

HOLDING PATTERN

Focused on contract work for the next few weeks, so updates are going to be a bit quiet. More info on Vigilance when something happens with it.

So. Here are a few quick indie game recommendations:

Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story is a “visual novel” type game about Facebook and privacy, told through high-school drama.

After a possibly ill-advised mid-life career change, your character starts work as an English Literature teacher. He is immediately given full access to his 16-year old students’ social network accounts and private messages and told to monitor them to watch out for bullying. Now, the game forces you to at least open all these messages, but the real question is: how comfortable do you feel doing so, and how comfortable are you acting on or sharing the private information you’ve accessed?

Beyond that, the way the story is told simultaneously in front of you and through social network messages means you’re constantly distracted from the action to keep on top of miscellaneous chatter. I found myself back in a conversation, unable to remember what had just been said, more than once. That hit a bit too close to home. Maybe I should close Twitter more often…

It’s not perfect, but it’s a powerful story that raises a few interesting issues between the 4chan riffs and winking lectures on metafiction.

Once you’ve played that, next up is Scorpion Psychiatrists of Saturn. This game’s a satirical mash-up of the above with Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars (itself a fairly pedestrian arena arcade game). It’s a bit of a fiddle to get it running, but it neatly skewers DTIPBIJAYS’s woollier aspects. GOOD WORK, apparently anonymous yet hilarious developer!

Okay BACK TO TWITTER

Jun 27 2011

SELECT DESTINATION

First off, here’s some music! I had to get up before 7am on Sunday, and then we had this heatwave… so I wrote a track about how mornings suck, and then there are attack robots.

– too goddamn early

Now. Where to?

This GPS is the level select screen for Vigilance’s arcade mode. Each stage has unique rules and its own high score.

Besides adding those new stages, I’ve also overhauled the title screen.

Jun 24 2011

PROGRAMMING INDIE GAMES

Just a quick one today – I’d like to point all of you interested in indie development (that is, making your own games) towards this talk by Jonathan Blow, of Braid fame.

It’s a talk about how Computer Science best practice in programming is, often, harmful to indie games development, and the only way to cut large amounts of robust code fast is to write it as stupidly as you can get away with (with an awareness of best practice for wherever it’s necessary). This resonates strongly with my own experience.

In the AAA sector, games have to be cutting edge to be competitive – code has to be laser fast and highly optimised. In indie games, that simply doesn’t apply; for the most part, games just need to run. That means you can cut a lot of corners and probably save yourself years. My own coding style has independently evolved to be 90% or so in line with the approach Jonathan advocates, and I’m grateful to him for analysing the topic in this depth and sharing the results.

Also of note this week is the trailer for Indie Games: The Movie. It’s shaping up to be an interesting film, and if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, I highly recommend taking a look.

Jun 22 2011

CERTIFICATE OF MERIT

Have you been good?

Of course you have.

Have a Merit Badge.

Yes, I found time this evening to bodge achievements into Vigilance. I didn’t want to go crazy with these – a lot of Flash games get ridiculous, right? – so there are only nine. Some of them are quite tough though!

Feature creep continues, though I’m running out of large things to add! I’m considering a level select screen so you can play Arcade Mode on all the different backgrounds in the game. The disco level is cool, but I think people will object to the sheer garishness of the animated floor, and besides it gets a bit dull playing it over and over.

Just for fun, here’s my remaining todo list.

Jun 20 2011

CAN’T DANCE

I’ve been busy working on Arcade Mode. In this mode, naturally, you run around in a nightclub and beat people until money comes out.

Arcade Mode also has epic orchestral techno. What with having its own background and music and mechanics, I think it’s done. Vigilance edges ever closer to completion.

Unfortunately, that last bit of edging may take a few weeks. I’ve started a month-long contract project, which is obviously going to suck up most of my time. The good news is, the income’s going to keep the lights on for several more months until I get this stuff paying for itself!

I’ll get Vigilance done in the odd late night hour and weekend session. It’s too close to “done” to put off for a whole month. I need to ship this thing so all this feature creep’s worth it 😀

MORE DISCO

Jun 17 2011

FIXES

Beta feedback is way helpful. I’ve been fixing a handful of issues in the game – some technical, some narrative – and it’s feeling that little bit more complete. All the game needs now is some artwork and text for the ending cutscene, some artwork and music for Arcade Mode, and I’m considering just a handful of achievements for the game as well.

I’m not sure whether I should talk about stuff from towards the end of the game on this blog. Would I be spoiling stuff? Maybe! I’ll talk about it anyway!

Jun 15 2011

FROZEN SYNAPSE

Since Monday I’ve been evaluating beta testing feedback on Vigilance, taking a (necessary) break and focusing on pitching for some contract work. I haven’t got any game work done, but I have had time to play Frozen Synapse!

It genuinely deserves the high review scores it’s getting. It’s a very engaging game, if punishing and a bit fiddly. My experience is that it’s a game about making a plan, running repeated simulations of that plan to see if the enemy can defeat it… and then dying horribly as they do something you completely didn’t think of.

The discrete nature – lack of any health bar (you’re either moving or dead) and no random outcomes – makes the game very different to most tactics games. In a way, it’s more SpaceChem than X-Com.

I recommend it. I’m playing on UK1 under the username “randomnine” (as ever!) and I’m always up for a game if you’re playing. 😀

Jun 14 2011

PORTRAITS. ALSO: ARCADE MODE

I’ve been busy over the weekend! Bit of a mixed update this, with very little visual stuff. I added character portraits to dialogue, and then I removed character portraits from dialogue. I added save game support, and put in an arcade mode. Combat got a fair bit of tweaking as well.

Here’s the faces. BUT THEY’RE GONE NOW:

Turned out these distracted too much from the action on screen, and they’re a bit naff and JRPG. It was fun learning to draw them though.

Arcade mode currently looks quite similar to night-time combat. There are some rule differences… namely, there’s a time limit, and you hit people until money comes out. I’m not sure what the subtext is there.

Speaking of combat, the AI behaves much more sensibly now with a variety of range and behaviour tweaks – they won’t chase you half a mile any more, they’re too lazy.

I’ve also started giving the player health back mid level. The longer stages were brutally hard – you ended up carefully watching your health bar, trying to mete out damage efficiently before you wiped out. To fix this, I reduced the amount of health the player has and now give you some back when you scare someone off screen or knock them out. The feel’s now much more immediate, since you can die more easily early on and you’re not quite so doomed later. Definite plus.

So that’s what I’ve been up to!

I know I said I’d stop on Sunday, but eh; an arcade mode was a good suggestion, and feature creep can be worth it 😀 The game’s fundamentally done now, apart from a few loose ends that need tidying (and Arcade Mode’s going to get its own quick unique backdrop and soundtrack).

It’s now in beta testing for difficulty/usability tweaks, which may run on a few days. I’ll try to avoid starting whole days’ worth of new work on the basis of testing; it should just be a few hours here and there until it’s done now.

Phew.

Jun 11 2011

COMBAT

I got rid of health bars. They were in the way.

Combat looks a lot slicker now, with the AIs communicating stuff by text and icons instead of a slightly wonky health bar. I’m not sure about how it feels – it was nice seeing that bar go down, I’ll be honest – but I think it’s a net win.

Besides that, I’ve been filling in background for the ending cutscene.

Jun 08 2011

BARKS

I’ve fixed my Flash preloader tutorial. You can’t easily get a version of Sam HaXe that will set the SWF header properties (resolution, framerate) for you, so I wrote a command line util to do that bit after the Sam HaXe resource build. Much better.

In actual game terms… I’ve added barks. Barks are when AIs shout out something incidental to indicate a change of state (or just to be funny/awesome).