Jul 20 2011

TRIPLE THREAT

I’m torn between finishing off three different projects at the moment. It’s a little hectic!

This contract project keeps going – the client’s requested a few minor changes over the past couple days, which is cool and they’ve been accommodated. Still, I think it’s done now.

Reels of Steel is progressing slowly in the gaps. Much of the game’s feel comes down to the physics of the rope, which needs to work differently when it’s cast and when it’s pulled taut and so on, so I’ve been tweaking that. It’s coming together!

As for project number three, I haven’t even looked at Fear is Vigilance yet this week. Still, I know it’s waiting for me to go in, fix up the analytics code and start pitching to sponsors.

The main thing is, I’m recovered from last week and the jam and I’m getting back on track. ONWARD.

Jul 18 2011

JAMMIN

TIGJAM TIGJAM TIGJAM TIGJAM

The weekend was ace! I made a few games, met lots of cool people, somehow got enough sleep…

Alistair put some photos up on Google+. Most of the weekend was spent feverishly dev’ing away upstairs in the CB2 café, but after they kicked us out in the evenings we headed to The Tram Depot, possibly the only pub in the world to have Grolsch Blond on tap. It’s all the better for it.

Stephen Lavelle (increpare) kept the whole thing running, walking round every few hours to issue themes for another three hour jam. Hardly anyone did a game for each three hour jam, of course – that way would lie madness – but each new jam was a fresh project. As the weekend wore on people began to stick with their favourites and develop them further.

I fell in love with the second project I started, so stuck with that to the exclusion of all else. But before I talk about that, here’s the first. I made it on Saturday in about four hours, and it’s an arcadey game about ants and bears and cherries that explode:

It’s an unbalanced mess, but it’s fairly dynamic. Dragging a cherry trail to an ant hill (hive? lol) brings a friendly ant out who’ll follow the trail and pick up other cherries for you, and if a bear finds a trail it can follow it to find ants to eat.

Here it is: BugsNThings

A few other jam games you should TOTALLY CHECK OUT are

– Inside a Starfield Sky by Alan Hazelden and Phillip Webster

– Untris by increpare

– line bender by increpare

The second game I started – the one I spent most of the weekend on – was a collaboration with a fantastic artist, so it’s much prettier. It’s a game about fishing with magnets, in which you hunt for robot fish hidden amongst the normal fish. It is REELS OF STEEL:

The art’s by Adam Vian of The Super Flash Bros, who is every bit as professional as he is talented. This one’s maybe half done, so you can’t play it yet but it should be out soon 😀

It’s been a busy few days so I took the day off. Back to work tomorrow!

Jul 01 2011

ANALYTICS

Today’s quick Vigilance adventure was in analytics. Specifically, playtomic.

This is a very cool (free!) service for Flash, iOS and Unity games that lets you track how long people spend playing your game, how long they spend in each level, and so on. Apart from sheer engagement (how long people play the thing) the best use is of course to identify difficulty spikes on various levels.

Then something else playtomic supports comes into action. You can set values on the server which your game will automatically load whenever it’s played, meaning you can instantly change the difficulty to balance out levels people are finding unwinnable. How cool is that?

Anyways, I’m implementing this stuff right now for Vigilance. Hopefully I won’t need it. I’d like to think I’m already balancing the game sensibly… but we’ll see!

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 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 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).