May 06 2011

SLOW AND STEADY

I’ve been experimenting today with a new type of ship in Fight Back. A whole new class of ship, in fact.

The “Barrage” ship, namely that fat thing that’s firing sideways, has no AI whatsoever and flies steadily down the screen and off the other side, periodically shooting sideways. Slow, heavy ships like this are a traditional way of mixing up the pace in shmups, so I thought I’d give them a shot.

Turns out they’re (predictably) rubbish to play as because they’re so slow. I tried turning them into a kind of ship that can’t be player-controlled, but turns out that’s confusing, as the rules suddenly get more complicated. It’s also diluting the uniqueness of Fight Back by nullifying its core concept.

In short, I need to either find a way to make this ship concept (a heavily-armoured, slow-moving obstacle that fires sideways and cuts up the play space in a consistent fashion) fun to play or I need to ditch it. I’d really like to be able to keep it, since workable designs for some common slow, heavy ships would give Fight Back way more variety in action. Guess I’ll have to think on it over the weekend!

May 02 2011

LUDUM DARE #20

This competition, right? You make a game from scratch in 48 hours over a weekend. The weekend that just went past, in fact. I was maybe going to do it, and then the mandatory theme came out, and I was like “wait, this theme sucks”, and then I had an idea and I did it anyway. And I am SUPER PROUD because I got to do some cool sprite animation, script some cutscenes and make a game in a genre I haven’t tried before: the genre of PUNCHING.

The theme was “It’s Dangerous to go Alone! Take this!”. Now, every time I do a Ludum Dare, I look for a chance to test myself or expand my skills, so I usually have a notion what kind of game I’m going to make before I go in. For LD #19, my plan was to make a content-heavy, story-based game. Combining that with the theme of Discovery led me to make Beacon.

This time, inspired by playing Nicolau Chaud’s Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer (review) last week, my plan was to make something contemporary and human. That led me straight to the idea of making a game where you punch people who don’t have rape alarms until they’re scared enough to want rape alarms. For their safety.

Consequently my entry “Vigilance” is a game about suspect charities, lonely women walking through empty parks at night, and pretending you’re a ninja. Go play it!

Apr 29 2011

LIFE BAR

The most consistent feedback I’ve had about Fight Back is that it’s hard to tell when you’re about to die. I avoided putting a health bar in for as long as possible, relying on smoke, visible damage and the general ‘feel’ of having taken damage, but I’ve finally been experimenting with one today.

Here’s the first version I tried, with RTS-style health bars over everything.

Clutter city, am I right? And the health bars don’t really stand out, either.

Firstly, I realised there wasn’t much point to having health bars for all the ships; the important thing is knowing what your health is. Secondly, the appropriately-coloured health bars are bad. If the health bars have the same colour scheme as the ships instead of the UI, then they disappear into the scene.

Apr 20 2011

STRUCTURE

I’ve been somewhat distracted by Portal 2. It’s pretty awesome!

In development news: I’ve set up a potentially-final menu layout. It’ll look prettier before the game’s done, but the functionality is there.

Apr 18 2011

START IT SLOW.

Check it out. Placeholder splash screen:

Amazing, right? Still, it stops the game from starting music immediately, which was bugging alpha testers.

More importantly, I’ve spent most of today totally redoing the tutorial. Fight Back is quite a mechanically complicated game, and it’s doubly cursed by being so fast-paced there’s no time to experiment with things. That means it needs quite an intrusive, structured tutorial to make as much sense as possible on the first run.

Apr 15 2011

SEESAW

The sucky thing about changing how all enemies and allies behave forever? Everything needs to be rebalanced. Between that and AI work I’ve got nothing really new to show today. Still, my AIs are believably stupid now and the difficulty curve’s starting to get back to fair.

Next week I’ll redo the tutorial and finally start work on that main menu business. It’s long overdue!

Apr 13 2011

SKYNET

Until today, Fight Back’s AI ships were simple creatures. They operated by blindly pressing buttons at random. They weren’t easy to beat, sure, but they were stupid.

Now they are smart like fox. I’ve developed the new AI by building it to play the game against the old ones. It’s now better than I am. Here it is taking the current level 20 boss on, with some debug visualisation:

I’m using a sort of heat map approach – a combination of long term planning and short term reflex avoidance. Green squares are places it wants to be. Red squares are places it doesn’t. That’s how it gets around, lines up in a shooting position and dodges bullets.

The first step in writing an AI is making it perfect. This guy’s still a long way off, but it won’t be long! The second step is making it human – giving it human failings like reaction times and a longer decision loop, then teaching it to compensate for those with smarter, fuzzier decision-making. That’s the stuff I’ve got to get onto next, because if I use this AI for all the enemy ships right now the game is hell.

Apr 11 2011

DAMAGE

I’ve been playing with damage effects. I’ve also recoloured the bullets from the sidepods so what pickups do is much more apparent.

Sadly it’s still not that clear. I think I’ll play around with procedural effects for damage tomorrow, change the smoke trails that indicate damage and change the pickup icon in the bottom left. (No, it’s not a pause button!)

Apr 08 2011

CHANGING GEAR

I think the experimental phase of Fight Back is done now and I have a fairly good grip on the core mechanics. That means it’s time to stop playing around and plot a course for the end of the project.

Apr 04 2011

GRADUAL TWEAKS

I started playing through the Metal Gear Solid series again a few weeks ago. MGS1 was great, but even the Twin Snakes version is obviously a bit dated. I’ve just this evening finished MGS2, which feels much more current. The cutscenes don’t half go on though, do they? Perhaps the worst excess in MGS2 is when characters repeat themselves – they literally say the same thing twice, and then other characters will rephrase the same thing again if asked, and so on. Still a phenomenal game, though.

Work on Fight Back continues. I don’t have anything to show for today as such, but I’ve been playing around with the difficulty curve + the AI’s capabilities and smoothing out a few other rough edges. I think I’m mostly putting off adding in non-fighter ship types and bosses and setting up a menu and so on. Maybe I’ve hit the point of project fatigue, but I’m determined to start things I finish instead of hopping projects. I’ll just get on with it tomorrow!