I’ve been playing and rating Ludum Dare games for the past few days instead of working on any of my own games. How do I legitimise this? Reviews! Here’re five stand-out games I’ve played so far:
May
04
2011
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
28
2011
HOLIDAY
It’s seriously tough getting back into the work mindset after a break. I’ve kinda got an excuse, though – Ludum Dare’s coming up this weekend, so I’ll be busy enough very soon!
In the meantime… one thing we did over Easter was pop into Bristol Zoo. Here are a few photos – click through for full size.
Starting tomorrow I seriously need to update WordPress, sort out some anti spam (I just deleted 900 spam comments from the weekend) and get back to work. I’ve had a ton of kickass feedback on last week’s alpha that went out for playtesting, so it’s time to integrate that and go make the game better. 🙂
Apr
22
2011
BREAK
It’s Easter here in the UK and the first hot, sunny weekend of the year to boot – so it’s time to stop working, up sticks and go visit the folks. (And take the laptop.)
See you on Wednesday!
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!)