Code Drops

More on One Game A Month 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:02:00 +0000

Listing out some ideas I have for what I'm thinking of making. These are in no particular order right now.

1. Arena / Twin-stick shooter: Going with a typical player in the middle (either a man or a ship, ship is easier to animate) who can shoot in a full 360 degrees using either mouse aiming or the classic 2 sticks on a joypad. Enemies would attack in various patterns. I've prototyped this playstyle in C++ with OpenGL in the past (image of prototype)so using that as a reference along with using my existing C#/OpenTK library means this should be easy to get up and running and so would make a good first month project.

2. Single room platformer: This would consist of a simple platforming engine in which each level is a single room on the screen (no scrolling). The original point of this idea was to allow me to experiment and learn about level design. Exact specifics about each level are unclear right now, whether there are collectibles/puzzles/enemies/all of these and the number of levels depends on time constraints.

3. Scrolling jumping platformer: The two more well known examples of this genre are Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack. Adding multiple levels you drop down to with the higher ones being quicker might be an interesting twist to this. Building the levels randomly (and consistently) will be an interesting challenge.

4. Ship management: Something similar to FTL, but much simpler. This would be more a prototype and I think it's one of those genres that a lot of devs would like to experiment with.

5. Side-scrolling shooter: This is a genre I've made a couple of simple Flash games of and I experimented with it using music to generate enemies, but I've never put a lot of thought into a comprehensive game in this genre. Several levels with various weapon/ship upgrades and limited lives. Not bullet-hell, more casual.

6. Survival: Something similar but simpler than Don't Starve. Mouse controlled movement, simple crafting. Again more a prototype but something to experiment with.

7. Hoshi 2: I love this game but I feel it's missing something and I'm only sure of parts of that. I would like to update the UI and sound effects especially. Some sort of online score system would be nice. At a stretch I'd like to add multi-player but I'm unsure how easy that would be to do in a month. I want to add more game elements as well and update the AI. It's extremely simplistic atm and overwhelms in a horde-style instead of actively hunting you. I'll write more about what I want to add/change if I decide to pick this up as a game.

8. Fixing Whirligig: A lot of Whirligig's problems are a result of some questionable design decisions when I first started it. Sometimes player rotation goes out of whack and there are pauses as the new planet bitmaps are produced after every impact. Additionally the physics (especially in bouncing) are a little odd at times. The amount of refactoring and fixing required would mean this would take as much time as a new project.

9. RTS/TD hybrid: This would consist of a small group of 'units' that you move around a map, gathering resources, defending yourself and building more units whilst being attacked constantly. I'm unsure how well this will work and may require a lot of tweaking.

10. Procedurally generated exploration: Not exactly a game, but it would create a landscape you could explore procedurally (that is, on the fly, computationally and consistently). The reasoning is that the Survival and RTS/TD hybrid ideas above would require such code before implementing the gameplay specifics for those games. Whilst I doubt this would be a huge amount of fun, with enough thought behind the landscape generation it should create some interesting scenery. Separating it out like this means I'm more likely to spend time fixing issues with the generation before moving on to gameplay elements which should produce a more robust system I can then use for more games.

11. 3D puzzle style game: Something akin to Marble Madness although I'm thinking closer to Arcturus (an old RISC OS game) with varying obstacles, different surface types, slopes and enemies to navigate.

12. Fixing/finishing Five Point Five: Five Point Five was a game I started for a TIG competition regarding multi-player only. Technically it works, although there's no input set up for all 5 ships and it's local only (looks something like this as I left it). The base gameplay is to destroy the other players, however you can't damage them until all the asteroids are destroyed. You can however push them around with your bullets. The asteroids drop power-ups like rapid-fire, power-shots, faster shield recharge. Once the asteroids are destroyed you can damage each other and whoever is left at the end wins. Has plenty of particle effects and you can see the heavy influence from Spheres of Chaos. Fixing and finishing it would require adding net play (which would be the biggest challenge) and a proper menu with rebindable controls. If you plug in enough joysticks it will work fine locally but having a couple of computers for it would make more sense. The levels are set up internally in such a way to reduce lag issues - they're based on a single number and procedurally generated from that, with all the sub-asteroids based from that original number, meaning that clients only need a location and time for a split and not all the individual asteroid information. Moving the game on from the original spec to include AI players would also make things interesting.

So those are 12 ideas. I don't know whether I'll use all of these as doubtless I'll have more and some aren't hugely interesting. There's also various puzzle games like Tetris or Puzzle Bobble that I'd like to clone and would be pretty easy to do.

A return

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 02:21:00 +0000

Resurrecting this blog as I'm taking part in 2013's One Game A Month project (http://http://www.onegameamonth.com/) and my original game-a-month project back in 2010 was one of the reasons I started this blog.

I'm on the site as 'phillmwebster' as that's my Twitter handle (http://www.twitter.com/phillmwebster/)

Not really sure which game ideas I'll be using for the projects. I may start off small with the 2 ideas I had for my old game-a-month project (simple arena-style and single-room platformer) and see where I go from there.

I will be re-using my C#/OpenTK library that I used for Hoshi and Whirligig in the past. At least for the first two projects. This is mostly because it's tried and tested and very easy to throw sprites around with.
I may drop into Flash and/or Unity for some of the later ones. Using Python is another possibility, but I'd be learning the language from scratch so would have to see.

Talking of Whirligig I have done some small additional work on it, but it still lacks the viability of a release as there's no real UI outside of a game so all the player names, amounts, etc are still hardcoded. I'll poke around with it some more during December to re-acquaint myself, probably film a video of it and perhaps release a hard-coded version with working random levels and the ability to re-start the level without quitting/restarting the game.

Rss, Feedburner, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:53:00 +0000

I think I had an RSS feed already, but I'm adding feedburner as well, this is mostly a test post to check it.
I've also added a "Subscribe To" gadget thing to make the feeds easier to find (assuming they were there at all before).

Anyway: as to coding, I've moved to a new computer and I'm still setting it up exactly how I want and testing all my old games out on the new(er) card in there. So not been up to much code as a result. :oD

More Flash stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:28:00 +0000

Been mucking about with Flixel more. As I stated in my last post talking about Flash and Flixel, I have a game idea that involves platforming that will work well in Flash. So I've set about learning how to write a platformer in Flixel.

Most of this I've taught myself, although I've pulled segments from this tutorial. Unfortunately the FlxCamera class seems to have gone missing, but I cheated my way around that. I'll go looking for it properly at some point.
I've drawn a complete set of tiled sprites myself for level building (they're very basic and just for mucking about with really, not pretty) and a short 4-frame animation for a guy running.

I used mappy for drawing the maps. It's fairly easy to use as I had problems using the editor suggested in the tutorial above. However mappy doesn't output map files suitable for Flixel (it has its own simplistic format for reading map tiles) but it does output in csv (comma separated values) format, which is very easy to read and port to Flixel's format. So I quickly wrote a C# application to do that.

Putting all this together resulted in a pretty basic platformer. I added a second 'layer' over the level that is used for checking for collectables, placing the entrance and checking for the exit. I have a feeling the way I'm doing this isn't very efficient in terms of Flash as I seem to be getting some minor framedrop, but it's a method that would perform fantastically under pretty much any other platform. There's a few ways around it. Thankfully it won't be an issue with the game idea I'm thinking of as the levels will be randomly generated.

Anyway, feel free to play around with Project C
I've not put any start or end stuff into this game. All it does when you complete it is shake the screen whilst you're stood over the exit. The idea is to pick up all 3 gems then head to the exit. The exit remains with a red light over it until all 3 are picked up. Simple stuff but as I say, it's all a test so not really 'complete'.

And moving on to Unity.

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:44:00 +0000

I've been learning how to use Unity as I mentioned in the previous post and so to test my fairly basic skills in the program I decided to write a simple invaders clone (it's a very easy game to write, I did it in under 2K of BBC BASIC once)

Unity has a very jumbled way of doing things it seems to me. I'm not used to having so little control over how things operate and this was the biggest challenge. Putting together the game was pretty easy, sorting out interconnections between objects and various other things was the main problem.
Unity has a variety of languages you can use to write code for. The tutorial I was using suggested Javascript, but I'm far more comfortable with C#, which is another offering, so I went with that. Overall the language use was pretty standard. Unity uses an external editor to modify the code, then recompiles it on returning to Unity, this system isn't wonderful and sometimes when editing multiple scripts Unity will only recompile one of them, also the editor isn't wonderful, lacking some of the modern amenities I'm used to, but overall this works pretty well and I get the impression you're never supposed to be editing more than a few hundred lines of code for each object and expected to do the majority of things in Unity itself.

Unity comes with its own 3D physics engine and hull colliders for a set of primitives. These are fun to play with at first, but trying to do anything constructive with them in a simple game isn't the best bet. I completely discarded the engine for my invaders game as it simply wasn't necessary and having seen some other 'physics invaders' games, it's not really a wonderful new dynamic.
I originally intended on using the collision detection from the physics engine for hit detection, but that proved more difficult than I anticipated. I suspect it is possible, but I wasn't able to get it to work as intended. As a result I do all the collision detection manually. This probably works better anyway as the Unity hit detection will do all objects against all other objects whereas mine just does bullets against aliens and bombs against the player.

So, I actually finished pretty much all this game, save the bombs, last weekend sometime, with just the bombs left which I added this evening since my last post.

My overall feelings are that Unity is a very nice bit of kit, very useful and very easy to use. I'm not sure how much I'll use it in the future at the moment, I've got an idea for a game that would work well with it and I've only just started to uncover what it's capable of (there's model importing, animation and a ton of other stuff I've yet to look at).

Without further ado, here's a link to my Unity game. It requires the Unity web plugin be installed, which should work on sane browsers under Windows and OS X. Not sure about Linux.
I might clean it up and release it as a separate executable, since Unity allows that easily. Will see.

What initially got me to take another look at Unity is this blog post by Sophie Houlden. I've recently started using Twitter a lot more and started following a number of indie devs and she was one of them. Currently she's working on a game using Unity called Lottie's Dungeon. So far there's not a huge amount of content, but it is fun to run around in and right now it costs practically nothing. Her intention is to raise the price as she adds more content, in small increments.
It's an interesting development idea and it's similar to the one that Markus Persson (aka Notch) has done with Minecraft, although he's charging half price until he's decided it's not an alpha any more. It's working for Notch anyway who's made a huge amount of cash and sold over 600,000 copies as of today.

As mentioned earlier, I'm releasing these two games as part of my game-a-month project now. Still leaves me miles behind schedule, but ah well. Maybe "occasional game release project" might be a better name? ;o)
This is project a anyway.

Flash, Unity and other things

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 17:29:00 +0000

So I've been busy coding, just not on my games again. :o/
Well, that's not technically true, I've been writing games, just not exactly for my game-a-month project.

What I've found is Unity and Flixel.
I knew about Unity before I started this project, but for some reason I'd got it into my head that it was pay-only and there was only a free trial. That's not the case. For PC, Mac and Web development it's completely free (save some more advanced libraries like realistic water effects).
It's astoundingly easy to use and I've created a small invaders re-make that I'll release shortly. It's almost finished, just needs 'bombs' adding.

Flixel is a flash library. Normally I steer clear of Flash because performance under it is absolutely terrible for games. Really terrible. How much this matters depends on your perspective and I'll write a piece on that another time.
Flixel allows quick and easy development of Flash games. It uses completely free tools (Adobe's Flex SDK is free and there's a very handy IDE called FlashDevelop). Which just leaves learning ActionScript 3.
If you've any experience with other modern languages, that's not really an issue, but it has some peculiarities in it and seems overly verbose in places to me, but still, it's easy enough. Following the 'hello world' tutorial on the Flixel site gives a reasonable introduction to the basics, but doesn't explain a lot of things.

So, 48 hours after picking up Flixel I have a full game written in it. Yes, it is that easy to use.
I could embed it directly in the page, but I've always kinda been against that, so here's a link instead.
Space to shoot, cursors to move.

You'll have to excuse my pretty dreadful graphics, I was mostly just experimenting and seeing what I could manage. The backgrounds took less than 2 minutes each and the clouds were about the same. The ship is from a while back. The ghosts were just me yesterday morning going "what's an easy enemy to draw?"

Most of the code is taken from this tutorial, which I don't think anyone who doesn't know about resource allocation should follow. If you follow that tutorial to the letter, you'll end up with some nasty memory leaks because it doesn't reuse resources properly, it just leaves them hanging around in the background. Most notably are the bullets (which aren't destroyed, so any that miss enemies and fly off into the ether to the right of the screen will just go on forever), enemies (same issue going off the left of the screen) and explosions (creates and doesn't dispose 10 sprites every time something dies).
So, I changed it slightly so that my game destroys bullets off the right of the screen, enemies off the left and re-uses the same 10 explosions, seems to work well.

I also extended the tutorial to include my parallax background effect and moving clouds. There's nothing particularly spectacular in there, but it was something I was interested in working out.

Flixel is pretty well known in the Flash community, the main author is Adam "Atomic" Saltsman who wrote the game Canabalt (google it, you've almost certainly played it before).

So that was this weekend's Flash adventure. Was interesting and I've an idea for a Flash game I want to put into practice at some point using Flixel. Although it's a platformer so will require me learning a fair bit more about how it all works.

Because I've not been keeping to my game a month schedule, I'm going to mark this minor game as part of the project but not give it a number, I'll label it 'b'. 'a' will be the Unity game which I'll finish off and post shortly.

A note on sound

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:32:00 +0000

Since I've revamped the sound engine for the toolkit I've created and have interfaced it with Whirligig, I thought I'd talk a bit about the design decisions behind the sound.

Firstly, all sound is played from plain old WAV files. This is purely for practical purposes. I don't want to start mucking about with OGG and other things in C# as there isn't much in the way of good libraries for doing so and all the sound effects are small enough that keeping them uncompressed isn't an issue.

All the sounds for both Hoshi and Whirligig (and probably projects 3 and 4) has been done in sfxr, which is a very useful project that just outputs simple waves with a few parameters to play with, allowing easy retro sound effects to be created with minimal effort.

So in actual code I use OpenAL where-ever possible. This is mostly because it's a fairly comprehensive library that takes raw WAV data and works on any system with the OpenAL library installed (Windows, Linux and OS X are all supported, for instance).
However OpenAL isn't available on all systems, but .NET and Mono provide a very basic sound player in the form of System.Media.SoundPlayer. This works well for single sound effects, but is useless for playing multiple sounds together. This will be less obvious with some games over others. It's very obvious on Hoshi, but does give an idea of what is being missed. It's also somewhat buggy under Mono it seems, playing sounds unexpectedly or not at all in some cases. As this is purely a back up system I'm not too worried about it and won't be making any effort to fix the problem(s) introduced through this method.

So, when started the sound system checks the options file. If the options file says to not bother with sound, it just loads the dummy sound driver, which just says "ok" to everything, so the game thinks the sound system is all working, but the driver does nothing with any data passed to it.
If the options file says to use OpenAL, it checks that OpenAL is installed on the system then attempts to use it. If either of the checks for OpenAL or if a valid OpenAL context can be created fail then it drops back to the dummy driver.
If the options file says to use the SoundPlayer then the sound system will attempt to create a SoundPlayer class, if that works then it will assume that SoundPlayer works and so use that. If it fails it will default to the dummy sound driver.

The last two options are 'Auto' and 'ForceOpenAL' and are a bit more complicated.
'Auto' is the default and will attempt to use OpenAL followed by SoundPlayer then will drop to the dummy if both fail.
'ForceOpenAL' will skip all checks when initialising OpenAL, which will cause a crash if OpenAL isn't installed. This shouldn't ever be needed by a user and was intended by debug purposes.

So that's the new sound system. As I stated, after modifying it to this in Hoshi, I inserted it into Whirligig this morning and now Whirligig has a multitude of retro sounds that bring some extra life to the game.

Hoshi bug fixes

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:29:00 +0000

I'm making an effort to get Whirligig released (hopefully this week, maybe even today, I'm not sure how long it will take to do what I want with it).
In doing so, one of the things that needs implementing is sound. I have all the sounds I need ready and I had Hoshi's sound engine. So, no problem, yes?

Well, Hoshi's sound engine isn't perfect. It actually causes the game to crash randomly when OpenAL isn't installed. This is a fairly major issue, so I decided to go back and fix this on Hoshi before moving the engine across to Whirligig.
Whilst I was working on the engine I quickly added a simple substitute for the sound when OpenAL isn't installed. This uses .NET's or Mono's System.Media.SoundPlayer. This isn't ideal because it will only play one sound at a time with no mixing and Hoshi requires many sounds to be playing at once to sound correct. But it's a good substitute for those who don't want to go searching for OpenAL.

So, now Hoshi will work out of the box with sound, although you'll get a much better experience with OpenAL installed. There's also an additional option in the hoshioptions.xml file in AppData that allows changing the sound engine. So you can set it off, set it to the Media.SoundPlayer option or set it to OpenAL. There's also a ForceOpenAL option which skips any checks for OpenAL and is not really recommended as it will cause the same crashing issues as before if used on a system without OpenAL.

Anyway, new release is here.
These are purely bugfixes, if the version of Hoshi you have already doesn't have issues you won't gain anything from this new version.

And now I can do some work on Whirligig.

Voxels

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 04:37:00 +0000

Yeah, yeah, I know, not really getting anywhere with the games. S'bad, but I'll get back to it.

I've been writing a voxel editor recently.
Voxel's aren't an easily concept to explain, although they're a simple concept to understand. In essence a voxel is a 3D pixel. That is a standard bitmap you create in paint is made up of pixels along the x and y dimensions, voxels add a z dimension allowing for easy 3D rendering.

So, I've written a (currently) simple editor for building voxel art with the intention of using it in my future games.
Right now the editor isn't much use for more than simple voxelart. I've been test-driving the editor for most of today and know there's about half a dozen features that need adding to its toolbox.
So, without further ado, this is what I managed yesterday:

For those not in the know, it's called a Menger Sponge which is a fairly basic cube fractal. This is taken to the 3rd iteration and contains 8000 cubes of which I clicked every bloody one (and don't I know it!)

So, will be adding some basic things like copy and paste, colour fill and keyboard shortcuts.
Also need to compress the voxel save files as a 27x27x27 image such as this one clocks in at 9.5MB.
At that point I'll make a simple video explaining more about the editor and if people are very lucky I might release it.

So what is the point in all this? Well it's to develop an art style for projects 3 and 4. Hoping having some artwork to play with will motivate me to make a move on them.

I also might have a try at doing some simple pure-animation using some voxels, will see how the games go first though.

Err, yeah, hi

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:04:00 +0000

I do still exist. The Game-a-month project is still on my list of things to do, I'm just having a bit of a hiatus.
This is, of course, not particularly good, but it's where I'm at for the moment so it's happening.

I've spent most of the last two months not coding, so, not a lot to say here.
However recently I've picked up an idea for comparing track rollercoasters on Audiosurf that someone was interested in a while back.
The original thread is on the Audiosurf forums here and is basically asking for an easy way to sort tracks by the amount of traffic they have.
Retrieving traffic information involves digging through a .ash file locally or asking the servers for it. I've not done any experimenting in pulling that data from the Audiosurf servers yet, however I already had the code for retrieving the track shape, which is a good indication of the traffic a track will have and the speed it will run at.

So, in a few hours I put together a very quick program to pull the track shape (and global scores) for a named track. Very easy to do, and the result is posted in the thread mentioned.

But that doesn't technically compare the tracks, or order them or anything, it just allows for quickly viewing multiple songs outside of Audiosurf. Useful, but not ideal.
For a long while I left the application there, then I picked it up again a week or so ago and began work on a 'playlist' section of the application. This downloads a track shape for every song in a playlist with the eventual idea being that it will show an estimate for how 'quick' the track will be, allow sorting and re-tagging of [as-steep] to slower tracks.

It quickly became obvious once I had the "download lots of track shapes" code implemented that the Audiosurf server is struggling to stay up at the moment (indeed, whilst making the screenshots below, I had significant issues with the Audiosurf server timing out, even for single-song lookups). This is noticeable if you use the forums much and/or play the game a lot as the forum, scoreboards and logging in are often down. Obviously I don't want to make this workload any worse, so I've implemented a cache for the track shapes that stores this data locally as presumably a track shape shouldn't change unless the picked user is cheating.

To avoid accidentally pulling out cheaters, the app always goes for the last global score of the 'Elite' category, if there's no elite scores it goes for the last of the pro, then last of the casual. The assumption being that a cheater will hold the top spot and not be lower down on the scoreboard. Additionally the "single song" searcher that was initially implemented (and will be launchable from the playlist window) will allow you to store which rollercoaster you want to see locally.

Possibly will take it as far as YAAP (Yet Another Audiosurf Player) with tagging features, etc, not decided yet.

Oh, have an example image that's rather sparse. Much will be added, hopefully (click to view full size):

Hoshi update

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:11:00 +0000

Err, yeah, forgot about this, sorry!

New version of Hoshi with working sounds under Linux.

Quick post

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:42:00 +0000

Just a quick note to say I've finally tested Hoshi in Linux.
Good news is that it works.
Bad news is that I messed up the sound paths. I'll push out an update for that tomorrow.

What is interesting is that it runs considerably better full-screen than on Windows. I guess that isn't particularly surprising though since Windows is bloated and not a particularly good OS choice from a gaming technical perspective.

General update

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:16:00 +0000

I've been lazy this week and not done any work on Whirligig. Hence the lack of updates here.

What I have been doing is playing Merentha again. Which is a MUD (an early multiplayer RPG, generally with far more involved systems than more modern MMORPGs).
Used to play it all the time, but it gets a bit of a grind so I play on and off since it's free.
No pretty graphics, it's all text-based, but the base gameplay is unrivalled by MMORPGs imo.

Err, that's pretty much it. I won't get any work done this weekend since I'm in Scotland for a stag do (not mine!)

The only real bit of news on Whirligig I guess I've for is that I started the shop on Monday then thought I had a serious UI problem, so I played Merentha whilst I thought it over and realised I didn't have a problem. :oP
Just need to put UI components together, but as I've stated before I don't enjoy that aspect of coding at all.

A word on Gaming in general

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Sat, 22 May 2010 15:29:00 +0000

Or at least my views on it.
This is an opinion post, you have been warned. ;o)

I'm going to delve into that pandora's box known as "games as art". It's been done to death I know.

Anyway, I came across this 15 minute presentation today:

I largely agree with this presentation. Games are a wonderful media with an amazing future. However I don't really expect them to be taken as art.

Personally games mean a lot more to me than a picture, tv program, movie, music or even a book ever will. And that's because it's both none of these whilst at the same time being all of these.

In a game you can combine a wonderful stylistic view (like Okami's) with visually dramatic story arc scenes (like Heavy Rain) whilst playing an epic sound track (too many to mention, just listen to some game soundtracks sometime) and having an over-arching story as long as a book without missing things out due to how long your audience is likely to want to sit in one spot (large JRPGs do this best, like the FF series). Oh, and it's all interactive as well. No other form of media can do all these things at once. Movies come closest, but lack the long-term story or interactivity.

This isn't to say games should be the only media. Personally I think they're by far the best around and they're almost the sole method I use now for 'proper' entertainment, but they'll always be a place for stories you don't interact in. For example, I still love a good book and I listen to music whilst coding as trying to play a game at the same time would be hard. But movies and TV have near no meaning to me. There's a handful I like, but it's not with the same passion I feel for a game. I struggle to find any film that engages me and TV is even worse. But that's a personal view of a fairly hardcore gamer. What I will point out is that many of those who criticise games don't play them. I do watch movies and TV, I just don't enjoy them anywhere near as much as I do games.

Now, despite all this, I still don't think games can be classed as art by most people and the simple reason is this: The definition of art is woolly. It will never be 100% certain.
In short, the fault lies in the people who define what art is, not in the games, which often inspire higher emotions than many, personally, for me, I'd even say all, forms of artwork.
This is why I've used the term "media" in here. Games are definitely a media, and in terms of entertainment media they have all others beat. In terms of engaging the user on an emotional level they have all others beat (assuming it's a good game) purely because they have interaction, which makes you feel in the story. No other medium can do that.

So, that's my take on the piece. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

More boring UI progress.

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:29:00 +0000

Pretty much all the key in-game UI is now done. Although not thoroughly tested, which will come at a later date.

The in-game logic for the UI is also done, take this screenshot for example:

You'll note there's no "Fire!" button. This is because the player doesn't have enough of this projectile type (would need 12 -- 3 bounce split x 4 normal split).
I will add a message for these occasions at some point (so I guess the in-game UI isn't finished ;o))

Another quick screenie:

This shows an instance when the player can fire, just a three-way split with a normal shell.
When a player has an infinite number of a weapon type, the infinity symbol is used.

Not shown in these screenies is the shot/shell/projectile windows that now also have the numbers of each type left as well.
So, as I've been saying for the past few days. Shop next!

Quick edit: Yes, I do know the labels are wonky, I've just fixed that. ;o) I should also point out that the "Split At" tools only appear when a relevant shot type is selected and aren't there the rest of the time as they're not relevant. Prevents confusion. ;o)

Quick UI taster

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:47:00 +0000

This is how far Whirligig has moved along:

As you can see, everything is labelled, the 'projectile', 'shell' and 'shot' types all have icons (although pretty crappy ones ;o)) Clicking on them opens a window like the shell type one shown, which is showing 'normal', 'bounce', 'double bounce', 'double split', 'triple split' and 'clusterbomb'.
A 'split time' counter has been added so you can see how that works.
Oh, and there's 3 players, which (as I think I stated) was possible back as far as the tech demo, I just used 2 players back then.

The window is busier than I'd like. I need to fit the number of shots/shells/projectiles on there yet, which will require some reshuffling. Also I've not implemented that part to the weapon-choice windows either. And still not started on the shop. Still, getting there slowly.

Minor update

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:30:00 +0000

Not a lot to report really, all current work is pulling together UI parts. It's pretty boring stuff.

Have I mentioned I hate UI work? ;o)
Unfortunately most of the rest of this project is UI work now. The only bit that isn't really is the AI and level generator.

The level generator will just create 3 (or half the number of players, whichever is lower) planets and make sure they're spaced far enough apart then randomly locate the players making sure they're never closer than 90 degrees on a planet.
There may be some occasions on small planets where players get placed close together, but these should be rare(ish).

The AI I'm unsure how to do... I think I'll just have the projectile report back how close to an enemy the shot was and have the AI adjust from there. I could probably write in a load of simulation code that would make the AI dead smart, but I think a simple "how near am I?" setup will work well enough for the level of game I'm aiming at this. Were it a commercial product I'd bung in several AI levels, including a genius one that never missed. ;o)

Whirligig Update

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Well I did write a fairly long post about this yesterday, but lost it, somehow.

Anyway, I took a small break over the weekend since I finished Hoshi early and yesterday I resumed Whirligig.

First thing I implemented was a shell type window to go along with the shot type window.
I should probably explain the shell/shot/projectile types at this point.

Projectile types determine the size of destruction (there's 4 sizes).
Shot types determine whether the projectile will split after it's fired and into how many subsequent projectiles (1-5). The length of time before splitting can also be set.
Shell types determine what the projectile does on impact. This is the most complex and consists of bouncing (once or twice) or splitting (2 or 3 times) or a clusterbomb which explodes at the impact point and fires 4 other shots off.

I now need to finish building the GUI for these (timing for split shots and projectile type need implementing) then put together a shop.

The shop is needed because you will start with a limited number of each projectile. The only thing you'll have inifinite of is normal/normal/normal. Although this can all be changed in the options.

Basic gameplay will consist of a series of rounds (1-20). The shop can be set to be available mid-round or only at the end of each round.
After the rounds various stats will be shown with a 'score' winner, a 'kills' winner and a 'rounds' winner.

I don't think that's as clear as my original post about all this, unfortunately. If you've any questions, leave them in the comments and I'll try and clarify. Or you can wait a few days and I'll post some screenshots hopefully. ;o)

Hoshi release!

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:10:00 +0000

I'm releasing Hoshi today, earlier than I originally planned because, well, it's done.

Without further ado, you can download it from here (~800KB).
And a picture of the final version:

I'm uploading a video of it running at the moment, will take some time because my connection is broken horribly right now, but will add a link to that when it's done.
Edit: Video is here.

On with Whirligig now, with a release date looking around June 15th, but that's not set in stone.

Feel free to comment with any bugs. AFAIK there aren't any, but if there's anything large enough I'll fix it and re-release.
I haven't done all the fiddling about with OpenAL that I intended to. There are some checks in there but I've no idea if they're enough, so you may need to install OpenAL as well. Downloads are available from creative here. Linux users should have it in their repo somewhere, but I'm not 100% on that.

Discussion on future projects

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:55:00 +0000

Since I've effectively finished Hoshi now, which is effectively project 2 but will be the first released, I thought I'd better start looking at ideas for future projects.

I do have a fairly large accumulation of game ideas, but most are too big for a month project and are more in the 6 month to 2 year time frame which I'm best staying away from for now.

So, what will fit in a month? Well, I have a ideas for 2 platformers, but I lack the graphics and level design experience to manage these properly in a month. Both would (ideally) need level editors which would be a project in and of itself.
So, I'll be leaving these for now, but I'll come back to them.

So I've decided on two relatively boring concepts for projects three and four and I'll give you the reasoning for them:
Project three will be an arena shooter (player in the middle of a single room with a gun that can shoot in 8 directions with enemies approaching from every direction). I estimate this will take around 2 weeks to write the code, but the sprites will take a long while as I'm hopeless at pixel art, but the entire point of this project is to improve that aspect.

Project Four will be a single-room-platformer. Classic examples being Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy from the 8-bit era. Again I'm not expecting more than around 2 weeks to write the main code and another week for a level editor. Some artwork will be re-used from project 3 (I may make this a sequel of sorts). The primary goal of this project is to experiment in level design and see what I can learn.

So, there you have it, projects three and four. Estimated (but not solid) release dates will be mid-July for 3 and mid-August for 4.

That was easy

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:46:00 +0000

It's, err, sorted.
Sound is working.

I haven't tested for systems without OpenAL yet. I think I have enough checks to stop an outright crash but I need to be sure.
I also haven't added the "sound effects on/off" line in the options, which needs doing as not everyone likes retro beeps and whistles. Might add a volume control to that as well, will see.

But yeah, the game is pretty much finished. I'll make a video later demonstrating the sounds and um, guess I'll release it once I've checked the OpenAL stuff and added that line to the options screen.

It's done!

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:17:00 +0000

That is, everything but the sound is.
I may not finish the sound by Sunday (should do, but I can't be 100%), in which case I'll release this version on Sunday instead.
Also, things may go terribly wrong with the sound on various systems, so I'm going to have to abstract it away and try and check for errors at runtime then run with a "null" sound driver if things go wrong.

Doing the additional checks is probably what will take up most of the time.
I'll be using sfxr to make the effects, which is exceedingly good at making retro noises, which fits in with the whole theme Hoshi goes for.
I'm going to try and recreate the original sound effects as closely as possible, but that may not work 100%, will have to see.

Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Had a busy evening.
Most of the options menu now works. It's klunky horrible, horrible code, but it works.
It's completely centred on Hoshi, which means I can't re-use this menu code. Something I realised late today. Given the choice I'd do the entire thing differently, but it's close enough to completion now to not be worth redoing. Next time I make a non-mouse menu I know what to do at least.

So what works?
- Resolution changes (only 2 resolutions are supported, but you can change these to whatever you want in the options, initially they're set as 800x600 and 1280x800).
- Moving to/from fullscreen. It's not ideal, OpenTK doesn't do this particularly well and I seem to lose a fair whack of performance (which I believe is actually Windows' fault), but it's there.
- Changing between keysets and joystick.
- Resetting the high score.

What's to implement?
- Custom key changes.
- Sound effects on/off (implementing sound first is a bit of a must for this one. ;o))

Additionally I added a refreshrate variable to the options file, so this can be changed by hand. It's set to 60 by default, which will be fine for TFTs but is generally unpleasant on CRTs.

Also: Options are saved on exit, not on change. So if you change some options then manage to crash the game (I've not managed it yet) then they won't be saved and neither will your highscore.
I know highscore editing is simple, but really, who benefits? ;o)

Also found and squashed a bug earlier where it was possible to spawn a bazillion enemies on level 1 and so use that to significantly boost your score. Whoops.

Still looking good for a Sunday release anyway. I worked out earlier that I'll have written the entire game in 26 days (started it on the 20th of April). Pretty sure that's a good achievement. :o)

Just a quick teaser, image of the options screen:

More on Joysticks

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:47:00 +0000

Slowly working through the Options menu. I really hate UI design.

The good news is the UK election is sorted. I'm not convinced it will last more than a couple of years, and things aren't exactly how I'd like them, but they'll do. We shouldn't be running off invading any more countries illegally for the time being anyway. :oP

Anyway, Joysticks.
I have Joystick support implemented and working. It feels fine to me, but I don't like joystick controls on this sort of game personally.
I edited the OpenTK source to implement it in the end with a semi-clumsy hack.
I'm fairly certain it's badly optimised, but it work for now. I'm not looking to break any optimisation records with Hoshi. ;o)

I'm not extensively testing it. Random unplugs etc are undefined. It's mostly there as a testbed for future projects among which will probably be platformers, for which joystick support is a must.

Another update

noreply@blogger.com (Mincus) — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:53:00 +0000

I've spent the afternoon avoiding the Options menu. I really hate UI coding, it's so full of potentially tricksy pieces.

Instead I've fixed all the niggly bugs and added explosions to ship deaths, including the player, with a seconds worth of delay after dying so you can watch the remains of your ship fly into the unknown.

So yes, everything is now drawn correctly at the edges of the Arena and I've removed those horrible red lines. Passage between one edge and another should be unnoticeable.

I've made some minor changes to balance.
Enemy ships now have a variable amount of shield power depending on the wave. Up to wave 5 you'll always insta-kill them. At wave 6 they'll take 2 shots, at wave 11 they'll take 3, 16 they'll take 4, etc.

I don't think there's anything else to add at all to the game itself now. Balancing tests still need to be done, but I think that should be fair enough. Getting past Wave 11 will require considerable skill I suspect, but that was true on the original Foray as well. I think the furthest I ever got on that was around wave 15.