Click here or on the image below to try it out! http://redclovergames.com/blog/?page_id=565

For the technically inclined, here’s a quick list of features implemented so far:

• Basic path finding (using A* of course, thank you Aron Granberg!)
• Controllable Wizard Unit w/Fireball spell
• Collapsible bridges
• Walls and Castle structures

I think I’m going to like this project…

So here’s what I came up with in the last 2 hours or so.  I may not have much time to work on it this weekend, but it’s fun anyway.  The concept is a Physics based Tactical RPG [turn based], played out on a hexagonal grid, with different types of units and interactive/dynamic terrain and obstacles.

I decided to run with the concept, and fix a lot of things, keeping some of the puzzles the same, rewriting some, and adding a lot more content.  I’m probably going to rename the game, because the name is too generic and I literally decided on the name in the last 10 minutes of the competition while I was submitting my entry.

I’ve done a couple of things so far, worth mentioning, so here’s a glimpse:

• I’m revamping the way my modelling in Blender was done, so I have cleaner transitions and better control over connections like the stairwell.
• Opened up the room depth, taking full advantage of the “octagonal space” on each floor.
• Stairwells no longer require a turn halfway through (I’m not sure if this will make it harder or easier, but so far I like the new style better)
• Adding Toon-Style shading where appropriate
• Fixed some camera angle issues to give better depth perspective.  (may tweak this some more)

Lots more to come!  Stay tuned!

Play: The Wizard Apprentice

Things I would have liked to do if I had the full 48 hours of dedication:

• Sound!
• Textured walls
• Animated Avatar
• Cleaner controls
• Better GUI
• More Magic (but he’s only an apprentice).

But hey, with such strict time limitations, not a whole lot you can do, so without further ado, go enjoy The Wizard Apprentice!

• Ice
• Penguins
• Alligators
• Bow & Arrow
• Pickaxe
• Mineable Copper Ore
• Ash
• Caves
• Skeletons
• Edit: Treasure Chests (with nothing in them and very cool audio)

Coming soon:  Banjos and Penguin mounts?

So to get things started, here’s a quick screenshot of the implementation in HexDev:

Concept

The basic concept is to display numbers above a unit whenever they take damage.  The number should rise for a certain height at a given speed and then poof away!  Nice and simple right?

So, to do this using my approach, we need a couple things:

1. A Prefab with a TextMesh component attached.
2. A Unit object with a MonoBehaviour attached that calls: SendMessage(“DamageTaken”, x);   where x is the number to be displayed.
3. The ScrollingCombatText behaviour below attached to the GameObject that you want to display SCT numbers.

So, Step 1) In my projects, I have created a prefab called SCTText which looks like this:

Nothing fancy, again just a GameObject that has a TextMesh object on it.  The beauty of it is that you can change this prefab to have a mesh or particles or whatever you want on it.  The number will be updated by the ScrollingCombatText script below.

For step 2, all of my units have a special behaviour attached to them that manages their health.  Whenever they take damage, they simply use the Unity SendMessage API to notify other MonoBehaviour’s attached to the game object that the unit has taken damage.  This will probably need to be tailored to your project.

And for step 3, I just attach the script below to my GameObject, give it the Prefab we defined in step 1, configure some parameters and whenever the unit takes damge, voila!  Scrolling combat text!  Here’s what the configuration of the script looks like on my units (each unit can have their own values or we can use the default values):

Code – ScrollingCombatText

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
 
public class ScrollingCombatText : MonoBehaviour
{
	// How fast will the spawned text object rise
    public float RiseRate = 4.0f;
	// How high should the spawned text object rise
    public float RiseHeight = 10.0f;
 
	// Prefab with an attached TextMesh component that will be spawned when damage is taken
    public GameObject TextPrefab = null;
 
    private List floatingTextObjects = new List();
 
	// This will be the starting height of the floating numbers
	private float initialHeight = 0.0f;
 
	// Use this for initialization
	void Start ()
    {
		// If this component is attached to a CharacterController, use the CharacterController's height attribute to set the initial height
		CharacterController charController = gameObject.GetComponent();
		if (charController != null)
			initialHeight = charController.height;
	}
 
	// Requires the GameObject to have a method call to: SendMessage("DamageTaken", int)
    void DamageTaken(int damageAmount)
    {
		// Create a new text object and set the starting height and text
        GameObject textInstance = (GameObject)Instantiate(TextPrefab);
        textInstance.transform.parent = gameObject.transform;
        textInstance.transform.localPosition = new Vector3(0, initialHeight, 0);
 
        TextMesh mesh = textInstance.GetComponent<TextMesh>();
        mesh.text = damageAmount.ToString();
 
		// Add to the list of floating text objects to update every frame
        floatingTextObjects.Add(textInstance);
    }
 
	// Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
		// Cache all text meshes to be deleted and later delete them
        List objectsToDelete = new List();
 
        foreach (GameObject floatingTextObject in floatingTextObjects)
        {
			float riseDelta = Time.deltaTime * RiseRate;
            Vector3 newPosition = new Vector3(floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.x, floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.y + riseDelta, floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.z);
            floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition = newPosition;
            floatingTextObject.transform.LookAt(floatingTextObject.transform.position + Camera.mainCamera.transform.forward);
 
			// Delete this floating text object if it exceeds our RiseHeight property
            if (floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.y &gt;= initialHeight + RiseHeight)
            {
                objectsToDelete.Add(floatingTextObject);
            }
        }
 
        foreach (GameObject objectToDelete in objectsToDelete)
        {
            floatingTextObjects.Remove(objectToDelete);
            Destroy(objectToDelete);
        }
    }
}

Ethics

For a game like Grand Theft Auto, someone sat in a room and answered some of those questions: “I want players to [virtually] kill other virtual characters with weapons.” or “I want players to steal cars [because you're not allowed to in real life!]” or “I want players to steal money to buy drugs.”  Maybe they didn’t say it out loud and they probably didn’t say it in those exact phrases, but someone had to think of the concept, convey it to a team, and test it out to see how fun it was.  And it must have been fun and people must have liked it because it sold like crazy!

I struggle internally with the idea of pushing content that is “unethical”.  If I make a game with violence in it, am I condoning that action?  If I put my brand logo on food that is bad for people’s health does that mean I want people to die?  Do I really want me kids and people playing my game to learn about violence or stealing or death like this?

Curiosity

I recently discovered an indie game called Catapult For Hire by Tyrone Henrie.  There was an interview conducted by Indie Games Channel where they ask him about his motivations and I really think I can relate to this guy [aside from the fact that I don't have the guts to quit my day job to program games full time since I'm supporting a family of 5]. In that article, he tells why he started developing Catapult for Hire:

Originally, I wanted to enter a game into a competition and so I decided to do something involving catapults. [...]  I didn’t want to do just another game where you throw stuff and hit stuff.

So from that, we can imply that his primary objective was to “do something different”.  Reading on a little bit, I found a more concrete example of his game design goal:

From a gameplay standpoint, my goal is to create a sense of childlike wonder where the world is your little plaything.

So there is a very abstract goal for his desire to make a video game, in which many game developers (including myself) share.  I do enjoy exploration and fulfilling curiosity, giving people an avenue to “play” things they cannot in real life.

Build A Better Mousetrap

In a recent interview with Raph Koster, he talks about developers being inspired by those that came before them.  The developers of EQ wanted to build something better than MUDs, the developers of WoW wanted to build something better than EQ, etc… etc…  So, I guess that could be viewed as an inspiration.  When we see something and experience something, I think it’s natural that we want to point out the flaws and try to fix them and make it better.

So should I just try to build something better?  Take the latest trend, fix a few things and tweak it?  Or is that shallow?  Personally I can’t see myself just creating another game like game X.  I feel like I need to make a difference and do something unique.

The Gamification Reality

Raph Koster also talks about the gamification of things in the real world and how the lines between gaming and reality are becoming blurred, in a totally whimsical but seriously awesome presentation at GDC Online this year.  Game design is no longer focused on your basement dweller, soda drinking, couch potato persona, it’s getting “serious” and “popular” and “social”, GASP!

Will Wright takes it 1 step further with a new start-up company called Hivemind, who will be developing games of the genre “personal gaming”.  In this article, Will Wright explains his concept of “personal gaming”:

The idea is that the game will be designed to provide a personal experience to each individual player by taking into account aspects from the player’s real life….If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life. How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?”

So, Will Wright is suggesting here that the objectives of these “personal gaming” game designs are to engage you more in reality rather than create a distraction.  I mean, right there he flat out calls games a “distraction”… which really makes a lot of sense.  So as a game designer am I really just building a “distraction”, something pointless to pass the time?  In some ways, I can’t help but feel that yeah, that’s what every game I’ve ever played is doing.

Virtual “Reality”

However, I am also reminded of Mojang and Minecraft and how they are inspiring communities to design their neighborhood.  Through this sandbox “game”, people are going to share their ideas about the community and construction companies are going to use these “virtual blueprints” to help design real.  life.  places! How cool!  The game becomes a tool!

Speaking of tools, our bodies are wonderful tools too.  Bret Victor of WorryDream.com, wrote an article that discusses the Future of Interaction Design.  What do I take from this?  Well, I think that consoles like the Wii [and Kinect] are already showing us the potential that our bodies have in the gaming world.  The idea and effort that went into designing this system was not merely an extrapolation of existing designs (add 1 more button, use 1 less finger), where we continue to use a controller.  Instead, they utilized the human potential to interact with the game worlds and created something that changed the world of gaming!  So, some game designer was inspired to give more meaning and value to gaming by creating this, which I think is great.

Then there is Foldit.  The concept is that by playing a protein folding “game”, you are helping contribute to important medical research, which can help real people!

Education Games

My children play lots of education based games right now that teach them numbers, counting, shapes, letters, logic, colors, and many other fundamental life skills that we also teach them by way of reading, talking, drawing, discussion, tangible toys, playing games, etc…  But I guess the point here is that some game designs are built with the intention to teach somebody something of value.  Knowing that golems are weak against fire and the only way to kill a 1 eyed tree frog with blue skin is to fire a poison dart into belly doesn’t really provide a whole lot of tangible takeaways.  That’s rather useless information really, but it’s fun!  Education game design takes the idea that we can convey important facts to people through fun activities.  Personally, I was always more motivated by labs than reading from a book in Science class.  I thought it was great to see stuff in action and learn that way.

As a game designer, our fundamental goal is to give our players something to do…

So now that I wrote this blog post, I guess I am still asking myself:  What do I want people to do?

Desining emergent gameplay is awesome!

<crickets>

Ahem, ok, so I made the link to HexDev at the top point directly to the game on Kongregate.  This will help me save some web space and generate a bit of revenue (hahahaha), ahem… as I keep developing.  At some point, if Kongregate supports the Shared Content API for Unity, I’m ready to integrate it into the game so people can share custom maps.  Someday I may have to write my own content sharing API if they don’t deliver.

Here’s where you come in!  If you have a Kongregate account, I need a few more votes on the game to see how people like it so far.  The problem with Kongregate is that once games fall off the “new” list, they never get seen again, unless they are 5/5 star games which make the front page.  But at the same time, that makes sense for their business because a lot of garbage and prototype stuff gets put there, so they have to.

So, long story short:

1. Go vote for HexDev on Kongregate! (so I can see the score)
2. If you dislike this change for any reason, comment below so I can reconsider the change.

Thanks!

Oh, and I reverted some of the graphics back to smooth shading instead of flat shading to get the nice outlines.  I think I like it.

Enjoy!