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Christmas is over, I’m home, and I have a bit of time before I go back to work. My resolution last year was to be more prolific – take on lots of different stuff, do it all, stop whining. In that spirit, I’m going to try to get a bunch of stuff done. I doubt I’ll manage it all, but here’s the plan.
Work on Gunpoint for two days straight Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th. Redesign Pentadact.com Start ‘Notebook’ Post: What Makes Games Good Post: What Games Are Bad At Tweak Scanno Domini | ||
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Some pictures from mine. It’s snowy here in England, and the Dorset hills are a nice place to stomp around in it.
I got a Kindle! If you mail me stuffs – anything like a .txt .doc or .pdf – it’ll pop up on my cyberhyperbook! This is the address: pentadact@free.kindle.com | ||
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Ronin08: Wow, lot of power for a little point-and-shoot. The last photo's especially good, and that shot of the deer running is great. =D
So were those photos you took of the hot-air balloon in an earlier post somewhere in the archives also on that Isux 65? | ||||
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I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it. It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true. That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me. Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Mike McQuaid: In with a completely tangental point that one of the managers in my company calls the younger employees "kid".
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I’ve just put up a new version of the game I made last weekend, Scanno Domini. You encounter randomly generated enemy robots, scan them to unlock their parts, then kill them and take all their guns, shields and engines for yourself. Grab the new version here.
If you do play it, I’d love to know what you thought of it – I’ve been really surprised by the feedback so far. This version fixes a few significant bugs I didn’t have time to test during the compo – the competition version will stay as it is for judging purposes, of course, I’m just putting this up for anyone who wants to have fun with it. The key changes are:
Sometime after Christmas, I think I may try a 48 hour sprint with Gunpoint. Getting so much done in such a short time is exhilarating, and it could really use a burst of progress to get it to a point where it makes sense.
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The Escape Game I’m Not Going To Make This Weekend, by Tom Francis: [...] on this weekend, and the theme is Escape. This is the 21st compo – I entered the 19th with Scanno Domini, and regretted not entering the [...]
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Jeeesus. Five minutes to go, and my game is zipped up and submitted. Grab it here. Feels strange and amazing to be ‘done’ with something – I’ve tinkered around with games for months without getting to a point I’m happy with. And while there are a few items not grayed out on my Scanno to do list, I did much more than I ever thought I could in two days. And I actually have fun playing the result. Rather embarrassed about Gunpoint now. It could probably be done in a week.
The finished game is pretty much what I planned: a top-down shooter with randomised enemies, whose randomised bits you can steal for yourself. I didn’t end up scaling much dynamically, except the gun sizes. I couldn’t find a way to make it look right in the time, so it was quicker – even for me – to draw a few engine and weapon types. The differences are more immediately interesting, too – “Ooh, blue plasma?”
Number one thing that went right was definitely time management. I had two days, so I picked something I thought I might just about be able to do in one. It was done in one and a half, so I had that crucial half day to take a working concept, find the fun, and make the game about that. I don’t know if I actually made it fun, but it’s so much closer than it would have been if I’d picked a more ambitious idea and only just got the basics hammered out. This is my first finished game, and given the time limit I thought I’d end up with something a lot more half-baked. It is buggy, and its tutorial is just gibberish, but in an ideal circumstance it’s conceivable that it could convey to you what you need to know. Oh, except that you have to press R to restart.
Thing that went least well was trouble shooting. I’m rarely good at this, but on the scanning ray in particular I just went out of my mind. It’s still buggy – won’t always scan everything there is to scan on your first scan – and I may have messed up other things in the last minute fixes.
I said I was going to leave graphics till last, but in the end I decided it was worth a stab at them if I gave myself a hard time limit. I basically managed to turn the visuals from offensively ugly to merely very crude. I’m OK with crude. There’s just a particular look to very bad graphics that’s not endearing or ignorable or in any way OK, and I had to try to avoid that. I also took time to put in sounds for almost everything important, and I’m really glad I did. I knew they’d be important to the feel, but I didn’t quite appreciate how important the feel would be to the overall thing. It’s not an art game, it’s not very brave or inventive, so it really needs to have some decent ‘pew pew!’s in. I have exactly no time tomorrow to polish this up and also submit it to the jam, the less strict contest that gives an extra day. Which is a shame, because it needs a few bandages to hold it together properly, and a few basic human rights like a choice of resolutions. I will do those things, just not right away. For now, I am done. Thanks for all the comments, support and puns.
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Jason L: To clarify the 'damage' thing, I absolutely agree that a shield should never take more or less than one bolt. I just thought that when I fired three bolts each bolt would take out one shield.
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Which is to say: not graphics or content complete. So brace yourself for a painfully similar screenshot:
But the two tiny changes you do see represent pretty much everything else I needed to get done for the game to make sense: you can now scan enemies when they’re not looking to steal the details of their weapons, then use that info to rebuild their guns, shields and engines when they’re dead. I’m happy I’ve got to this point, but there’s a lot more to do. I have a choice of a few fairly major areas to work on, and I’ll list them in my current priority order:
The reason graphics is so low is that the time it takes is such a wildcard – sometimes I get something bad right away, other times it takes me hours to make something bad. Let me know if you think my priority order is nuts. Current title idea: Scanno Domini. Other scan puns welcome.
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Jason L: Through A Scanner Whitely
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The screenshot I’m about to show you won’t look spectacularly different to the one earlier – I still haven’t fixed the horrible protagonist bot or the laughable kid’s snow effect. But to play, it’s already close to what the finished game will be. The main thing is randomised enemies, with visually apparent stats. Randomisation will be part of the Discovery element, and also just the fun of the game: it’s never going to be a great shooter, but it’s already kind of cool to blunder into a triple-barreled deathbot with hyper speed and discover a whole new echelon of boned. The visual apparency – representing every stat in the shape of the enemy rather than a stats readout – is part of that too. It gives your read on the enemies immediacy, and that’s a catalyst for fun. I need all of those I can get. Hopefully you can tell which one of these enemies has more firepower, and which one is better protected.
What you can’t see, and what you probably won’t even find if you play it, is the ridiculous amount of fun I’m having with it. Most of this afternoon was spent thrashing out the enemy movement to be more convincing and dangerous, and all of this evening was spent drawing just a few bad sprites – it takes me actual time to get pixel art to the dismal level of quality you see here. Then in less than half an hour, I did the coding legwork to implement every chunk of art into modularly assembled, dynamically scaled, randomised deathbots. And the game’s gone from being a tame arena where I can always win through knowing the tricks, to a terrifying robot safari where things with crazy muzzle velocities can also outrun me, and I see combinations I hadn’t pictured. It’s not exactly good, yet, but it’s an amazing thrill to see that kind of stuff come to life from a few simple maths statements. I can pretty much stomach art work if it’s for a game that can stretch and recombine it to endless different purposes.
I’ve also had an idea for how to relate the game more obviously to the Discovery theme. It’s fun to try and creep up on these bots when they’re not looking. They turn round if you shoot them, to prevent the game being too easy, but I’m going to make it so that you can subtly scan them if you get up close and undetected. If they have a module you’ve never used before, you’ll gain the ability to salvage it if you later kill the bot. And if they don’t, you’ll be able to read their robo-thoughts. Not entirely sure what I’m going to do with that, but even if it’s just an array of pointless introspection it should be fun to write.
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Jason L:
If they have a module you’ve never used before, you’ll gain the ability to salvage it if you later kill the bot. Hooray for this. There is nothing wrong with any game being more like Captain Forever. | ||||
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Two surprising things have happened: firstly, I’ve made a game that works already. There’s no point in playing it yet, since it does nothing interesting, but that was all I hoped to achieve today. This’ll give me time to make it interesting today, and make it good tomorrow. Secondly, now that I’ve made enough of it to see what it’s going to be like, I realise it has almost nothing to do with the theme. The angry deathbots you meet aren’t randomised yet, but even once they are I think running into them is just going to feel like encountering enemies in an arena. It technically is discovery, but because they’re simply off-screen rather than visibly obfuscated, it’s not going to feel like it. I’m not going to worry about that too much yet – my priority order is to make it interesting, then make it good, then make it fit the theme. Here’s what it looks like now:
The blue circles are shields: I didn’t fancy putting a bunch of work in just to recreate the conventional hitpoint bar or health meter on your interface, so I went for something more visual and in-fiction. Right now each shield takes one hit, but as you can see that makes you impractically large for not much health, so I’ll probably tighten their size and thickness before I’m done, and perhaps make them come back online a while after they’re taken out. The enemy will have these as well, and they’re one of the things that’ll be randomised, so it’ll be very obvious when you’re facing something tough. Not sure if I’ll also have big hulls – that’d mean introducing an armour system as well, which may defeat the point of the shields. I do plan to have large engines/tracks for fast bots, and a large turret or power core of some kind for things with a lot of firepower. Basically, if I can have at least three functionally important metrics that enemies can vary in, and make each one visually readable at a glance without any interface, I’ll be close to what I want. Challenges right now:
Title ideas: Sighs of the Snowbots? Snowbot Snores?
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Delacroix: I'm liking this idea immensely. Brace yourself for "Whose botprints are these?" in regards to your random movement idea and the fact that bot lines of sight are represented by triangles.
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Very few games have truly captured that same tactile feeling for me, that feeling of physicality that makes you wince when under fire, or turn up your speakers to really hear the tinkle of a shell casing hitting the floor.
I tend to look for things like this in games much more now than I do ultra high resolution specular gloss bump mapping!