March 10, 2010

Postmortem: A Geek Valentine

Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I'm starting to feel this tiny little programming urge again... This time it's not Haskell or a new experimental game that's luring me on, no this time it's me longing to create this fantastic awesome epic RTS game. Sadly it's a long way to go there...

Anyway let's get this going!

A Geek Valentine isn't a good game by any means, it's really nothing special. The gameplay sucked really bad. It's kinda funny as I told Sundb00m this would be my greatest game gameplay wise. Yeah right..

Hard Work Work!

This is a small graph which shows how I've worked for a straight week from the 22th to the 28th. The Y-axis is hours and the X-axis is days. The labels are for either work or break and the height of the green peaks if you check it on the Y-axis is the sum of both green and red. Green is for hours where I actually worked and the red is for when I had a break. You know food, clipping toenails, reading manga and playing counter-strike.

Total work time: ~25 hours
Total break: ~15 hours

Weekend work: 13.8 hours
Weekend break: 8.3 hours

The noteworthy thing about this is that I spend more than half of the whole week's worth of time in the weekend and I probably got even more done during that time. I think it's the whole deal with being chased with a the brutal thing of failure that motivates me.

Graphical Adoration
About the game let's start with the positive stuff. I really like how the game looks, it actually looks pretty darn good (even though I forgot about the girls' turning, now they're just looking forward). I'm really improving in a graphical sense, something I thought impossible when I began this journey.

Do something you Like
Like with a Big L. I felt I had a really nice idea going for this one. In the end it looked and felt like a bad pacman clone but this wasn't what I had in mind at all. The idea was to build cool trap-combos sort of like in the Epic Game Evil Genius.



I really love Evil Genius and especially the base building but let's face it - I failed. But the idea kept motivating me and it was really fun to try to make it happen.

A first small taste of an "AI"
How do the girls move? They have a 5x5 vision with a 2 radius (they're in the middle) and they choose what to do. If they see the dude close to them either in front, left or right they'll go there. Otherwise they'll try to follow a path in front of them or to the left or right. Otherwise they'll just go in a random direction.

They are extremely stupid and you can trap them in a never-ending loop fairly easy and it's a stretch to say they have intelligence but it was pretty cool to dip my hand into AI programming. I know it's extremely shallow and bad and stuff but still it was pretty rewarding to see them actually move around on their own...

I might actually develop this game further with special regard to AI. Change the core of the game so you can script both the player and the girls, just for laugh and giggles?

The game sucks but hey...
Yupp it's not my best game, in fact I think it's one of the worst. But I still like it a lot and my trap-building idea is still alive and I might develop the game more, improve the AI and focus on building traps (need a lot more cool traps damnet). Yes I think I might do that...

March 2, 2010

March Theme: 10 seconds

Well well here's something interesting. The Experimental Gameplay Project has given us a really interesting thing to focus on: Time. Like Braid, it's time for us to make something interesting with time itself. 10 seconds is the constraint and that's not a lot, but perhaps enough?

February 28, 2010

A Geek Valentine

Yes! I made it! It's 22:22 on the very last day of February and I've been programming virtually non-stop for the past two days, my brain feels like mashed potatoes...

A Geek Valentine


Download
A_Geek_Valentine.zip (4.1 MB)

Controls
Steer with the arrow keys.

Use spacebar to:
1. Build the time machine
2. Buy and place traps (Just face an empty square and choose a trop on the top right)
3. Sell traps (Face and click)

Story
Well it's Valentine's Day and as the geek you are this is the worst day ever. Luckily you havean almost complete time machine hidden here in the grass and if you could complete it you'll be safe for now! But beware... The girls are searching for you! Place traps and run away!

About
This game, as usual, was made for The Experimental Gameplay Project. This time they asked for a short explanation on how the theme would fit together so here it is:

Rejection + Valentine's day = feelings hurt

And you're the one hurting all the girls' feelings. Enjoy.

Credits
Music: Nighttime Falls, I'll be Waiting for Her - ilocan18
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/Rejection

Discuss
On the forum

February 1, 2010

February gets Themed: Rejection

The Experimental Gameplay Project has announced their next theme - and shame on me if I wouldn't follow suite! With valentine coming up I might just have found a pretty nice idea, just now, writing this...

Booyah!!

January 24, 2010

Why is my file so huge?

My latest game was absolutely huge! And I'm not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.

It was 14,6mb!!

Now every way you look at it, that's incredibly huge. It's like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it's not.

Incredible I thought, what the heck did I do wrong? I mean my code isn't really good but I never knew it was this horrible. So today I was determined to find the cause of this obscene mutant ant.

I started out chopping off everything regarding exceptions, cause all c++ resources I've read say exceptions will take space like a mutant gremlin. Okay I thought and chopped away everything - but nothing happened.

Now that's weird, what happens if I scrap this.. and this.. It ended with me beginning a big revamp of my whole "engine", or rather collection of stuff - nothing inherently wrong as it was badly needed - but nothing happened with my exe file! It was still almost 2mb big with basically only a hello world...

Then it struck me! I had been using -g with gcc and without any optimizing at all. When I turned on size and speed optimizations and scrapped the debugging the change was quite extraordinary.

The mutant 14 637 kb was magically transformed to a more fitting ant size of 856 kb. I couldn't save much of the total file size (23 254 kb -> 20 768 kb) so while I apologize for hogging your bandwidth, time and harddrive space I'm hoping you won't be too mad at me.

January 19, 2010

Postmortem: The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

My first shooter! It's working (although a friend got a null pointer error) so I'm a little happy.

The Time
I spent about 24 hours on this game. A whopping 30% was break time, mostly me eating, reading manga or playing games... This is proof of me being really lazy this month I think.


It's pretty cool that everything regarding the scripting, loading the little levels I had from lua files and writing them took only a mere hour! I could have saved so much time if I would've scrapped the whole levels idea completely. (Levels are more than just the code it takes to load them from a file... a lot more)

Immersion
We all love big bangs and loads of stuff flying around on screen and sadly I didn't deliver. I had all these ideas of pieces of dead afros flying around and dead things piling up on the ground which you'll walk over... but I never did any of it which is sad cause it would be pretty damn cool.

Another thing is the messages on the left side. Pretty cool - if they would actually say anything, but again I didn't have time or the inclination or whatever to do anything with it...

All we're left with are the quakes which are kinda cool but they could do with some tweaking, maybe shorter and less frequent to really get the omg effect.

Gameplay
It plays okay. Not a lot happening, it's just a race against time. The immersion part would really hot up the gameplay cause really, it's fun to blast things into the sky!

Conclusion
The game feels like it's not finished. The whole afro thing was cool but it's not revolutionary or anything different. It's stuck in the middle between random ideas and mediocrity. Too bad.

January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

January 16, 2010

The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

Aaah feels good having a game ready after the last month's failure! This time it's a small shooter.

The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros


Bullet masher - can you keep up with 100 enemies at the screen? Try it!

Download
afro.zip (19.8 MB)

Instructions
W: up
A: left
S: down
D: right
mouse: shoot
space: leap into the sky!

Credits
Music: The Last Prophecy - Matthew Le Blanc (SynthR)
Sound effects: Random from freesound
Rest: Me

Source
http://github.com/treeman/100-things

Discuss
On the forum