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...

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.

December 1, 2009

Postmortem: Jonas IceCream Stand

Ah my latest game Jonas IceCream Stand is finished and up and running and I'm really proud of it! And thanks for the feedback guys, it's always welcome.

I spent almost exactly fifty hours on this game and that's by far the most I've spent on a 7day project. To be honest it's probably more but I'm not really good at logging all the hours...


A Race
This game was a race against time from start to finish. I understood right from the beginning this wouldn't be easy. Creating a whole GUI from scratch, composing animation and a focus on graphics(!). I've never done a GUI, it would be really easy with a decent framework for it... But I don't have one for it so all the GUI code is really messy and hard to maintain.

I guess I'm learning the coding lessons the hard way. Keeping it structured and maintainable even, no, especially under pressure is extremely important. It's a good thing I have a fast iteration cycle repeating itself for every new game I'm making.

Art
I keep saying it again and again but I'm not a graphics designer but I should stop saying that! Although not wonderful I think my games are looking good and this game is no exception. It's certainly the most complex graphical wise.

The fading effect on the sky was pretty cool, but it's kinda crude and it doesn't fit the overall theme very well. The theme has a few distinct colors with a little "childish" feel to them. I feel the fading adds a bit too many colors to it. But I do think the end points (in the middle of the night with all the stars and when it's as light as possible) looks pretty good. And I'm not sure it was a very good idea to include a MenuCity silhouette in the background.

Gameplay
Sadly I don't think the gameplay was one of my best. Sure the first five maybe ten minutes are a blast, they almost awoke my slumbering tycoon feelings. But the game is so badly balanced, it's far too easy when you've passed a point in the game. The problem is that I balanced the game the last handful of hours on the very last day and that doesn't work, not at all. A great gameplay needs to evolve, it can't be created just there on the stop. Well that's my experience at least.

Conclusion
I think the game is really great. Sadly it gets boring far too fast but it does have great potential. It's almost worth given a remake as a "real" game.

October 19, 2009

Postmortem: MenuCity

Good times, good times. MenuCity has been out a while and thanks for all the positive and constructive feedback guys, it's like my food doing this (programming is my air and the fun is the water... err). Anyway here's the postmortem of my latest, and greatest, game.

Let's start with a hideous graph:

God it's ugly, but it works I guess. I spent about 32 hours on this game which is the most I've spent on an experimental game so far. The bulk of the game was actually done really, really quickly like the second day or so. All the gameplay was there and with pacemaker art too! The last 5 days of production was focused on polish, level design and art.

Art
I spent a lot of hours doing the arty business and I think the game looks really good. You'd think the art I have in the game would be doable in a lot fewer hours than I spent and you're absolutely right. In the beginning I had a very different style in mind, it was supposed to be a dude trapped in a console (a beautiful one) with all the ground, the birds (yes birds!) and the blocks all comprised of numbers... But as I worked on it I switched more and more to the style I have now, albeit diverging from the theme but meh.

Production
These games I'm doing, they're more about production than the games themselves I realize that now. Naturally I'm making the games how could they not be about games?

It's just my impression but when I'm doing the games my focus is more on the process of making them, like planning on a free day which I can get zoned and only focus on the code, instead of playing around with "cool" stuff.

This is good I'd say! But meh - we all like cool stuff, I mean it's cool! But making things happen, making things work on screen is way cooler than having them all set up in my head. And besides, my very best ideas (and games) have come when I focus on making them work instead of how cool they should be.

What is is always way cooler than what should be.

The Game itself
Ahh the game... This one is my very best; it looks as good as Bugger, it's more addictive than Balls and it's even criminal to compare the levels to those of Black and White! So what could be better? There are a few things:

• Horrible tutorial. I tried to redeem myself here but still.
  
• Be able to move the camera for an overview of terrain. This I had planned, but I had other more important things to do and then I sorta forgot about it...
  
• Go back 5sec or a few moves. I mean how many times did you press the rest button? I know I did press it a dozen times too many.
  
• Move up with the side keys instead of having to switch, and slowing down, between up and side. This was suggested later and I don't know why I didn't think of this from the beginning :S
  
• Repetitive sound. Well honestly I.. uh... yeah. The song is wonderful but some variation would be nice. And for the next game you need to stop and change the music from a menu, instead of the obscure console options. (sound_enabled 0 in console f1 or set in settings.ini)
  
• Disappointing ending. This one is so true.. I might spoil this for you but the last level isn't as demanding as the ultra hard ninth level. And there wasn't even any ending credits or anything like that, almost like cleaning my room real good without anyone acknowledging it =(
  

Conclusion
MenuCity gave me a great ride, both developing it and playing it. And all the positive feedback doesn't hurt my ego either ^^. There are things I dislike and annoy me but the games are getting better, I'm learning loads and the most important thing of all: It's fun :)

Yesterday I checked the date and there's almost two weeks left until my next monthly experimental game! I might have to start another side project... hum hum...

September 24, 2009

Postmortem: Bugger

It's time for the follow up on my latest game Bugger.

Wow it seems like forever since I begun this monthly game business, but it's only been two months since I first thought about this and here I am having finished my third game. I've really come a long way, in the beginning I though I'd only make state of the art crap games. Like I would struggle to even get a Tetris up and running. That's partially why I decided to make Balls.

Anyway I started out with a small idea: speed-typing. It later turned out to be bugs you killed, but that's of minor importance really. They were supposed to bind to the theme Failure by letting the average gamer feel how a programmer fight for his life against bugs. Bugs are for those who don't know errors in your program - they can be as simple as a wrong letter in the wrong place causing havoc in the game or a bigger thing like a fundamental flaw in your game. Think about the balls who got stuck in mid-air in Balls. That's a typical bug...

If I followed the theme good or bad you be the judge. Personally I don't think it was as clear as I'd want it to do but meh.

The game itself took 25 hours to make - but more than 5 hours of them was me having a break...
Here's a little jummy pie of what took time:



Compared to my two other games I spent a bigger part on both graphics and level design - and that was sourly needed imho. The "embedding scripting" part is where I built in the ability to build levels from lua. I think the result was really good and it saved a lot of time just being able to edit a file without having to recompile every single little change.

You can make your own levels too, just open the "levels.lua" file in a text editor and make your changes. I won't explain anymore since it's really simple.

I'm also using about 1/5 of my working time to rest. Jikes! That's almost too much. But I dunno, it really hurts staring at your computer screen hour after hour. My longest session - without a break, even a bathroom one - was almost five hours. I totaled more than 10 hours that day I think.. As always I do the bulk of the work when I'm out of time. The last two days were responsible for at least 90% of the work!

I guess you could say that's a lesson: you're most productive, and ambitious, when you've got a smoldering iron up your ass.

August 21, 2009

Postmortem: Black and White

All this time working on my latest game I thought it sucked and I was trying hard to make it to not suck. My spirit wasn't high, just check this post and this but now when it's done it's like night and day, or like black and white! I'm damn happy I got it done!! Aah I'll try to make this postmortem shorter than the last one... That was huge.

Lessons I've learned

• Levels take time
  I know you're all disappointed by a measly three levels in the game and for that I'm sorry. I hadn't set aside time for making the levels in my mental plan so when I ran over the time limit of 7 days I had to cut down on some stuff - this time it was the levels.
  
  
• A codebase rocks
  For my first game I had some basic code from older projects I used, like handling states, a small menu and a vector class among others and that saved me a whole lot of time. Now I had even more code so I got something on screen a lot faster and I could afford beginning with creating the dude and his animation (although I kinda overdid that) knowing I already had the basic foundation in place. Now I'm going to get my coding skillz up and the experience and this is another really big stone which will allow me to make bigger and more badass games later on.
  
  
• It might not suck so hard after all...
  In the beginning I was pretty confident but I quickly lost that momentum and I thought a lot about how sucky this game is... It's not polished, it's not fun and the levels suck etc but it turned out to be okay! I have to stop being so damn negative! These are experimental games for crying out loud, they're expected to fail once in a while and guess what? It doesn't matter!
  

August 4, 2009

Postmortem: Balls

So it's been what? Two, three years since I discovered the art of programming and I haven't made one single game?! Well now I'm not counting the visual basic nightmare mastermind I made a long time ago but a real game. Whatever that means. I've had these monster-projects;

• point and click monkey island style adventure game - the beginning c++ adventure for me. Kinda harsh start up don't you think? I thought so too - it never got anywhere near completion or playability.
  
• another heavy game - think fully destructible environment. Need I say more?... No.
  
• the Game Engine - the project everyone dreams of making games ends up doing and either discover it didn't amount in anything playable, which I did, or you'll end up thinking creating games is extremely hard and it'll take years for just a small game.
  
• the Dream project - I've been thinking of making a few posts about the games in my dreams. Which I'll most certainly complete! Sometime... Maybe...?!
  

Somewhere about now I got interested in Indie games. I think World of Goo was the first but I'm not really sure. Maybe armadillo run or bridge builder? Damn! I couldn't even google the link to bridge builder aka pontifex 3 - all I found was a thousand torrent sites...

But what I did find was kloonigames, some guy who did the same thing I'm doing. Or I'm doing the same as him: following the footsteps of the Experimental Gameplay Project. Making a game in 7 days, something surely impossible, and I haven't even made any game before! Oh crap! But as Petri (kloonigames dude) so elegantly put it:


And here's a summary of my first ever game Balls. It's available here for download.

The Good

• I got it done!
  It seemed impossible and it scared the hell out of me. But I made it!! Aaah... It feels so good right now. And the game is actually pretty fun! It doesn't suck, it doesn't crash (but it's a bit buggy) and I can sort of say I managed to stick to my theme Addictive Gaming. Now with this over with I can focus on my next game. Not just now but in a while, now I'm confident to try new, bigger and hopefully better things and I know I can pull it off!
  
  I'm on top of the world! Nothing is impossible! Superman and Neo - you're just sooo jealous right now.
  
  
• It didn't even take long...
  I end up using timelog from kloonigames to track my time. The game took 25,5 hours to make, but I spent 7,5 hours of that time on a break! Either reading manga, playing cs or just surfing around and chatting. This isn't the time to nag about my lack of concentration and that I'm lazy, this is where I realize I didn't even work myself to death making the game. I could afford a break here and there, and now when I think about it they were really necessary.
  
  
• Pressure is good
  I did manage to implement some physics and collision detection, even though it's really simple. This was a first for me and I did it under a tight schedule! A coincidence? I don't think so, a small amount of pressure is really really good. It is during these times I'm most productive and I really do get things done if I have to.
  

The Bad

• The motivation didn't stick
  Although I made the game and it was pretty good I didn't even remotely invest as much time in it as I could - and I don't know why. I lost that super motivation pretty early in development and when I hit a bug or something that needed a lot of changing to implement I usually cut corners or just ran away screaming.
  
  Is this the every day life of a developer? If it's this though to get motivated wonder how you can motivate yourself working on a shitty project?
  

The Ugly

• The code
  Wow - I'm never showing the source of this to anyone! I tried doing the things which would make the game nearest completion, I did cut some corners but in the end the job is done. But it's really ugly and before reusing the code I'll need to clean it up a lot!
  
  What's that smell...? It stinks of smelly code!