Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Game Suggestions for the New Wii Owner, Part 2

If you’re like me, you recently obtained a Wii and have almost no idea what games released over the past three years are worth playing. I asked for advice from friends, family, coworkers, and Twitter followers, and I received quite a few suggestions. Yesterday I posted Part 1 in this series, featuring five games I was told I needed to play, and today I present the next five games, in no particular order.

Metroid Prime: Trilogy

Metroid Prime Trilogy Collector’s Edition (rated T) is slightly controversial. Getting three great Metroid Prime games in one collection sounds great, especially when taking advantage of the Wii controller, but apparently some people have noticed that some graphic effects involving water and beam weapons were actually worse than in the original releases. Watching a video, it seems like a shame, but when I said slightly controversial, I meant it. Most people seem to think that the difference is negligible and doesn’t detract from the series at all.

I already have the first Metroid Prime for GameCube, but I might pick up the trilogy just to get the remaining two games. It sounds like Trilogy is supposed to be the “definitive” Metroid Prime collection, and recently there was talk about how this game might be the Citizen Kane of gaming, although I personally find the choice a bit strange.

Super Paper Mario

Super Paper Mario (rated E) is another game in the role-playing Mario-based series, known for its humorous story and puzzles. This game was generally well-received by the gaming press, although some found the plot lacking. That said, the game play is relatively unique. Levels are played in the familiar 2D, side-scrolling view, but you can “flip” to a 3D view, allowing you to pass obstacles or find secrets you couldn’t otherwise. If you’ve ever played the indie game Fez, it seems the game play is similar…minus the “trixels”, of course.

The last time I played a Mario RPG, it was Super Mario RPG, the first one. I might have had a chance to watch someone play Paper Mario, and I remember hearing friends who don’t normally play video games talk about how they couldn’t wait for Super Paper Mario.

Zack & Wiki

Zack & Wiki Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure (rated E) puts you in the role of an aspiring pirate named Zack. It was a highly reviewed game that unfortunately didn’t sell well. It makes good use of the Wii remote, and the adventure involves a dead pirate’s ship and treasure. I had a number of people tell me that I needed to play this game, so it is on my list.

Wiki is Zack’s friend, a flying monkey of some sort, it looks like, and by shaking him as a bell (a flying monkey that turns into a bell?), enemies can turn into useful items, apparently. It’s definitely a quirky game.

House of the Dead:Overkill

If you’ve been in an arcade in the last decade, you’re familiar with the first-person shooter on rails zombie series. It’s B-movie voice acting and the over-the-top story are notorious among fans. House of the Dead: Overkill (rated M) is the first console-exclusive game in the series. It’s a prequel explaining the events before the first game, and it was partly inspired by the Grindhouse film Planet Terror directed by Robert Rodriguez. It’s violent, it’s gory, and apparently it is one more Guiness World Record holder on my list of suggestions, this time for being the most profane video game in history. This game is not family friendly, and it isn’t meant to be. The developers purposefully tried to recreate the feel of a class grindhouse, exploitation film, and the reviewers seem to think they managed to do it.

I’m usually not a fan of rails shooters. I prefer making choices about where to go and what to do, but House of the Dead games are still fun to play, especially with a friend. Overkill was highly recommended by a few Twitter followers, so I’ll have to look into it.

Dead Space: Extraction

Dead Space Extraction (rated M) is another prequel rails shooter. In the first Dead Space game, the story involves the crew of ship as they investigate the distress signal of a mining ship near the colony Aegis VII. The story about what may have happened gets revealed as you find digital diaries and other clues. In this Wii-exclusive prequel, you get to play as a member of the original mining colony, fighting against the always-creepy Necromorphs, mutant zombies based on the corpses of your friends.

I played the original Dead Space at a friend’s house, and while this game isn’t as open-ended, it’s apparently not a typical rails, arcade experience. It did not sell very well at all, but if you’re a fan of horor sci-fi movies, you may want to pick it up.

Thus ends Part 2

That’s the second half of the first 10 games. Make sure to come back tomorrow to see the next 5 and the rest of this series. Feel free to use one of the icons below to suggest this series to others, and make sure to leave a comment below to let me know what you think about these choices.

See the rest of the series:

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Game Suggestions for the New Wii Owner

After years of waiting, I purchased a Nintendo Wii. A friend’s uncle was selling the Wii, 9 games, and a few controllers and peripherals for a little over $200, and I couldn’t pass up the deal.

With the recent price drop, I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has a new Wii and has no idea what games to purchase. So I did what anyone would do. I asked for advice. Friends, coworkers, family, and Twitter followers were all too happy to offer suggestions.

Over the next week, I’ll list out over 20 games that people have suggested I go out and buy, in no particular order. For today, here’s the first 5 in the list.

No More Heroes

No More Heroes (rated M) features a badass named Travis Touchdown, who ends up killing a ranked assassin and becoming ranked himself. He now has to defend his rank, and he decides to try to become the #1 assassin with all the rewards it entails. The game was highly praised by most reviewers. It’s incredibly bloody, at least in the North American version, so if violence and gore aren’t your thing, you might want to pass on it. I haven’t played it myself yet, but watching a few videos on YouTube, it’s now on my list. The game play is open-ended, although it is a bit more linear than Grand Theft Auto games. The game play reminds me of MadWorld (also rated M), which I have played, but it seems much more tame in terms of blood and violence. Of course, if you’ve played MadWorld, you know that’s not saying much.

Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Galaxy (rated E) is the third 3D platformer in the series, the previous two being Super Mario 64 for the N64 and Super Mario Sunshine for the GameCube. Sunshine sold and reviewed well, but it had its share of critics who claimed the game seemed unpolished. If Galaxy can be considered a comeback, it was definitive. Everyone loved it, and there are few complaints. Guinness World Records ranked it 29th out of 50 on its list of the top console games of all time based on the game’s initial impact and lasting legacy.

It’s not a bad suggestion at all! It was one of the games that I got in the bundle, and while I have only played it for part of one evening, I can see it being a lot of fun. Everyone I’ve talked to had nothing but praise for this game. Also, it’s has support for two players! I recall reading a blog post about how much fun it could be to join a friend or family member. One person can play the main game while the other can help him/her collect items.

I’m still not happy that a modern console game has a concept of lives. It’s not an arcade game, so it’s not like I need incentive to pump more quarters into it. I’ve already purchased the game, and limited lives does nothing but frustrate me. Then again, I was told that the game is similar to Super Mario World for the SNES in that it is easy to have a ton of lives without losing them often.

Resident Evil 4

For a long time, I was frustrated because I purchased Resident Evil 4 (rated M) for the GameCube, but I couldn’t play it because I lost the first disc when I brought the game over to a friend’s house. It turns out that buying the game a second time for the Wii is supposed to be worth it, so that’s good news. The Wii version takes advantage of the unique controls. If you are into survival horror, everyone told me that this is supposed to be the game to get. It’s on my list as well.

But, real quick, for people who have played it before, how scary is that chainsaw-wielding guy with the bag on his head?! I didn’t get to play the game much, but when I did, I could not find a way to survive the early mob he was leading. I thought I had secured a makeshift barricade, but the next thing I know, they’re swarming in from the windows and knocking down the doors! I can’t wait to try again with the Wii version.

Muramasa

I never heard of Muramasa: The Demon Blade (rated T) before coworkers and friends and Twitter users swamped me with the knowledge. It’s an action role-playing game set in a feudal Japanese era, and it was sold out in Japan within a week of being released. It allows you to use three different control schemes based on your preference, and it offers multiple difficulty levels, different playable characters, RPG elements, unique art and musical scores, ninjas, and swords.

Some complained that the action is repetitive, but I just watched some video of it. It looks very similar to a game I wanted to develop myself, so I definitely want to try it out. And quite frankly, playing the role of a ninja probably can’t get old. Just sayin’.

Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!! (rated E10+) was considered a great successor in the series, and some of the additions make it a great party game as well. It has a two-player mode, for one thing.

It’s very similar to previous titles in that it’s a boxing puzzle game. Each opponent has a weakness, and you have to figure out how to exploit it while timing your moves. Most of the boxers are featured in previous games, such as Glass Joe and Bald Bull, bringing back fond memories for those of us who played the original game when Mike Tyson was featured.

Tomorrow…

And so ends the first five highly suggested games on my list. Make sure to come back tomorrow to see the next 5 and the rest of this series. Feel free to use one of the icons below to suggest this series to others, and make sure to leave a comment below to let me know what you think about these choices.

See the rest of the series:

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Generating Buzz for Indie Games

Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games, creators of Determinance, wrote an article for Gamasutra called Building Buzz for Indie Games which I think ties in and expands upon Christopher M. Park’s advice for aspiring indies that I wrote about last week.

He starts by emphasizing marketing, quoting Tim O’Reilly’s message that obscurity is a bigger problem than so-called piracy.

Most marketing books and articles will tell you that marketing should start with product creation, that if you created a product before finding out if anyone wants it, you’re going to fail. Taylor and Jeff Tunnell will argue that the nature of the video game industry makes it harder to predict what people will want to play. Who would have thought that World of Goo would have been the success it is?

The bottom line for Taylor: if you are passionate about something, it will be easier to develop, but you’re going to need to find a way to get it in front of people. The more mainstream the product, the easier it is going to be, but the wackier it is, the more work you’ll need to put into marketing. And given that you’re an indie, you’re probably not trying to make something pedestrian or mainstream in the first place.

He talks about the importance of building your presence early on. All you have is simple concept art or a crazy programming demo? Post them up! SOMEONE is bound to care about them. Look at Dejobaan Games for an example. I remember seeing early videos of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity before I even knew what it was. Wolfire Games has a development blog that constantly gets updates with technical details, concept art, videos, and general information about the business of making games. These two indies give their fans a place to rally for them.

Taylor wrote a four page article with marketing tips, taking you from concept announcement all the way through to post-release. Read the entire thing, and check out the links at the end of the article for more information.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Advice for Aspiring Indies

Back in August, Christopher M. Park of Arcen Games gave advice for aspiring indie game developers.

He has a number of observations after releasing his first game, A.I. Wars, and my favorite part is categorizing what class of indie game you might have your hands on. He separates them into three main groups: Indie Darlings, Undiscovered Gems, and Hobbyist/Nonprofessional.

Knowing which category you’re in is important because it allows you to realize what you can do to improve sales and get publicity. It is very important to recognize if your game is part of the last class. If you think you are running a business, but you don’t set your priorities so that you treat your business as one, it will be an uphill battle until you admit that you haven’t been dedicating the time and effort that a business calls for.

Another set of observations I liked: art is really important, but it’s usually not as important as most people think it is. Releasing a finished game with placeholder art is much better than not, and you can always release an update or a sequel or a completely new game with better quality.

As a side note, I used to think that graphics were much less important than I think they are now. Thanks to my time spent in the Game Design Concepts course and in Twitter conversations on the topic with Krystian Majewski, I’m now of the mind that the audiovisuals are as much a part of the design of a game as the mechanics.

Majewski said:

Otherwise, you run into a situation where you have an addictive game with exchangeable, hollow visuals. A growing problem today.

Bottom line: art is really important, but don’t let it be an excuse for not finishing your game.

Park’s other big observation echoes what you might hear from any discussion about marketing and sales. Refine your story. Tweak your copy. I love that Park gives multiple examples of emails he has sent out over three months.

The article has some good nuggets of information, so I would suggest reading it in its entirety. It’s not going to detail a plan for you to follow, but it is always a good educational opportunity to see what someone’s business looks like when it makes contact with the market.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

No Thousander Club Updates?

There’s a reason why you haven’t seen any Thousander Club updates in a long time. I haven’t been programming!

It’s a bit painful to see yet another week go by where I haven’t done some coding, but my current priorities don’t leave time to do game development. I’ll have more to say when these non-game development projects come to fruition, but I’ll be back to making games soon enough. Even though I put game-making on hold for now, I intend to write for this blog at least twice a week, so make sure to check back for regular updates.

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]

Categories
Game Development Games Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

What Game Platforms Do You Support?

While I beat the drum about supporting GNU/Linux gamers, more than a few people have noticed that the world doesn’t revolve around Windows vs Mac vs GNU/Linux anymore. Jeff Tunnell wrote in February that putting your game on OS X and GNU/Linux is not enough.

Instead of debating OSX, Linux, and Windows vs. just Windows, you should be considering all OS’s, Flash, the browser, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Steam, Instant Action, Greenhouse, your own site, iPhone, Android, other smart phones, Nintendo DS, Xbox via XNA, XBLA, Playstation Network, Wii Ware, box distribution, Casual Portals like Big Fish Games and Yahoo Games, Flash Portals like Kongregate and New Grounds, international portals.

When I worked to convert a game to Flash and bring it to Facebook, Sea Friends was the result. And until I made this effort, I didn’t realize how much Flash, Facebook, and the web in general were individual platforms.

When Netscape and Java were new, the promise was that applications would no longer be locked into the operating system you were using. All work and play would be in the web browser. The push got stopped long ago, but look around you today. Facebook is huge, and more people spend time logging in there than many other sites. The iPhone had a gold rush, and Android phones may have their own.

And the platforms impact how you play. Games available through Facebook and other social networking sites tend to be social games. It’s only natural. If you can’t interact with friends in some meaningful way, your game won’t get played. iPhone games tend to be quick and easy to play, which are perfect for people who are sitting on a bus or waiting in line somewhere.

If anything, supporting Windows exclusively, as many indies do, is a sure-fire way to marginalize your game in the world. Supporting Windows exclusively is easier, yes, but why should you expect that doing the easy thing will be profitable?

But the bigger point is that supporting Windows, OS X, and GNU/Linux aren’t enough. Does this mean that Joe Indie has his work cut out for him? Perhaps, but it also means your game has many ways to meet potential players. You have many options for testing your game designs long before you invest years of your life into the implementation.

Always see, and really see, what is possible.

Categories
Games Linux Game Development Marketing/Business

Linux Gamers Demonstrate Demand & Support Suppliers

I like calling attention to the reasons why you should support Mac OS X and GNU/Linux as a game developer, especially since so many people still ignore these markets at their peril.

Recently, Koen Witters of Koonsolo Games wrote about how surprised he was to find that Linux users show their love for the company’s indie game. He posted Mystic Mine‘s downloads and conversions stats, and the results demonstrate that GNU/Linux users are a gaming market that is relatively easy to target and is willing to purchase quality games.

Mystic Mine is an action-puzzle game with simple controls. You basically switch tracks for mine carts to use as they collect coins, diamonds, and other items. As more and more carts run around, you’ll find yourself switching tracks just to keep them from running into each other, and the action can get frantic.

This game is available for GNU/Linux as a native client, and the customers are buying. I downloaded the demo, and the game runs right out of the box. It’s a fantastic user experience.

Contrast that experience with EVE Online. Back in February, EVE Online‘s official GNU/Linux support ended. The reasoning? Not enough GNU/Linux users to make it worth the complexity of supporting three operating systems.

If you read the comments of that news item, you’ll see that everyone agreed the native client was horrible. One person said that using Wine to emulate the Windows version worked better than the native client. People even left the game because the native client was so painful to use.

No wonder there weren’t many GNU/Linux users. Based on the feedback I’ve seen, they were treated as if they were second-class customers, given an inferior experience and expected to act like it was good enough.

Again, contrast that experience with 2D Boy’s World of Goo. GNU/Linux users had to wait for that game to be released long after the Windows version was. When the port was finally released, more games were sold on that day than any other day.

This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all 🙂

If you’ve played World of Goo on GNU/Linux, you know that the native client is great. It’s not buggy. It’s not frustrating to use. It just works.

So Mystic Mine and World of Good are both games that treat GNU/Linux users as first-class customer, and the creators are rewarded with good conversion rates and sales. EVE Online produces an inferior experience for GNU/Linux users, and then the creators cite the low number of customers as the reason to drop the poor support they were providing.

If you want to argue that EVE Online is an MMO and has different support costs, keep in mind that A Tale in the Desert is also an MMO, and when it first came out, 38% of GNU/Linux users converted to paying customers while only 20% of Windows users did.

In terms of absolute numbers, there are more Windows users than GNU/Linux users, but there are other benefits besides sales and subscribers. Publicity is a huge one. With websites dedicated to Mac and Linux games, you’ll easily make a name for yourself if your game is well-made. Of course, if you half-ass it, you’ll make a different name for yourself.

I’ve asked before: why aren’t there more Linux-using gamers? But the market exists. It has a significant user base. And they pay money.

As an indie, you can afford to provide a quality experience for these people and reap the benefits, especially since, by and large, the mainstream game industry ignores them.

Categories
Game Design Games Geek / Technical

Randomness in Game Design

Greg Costikyan gave a presentation at GDC Austin ’09 titled “Randomness: Blight or Bane?”.

It’s a long post to read, but I like how this one is actually readable. Most presentations end up online as slideshows only. Without the speaker there, the context of a slide is also missing, and it is hard to know what you’re expected to take away from the presentation. In this case, it seems he took his presentation, put it into blog post form, and used the slides as images to break up the text nicely.

He opens it up by explaining how our sense of accomplishment requires that we feel we used skill to win. If you press a button that has a 50/50 chance of declaring “YOU WIN”, it’s not really compelling by itself. We won’t feel we earned anything. It was blind luck that resulted in a victory.

So naturally you would think that if you want compelling, interesting games, you need to eliminate randomness, right? Well, that’s a tall order, something I wish someone would have told me when I was designing early games in the Game Design Concepts course.

And yet, lots of popular, long-standing, “stood-the-test-of-time” games have random elements in them. Some are more random than others. For instance, a game I’ve been enjoying with my friends these days is Farkle. It has many different names and various implementations, so if you want to know how to play, you can read the rules yourself on the Wikipedia page. The point is that Farkle is a dice game, and as such relies heavily on the results of dice throws. It’s pretty random, and nothing about the result of your roll is impacted by your skill. And my friends and I are enjoying it.

Fun fact: Sierra Games put out a Hoyle-series game with a version of Farkle.

Ok, but when you win in Farkle, why aren’t you bored? It’s probably because the player is choosing when to rely on luck. If I have 1200 points, and only one die left, there is a 1 in 3 chance of rolling well and continuing with all six dice for even more points. If I take the chance and win, that’s a huge win, enabling me to increase my score greatly. If I lose, I lose the 1200 points I racked up. On the other hand, if I want to play conservatively, I can pass the die to another player and keep the 1200 points on my score sheet. Now the next player might roll that one die and try to build on my score, essentially riding on my success, or he/she can roll all six and start over.

Another way I impact the game is in how I choose which dice to keep. If I roll six dice and get a 1 and two 5s, I can keep all three of them, but I could also keep only one of them so when I roll the remaining dice, I have a chance of getting better results.

Without the randomness, however, what would Farkle be? Part of the game is essentially gambling. I sometimes take high-risk rolls on the off-chance that I will leap ahead in scoring. I sometimes fail. If I couldn’t fail, it wouldn’t be fun. I’m basing my decisions on my understanding of the odds of scoring with the remaining dice in my hand.

I would highly suggest reading the article, but here is a quick summary of the role of randomness in game design:

  • to heighten the realism of a simulation.
  • to break up symmetry.
  • to ensure variety of play, preventing players from predicting what happens next.
  • to offset the vast differences in skill levels between players to allow everyone a chance of winning.
  • to generate algorithmic content.

There is a point where Costikyan talks about why games like Chess and Go, which have no random elements and players in symmetrical starting positions, are able to remain interesting while games such as Hex and Twixt are “solvable”.

Games in which all players pursue the same strategy result in a win by the player who makes the fewest mistakes — or, if none, by the player who has the player-order advantage.

This is dull.

Chess and Go have strategic depth, and the symmetry is broken soon enough. Hex and Twixt have an optimum strategy. In Chess, each player isn’t using the same strategy. There are many that can be pursued, especially as the game develops. This reasoning is why my early attempts at those game designs sans random elements were so hard to make interesting. Especially because it was an early, rough design, there was no strategic depth! Whoever went first would win, and if someone was mathematically inclined, they would find a way to solve my games. One of the things I did in an attempt to fix this problem in my High School Reunion board game design was make it possible for each player to pursue different paths to victory. Apparently I was on the right path in attempting this, but as Costikyan points out, Chess was developed and refined over thousands of years, whereas I was designing my game part-time for a class. I’m not going to easily create a great game design if I am trying to avoid using luck to play a role. B-)

The article also mentions a few uses of random elements which seem pointless. For instance, weapon damage in Quake was random, but never enough to impact the game in a meaningful way. Most people wouldn’t know that it was random at all. So why include it at all?

His explanation of how randomness regresses to the mean, allowing strategic elements to dominate if both randomness and strategy is possible, is also fascinating stuff.

In game design, randomness is a tool. Like any mechanic, having a deep understanding of it can only help you apply it better.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

The American Gamer

People like to analyze NPD statistics on console ownership, so feel free to pop on over to The Great American Gaming Landscape if you want to see what this past year can tell you about the American gamer.

Or I can spoil it for you. B-)

Over half of the population plays video games, yet only a quarter of households own a next-gen console. Unless you count my Nintendo DS, I fit into these stats. My gaming takes place mostly on my computer, and I still have GameCube games I haven’t finished. Heck, I still have N64 games I haven’t finished. And SNES. And NES. And I have a few Atari 2600 games to go through. I should add that if you follow me on Twitter, you would know that I also play next-gen games at my day job’s employee lounge at lunch. My coworkers and I would play Metal Gear Solid games together, then N+ (yay, indie!), and now we’re on a Boom Blox kick. It seems lots of people who play next-gen games do so somewhere other than home.

Those people who insist that they needed to get every next-gen console so they don’t miss out on any great games? There are almost 3.4 million of them. Sounds like a lot, but that’s only a little over 1% of the population. Those people are elite.

Almost half of all households with a next-gen console have a Wii, which dominates. Most likely if you have a Wii, though, you won’t have a PS3 or a 360.

And with the Wii price drop coming, even though there is a dearth of quality games, it’s likely that the Wii will only get more popular, even in the face of new offerings from Sony and Microsoft.

Again, if you want more details, visit the link above. It’s fun to pore over the numbers. Just think: 75% of households who play games don’t own a modern-day console. If you make browser-based games or downloadable games for PCs, my interpretation of the data suggests you are a force to be reckoned with.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development Post-mortem

LD#15: Mineral Miner Post-mortem

Ludum Dare #15 is over, and I already wrote that the results are in. Aside from placing well in Community, which shows how much I love participating in LD48, I also saw my overall ranking come in at around the 40 percentile. I was ranked #63, which sounds good, but there were a number of ties for previous rankings. Out of 144 entries, Mineral Miner was 87th. It’s much better than coming in almost dead last in the previous Ludum Dare (and not completely last only by virtue of two other entries not getting rated at all), but I’ve done better.

Let’s look back on this project and see what happened. First, let’s go over a summary of the game. Mineral Miner turned out to be a puzzle game in which you drive around a cavern in a tank, getting out to collect minerals. You can only collect one mineral at a time, so you need to drop off collected minerals in your tank to collect more. If you are near a monster lair and not inside the safety of your tank, a monster will come out and chase you. If a monster catches you, you lose. If you collect all the minerals, you can leave the level and win.

What Went Right:

  • Rapid Prototyping on Paper I took a free, online game design course at GameDesignConcepts.wordpress.com, and I was able to put use those skills to great effect. During the competition, I posted about my prototypes. With only 48 hours, it can feel painfully slow, but I iterated through the design, adding a new mechanic, trying it out, and deciding whether to keep or remove it, and then repeating until I had something I thought might be fun. Painfully slow? It took me almost no time at all. In previous LD48s, I’ve been known to add mechanics at the last minute in an attempt to make a game out of the code I was writing. This time, I knew exactly what mechanics I needed, and there were no real surprises here. The finished game ended up playing exactly how I hoped it would. Prototyping!
  • Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics I’m not terribly familiar with art tools, such as The Gimp, and so every LD48 I find myself looking up how to use it to create what ends up being ugly art for my games anyway. I decided that this time, I wouldn’t try to make anything fancy. If I have any images that need text, I will use the basic text tool instead of the script-fu that creates cool looking logos if you tweak parameters just right. The tank? A square with a dot to let you know which way is the front. The driver? A yellow circle. Hey, it worked for Pac-man. I was able to focus more of my time on making the game because I wasn’t frustrating myself with trying to create halfway decent artwork.

    Screenshot-Cavern Game

    CavernGameCollisionDetection

  • I Made Sound Effects This is my fifth Ludum Dare, and only the second time that a game I made had sound effects. Because I had a game that pretty much worked the way I expected it to, I had time for some polish. I made a list of sound effects I thought I would need, used sfxr to create the beeps and boops, and wrote the code to tie it all together. Adding sound really makes a big difference to a game, and I was glad that I could do so for this one.
  • Faster Build Times and Lighter Distributables Because I had been doing some work on my Vampire Game, work that involves using TDD from the first line of code, I also did some work on my build scripts. Going from a 10 minute build time with a distributable that is already 10+MB due to including source libraries to a build that finishes in seconds and is less than 2MB is amazing for productivity, especially as it comes down to the final hour of the competition. Everything happened so much faster, keeping me focused on game development instead of getting distracted as I waited for a build to finish. Now, it isn’t as if my builds always took 10 minutes, but going from checked out source code to a complete build would. Once the libraries were built with my old system, compiling and linking would still take some time, much longer than the time it took with my new build scripts. Plus, one of the complaints I would get from previous competitions is that my game package was so large, so that’s one complaint I did not see this time around. B-)
  • Simple AI Goes a Long Way I remember taking a few minutes to think about how I wanted the monsters to interact with the level. Should they obey the walls and other obstacles, like the player has to? If so, that would take a bit of AI programming. I don’t have much experience with AI, and I didn’t want to take the time to learn it for this LD48, so what did I do? I made the monster head towards the player every step, ignoring the environment. I could explain it away. It’s a monster. Maybe it climbs walls like crazy? The big surprise was how well it looked. Besides making it move towards the player, I also made the monster randomly move horizontally or vertically to do so. Combined with the sound effect when it comes out of its lair, the twitchy looking monster moving really fast at the player actually feels scary.

What Went Wrong:

  • Distractions I have two cats, and both of them have been featured in previous LD48s, so I won’t focus on their antics too much. My home office wasn’t in a usable state, so I was out in the kitchen or living room. The cats love distracting me from productivity, and LD#15 was no exception. The one thing I did my hardest to control was external obligations. Anytime someone wanted to make plans with me for the weekend of LD48, I would politely tell them that I was busy. And it worked! I was able to focus almost entirely on eating, sleeping, and LD48ing…except for the Chicago Fire game.

    Chicago Fire vs D.C. United

    I won tickets to the Fire vs D.C. United game, which happened to be the same weekend. They were really good tickets, too, and so I made an exception. In practical terms, I lost a good chunk of Saturday. I was able to get the game finished, but having an extra hour or two would have been good for tightening up the graphics and audio. On top of knowing that, the Fire lost, so it wasn’t even as fun a game to watch from the 2nd row as it could have been.

  • The Sound Effects Were Very Rough By far the biggest complaint from people playing my game is that the audio hurts. I was able to get audio in within the last hour of the competition, but I didn’t have time to adjust it. I knew that some of the sound effects were loud and obnoxious, especially the one that plays when you bump into walls, but I couldn’t dedicate the time to tweaking it. The deadline was looming, and I still had a few more programming tasks to complete.
  • There’s Only One Level Right before the end, I realized that I did not have a victory condition. I had programmed a way to lose if a monster caught you and also if you tried to leave the level without collecting all of the minerals, but someone will eventually collect all of them. What then? Ideally, I would have added code to load the next level, created that level, and kept going. In fact, Level 2 is in the distributed game, although it is a copy of Level 1 and there is no code that knows about it. I was thinking about taking Level 1 and breaking it up into at least three levels, with each level introducing new puzzles and getting progressively more difficult. Three doesn’t sound much better than one, but it would have made a big difference. The player would have felt that progress was being made, and the later levels could introduce the trickier ways to deal with monster lairs.
  • Level Loading Bug I could not figure it out in time for the deadline, and I still haven’t looked at it since, but every so often, the level loading code would choke on the data, bringing the game to a halt. Sometimes shutting down the game and rerunning it would work. The data came from a text file, and my code is supposed to load a single character at a time, mapping the value to a tile. Sometimes, however, it would choke because a single character variable would have a value that is two characters long. For a time, I was dedicated to fixing it, but with only 48 hours, a good chunk of which I couldn’t make use of, I decided that since it wasn’t a show-stopper, I would keep going. I really wish I could have figured out why that bug was there. Besides ruining the perceived integrity of the game, I know at least one person didn’t review it due to this crash.
  • Making a Puzzle Game I didn’t set out to make a puzzle game. I didn’t want to worry about creating a lot of content. One level might not be such a problem if the level was varied and fresh each time you played. I could have created a procedural level generator, but I never built one before. I didn’t want to spend time learning how to do so, nor did I want to spend the time tweaking the algorithm to make nicer levels even if I did end up accomplishing it. Out of all of the ideas I came up with, the game I liked the most ended up being a puzzle game, which unfortunately meant I was either going to spend a lot of time making clever levels or finish a game with hardly any levels. It ended up being the latter.

What I Learned:

  • Rapid Paper Prototypes Work My game design skills are sorely lacking, but I’ve been able to practice what I learned in the game design concepts course, and it really paid off with Mineral Miner. I’m not claiming that it’s a fantastic game, but it did rank #45 in the Fun category, putting it in the top 50%, and #27 in the Innovation category, which puts it in the top quarter! It feels good to know that the game design I prototyped early on before writing a single line of code came together, and the comments for my entry showed that people saw a lot of potential in my game. Everything I wanted to put into the game, I learned from minutes of drawing on paper and messing around with tokens. I didn’t need to have a game engine coded up to explore, discard, and introduce mechanics, which means I saved a lot of time that would otherwise have been wasted on code that would get thrown away and changed needlessly.
  • Quick ‘n Dirty Graphics and Audio Can’t Be Permanent My art and audio work was minimal and saved me a lot of time, allowing me to work quickly at getting the game play up and running. Unfortunately, my overall rating got hurt here. I was near the bottom in the Graphics category at #104 and surprisingly a little better in the Audio category at #77. I was hoping for time near the end to replace crude art and sounds with better ones, but it didn’t happen. On that note, even if it did happen, it wouldn’t be more than marginally better since I don’t have the practice and skill with my art tools. One suggestion was to use images of my prototype work, and I agree, the drawings look much nicer.
  • My Pacing Still Needs Work I felt much more confident about my entry this time around, but I still found myself finishing the game at the last minute. There’s very little time for polish when the complete game forms only an hour before the deadline! It’s especially a concern since I decided to go with quick and low-quality art in order to get the game running as quickly as possible. I probably could have set mini-deadlines for myself. 48 hours sounds like an incredibly compressed period of time to make a game, and it is, but it’s still enough time to flounder. Early on, I have two whole days to worry about everything. In the last 5 hours, I’m in crunch mode. I could stand to manage my time and prioritize my tasks much better.

If I could do LD#15 over again, I would try to manage my time better. I could have had the prototype work done much earlier on, leaving me with more time to do the actual programming and arting. I might have been able to get more levels and variety in if I didn’t waste 5 or 10 or 20 minutes at a time wondering what to do. Still, even though Mineral Miner wasn’t a winner of Ludum Dare, I felt it was a success. I designed early on paper instead of designing with hard-to-change code, and I was able to focus on making the game I felt had a chance of being fun. People said they enjoyed the game and wished there were more levels. It was a complete game, meaning that aside from the level loading bug I mentioned above, everything that happens in the game happens because I designed it that way. In 48 hours, a complete game that provided some entertainment for others is a good accomplishment.