Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: May 14th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 101 (current year) = 363.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 33 (current year) = 649 / 1000

Last year, I was at only 85 hours. I know I could have done better this year, but at least my current hours show an improvement from last year’s effort. Hitting 100 hours in mid-May is better than hitting that same milestone in mid-June. Still, it would be nice to be two months ahead. Last year I hit 200 hours in October. Perhaps I can hit 200 hours in August instead. July would be even better. B-)

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: May 7th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 96.75 (current year) = 359 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 33 (current year) = 649 / 1000

Monday and Tuesday: I took the time to look through my code and figure out the best way to implement temporary invulnerability. It was great because Tuesday morning I spent about 30 minutes actually coding the feature. I did it simply by hiding and showing the sprite. Later I implemented a way to earn an extra ship every 10,000 points.

I also threw in a cheat that lets me immediately destroy all of the aliens in a wave at once, earning all of the points for the kills. It is a lot easier to test that I can earn an extra ship if I didn’t have to play through four levels every time.

Wednesday: I tweaked a few variables to see if I can improve the feeling of the game a bit. I’ll have to do more experimentation here. I also added some string to the yarn balls to make it more obvious what they are. I added a difficulty menu, which was tougher to do than I thought. I need to overhaul the menu code.

Thursday: Added the different difficulty settings. I may have to change what actually makes one setting different from another, but at least someone can choose something easier or harder if they want.

That night, I transferred the game to my laptop so I can show off the new features to the people at the local LUG. I found out that temporary invulnerability didn’t look right. It must have something to do with either the LCD display or the refresh rate or the fact that the laptop is dual core. Whatever was the cause, the ship was either completely hidden or completely visible during the temporary invulnerability state, so it was definitely wrong. After a quick change to the code, the ship slowly fades back into view when invulnerable. Not only does it work on all machines, it looks much cooler! A similar problem was occurring with the yarn balls. They didn’t seem to rotate properly, and the trailing strings didn’t seem to flow. Friday night I attempted to fix it by not updating the animations as often.

The good news is that people were starting to recognize the yarn balls as yarn balls. B-)

I did get a few of the same < title="Do You Listen to Feature Requests: Previous Post" href="https://www.gbgames.com/blog/?p=621">requests, such as power-ups and shielding. I didn’t think it made too much sense to have shielding, but I thought of something better and funnier: flying fish. Fish with pilot hats. They fly across the screen, and when they get hit, maybe you have to catch them to get a power-up.

Friday morning I experimented with rapid fire. I just increased the speed of the player’s shot to see how well it played. It made the levels much easier, but it also seemed to make it more responsive. When the kittens are near the top of the screen, it just takes longer to shoot them, and so the action seems really slow. I don’t think I can make it a permanent change, but I can see providing a rapid fire power-up. Now I have a new decision to make: is rapid fire a temporary power-up, or do you get to keep it until you lose a ship? I suppose if I make it last until you lose a ship, I would need some other power-ups in the game as well.

At this point, I’m starting to think that these features can always go into v2.0. I could spend another few months just getting all of these features working properly, but I could have released the game and gotten a lot more feedback in those months.

Categories
Game Development General Marketing/Business

Indie Game Dev Podcast: Interview with BlitWise Productions

Action has released another interview, this time with Mike Welch of BlitWise Productions, creator of DX-Ball and Scorched Tanks.

Mike discussed the importance of author recognition, working with Seumas McNally on DX-Ball 2, and developing a community for his games. While he isn’t deeply involved with the game development community, he watches it, usually with amusement.

I enjoyed hearing his opinion on the difference between working with portals and working for yourself, particularly from a recognition point of view. He mentioned some of the unexpected letters he has received from fans of his games, stating that if his games were sold on portals he would never receive such letters or recognition.

Mike definitely sounds like an indie.

Categories
General Linux Game Development

POTM for April: Vim

The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you in some way that might not appear on most people’s radars.

This month I donated to Vim, the improved vi editor that I use for all sorts of text editing, including coding and configuration editing. The main developer is using all donated money to help AIDS victims in Uganda, which is both a great cause and motivates him to do more development.

While a lot of developers like Visual Studio, and some of those developers use SlickEdit or Code::Blocks as alternatives, I prefer using Vim. It’s a text editor that I can use whether I am at my desktop or logging in remotely. If I move to a different computer altogether, Vim is pretty much going to work as I expect it to. Without it, I might have to relearn a different editor when I am at home, at work, at a friend’s computer, or anywhere else.

I used to use Nano when I first started experimenting with Gnu/Linux since it was the most similar to other text editors, such as Notepad. Once I learned that there are some editors that are much more efficient, I decided to to learn Vi/Vim. Now editing files requires less key presses, and my fingers almost never have to move far from the home row. If I could find a Vim plugin for Firefox to allow me to use it as an alternative editor for text boxes in forms, I’d use it.

I also find that I am still learning ways to improve my efficiency with Vim. Recently the main developer gave a talk called “The Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing 2.0”. There is a video, which is a little longer than an hour, and slides with notes. While I knew some of the tips, some of them were only recently learned, and the talk had a few new tips that should make my future text editing much more efficient.

I do have to say that it can take some getting used to if you are not familiar with Vim. Having a command and visual mode separate from editing mode in a text editor might seem counterproductive, but once you get over that hurdle, you can be up and running in no time. Text editing becomes much more fun and productive.

Even if you don’t care much for Vim, you can also think about using its cursor keys as training for Nethack. B-)

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: April 30th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 86 (current year) = 348.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 32 (current year) = 648 / 1000

Monday: Increased challenge gradually by adding an extra bomb for the aliens to drop each level. Now level 11 doesn’t look and feel like level 1. I still have to tweak some settings, though. It seems that after a certain level, you can’t really tell that there are extra bombs. I will probably need to increase the rate of fire as well as increasing the maximum number of bombs.

Tuesday: Fixed the game over menu. It now restarts the game if you pick the appropriate selection.

Wednesday: Increased challenge again by increasing the rate of enemy fire. Now when you get to a later level, it doesn’t have nearly as much resemblance to older levels. In a way, it now kind of resembles those shooters in which there is nothing but a shower of bullets to navigate through. I also thought of a few more ideas that might make the game more fun and fair in light of the challenge increase. Adding features this late in the schedule probably isn’t the best thing to do, but as I didn’t have much of a schedule, I suppose I can’t be “off track”.

Thursday: Made some minor changes. For instance, the player’s bullet appeared too far above the actual ship, which wasn’t too noticeable before, but now that you can shoot the bombs, it was frustrating when you miss one that you shouldn’t have.

I spent the past few days watching people play the game.

While I didn’t spend more than a few hours on game development this past week, those hours really made a difference.

Categories
Game Design Game Development

Do You Listen to Feature Requests?

Last night, I loaded up Killer Kittens from Katis Minor on my laptop and brought it to my local LUG meeting. I had almost everyone at the meeting try out the game, and I watched them as they played. I already knew that I should just watch. If they get stuck due to an interface issue, I should make a note of it, but I shouldn’t interfere. Most players won’t have me standing there to guide them, so I should learn what they might encounter as obstacles.

Well, I definitely need to add a screen to the game that explains the controls. B-)

As for the game itself, a number of people actually enjoyed it! It was exhilarating to watch as people hit the “Restart game” menu option after losing all of their reserve ships! People would actually come back for multiple turns at the game, sneaking into the chair after someone got up. Up until this past week, the game was a poor Space Invaders clone. Now it was actually fun!

And then there were the people who obviously didn’t enjoy it. Watching someone get a game over without advancing past the first level, then getting up and politely saying, “That was fun” wasn’t fun. Granted, some of these people don’t play video games in general, but some of them did. Maybe the game is too hard? Maybe the game just doesn’t feel right? Is it too difficult to tell where the bombs are? Does the fire rate of your own bullets need to be increased?

While I did ask people for their opinions after they were finished playing, some of them started asking questions about the game during the play session. One question I received a lot of: “How do you get an extra life?” It’s a missing feature, and while I have always intended to provide it, I did not write it down until now. Another feature request was shielding. I currently do not offer shields or walls as the original Space Invaders did. Some people wanted a way to shoot multiple times. Quite a few wanted power-ups, while others thought the fire rate and speed of the bullet needed to be increased.

Some feature requests are no-brainers. A way to get an extra life? No problem! Temporary invulnerability when a reserve ship is activated? Yeah, absolutely! Changing the number of bullets you can have in the air at one time? Um…Now I’m not so sure.

Not listening to customers is bad. Completely listening to your customers is also bad. Well, it isn’t bad to listen to your customers, but I don’t want to implement something just because my girlfriend and a couple of other people requested it. Yes, they are playing the game and identified what they would like to see, but just because they want it, it doesn’t mean it would be good to put in the game.

I had a few people request power-ups. Some people requested multi-shot, rapid-fire, area-effect explosions, and a bonus ship to shoot down. Watching the people play, I realized that I needed to provide multiple difficulty levels. I also found a bug involving the pause menu coming up during the game over menu. Some of these things I plan to add or change. Some of them I plan to ignore, partly because they would require major overhauls of code and partly because I am not sure that it wouldn’t hurt the game.

Even though I am not sure about some of these feature requests, I think I can only help this game get better by trying those features out. If the game becomes more fun because you can shoot more than one bullet, then I can keep it. If not, I’ll throw it away.

The best part is that I have something that is considered fun right now. People played my game and actually liked it! I can use the current game as a control as I experiment with different features. I can always release the game with its current feature set, get even more feedback from the world, and use that feedback when making a potential sequel or upgrade.

In any case, I’m still pretty happy that people enjoyed the game, even with its poor graphics and audio work. B-)

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Programming Yourself

Steve Healy wrote Programming Your Mind to Think About Programming, which gave me a few more ideas on how to convince myself to work even when I don’t feel like working.

He mentions feeling motivated while listening to certain songs, reading select articles, or watching a certain television show. I know that whenever I hear certain video game remixes (especially Contra and Mega Man 2) or techno, I can’t help but want to type semicolons.

I would like to develop rituals to get me in the mood to think creatively. For instance, I want to immediately pull out a pen and notebook whenever I am waiting for something. In line at the grocery store? Take some notes on my next game project. Waiting for something major to compile? Write down a few game ideas.

It is sometimes too easy to just let time go by without any results. If you can program yourself to do things automatically, things will get done as time passes.

Categories
General Personal Development

Nastiness on the Net

I haven’t been keeping up with the blogs I normally read, so when I read the first line of Martin Fowler’s blog entry NetNastiness, I had to look into it.

Somehow I hadn’t heard that Kathy Sierra, of the Head First books series and Creating Passionate Users blog, has had death threats made against her. She canceled a presentation and talked about discontinuing the blog due to these misogynistic threats.

I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)

I knew about Tim O’Reily’s bloggers code of conduct, but I didn’t know it was proposed in light of these death threats. I still don’t quite understand what the situation was, but apparently some well known, otherwise respected people were involved with the websites that hosted the comments.

Fowler wrote about the subject of nastiness on the Net in relation to these threats.

I worry that people who have interesting things to say and questions to ask are put off by the cut and thrust. They don’t feel free to speak. The freedom enjoyed by people who are nasty does deny freedom to others – and the nasty people belittle the fears of those they have silenced.

We can’t just sit back and say, “Well, that’s the Web!” It isn’t how I want my Web to be.

You may be thinking that this is taking it too far, some people will take offense at anything; following this logic leads to people who either say nothing, or speak in the bland platitudes favored by PR companies.

There is no need to go to the extreme of not saying anything for fear of offending someone. Fowler is right, however, in that we need to be aware that what we say may mean something a bit more than we intended. If you think that the nastiness is no big deal, you may want to ask yourself what effect it is having. Fowler’s entry touched on research that claims only 1.5% of women are involved in open source, even though 25% of women are involved in proprietary software development. His numbers are actually a bit different, as I got mine from a slideshow my friend sent me from the Flourish conference hosted in Chicago recently. One of the more interesting slides asked the question “Have you ever observed discriminatory behavior against women in FLOSS?” Just a little over 20% of men said yes, while almost 80% said no. Women, however, answered in the reverse.

And this is a study focusing on women in open source. What about foreigners? What about homosexuals? What about parents? What about students? What about race, or handicaps, or religious beliefs? How many people don’t feel welcome on the world wide web due to some level of nastiness that is tolerated in communities such as IRC channels, mailing lists, and blogs? It doesn’t need to be a misogynistic death threat to cross the line.

I want my Web to to better.

Categories
Games Politics/Government

Research into Why We Play

Thanks to GameDaily, I learned about a British Board of Film Classification report about the reasons people play video games.

There were a number of findings that surprised me:

  • There is a sharp divide between male and female games players in their taste in games and how long they spend playing. Some of you might be saying “Duh!”, but I was sure that women played the same games that men played. Perhaps the data I had was specific to hardcore gamers.
  • Gamers appear to forget they are playing games less readily than film goers forget they are watching a film because they have to participate in the game for it to proceed. The report also goes on to say that gamers are not emotionally involved but instead are concentrating upon “making progress”. So most people really do play games mechanically and don’t care about story? Is this really why there are people who will gladly pay every month just to gain experience by doing the same thing over and over again? Are games nothing more than “I Win” buttons to most players? Disturbing.
  • A range of factors seems to make less emotionally involving than film or television. The adversaries which players have to eliminate have no personality and so are not real and their destruction is therefore not real, regardless of how violent that destruction might be. Er, did we really just say that video games are less emotionally involving BECAUSE they aren’t realistic? If we give the adversaries personality (and I am sure that there are more than a few games that do so already), does their destruction result in games that allow minors to lose their grasp on reality?

There isn’t much else in the report that we didn’t already expect. Game players generally understand the difference between video games and real life. Game players are not all children, although parents (and I may add politicians) still think that games are for children only. One of my favorite lines:

Parents should not treat video games in the same way they would board games.

Parents aren’t readily giving their children The Newlywed Game boardgame, yet they think nothing of letting them play GTA 3? There are adult and mature-themed board games, so why are video games supposed to be played exclusively by children?

You can download the full report at the BBFC website.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: April 23rd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 83.5 (current year) = 345.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 24 (current year) = 630 / 1000

I managed to get some time in this past week despite the day job. I picked a title for my Space Invaders clone as well as a theme. It’s now called Killer Kittens from Katis Minor. The theme is pretty much the same thing as Space Invaders, only now there are killer kittens instead of generic aliens. Instead of dropping generic bombs, the kittens drop exploding yarn balls.

While this theme is pretty much a cosmetic change, I have managed to add a few minor features as well. Also, killer kittens are funnier than generic aliens. If I can focus on this project in the coming week, I might be able to finish enough to release it before the end of April.