GBGames
Check it out! The squad car is chasing the getaway car! This is actually about 200% of the size. You can control the squad car, but I also set both cars to follow the border of the game screen so I can see what it looks like when it runs on its own.
Oh, uh, what happened to the roads? Yeah, they’re coming.
After getting some boilerplate code down, I took a break to have lunch:
Peanut butter, cinnamon, and raisin sandwich, plus some blue corn chips and hummus, washed down with Tutti Frutti flavored Jaritos. Also, some carrots (not pictured).
I spent lunch and the hour after trying to nail down a specific direction to take this project. Here are my design notes:
I’m still hoping to get basic game play by dinner today. We’ll see how ambitious a goal that is.
I woke up this morning kind of groggy. I had to sleep on the couch because my cats left me a smelly surprise on my bed. I guess they didn’t like being locked out of the office. B-(
It snowed a lot last night. It’s very white out. I need to drop off my laundry at the laundromat, and I also want to go to the pet store to purchase Nature’s Miracle enzyme cleaner. Darn cats.
Anyway, breakfast!
I’m afraid I probably won’t do well in the food competition this time around, but we’ll see.
I’ve also been thinking about my project. Perhaps it won’t be a simple puzzle game because then I would need to design puzzles. I was thinking it could be an action game in which you play the role of the getaway car trying to outrun the police, but then I would need decent AI and it might end up being a clone of Pac-man. I’ll think a little bit more about this game.
I liked the idea of the police strategically blocking certain roads so that the criminals can’t get away. Road Lockdown is my current name for the project, but it might change. B-)
From this mock-up, you can see the red getaway car of the criminals as well as the squad cars blocking the roads. I think I’ll keep the road images for the final game, and the cars seem to have come out fairly nice, I think.
I think I’ll go to sleep now. Tomorrow morning I have a lot of coding to do.
So the theme is Roads. According to the voting results, it was the only one with a positive number of votes overall, and yet the IRC channel is erupting with people surprised that it was the theme that won out.
What are some ideas?
– Building roads between cities to facilitate commerce.
– Managing traffic congestion.
– Planning/Acting on The Road Ahead for your life.
– Maintaining a small town’s roads.
– Transporting materials along a long road.
– Find your way without a map, searching for a lost road.
– Strategically shut down certain roads to guide a getaway car to the police.
There are plenty of ideas, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more.
Last night I got back from over a week-long vacation. I visited friends in Des Moines, and it was very relaxing, aside from hurting my back and seeing the chiropractor four times. I walked around downtown Des Moines, visited the historic Capitol Building, went to a dueling pianos show, watched a couple of movies, danced at a nightclub, and otherwise had a great time.
Oh, and I learned how to play checkers.
I was in the library and passed the game section. There was a book on playing checkers. I thought, “Ok, I haven’t played that game since I was a kid, and I think I heard someone saying that it is as cerebral as chess. Let’s see why.” Did you know that the official rules of checkers REQUIRES you to jump your opponent’s piece if you can do so? I didn’t know this rule, and when I asked, it seems that most of my friends didn’t either! This one simple rule suddenly makes this otherwise child-friendly game really, really complicated.
Besides trying to figure out ways to make simple games more strategic by forcing moves the way checkers does, I spent a good amount of time figuring out my next move in life. I read a couple of books and articles on life purpose and business and wrote a bunch of notes. I took advantage of my time away from work obligations to think about what I want out of my life. I’ll have more to write about my decisions later, but suffice it to say that I don’t want life to force my hand because it might put me in a suboptimal situation.
It’s my move.
[tags] checkers, life purpose, business, game development [/tags]
Gregg Seelhoff announced that he attended Meaningful Play 2008, an academic conference ” that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways”, and he posted his notes.
I’ve been thinking about the kind of games I wanted to make, and rather than create short-term sales product that will be thrown away within a week, I’d like to make games that matter. Games that stick around long after you’ve played them, like a good book or a good movie. I really liked the idea of an entire conference dedicated to meaningful play, and I hope I can attend the next one. There were some good nuggets of information that Gregg managed to report, such as who plays games at Pogo.com and for how long, but I especially liked reading the following on what kinds of serious games received good reviews:
An acceptable game (threshold 1) succeeded in the areas of technical capacity and game design. A good game (threshold 2) passed threshold 1 and, additionally, succeeded with aesthetics, visual and acoustic. For a game to be great (threshold 3), it had to pass both previous thresholds and also succeed in the final two areas of social experience and storyline (“narrativity and character development” is too long). Few games reached the final threshold.
Look at that! A prioritized list of what makes up a good game!
It’s unfortunate when you can’t play games because they are made for specific platforms, especially when there is always this emphasis on the ubiquity of Flash. Many of the games Gregg links to were Windows-specific, and they wouldn’t run in Wine. When so many of these games aren’t even meant to be commercially viable, is it still a valid argument that providing a port to other platforms such as Mac and Gnu/Linux would be pointless since having access to a few hundred thousand more players wouldn’t be worth it?
I would have liked to know more about Ian Bogost’s keynote, but Gregg provided some good notes for most of the rest of the conference. I have more than a few PDFs to download and read through.
[tags] meaningful play, game design, game development, serious games, casual games, conference [/tags]
Jeff Tunnell posts for the first time in a long time about how you shouldn’t fear the economy and should start your game business now. Yes, there is a lot of doom and gloom about how the economy is stagnating and people are worried about paying the bills.
But that just means there are less people willing to take the risk of starting their own businesses! Less competition means more opportunities for your business!
But how do you start? I wrote an article about Forming an LLC in Illinois, and running an LLC is much easier than running an S Corporation. If you don’t know the difference, there are plenty of resources online about the different types of business entities.
I also wrote about what an indie developer needs to know about copyright. Copyright laws can be quite complex, so it pays to know at least SOMETHING about them.
Not sure how to even start making games? I also wrote You Can Make Games, which describes how easy it is to get into game development, and the best part? It has gotten even easier since I wrote that article two years ago! With technology like PopCap’s framework (and TuxCap for people who want to recognize that there are people who use Mac and GNU/Linux), libSDL, and freely available Java and Flash web development tools, there should be nothing to stop someone with a computer, an idea, and a willingness to put some effort behind it from making a game.
There are great articles and other resources for running your game development business at GameDev.net. Advice can be found at the IndieGamer forums.
So what’s stopping you? And for that matter, what’s slowing me down?
[tags] indie, game development, video games, business [/tags]
These past two weeks have been very unproductive, so there just isn’t anything to report for the Thousander Club. Crunch at the day job isn’t over yet, and since it started getting a bit colder, I haven’t been feeling 100%.
Instead, how about a list of links to interesting indie-related things going on in the world today?
What has everyone else been up to?
Years ago, Nintendo Power’s 100th issue listed the best 100 games of all time. Besides Mario and Zelda games, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior, there was the game listed at #3: Tetris.
I remember that a lot of people complained that there is no way that Tetris could be ranked so highly in such a list. In fact, people still complain when they see Tetris listed very highly in Nintendo Power’s most recent update of the list with the top 200 games.
Tetris is a great game. It was probably the first financially successful game that caused other game developers to say, “Wait, I’m crunching for years at a time, and I could have made THAT?” So why all the animosity? Oh, right. It’s a casual game. It’s too simplistic to be considered among the best.
But is casual really mutually exclusive with hardcore? Are these words really describing two different types of games?
Earlier this year, Corvus wrote that casual games can be identified as such by how forgiving they are. If you only have 5 minutes in your busy schedule to dedicate to a game, you’ll play Bejeweled sooner than you’d play Starcraft. Trying to play Starcraft in 5 minutes would be an exercise in stress management. You can’t just stop when you have to leave, so your choice is to keep playing the map you’re currently on, ruining your schedule, or quit and lose your progress. Bejeweled much more forgiving in this sense.
In this sense the GameBoy game Wario Land 2 was much more casual in nature than many other platformers. In this game, Wario was unkillable, a departure from the typical Mario-based platformers. If you can’t kill or harm Wario, what can you do? Solve puzzles! If you’re not very dexterous, the game doesn’t punish you the way Super Mario Bros would. Again, it’s very forgiving. Contrast Wario Land 2 with Super Mario Sunshine, which gives you a limited number of lives, requires you to restart a level if you fail, and features enemies and obstacles that can kill Mario. Super Mario Sunshine is very punishing. The challenge comes in punishment avoidance.
Contrast Strange Adventures in Infinite Space against Sins of a Solar Empire, two very different games. One lets you play multiple games within a matter of minutes, while the other one requires a much larger time commitment. Actually, if you’ve ever played SAiIS, you’ll know that the game also requires a larger time commitment simply because you won’t notice that an hour has passed and that you’ve played hundreds of sessions. Still, the interface for SAiIS is point and click and dead simple. SoaSE might have a good interface for strategy fans, it’s just hard to fathom someone fresh to video games getting it as easily as they would with SAiIS. And how about the difference in game play? If you lose a space battle or otherwise fail in SAiIS, it’s not so bad. Just start a new game, just like you would if you won. Try again. The sting of defeat isn’t harsh because you probably lost and won many games in the time it took you to read this post. Losing in SoaSE, on the other hand, is a bit more harsh.
So maybe there is a difference between casual and hardcore games, but I still think that there are steps that a game developer can take to make any game more accessible. Developers should take steps to make the complexity more manageable through the interface at the very least. And if your game is punishing the player for taking certain actions or for failing, ask if it is really necessary to punish him/her that badly. Hey, Nintendo! Do we really still need a limit on lives for Mario games?
[tags] indie, casual game, game design [/tags]