Category: Game Development

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development

LD32: Weapon Ideas #LDJam

Ok, it’s two hours later. I had leftover green olive and onion pizza for dinner:

LD #32 First dinner

And my wife came home from an event with a red velvet cupcake for me:

LD #32 Red velvet cupcake

I came up with a number of ideas for this theme, especially as people on IRC bounced quite a few around:

  • The Bourne Identity: remember that scene when Bourne used a rolled up newspaper to hit the other guy? And then he stabbed him with part of a pen that was lying around? A game with a lot of random stuff that requires the player to be resourceful and clever.
  • Infectious Agent: a restaurant owner is trying to poison the right spy without killing customers.
  • Kite a Giant: lure a large monster toward a city/castle/friend’s cooler treehouse/etc, while ensuring it doesn’t get bored or killed.
  • Sunlight Focused: kill a neighbor’s flowers with beams of concentrated sunlight in order to win the local horticultural contest.
  • Food Fight: a cafeteria featuring students with ridiculous weapons, such as mashed potato guns and banana missiles.
  • Toys: inspired by the Robin Williams movie, in which wind-up toys fight (I recall this is a multi-decade old game already).
  • Information Warfare: choose which important papers to shred in order to leak secrets.
  • Books: check out books from a library before your coworker does to prevent him/her from learning and getting that promotion.
  • Excruciatingly Severe Body Odor: your odor is repellent. Make use of it!
  • Numbers vs Letters: it’s a battle between the higher level and abstract thoughts!
  • Shapes: an RTS inspired by the different shapes in Flatland.
  • Monopoly: use market pressures to defeat your competitors.
  • Avalanche/Cave-in: cause a disaster to trap other people.
  • Cactus vs Balloon: inspired by some art in my room.
  • Nanotechnology: tiny invaders that destroy your enemies from the inside out.
  • Mind Control: make your opponents do self-destructive things.
  • Fear: scare people towards disaster (for them, obviously).
  • Vampire Hunter: use blood disease to kill vampires.
  • Eggs: birds hatch and peck at opponents.
  • Plunger: you’re a plumber, and you have to save the day.
  • Hopes, Dreams, Aspirations, and Fears: you work in HR at Large Corporation, Inc.

I also tried to come up with a list of potential weapons:

  • Gravity Wells
  • Vacuum cleaner
  • Air guns
  • Summon beings, such as demons
  • Weather
  • Ever increasing mass
  • Sex appeal
  • Paper cuts
  • Bullying
  • Embarrassment
  • Candy
  • Innocence
  • Music
  • Laundry (dirty or otherwise)
  • Humor
  • Banana peels
  • Kisses

Out of all of them, Kite the Giant is the one I keep thinking about. I like the idea of indirectly influencing a destructive force.

I think I’ll go ahead and call it. That’s my game idea, and I’m moving forward with it.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development

LD32: An Unconventional Weapon #LDJam

The theme has been announced, and it’s An Unconventional Weapon.

I think I’ll start by exploring that theme quite a bit, and I’ll get back to you about what I’ll do. I’ll think about this theme over a quick dinner.

My goal will be to have something playable, or at least controllable, before the first 12 hours are up.

Since I’m not using something like Unity or Unreal Engine, I won’t be able to whip something up in mere moments, but I know I’ll be able to leverage some of my own code as I have in the past. Each Ludum Dare gave me something new to make use of.

My strategy for this Ludum Dare is to doodle a lot whenever I’m not programming. I’m not very good with digital art programs, but I can put pencil to paper decently enough, and I can just digitize it after the fact.

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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Personal Development

Ludum Dare #32 Is About to Begin #LDJam

I’ll be participating for the first time in two years, when I made a simpler-than-I-would-have-liked game for Ludum Dare #24: Evolution.

Before that, I participated in #11 (Minimalist), #12 (The Tower), #13 (Roads) #14 (Advancing Wall of Doom), #15 (Caverns), #18 (Enemies as Weapons), and #20 (It’s Dangerous to Go Alone. Take This!). I also have a number of MiniLDs under my belt. I’ve gained enough experience to attain Veteran status, so I get +1 to the category of my choice, I think.

I’ll be using libSDL2 and related libraries, NFont, Gimp, Audacity and SFXR, C++, vim, and my Ubuntu system for a development environment.

My past self posted a handy checklist on my blog: https://www.gbgames.com/blog/2012/08/pre-compo-checklist-for-ludum-dare-ld48/ Thanks, Past Self!

As always, I’ll try to cross-post my progress both on the Ludum Dare website and on my own blog.

Oh, and here’s my office pic:

My Office for LD32

Good luck, everyone! I’ve missed you.

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Game Development

Hear Indie Speakers for Free at EPX Indie 2015

If you’re in the Iowa City, Iowa area, you might be interested in attending EPX Indie 2015 today at 6PM, hosted by EPX Studio, a student organization dedicated to developing media such as video games, animations, websites, product design, robotics, and whatever else their members are interested in.

They’ll have four speakers, including:

  • Kate Craig – Artist for Gone Home (Skyping in)
  • Anthony Burch – writer for Borderlands, blogger, co-host of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin? & more (Skyping in)
  • Eric Neuhaus – local game developer for Virtually Competent
  • Tom Heinecke – local game developer who’s worked on the Guitar Hero series, as well as Bit Dungeon for his own company KintoGames

For more information, see the EPX Indie 2015 Facebook event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/423711344477067/

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business

GDC 2015 Starts Today

Four years ago, I attended my first and only Game Developers Conference.

While many people find the conference overrated or a pain to travel to, I miss the energy of so many game developers in one place, sharing their passion and experience with each other.

I miss the Independent Games Summit and the AI Summit. I learned quite a bit from the sessions I attended, and I met quite a few game developers I only ever knew online for the first time.

I miss the Expo floor, not only for playing demos of everyone’s games but also to see what new trends and technologies might be coming.

I would love to check out the GDC Education Summit.

I want to see who will win at the Indie Games Festival and how Nathan Vella compares to Andy Schatz as host. I’m sure he’ll be great, and he’ll say inspirational things we’ll all want to write about. No pressure.

I’ll be following this year’s action on Twitter and on Gamasutra, unless anyone has any better recommendations.

While my wife and I are still watching Oscar-nominated films, I’m surprised I haven’t been looking into playing Seumas McNally-nominated games. I’ll fix that now.

Congratulations to all of the finalists for the IGF! I see many of you have a GNU/Linux version of your game, and I’m looking forward to trying them out.

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Game Development

Isometric Pixel Art Cheat Sheet

I’ve never made an isometric game, but I know that there are some calculations needed to translate what’s on screen to what’s in the world and vice versa, calculations that aren’t necessary in an top-down view.

But what about drawing the art to populate an isometric game? Well, Dennis Busch provided a handy cheat sheet to help you figure out how to do so:

Isometric Pixel Art Cheat Sheet

It provides illustrated tips for:

  • tiling floors and walls
  • transforming flat images to walls or floors
  • rotating a vertical structure
  • handling slopes
  • casting shadows with global and point lights

Thanks to Jon Jones for finding this cheat sheet a billion years ago.

And if you find it useful, consider contributing some funds to Dennis or hiring him. See some of his pixel art to get an idea of what he can do for you.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

More Game Mechanic and Algorithm Visualizations

Sometime back, I wrote about GameMechanicExplorer, which was a new site that allowed you to explore game mechanics interactively.

Seeing a new technique represented in a visual space can help make it easier to understand, especially if the math or algorithm is complex.

If you’ve ever done searches online for game development, you’ve probably come across Amit Patel’s website, which acted as a public set of bookmarks for various game development resources.

RedBlobGames 1

In the last year, he started posting interactive visualizations to explain topics such as lighting and visibility, A* pathfinding, probability, and using noise to make procedural generation look natural, among others.

RedBlobGames 2

I enjoyed his article on procedural map generation in the past, but being able to see (and hear) how noise works and learning about the different kinds of noise in one place is amazing.

In general, you can find a lot of great game development resources at Red Blob Games, but these new visualizations add a lot of value. Thanks for posting these, Amit!

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Controversy over 2nd Mighty No. 9 Funding Campaign?

Outraged Gizmo

Last year, comcept USA, LLC raised over $4 million for their 2D platforming game Mighty No. 9. Over 60,000 backers plus whoever contributed through PayPal are looking forward to this Mega Man-inspired project to get completed, and the development team has been periodically releasing their work to show how much progress has been made, such as this Mighty No. 9 work-in-progress video released last month:

It’s generating quite a bit of excitement, and as the developers realize that this game has a large and dedicated following, they decided to capitalize on it.

Announced at the 2014 Anime Expo, there is a new funding campaign:

More details about the announcement are at the Mighty No. 9 website, but the general idea is that the original funding is enough to make the game and it will still be made, but this new campaign is to fund bonus content. The first announced stretch goal is full English voice acting.

Apparently some people are outraged about this second campaign. People are complaining that producer Keiji Inafune is greedy. “You’ve already got $4 million, and now you want even more money?!” Some people have compared it to Exploding Rabbit’s Super Retro Squad, which met its very conservative funding goal easily, yet the developers were inexperienced and realized during its development that making games is hard.

But Mighty No. 9 is getting made. The people behind it know what they are doing and are fully-funded. The new campaign isn’t to help finish the game. It’s to add more bonus content to the game.

There is a very strange entitlement issue that some vocal Internet denizens seem to share. Kickstarter is a way to invest in something, and it’s entirely possible that it will fail. You contributing $5 or $500 does not mean you will get what is being made. A project may also turn out completely different than originally planned.

And when Mighty No. 9 is looking like it is well on its way to being exactly as advertised, the hostility lobbed at the developers for what some people misunderstand as greed is even more bizarre.

Making games in full view of the public is like being an umpire at a Little League baseball game in which all of the parents watching are drunk and boisterous and occasionally violent. Oh, and they don’t know how the game is played, yet have no trouble telling you how you are doing a terrible job in very colorful language.

Is it just business, though? Are people merely getting insight into what it is really like, now that funding is crowd-sourced? Or is it the nature of business on the Internet?

I imagine Bill Gates long ago learned to put a filter on the content he reads to keep his sanity. It’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry if you are going to read about how you are the Devil incarnate on a regular basis. I suppose before the Internet you just had to worry about a harsh opinion piece in the newspaper because most publicly-available forums were professional in nature.

Being an indie developer has appeal for many partly because you are not beholden to someone else. You have no boss but yourself. You have no constraints on your vision but your own. You have no deadlines but the ones you impose.

Yet, crowd-sourced funding puts you in this strange place. It enables you to not only do market research and connect with fans, but it can also give those fans a sense of ownership in your independent venture. And if the expectations aren’t clear upfront, there can be a lot of pain.

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Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development

Reminder: Come to My Lunch and Learn Presentation on May 29th

If you can make it, please come to my Lunch and Learn post mortem about my time running GBGames full-time on Thursday. I hear it will be a good one.

Playing the Long Game: The Vital Importance of Purpose, Mission, and Vision to Your Business

Gianfranco Berardi will share the major lessons that can be drawn from his experience running an independent game development business full-time.

He’ll explain what happened between the time he delivered his two weeks’ notice to his day job in 2010 until 2012, when a lack of funds forced him once again back to part-time business owner status. See how a lack of strategic planning resulted in a business with no focus and a business owner feeling out of his depth. More importantly, learn how doing the hard work of identifying your Why, How, and What pays off both immediately and in the long-term.

WHEN:
May 29th, 2014 at noon

WHERE:
StartupCity Des Moines
317 6th Ave, Suite 500, Des Moines IA, 50309
p: 515-868-0473
e: info@startupcitydsm.com

It’s a free event, and I’d love to see you there. Register for it at https://tikly.co/-/2510.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development

A Recipe for Meaningful Gamification

Gamification has been quite the buzz word for the last few years, although I haven’t seen too much in the headlines recently.

Sebastian Deterding defined gamification as introducing game design elements in non-game contexts in the presentation below:

From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining "Gamification" from Sebastian Deterding

Deterding has since been upset at how gamification is thought to be nothing more than using incentives to reward people (press button, receive points/badge/achievement) for doing what the designers want them to do, and he argues that good game design and a larger purpose behind it all is still needed to make it successful.

Gamification isn’t new, and people have been talking about it for decades under different terms. Deterding has since preferred “Gameful Design” as a term instead.

I recently learned about Scott Nicholson, associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. He researches learning through games, and he’s the director of Because Play Matters Game Lab, which is meant to create transformative games and play for informal learning environments.

Nicholson is interested in Meaningful Gamification, which he defines as “using game design elements to help users find meaning in non-game contexts.”

So, you are trying to establish long-term change and making such effort intrinsic rather than relying on rewards to keep it going. There’s a lot of research on compensation in the workplace. The old carrot-and-stick approach seems logical. If you want people to produce more, you reward them with more pay. If you want to stop some behavior, you punish. If you take away those rewards and punishments, people will revert to behavior you don’t necessarily want.

But for some time there has been the idea that extrinsic motivation actually reduces productivity. A person told that he/she will be rewarded for doing an activity will be more likely to stop doing the activity when the reward stops than a person who was not presented with an award.

Nicholson created the following recipe to help create meaningful gamification:

  • Reflection – assisting participants in finding other interests and past experiences that can deepen engagement and learning
  • Exposition – creating stories for participants that are integrated with the real-world setting and
    allowing them to create their own
  • Choice – developing systems that put the power in the hands of the participants
  • Information – using game design and game display concepts to allow participants to learn more about the real-world context
  • Play – facilitating the freedom to explore and fail within boundaries
  • Engagement – encouraging participants to discover and learn from others interested in the real-world setting

I think choice is interesting, because a lot of gamification interest comes from the idea that if you create a game that everyone in your organization must play, then it will drive the behavior the organization wants, when it’s not actually the case.

More information about this recipe is at the Because Play Matters Game Lab website.