Category: Game Development

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

May #1GAM Entry: Hungry Frogs

The updates have been coming in quickly towards the end of the month, but my May project for One Game a Month is finished.

Download Hungry Frogs for Linux 64-bit (352 kb tar.gz file)

May #1GAM

Rather, it is finished enough. You can control the frog by jumping and turning around. If you fall in the water, the frog slowly swims back to the nearest lily pad. Flies will move across the screen in a straight line from left to right, and you need to jump to eat them. If you miss half of them in a given round, the game is over. Otherwise, the flies move faster each round, making it more difficult to catch them.

I didn’t take many screenshots as I thought the rectangles made for an uninteresting still shot, but I did make videos to demonstrate progress of the game’s development.

First, getting the jumping physics to work:

Then, landing on lily pads and swimming when you fall in the water:

Then, some game play, with edible flies:

And the final version, with faster flies each round and a game over screen if you miss too many:

I moved the frog’s tongue down as I realized it looked strange at the top of the head and I wasn’t going to have time to replace the white rectangle with a nice animated frog image. I would have liked to have flies moving in fly-like ways instead of straight lines. I really appreciate how the developers of Frogs and Flies nailed it in the constraints of an Atari 2600’s memory and processing power.

I’m not sure I’m happy with how easy it is now. Originally it was difficult to catch flies, so I expanded the tongue’s collision detection to include the frog’s body as well as a space around the tongue. Now it might be too forgiving, although there’s a gap if the frog is moving fast enough that from one frame to the next the collision box goes around the fly’s location. I’d fix that next if I had more time.

I’ve never made a platformer before, and this project was a good start. I am pleased with the jumping physics, although I need to figure out a better way to determine the maximum heights of jumps.

All in all, it was a fun project to make, even if it is once again another project with scope cut drastically to make the deadline.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

My May #1GAM: Now You Can Eat Flies

During the GBGames Game Dev Co-Op Hour this morning, I added flies and the ability to eat them, as you can see in this Hungry Frogs progress video:

I realized that the tongue’s dimensions were too small and made it too difficult to eat flies, so I increased the dimensions beyond what the tongue’s visuals would indicate, and I eventually even added the frog’s body as part of the “did the frog eat this fly” collision detection.

I noticed while making this video that sometimes the frog’s tongue looks like it should eat a fly as it falls, but it must be falling too fast since the fly remains, meaning that the collision detection happened above and below the fly but not in-between, where the fly actually is. One way to solve it is to do a more complex collision detection in which I keep track of where the frog was in the previous frame and check for the space in between as well. Another is to reduce the speed that the frog currently moves so that such checks don’t have to happen. The latter would be easier in my limited time.

My next step is to provide a way to end the level and start a new one.

And animation would be a nice way to finish it before the end of the month, although I’m not optimistic that I’ll be able to dedicate the time.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

My May #1GAM: Now with Lily Pads and Water Hazards

Last week, I wrote about my May #1GAM project’s progress, explaining that I haven’t been able to dedicate a lot of time this month to the project, partly due to day job crunch and partly due to travel and events going on around this time.

I was able to tweak the jumping physics a bit, and I’m much more satisfied with it. I like the idea of short hops getting the player into position to take a large leap and landing safely on the other lily pad.

As you can see in this updated May #1GAM demo video, I’ve split the lily pad into two, and now I’ve made the water a hazard:

If the frog falls in, it automatically swims to the nearest lily pad. It’s a constant speed, unlike the swimming motion that was mimicked so well in Frogs and Flies, but it’s in.

Since the player can’t control the frog when it is swimming, it means the player has less time to eat the flies before the sun goes down, and so therefore landing in the water means less points will be earned.

The next biggest thing to implement: flies and the eating of them. In hindsight, this aspect should have been implemented first, as it impacts how much I like the jumping physics, but I really wanted the swimming aspect in.

And I’ll follow it up with a score indicator and a timer to represent a day of fly-eating.

If I have time, maybe I’ll be able to replace the square with an actual animated sprite of a frog.

How’s your One Game a Month project going?

Categories
Game Design Game Development Linux Game Development

My May #1GAM’s Progress

I’ve been trying to use my participation in One Game a Month to take each game project and try to learn one new aspect of game development in its development.

One thing I’ve never done is make a platformer. I figured that it would take some time to figure out the jumping physics and timings and collision detection with the ground versus a wall versus a floating platform, and I had no interest in pursuing it during a Ludum Dare compo.

That said, my project for May was meant to be an attempt at capturing the feel of a game I used to play a lot as a child. Frogs and Flies for the Atari 2600 used to keep my sister and me occupied for many an afternoon. Looking at Google Image Search, I can see that I’m not the only one who has ever wanted to make a game like it.

Oh, well. The important thing is that this is an opportunity to limit the scope of the game while I try to code up some jumping physics. The ground is static. There are no platforms to leap onto.

Unfortunately, due to day job crunch and various other responsibilities, I’ve only been able to dedicate a few hours to this project all month.

You can see the current status in this May #1GAM demo video, as it would be more interesting to see a box jumping around than a still screen:

I had some trouble with the jumping being inconsistent. Since I was using fixed-time steps, it made no sense to me why one jump would reach a different height than another.

Then I found that I wasn’t handling the jump states very well.

Jumping has three states: NOT_JUMPING, JUMPING, and FALLING.

In my code, if you hit and hold the spacebar, the state would be JUMPING and you could control how high you jump by how long you hold the key down.I f you let go of the spacebar, the state would change to FALLING. Once you hit the ground, the state changed to NOT_JUMPING.

For some reason, holding the spacebar down for the entire jump resulted in inconsistent heights reached. Imagine playing Super Mario Bros and getting frustrated that taking the same action results in randomly not being able to jump high enough to get to the next platform. What gives?

The video shows a white and gray box on the left side to indicate the max jump height and the last jump height respectively as I tried to figure out if it was a real or merely perceived problem.

I realized what the problem was eventually. Gravity was always being applied to the vertical velocity of the frog, even when it was on the ground. So in one update, the frog’s position hasn’t changed, but it’s velocity has. The next update, the position would change due to the velocity, and so when it fell below the ground, I’d reset the velocity and the position.

So while the player wouldn’t see any change in position, as it is a static box, there’s a 50% chance that the spacebar would be pressed while the player’s velocity is lower than 0, and the velocity of a jump was added to the player’s velocity instead of being assigned to it, which would have masked the issue (or solved it in the first place, if you prefer).

I changed the code so that gravity is only applied if the player is not in the NOT_JUMPING state, and everything worked much more consistently.

Then I added a direction and provided horizontal impulse as well, so each jump not only moves the frog up but also left or right. I want the player to use small jumps to move about, and bigger jumps to try to catch flies, similar to the advanced mode on the Atari 2600 game.

I’m pleased with how the jumping feels, although I find it awkward to figure out how to manipulate the relevant variables to get the jump how I want it. Gravity, initial jump impulse, additional jump impulse if you continue holding the spacebar during a jump, and time all conspire to say how fast and how high you jump, and I’ve been under time constraints to do the probably simple parabolic math that I’m sure it involves.

Like my past few months, I’ll probably have to limit the scope of this project significantly if I want to get it completed before the end of the month. I still need to add flies and way to catch them. I probably won’t have time to implement falling off the lily pad or day/night cycles. Even though I have a week left, it’s a rough week.

How’s your #1GAM project going?

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Linux Game Development Personal Development

March #1GAM Entry: The New Worlds

I did it.

I thought I had a design that was a bit too ambitious, but I somehow managed to finish my March entry for One Game a Month.

“The New Worlds” is a space exploration game. Your homeworld’s star is known to go nova eventually. Evacuating everyone is the only option, and evacuation is expensive. Explore the universe, set up bases on suitable planets, and increase the wealth of your homeworld before time runs out.

Download The New Worlds for Linux 64-bit (547 KB tar.gz file)
UPDATE: A 32-bit Linux version is available now. Download The New Worlds for Linux (543 KB tar.gz file)

I’ll have to write up how it all happened later, as I’m rushing off to see family this weekend. I had to cut back on features, such as setting up trade with alien civilizations.

There’s still at least one major issue with the game play. It’s entirely possible to run out of fuel and supplies and have the game continue to run even though you can’t do anything. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t wait to die. You can’t scrounge for supplies as it was a feature I didn’t have time to add even though I really wanted it.

I want to come back and address this issue, although the next time I touch this code I’m sure I’m in for a shock. It’s horrible and ugly and I hate myself for writing it. B-)

Still, it’s playable, and it’s possible to lose and win. And it is fun exploring and trying to survive in the universe.

March1GAM-14

March1GAM-15

Categories
Game Design Game Development Linux Game Development Personal Development

Jumping Into The March #1GAM Project

Last month, I finished my One Game a Month February project on the last day, just in time to submit it and get credit for it. Whew!

February’s project was made in almost 12 hours of actual work throughout the month. That is, for about 3 hours per week, I was able to hack a game together. What surprised me was that I didn’t need a huge block of time to get something substantial accomplished. I thought that 45 minutes was the minimum amount of time I needed to concentrate and get my bearings before writing or changing code, but some of my more productive game development sessions weren’t more than 15 minutes in length.

For March, I know I am capable of throwing something together quite quickly. I’ve spent a little over four hours so far on game development this month, and while I’m worried that my game design might be a bit too ambitious, I’m pleased with the results so far.

March’s game is “The New Worlds”, a space exploration game. You’re tasked with discovering interstellar resources to bring back to your homeworld to get everyone off of the planet before the sun goes nova. Hopefully you can find a new home for everyone as well.

Along the way you might discover planets that are already inhabited, and you can setup trade. As you increase the wealth of your homeworld, your ship can be upgraded to allow you to travel farther and faster with more passengers.

Here’s some in-progress screenshots over the last ~4 hours of development:

A random star field.

March #1GAM

Some random solar system. I changed the background from black to a purple-ish hue as I found it was a bit easier on the eyes.

March #1GAM

More planet variety, and clicking on a planet sends your ship there.

March #1GAM

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

February #1GAM Entry: Electomagnetic Play

I managed to put my February entry for One Game a Month together mostly in the last couple of weeks, sometimes with only 15 minutes at a time to dedicate to working on it. It’s amazing how much comes together in 15 minutes.

Electromagnetic Play is currently only available for 64-bit Linux as I wanted to get it in under the deadline. I’ll work on ports later when I have some time.

Download Electromagnetic Play for Linux 64-bit (1.5MB tar.gz file)

A quick description of the evolution of the game.

I thought of having magnets that you use to move metal balls around an arena.

February 1GAM

Eventually I decided on a simple game in which you have to catch the balls in a metal bucket, and you can only move the bucket by charging magnets on either end.

February 1GAM

Once I had balls dropping and magnets charging when you clicked on the green buttons, I had something that was basically finished.

February 1GAM

Add some scoring and lose conditions…

February 1GAM

…and tweak the challenge a bit by level, and we have a game.

February 1GAM

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development

I Have a Day Job Again

EDIT: You can see a post mortem of sorts in a presentation I made on the lessons I learned from my experience: Playing the Long Game: The Vital Importance of Purpose, Mission, and Vision to Your Business.

“You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results!” – Dr. Ray Stanz

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for some time. Back in May of 2010, I put in my two weeks’ notice at my day job.

At the time, I wrote:

So why walk away from that? Because I’m also cutting myself off from an obligation to be anywhere for 40-60 hours a week. Those hours are mine now. I have the freedom to use them however I want. Instead of being a cog in an otherwise pretty great wheel, I’m making my own wheel.

Of course, with that freedom comes great responsibility. I’m solely responsible for the success or failure of my business. My future income depends more on my marketing, sales, creativity, and productive output than the time I spend sitting at a desk. It’s going to be hard work, and I’ll encounter challenges the likes of which I’ve never seen.

My burn rate said that I’d have enough savings for one year. Thanks to living in a city with a lower cost of living, the stipend I get as President of the Association of Software Professionals, and the support of my girlfriend-now-wife, I was able to last until 2012 before I needed to seriously look to supplement my income.

My income was near non-existent, though, and I should have been focused on supplementing it way earlier. You can do a lot of things wrong, but so long as you have sales/cash flow, you can live to tell the tale. If you don’t have cash flow, you can’t survive. I waited too long, unfortunately, so after having some contract PHP work disappear out from under me and realizing that I didn’t really have the network of support to find game development work easily, I once again took a full-time job.

I should do a full post mortem on my full-time indie attempt, but for now, here’s the highlights.

When I started out full-time indie, I probably spent too long figuring out what to do with my time. Eventually, I got into a structured daily routine of work. Things were going to be fine so long as I spent my days being productive. Get up, exercise, get some game development done, write a little, repeat the next day.

Unfortunately, I didn’t ship fast enough. My flagship game, Stop That Hero!, wasn’t officially released until a year after development, even though I thought it would be a one-month project at first. Even though I knew not to focus on technology and to focus on the game, even though I knew I should focus on getting to a positive cash flow as quickly as possible, even though I knew better, I still did the exact wrong things. While I had a good flurry of support from the pre-order, the sales are very low and aren’t going to be covering a regular meal, let alone mortgage payments.

Clearly what I’ve been doing isn’t working, but what was I supposed to do next? How was I supposed to turn things around?

Anything I spent my time on that didn’t bring in money felt like the wrong thing. I was feeling a lot of stress. Towards the end, I found myself somewhat paralyzed. Planning was important, but planning wasn’t action, but action for action’s sake wasn’t working. I could spend time learning a new development platform, but that would still mean no published games right away, but if I took time to plan I could figure out a way forward but who has time to plan? I know one hour of planning saves three hours of work, but if you only have mere hours left, you want to make them count. But that brings me back to trying to move forward while also trying to figure out which direction forward is. Gah!

I was disappointed, but I also felt like I was letting a lot of other people down. I’ve had a number of aspiring game developers tell me that I was an inspiration to them. My wife reminds me that I had a good couple of years worth of trying which is more than most people give themselves since they never make the attempt. She’s right, but it’s still hard to think I had an opportunity and lost it.

These days, it’s a lot less stressful not to worry about how to spend my day, wondering and second-guessing if I’m making the right choices in order to make a living. I’ve reintroduced that 40-60 hour week obligation, which means everything else in my life takes a backseat, but for the last few months, I’ve been able to breathe a bit more. I could take some time to reassess.

When I was hired, I made it clear that I fully intend to continue work on my business. It would have been a deal-breaker for me if I they were going to insist that I couldn’t as a condition of employment.

Now the trick is making time for my business outside of the day job hours while balancing the rest of my life. But I’ve been here before, and being on the other side of having a full-time business, I have new insights. I understand more fully the lessons I thought I pre-learned. I understand the game development industry just a little more.

So I’m not done. I’m going to live on. I’m going to survive.

And while there’s plenty of advice on how I should go about doing it, while there’s no shortage of people who can say that I should have focused on Facebook or mobile or free-to-play or Flash or HTML5 or Unity or Windows or any number of business models, platforms, and tools, I know I’ll find my own way. I’ll make my own rules.

In some cases, the consequences are heartache and failure that could have been avoided had I listened to someone else.

But I didn’t go into this to follow someone else’s lead. I’m not doing this to be like everyone else or make games like them.

I’m an independent game developer. I define my own success.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical Personal Development

January #1GAM Entry: Walls and Armies

I’m in crunch at the day job, and so I didn’t have weekends like I had hoped to work on a game project. Luckily, I had finished the design of this two-player card game, and it counts. I call it “Walls and Armies”, and the rules are below.

CardGameDemonstration

Setup:
Take a standard 52 card deck of cards. Remove the jokers from the deck and leave them out of the game.
Shuffle all cards into a main deck.

For each player:

  • Determine how many “walls” and “army” cards you get. For each type,
  • Flip the top card from the main deck to determine the number of cards to deal
  • If it is a face card (Jack, Queen, King, Ace), then place that card down in front of the player face-up and sideways to indicate that it is a “shield”.
  • If it is a number card, discard the card and deal the indicated number of cards face-down in front of the player. For example, if the top card was a 3, then discard the 3 and deal three cards.
  • The wall cards and shield cards are laid out individually in front of the player. The army cards are placed in a deck, and the player should not look at them.

Play:
The first player is the one who has the fewest wall cards, or if tied, the one with fewest shields, or if tied again, the one with the fewest army cards. In case of a tie across all three sets of cards, flip a coin.

For each player:

  • Pick one of the opponent’s wall or shield cards to attack, then flip the top card from your army deck. If the target card is face-down, flip it over to reveal it. You cannot attack wall cards until your opponent’s shield cards are eliminated.
  • If your card is higher, then discard both the target card and the army card.
  • Otherwise, your opponent can choose to leave it alone or counter-attack:
  • If left alone, you may stack your next army card on top of any of your in-play army cards, adding the number of the armies together to attempt to eliminate the target card.
  • Your opponent may choose to counter-attack by playing one of his/her own army cards.
  • If the counter-attack is higher than your army card, then the counter-attack is discarded, and each of the stacked armies are added to the opponent’s wall cards.
  • Otherwise, both the counter-attack and the stacked armies are discarded.
  • Repeat until you run out of army cards.
  • Replace all face-up shield and wall cards with face-down cards.
  • Replenish your army deck by flipping the top card from the main deck. If it is a face card, add it to your shields. Otherwise, deal yourself the number of cards indicated into your army deck.

    • Play continues until either player has run out of wall cards. The other player is declared the winner.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Personal Development

12 Games in 12 Months #OneGameAMonth

OneGamePerMonth

It’s mid-December, which means people are remembering their New Year’s resolutions and rushing to accomplish them before 2013 rolls around.

Last year, I managed to release the Stop That Hero! alpha after many months of delay. This year, I similarly managed to get the next update out a few months ago after many months of delay, and it still hasn’t been ported to the Mac. Otherwise, I have a couple of Ludum Dare games under my belt. One of my aspirations is to be a prolific game developer, and this is not a good track record.

Ludum Dare has three main compos during the year (one is this weekend!), but each month in between features a miniLD with custom rules by whoever is hosting. I have been considering making it a goal to participate in each of these miniLDs if only to get 12 games in any given year.

Chris Kaitila, aka McFunkypants, wrote 12 games in 12 months about his experience in the last year attempting to make at least one game a month, so it seems I’m not the only one with such aspirations.

I set out this year to prove to myself that not all game projects need to stretch on for months or years. It was a battle against the featurecreep and code bloat that I’d suffered from for years as an indie gamedev. I’ve started so many more games than I’ve finished in the last 20 years.

From assembly language “hello worlds” to BASIC choose-your-own-adventures without an ending. From to Turbo Pascal Tron lightycles games, to Visual Basic prototypes so woefully buggy and half baked they weren’t even worth backing up. From unpolished (but complete!) C++ openGL shooters with only one level to Adobe Director (shockwave) horse-racers with no finish line. From php sports simulators with broken AI to html4 multiplayer chat worlds with server problems.

Looking in my Projects directory, I see that my unfinished 0h Game Jam about a horse race with no finish line. Hmm.

Now, Kaitila has a broader range of experience with tools and engines than I do. I could probably stand to get outside of my C++/SDL comfort zone, but the risk is taking the time to learn something new versus using what I know to work on games.

But he found that it’s easy to get sucked into a never-ending project, one that quickly stops being fun to develop, and so becomes one that never gets finished. I’m sure we’ve all been there. There’s a lot of discipline involved in game development, which isn’t obvious to anyone who hasn’t done it before.

So what can you do? Reduce scope! But feature creep is always a problem. Set short deadlines! But projects always have a way of taking more time than you planned.

Kaitila’s answer to both: game jams.

Instead of getting involved in a long marathon of game development which might force you to choose between your health/family/friends and your project, you run little sprints. Ludum Dare’s 48 hour compos and miniLDs are perfect. There are also other game jams throughout the year, such as Meaningful Game Play Game Jam and 0h Game Jam held during a missing hour due to Daylight Savings, so there are plenty of options.

Like daily workouts, each game project made me stronger. Faster. Better.

You can do this too. Challenge yourself to make a game a month this next year. Let this be your new year’s resolution. I’m going to do it all again in 2013. One game per month, on average, and a dozen finished products by the end of the year.

I’m issuing a challenge to all my gamedev friends: join me in the epic quest. It CAN be done. You don’t have to be hardcore, insane, or obsessed. Join me in the gameamonth challenge. We can help encourage each other.

If you have a Twitter account, you can sign up for the One Game A Month challenge. It’s like a game for game development. You get XP for each new game you post, and people who sign up before January 1st get 100 early adopter bonus points.

I’m in. Are you?