Category: Game Development

My last documented development session was mid December. It’s now about a month later, and I haven’t worked on Oracle’s Eye.

I could list a bunch of reasons why I haven’t been able to work on it. Christmas took up a lot of my time. I was out of town for a week at the end of December, and I don’t have a laptop I could have used to work on the project. I moved during the first week of January, and only now do I feel that my computer area is mostly distraction free.

But those are just excuses. Clearly I didn’t give my project the priority it deserves. Still, I think there was something more to it.

I would decline invitations to events and say, “No, I really need to get some work done.” Then, during the time I should have been working on game development, I would get too easily distracted. Email would get checked way more often than it should have. I’d shuffle through papers on my desk. I would handle other tasks in my list of things to do. Then it would be incredibly late, and I would have to go to sleep to go to my day job in the morning.

It would be another evening wasted. I could argue that I at least got to cross some things off of my list. “The day wasn’t a total loss!” Of course, that’s not a useful justification when I haven’t done what I should have been doing for a month. If I keep this up, December 2006 will show up and I still won’t have a game to show for it.

So why haven’t I been able to even look at my project for so long? I finally identified it as fear. I’ve gotten the project to a point where I don’t have clear specifications and so it is hard to know exactly what to do next. I had the same problem when I started the project. I didn’t know what to do, and so I didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to do anything wrong! I’ve since learned that it is better that I do something rather than nothing. By hacking at my code until I have something useful, I now have a base to work with. Now, when I have to decide on my next task, I can more easily see if it will make the project better or worse.

So I sat down and wrote down all the things that would need to be accomplished in order for Oracle’s Eye to be considered really finished. For each of those accomplishments, I can then write down a plan of action. Afterwards, it should be a simple matter of just following the plan. Once the plan is completed, I can repeat the process with another accomplishment. It won’t always be easy to list out exact actions, of course. After all, I’m still learning about the problem domain. Still, it should get me out of this slump.

While I was writing this post, I realized I was referring to my lack of progress as a slump, which reminded me of Steve Pavlina’s article From Slump to Supercharged. Rereading it, I see that I was able to diagnose the problem correctly.

So let’s dive right into the heart of the problem. Why are you in a slump? You’re in a slump because you’re afraid. And you’re expending a lot of energy avoiding what you fear. It may not even be the subject of your work. It could be something totally unrelated, but it’s something that’s very important to you.

Near the end of the article, he talks about how fear and love are opposites. When you get rid of the fear of a challenge, you replace it with the love of the challenge. I noticed that when I was able to get past the fear of doing the wrong thing and could jump into development on Oracle’s Eye, I was loving it.

This week, I’m tracking my development time very closely. I’ve joined The Thousander Club at the beginning of January, but I haven’t done anything to show for it yet. Essentially that means that I am almost 85 hours behind for 1,000 hours of development time this year. I intend to catch up, which means that I’ll need to work on a plan to do so.

In the meantime, I just want to get out of my slump and start loving my game development again.

I posted the date of the next Chicago Indie Game Developer Meeting on the Indiegamer forums:

Where: The Starbucks at
Streets of Woodfield
601 North Martingale Road
Schaumburg IL, 60173

When: Tuesday, January 17th, at 7PM.

This post is just to provide a little over a week’s notice to those who can make it to the meeting. We’ll alternate between Chicago and the western suburbs each month, so February’s meeting will be in Chicago.

I was also experimenting with an About Us item:

The Chicago Indie Game Developer Club is an informal group of indie game developers who meet every month to talk shop with likeminded people. It’s generally good to keep in touch with your industry; no one wants to become obsolete. This club is just one way to make and keep contacts, learn about developments in the industry, and provide personal feedback to other developers.

It’s one way to help improve the CIGDC. I think a dedicated domain and website would be another. These are some of the things I would like to discuss at the meeting.

Oracle’s Eye is really shaping up as a game. I’m awfully close to the project, of course, so there could be lots of things wrong with it, but it’s definitely much more playable than when I called it “technically completed” a few weeks ago.

The links from December 9th still reflect the game’s current state, which means I haven’t done too much to update it. I made the Player’s sprite smaller and haven’t been able to walk through walls so far. Some of the small tweaks I’ve made with the code have made drastic changes in the resulting gameplay. For example, I combined two sections of code knowing that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I just wanted to get closer to whatever it was I was doing. The result: now instead of just pushing the Ball, you can push against the Walls, and depending on the direction you are facing, the Ball moves. Psychic powers?! Maybe I could make some Walls into switches that create a gravitational pull on the Ball? It might be an interesting gameplay development.

Of course, I haven’t exactly created or updated a detailed design, so how can I know when something is progress or the introduction of a bug? This project is starting to become a bit more concrete, so I think it is appropriate to list specific implementation goals. Since I’ve gotten this far, I really think it would be appropriate to turn it into a commercial quality game. Besides having a game to sell, it would also allow me to have the experience of finishing a game that doesn’t look and feel like a newbie’s first project.

It’s clear that Oracle’s Eye is becoming more like a puzzle game than anything else. The basic premise: maneuver the Ball through the Room to get to the Exit. Maybe that’s all a player needs to know, but what about me? I’m still making it!

• The Player should not be able to occupy the same space as a Ball. If the Ball hits a Wall, the Player should find that he/she needs to push at the Ball from a direction that isn’t towards the Wall in question. The point is to force the Player to use the level layout to find the best way to move the Ball. Allowing the Player to move the Ball through him/her would break the game since the Player would not need to worry about where certain Walls are.
• Graphics: the Ball should rotate when it is moving and in a way that implies rolling. As it stands,the Ball rotates in only one direction, and while it might not be too noticeable, it is incorrect. Similarly, the Player should have images from multiple angles and various key frames. The static Player image is fine for placeholder art, but it will need to be replaced by someone that looks alive and breathing. The Ball and the Wall and Floor tiles should also be updated with higher quality art. The graphic style should be cartoonish but not exaggerated.
• Sound: the game is silent currently. I should work on getting at least one piece of music for the background. The music should be upbeat and fun. There should also be sound effects for the Player when he/she kicks the Ball or hits a Wall. There should also be sound effects for the Ball hitting a Wall or getting to the Exit.
• Levels: each level will consist of a Room with Floor and Wall tiles, an Exit, and a starting location for the Ball and Player. Rooms should be able to have different dimensions. One Room might be 10×10, another might be 5×15, and another might have varying widths. The purpose is to allow vastly different level designs as well as varying visuals. The maximum limit is related to the screen dimensions and the Tile lengths. The Player should be able to choose levels from a menu, and finishing one level should allow him/her to continue to the next one. I imagine that the game would require the ability to restart a level if the Ball gets stuck in a corner or gets in some other situation that prevents Player progress.

I was about to add that I wanted extra items, like angled banks for the Ball to bounce in new directions, but I already decided to cut out such features. It’s a nice-to-have, and maybe I’ll find that it will be easy to add, but the above listing is what I want to concentrate on. I think that focusing on these things will greatly improve the game, and I can always write down the gameplay elements I come across that don’t fit this design but might be useful elsewhere. I will keep an offline version of what I have here. It should be easy to update as I gain more insight into the project and its needs. I already know that this isn’t nearly detailed enough, but it should be good enough to show you (and me!) what I’ll be working on.

Working off of the list of improvements for Oracle’s Eye, I managed to improve the hit detection somewhat.

I was originally thinking about changing the movement code completely. Instead of freely moving about, the Player and Ball would move in a tile-based manner. I spent a bit of time thinking and writing about how I would go about implementing a tile-based game, and I still believe that it might make some things easier. I could also start adding different objects easily.

But when I sat down to code, I decided to continue to do what seems to work for me: mold the existing project until it works.

A major problem with the movement is that the Ball can get stuck in Walls. It can bounce back out normally, but if the Player is too close, it will get stuck in the Wall. Unfortunately, one of the ways I tried to avoid problems with movement causes a very annoying bug. If the Ball moves into the Wall, it is supposed to move back out at twice the distance. It looks like it bounces back out. But if the Player is touching the Ball, it stops moving. Well, if it stops moving, it won’t bounce back because the reverse of stationary doesn’t exist! The next update through, if the Player moves, the Ball wants to move with the Player; however, because it is stuck in the Wall, it “bounces back”. The result is that the Ball looks like it is going the exact opposite way that the Player would expect, which makes the game feel buggy. And not the good, on-purpose buggy, either.

I’m not a fan of guessing with my code. If X = X + 1 doesn’t seem to work, I don’t just automatically turn it into X = X – 1. I prefer to analyze my code and try to determine what exactly is going wrong. In this case, I found that each update, the Player moves, then the Ball moves. Then the Kyra engine’s tree is walked, which allows me to accurately handle collision detection. The next step is to check if the Player collided with a Wall. No problem there. I just reverse the direction of the Player, move him, then change his direction to STOPPED. Then I check if the Player collided with the Ball. If it does, then the Ball will take on the direction of the Player. It makes sense in most cases. If the Player touches a stationary Ball, the Ball should act as if it had been kicked in the same direction that the Player was moving.

When the Ball is near a Wall, however, the Player can kick a Ball, and the Ball can bounce off the Wall. Now the Player and the Ball overlap. Again, it is not a big problem. If the Player moves, the Ball follows the Player. The problem occurs when the two overlap AND the Ball is overlapping the Wall. The Player moves, makes the Ball move, but then the Ball wants to reverse itself.

I found that most of the Ball/Wall overlap can be avoided by changing the order of the collision checking code. The Ball will check for collisions first, then the Player will do the same. The Ball might still get stuck in the Wall, but I’ve found that it is a quite a bit more rare and not as dire a situation. It is a lot harder to reproduce the issue, but of course, right when I was about to say that the problem was completely solved, it occurred.

In any case, it was a quick fix and didn’t require any new code. I’ll probably continue to work on this same issue, but for now it has been vastly improved. I think I will also want to change the size of the Ball. The diameter of the Ball is the width of a Tile, which makes it very difficult to maneuver. If there is a single Tile opening between two Walls, a player might find it incredibly frustrating to try to get the Ball in between. It is part of the reason why I was thinking about using Tile based movement. I should eliminate this problem entirely. Of course, Duke Nukem Forever has had its engine gutted and replaced a number of times, and I would actually like to complete this game soon. B-)

Download files: EDIT: I decided to take down this set of downloads. For both tar.gz and .zip files, it comes to about 16.5MB, and I’m running out of space on my server apparently. This update doesn’t exactly merit its own release, so I will remove it and allow space for better uploads.

Already I’ve improved the movement of the Player and the Ball.

Essentially, what I am supposed to do is make any moves, then walk through the Kyra Tree, then check for collisions and respond accordingly; however, my hardcoded movement code moved the Player, then walked the Tree, then moved the Ball and checked for collisions. The Player worked out just fine, but the Ball would get stuck in the Wall.

Then I changed it so that the actual movements wouldn’t happen until the update code ran. When you push the arrow keys, the Player’s Direction changes accordingly. It will only change positions during the update, and it does so at the same time as the Ball. Then I walk the Tree, and so collision detection is a bit more accurate.

Also, the Player only moves in four directions now, so it isn’t possible to move twice as fast on a diagonal. For this game, not being able to move diagonally shouldn’t be a problem, but an adventure or action game might require such movement in the future.

The Ball currently changes Direction when it hits a Wall. It’s actually kind of cool to watch the Ball bounce back and forth between the Walls. If I start adding more Walls throughout the middle of the level, it could actually be fun.

It’s amazing what can be done when you don’t have to worry about ruining the code base. I’ve been using Subversion all this time, but psychologically I’ve been concerned about doing the wrong thing. I basically convinced myself that I’m going to be writing code that needs debugging anyway, so the “wrong thing” will most likely be a bug that needs to be fixed to make the right thing. So far, I haven’t had to rewrite whole sections of code, or if I had, I haven’t noticed it as hard work.

Thanksgiving is here, and I’ll be out of town for the rest of the week/weekend. I’ll probably have a bunch of spam comments to delete, and I won’t likely have time this weekend to approve any. Still, keep the comments coming. I love the feedback. B-)