The new domain is online!
Enjoy your stay on wzl.vg! :D
Also the first game dissection article just got published over there too!
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Game over for Redwater games
I decided to make a step forward, and in order to do so i am taking this blog out of business.
Let me quickly explain: I never released something that would be worth putting a label on and i kinda got tired of it. That's why i will abandon that name for the sake of making new stuff, and not concentrating on appearing all professional and shit.
Also i don't quite like the blogger software, so i'm moving all my stuff over to another place:
I think a forum fits my needs more than a blog does, so i got myself some webspace and set one up.
I'll register a domain soon so it will be easily accessable ( ^ i'm not expecting you to remember that link).
This blog will keep existing though. For history \o/
For further updates and information on the status of the new place you can of course visit it directly or follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/wzl_
Let me quickly explain: I never released something that would be worth putting a label on and i kinda got tired of it. That's why i will abandon that name for the sake of making new stuff, and not concentrating on appearing all professional and shit.
Also i don't quite like the blogger software, so i'm moving all my stuff over to another place:
I think a forum fits my needs more than a blog does, so i got myself some webspace and set one up.
I'll register a domain soon so it will be easily accessable ( ^ i'm not expecting you to remember that link).
This blog will keep existing though. For history \o/
For further updates and information on the status of the new place you can of course visit it directly or follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/wzl_
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Unterholz
Unterholz is a particle based sandbox similar to the Powder Game. It uses Cellular Automata to calculate the water simulation and grow plants.
This game is built for LudumDare's 23. game development competition in around 12 hours.
The basic idea was to be able to influence the development of the environment through elements like wind and rain, and other influences like the sun, or its absence. The current functionality is limited to rain falling down and settling in lakes. Surrounding soil will consume water to become damp and have a chance of spawning a plant.
Eventually all environmental behaviors should only be minorly influenceable, like clouds forming automatically with the given circumstances, so it becomes more of a simulation than a sandbox.
Implementation
1. A major change should be a decently partitioned grid with Awake(regular updates), Idle(unreliable/irregular/occasional updates), and Sleep(no updates) states. Each state has a different update priority, so water that is settled once goes into Sleep, and will only be reevaluated if a neighbouring Cell's state is changed.
2. The image data needs to be stored in a buffer that is updated and changed throughout the update phase and just once uploaded. Several texture maps should be used for terrain, water, lifeforms (plants/critters).
3. For the sun to do it's magic i need to think of a way to calculate the lightmaps for the daycycle in a cheap but accurate fashion, so caves stay dark and cold while the surface might dry up.
4. Flow maps for heat and wind for generating cloud formations to make it rain and storm.
 |
| Pictured: Activity |
Grow it big
More plants can be added with certain environmental prerequesites for them to grow, depending on the amount of light and space they have. Plants can range from algae to flowers to trees. The difficulty is making them appear distinct when only having pixels to work with.
Critters were planned to be added in the compo game. Time constraints didn't let me though. Life forms would be spawned near or in water, being fish or land dwellers. Fish would consume algae and produce offspring, their died bodies will be consumed by the earth leaving nurtured earth behind for better developing plants.
Land-dwelling critters would walk around eating plants or other critters, changing the ecosystem along the way.
This currently sounds like a big terrarium (i think i just got where Terraria got it's name from, duh :p) with only few interaction, so i am thinking about adding active players to the mix. They would be able to harvest, hunt, fish and transform the environment, actually impacting the whole ecosystem. When they block the sun and rain on a certain spot, plants will wither and leave dirt behind. Being too influential with your surrounding might end up tipping the equilibrium and you end up in a desert wasteland.
 |
| The most hi-res animation i ever made |
What's the difference?
There is minecraft and it's horde of clones, Terraria and possibly more offspring in that genre, whatever those may be called. I really like both those games, and playing them extensively made me realize a thing or two.
The environments are very static. They can extensively be manipulated by the player, but if left alone nothing changes. A living environment would help to create a deeper atmosphere, seeing it developing on it's own and experiencing that your actions have consequences on your surroundings aswell.
Both those games have Biomes (fixed zones) to create more diversity to the environment. In Unterholz those biomes would be created dynamically, depending on rain, sun, clouds, wind, wildlife etc.
Although you can cultivate different plants in either game, the rules to do so are very vague. They need not to be irrigated or photosynthesize and have, apart from being resources, just an esthetic use. In Unterholz they would wither if being unattended for longer periods of time or would serve as food for wild life or else care for it's own business.
Why?
The idea now is to take what i learned from both and try to merge it into one interactive simulation and see what happens next.
You can download the compo version of Unterholz here.
Monday, April 9, 2012
EA’s Madden ’13 Kickstarter Makes 8.5 Million in Five Hours
This is a response to the post to Dinofarm Game's article: EA’s Madden ’13 Kickstarter Makes 8.5 Million in Five Hours.
It's interesting to see other indies struggling with the same problems when trying to crowdfund their game.
They seem to have the same perception of the problem that i have. If there is already a target audience (i.e. you're a gamedev rockstar or have a famous franchise) you're pretty much set. In every other case you need a huge chunk of luck, self promotion and a lot of help from your friends to succeed.
Even then there are still people who do not understand that it costs money (i.e. living expenses) to develop a game. People, what do you even expect?! If you don't want to contribute that's fine, nobody forces you to, but keep your incompetent comments to yourself("I can’t see a point in supporting lazy people with so much money." - quote from Dinofarm games article). You're hurting the project by putting other people off their intent to donate. If this mindset continues to exist it could really damage the potential for indies to go for crowdfunding.
Making games cost money. The time you need to code, create concept art and assets, hire a musician or otherwise help from outside. It's not like we want that money because we're greedy bastards who want to leech on you so we can enjoy a lifestyle better than yours.
In case you live with your mom, here's a simple estimate of monthly living expenses (this applies to germany at least)
300-500Euro - Rent, power and gas
100+ - Food and stuff
200+ - Health insurance
This totals in at least 600-1000 per month depending on your size, appetite, health insurance policy, location you live in etc.
Maybe now you can see why a budget of 10.000 Euro is not much, in fact it is terribly humble. Indie developers do not have a set work schedule. It is not rare to work more than 8 hours a day, because we love what we do, and you cannot just stop working if you're in the zone. But we're not in it for the money. If we were we'd rather be working as system admin or software developer, tech support or something else.
We do this because we love doing this, and we want to provide you with awesome games. Alleging us to be greedy will not only hurt us or our community, but the games you will eventually get from us (or won't get).
Finally, i want to adress the headline, something the Dinofarm guys unfortunately didn't. This is something that crossed my mind a few days back. Publishers without a doubt have taken knowledge of Tim Schafer's and Brain Fargo's success through Kickstarter, so what if they decide "Hey, what they can do, we can, too".
This scares me. Big scale publishers don't need this, well, because they are publishers. They are supposed to fund the development of the game, since they take the biggest piece of the pie. If they offload a portion of the budget onto the customer, not only will they screw us twice, but probably adding ludicrous perks like "Day one DLC for free".
This might be the most likely outcome, but it could benefit us aswell, as a certain factor of risk could be put off by us. "Is it worth making the game/new sequel/new title to an existing franchise?". Probably not on the scale they'd like it to, but still, there are games that could come to life that way, games where major publishers hold the IP and aren't made because they fear the target audience is too small to return the cost.
I doubt that publishers are that sensible though.
Let's just see how it turns out and let's look forward to the next great Kickstarter campaigns \o/
It's interesting to see other indies struggling with the same problems when trying to crowdfund their game.
They seem to have the same perception of the problem that i have. If there is already a target audience (i.e. you're a gamedev rockstar or have a famous franchise) you're pretty much set. In every other case you need a huge chunk of luck, self promotion and a lot of help from your friends to succeed.
Even then there are still people who do not understand that it costs money (i.e. living expenses) to develop a game. People, what do you even expect?! If you don't want to contribute that's fine, nobody forces you to, but keep your incompetent comments to yourself("I can’t see a point in supporting lazy people with so much money." - quote from Dinofarm games article). You're hurting the project by putting other people off their intent to donate. If this mindset continues to exist it could really damage the potential for indies to go for crowdfunding.
Making games cost money. The time you need to code, create concept art and assets, hire a musician or otherwise help from outside. It's not like we want that money because we're greedy bastards who want to leech on you so we can enjoy a lifestyle better than yours.
In case you live with your mom, here's a simple estimate of monthly living expenses (this applies to germany at least)
300-500Euro - Rent, power and gas
100+ - Food and stuff
200+ - Health insurance
This totals in at least 600-1000 per month depending on your size, appetite, health insurance policy, location you live in etc.
Maybe now you can see why a budget of 10.000 Euro is not much, in fact it is terribly humble. Indie developers do not have a set work schedule. It is not rare to work more than 8 hours a day, because we love what we do, and you cannot just stop working if you're in the zone. But we're not in it for the money. If we were we'd rather be working as system admin or software developer, tech support or something else.
We do this because we love doing this, and we want to provide you with awesome games. Alleging us to be greedy will not only hurt us or our community, but the games you will eventually get from us (or won't get).
Finally, i want to adress the headline, something the Dinofarm guys unfortunately didn't. This is something that crossed my mind a few days back. Publishers without a doubt have taken knowledge of Tim Schafer's and Brain Fargo's success through Kickstarter, so what if they decide "Hey, what they can do, we can, too".
This scares me. Big scale publishers don't need this, well, because they are publishers. They are supposed to fund the development of the game, since they take the biggest piece of the pie. If they offload a portion of the budget onto the customer, not only will they screw us twice, but probably adding ludicrous perks like "Day one DLC for free".
This might be the most likely outcome, but it could benefit us aswell, as a certain factor of risk could be put off by us. "Is it worth making the game/new sequel/new title to an existing franchise?". Probably not on the scale they'd like it to, but still, there are games that could come to life that way, games where major publishers hold the IP and aren't made because they fear the target audience is too small to return the cost.
I doubt that publishers are that sensible though.
Let's just see how it turns out and let's look forward to the next great Kickstarter campaigns \o/
Sunday, April 1, 2012
More weeks passed
In the second week Astronaught received a small number of contributions, boosting it up to $167. This results effectively in 110Euro. The following days and weeks didn't bring in any contributions and we're still at that number.
To explain the lack of updates i need to clear something up: I am currently in a difficult situation. I need to get out of my apartment end of this month and find a new one. This implicates to be actually able to pay the rent. Finding a suitable job is not easy either, mainly because i am not sure what i can do. Well, i'm a programmer, i could just get a programming job. The thing is i'm more a creative person than a hard laborer, so working on repetitive and unrewarding tasks is dragging me down both physically and mentally. This is why i chose to be independent. Turns out the term is misleading if you don't have a stable source of income or you're not called Tim Schafer. ;)
Additionally programmer jobs are usually long term and full time day jobs. 2 ways to prevent me from enjoying my personal game development.
So what else could i do? Currently i am clueless.
Regarding gamedev, well, maybe i've been approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction. But i can only learn by doing these mistakes. Overambitious feature-creeped project anyone? Turns out i often cannot settle with games that could effectively be programmed on a computer that is 20 years old. I desire the technical and design challenges my ideas provide me with. While it is entertaining to come up with a solution to a difficult problem it can also aid the learning process and help coming up with solutions for completely different problems. This is what makes game development interesting to me.
So what am i trying to say here? You might have guessed it by now: Astronaught won't be developed.
I want to apologize to everyone who supported and put their faith in me and the game. I received some awesome feedback and i am very glad about all of the comments you made.
Also i want to thank everyone who contributed to the campaign. Your support will help me through this difficult time and i hope i can make up for it with a future project.
Special thanks fly out to Bob Chatman for all his encouragement and his generous contribution.
Sorry i couldn't live up to your expectations.
wzl
To explain the lack of updates i need to clear something up: I am currently in a difficult situation. I need to get out of my apartment end of this month and find a new one. This implicates to be actually able to pay the rent. Finding a suitable job is not easy either, mainly because i am not sure what i can do. Well, i'm a programmer, i could just get a programming job. The thing is i'm more a creative person than a hard laborer, so working on repetitive and unrewarding tasks is dragging me down both physically and mentally. This is why i chose to be independent. Turns out the term is misleading if you don't have a stable source of income or you're not called Tim Schafer. ;)
Additionally programmer jobs are usually long term and full time day jobs. 2 ways to prevent me from enjoying my personal game development.
So what else could i do? Currently i am clueless.
Regarding gamedev, well, maybe i've been approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction. But i can only learn by doing these mistakes. Overambitious feature-creeped project anyone? Turns out i often cannot settle with games that could effectively be programmed on a computer that is 20 years old. I desire the technical and design challenges my ideas provide me with. While it is entertaining to come up with a solution to a difficult problem it can also aid the learning process and help coming up with solutions for completely different problems. This is what makes game development interesting to me.
So what am i trying to say here? You might have guessed it by now: Astronaught won't be developed.
I want to apologize to everyone who supported and put their faith in me and the game. I received some awesome feedback and i am very glad about all of the comments you made.
Also i want to thank everyone who contributed to the campaign. Your support will help me through this difficult time and i hope i can make up for it with a future project.
Special thanks fly out to Bob Chatman for all his encouragement and his generous contribution.
Sorry i couldn't live up to your expectations.
wzl
Sunday, March 11, 2012
First week of Astronaught funding passed.
Ok, so it's not exactly one week, but i'd like to make these updates on Sundays.
The campaign has been running since Tuesday, so let me post some info on how it went so far.
Let's start with the Youtube video. It got around 1300 views since then. This is rather amazing, and the highest view count i achieved to get ever in a Youtube video. The analytics on it are interesting to analyze:
The spanish game portal anaitgames.com covered Astronaught with a short article which resulted in the biggest source of views (nearly 300). Thanks for covering it anait!
The second biggest source of views(nearly 200) is indiegamemag.com who first covered my game in a news post, and it seems to origin of all the other (p)reviews on blogs. Thanks Priestman for the great article!
Almost the same amount of views comes from reddit. Thanks @slushy_ to post it there!
The remaining views are spread across several sites, link-portals and of course the 8BitFunding campaign site.
So what else did i do for publicity. I went to different forums i frequent like TIGSource and GPWiki and a few other smaller places. I created a project site on indiedb.com but the news didn't get approved to appear on the front page yet, so the resulting views and feedback are very few.
Lastly i obviously post updates on Twitter and a lot of kind users are retweeting it for more exposure. Thanks a lot guys!
So let's get to the juice!
This weeks earning through the campaign were 65USD by 6 people in total, averaging in around 11USD. This translate to 42EUR after substraction of the 8BitFunding and Paypal fees. Pretty good for a start, but not anywhere close to hit the goal (~0.5%). Judged by the amount of Youtube views (100 / (1300 / 6) = ~0.5%) it extrapolates to the estimation that i need a total of around 300,000 views to get the total amount of funding. Although it obviously doesn't work like that.
TL;DR
While it looks like a good start, it doesn't even get close to the goal given the time and duration (5 out of 56 days).
In the remaining 7 weeks i need to implement and show off more core features the game will include, create new art and get a decent gameplay video up to convince people that it is worth contributing.
You all obviously play a big role in it! The more you can spread this by word of mouth (or typed in that respect) the more likely this game will become realized eventually.
Finally, i want to thank everyone who tweeted, blogged, talked and contributed (!) about it so far. I hope i can do your hopes justice and deliver a great game!
Special thanks fly out to Jourdan Cameron who made a good effort of advertising the campaign on several blogs and forums!
http://blackmannrobin.com/2012/03/08/8-bit-outer-space-horror-meet-astronaught/
http://bitmob.com/articles/8-bit-space-horror-and-why-the-industry-needs-to-take-bigger-risks
Thanks man, it is much appreciated!
The campaign has been running since Tuesday, so let me post some info on how it went so far.
Let's start with the Youtube video. It got around 1300 views since then. This is rather amazing, and the highest view count i achieved to get ever in a Youtube video. The analytics on it are interesting to analyze:
The spanish game portal anaitgames.com covered Astronaught with a short article which resulted in the biggest source of views (nearly 300). Thanks for covering it anait!
The second biggest source of views(nearly 200) is indiegamemag.com who first covered my game in a news post, and it seems to origin of all the other (p)reviews on blogs. Thanks Priestman for the great article!
Almost the same amount of views comes from reddit. Thanks @slushy_ to post it there!
The remaining views are spread across several sites, link-portals and of course the 8BitFunding campaign site.
So what else did i do for publicity. I went to different forums i frequent like TIGSource and GPWiki and a few other smaller places. I created a project site on indiedb.com but the news didn't get approved to appear on the front page yet, so the resulting views and feedback are very few.
Lastly i obviously post updates on Twitter and a lot of kind users are retweeting it for more exposure. Thanks a lot guys!
So let's get to the juice!
This weeks earning through the campaign were 65USD by 6 people in total, averaging in around 11USD. This translate to 42EUR after substraction of the 8BitFunding and Paypal fees. Pretty good for a start, but not anywhere close to hit the goal (~0.5%). Judged by the amount of Youtube views (100 / (1300 / 6) = ~0.5%) it extrapolates to the estimation that i need a total of around 300,000 views to get the total amount of funding. Although it obviously doesn't work like that.
TL;DR
While it looks like a good start, it doesn't even get close to the goal given the time and duration (5 out of 56 days).
In the remaining 7 weeks i need to implement and show off more core features the game will include, create new art and get a decent gameplay video up to convince people that it is worth contributing.
You all obviously play a big role in it! The more you can spread this by word of mouth (or typed in that respect) the more likely this game will become realized eventually.
Finally, i want to thank everyone who tweeted, blogged, talked and contributed (!) about it so far. I hope i can do your hopes justice and deliver a great game!
Special thanks fly out to Jourdan Cameron who made a good effort of advertising the campaign on several blogs and forums!
http://blackmannrobin.com/2012/03/08/8-bit-outer-space-horror-meet-astronaught/
http://bitmob.com/articles/8-bit-space-horror-and-why-the-industry-needs-to-take-bigger-risks
Thanks man, it is much appreciated!
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Astronaught went public
Around 3 weeks ago i had a blurry recollection of something that might have been a dream after waking up. The image in my head was a little pixel astronaught running around in a space station. I am not actually sure why i dream in 8bit, but i sure liked the impression.
I started drafting first sketches of the character and a walking and jumping animation. The day after i started a mapeditor with some placeholder tiles and basic box2d collisions.
The coming days i improved on each the tileset, the mapeditor and the game mechanics and went ahead to build the lighting shader. For now it is simply raycasting with a fall-off value to get some nice light rays. So this is the current state development in a nutshell.
So yesterday i started the 8BitFunding campaign and got a really nice review over at the Indie Game Mag. I will dedicate the next few days on some more promotion of the campaign before i can concentrate on the project again. More info on future plans will also follow in the coming days.
I started drafting first sketches of the character and a walking and jumping animation. The day after i started a mapeditor with some placeholder tiles and basic box2d collisions.
The coming days i improved on each the tileset, the mapeditor and the game mechanics and went ahead to build the lighting shader. For now it is simply raycasting with a fall-off value to get some nice light rays. So this is the current state development in a nutshell.
So yesterday i started the 8BitFunding campaign and got a really nice review over at the Indie Game Mag. I will dedicate the next few days on some more promotion of the campaign before i can concentrate on the project again. More info on future plans will also follow in the coming days.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Thoughts on Minecraft
I thought about writing an article about this for some time. Now some friends(@AstrorEnales) are building a game in that genre, and this is enough motivation for me to write down my take on this game, as this might help them with some design decisions.
Generally i think minecraft is a genius achievement. It's a great idea to have a sandbox world randomly created in what you can do whatever you want to do. Exploring, building, fighting, it all seems aaaawesome. Until you've done it all, at least once. Don't get me wrong, i still play it from time to time, and i still enjoy it. But i have a bunch of issues with it that makes me think of this game more like a broken product than a finally released game.
So lets start.
I always found the beginning of minecraft the most rewarding. Spawning with nothing but your hands. Farming the initial resources, mostly wood, to craft your first tools.
And this is where the trouble starts. The crafting system is nice. I really like drawing out the tools and objects you craft. But where do you learn the recipes? Obviously you'd head over to the wiki and check what's there. This is a major problem! We're only able to play the game to the fullest if we resort to outside resources? As if that isn't bad enough, you easily end up reading through the whole wiki, spoiling your gaming experience, because it's damn interesting to find out stuff, right? Nothing wrong with that, except you should find those info ingame, right where it belongs. I'm not saying implementing the wiki into minecraft is a good idea, but there needs to be an information interface of some kind to learn about the recipes you can craft.
So we built our first wooden shovel and pickaxe and built our shelter for the night. To get through the night we start digging a hole into the ground, our first mine shaft. This is were the next problem starts.
You're basically 5 minutes into the game, and already tier 1 (Wood) equipment is inferior to what is available to you now (Stone). Nowadays when starting a new game, i head for a tree, chop it down for a pickaxe, farm some stone and whoop, i'm in tier 2 within one minute of gaming. This makes wood tools virtually useless, apart from the initial 3 stones you need to get a pickaxe. Oh and what is that shimmering in the distance? Is that iron? Oh right, in the later updates you find iron in such an abundance and accessibility it's not even funny. Tier 3 within less than 5 minutes of gameplay? This would not be so bad if it was a game you would just play for an hour. But you're trapped in this for days or weeks. So after the initial 'whoo upgrade' phase it's basically no progress anymore, only sustaining your stock of iron and diamond. This really ruins a big part of the game for me and i was hoping the leveling system that was anounced for 1.8 would adress this issue, like requirements which must be met to be able to upgrade your equipment.
Farm 2 stacks of stone with a wooden pickaxe before unlocking the recipe for the stone pickaxe. At this stage you could easily implement the recipe info aswell. "Hey! You unlocked a Stone Pickaxe. Here, it's built like that, have fun!"
We've been digging for some time and found a nice big cave. Theres Zombies, Skeletons, and ... BOOM. You very well know what i'm refering to.
One hit kill. Seriously. By a stealth unit that only makes a sounds if you virtually have no time to react, or hectically jump down a cliff or step into lava. Don't get me wrong, i like the idea of creepers. They are an interesting unit which is difficult to handle with, that's fine. What i'm not fine with is that it instantly kills you, spraying your items around, often into lava. Yes, you can build armor, and it pretty much seems required in the latest versions if you don't like to be one hit killed. Oh, why did we have custom skins again? Ah yes, to hide them under a set of armor, of course. This is really crucially important to me. You are able to design your own skins, and people do and love it. What use is it if you're required by the game to wear armor that obstructs anything but your face, making everyone look the same again. Although the need for armor does explain the amount of iron you are able to find lately. What about the other enemies? Zombies? Skeletons? No threat at all, if you have at least a wooden sword. You need around 12 hits with your fist, but only 2-3 with a wood sword? What kind of balancing is that. Why would you even upgrade to stone or iron, except for durability?
The ai is a joke. Zombies and creepers heading straight for your position. No pathing at all, eventhough a trivial a* should be working good enough on that kind of grid based terrain. Skeletons stop at a distance, shooting their arrows in your face, and don't feel too bothered if being beat up by a sword. You can basically mow through enemies if you're not reckless.
One thing that i found really thrilling were the cave spiders. The poison was not deadly but brought you down to half a heart. It was action, it was horror, it was what i was expecting from deep cave exploration. Then they changed them from being a threat to only being really annoying.
Now you're several weeks into the game, built awesome monuments and intricate redstone circuits with your friends. So what is left to do? Oh, yes you can enchant your equipment or brew potions.
Dig faster, longer. Run faster, dive deeper! This is a good way to still increase your gaming experience. Decide on a task and prepare for it with enchantments and potions. But then you realize, you need levels to enchant equipment. Not only do you need to reach certain levels for certain enchantments, but you also lose all your levels depending on the level of the enchantment, and you are not even guaranteed a good enchantment. So what is left? Grinding? Just no! This feels to me like a cheap way of procrastinating game time. I agree that you'd need a high requirement of something to get an improved tool or weapon. This could aswell be worked out through experience and leveling. Better potions and enchantments over the amount of things you brewed or improved in total. Ton's of games did it that way, and it works! Don't tell me you did it different just for the sake of doing it different. We're spending loads of time in minecraft already, don't make us waste time by grinding monsters for eventually not getting the enchantments we're hoping for.
That said, i must say i still love minecraft for what it is and what it did for the indie dev community. There's obviously a ton of things that could be implemented to make it even more awesome, but i think these are important points that need to be adressed at some point. Enough rambling now!
Now, back to work on Into Beyond! (Now on Indiedb too! :D)
Generally i think minecraft is a genius achievement. It's a great idea to have a sandbox world randomly created in what you can do whatever you want to do. Exploring, building, fighting, it all seems aaaawesome. Until you've done it all, at least once. Don't get me wrong, i still play it from time to time, and i still enjoy it. But i have a bunch of issues with it that makes me think of this game more like a broken product than a finally released game.
So lets start.
I always found the beginning of minecraft the most rewarding. Spawning with nothing but your hands. Farming the initial resources, mostly wood, to craft your first tools.
And this is where the trouble starts. The crafting system is nice. I really like drawing out the tools and objects you craft. But where do you learn the recipes? Obviously you'd head over to the wiki and check what's there. This is a major problem! We're only able to play the game to the fullest if we resort to outside resources? As if that isn't bad enough, you easily end up reading through the whole wiki, spoiling your gaming experience, because it's damn interesting to find out stuff, right? Nothing wrong with that, except you should find those info ingame, right where it belongs. I'm not saying implementing the wiki into minecraft is a good idea, but there needs to be an information interface of some kind to learn about the recipes you can craft.
So we built our first wooden shovel and pickaxe and built our shelter for the night. To get through the night we start digging a hole into the ground, our first mine shaft. This is were the next problem starts.
You're basically 5 minutes into the game, and already tier 1 (Wood) equipment is inferior to what is available to you now (Stone). Nowadays when starting a new game, i head for a tree, chop it down for a pickaxe, farm some stone and whoop, i'm in tier 2 within one minute of gaming. This makes wood tools virtually useless, apart from the initial 3 stones you need to get a pickaxe. Oh and what is that shimmering in the distance? Is that iron? Oh right, in the later updates you find iron in such an abundance and accessibility it's not even funny. Tier 3 within less than 5 minutes of gameplay? This would not be so bad if it was a game you would just play for an hour. But you're trapped in this for days or weeks. So after the initial 'whoo upgrade' phase it's basically no progress anymore, only sustaining your stock of iron and diamond. This really ruins a big part of the game for me and i was hoping the leveling system that was anounced for 1.8 would adress this issue, like requirements which must be met to be able to upgrade your equipment.
Farm 2 stacks of stone with a wooden pickaxe before unlocking the recipe for the stone pickaxe. At this stage you could easily implement the recipe info aswell. "Hey! You unlocked a Stone Pickaxe. Here, it's built like that, have fun!"
We've been digging for some time and found a nice big cave. Theres Zombies, Skeletons, and ... BOOM. You very well know what i'm refering to.
One hit kill. Seriously. By a stealth unit that only makes a sounds if you virtually have no time to react, or hectically jump down a cliff or step into lava. Don't get me wrong, i like the idea of creepers. They are an interesting unit which is difficult to handle with, that's fine. What i'm not fine with is that it instantly kills you, spraying your items around, often into lava. Yes, you can build armor, and it pretty much seems required in the latest versions if you don't like to be one hit killed. Oh, why did we have custom skins again? Ah yes, to hide them under a set of armor, of course. This is really crucially important to me. You are able to design your own skins, and people do and love it. What use is it if you're required by the game to wear armor that obstructs anything but your face, making everyone look the same again. Although the need for armor does explain the amount of iron you are able to find lately. What about the other enemies? Zombies? Skeletons? No threat at all, if you have at least a wooden sword. You need around 12 hits with your fist, but only 2-3 with a wood sword? What kind of balancing is that. Why would you even upgrade to stone or iron, except for durability?
The ai is a joke. Zombies and creepers heading straight for your position. No pathing at all, eventhough a trivial a* should be working good enough on that kind of grid based terrain. Skeletons stop at a distance, shooting their arrows in your face, and don't feel too bothered if being beat up by a sword. You can basically mow through enemies if you're not reckless.
One thing that i found really thrilling were the cave spiders. The poison was not deadly but brought you down to half a heart. It was action, it was horror, it was what i was expecting from deep cave exploration. Then they changed them from being a threat to only being really annoying.
Now you're several weeks into the game, built awesome monuments and intricate redstone circuits with your friends. So what is left to do? Oh, yes you can enchant your equipment or brew potions.
Dig faster, longer. Run faster, dive deeper! This is a good way to still increase your gaming experience. Decide on a task and prepare for it with enchantments and potions. But then you realize, you need levels to enchant equipment. Not only do you need to reach certain levels for certain enchantments, but you also lose all your levels depending on the level of the enchantment, and you are not even guaranteed a good enchantment. So what is left? Grinding? Just no! This feels to me like a cheap way of procrastinating game time. I agree that you'd need a high requirement of something to get an improved tool or weapon. This could aswell be worked out through experience and leveling. Better potions and enchantments over the amount of things you brewed or improved in total. Ton's of games did it that way, and it works! Don't tell me you did it different just for the sake of doing it different. We're spending loads of time in minecraft already, don't make us waste time by grinding monsters for eventually not getting the enchantments we're hoping for.
That said, i must say i still love minecraft for what it is and what it did for the indie dev community. There's obviously a ton of things that could be implemented to make it even more awesome, but i think these are important points that need to be adressed at some point. Enough rambling now!
Now, back to work on Into Beyond! (Now on Indiedb too! :D)
Monday, November 14, 2011
Into Beyond goes live on 8bitfunding.com
So, today Into Beyond (v. Aries) got approved and published on 8bitfunding.com. I'm really excited about this, as this will be either the rise or fall of this project. So far the news is being spread pretty slow. But with a preview like that, what can i expect.
I very well realize that the current project doesn't look too promising, or graphically appealing. I could change this, i could beautify it to some degree, but it would be a big amount of work for me, which needs to be redone by a decent artist at some point anyways. I don't have a definite art direction, so every assets i would come up with, regardless of how good they might look, would be for naught if they didn't fit the concept.
For that purpose i will for now keep it pretty much at placeholder graphics, and only make minor tweaks on them in the spare time.
To be honest, it bothers me. A lot. This game is fucking ugly currently, and i'd like it to have a visually pleasing design, but right now it can't be helped.
Instead, i will concentrate on what i can do, and what i know won't go to waste: gameplay. It is, after all, the most important aspect of a game.
So what you can expect in the next version (v. Betelgeuse) is improvements on the ships controls, mission objectives and content, like enemy types, weapons, inventory and a shop system.
The version is due at the December, 31st, same as the 8bit funding deadline.
The continued progression of Into Beyond after that is very heavily dependant on how well the funding turns out, so if you like to see a new shmup, with a classical touch but modern design, head over there, press the big yellow Fund button.
Feedback is very much appreciated and love is given to all of you <3
wzl
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Into Beyond
I haven't been updating this blog in a while. Mainly because i was writing journal entries on the Ludum Dare page for progress. So if you're curious what happened the last month, you can head over there and see for yourself, or read this small recap:
The Ludum Dare October Challenge got me quite pumped about my project Into Beyond (formerly titled Space Hunter). I've been busy solving some technical challenges within the engine, and implementing new gameplay features to get a solid proof of concept up and running.
Here are the latest updates:
This is the latest gameplay video i uploaded, showing some basic gameplay. It is already out of date, but my current pc-situation won't allow me to record videos with fraps.
This is a more technical demonstration on how shaders can be edited and recompiled ingame, which is a big help when finetuning them.
So that's mostly what happened last month.
I will now keep updating this blog in favor of the Ludum Dare journal as the challenge is over.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Spacehunter - An introduction
So after cancelling the remake of the ludum dare 21 entry for several reasons, i go back to my previous decision on making a space game for the same reasons i mentioned in that post.
Okay, so what will it be? There's a ton of shmups out there, really good shmups.
For one, a lot of shmups are console games. There's only a handful of well made games for the pc, one of them is the recently released Jamestown. So i think there's still a market there.
Other than the business side, i think it's a good way to gradually progress on a game. Making step by step iterations. It is possible to leave a lot of things out, without having the game feel incomplete (because no one know what the final version will include!)
So what i have in mind is creating this episode wise (Code naming them alpha, beta, gamma...).
Episodes could also be seen as different versions, but i think version numbers wouldn't fit to it, so i am alienating the use of development states for that purpose.
Each episode will radically enhance the gameplay or game features, so it might feel like a whole new or rather bigger and better game with each iteration (although existing features are unlikely to get removed or changed that much).
I have not planned on the actual number of episodes it will include. That is partly due to the concept not being entirely finished at this point, but i think it will be somewhere around 5 to 8. The iterations for each version will be increasing. So for instance i try to get alpha ready for end of october, while beta may be only due by the end of the year. An elaborate feature list of the upcoming episode will be published at some point, so you know what you'll be waiting for.
To be able to work on it on a full-time scale, i need to introduce a prepurchase option, and get all of you chaps to get a copy! Why should you buy an unfished game, that might not even get finished, you ask?
Your concern is valid. Therefore the prepurchase will start at 1€, and will increase by another 1€ with each episode. You won't have to rebuy, once you invested though, you'll get updated just like that! That means, you can buy a cheap (shitty) game now, funding its development, or buy a good game later, but paying a price for it.
Additionally, if you have too much money on your hands, or are a very kind person, you can pay any price you want to further increase the chance that this projects will flourish sooner.
I will set up paypal somewhat later this month so it can begin with the release of alpha!
Stop blabbering about this boring stuff! What is it about?!
Ok, so what you see in the above video is an early prototype of alpha gameplay. In fact this is 3 days into production. So you control your ship in a side scrolling manner, but stages are not just left to right, but you can rather move freely in them. This makes it different from most shmups already, since it results in a nonlinear level design. This will change gameplay from Start Level -> Fight enemies -> Fight Boss -> Next Level to a more purposeful line of actions. Something along the line of Destroy Forcefield generator in the south, and the Flood Gates on the far east, which will drive the enemy off his Underground Base, so you can take him down. This is just a small example what might be possible. There will be different kinds of mission, to not get bored with the same thing repeating over and over again.
Additionally to this play style you will be able browse through the solar system to travel to different locations, or land on stations to resupply or receive contracts. I will be more elaborate on that some time later as this will likely be Beta content.
Also, this is currently inspired to be made for the Ludumdare October Challange, so check out the other games that are getting prepared :D
Regarding the title: Spacehunter sounds kind of not very cool. If you have a suggestion for a better title, you can leave a comment, or say hi, or give me all your money and your first born child.
Okay, so what will it be? There's a ton of shmups out there, really good shmups.
For one, a lot of shmups are console games. There's only a handful of well made games for the pc, one of them is the recently released Jamestown. So i think there's still a market there.
Other than the business side, i think it's a good way to gradually progress on a game. Making step by step iterations. It is possible to leave a lot of things out, without having the game feel incomplete (because no one know what the final version will include!)
So what i have in mind is creating this episode wise (Code naming them alpha, beta, gamma...).
Episodes could also be seen as different versions, but i think version numbers wouldn't fit to it, so i am alienating the use of development states for that purpose.
Each episode will radically enhance the gameplay or game features, so it might feel like a whole new or rather bigger and better game with each iteration (although existing features are unlikely to get removed or changed that much).
I have not planned on the actual number of episodes it will include. That is partly due to the concept not being entirely finished at this point, but i think it will be somewhere around 5 to 8. The iterations for each version will be increasing. So for instance i try to get alpha ready for end of october, while beta may be only due by the end of the year. An elaborate feature list of the upcoming episode will be published at some point, so you know what you'll be waiting for.
To be able to work on it on a full-time scale, i need to introduce a prepurchase option, and get all of you chaps to get a copy! Why should you buy an unfished game, that might not even get finished, you ask?
Your concern is valid. Therefore the prepurchase will start at 1€, and will increase by another 1€ with each episode. You won't have to rebuy, once you invested though, you'll get updated just like that! That means, you can buy a cheap (shitty) game now, funding its development, or buy a good game later, but paying a price for it.
Additionally, if you have too much money on your hands, or are a very kind person, you can pay any price you want to further increase the chance that this projects will flourish sooner.
I will set up paypal somewhat later this month so it can begin with the release of alpha!
Stop blabbering about this boring stuff! What is it about?!
Ok, so what you see in the above video is an early prototype of alpha gameplay. In fact this is 3 days into production. So you control your ship in a side scrolling manner, but stages are not just left to right, but you can rather move freely in them. This makes it different from most shmups already, since it results in a nonlinear level design. This will change gameplay from Start Level -> Fight enemies -> Fight Boss -> Next Level to a more purposeful line of actions. Something along the line of Destroy Forcefield generator in the south, and the Flood Gates on the far east, which will drive the enemy off his Underground Base, so you can take him down. This is just a small example what might be possible. There will be different kinds of mission, to not get bored with the same thing repeating over and over again.
Additionally to this play style you will be able browse through the solar system to travel to different locations, or land on stations to resupply or receive contracts. I will be more elaborate on that some time later as this will likely be Beta content.
Also, this is currently inspired to be made for the Ludumdare October Challange, so check out the other games that are getting prepared :D
Regarding the title: Spacehunter sounds kind of not very cool. If you have a suggestion for a better title, you can leave a comment, or say hi, or give me all your money and your first born child.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Adventures with Triangulation
Oooh, blogger has a new interfa.... err getting distracted again.
So, as i mentioned i am currently working on The Collapse, or rather, i am kind of redesigning it. I was brainstorming with Lateman this weekend and he had a nice idea for a graphical design concept. But more on that in another post.
To be able to achieve what we had in mind i had to redesign the leveleditor from scratch. No more boxes, cubes, and spheres.
One technical hurdle was getting convex triangulation with holes to work. I was scrolling through a couple of papers earlier today, and i got a good glimpse of... well i wont be shitting you, i didn't get most of it. I currently don't care much about how it is solved technically, considering that it is quite a complex topic, so i further ventured through the internet looking for resources. Eventually i found this.
I am using the C# version by Erwin Perik, ironically the High performance version by Salvatore Previti, well the sample anyways, was pretty slow. We're talking about ~1 second for around 150vertices slow. Kind of curious since they both are derived from the same base code.
So what am i gonna do with it? I am feeding it a series of vectors in order to receive a generated surface i can texture.
So far so good. The problem is though, i dont have randomly scattered vertices like shown above.
What i am looking for is, after all, a concave polygon with holes. So when feeding it with proper data, it was more looking like this:
Just then i was remembering a rule to determine if a point is within an arbitrary shape or not, which is: draw a line from a point you chose to a point anywhere within the shape, and make an intersectiontest with every bordering line segment. Is the amount of intersections even, the point is inside the shape. Is it odd, it lies outside.
So what i can do now is simply define an anchor point within the shape, calculate the center of each triangle, and do intersection tests with the border segments, check the amount of intersections and voila:
So i guess this is kind of cheating, but it works, and quite fast too. I worried that it might take a week to get it working correctly, but thanks to the internets it just took a couple of hours \o/
If you have questions, let me know below
So, as i mentioned i am currently working on The Collapse, or rather, i am kind of redesigning it. I was brainstorming with Lateman this weekend and he had a nice idea for a graphical design concept. But more on that in another post.
To be able to achieve what we had in mind i had to redesign the leveleditor from scratch. No more boxes, cubes, and spheres.
One technical hurdle was getting convex triangulation with holes to work. I was scrolling through a couple of papers earlier today, and i got a good glimpse of... well i wont be shitting you, i didn't get most of it. I currently don't care much about how it is solved technically, considering that it is quite a complex topic, so i further ventured through the internet looking for resources. Eventually i found this.
I am using the C# version by Erwin Perik, ironically the High performance version by Salvatore Previti, well the sample anyways, was pretty slow. We're talking about ~1 second for around 150vertices slow. Kind of curious since they both are derived from the same base code.
So what am i gonna do with it? I am feeding it a series of vectors in order to receive a generated surface i can texture.
 | |
| Simply simple |
What i am looking for is, after all, a concave polygon with holes. So when feeding it with proper data, it was more looking like this:
 | |
| Oh, why you be so convex :( |
Just then i was remembering a rule to determine if a point is within an arbitrary shape or not, which is: draw a line from a point you chose to a point anywhere within the shape, and make an intersectiontest with every bordering line segment. Is the amount of intersections even, the point is inside the shape. Is it odd, it lies outside.
So what i can do now is simply define an anchor point within the shape, calculate the center of each triangle, and do intersection tests with the border segments, check the amount of intersections and voila:
 |
| Concave, with holes, not all that complex after all |
So i guess this is kind of cheating, but it works, and quite fast too. I worried that it might take a week to get it working correctly, but thanks to the internets it just took a couple of hours \o/
If you have questions, let me know below
Monday, August 22, 2011
The Collapse - A Ludum Dare Entry
I was participating at the Ludum Dare Game Compo this weekend.
I started on a basic prototype idea on Saturday afternoon, pondering about a concept. After a few lines of code i had a random generated maze out of differently sized cubes, and some enemy entities with a basic homing ai.
I kinda liked the physics based movent around the obstacles, but getting decently playable levels out of random generation is quite the effort, and i wasn't sure of success. So my decision was to develop an editor that is capable of designing custom levels.
While i was at it, ideas kept flowing in: different types of geometry properties like bouncyness or stickyness, moving platforms, and some more i didn't want to consider at that point. It is only an 48 hours compo after all.
So i started on the basics, having the ability to move and scale cubes to form a level, and advanced on editing features like rescaling or translating specific objects to not start over on a misplaced object.
Most of the work went into the editor, as the gameplay features were pretty simple and quick to implement.
In the end i am fairly satisfied with the result. I was able to implement all the features i planned for it, got a catchy tune, some ok'ish sound effects, and the graphic effects (apart some minor issues).
However there seem to be a few bugs in the engine, as i received some messages that it won't work, or crash on startup. I need to look into that.
Anyways, heres the gameplay video of the submitted version
While developing this i came to like the concept pretty much and i have a couple of ideas that can be implemented to have a more versatile gameplay; depending on the feedback i will consider making a full game out of it.
So yeah, thats all for now. If you have questions, or if something doesn't work, please let me know in the comments or on twittor.
Download:
You can download the Ludum Dare release here.
I made a small fix that might cause a crash on startup depending on your systems localization. Also improving the Physics/game update, resulting in a better gameplay performance, and fixing the issue about not loading levels for some, also showing the goal model. I strongly suggest you download it instead the official ludum dare release!
Download the fixed version from Dropbox.
You need the .net 4.0 framework or better to run this.
I started on a basic prototype idea on Saturday afternoon, pondering about a concept. After a few lines of code i had a random generated maze out of differently sized cubes, and some enemy entities with a basic homing ai.
 |
| Very unspectacular |
While i was at it, ideas kept flowing in: different types of geometry properties like bouncyness or stickyness, moving platforms, and some more i didn't want to consider at that point. It is only an 48 hours compo after all.
So i started on the basics, having the ability to move and scale cubes to form a level, and advanced on editing features like rescaling or translating specific objects to not start over on a misplaced object.
Most of the work went into the editor, as the gameplay features were pretty simple and quick to implement.
In the end i am fairly satisfied with the result. I was able to implement all the features i planned for it, got a catchy tune, some ok'ish sound effects, and the graphic effects (apart some minor issues).
However there seem to be a few bugs in the engine, as i received some messages that it won't work, or crash on startup. I need to look into that.
Anyways, heres the gameplay video of the submitted version
While developing this i came to like the concept pretty much and i have a couple of ideas that can be implemented to have a more versatile gameplay; depending on the feedback i will consider making a full game out of it.
So yeah, thats all for now. If you have questions, or if something doesn't work, please let me know in the comments or on twittor.
Download:
You can download the Ludum Dare release here.
I made a small fix that might cause a crash on startup depending on your systems localization. Also improving the Physics/game update, resulting in a better gameplay performance, and fixing the issue about not loading levels for some, also showing the goal model. I strongly suggest you download it instead the official ludum dare release!
Download the fixed version from Dropbox.
You need the .net 4.0 framework or better to run this.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Lullaby beta 0.9 release
Summary:
Lullaby is a portable minimalist lightweight (buzzword alert) Shutdown and Alarm timer for Windows.
It is pretty much feature complete and working, but only tested on my own machine. So if you encounter any problems, please let me know in the comments.
Features:
Alarm
Shutdown
Reboot
Hibernate
Sleep
Installation:
Not required. Extract into a folder and go!
Usage:
Select your time by typing in the respective boundaries (Hours:Minutes:Seconds), or hold the mousebutton down in either and drag up and down. Select your action from the drop down menu and press start.
You can replace the Alarm.wav file with a wave file of your choice, but don't rename or remove it, as it might crash Lullaby.
Download:
You must have the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or greater installed to use Lullaby.
Lullaby.exe
Lullaby is a portable minimalist lightweight (buzzword alert) Shutdown and Alarm timer for Windows.
It is pretty much feature complete and working, but only tested on my own machine. So if you encounter any problems, please let me know in the comments.
Features:
Alarm
Shutdown
Reboot
Hibernate
Sleep
Installation:
Not required. Extract into a folder and go!
Usage:
Select your time by typing in the respective boundaries (Hours:Minutes:Seconds), or hold the mousebutton down in either and drag up and down. Select your action from the drop down menu and press start.
You can replace the Alarm.wav file with a wave file of your choice, but don't rename or remove it, as it might crash Lullaby.
Download:
You must have the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or greater installed to use Lullaby.
Lullaby.exe
Monday, August 15, 2011
LameR beta 0.9 release
Summary:
LameR is a GUI for utilizing the LAME encoder for quick and easy access. It is lightweight and portable (though it needs to be set up for shell extensions). It features the most basic settings you need to convert wave files to mp3 format.
It is pretty much feature complete and working, but only tested on my own machine. So if you encounter any obstacles, let me know in the comments.
Features:
Lightweight
Portable
Latest artist, title, and bit rate are saved in a config file for quick re-encodings.
Installation:
Having the LAME binaries is mandatory to use the LameR.
Place the LameR.exe in the same folder as the lame.exe. (not necessary if you downloaded the bundled version)
Execute LameR.exe and press install. This will setup the Shell extensions in the registry.
Usage:
Double-click a .wav file to open LameR.
Enter Artist and Title and press Encode.
Alternatively you can right-click the .wav file and choose Open with, and navigate to LameR.exe to open the program.
Download:
You must have the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or greater installed to use LameR.
LameR.exe
LameR bundled (includes the LAME 3.98.4 binaries and is ready to go)
LameR is a GUI for utilizing the LAME encoder for quick and easy access. It is lightweight and portable (though it needs to be set up for shell extensions). It features the most basic settings you need to convert wave files to mp3 format.
It is pretty much feature complete and working, but only tested on my own machine. So if you encounter any obstacles, let me know in the comments.
Features:
Lightweight
Portable
Latest artist, title, and bit rate are saved in a config file for quick re-encodings.
Installation:
Having the LAME binaries is mandatory to use the LameR.
Place the LameR.exe in the same folder as the lame.exe. (not necessary if you downloaded the bundled version)
Execute LameR.exe and press install. This will setup the Shell extensions in the registry.
Usage:
Double-click a .wav file to open LameR.
Enter Artist and Title and press Encode.
Alternatively you can right-click the .wav file and choose Open with, and navigate to LameR.exe to open the program.
Download:
You must have the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or greater installed to use LameR.
LameR.exe
LameR bundled (includes the LAME 3.98.4 binaries and is ready to go)
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Decisions
I just guess that's how life works.
You work on something, you enjoy it, you're looking forward to it.
Then you get distracted, you loose your focus and you get annoyed by it.
In my case it was a shift in priorities. I had to focus on earning money to pay the month's rent, and i resumed to play Minecraft which was a horrible time-waste in itself.
So yeah, now i am stuck with thoughts about what my next step would be. Working on the existing prototype, with no clear goal, or rather thinking up some concrete, fast-to-realize Projects, or even doing something entirely different.
Developing a game is a long journey and no matter how easy it seems in your mind, there will always be some hurdles you haven't anticipated, be it of algorithmical, logical or conceptual origin, or even interventions from the outside. And it doesn't help if you are good at distracting yourself with forms of entertainment, be it games, TV shows, and virtually anything that momentarily seems like a better alternative than being stuck on that one problem that just appeared.
While pondering what to write, and with the hope to come up with a solution to my uncertainty, i went through my different ideas and concepts and thought about how much time and man-power each would take, and how complex the realization would be.
What i think seems most realistic in terms of the most soon'ish implementation is a space shmup. Yeah we have a bunch of those already, i know. But there are people who enjoy those, and are looking forward to more and different kinds of them.
Furthermore it is easy, fast and straightforward to prototype and i can play with a lot of different shader effects. I reckon there is not much to be done in terms of research for technical or logical problems.
I still need to think it through, and sleep over it, talk to people and stuff, but i think that is the best bet i can come up with currently.
You work on something, you enjoy it, you're looking forward to it.
Then you get distracted, you loose your focus and you get annoyed by it.
In my case it was a shift in priorities. I had to focus on earning money to pay the month's rent, and i resumed to play Minecraft which was a horrible time-waste in itself.
So yeah, now i am stuck with thoughts about what my next step would be. Working on the existing prototype, with no clear goal, or rather thinking up some concrete, fast-to-realize Projects, or even doing something entirely different.
Developing a game is a long journey and no matter how easy it seems in your mind, there will always be some hurdles you haven't anticipated, be it of algorithmical, logical or conceptual origin, or even interventions from the outside. And it doesn't help if you are good at distracting yourself with forms of entertainment, be it games, TV shows, and virtually anything that momentarily seems like a better alternative than being stuck on that one problem that just appeared.
While pondering what to write, and with the hope to come up with a solution to my uncertainty, i went through my different ideas and concepts and thought about how much time and man-power each would take, and how complex the realization would be.
What i think seems most realistic in terms of the most soon'ish implementation is a space shmup. Yeah we have a bunch of those already, i know. But there are people who enjoy those, and are looking forward to more and different kinds of them.
Furthermore it is easy, fast and straightforward to prototype and i can play with a lot of different shader effects. I reckon there is not much to be done in terms of research for technical or logical problems.
I still need to think it through, and sleep over it, talk to people and stuff, but i think that is the best bet i can come up with currently.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Getting more interesting
As all so often there's a lot of things on my todo and i can't manage to focus on getting one thing done before starting the next, thus i am jumping around a lot of different construction sites.
So what i'm going to show you today is something i worked on a few weeks ago.
Behold inverse kinematics walking animation:
There are still a bunch of issues, like the elbows being all over the place, and the legs crossing at some points when turning around, but it works fairly stable
This prototype is pretty simple in itself as it only works on a flat surface yet. Eventually the model should be able to climb stairs and slopes similar to how a person would to it.
So why am i doing this?
Obviously because it's pretty darn cool. The other point is having realistic animations which are adjusting to the environment, without the need to have the animator design a bunch of animations for specific cases.
Another reason is the immersive aspect (as much as this word is misused nowadays, i think it fits at this point): Nothing tips me more off in game as terrible animations, starting at simple things like syncronising the movespeed with the walking animation cycle, or a simple waving the hand to interact with objects, instead of grabbing the doorknob to open the door for instance. It just looks like a poor puppetplay.
I realize that in the past it was not easily possible to implement it any differently due to performance restrictions and some other barriers. But we arrived at a time where graphics will only improve slightly, so to increase the realism(for lack of a better word) in games we need to focus on things other than the polygon count. Many studios realized that already and came up with a bunch of nifty features, such as Assassins Creed's climbing and user interaction animations, or LA Noire's captured facial and body animation.
This is currently a work in progress proof of concept. This attempt holds a lot of mathematical barriers to me, implementing restrictions for joints, finding the correct pathes to move for the limbs, reacting to outside forces and a bunch of more stuff. So i take this as an iterative process. I will improve it step by step to get a good approximation of what i have in mind eventually.
So what i'm going to show you today is something i worked on a few weeks ago.
Behold inverse kinematics walking animation:
There are still a bunch of issues, like the elbows being all over the place, and the legs crossing at some points when turning around, but it works fairly stable
This prototype is pretty simple in itself as it only works on a flat surface yet. Eventually the model should be able to climb stairs and slopes similar to how a person would to it.
So why am i doing this?
Obviously because it's pretty darn cool. The other point is having realistic animations which are adjusting to the environment, without the need to have the animator design a bunch of animations for specific cases.
Another reason is the immersive aspect (as much as this word is misused nowadays, i think it fits at this point): Nothing tips me more off in game as terrible animations, starting at simple things like syncronising the movespeed with the walking animation cycle, or a simple waving the hand to interact with objects, instead of grabbing the doorknob to open the door for instance. It just looks like a poor puppetplay.
I realize that in the past it was not easily possible to implement it any differently due to performance restrictions and some other barriers. But we arrived at a time where graphics will only improve slightly, so to increase the realism(for lack of a better word) in games we need to focus on things other than the polygon count. Many studios realized that already and came up with a bunch of nifty features, such as Assassins Creed's climbing and user interaction animations, or LA Noire's captured facial and body animation.
This is currently a work in progress proof of concept. This attempt holds a lot of mathematical barriers to me, implementing restrictions for joints, finding the correct pathes to move for the limbs, reacting to outside forces and a bunch of more stuff. So i take this as an iterative process. I will improve it step by step to get a good approximation of what i have in mind eventually.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Not a changelog
No updates last week or this? Whats the matter, getting lazy?
Well, not lazy, but having different priorities. On the weekend two weeks ago i sat down with a friend, who is a concept artist, and knows a fair deal about game design, to discuss some game concept issues. The outcome was, that i had to get rid of my current concept, as is, for several reasons. One being over-ambitious (as always), and another one being the heavy competition in that genre.
So i sat down for a few days and thought about what i can come up with for an entertaining concept, and i think i got a pretty decent idea. There is not a lot of details worked out yet, but i could imagine it being quite fun to play.
Another thing that happened was Terraria. It is a cute little 8bit inspired platform game that takes off where minecraft is stuck currently.
In my experience, Minecraft was a fun game, but it was very very repetitive. Exploration was interesting, until you've seen any biome, or gathered each resource. Caves were all grey in grey, leaving you with an eyesore after a while, and all you got from it was a handful of diamonds to build another pick that would enable you to explore(or dig) even more caves. I really enjoyed playing it, but it got so boring that eventually i don't even consider playing it at this point.
This is where Terraria comes in. Despite it being in 2d, it adds a lot of depths to the gameplay. There is more exploring, less mindless digging, better rewards, more enemies, more ways to navigate through the map. And frigging bosses.
To be fair, after i found most of the items, and crafted the stuff i was interested in trying out, i put the game aside, but it still has some potential to replay. I think, i will wait for some updates, and try me some multiplayer.
Oh yeah, also we decided to make another demo for the evoke 2011 demo party in cologne, germany in mid August. So that's what i am actually working on currently. Can't show anything yet, because secret! You'll have to be patient and watch it on the bigscreen on the party, or afterwards on pouet. That means i can test the engine a little further, but i won't have as much time to work on a game concept, or prototype. I have to see how i will arrange my priorities, or rather see, how well we'll progress with the demo, and adjust the schedule accordingly.
Well, not lazy, but having different priorities. On the weekend two weeks ago i sat down with a friend, who is a concept artist, and knows a fair deal about game design, to discuss some game concept issues. The outcome was, that i had to get rid of my current concept, as is, for several reasons. One being over-ambitious (as always), and another one being the heavy competition in that genre.
So i sat down for a few days and thought about what i can come up with for an entertaining concept, and i think i got a pretty decent idea. There is not a lot of details worked out yet, but i could imagine it being quite fun to play.
Another thing that happened was Terraria. It is a cute little 8bit inspired platform game that takes off where minecraft is stuck currently.
In my experience, Minecraft was a fun game, but it was very very repetitive. Exploration was interesting, until you've seen any biome, or gathered each resource. Caves were all grey in grey, leaving you with an eyesore after a while, and all you got from it was a handful of diamonds to build another pick that would enable you to explore(or dig) even more caves. I really enjoyed playing it, but it got so boring that eventually i don't even consider playing it at this point.
This is where Terraria comes in. Despite it being in 2d, it adds a lot of depths to the gameplay. There is more exploring, less mindless digging, better rewards, more enemies, more ways to navigate through the map. And frigging bosses.
To be fair, after i found most of the items, and crafted the stuff i was interested in trying out, i put the game aside, but it still has some potential to replay. I think, i will wait for some updates, and try me some multiplayer.
Oh yeah, also we decided to make another demo for the evoke 2011 demo party in cologne, germany in mid August. So that's what i am actually working on currently. Can't show anything yet, because secret! You'll have to be patient and watch it on the bigscreen on the party, or afterwards on pouet. That means i can test the engine a little further, but i won't have as much time to work on a game concept, or prototype. I have to see how i will arrange my priorities, or rather see, how well we'll progress with the demo, and adjust the schedule accordingly.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Changelog 003
I mostly finished the work necessary for porting to OpenGL >3.
The model class got rewritten to use VBO's instead of immediate mode, and the imported collada vertices were changed to fit into the VBO's vertex structure. In retrospect, it was a straight forward process, even though there were some minor hiccups. There is still much to do, converting the actual existing code that is still using deprecated functions, but the worst part is done.
After mog mentioned he wants to code a 2d rotating ribbon effect, i thought about how i would realise it and today i was playing around with the shader realtime editor and built that oldschool 2d ribbon/twister effect, which is common in older demos.
I ended up playing around with the same code in the shadertoy and it ended up in a textured more dynamically moving twister thing (paste to the default Deform shader code and hit the compile button (or Alt-Enter)). You might need to manually enable WebGL in your FireFox about:config or use Chrome.
The model class got rewritten to use VBO's instead of immediate mode, and the imported collada vertices were changed to fit into the VBO's vertex structure. In retrospect, it was a straight forward process, even though there were some minor hiccups. There is still much to do, converting the actual existing code that is still using deprecated functions, but the worst part is done.
After mog mentioned he wants to code a 2d rotating ribbon effect, i thought about how i would realise it and today i was playing around with the shader realtime editor and built that oldschool 2d ribbon/twister effect, which is common in older demos.
I ended up playing around with the same code in the shadertoy and it ended up in a textured more dynamically moving twister thing (paste to the default Deform shader code and hit the compile button (or Alt-Enter)). You might need to manually enable WebGL in your FireFox about:config or use Chrome.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Changelog 002
This week i started out improving the shader editor, so it becomes actually useful. It still lacks some kind of selection of what shader currently is being edited, but i added some visual enhancements like fading the top and bottom code lines, adding a line counter, and error handling and parsing the errorlog to highlight the lines which makes the compilation fail.
Further i added tangent calculation from the texture coordinates for normal mapping and texture mapping on the sphere primitive.
In case you're wondering, theres a julia fractal being animated in the corners.
The rest of the week i was trying to port the engine to the OpenGL 3.3 core specs which includes uploading the modelview and projection matrices, and the actual vertex data to the shader, and stop using immediate mode ( i will miss it! ) for the sake of using Vertex Buffer Objects.
So hopefully i will be done porting most of the code by next week so i can focus on the fun stuff again.
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| Failed compilation with highlight on the errornous code line |
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| Is this normal?! |
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| Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away |
The rest of the week i was trying to port the engine to the OpenGL 3.3 core specs which includes uploading the modelview and projection matrices, and the actual vertex data to the shader, and stop using immediate mode ( i will miss it! ) for the sake of using Vertex Buffer Objects.
So hopefully i will be done porting most of the code by next week so i can focus on the fun stuff again.
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