Ghost's Glimpse

More Of The Same, But Not As Lame

2012-01-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

A while ago I was really "into" casual games, for several reasons. I would download several of the traditional 60-minute-demos, decide on a worth candidate for my hard drive and, maybe once a month, treat myself to a variant of Match 3, Time Management in cafes, or the odd Tower Defence. Good times, but sooner or later oversaturation started. There are only so many screens with jewels on a grid you can stare at before you realise that you've probably seen the best of them already. The last game I actually purchased was Plants vs. Zombies. And my game folder these days is pretty lean anyways- I still have Puzzle Quest and Bejeweled Twist, though, because they really never chease to entertain and relax me.

One of the slightly unusual games I seriously played the hell out of back in the days was Treasures Of Montezuma. When it was released it had some novel small gameplay twistst to set it apart from other Match 3 games, and it looked and sounded really nice. I reinstalled it when I bought my new PC last year, and kept it around for a second play-though that I never really finished.

ToM is you basic Match 3 with coloured stones on a grid. Instead of earning points by making groups, you must match specific tokens with a small gemstone on them, and there is a goal of gemstones to collect per level that quickly rises to ridiculous numbers. Add a somwwhat generous time limit and catchy music and you got a good casual game.

The gimmick of ToM was a system of "totems" that you could buy and upgrade. Each token was activated by making two matches of same-coloured stones in a row, and each one had a specific "special ability"- one collected all gemstones on the board for you, another added time to your level counter, the next dropped random minur goodies, and so on. The totems became powerful tools, but with some skill you could win about half the levels without them- but none of them was useless, and since you could upgrade them as you saw fit they allowed for different strategies, too.

ToM had a sequel that I never bought- I played the demo and found it too similar to the original, and even worse, they had opted for the then-standard cartoon style that did not mix well with the realistic backgrounds and tokens of the game.

And just today I saw Treasures of Montezuma 3 on a shelf. I picked it up with mild interest; real life, the BakeSale and some other projects had and have a cruel impact on the time left for actually playing a "real game". I'm still struggling to win over Morrigan in DA Origins, and the Fallout 3 GOTY icon is crying at me when I switch on my computer. But you can ALWAYS spend a few minutes with idle gem swapping.

Okay. Now the first thing about ToM3 is, it is almost a carbon copy of the original game. Everything returns. You got the nice lush backgrounds, you still are somhow sitting in the jungle matching stone tokens, and every bonus and every totem is back too. Even the music is pretty much the same. The resolution is higher, the graphics have a more polished look, and there's a pointless but impressive intro movie, but that is IT. Look at ToM3 and you see ToM, slightly upgraded. The cute archeology student's gone, though, and there is no attempt to tell a story. Instead you have a couple of treasure chambers where you unlock chest after chest by scoring as many points as possible.

The second thing about ToM3 is, they changed ONE gameplay element. And somehow that one change makes ToM3 a totally different game. ToM was drawn-out, forcing you to collect 5, 10, 15, 20 and so on gemstones in the roughly 40 levels. There was no increasing difficulty, it was just that you needed a much longer time for each level.

In ToM, you have one minute per level to score the hell out of the board. One minute. You can still use the orange totem to add a few seconds, and there's the familiar "mini-clock" goodie, but really, you have 60 seconds. After that the game times out, your score is collected, and if you managed to score enough points to unlock the next seal on the treasure chest you're working on, great. If not, repeat.
And repeat.

Because a minute is nothing. In terms of playing a game, a minute really doesn't count. It's no time at all. If you screw up, you do NOT feel especially anrgy that you wasted a lot of time only to fail. Hell, let's try again, what's a minute? And maybe next time the grid will offer you a better setup, you may be lucky and find enough red tokens to trigger a few explosions, and if not... hey, you've just played TWO MINUTES.

Each session is a frantic fight. The game really fights you all the way; some of these chests require HUGE scores to unlock. Maybe you won't even be able to earn that score yet, because your totems aren't powerful enough. In ToM the totems really are more than a powerful tool, they are pretty much your only way to victory as soon as you go past level 5. You'll always be glad to beat a level and get a star to upgrade them.

The totems really are your friends here. Maybe the only friends you have, because the game surely is NOT your friend.

That being said, the game DOES offer an enourmous amount of nice, sometimes great eye candy. Unlike other games of its ilk ToM3 allows you to make matches while sliding animations and special effects are still playing, meaning that you can make more matches while all around you stones zip around, explode, and lightning shatters the grid. It can feel pretty intense and is always satisfying, especially since you are the one who causes all the sparkle, though maybe sometimes by accident.

That minute is intense. As soon as you hesitate for more than two seconds a hint will pop up, because you really can't affort to lose those two seconds. Every match counts. It's frantic. It's no longer the gentle beast that ToM was, it's gem-matching on crack.

If anything, he game repeats a flaw that was already noticeable in the original- "bonus" objects really obscure the tokens they are placed on, and it's frustrating to see, out of the corner of your eye, that you just missed a match that would've granted you triple score. But that's really the only complaint I shall utter, for this game does most things right (while doing nothing new).

And it's totally addictive. It DOES nothing new, it just once again proves that casual games have one ace up their sleeves- little time commitment needed.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Games!

2012-01-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

It's going to happen soon!

End of 2011 a couple of AGS forum members, rallied by Ponch, got it into their heads that it would be a cool idea to raise some money by creating a bundle of AGS games and sell them on a pay-what-you-want-model. The initial plan to give something back to AGS's creator by improving the forums took a different shape quickly, and the "AGS Bake Sale" became a charity event, with all raised money going to Child's Play. They do amazing work.

In case you still have no idea what I am talking about right now, please check this list over at the AGS forums to read the MENU . I'll wait here.

The group that became known as the "secret bakers", "Ponch's 13" or "merry men in leather pants" includes big AGS names and newcomers alike, makers of long-running series as well as people with a small portfolio, and as the games were announced it became clear that there'd be no lack of quality or diversity. Everyone seemed hell-bend on creating something unique, and it was decided to make all these games exclusive to the Bake Sale, too. The bundle will be made of games that won't be available outside of the sale. I hear there'll be a nice freebie signature image in it, too ;)

And last weekend was the dreaded deadline day, the day we all turned in our games after a last careful check. The Sale will start really soon, now, sheduled for January the 20th, and that's when a bundle of exclusive games will be available for everyone!

The bundle offers an astonishingly varied bunch of games- there's a little bit of everything. Classic point-and-click, naturally, from light-hearted and funny to thoughtful and emotional. There's a very original take on an "ASCII" shooter, a jump and run and a hilarious shooter-thingy featuring robots. There's a bit of everything, even a "special episode" that ties in to the long-running "Barn Runner" series. There's a casual sim about ghosts (I did that one). While AGS is clearly an engine for adventure games, the community has always managed to create little oddballs and original content, and the Bake Sale bundle is a testament to that diversity.

I'm super proud to have been part of the secret bakers, and I'm sure that after the sale I'll have a lot of fun with a few "behind-the-scenes" report of RAM Ghost, but all the ego aside, seeing that collection of games is the coolest thing. It's like these extra-large boxes from Dunkin' Donuts, where you know that you're going to savour every single one.

There's going to be cake, and that's NOT a lie ;)

2011, tic tic tic...

2011-12-31T13:47:00.001-08:00

Let's not beat around the bush, this has been a busy year, but also one that saw two game releases by yours truly (one that I am proud of, even). It has also been a very short year. It should have been longer. But then it would maybe have been too long, so it's probably okay.

Despite my efforts I still have no constant net. I miss my forum friends, and thus would like to speak a toast:
"Here's to you, and let's fill 2012 with even more games."

Bulletproof Vests For The Butt Included!

2011-11-12T18:13:00.001-08:00

Doom RL has recently been brought up to version 0.9.9.4, and according to their DevBlog people are actually thinking that the game starts to become too complicated.

Ah, I am getting ahead of myself again.

Okay, Doom RL stands for Doom, the RogueLike. Roguelikes are games where the player explores randomly-generated dungeons, presented in either ASCII or minimalistic tile graphics, basically wandering around killing enemies and getting better stuff. Roguelikes are by their very nature Nintendo Hard games. Really, they can be unforgiving, actively trying to make things hard for you. And they are not that easy to learn either; they often come with huge rulesets and tricky rules. Even a player who knows how to deal with Roguelikes in general will often struggle to get used to a new one. Roguelikes are games for people who can live with dying a lot of deaths before they start to figure out basic tactics, and who can then get a kick out of learning how to do things almost right, and who are willing to pour a lot of time into a game to master it.

And even then the buggers can be really hard, really unfair, and still remain very entertaining. Roguelikes are rulesets, not story-driven games full of eye candy. You play them as you'd play chess, admiring how twelve different pieces on a checkered board make for such a diversive game.

To give you just a few hints that WILL hurt the jaded modern player: In a Roguelike you lose your character forever when you die, and you will die a lot, even in situations where you feel like a walking legend. You will have to rely on magic to find out what things do, but you will first have to learn identifying by trying out random stuff. You will have to eat. You will constantly be outnumbered or overpowered. You can get cursed and seriously weakened permanently. You will have to memorize a lot of keys because graphical interfaces are for posh people and RL players are underground. Pressing a wrong key, by the way, will naturally always do the most inconvenient thing, like maybe throwing all your armour away while being attacked by dragons, or lighting a barbecue in a cave full of trolls.
And all the while you see nothing but an @ surrounded by an awful lot of other letters.

When DoomRL was released it was extremely different and got the unusual moniker "coffee-break Roguelike". It was written to be easy to learn, and you could well finish the game in somewhat less than an hour. Many things that were extremely cumbersome in hardcore RogueLikes were extremely simplified: There are about seven important keys to remember, each level is exactly one screen in size, and there are not too many different types of objects either. It was easy to learn but, and this is important, still held a lot of challenge.

And DoomRL is, of course, based on the iconic FPS "Doom", and it turned out to be surprisingly faithful to the original. Instead of speedy shooterings through 3D environment we now get turn-based shooterings through ASCII dungeons, and it still plays almost the same- with much more focus on tactics, however. Almost all combat it ranged combat, there are all the classic monsters and even the very same items (some changed a little to make them more useful for a RogueLike).
The game has been around for a while and has constantly been tweaked and added to. And now where it starts to get really close to its first "official true release" (after SEVERAL YEARS of public beta), complains are heard that "this is no longer the fun little underdog". That it is getting to complicated.

Now I am where I started and where this post will start to make sense. Because, you see, DRL (as I will now call it) did something very, very right.

RPG rulesets are often quite complex, and let's say you want to write your own. This is very, very hard. In fact, almost every original ruleset is likely to be complicated: You will not only have to invent and code it, you will also have to test it. And each time you tweak it, the whole testing starts again.
Let's say John D. AverageGuy wants to write an adventure game with a combat system. He has some ideas, he jots them down, and comes up with a couple of different weapons of different damage types and, to counter that, different resistances. He also includes armour, which is also bound by the elemental system, and then some items and skills. As an avid D&D player he knows that this is simple, but it looks okay on paper so he gets to work.
Five years later, he calls it quits- it just doesn't play right, it's much more complicated than he thought, and what's worse, it's not even fun!
This sounds extreme, but there is a reason why even ancient rulesets are constantly tweaked and why we still got patches for Diablo 2 eight years after the release.

DRL did it pretty much the other way around- it was released simple, and then small changes were added, and the author could count on his players to test it, comment on it, suggesting stuff. When you have a solid game where a dude runs around shooting imps, that is already a very valueable thing to have. THEN you can start making things a little more complex.
For example, DRL originally had about 10 weapons, most of them directly lifted from the original game, some added for RL compatibility. But technically you always shot at stuff or stabbed/punched. There was little to learn here. Then hardcoded special and unique weapons were added. That was fun, now there was a chance to find new stuff. And then at some point "mod paks" were added that could be used on weapons/armour to give them more damage/protection, a larger magazine/durability and so on. And THEN the system was brought to the next level with "assemblies", where a certain combination of these mods created a new special weapon. This is how a ruleset should be developed, from simple to complex.

Is DRL really no longer the fun ride it used to be? I disagree but am aware that I am a long-time player of the game. Like with AGS, I grew with it. A new feature, for me, was a challenge to alter my proved tactics, or a cool new toy to play with. I knew the game already and liked to get fresh content. And even today it is a simple game with simple controls and a simple core mechanic, which involves shooting at monsters more than being shot by monsters. A medipak is still a medipak and I do NOT need to find out which of the twenty unnamed scrolls I have will identify it as one. That capital B over there is still a Baron of Hell, even though it is now less vulnerable to my shotgun- I can deal with that because the core mechanics are so tried and tested and work that an addition really is an addition. It took the game several years to become HALF as complex as your traditional "true" Roguelike, and even now it feels very basic: All these new features blend in nicely, they have grown out of a robust base.

So the next time there's the thought "I will recreate Pokemon, that must be simple, it's for kids!" in your head, download DRL. Once you've made it to Cacodemon Sergeant Major, you'll see that "simple on paper" is not "simply done in code".

Oh yea, and if someone has a good tactic for a pistol run... I need to take five Mancubi down with that little squirter...

There's Going To Be Cake For Chris(Jones)Mas

2011-10-23T05:46:00.000-07:00

I am a Dunkin Donut addict. I love their huge boxes of assorted dough-thingies with a hole in the middle. It's so nice to have such a box, full of different sweet treats. My fav is the one with the double chocolate filling. That and a nice cup of coffee can keep one determined game maker awake for the best part of a busy night.

Some geniusses over at the AGS board apparently have realised that everyone likes cake, and much of it, and a diverse selection of it. And so they asked around and eventually had a group of forum members... all willing to bake a cake and send it over to a central spot where people would be allowed to look at it from a safe distance for only ten dollars a minute, napkins extra, no flash photography allowed.

Then the secret bakers realised that this woudld result in an awful lot of traffic, and instead opted to make GAMES instead, and offer them as a bundle on a "pay what you like" basis. The noble goal of the AGS BAKE SALE is to raise funds for a new server. The sale will take place sometime mid-December, meaning that it's going to be an awesome xMas all around!

How awesome is that? CJ, he who rules the forums with a benevolent and onion-ringed hand, has always been pretty adamant when it came to hard monetary support, but this is the perfect idea. Everybody wins: More AGS games for peeps to play, a very generous payment concept, and even some publicity for our little island of webspace.

Yesterday the cover was blown, the secret bakers rose from the shadows, and there was much rejoicing and a flurrican of dough. We still have to wait for CJ's reaction, but... hey, what's not to like?

So far elven games have been anounced, and rumour has it that there may be even more- from now on there's roughly six weeks to get a game done, contact the bakers and make it part of the bundle.

The word has already spread, but I'd like to plug this anyway: Here's what the bakers have come up with so far... a very great selection of often unusual and cool ideas.

Ponch - Barn Runner: The Rich Dame Who Cut The Cheese
GiP Thread
Barn Runner is a long-running series that I discovered far too late in my AGS career. With a distinctive look and some intentionally cheesy humour it has proved to have the staying power, too. This episode revolves about a stolen cheese, and apparently has an endless looping room, something I've not yet seen since the AGS 2.7 starter game.

WHAM - Undead Hangover
GiP Thread
Waking up with a hangover's never nice. Neither is having zombies all over the place. WHAM hints that this could be a Nintendo Hard game where you do not necessarily win eventually, and where your actions need to buy you time. It sounds very dynamic indeed!

ddq - SCOUT
GiP Thread
An astronaut on a lifetime mission. While we don't know yet what exactly that mission is, the game already looks terrific, with a clean 4-colour palette and a unique pixel-look.

Tier - Understaffed
GiP Thread
A flurry of puns already rose: Understaffed reminds me of Kyrandia 1 in terms of its looks, and it seems to aim for tongue-in-cheek humour too. Also aboard: A sidekick owl and GEM PUZZLES. Tier also seems to think about voice acting; always a nice addition!

tzachs - 9 Months In
GiP Thread
A pregnant woman in jail is suspected of haing killed an inmate. This is quite possibly one of the darkest and most mature setups I've yet seen in an adventure game. Seriously, I think it needs an indie game for such a plot. You know that one donut you KNOW will taste best? In a box already full of tasty treats, 9MI may well be that donut.

Grundislav - Ben Chandler, Paranormal Investigator
GiP Thread
Ohnoes- Promising young game designer Ben's sweets are gone! Will he find them? All right, Ben Jordan is another long-running series (BJ1 Deluxe was the first voiced AGS game I ever played!), and always reminded me a bit of John Sinclair. Now Grundislav takes it up to eleven with a direct reference to the forum's own Ben304. This is meta, and sounds like a lot of fun. We're also promised authentic Australian music and voiceovers.

ThreeOhFour - Falling Skywards
GiP Thread
Modern "stalkers of the sky" seek treasure on floating islands to bring back to the ruined face of Earth. Now that sounds a bit grim indeed, but chances are that you already KNOW Ben304's knack for balancing the serious and the humour. What else to say? It looks very nice indeed, with a distinctive "bloom" to the background graphics. Hell, it's a Ben Game!

cat - Escape the barn
GiP Thread
Cat has a history of cute, child-friendly games, and has made me searching for apples already. Here's a classic "escape the room" situation in a very bright, clean and soothing art-style. cat promises "a lot of item combination", which IS pretty hard to do and very rewarding for players who hate the generic "I can't do that" responses.

Calin Leafshade - Murder On The Lady Titania
GiP Thread
A whodunnit on a ship (apparently a large one). A very cool setup indeed, and what's best, this is going to have a PARSER. Calin also has a reputation as a maker of, in his own words, swishy-swashy interfaces", apparently related to the timey-whimey ball of... stuff. Anyway, a parser-aided investigation on a dark ship sure smells of classic adventure.
Man, I LOVE parser games, did I mention that? We need more of these.

Baron - Blue Lobe Inc.
GiP Thread
Baron (aka "Swarm Daddy") us a force to be reconed with. His setup is very self-aware: Three guys team up to form an indie game studio, facing all sorts of net-joke problems. The game's made to look very much like a comic book, right to the characters using speech bubbles. Clearly something to please those who like geeks, nerds, webbs, nerdgeeks, and dennis.

Ghost - Mythaumatology
GiP Thread
Heh, yes, this ghost's also aboard. I mean hey, I got to wear secret leather pants and move my haunt to the Batcave. The game's about a strange creature with all the marks of a true hero: Memory loss, no aim in life, mysterious scars... but what does that even mean?

To sum it up, this is one amazingly diverse selection! Stay tuned here, too:
The Original Reveal

And please forgive the awful lot of links. One day I'll figure out how to ride this beast of a blogging page.

Thoughts on a "Model World"

2011-09-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

When I first launched the (at its time) cutting edge "UnrealEd" to make my very first UT level (which sucked), I was pretty surprised to be told that levels are, in fact, a huge solid cube of material from which I carve away my rooms. I thought it would be the other way around: That there would be some sort of data void, some "nothing-ness", and I would just "place rooms" in it.
But most editors that deal with 3D environment allow you to either "build" something (by placing shapes) or to "carve" something (by removing a shape from an already existing block). And that's very, very convenient: Sometimes it is easier to just "carve out a block", sometimes I need to "place a statue". Sometimes I go with what is there, sometimes I need to create something new.

What's that to do with adventure games? Am I going to make an Unreal Tournament adventure game? Is there an UnrealEd plugin for AGS now? Can AGS characters now have Bouncy Boob Physics?
The answers, in order: "A lot, as this post will show", "No, no way", "Possibly not" and "I'm still desperately hoping for that".

Today I want to compare two methods to create an adventure game, and to do so, I will compare AGS with Inform. This may need some explaining, depending on your background, so read on to get a summary. If you're familiar with the toolkits, skip the next bit.

AGS is a toolkit for making graphic adventures, and it mostly works by giving the user a few types of "building blocks": Rooms, Hotspots, Objects, Characters, Inventory Items are the most important ones. These building blocks are then handled by the AGS runtime engine, which ensures that animations and scripts attached to the objects are executed in the right order. Just creating a room or a character will not make a lot happen: You must assign graphics, views, and scripts to give an AGS object any functionality (not really true, but more on that later).

Inform is a programming language for Interactive Fiction (or "text adventures"), the forerunner of the graphic adventure. Inform works by defining a huge set of rules that create a "world model", and giving the user a few types of building blocks, all of which are instantly subject to all rules. Functionality that goes beyond the basic rules are defined by the user, either by assigning different rules, or by replacing reaction to the rules.

(Skippers, read on!)

Technically a fresh AGS project is a "void". What AGS knows is that some things must be there (you can't start a game that has no rooms), and some functionality is given from the start (like mouse clicks being read, and so on). To fill the void, the user then creates rooms and characters and so on. And each of these needs some set-up before anythig can happen with it. Creating an object and giving it the sprite of an apple, for example, just makes the sprite of an apple appear in a room, because that's what AGS knows about objects: "If an object has a sprite, draw it". To make the object a bit more interesting, the user can write a script that is executed with the player "picks up" the apple: The object is made invisible, and the player says "Hmm, tasty!". Or an inventory item is given to the player, with the same apple sprite: Then the player has picked the apple up.
What you do mostly in AGS is creating individual elements with very individual events attached to them. There isn't such a thing as an "object which can be picked up by the player"- there's just AGS's knowledge about a cursor mode called "pick up", and most classes in AGS can react to it (objects, hotspots and characters as well as inventory items). Each time you want an object to be "gettable", you must write an event to do just that.

Inform, on the other hand, is mostly about rules, and there are many of them. Some are there to sort out the structure of the game: the player, for example, must always be in a room, and things the player throws will drop to the ground, and without light the player cannot see a thing, and so on. Everything the player creates (mostly rooms, objects and characters) is instantly subject to all the rules. In combination with the non-graphical nature of IF, this means that you can just write "The apple is on the table." to create an apple- and the player can instantly do a lot of things with the apple, like picking it up, offering it to a character, putting it into a box and so on. The apple is a generic object, though, and Inform rules say that objects cannot be eaten.
However, just by writing "The apple is edible", this is fixed- Inform knows about the "eat" command, and once we make the apple subject to that rule, we're good.
And even more, since Inform IS technically just rules, we can also say:
"A food is a kind of thing that is edible." From then on, we can have edible stuff everywhere by writing "The banana is a food on the table."

AGS is about creating objects and giving them individual rules. Inform is about creating exeptions and extensions to a ruleset and creating objects accordingly. You could say that AGS has no idea at all how objects should react to whatever the player tries to do with them, and each object needs all the basics covered over and over again. Inform has a rather clear idea about how a "basic object" must behave, and functionality is created by tailoring the rules. AGS makes you BUILD stuff. Inform makes you work with what's already there.

Now, a lot of that is only possible because IF does play quite a bit different from your basic graphic adventure. Our AGS apple needs stuff no Inform apple ever has to worry about- it needs a sprite, an x/y position on the screen, it must draw itself, and if we want to go all the way, we even need stuff not at all part of the apple (like a player animation for eating it). The Inform apple just needs a bit of text like "After eating the apple, say 'You even gulp down the core, it's just so juicy!'". That's it.

The AGS system offers a great deal of flexibility, though, because all objecs are technically only different in terms of their abilities. In AGS, the apple can be a hotspot, an object, or even a character- we can always make the player pick it up! (But as a hotspot we can't make the original apple disappear, and as a character, we do not win anything because the apple neither talks, nor does he have an inventory) If we made the apple a character, as it is, the player wouldn't notice... because it still looks like an apple. A savy AGS user who notices the same apple appearing in different rooms MAY think: Oh, crafty Ghost used a character for that apple so that it can change rooms. But that's about it.

AGS has no "world model"- everything you create is unique. The only exeption to the rule is, by default, the "unhandled_event" bit in the global script, where users can define reactions to, well, events that have no scripts. As soon as you create the function and define something like: "picking up a character makes the player say 'I prefer blondes'", you technically have made a "world rule". Every character who has no script for being picked up will trigger that response.

I am not sure if a more elaborate model world would be a cool thing to have in AGS, but I think it wouldn't be too hard to implement some basic rules- using properties and checks in repeatedly_execute. For example, if my player character has a camera, and must photograph a rare bird in the woods, it would be quite useful to have a "world rule" that everything can be photographed, but only the bird will make me win the game. As it is now, AGS requires me to have every object in the game have its own reaction to the "use camera on me" event- it would be more sensible for the camera to check if the thing it was used on was the bird.

Well, that's something to talk about, isn't it? First post gets a free unhandled_event!

Graveyard Digs

2011-09-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

Gee, is it that time of the year again?

Almost A Post Mortem

2011-08-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Most of the stuff I write here tends to be on the "theory-heavy" side, or to be about game making in general (the rest is bad jokes). This time I have made a game, and want to give you a backstage tour because I am still so very exited that I made my second release.
The game can be found at

http://www.bigbluecup.com/games.php?action=detail&id=1455

as a free download, by the way. And now that we've got the spamming sorted out, let's have a look at a caffeine-riddled tale.

Ben Made Me Do It
Chance Of The Dead was made for the MAGS competition- if you don't know about that one, it's a fun little competition where you have to create a game within one month, adhering to rules set by last month's winner. I never entered MAGS before- I am terminally afraid of deadlines, and one month really isn't very much time. But Ben304 set a theme that was hard to resist: "A Second Chance"- make a game about someone getting another go at somthing he failed to do before. To me it instantly read "make a game about a zombie". It's rare that an idea hits so hard that it almost hurts; I instantly had a basic plot and location and mood in mind. I checked my calendar: July the firts. At least I'd HAVE a full month.

How I Prepared For The Caffeine Month
I made a plan. I gave myself one week for prototyping, one week for refining, and one week for testing. That got one problem out of the way very early in the process: I would have a whole week to spare if things didn't work out. It would be awesome to have the game done in the third week, and if not, I'd still have a safety net in the shape of seven days.
I also quite recently had written an article in this very blog detailling my reasons for game-making failure. I saw this game as a nice chance to get rid of some of them, and in several small ways it worked out.

The Story
I wrote three versions of the "story" (well, I CALL it the story), and each one was a lot smaller than its forerunner. Wanna see? Here-

First Draft:
Janet wants to submit a cake to a school competition, but she has no time to make it. Since she works at a diner, she tries to bake it there- during the night shift, but the customers get into her way. Then there is an accident, and the diner burns down. Janet manages to get the people out, but she dies. She is resurrected from the grave to go through that night again. Now knowing what will go wrong, she can chance the events of the night so that she has enough time to make her cake.

That was the original plan, and I found it really intriguing, but to be honest, I saw only one way to make it playable: I'd have to show the whole night going wrong, and then rewind, and handing over control to the player.
To make it short, I really didn't think it'd work. So-

Second Draft:
Janet never won her school’s baking competition because some other school girl cheated her. She rises from the grave one last time to get this done, and breaks into a diner to bake the cake. She’s noticed, though, and all of a sudden she has customers! But even though they want her to serve stuff, she needs most of that anyway (coffee, and a quickly improvised mix for shortcakes), and she even enjoys working the night shift so much that she serves her cake when it is done, to the cheers of the customers. Then she realises that she’s already HAVING the fame she wanted. With a happy sigh she sinks into the ground.

I liked that one much better. It was more focussed, and had that slightly bitterweet ending. Still too much for a month, though- many customers meant a lot of spritework, and I know that I am a slow animator. A dozen or so static characters wouldn't look too good, though. I somehow needed to slim down the plot even more. But I already had a good idea of where the game would take place, and so I started work on my zombie girl and the main location, the "diner" and waited for ideas to crop up. Sometimes you need to wait for the little buggers to knock on your back door.

The last iteration of the story, compared to the initial idea, was really something completely different, and it fell into place when I drew a graveyard for the introduction. I wanted to have Janet pop out of her grave- you need to play some tropes straight when you're doing a zombie game. Then I realised that it would be VERY STUPID to have a zombie drag itself up and instantly going into a monologue about baking a cake. I needed a second character. What would do? In the end I borrowed from an old plot idea I wanted to establish in a game that never got done: Managers of the afterlife. And thus-

Third Iteration:
When we die with unfinished business still in our mind, the Powers That Be try to take care of it. An agent of the "Powers" raises Janet from her grave to allow her to finally submit a cake to a famous competition that she never won. The agent already "prepared a situation", and Janet has one night in a jury member's diner to make her cake. As it happens, she meets two late-night customers there and can't resist serving them. She learns that the diner does not too well, and when she finally has her cake ready, she asks the agent to leave the recipe as a present to the diner's owner
before she returns to her grave.

Fun In The Kitchen: The Puzzles
As it was, the story neatly provided clear "sections", or "obstacles". First Janet would have to find a way into the diner, because it would be logically locked.
Then she'd prepare the kitchen and meet the first customer, who asks her for a coffee, so the next puzzle would be about making a good cuppa. It made sense that Janet would want to improve the quality of the diner's coffee machine because she herself would need coffee for her cake.
The cup being served, another customer would turn up, offering help in exchange for a good sandwich. Again, it made sense that Janet would accept that puzzle: She needed fruit for her cake, but there wasn't any fruit in the kitchen. The trade would be quite attractive to her.

I also wanted to include three puzzles directly linked to the cake: Janet would have to fix yet another machine in order to thaw some frozen cream, she'd have to find a way to get the right amount of cream into her mixture without proper equipment, and finally, just as she'd start to mix everything up, her left arm would fall off, forcing her to perform some improptu surgery on herself. None of these puzzles made it into the initial release, for several reasons. The first was TIME (I had one hell of a week setting up all the story nodes AND Mr. Coffee). The second was my wish to have only logical, relatively simple puzzled in the game that didn't require ANY guesswork, and I felt that all of the cake puzzles were either repetitive, somewhat "shoved-in", or just a tad too tricky. It was also becoming clear that the game was basically a "one room" affair with some extra locations (where story happened, but few things could be done), and I felt uncomfortable cramming yet more puzzles into the already quite crowded kitchen.
Sometimes a cake's just there to be eaten- no need to go all puzzle drooling.

Rusty The Wonder Dog
The little dog in the backyard, inofficially called Rusty, made me realise that even a simple plot with no more than two real puzzles can be fun if you are prepared to polish things up.
I don't know how popular it is, but when I was a kid many people in my town actually had their dog carrying a spare key in a small pouch on their collar. Sheepdogs and these big bulky Mastiff ones. I borrowed the idea because it made a nice first puzzle to distract the dog with a bone and get the key. First Janet was actually required to use her own rib (I had an idea that she'd then not be able to rest in peace, and would remain linked to the diner in some ghost-ish way). And at first the puzzle was totally barebones: The dog was just a static character that never moved from its watching spot at the fence, and Janet just picked up the ribs and fed them to the dog. I spend two days to polish this one up: Custom animations for Janet prying the leftovers from the street with her own rib, then a zombie-ish animation of her gnawing the meat, and finally a simple walkcycle for the dog, plus a "sleeping" version of it. When I saw all of that in motion I understood that even a simple puzzle can be fun to watch. From there on, I tried to shove in as many custom animations as possible.

Mr. Coffee
Yeah, include a coffee maker into the game where three elements can be altered to improve the quality of the brew. Easy, and machines really make good puzzles: I was so happy when Janet could go through the whole Mr. Coffee sequence- it was simple but logical. Then things got complicated.
My first idea was that Janet would know about the Mr. Coffee line because her father used to work for that firm. I dropped that idea in favour of adding a layer to the puzzle- Janet would have to call the service line in order to find out how these things really work. And then (at that time the game was in its beta testing phase) Tabata did her job to the fullest and because of her, Mr. Coffee turning into the most ugly bit of code I ever saw in a room script of mine: an actual state machine with so many checks that it hurts. In several other scenarios, Mr. Coffee would've been enough for me to call it quits. But his code worked, it just wasn't nice to look at, and so I merely shrugged and left it as it was. Tabata is also responsible for the machine to be able to trigger (for almost any scenario) a sensible response from Janet.
Fixing Mr. Coffee is the "main bulk" of the game, and its main source of grin animations and double ententres by Janet. Again I tried to add some details, but mostly Mr. Coffee is classic gameplay.

Making Contact
At the end of Week 2 or so I had a crude beta of a game. That was already more than I could have hoped for. It was short, but it felt complete- I really felt comfortable with most of it. A few things were still missing, but it was clearly goinf to be fully playable really soon. So I did the sensible thing and asked around for testers on the AGS boards, hoping to get one or two volunteers.
And another thing was really buring under my nails: I had no music. I had a placeholder midi file (Fossils, by Camille Saint-Seance) and thought I could just leave it in, and maybe scrounge another tune from somewhere... but since I was already asking for help, I also asked for someone who could do some midi.
This was when some serious magic started.

Enter Mods, And Also The AGS Audio System
I have little knowledge of the more advanced features of AGS's audio system. I know the basics, but in my first release I simply stole some audio from Legend Of Kyrandia and looped it through the whole game. But the next day I got a PM from Mods. He offered his services, and if I remember correctly, I got some tunes from him THE VERY NEXT DAY. Over the next two weeks he made a full soundtrack, ten pieces of original midi that really changed the game for me.
I know I can draw, and I think I am a decent animator. I can script, and I also have a good collection of sound effects. Technically I can do a game all alone.
But seeing someone else reading your summaries, and having a look at that beta, and then making music for that, that's awesome. There's no other word for it, it's awesome. It was no longer a buch of sprites dancing to a ripped midi version. It felt really fresh.
Mods is also responsible for the large scrolling screen seen in the intro- originally I wanted Janet to pop up from her grave with Ted standing next to her, but that was pretty tricky... then I got the "And Then There Was Janet... Again!" tune, and it was easy enough to time it with the music. And what better intro to a zombie game than a hand outstretched in front of a frikkin' gravestone?
So listen to me, game designers, if you can get someone to make original music for your game, never say no. Never.

Now that I had music I also needed to brush up on audio knowledge- it's not much, but COTD does some subtle fading effects, and as far as I know, tit's impossible to wreck the music by skipping though speech. Not bad when you consider that all the music handling in OUAC was automated.

Why The Forums Are Awesome
When you send out a PM to five persons, asking them to test a game, and you get four positive responses just the next day, you know your forum's great. When two of your testers do their job really well even though they are extremely busy, you know your forum's super awesome. And when you find a tester who just keeps on adding ideas and suggestions and who apparently destroyed a mouse by using cups on Mr. Coffee, well, there are superlatives to super awesome.
bic, Tabata, ponch, Dual, you're all the uber awesome. Thanks to you the game has been such a clean relase, well, it's just. Uber.

On a side note, playtesting the game was hell. I dealt with the story by dividing it into "chapters". There were four of them, and each required quite a lot of variables to match certain conditions. For example, I couldn't just start the game, turn on debug and then warp into the kitchen to try out the filter puzzle section- very often I really had to play through all the small steps until "conditions X, Ya, $g, and Dennis" were met. I still like the idea of "story knots", and I think that it would make a gret module/plugin- it's cool to know that in a certain situation, the player will really only be able to be at places X and Y.

On another side-note, a very strange thing happened in one of the house betas when I debugged for "all inventory" while in the kitchen and then looking at Janet's rib: the dog would appear and, still in its sleeping view, would slide around, following Janet. Yeah, I had a follow command there that worked only in the backyard, and I had forgotten that some commands are global.
The first time it happened I was just done with my eleventh cup of coffee, it was close to midnight, and it was quite scary.

A Matter Of Life And Ted
I went through one beta (July 17th), RC1 (19th, I think) and a last RC2 (23 or 24th- at that time my blood was almost 86% coffee, things started to blur). Many, many little tweaks were done in each version, but the thing that changed the most was the end. I love writing ends, and at the same time I find it the hardest part: You want to end with something memorable, and you want to have your players leave with the feeling that everything's solved.

Originally I wanted to leave a certain choice to the player, and that's where the graveyard soil (the only superfluous inventory item) came into play: After having all ingredients for the cake, Janet would make it, and then a button would appear on the GUI that would call Ted. The player would have the chance to ruin the cake by smearing the earth all over it, and that would've nulled the contract with Ted, and Janet would then remain in the land of the living.

I scraped that, and wrote the ending a good deal simpler: Janet would hand over the cake to Ted, who'd tell her that (according to his magical bit of paper) it would win. Janet would then give a brief "Yay", and... roll the credits.

That felt extremely rushed, tough, and after quite a lot of rewrites, I finally found the tone I wanted. I even managed to shove in a quick "kiss the cake goodbye" animation. Like most of Janet's custom animations it is very simple, but just fits.

As a bonus, I did an "after-credits" screen to really cover all lose ends, and to shove in a tiny hint that Janet somehow really isn't quite as dead. It took a lot of time; I think I went to almost half a dozen "final dialogs", but it felt important. Puzzle-wise the game really isn't that interesting, it's standard adventure fare. But I think Janet makes a good character because she is (within the game rules) believable and quite easy to relate to. There really is a story here, and the final recap makes it complete.

The Aftermath
I released Chance Of The Dead within the last week of July, and felt very proud indeed. A memorable line from the MAGS rules reads Yet hopefully, at the end of the month, the accomplishment of finishing a game will be your greatest prize. And yeah, that's true. For me the MAGS rules provided a bit of a pointy stick that made me get my **s up- I daresay that the need to think small lead to some design choices I wouldn't have made under different circumstances. There is a difference between having all the time in the world to bumble around and revisit everything you create for ages, and knowing that you got 30 days and better effing deal with it.

It's also just hilarious to see the internet reacting to you. It was great to read positive comments and good suggestions in the Announcement thread, and it was very strange to find my game - hey, come on, MY GAME!!!- all over the net, at freeware portals, and even described in spanish! (I don't speak that, but the Google translation was... well, I got the gist of it.)

If COTD hadn't been a "MAGS game", it wouldn't have been made. Now that I've seen how nice it is to deal with a smaller setting, I think I've really learned a lot. Small scope doesn't mean inferior game- it just gives you such a lot of opportunities to put detail in. And zombies, well, zombies are always cool.

Easter Eggs And Cameos
Some references crept into the game almost instantly, others were added later, but if you know where to look, there’s a little cameo or reference in almost every room.

- Ted names the MAGS theme and even knows that it is available “only this month”. Think about it- of all characters he’s technically aware that Janet’s night out can only happen within these four weeks!

- Biting the flowers in front of the diner will make Janet quip “A zombie eating plants- what next?” A little nod to Plants vs. Zombies (great game).

- There’s a Once Upon A Crime poster in the back yard, but it isn’t a hotspot. It’s just there, I didn’t want to go overboard.

- In case you wondered: The black outline in the diner’s hall is a statue, and it’s actually my old “Ghost-in-a-sheet” avatar sized up. I just needed a little bit of foreground to cover a tricky spot in the walkbehind areas.

- The kitchen has the (traditional) blue cup in the shelves- the “service line dood” even references the hazards a really big blue cup can cause.

- Asking Pam for the date brings up the “final” date for COTD- the day I prepared for release. Janet even says this’ll be a special day for her, but in context it just means that she’ll never forget the night she got her second chance.

- In the after-credits sequence, where Ted ties up the loose threads, we see the new cook standing behind the counter- it’s Beverly from Daemons In The Attic, just in a new outfit.

Fun Facts
- The room script file for the kitchen is 1187 lines, that's more than OUAC's Klutzenstein (with 3 locations and four puzzles).

- Using the "steam vent" (just using it, not using the pipe on it) triggers yet another double entendre from Janet.

- Janet was originally "Jennifer", and the first sprite had her with her ponytail down and brown hair, and also darker, torn clothes. She also had red eyes initially. "Burdie" is a tiny nod to "The Wee Free Men" by Terry Pratchett, where one of the MacFeegle rides a "wee burdie"- I really liked the sound of the name. Like Beverly's last name it can be read as a hint that she's Irish.

- "It's time to whip cream and pour in some rum" is a thinly veiled apptempt to shove in a Duke one-liner. As it is, Janet could also have shouted "Fights!".

Thanks for reading!

From THIS To... THIS!

2011-06-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

Ninja Assasin: My blade... broken! You defeated me... but HOW? Just WHO ARE YOU?
Burly Man: I am Mr. Mister.
Little Girl: And I'm Sister Mister. His sister.

Sometimes you think of something and burst into laughter, or at least a good-natures chuckle. I drew a small doodle that fitted the above dialogue and thought, hey, that's funny. In truth it wasn't, but the same evening I picked up my battered copy of Sam&Max and played it for a while, to rejoice in the nostalgy. I think that this was the moment where the idea to write a small AGS game about two characters took off.

I like games where the designer gives me more than just one main character, and I like it even more when I am given a team, or group- that's what will always earn Maniac Mansion a special place in my Game-Long-Term-Memory. It's just plain fun, and it has a lot of potential, too: Puzzles that require teamwork or stress one character's abilities, more than one way to interpret something (just think about LOOK responses), and of course team dynamics.
And I had this idea of a very strong man and his little sidekick, and nothing else. That's not enough to make a game, but it's enough for an article about how a very unlikely team came to be.
Read on.

My first idea was to really make just one room; one situation: Two secret agents about to defeat their nemesis, or something, but played completely for laughs, totally over the top. That was my whole GAMEPLAY idea, and so I launched my graphics editor and played around with some shapes. Big beefy guy and small girl. The result, eventually, was this:

(I should add that I really draw my pixel stuff with the mouse alone. These crude lines are the start of most of my spritework.)

After a while, the characters got refined, and as they took shape they also developed a certain character. First there really was the big strong hitman and his relatively naive sister, here:

The girl did, however, undergo several clothes changes, from girly "pricess dress" to perky goth look, and in response her role became that of a snarker, while the big dude was supposed to be an over-the-top burly hitman with a childish streak.

Since my idea was to have two characters defeat a madman in one room, that really was more than enough characterization. Team dynamics would already make this work. So I thought. The problem was, I had no idea where to take my two sprites, and so I made a saving throw and drew a GUI to use in the game. I think better when I draw GUIs.

Creating that GUI took two weeks. It's food for an article I plan to write soon, so stay tuned and just believe me, it was awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I found it wasted on one room. Instead, I took a generous pile of movies, a bottle of Diet Coke, watched a movie and thought about a slightly better plot.

I am a stickler for some themes. Whenever I get creative some of them will sooner or later creep in. Body Change, for example, becoming something else and dealing with it. The idea of an afterlife where you're forced into a ghost type. Ghosts and spell mythology in general. That always pops up, I can depend on that. And I like to take things up to eleven, not just to get a joke out of them, but to emphasize them. You can be ridiculous and still respect your source material, and I think that is the pool from which I fish my ideas.

After a while, anyway, I had the following: Two cosplayers get killed in a freak accident, and in the afterlife, must use the powers of their (now real) masquerade to escape hell. The supporting sprites:

From there on, writing a small plot and setting up a few puzzles was a piece of cake, but I stopped after a while because of one thing: It took me far too long to get to the POINT of the game. I had to introduce two characters, tell the player that they were geeks for a) Warhammer and b) Vampire stuff, had to get them killed, realise that they now WERE their costumes, and realise that they could escape the netherworld.
There seemed to be far too much intro there. And I wasn't too fond of the whole dying thing too, it tasted wrong.

I read somewhere that when you aren't happy about something, you should try reversing it. In my case, this actually worked. Instead of a long intro about two people dying and becoming something else, I simply had one non-human enter the real world without any additional intro, at all. And since the whole hell idea still was a bit fresh and there are worse scenarios around, the new plot was: Revenant meets Girl! Togehter they have an adventure!
Thus the sprites:

This was TRUE FUN, because it was really silly, and a great relief. There was no need for all the super-elaborate intro stuff at all now. I had one of the most badass Doom 2 monsters, and it would be a hero. I had a cute Chinese girl, too, to counter the non-human character. This was so over the top that I felt quite save to write a ridiculous small plot, in about two hours, and that's what I'm currently working on.
The sprites, by the way, got a lots of extra tweaks (reminding me of how great the community is):

So, from a cheesy dialogue all the way to an Odd Couple. I learned a lot from the various edits, especially how much a good character can write a plot for you at the same time as you are working on his/her pixels.

Random Bits

2011-06-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Duke Nukem Forever is out, and it's not very good. I had actually been looking forward to playing it for the sheer sake of it- I mean, 14 years in the making, that's even longer than Daemons In The Attic! Over here in Germany the reviews weren't that bad, too, but what I have played (the demo), well, it REALLY P*SSED ME OFF.
I do, however, still have a lot of fun with my old Duke 3D, which runs fine with a soppurting HiRes pack.

Speaking of fun games, I'm currently gunslinging my way through GunGirl2, and that's a game to be treasured. The soundtrack alone... gee, we need more of that stuff.

My DVD collection has grown considerably in the past few weeks, mostly owing to the re-release of several good flics in SteelBooks. I was able to get The Hole (by George Dante, not that flic with the chick in the bunker), Mutant Girl Squad (so bad it's awesom splatter), YatterMan (so awesome it's legendary superhero flic), and both orginal Ju-On movies (where the sound effects for the ghost were apparently made by ripping the last bit from a tesafilm roll)- all of that for the price of ONE new DVD release. I enjoy both good and terribly bad movies a LOT, so this is a great addition to my collecion.

Also went and rented Monsters. It should be called "Off-screen Monsters". I'm happy to spent twenty minutes with the jerks before things get rolling, that's totally okay. But Monsters, well, gives me roughtly 68 minutes of jerks running through a forest, and then watching two huge squid copulate. Yeah, that's the whole flick.
To reach equilibrium I then rented Rubber, a movie with a premise that could not possibly work, and I watched with wonder how a flic about a TIRE that kills people with TELEKINESES actually worked.

Another long-awaited sequel hit the shelves here, Alice: Madness Returns, and this one made my day. It's basically the original with modern graphics, but that's absolutely fine by me. A keeper indeed.

And I joined the SWARM over at the AGS boards, where a game grows, fed by the contributions of many. It's great fun and an exiting project indeed!

Work on a GUI that I had started as a challenge for myself has turned into work on a small game which defenitely is going to see the light of day. It's a trope trip indeed and might not be very long, or very complicated, but that's not a bad thing. Will write a bit more about that soon, because hell, it's fun.

Why Games Aren't Made

2011-06-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

This is one of the rare articles in this blog that are specifically aimed at adventure games (the genre) and Adventure Game Studio (the toolkit). It's also a very subjective one, but that's just to be expected. So read on, I promise it'll be worth your time!

First of all, I think it's safe to assume that there are more AGS games being started than there are finished AGS games. Just check the Games In Production thread. That's because we're still to almost 100% an indie community. We're hobbyists. When I, for example, fail to release an announced game, the worst thing that might happen is some mild concern (or/and ridicule) from my fellow forum members. But my job isn't at stake, I lost no money, and I will surely have no reporters mail me for a statement.

Let's further say that maybe three out of ten started games are abandoned for a reason: Maybe the author realises that his skills are not up to it, that his idea sounded great but plays not quite as well, or something similar. Sometimes a game DOES tell you that it isn't worth it (in the case of Phantasmagoria 2, this took quite long). Sometimes you just realise that this thing you started isn't worth your time, and you stop working on it. No harm done.

But there are games that disappear from the world for quite different reasons, and this is what this article is about.
Commercial games usually see the light of day, but it's not that all of them are great games. Their quality ranges from outstandingly good to the exact opposite, yet they are finished. So obviously they are made by people just like you and me who still somehow are better at handling projects.
Several AGS games, so I believe, are scrapped because the designer can't handle a game project. It's as simple as that- even a relatively small game can be pretty overwhelming (depending on your experience), and all of a sudden your cute little adorable baby becomes something right out of a Fantasy Filmfest movie, and you don't dare to touch it with a long stick.
It stands to reason.

It would be really cool if I could write just here and now that I have analysed the situation and returned with a list of "What can go wrong during your game making, and how to solve that". I haven't, and think that no-one else has, yet.

At least I came up with a hands-on list of things that has gone wrong FOR ME, and a supporting list of solutions I HAVE COME UP WITH, which could be the next best thing. I do, by the way, qualify for writing this all by having not released several games myself. My last release has been almost three years ago, which is quite a long time, but I can redeem myself a bit by having failed to release something for quite interesting resaons. I have also beta-tested several games that were never released, and think I see some pattern in them. And finally, I just happen to write articles, so there.

Reason 1: My Comments Were Not Up To It
When writing something really complicated, be it a puzzle or a GUI, you can quickly create a lot of code in one function, or a twisty maze of code that stretches over several functions. At some point during your game's production, a bug WILL find its way into that code. And then it's up to you to dig through all the stuff, find the line where things go wrong, and correct it.
And sometimes you'll realise, in horror, that you can't even remember what your script does right now in the first place, because you never commented anything and didn't care too much about formatting either. So instead of some already hard bug-hunting through A LOT OF CODE you understand, you face bug hunting though a lot of stuff you can't make heads or tails of. And a beginner, faced with this choice, might consider to call it quits and just start fresh.
Writing comments is useful, but this game stopper actually never was a big issue for me. I think it gets less important as you get experience, so it will sooner or later eleminate itself.

Reason 2: It's messy, I'll just start it over fresh
I've fallen to that one a lot. Your project starts to look cluttered and messy because you shoved stuff in to test it out and then changed it and tried something else- so you decide that it would be clever to simply ctart from a fresh point Zero, now that you are wiser and have some clue about what you're doing.
I'm very sure this this can be a good thing. For me, however, it became a hindrance. It's easy to keep things a good deal more organized when you redo a project- you can keep your sprites in nice order, you lose a few extraneous functions and stuff. It will all look neater for quite a while, but this is countered by a considerable downside: You will repeat a lot of boring stuff, like importing a shitload of sprites, setting up lots of GUI elements, remembering how these frames were supposed to become a walk animation. I think I redid the DITA GUI five times, each time hoping to get things just right. It was just lots of boring stuff with a slightly niver paint job, really.
Workaround? For me, it was accepting that you don't need all your GUI sprites in numerical order, and that dialogs can be written in any order too. It's NICE to have things in order, but since you rarely create your assets in order of theme (most times I add them as they are needed), why force authistic behaviour on you?

Reason 3: My Global Script Just Exploded
AGS keeps a lot of its code in the global script- the core game functions, obviously, are there, and the functions of all GUI elements, characters, and inventory items go there too. They never get automagically sorted, too, and instead just plop in in order of creation. That means that YOU are the one who must keep things in order. This sounds pretty harmless, but I have read huge complaints about the fact, and for some people it really was enough to call it quits.
In truth there are several ways to keep your global script lean or at least human-readable. It's just that it's not build in. I find it quite easy now to keep a "chapter" structure by grouping the core functions, gui functions, characters and finally inventory functions in "chapters", and I use commented lines as separators. It took a while to get used to, but it works quite well. I simply add the extra half-hour of sorting the stuff I added in a day's work. It's worth it.

Reason 4: It's Scripting, So It Sucks!
I'm comfortable with AGS but also aware that it is a game toolkit. It is specifically made for one genre, no matter how creatively it has been abused. In short, it's not as generic and flexible as, say, learning C#.
So sometimes you meet people who see that AGS can't do one thing, and who decide that this incompetence alone is enough to drop the toolkit altogether. If this happens somewhere in the middle of a project, well, the game also is dropped. I personally have little sympathy for anyone who rates a toolkit on failures, but I admit that sometimes I've run into situations where I can't get something to work and hit a dead end finding a solution.

Reason 5: I can't draw Batman... shit, I can't draw a ALL!
AGS games lose all impact without graphics, and some of us, well, are not very good at it. Trying to draw something and FAILING can lead to a dead end- furious at your own incompetence you try to make things up and draw something else, but since you're already in a bad mood you fail again. If you don't stop RIGHT THERE, you'll find yourself drawing crap for the rest of the day. Heavily overlaps with Self-Induced Writing Block, discussed later.
For me, a simple remedy worked surprisingly well: When I can't get something done graphically, I listen to my current favourite song. That never makes me DRAW better, but it's a nice distraction. After that, I try again and usually I'm in a better mood now.

Reason 6: How Do I Make Door Puzzle? Oh, never mind...
It would be unfair to say that newcomers can't make games, but they seem often challenged to make it through the most basic scripting commands. When you are not able to figure out how you use an inventory item on a hotspot, you should not yet be making a game.
Can lead to:

Reason 7: I Can't Figure How X Is Done... I Need A Side Project!
I HAVE fallen for that, and I'm not ashamed to say it loud. Stuck in one project? Well, there are people who take a break and return to it a wiser man. There are people who take a long break and forget about it completely. And there are those who start a side project where they stumble over a new little problem, which makes them say: "Darn, I need a side project!"
I know a few people who need side projects and who can juggle them with ease. For me, side projects are the shiny tin foil that makes kittens so cute- as soon as they are there, they magically catch all my interest and energy until the next bit of shiny is waved. Sometimes it's better to focus on one thing. Sometimes, when you already are distracted, a new distraction is NOT something you want.
I'm working on a solution to this.

Reason 8: Self-Induced Writer's Block
Stuck. Some information you need to make the character believable, the puzzle sensible, the back story correct, is not part of your knowledge. So you hook up the internet and check it out.
And you find it.
You also find a lot of other interesting, related things, and start reading them, and the links from there soon have you a lot wiser. You want to use this new knowledge. You feel like having a new game idea already!
And this ends your project, because now you know so much more, it's no longer good enough.
This is a form of writer's block: You are stuck dead, and solve this, but instead of working with what you already have you just add something new, and this can create a ripple.
No remedy here, though. Sometimes the stuff you find really is awesome, and we all know the world needs more awesome.

Reason 9: Always Too Big
My personal second-biggest issue. I can't think small. I can't think small plots. I always want games to be long, and complex, and large. This is bad for any project, and especially bad when you're already having a hard time managing a small game.
My saviour was Stephen King. I grew up with the man's doorstoppers of books, and found his shorts stories very late in my reading career. And you know what, they are almost all better than the huge volumes! When I start thinking too big these days, I take a step back and concentrate on the one scene I really MUST have in the game, and then the relatively few steps needed to get there. This often eliminates a lot of clutter.

Reason 10: Never Good Enough
This is my personal favourite, and I think it's my greatest issue. Very often an idea sounds nice to me and then the game never seems to live up to it. I feel like William DeWorde in the Discworld novel (a man who wants his newspaper articles treated like great literature): Even a small line from a supporting character, I feel, must be so cool that Shakespeare cries.
I think deliberately reminding you that you are NOT working on the latest killer game helps. For me, refuge in audacity also sounds a good remidy- make something outstandingly simple and deliberately "bad" just to show yourself that this is also fun.

And that's my share so far. It obviously won't help many people making games, but by naming a problem there's now space for discussion. I'm all game for that!

Food For Thought

2011-01-12T04:52:00.000-08:00

As a german reader of mostly american, japanese, french and, naturally, dutch comic books I am aware of the tension that the obvious "monopol" on comic book distribition creates in the USA (and, since most of that stuff swaps over here eventually, in my own comic book shelves).

This set of articles tries to explain not only the problem but also a solution, and it makes me all the happier that it's written by an artist who has much better vocabulary than me, but is also doing a wicked cool comic.

Hence I link it here. Read it up, pretty good stuff.
http://vividstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/article-comics-banished-medium.html

Pinch Of Salt, Mustard's Extra

2011-01-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

It's already an old hat, but I saw a game the last week on the shelves that really made me cry. And since everybody is allowed to poop into the interwebs these days no matter how minor the matter, well. This is my blog, and the poop starts here.

I love, really loved the oldfashioned attempt to video game selling, which went like this: I entered a small shop completely dedicated to PC games, had a little chat with the owner, maybe sharing a cigarette, we discussed the new releases, and after a while I would hand over some money and get a cardboard box which, when opened, would reveal a CD and a manual and maybe even some little goodies like a glowing bit of plastic that was supposed to be a magical moonstone.
As unlikely as it sounds, I liked reading the manual of complex RPGs and suchlike before I even installed the game. I still got my Lemmings 2 keychain. But the best thing was that I had this disks, or CD or whatever, and could then install it and enjoy a neato singleplayer game.

I never was too fond of online multiplayer- network was always good enough for me- and I certainly was not happy about the solid cardboard boxes dying out. DVD cases are nice, yes, and they stack well and save some space, but getting a barebone bit of plastic cover with all the documentation on the disc itself... well, I swallowed that. Eventually. At least I still had my game and could easily install and play it.

The recent trend of online activation, however, really pisses me off. So let's see, even when we assume that all the games I buy are totally up my alley and I REALLY want to play and OWN them, first they reduce the cool extras, then the cool packaging, and when they realise that all this makes me feel less inclined to buy it... instead of giving me something extra, they force me to be online for their activation process.
Well, yes, I somehow can live with that. Piracy and all, and games really are much more expensice to produce and the people who made it want money too. I won't start with the old idea that people would buy more games if there were more cool things in the box. It COULD work in an ideal world, but in an ideal world there would also be enough vespene gas for everyone, and movies would feature Gigi Edgley more often.
I think if things had stopped there, I would just be a lone rambler who'd give up at some point and then restrict himself to playing "the olden classics".

But what's it with this "you can only play our game when you're online, all the time" approach? The "any you can only istall it three times" approach, and the even more ridiculous "once you installed it you can not sell it, by the way, and the game is actually not on your disk but on our servers and, not that we think about that, you can only play it when these servers aren't off, a state that you have no control over at all, natch!" approach?
I can't believe that this is going to be the next great thing. Combined with the trend to emphasize online play more and more this really is a totally turn-off for me. I know that there are advantages in that trend, but for the hell of it I'll deny them all and name not one.
As far as games are concerned, I see myself as the goddamn consumer who pays for something to OWN it (in the very abstract way one can own a video game- I understand that all I own is the right to play my copy). I want content and a disc and the right to install it on my computer and have some fun with it, because there is a price tag on that box that has a number on it, and I just paid that number in hard currency.

That game box I saw, by the way, was C&C Red Alert 3, with the following printed on the back, in rather small print: "Doesn't contain a disk but a direct link to where you can download your copy of the game."

Is that what video games are now? Buggy games I can somehow understand and even sympathyse with. Flawed games, yes, well, we all live and learn. Broken games- annoying, but just part of the whole thing I guess. But to enter a New Age where I pay to MAYBE be able to play a game... is it only me, or is there something wrong with that picture?

I think I'm going to start a business this very week- in about three years it'll probably be one of the main ways to make money: From now on I'm free for hire. For the modest sum of 10€ I will allow you to turn on your computer, and for an additional 5€ (per hour) I will tell you which server to play a game (of my choice) on. Sounds like a deal?

(I fully understand that I tended to rant here, and made blunt jumping to conclusions, and ignored the fact that in three years we'll all be constantly online anyway. Hence the title of the post, so go fetch the salt and pass me the mustard.)

First Post Of The Year

2011-01-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

The following dialogue actually happened- I should know, because I was there; actually I was the one I chose to nickname "Ghost".

Dude: "What's that you're playing?"
Ghost: "That's Bejeweled 2."
Dude: "Any good?"
Ghost: "Yup."
Dude: "Hey... That's one of those Match 3 things, yes?"
Ghost: "Yes, it is."
Dude: "Got one, too."
Ghost: "Which one?"
Dude: "Treasures Of Montezuma. Bit lame."
Ghost: "Oh, I know that, got it too. Pretty good."
Dude: "Eh? Why would someone buy the same game twice?"

This is where I realised that the conversation would get pretty philosophical, and I switched on the inner tape-recorder that my mind can become when necessary.

Ghost: "Because it's not the same game."
Dude: "It is. Match three things to make a row, get points, over and over until you fall asleep."
Ghost: "It's still not the same game."
Dude: "Come on."
Ghost: "No, really. Would you say that... (I hesitated here. The Dude plays games based on how good their multiplayer is.) ... Half-Life and Bioshock are the same games?"
Dude: "Heh, no. In..."
Ghost: "In both you shoot at things."
Dude: "You can't compare that to matching stuff on a grid!"

But I can and I do. When all's said and done, you can divide games into genres that stick to pretty small rulesets. In Shooters you shoot at things, in Point-and-Click adventures you point and click at things, in strategy games you move units around and conquer things, and in Phantasmagoria you yawn as a mediocre plot unfolds and the most exiting thing you do is swapping disks.
Heck, why stop at games? Almost all books I know work exactly the same. You flip the pages and read one word after the other until you reach the last page. And movies? Let's not even go there.

The fact we willingly shell out hard money for a couple of games that have the SAME RULES is, when discussed totally logical, very strange. Isn't it against logic and common sense that some people will praise one game of a genre and feel indifferent, or even dislike, another one? If you really like building simulations, why would you prefer, to take an example at random, Sim City 3 over City Life? In both you build cities. If adventure games are your favourite genre, why do you like the Gabriel Knight series but hate, loathe and ignore Legend of Kyrandia? I mean, from a dispassionate and logical point of view it makes no sense, because clearly in both games you collect stuff, use it somewhere else, and eventually solve a sting of puzzles.

I like to think a game's genre is something pretty different for the designer and the player, and with that sentence this article finally goes somewhere (pfew!). Once the designer has decided for a genre, he knows how the player will expect the game to play. Real-time strategy: Fast-paced base building and so on. Match 3: Match three somethings. Arcade racing game: Cars with unrealistic (but hopefully fun) handling. And so on. The player, however, will expect some unique flesh on this skeleton, because that's really all what makes the games of a genre unique, and sometimes very iconic.
For you as a designer the "expected rules" are also a great way to decide where to deviate from the formula, and how much, and in what way. I think that putting "flesh on the bones" is easier when the game really has a small ruleset. Many Match 3 games really play identically, but become unique by having themed, pleasing graphics or a really good background music. Adventure games, being stories to be played, become unique by their setting and story, but rarely by introducing a fabulous new way to open the inventory. And could you really distinguish any two modern shooters of you removed all the textures and eye candy? Thought so.

When all's said and done, there are no new genres anymore, and I think there haven't been new genres for quite a while now. But there are still new games. So putting interesting new clothes on well-known skeletons seems to be the way to go.

That's it, folks, for the first post of the year.

Season's Greetingage!

2010-12-24T02:35:00.000-08:00

A merry Xmas to you all!

To Binge (NOT By Gorill@z)

2010-12-23T16:12:00.000-08:00

This year has seen me move to a place where my constantly wobbly internet connection was replaced by non-existent internet connection, and to my chagrin this has not yet changed. The obvious downside is that I no longer hae all the information of the web at my fingertips. The obvious benefits are that I've started to use books and notepads a lot more, have with some success "guessworked" the functionality of a Match-3 game, and have one less distraction while trying to actually work on my computer.

Now that I have a nice two-week holiday which I spend in the close vicinity of a computer that HAS constant net access, the old habits once more emerge. Boy have I missed ARCHIVE BINGES. Here are some webcomics I found, rediscovered, and would like to point out for the sheer fun they are.

Spinnerette is basically a parody of Spider-Man, and there are is no shortage of comics that are made by people who wish they'd been the first one to fuse a spider with a human. This one is actually quite different- it takes place in a world where all our superhero comics exist, but where actual superheroes are also very real. This allows for a neat mix of parody and thinking further: We have a nerdy grad student who, by accident, is fused with spider DNA, and then constantly is reminded that superheroes aren't instantly super. The titular Spinnerrette runs into far more problems than old Peter Parker, having six arms and shooting webs from her butt and NOT KNOWING ANYTHING about combat, fighting crime, or keeping a low profile. It's to Spider-Man what Kick Ass (the movie) is to the general superhero universe, a tale with a twist that has some elements of deconstruction and still is surprisingly light-hearted.
Also has an awful lot of shapely women. Not that I'd argue about THAT.
Can be found right here:
http://www.krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/

RPG World is extremely old, and some may argue that it looks like BAD ART all the way through, but for any RPG geek is is a lot of fun. Also extremely rich in tropes and general jokes about game mechanics. I'm not through the archives yet but KNOW that the plot was abandoned, so this is an archive binge that will hit a wall at some point- but you know that you can make it through.
Read here:
http://rpgworldcomic.com/d/20000827.html

Eerie Cuties surprised me mostly with the art, which is very good, and a lot of rather well-made characters despite the fact that the comic is relatively new. An overdose of anime girls will not go well with many readers, but this is really good stuff. I mean, how often do you see a vampire who, being born on Easter, refuses to drink or eat anything but chocolate?
See here:
http://www.eeriecuties.com/d/20090601.html

Author, Player, Hero: A Precious Triangle

2010-12-23T03:35:00.000-08:00

In movies you are usually reduced to being a watcher- there's a camera that shows you what happens, and you may or may not become emotionally involved, but you can't really interact. You can not, as it is, grab the camera during a scene and point it towards something YOU are interested in.

In an adventure game you usually can set your own pace, and you can also decide what to look at, what to do first, what to pick up and who to talk to. You can interact, and you have an active role. You can't completely take over, though- there are events that will happen in any case, and there are actions you are simply forced to do.

It's clear that an adventure game has an author- the very person who made the game. It also might have a narrator, who may or may not be a completely different character. There will be at least one main character; usually the one the player controls. And yes, an adventure game needs a player because otherwise, no-one would start that .exe file and do all the mouse clicking.

There's an interesting connection between these roles, and since I haven't posted in such a long time, allow me to discuss. It's a bit like taking a play apart.

Let's say you're the author. Your knowledge about the plot is absolute; you're the only one who knows everything: The whole story, the solutions to all the puzzles, even the "best order" in which to play the game. You are the one who made it all, and it is very likely that your overall knowledge and taste already shaped the game a good deal (as in, your love for greek mythology resulted in a game that is, basically, the Ulysee). You do not only know the plot, you also know your motives.

Enter the player: He doesn't know the plot, but he knows that he is playing an adventure game. In addition to that he will be "genre savvy" enough to expect certain plot twists and puzzle mechanics. The player is aware of the author's existence and the fact that he's playing a game; even without knowing about the exact structure of the plot he will very often at least have a very good idea how a puzzle can be solved, and what will happen next. He expects things. He doesn't have the author's complete knowledge, though.

And that's where the game's main character comes in. As an inhabitant of the game's world he is bound by its rules and should have some knowledge about it, at least "common sense" knowledge (and this can be very different from the knowledge both author and player have). Like the player, the main character usually doesn't "know" about the plot- he lives the plot (if the game isn't a backflash) and comes with his own set of motivations, expectations, resources and emotions. The main character is not the author, but the author has complete control over it, and must, at the same time, give the player the feeling that it's HIM who's in control.

It's even more complicated in Interactive Fiction games, where a fourth narrating voice CAN come in- we have the descriptions the game gives of locations and events, but in many IF games the parser itself takes an active role and comments actions (including and not limited to arguing with the player).

Nice triangle, eh?

The main character is where author and player meet on something like equal ground. As far as the game is concerned, the main character gives to the player all knowledge and abilities required to follow the plot dictated by the author. I think it's really helpful to be aware of that. Let's take a certain Indiany Jones, who is a professor of archeology and an able adventurer. It's safe to assume that many players aren't able to single-handedly defeat burly soldiers with a bulwhip, don't know about moon constellations and ancient runes. Heck, most won't even be able to read a message written in Latin. Jones does, though, and the player can simply borrow these abilities from him if the author took some care (by provising meaningful 'look' resposes and adding the whip to the inventory).

It's a bit harder in games where the setting includes magic, oddball in-game logic or very specific knowledge. In my own game Once Upon A Crime I thought it safe to assume that a player would stick a fuse into a huge cherry, thus creating a cherry bomb. It still think it would have worked if I had thought about the author-player-main character triangle a bit more. That's why I am actually writing this all down.

When the player of an adventure game comes across a puzzle he WILL realize it is a puzzle. A good author should not only provide hints on how to solve it, but use the main character as a delegate both to make the puzzle solvable and sensible.

Gee, posting close to Xmas really is fun.

Win Some Lose Some

2010-04-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

Some fun stuff has happened. Some non-fun stuff has happened. Here's the gist of it in bite-sized packages.

It was time for an art shift, and finally getting that Wacom was a nice excuse to sit down some more and rediscover those drawing skills of mine. I was never too happy with the annoying difference between my male and female characters- well, some might argue that I just draw male characters far too seldom. In some ways my style's a sponge, soaking up a lot of stuff I like and combining that into a mix that I hesitantly call "my style". I feel the power of the three P's (Practise, Practise, Practise) paying of now, and it's nice to rediscover some tricks and learn new ones on the way.

I bought HeartGold. It's the first time ever I bought the "girlish" version of any Pokémon game, but it had Ariados and a couple other neat critters, while Silver only had the Lugia as bait. I've put great hopes into the Gold/Silver remakes and was not disappointed. Sure, one Pokémon game plays like the others, but unlike FireRed/LeafGreen, these remakes really shine and add a lot of nice touches. The interface finally exploits the touchscreen to the max, too, and it must say something about the sheer fun factor when a 35-old can rediscover a game with actual content in his eyes.

Another game has me hooked, called Picross 3D. I was skeptical how good a pure 2D puzzle would translate to 3D, but hell, it's fun. Pretty challenging too.

Jonny Depp was NOT enough to make the new Alice movie worthwhile, and this says all about the movie one needs to know.

Blizzard has just managed to become my number one example for people losing it. My jaw dropped all the way down to the floor when I read what they plan for StarCraft2, the new BattleNet, and Diablo3. A game that I can buy and play only with a constant link to the internet? That I can't even resell because it can only ever have one account, and that account won't be mine, it's Blizzard`s? And all of that for a solo campaign??? Sorry, Blizzard. I think I destroyed four or so mice while playing Diablo over and over again. Diablo 2 had me heaping praise on you. Now you've lost a fan. And the sad thing: it won't matter. To YOU.

The new Gorillaz album hit the shelves and is now a constant guest on all my media-related gadgets. Can't wait for the first Superfast Jellyfish flash games. Oh wait. They are there already, right?

Still no stable net at me ole haunt. It's turning a bad joke, right? But it also helps, in a way. Less distractions. Less easy acess to valuable info also means you really make the most of the limited online time you actually get. I find myself making notes more often, and rememebering them better. This mostly goes for my C# programming, but also a lot of articles I find MONTHS after everyone has been excited about them.

Everyone told me S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would not be worth the time it needs to install and configure. Installing it I did, and configuring it I skipped, and lads, you're all wrong. It's a good game. Then again, you didn't understand me when I compared it to System Shock, so... not your fault.

Internship is coming to an end. If that is a good or bad thing, well, I am not yet decided.

Apparently they still will not do the Captain Future live action movie they announced five years ago, but then again, there seems to be a Gargoyle CGI in the making. I live in hope.

The Game Of Critique

2010-02-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

Whether you made a game and put it up the forums for others to download and play it, or whether you played the game someone made, sooner or later a funny little word enters the scene: Feedback. Or critique; call it what you like. If the game somehow touched you, giving a little feedback is polite. "Crits" are a game played by two, though- there are many ways to crit a game, and there are many ways to recieve and respond to critical comments.

Let's start with you being the critic. Your job so far was easy; someone made a game, and you played it. Having an opinion is natural, but how to communicate it?

The worst thing you could do is saying NOTHING AT ALL. Maybe you think the game'S not even worth a small sentence. Maybe you think your opinion doesn't matter. Maybe you can't say much that has not already been said. But saying nothing is impolite. Really, it is. And if enough people think like you and say nothing at all, the result is some unspoken "Your game, dude, didn't matter." Few unspoken sentences bite harder.

If the game really was not good, for whatever reasons, or if it was superb, and you either loathe or love it, don't just go and write the hackneyed "Dude this sucked, give it up!" or (equally bad) "Great game!".
Just scoffing a game is lazy and rude. Even simple games with template graphics and buggy gameplay obviously had some work being put into them, and the devastating one-liner is nothing but rude. It doesn't offer any hints WHY the game sucked. It's not critique, it's just an insult, even if it MAY be justified (god knows there are a lot of bad games out there).
While a short, positive response arguably sounds nice, it also doesn't offer much to the game's author. Apparently the game was good. But what exactly? And could it have been better? Game authors MAY be attention whores, but they are also (usually) keen on feedback that is more specific.

A critical comment that is both honest and useful will usually mix good points and bad points. It will point out flaws in the game, but also point out things you liked, enjoyed, or found promising. As soon as you get rid of the old black-and-white mould you'll realise that almost every game has at least something that you liked in a certain way, or that it COULD have had these things were it not for some flaws. As soon as you realise that, you can write constructive crits.
"At first I was really disappointed with the game. After all the hype- and after being in the making for three years- my expectations were probably too high. The intro was lengthy and far too convulted, and there was a clear lack of animation. Watching three people flapping their lips for over an hour really didn't set the mood, and I really wanted to skip on all the dialogue about apparently random, everyday stuff. I sat through it, though, and once the first few puzzles unlocked and things got into motion, I started to warm up for the game. I noticed that halfway through the game the animations became a lot better, and later backgrounds were of considerably better quality. I think the long development time made you "forget" to update older parts, for whatever reasons, and that is a shame: The last third really shines, the characters show a good deal of depth, the puzzles tie together nicely (especially the one about the Orrerey, which really is a little coding masterpiece), and the final sequence where everything is resolved really made me wish the whole game had been of the same quality. Unfortunately, the same last third is full of typos and plaqued with small bugs. None of them broke the game, at least for me, but it gave the impression of a game being rushed to meet an already missed deadline.
All in all, the good outweights the bad, but it's a close shave. You may easily lose a lot of players for the stale intro and the weak "first five minutes", and for a main character that becomes likeable only half-way through the game."
And so on. See what I mean? You can point out flaws without sounding rude and simple. You can say that a game didn't "make it" while offering tips about how it would have done.

Since crits are a game for two, the author, who is at the receiving end of tall the stuff you just wrote, should respond equally polite and open-minded. You made the job easy for him by using polite language, offering tips and justifying your opinion.

Just some thoughts... hope you can get something out of them ;)

... To You All!

2009-12-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

If everything works correctly, this post will automagically appear in teh interwebz just before Christmas. Hooray for sheduled posts!

Well, it has been a fun year. And now it comes to an end, accompanied by two big big big events: Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Well, I don't know about you, but I'll be having a quiet Christmas over here in freezing cold Germany, and I hope you too will have a good Christmas. Enjoy some pudding or whatever local festive food you have, spend some good time with friends and family, and remember: Chistmas is that one day where you SMILE when you get socks (making a mental note to return the favour next year), where you do NOT THINK ABOUT CALORIES when you eat, and where any drink can have any colour, as long as it is LIQUID.

Merry Chrismas to some good friends- Bic, Ben, Dual, Indie, you know who I mean. And also some festive time to all those forum members I miss so much.

I'll check my presents soon. I hope someone gives me 'net ;)

Have a good time, lads!

Better Than It Sounds

2009-12-13T09:53:00.001-08:00

Found this in the depths of TVTropes. Clearly a movie can be very good... yet be reduced to something that makes it sound like a really BAD movie.

I am still giggling ;)

Alien: A stomach cramp gets out of hand.
Aliens: An entire colony has very bad stomach cramps. The only one who can help them was sleeping for years. All of the sequels are exactly as bad as they sound.
Alien³: A dog stomach cramp gets out of hand.
Alien Resurrection: Woman is brought back to life because of stomach cramps.
Alien Vs Predator: A lot of people get stomach cramps in the Arctic. Three Big Game Hunters have to clean up after them.
Alien Vs Predator: Requiem: Big Game Hunter gets stomach cramp, forcing his friends to stop in a small town.

I may be a while...

2009-08-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

Me And DeviantArt

2009-07-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

DeviantArt is a mystery to me. I like the site, that should be said first. It's both a great playground and a proving ground for everyone who happens to consider himself an artist of almost any genre, style, and ability. You can find anything there, from simple sketches to great, elaborate artworks, from papercrafts to full comics, and too much reference material and pR0n)to name and number.

I have a DeviantArt account, here. I have it for two years and a bit now, and sometimes I do some updates, and sometimes I don't. You know how it is. I wanted to do much more with the account, obviously, but well, it's never really taken off.

What nags me is the total UNFAIRNESS of having the whole world as your audience. Each time I try to do cool stuff, like introducing a new, original character, or maybe uploading some old (bit still nice) sketches, the following happens:

Nothing.

Each time I upload something you could label "fanart", the following happens:

I get a dozen more pageviews and requests for more of the same.

I'm basically okay with that. A view counter is just that- a counter. And if I did my little drawings just to make a counter increase, I'd be a poor artist. But checking my statistics revealed a sad fact- my most viewed, most commented, most downloaded works are a certain female robot (XJ-9 from My Live As A Teenage Robot). I used to love that show, and I liked the character enough to do a few pieces, and now that thing's stealing the show.

I went and checked a few other Deviant's sites and did some rough calculations and also ate a tuna sandwich until I came up with the following theory: The world does not want new stuff. It wants old stuff. It craves old stuff.

I am a walking library of old stuff, and I pride myself to be able to make old stuff somewhat less old. Thus I decided to do the DevTest. It's fiendish. I will do two, no, three things at once, and let the world decide.

First, I will start drawing a bit more. Second, I will try to draw stuff I never drew before, and third, I will see what DeviantArt has to say about that. I am going to steal a mould, break it, glue it, and fill it with Ghost.

In short, I decided to draw a few POKEMORPHS and see what happens. I mean, you can't get much older than Pokemon.

And the strange thing is- it's great fun. I never went for fancy costumes and anthromo--phors... making animals look like people*, but this is really something I could get used to. Another plus, the original designers had really good palette awareness, and one should always go and learn from the best.

I am not ashamed to admit that the last three deviations I uploaded are really something I am proud of.

* A blatant lie.

This Time, We Cheat

2009-07-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever I draw my little comic thingies, I realise that I tend to skip on the legs. Whenever I start working on a game and get a bit more serious about it, I leave the walkcycles as long as humanly possible, because I hate them. And don't get me started on hands, the most annoying thing in this universe one can decide to draw.

When you're working on your game, your imagination will often light creative fireworks that you just know you will not be able to animate, code, compose, or get for free from the interwebz. Your cast of thirty-seven characters, ten of them requiring full walk/talk/idle animations, your idea for a time-critical Guitar Hero ripoff, that puzzle where you need to align stars in real time, the cursor dipping into the picture as if it was wet paint... they sparkle in your brain, but you know they won't look that perfect on the screen. They may, in fact, look like crap.
Alternatively, you may have a rather minor character who needs one big animation, and realise that the amount of work for this small scene would be bigger than the rest of the game.

As a "lone wolf" who does all the jobs, you will often face a situation where you lok at the idea, the required work, your shedule, and then sigh and scrap the idea. Even if you're part of a team or have some connections to people who will help you out in a tight spot, you will often find yourself wondering if you can pull it off.

Fortunately, we can always... cheat. We can, by means of trickery and guile, create the ILLUSION that awesome stuff happens in our game without spending a lifetime to animate, script and coordinate it. Oh yes, we can. Hey, there are comics out there where the artist never shows the legs of any character. There's music that mostly consists of silence. There's games without a main character at all.

Behind closed doors:
You have a great action scene in mind. Your die-hard PI is going to meet a shady guy and beat seven different kinds of crap out of him. A fight to the finish, where things get broken and hijinx ensue.
You don't want to animate that at all- it's just too much.
So... let the PI enter a dark alley, effectively leaving the screen. Then, display dialogue. Make it good dialoge. Make the screen shake. Get some smackin' sound files. If your writing is good, the players will imagine just what you had in mind. And it might even be better than what *you* had in mind, because players love to see their own imagination.

Behind Walkbehinds
You have a character who will, as part of a puzzle, leave his office/hideout/whatever so that the player can do something in the room. That means the supporting character will need a walkcycle.
Walkcycles are time-consuming...
Just place a convenient WALKBEHIND. You can then move the character without animating his legs; a slight movement of the head, 3 frames or so, may be enough to complete the illusion!

Explain It Away
A character has super-speed, is extremely nimble, a born acrobat. At some point his skills are needed to be shown. Animation again, and you are no good at speedlines and stuff.
What you want to show may look cheap.
Explain it away. A very fast character? Why, he is so fast that you don't even see him move! You ask him to show his speed by daring him to shuffle a deck of cards- then you play a quick rattling sound, and the character says smugly: "And I just did."
Works very well with speed; other special abilities may need better and more creative explanations.

Hide It In Clouds
The assembling of a complicated machine is required. Many, many small parts will be needed to animate, move, scale... You shiver as you think about it.
Don't show it at all. An old cartoon tradition is the Big Ball Of Dust: Have such a cloud and show the character's hands moving around it, and stop with the fully assembled machine.

WARNING:
Overuse of these tricks may result in a game that looks rushed and as if made by a guy who doesn't put his heart into it. Counter effect by adding a few elaborate scenes.

Last Of The Least, Or Merely A List?

2009-07-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

While many people will argue all the way when it comes to interface design- starting with the actual number of actions you need, and not even stopping at the dreaded looks of the thing- you will see them happily agree that at least INVENTORY IS EASY. Just have a large window somewhere in the game where everything is put, be that small everyday items or whole live dogs. Inventory is simple.

Back in the days of interactive fiction, inventory was actually pretty complicated, since it was modeled a bit more after how real life works. You had a carrying capacity, needed containers, maybe there was even a weight limit, and transporting liquids or clouds of gas were puzzles in themselves. Stuff could break, and so on.
And in truth it was often very cumbersome to juggle the two dozen items you had only to make room for one more.

These days are long forgotten. Most graphic adventures allow you to really pick up everything, regardless of size and weight, as long as the plot *requires* the player to pick it up. Sometimes the plot justifies the player's ability to carry a ridiculous abundance of oversized items (Simon the Sorcerer, for example, just does it by magic, and Rincewind has a bottomless Luggage), sometimes the sillyness is lampshaded a bit (Monkey Island), and occasionally the designers take care not to overdo it (Broken Sword's George Stubbard puts his pickups into his jacket, but at least each single one would fit). But a certain consent has been reached that an adventure game has a bottomless inventory. Some sort of black hole in a pocket maybe.

From the designer's point of view the unwritten law of magic pants makes perfect sense. No human being can carry a fire extinguisher in his pockets, but we accept the fact that our player character just did it. Somewhere later we will need this fire extinguisher. So well. In a movie the hero would then dash off and get the damn thing anyway. It's a game, and in a way inventory is symbolic: Having that fire extinguisher in our inventory means we have access to it. Actually carrying it or knowing where it is... where's the difference? Games aren't real life, plot comes first.

Once we, the designers, *have* the bottomless inventory, we feel the urge to fill it up. Hey, it's bottomless! Let's chuck some cool stuff in there! Inventory items are good for puzzles. They can be used on objects, and they can be combined- the latter is a very satisfying element because it gives us the feeling that we build something: A solution to a problem build from the resources at hand. Who hasn't, as a kid, built at least one very strange LEGO contraption and called it Super Burglar Alarm or whatever? We like to build.
And many, many adventure games heavily rely on what they call "inventory based puzzles". Inventory items are "the solution" to a puzzle. That means that most puzzles in such games can be solved by a) getting an item and/or b) figuring out the correct item to use on the correct object.

Nothing wrong with that, though it encourages the old "use everything on everything else" syndrome.

It also means that many games treat inventory items as exactly what they are for the designer: A works-only-once freeway ticket to a puzzle solution. Once you've used the Great Big Crystal Of Eek to unlock the Portentous Portal To The Stars... you don't need it any more. But few graphic adventures apart from Quest For Ylorg allow you to drop items (another small detail that was perfectly common in interactive fiction), your bottomless inventory will, halfway through the game, look pretty crowded.
"But that doesn't matter!", say some, "It's bottomless!"
It matters though. If a player knows that items are used to solve puzzles A LOT, each item is a possible solution to future puzzles. And having twenty obscure things to use on each doorknob, patch of water, ice cube and Police Constable in a medium sized game... well, it can become bothersome, especially when the player has a very sensible idea why tying a bit of string to a stick should make an okay fishing rod, but he's required to fetch a slightly longer stick anyway because the old stick was already used in an earlier puzzle.
If you do not believe me that a cluttered inventory can actually confuse the player, have a look at Discworld. It's totally worth it, and otherwise it *is* a great game in my book.

Sometimes it's also not quite easy to see why an item is needed in the first place. Let's say the hero of our game knows something about car engines, and a certain puzzle requires him to repair one. He has a good look at it and then informs us: "Ah, easy. Loose cables. Happens a lot, I can fix that all right." The game then forces us to find cables and use them on the engine.
In this example, the cables aren't really necessary. They are loose cables after all, not missing cables; all our hero should need to to is plug them back in. But that would mean a simple "use cable" would solve the puzzle, and the designer thought this too easy a challenge.
Yes, it's a far-fetched example, but it leads to the next thought: Very often an inventory item is actually an ABILITY. It represents a skill. Add some more puzzles like that to the above example game, and you could as well add a "fix/repair" action and get rid of cables, broken circuits and leaking pipes. Or, I don't know, just add a toolbox to the inventory: One item to "do all sorts of mechanical wonders". Discworld, again, wonderfully lampshaded this idea by claiming that Rincewind could learn "skills". He could, all right, but these skills were another inventory item: use pickpocket skill on big scaly dragon.

So: Not only is inventory not simple (especially if you're about to script your first GUI yourself), it's also always treated a bit like the one thing taken for granted in any old game, with no desire to experiment a little.

A small, uncluttered and somewhat representative inventory is a good thing. As you write your game you will usually write a list of the stuff your magpie of a character will pick up. Once that list is done, check it, twice. Are there items you can easily merge, recycle or use in that location instead of carrying it around? Are there many items with a certain theme (like the toolbox example) that could be made into an action verb? Once you have your inventory a bit less cluttered, you may find you actually won a fair bit.

And why stop here? Why not play a bit more? Could you make a game without any inventory at all? One where the player has a starting supply of stuff that can be used up, but not easily replenished? One with only three multifunctional tools? One where the items behave somewhat physically correct (water spills, ice melts, and so on)? One where the inventory items talk and need to be persuaded to do their job (hey, Planescape did it!)?

I hope to have put some sparks into your inventory for you to use on unwritten games.

Getting Flow

2009-07-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

You've just bought the latest novel of your favourite author. Your favourite chair is waiting already, no-one's to disturb your private reading hour. You've been looking forward to this ALL WEEK, and now you sit down and dig into the plot. It's GOOD: Maybe even better than the last one, and you find yourself enjoying the whole book a lot. Perfect bliss ensues.
And all of a sudden... the pages of chapter 5 to 7 are glued together, chapter 9 is written backwards, and all pages with an uneven number have only empty spaces where a vowel should be. Chapter 3 reads like a summoning spell for Great Cthulhu himself! And in addition to that, from page 666 onwards, there's only blank pages.

These things don't happen when you buy books. Books require no effort to follow the plot (though it may be a complicated one), turning pages is all you need to do. When you start on page one you can rely on finding the last page eventually. Books are easy.
Adventure games, on the other hand, are similar to books in that they tell a story, and totally different in that they require the player to put some effort into FINDING the story. That means that sooner or later some gears will grind to a stop, and the player is facing a puzzle he can't solve, and the plot reaches a more or less long "pause".

An adventure game tells its tale in small chunks. It's usually a bit of exposition or background story that gets you started, then interactivity in form of puzzles takes over, and once you reach a certain "key event", you're fed some more plot. That's how adventure games do it, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some games have the plot tied to the puzzles in a better way than others, some have a cooler plot, some have a better pacing, but basically they all work the same: Plot, puzzles, key event, more puzzles, rise and repeat.

If you were to play an adventure game in a "perfect run", without ever needing to figure out a fiendish puzzle, you'd get the illusion of an interactive movie, where your actions nicely lead from cutscene to cutscene, and a satisfying plot is created by doing the proper things. If you were to record such a perfect run you would end up with a movie, or cartoon.

But adventure games have puzzles, and usually there's at least one really tough chestnut that has the player stumble. Maybe he doesn't see the puzzle itself, or he can't figure out how to solve it, or he falls victim to a red herring- either way, he will do what players do: He'll start revisiting locations to see if he has missed something, he will retry all dialogue options, he'll start using everything in his inventory on everything else. And eventually he will get a walkthrough.

Personally I have nothing against hard puzzles. I don't even mind "guess the designer's mind" or silly puzzles as long as they make some sense within the game's world. While I like the stories adventure games tell me, I equally like the way they tease me to figure out something.
Finding the key to open the door is not a puzzle at all, that's just some interactivity.
Finding a way to dispatch the door's guard by figuring out how much he needs to go to the loo, and them offering him a lot of iced tea and telling him about my last trip to the Niagara Falls, now, that's really something I can admire.

But either way, once the player hits the bottleneck such a puzzle invariably creates, a certain flaw can become very, very obvious: As a rule, adventure games are EXTREMELY static. Time advances depending on the player's actions. It will remain midnight until the hero unearths the mystic artifact from the crypt (even if it takes you days to figure out the rune code), the merchant will continue to tell you that he will sell the cool weapon any second now (but will still have it ten hours later when you finally figure out how to steal it), and the damsel in distress will keep her hold on that frail branch for however long you need to get that rope from the sunken ship TEN MILES AWAY.

As long as your player can easily dash through the game, you have good flow. As soon as he's stumbled, your nicely set up world turns into a lot of loose ends waiting for the player to pick up the thread again. You could say that one of the main purposes of an adventure game (intellectual challenge) totally contratics another main purpose (entertainment).

Now, you can hardly do anything about players being stuck. You can of course resort to only very simple puzzles, but that can become boring and still is no guarantee that no-one will ever get stuck. There are people who got stuck in PHANTASMAGORIA.
But you can do a lot to minimize the risk of everthing coming to a full halt with just a few simple tricks.

First, do not make your game a linear string of puzzles. If there is Puzzle A that leads to Puzzle B, which leads to Puzzle C and so on, you already lose a lot of that "it's a real world out there" feeling. Still, several games are linear and still very enjoyable, but one catch remains: If you're stuck on Puzzle X, you're totally stuck. There's nothing to go back to (because you solved all puzzles before), and you can't find your way forward.
Make sure there are several puzzles open at once. That way, once the player is stuck on one puzzle, he can at least turn to another one for a while. It's common practive to have puzzle overlap, too: Halfway through Puzzle A you will get a clue about Puzzle B, and maybe even an item that's needed to solve it, and so on. Personally I love the way certain games drop more and more hints about a certain puzzle that the designer realised to be a potentional bottleneck (Gabriel Knight did this to great effect). You are stuck, but you still can do other things, and the one thing you were stuck at suddenly becomes much clearer.

Second, refuse to freeze time. If your game has several NPCs that, once you're stuck, just repeat their old lines and basically just sit there waiting for you to figure out how to tame that nasty eel in the bucket... you break some of the illusion. It's very easy to make these static characters at least a bit more dynamic. Let's say there is a complicated puzzle in a certain location where there is also a wry old sailor. Make a simple counter, and have the guy come up with a few snappy comments depending on how often the player failed to figure out that ancient flag code: "Eh, when I was a kid, we knew these codes by heart after two tests!" or "Aren't you getting tired of fiddling around with these flags?" Heck, if you want you can even make the sailor cry (after 20 failed attempts): "Lad, it's BLUE RED RED BLUE!"
Alternatively, have people wander around. Add random muttering. Anything, really.

Third, balance your puzzles. You are the designer, all right, and may not see the wood for all the trees, but you should be able to guess if a certain puzzle is complicated or not (might take some practise; I was extremely surprised how much of a game stopper the "cherry bomb" in my own game OUAC turned out to be). That's where beta testers are so very useful, if possible, have your parents, non-computer-owning friends and your DOG play the game too!
Then check if you have a series of very hard puzzles all in a row. These can turn out very frustrating; try to loosen things up a little. After a very fiendish puzzle, open up a few simpler ones. Or break up a hard puzzle into several steps, each one just a tad simpler. Shifter's Box did this well: While very linear, it offered a rather different challenge with each puzzle, and some were intentionally easier to figure out.

Finally, never see a puzzle as separated from the whole game. It stands to reason that the plot connects all puzzles, and the puzzles themselves are a way to keep track of the player's "position" in the plot. One can design a lot of puzzles, restrict them to one location, and once they are solved, they just disappear from the game. A very good example is the Vulcano Puzzle in Curse Of Monkey Island, where our hero makes a volcano erupt to melt a small kettle of cheese (!!!). I mean, half the island is covered in lava afterwards! Do we see any reaction? No. But we have molten cheese now. If a puzzle has some consequences, you win big time: You can have people comment on it, enriching your game's "illusion of being a real world", and maybe you can take advantage of that change in another puzzle. If you always try to remember the whole picture, blowing up a vulcano offers a lot more than molten cheese.

So You Want Good Game?

2009-06-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

You have made a game, and now you are sitting there... it's late at night, apparently the game is bug-free, you've written a nice synopsis, made a few catchy screenshots and... well, now you are staring at the UPLOAD button of your host-of-choice and suddenly feel the worm of doubt chewing its way through your heart. Is that game you made really a good game? Will it hit?

At first glance the question seems to make little sense. You've spent some time on it and followed the basics: You had a beta tester, you did the spell-checking, you played it yourself a couple of times. Surely you wouldn't have wasted all that time and effort on a bad game? You made it and it works, so it is SUPPOSED TO BE GOOD, isn't it?

I won't pretend I released an awful lot of games and thus am in the perfect position to write an article about what makes a good game. But I did release a few games, and helped a few people in making their games, and I saw a lot of reactions and would like to write this article anyway. So let's see.

Having a WORKING game isn't the same as having a GOOD game. If your game is good, people will (possibly) forgive a few bugs and misbalanced stuff, while a bad game will make these bugs seem all the bigger and badder, but ideally you will want to release a GOOD game that also WORKS. The latter is mostly a technical thing- code and functionality can be checked and tested and corrected. But what about the "good"-ness?

First of all, it seems a designer is often very bad at judging his own games. They either tend to see all the flaws, or they are so convinced about the greatness of their game that they can't understand any sort of crits. Both isn't good and can lead to promising games never seeing the light of day, or to promising yet flawed games that never get fixed (which is sometimes more painful).

What can you, the designer, do to check if your game's hit and not miss: Several things! None of them is a guarantee though, but all of them should help.

Can you sum it up in a meaningful way?
If someone was to ask you what your game IS ABOUT, could you give a simple answer? Not a catchy one (that's a bonus), but can you, in one or two sentences, tell a complete stranger what the game's about? Something like "Oh, it's a Jump-and-Run, very much like Mario, but faster and you're a robot" is okay. "It's an adventure game about a guy who wants to become a famous pirate"- bland but cool. If you find yourself just listing features you may have done something wrong: "It has many polygon-based engines, and the particle effects look awesome, and there's a cool soundtrack..." That doesn't sum up the game, and if it does, there's something amiss.

Is it complex, or merely complicated?
Try to see the game with the eyes of a stranger, or (better), have a lot of strangers play the game and interview them afterwards. Did they enjoy a storyline that started simple and became more intriguing layer by layer, or did they just play the game equivalent of Naked Lunch combined with Atlas Shrugs? In short, do you have a solid game that's easy to grasp and later adds complexity, or is the whole thing hard to understand, convulted, illogical, and actually intimidating to the newcomer?
People like simple games that are presented well, and people usually love simple games that reveal their hidden complexities after a while. But nobody liked to be thrown into the deep end without an inner tube.

Is there a Mary Sue/Stu?
Mary Sues/Stus are characters that clearly have too much focus, to many abilities and too much in common with the designer/author: A perfect avatar. They are usually shrugged at because they seem to contradict the main purpose of a game: Allowing the player him/herself to immerse. Imagine playing Monkey Island with a main character who is skilled, resourceful, witty, and who actually makes you feel stupid for solving all these puzzles!
If your game is all about the way you want things to be, better write a novel, or do a comic. Games are about what the player wants.

Are you fair?
As you design your game, you will also play it. You will know the solutions to all puzzles, you will become pretty good at shooting the Cyberdemon, you will know the position of most powerups by heart. The game will eventually seem to easy for you, so it's only a matter of time until you decide to raise the difficulty level.
Don't. You're not the player. You are the designer. Include different difficulty settings or create some alternative solutions to puzzles, but always keep in mind that there will be someone who ISN'T able to figure out all the rules and tiny finesses in ten minutes. There's always one who's challenged even by SUPER EASY KIDDIE MODE.
On the other hand, there's also always someone who is much better at your own game than you yourself. Include a super-hard mode for fun, but tell people that it isn't even REMOTELY FAIR!

Did you do the research?
Since adventure games are so very much focussed on plot and setting, make sure you and the player are on equal terms. If your game has something that a player may very well know, but you handle it differently, SAY so, ALOUD! If in your game the elves are evil bastards and the orcs are noble savages, make sure everyone knows it, because usually it's the other way around.
Also, if you include elements that are "commonly known", try to anticipate logical reactions. People will always expect the coke + mentos(tm) trick to work.

Did you love it to death?
This can happen A LOT. You have a great idea for a short game and pour some work into it, and all of a sudden you realise this might be the BEST IDEA you ever had, and ever will have. You don't want to waste that idea for a short two-room-game. You want it larger. And after a while you don't recognise your own cool idea in the mess. Dialoge that was once snappy and spontaneous is now detailed, finely crafted, witty and BORING. Fun ideas now require so much additional work that you start to skip on them. You're loving your idea to death.
To be honest: I sometimes realise that I constantly do that. People who know me should be now be aware that I come up with fun ideas very often, but hardly ever see them through to the end. Sometimes DESIGNING a game is easier than actually MAKING it. So a well-meant little tip: Break the mould as soon as you see it getting crusty.

Are you ready for the truth?
If I can say one thing with absolute certainty, it's this: As soon as you release your game, there will be people who love it and people who hate it, and most probably all shades of emotion will pop up too. In a way you can't make the ultimate "good game" because your audience is so very volatile. What Player A loves will leave Player B totally unimpressed.
It's a mad old world, and as long as you know that, you're already doing fine.

So, does this all allow you to tell that your game's good? Not precisely, but it will aid you a little I daresay. Honestly, if you DO know the answer, please post it here and allow me to sell it too. I'd be a rich man end of the week then.
You can't. You really can't go and say, hey, if I do this and that then the result will be a GOOD game. You simply can't do that. You can, of course, check the demands of certain genres, you can collect information about popular games and their most popular and successful features, but there seems to be something more there, something almost intanglible and metaphysical. I like to call it the "soul" of the game. Around this core you can build features and mechanics and data, enriching it. But if the game lacks soul, well, you're basically putting eye candy around a hollow shell.

On Puzzle Design

2009-06-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

"Adventure games are a narrative at war with a crossword", says Graham Nelson, creator of several mentionable interactive fiction games (and of Inform, the matching scripting language). It's great fun to have a story in mind and share it, but to make a game, one needs to add interactivity. That means, when all is said and done, that there should be some sort of puzzle and stuff for the player to click at. Oh, and boobs.

There are no "psychological profiles" for design concepts. But let's, for the sake of example, assume that we could personify them. Just for the sake of example. Every game designer will naturally combine a lot of different habits, preferences and suchlike, but, well, I wrote this bit. Do a check how much of what you are ;)

The Puzzle Collector
This designer likes to jot down any puzzle idea in a notpad, and he usually isn't discriminating- anything goes, from interesting chess constellations to puns and riddles, mathematical mind-benders all the way to actual adventure game puzzles he finds intriguing. A puzzle collector will eventually have a large library of different challenges written down.
A great advantage of such a collection is that it is often quite abstact and can be used in all sorts of settings. A chess puzzle can be put into almost any story, and who hasn't ever written a wiry guardian who wants a certain password that he will hint at, but never explicitely say?
Puzzle Collectors usually like the challenge of recreating a puzzle and may not care too much about an actual main character, story or setting. If they were games and not designers, they might be Myst or some better clone.

The Puzzle Evolver
Almost the complete opposite to the Puzzle Collector, this designer actually starts with a true story, one he usually writes down without doing anything so crass as to mention it being a game. Once the story is written down he takes the plot as a guideline to construct a simple game flow. Introduction, Middle Part, Ending, that's the first step, and after that he has a close look at his characters, their motives and abilities, relationships and emotions, and creates puzzles based on these elements. He creates puzzles based on what his hero needs to achieve and what he can do and knows, and usually this leads to puzzles that emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of the characters. Such puzzles could very well be used in a different setting, giving that the plot is similar.

The Puzzle Researcher
A close relative to the Puzzle Evolver, this designer also starts with his story and then makes notes about his "framework". Instead of looking at the story and checking where puzzle situations could come up, the Puzzle Researcher uses the setting, the environment, the actual "world" as an inspiration. A Puzzle Researcher will often know more than just a bit about the setting he uses and considers it interesting, maybe more interesting than a strong character. These designers may know how much life in a mediveal village depended on being resourceful, and may create puzzles that fit the knowledge of this time. Puzzle Researchers tend to have an awful lot of Wikipedia bookmarks.

The Formula Follower
This designer is content with getting standard puzzles into his game, but you can see his attention is somewhere else. He will throw solid, simple, linear puzzles into the mix because he knows it is expected. When there are doors that are locked, the key will be in the lock, on the other side, and there will be a newspaper close. When there is a car, some gas will be in a leaking canister that must be repaired. The Formula Follower wants to tell a story, test his abilities, see if he can pull it off, and rather plays it safe.
That doesn't mean that he creates boring games. Since his puzzles are usually on the easy side he can focus on other strengths of a "good game", like great animation, plot, or even a mix.

The Frankenstein
The exact opposite of the Formula Follower. The Frankenstein stitches well-known ideas into a hulking beast of a mutation of a monster: Puzzles that overlap, entangle, have multiple solutions, or simply are totally unique. The Frankenstein is a creator of myths, and a rare breed these days. But every designer wants to be a Frankenstein, it's in our blood.
A sub-type is the Frankenstein Wannabe, who has good ideas and plans but sets them up so complicated that he confuses his audience. He creates games that are complicated and intricate but fail to be accessible.

The Backtracker
This designer has an interesting concept of puzzle design: He starts with the solution (Hero unlocks the treasure chamber)and then goes backwards from that solution, creating a chain of smaller tasks that lead to this solution. As a result, the hero must obtain wax from a beehive to get an imprint of the original key, and must find someone to sell him whiskey that he can give the blacksmith so that he can use his workbench to create a copy of the key (which also means that he must steal a bar of metal by means of baking a pie to distract a bumbling policeman who stands on the only metal grille in the whole game).
A good Backtracker knows how to create all sorts of subgoals and can then set up a long chain of sub-puzzles, entangling them and, if need be, even take some of the chain links away.

The Magnetic Plot Creator
This designer believes in the old saying that an "arching theme" is not to be sneezed at, and so he doesn't. He goes overboard and throws it all in. By creating strong plot elements he can make sure that the player knows "what the game is all about", and the player, hooked by the key elements, will see everything just in the right light. Magnetic Plot Creators build a game with just the right setting, mood, or a powerful key phrase, and everything seems to fall into place. Everything the player can do in the game instantly fits the mood, serves the only possible purpose and is style impersonated. I'm looking at you, Gabriel Knight.
Magnetic Plot Creators walk a thin line: If the player doesn't like or understand the setting, the game is lost on him. If, however, the player can relate to the game's magnetic plot, he's instantly hooked.

The Joker
Often scoffed at, the Joker revels in puzzles that make perfect sense... if you know all the inside jokes, movies, books, chats with friends, phrases and weird slangs the Joker knows. If you don't know them the game's plot OR the puzzles OR, in the worst case, neither of them, will make much sense. In a Joker's game you may need to eat a pineapple AFTER reading from the Necronomicon in order to turn a young boy into porridge. What, you didn't watch that movie where the hero saves the world by doing so???
There is a bit of a Joker in all of us, and that's where Easter Eggs come from, so let's not look down at this designer. On the positive side they often are very good at getting a simple plot together and make it actually funny. As long as there is rhyme and reason, no harm is done. So... why so serious?

Got it? Okay, now see how much of what you are, arrange the titles in the matching order, and paste it into your signature.

I'm a Magnetic Plot Puzzle Evolving Researching Joker.

Ninja Gardening Skills

2009-06-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to write a little something about Plants vs. Zombies hardly ten minutes after I laid hands on it, but held back until I got a deeper glance into the game. Now that I have finished the bulk of it (currently running through the main campaign the second time), I think it's about time.

What can I say that hasn't already been convered by casual game review pages and even the Edge magazine? Plants Versus Zombies is a hilarious game with roots in the Tower Defense genre. It's generally hailed for its whacky humour, coupled with a depth that belies its cartoonish look, and it's considered a success. All this has been said.

What I find extremely interesting is how you can so clearly *see* the roots of the game, and the designers still managed to put a little twist, polish or at least style on all these "known" elements. The (now almost useless) term "casual game" was, for me, always a synonym for "small rulesets". And a small set of rules is a very cool thing to have. Few, simple rules mean that you can pick up the game very easily, and that's good. It also means that even a slight twist on any rule can dramatically alter the whole game. Plants Versus Zombies is the living testament to my theory.

For those of you who DON'T know about the game, here's the gist: Zombies are about to invade your house and eat your brains. Grunting and moaning they shuffle over your carefully tended lawn. Your means of defense: Plants. You plant sunflowes, peashooters, venus fly traps and so on, each with a unique way to dispatch or hinder the undead parade. Stop the waves of zombies before they reach your door, and you win the stage. Let one zombie pass your line of defense, and it will eat your brains. As you make progress, new types of zombies show up, either tougher or with some means to overcome your lawn defense, but your arsenal of plants also constantly grows, allowing you to come up with new strategies.
Oh, and about every ten levels the setting changes, and all of a sudden your tried and tested strategies no longer work that perfectly.

This is how a game in progress might look...

Basically Plants Versus Zombies IS like any Tower Defense game you care to name. You're facing waves of enemies, you set up stationary means of defense. But by changing just a FEW elements, the designers made an almost unique update to the genre.

You're not dealing with a top-down game here. Tower Defence usually is top down, and the towers have a radius, while the waves are basically a string of enemies snaking on a fixed path, never touching your towers. Plants Versus Zombies sticks to the waves all right, but that's about it. Your lawn is a grid on which the zombies travel from right to left, while your plants always attack to the right. And since a zombie, once it has decided for a line of the grid, will stick to it and shuffle forwards, it can and will attack your towers, er, plants. So instead of having invulnerable means of defence with a circular radius, you have a highly directional plant that can only stand so many hits. This single change alone makes the game extremely dynamic. After a while you know the units quite well and can easily decide that two peashooters will, allowing for a distance of three grid cells, be able to kill a regular zombie before it can even make a scratch at them. But a few levels later there will be tougher undead, or pole-vaulting ones, or bungee-roper zombies, and diggers, so you will often need to change your layout on the fly.

You also do NOT purchase your plants with money you get for killing monsters, which is usually the case in Tower Defense games. You get money from zombies, and you can buy cool little upgrades for that, but within a level, plants are bought with sunlight (which makes sense, when you think about it)- and you get that from either plants you put down yourself (sunflowers and nightly mushrooms) and also, frequently, falling from the sky. So some space of your lawn will be reserved for plants that do nothing at all but give you the means of planting other plants... and which are vulnerable to attacks. Another nice twist that makes the game pretty dynamic.

The sheer amount of units is also quite impressive, and I was often surprised how there was no redundant, superfluous unit at all. 31 zombie types, 40 plants and eight "upgrade plants" already sounds impressive compared to the relatively small amount of different units in your standard Tower Defense, but what's even more impressive is how each side has a means of countering the other. As soon as the zombies come up with a new unit, you will also unlock some additional plant which is a key element for a new strategy- because it's possible and often necessary to combine plants. A flaming tree stump ("Torchwood") can inflame the pea bullets of the four different "pea shooters", allowing them to deal more damage. The tough but defenseless "wall-nut" shelters vulnerable plants. The magnetic "Magnet Shroom" steals the bucket-helmets of tougher zombie units, rendering them much weaker, and so on. Very few plants are mere upgrades of an existing plant; even the three basic pea-shooters all have a unique ability.

The game also plays a lot with the environment. The fight for your brain starts in broad daylight on your front lawn, then is set to night (no sunlight from the sky, and you can plants mushrooms wich are dormant during the day), then the zombies find your backyard (with a large swimming pool that requires you to cope with less space)... then fog is introduced which obscured half the screen unless you plant lanters, and finally the fight goes up to the roof, where you're restricted to flowerpots to plant your defenders into. Each change brings something new and, more important, interesting- at no point did I feel that the game was merely tossing stronger units at me, there was always a little twist, a little bonus. Tower Defense tends to get boring once you find an all-round strategy, Plants Versus Zombies successfully counters this by putting a small twist into he ruleset every so often.

You may have noticed how I have not commented on the graphics at all. Yet. They are no twist on the rules, after all. They are very good, the graphics, and setting the game into its smaller, gridbased side view allowed the designers to have larger, more detailled graphics than Tower Defense usually has. The cartoon style is about the only thing that could make the rather grisly base setting actually fun to watch- Plants Versus Zombies looks like a Flash cartoon and really has some memorable details, but that's a bonus.

One last thing that stands out is how much extra content there is in the game. As you play through the 50 main levels you will occasionally (once per stage) get a level with a totally new mechanic. Zombies appear as usual, but now you need to knock them out with a bowling ball (okay, a wall-nut), or your neighbour has set up a grid of vases for you to smash, with either a plant or a zombie in them. Once you finish the main game, over 20 small mini-games, puzzle games and "endless" modes unlock, each one, again, taking the basic ruleset and putting a twist on it. Can you survive x waves of zombies with one setup of plants and no means to refresh your defenses? Can you defend yourself against INVISIBLE zombies? What if you have no chance of chosing your own plants? And so on... and so on. There's even a "Bejeweled" and an "Insaniquarium" clone in there. The game just keeps on giving, and this is a double reward: You can still waste away a little time with all these funny minigames, and you can actually see how a small change of rules goes a long way.

Plants Versus Zombies, ladies and gentlemen- entertainment done right, and a nice game for anyone. But also, when analysed a bit, almost a case study of design done right. Done so right that you could derive a lot of different games from the core rules, each one being at least moderately interesting. I think that any game designer could really find some enlightment here.

Popcorn Culture

2009-06-02T18:41:00.001-07:00

Back in the old days... really the old days, we are talking about 1720 or so, people in ancient China knew this tale about "jiangshi" (might not be spelled right). They were a type of undead, a sort of vampire, very distinct too... they were dressed in the expensive robes of the nobles, and they moved by hopping. The story went that a priest could make a corpse a jiangshi by pinning a ward paper on his forehead, allowing the corpse to move. Which was a great way of getting corpses to their burial grounds.

And thus there would be processions. There would be priests walking the dark roads in the night, followed by a trail of corpses hopping after them, slowly, groaning. The priests would carry rods with bells to warn people they were coming, since a jiangshi would, if distracted, go after the living, trying to strangulate them, and then eating them. Even seeing a jiangshi was equal to being a dead man walking.

These processions actually happened. There were people in the robes of priests, they had the rods with the bells on, and there were men in rich robes hopping after them. History agrees that at some point, smugglers found the set-up a very easy way to transport goods; it is also thought that maybe the smugglers invented the whole legend as a means of moving contraband unhindered in the first place. It's a beautiful bit of legend, though: Well thought out, well told, rooted in history, and perfectly explained.

Since jiangshi are so popular they also feature in other media- the first one I ever saw was in a video game called "Darkstalkers", where a female jiangshi quickly became my favourite character:

A similar character was featured in Shaman King:

It just proves that a lot of funky stuff we find in the modern media has deep roots, very deep roots. I love diffing out these obscure little shinies... The past has a lot of "material" one can use for the most interesting new iterations.

Which legend's not been featured somewhere recently, now?

Progress: 3%

2009-05-31T12:27:00.001-07:00

** assembling graphics **

Progress: 0%

2009-05-30T14:29:00.001-07:00

Some Random Thoughts On Waning Interest

2009-05-29T02:14:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the internets disappoint me. Yesterday I did a thorough- a really thorough- search for the good old "how to make a webcomic" topic. I still haven't given up on the idea that one day I will have something like a buffer, the persistence to stay on shedule, and an actual title for that little strip of mine. I like to learn, but the links I found were of... erratic quality.

Apparently even tutorials (by semiprofessionals) are subject to a certain "demand and delivery" fluctiation. A couple of years ago you just typed "3D Game Maker" into your search engine of choice and then took cover for the flood of links, several of which would eat up your time for breakfast, they were that good. Or go and try "waffles". Oh, the recipes you'll learn. Waffles are always in high demand. And these days even bookmarking HALF of the "XNA tutorials/developer diaries/blogs" demands a lot, a LOT of patience.

Back to webcomics, and the searching of tutorials. They seem to die out, or at least to thin out, and I wonder why this is. Last time I checked (yesterday) there were even more of the actual product than a couple of month ago. There was one with copy-n-paste Naruto-vs-Zombie Pirates-vs-One Piece...thingies. There are (even highly) professional ones in a slightly larger number than a year before. There are still all the long-standing series. There's a lot of webcomics out there, and people are still joining in, so has everybody learned everything, and is now happily plodding along?

Can't be, otherwise there WOULDN'T be the copy-n-paste one about Naruto and the Zombie Pirates.

Personally, I think that there's a different reason: A sort of "saturation" with the topic. Let's face it, webcomics are comics. Comics are, even om the screen, a medium with a certain ruleset. And there are only so many ways to say: "You will need to know how to draw", "You will need a host to upload your stuff to" and "You may want to do spellchecking". That means that after a while, people have read everything there is to read, stop visiting the sites, and thus making the sites die out. It's pretty much like having written a book that after a while stops selling because everyone has a copy and doesn't need to by a new one.
Except that one day he might need to by a new one, but can't, because the book is now out of print.

I don't like the sound of that. First of all, there are constantly NEW people stumbling over the idea that a webcomic would be fun. They have all the tools, with the net becoming more and more accesible even today. They even get better tools than just a few weeks ago- more hosts, cheaper hardware, better software, more elaborate online spell-checking (and, sadly, more Naruto episodes on YouTube to lift their images from). That means that the technical side just keeps progressing. But what about the pencils, the paper, the storytelling, the actual craft you are supposed to practise?
Well, that one seems to be on pause. The common pencil hasn't evolved over the past few years because, like a shark or a turtle, it is already at the peak of its evolution and really doesn't need to change. Pencils are boring. Why should one waste time with pencils when there are Wacom graphic tablets?

'cause pencils are reliable, don't require USB connection, are easier to transport and just happen to be able to make you draw.

I hate to finish a good third of all my entries with the same tired line, but I'd hate to wake up one day, do a check for webcomic tutorials and find a detailed explanation how to trace over Naruto episodes, without a pencil ever being mentioned.
I fear there's a trend forming.

Myths Galore, Let's Settle The Score

2009-05-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

A watched pot never boils
Tried that one out yesterday. Needs better phrasing: Obviously they do boil, eventually, but always only ever after you've stopped watching. Precisely when
seems to depend of the contents of the pot.

Everything goes with mayonnaise
Not a myth at all, but a fact. Really, try it. EVERYTHING goes with mayonnaise.
Try potatoe crisps and then call me a liar.

The Net never changes
Shouldn't be true, but ties in with the thing about the boiling pot. As long as you're waiting for a change it won't happen. Sometimes it's actually easier to start a website just to make the change yourself.

Popcap lost it
After Bejeweled Twist, a game that was "four years in the making" for exactly one
gameplay mechanics change, which was recieved badly, people said Popcap lost it. I didn't, mostly because I liked the change they did in Twist (but wouldn't say so aloud). Now they released Plants vs. Zombie, which is, as far as casual games go, pretty much a case of Entertainment Done Bloody Right, In Massive Amounts.

If I know the tools of artist X, I can do art like artist X
It took me a long time to find a reliable source of Bristol paper, a material that held mystic attributes for me, since it seems to be used by so many artists I admire. With my newly won treasure I returned home, only to find that I still draw the same, only on more expensive paper. My cats, who always curl up on any sketches I leave lying around, seem to like the taste of Bristol, though, adding feline saliva to the show.

If you got all the time in the world, you won't do anything in it
Partly true. Tight shedules are stressy and a lot of un-fun, but you tend to get done more (because you know you won't have much time in the next few days). Lots of time, however, seems to encourage trying-out-new-stuff, so that can't be a bad thing.

Rewriting code from scratch beats partial rewriting
Not entirely true, but recently I found myself updating some AGS frameworks I've been working on, and the new code is much better managed and readable. Setting up all the GUIs again is a pain though. And apparently it's totally untrue for prototyping.

Prototyping should go first
I tend to disagree. Sometimes you need eye candy and some reward for the dry lines of code you've been typing. So let's say that SAYING prototyping should go first is totally sensible, but you're allowed to spend a day on doing a tileset you're likely to scrap later anyway to treat yourself a little reward, provided you're doing it when nobody's looking. I mean, there must be a reason why there are more cool Duke Nukem Forever TRAILERS than actual Duke Nukem Forever GAME. Which brings me to:

The Duke Is Dead
Apparently so.

Tropes And Adventure Games

2009-05-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

A "trope" is "any sort of devices and convention that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." According to a really cool site tropes are not clichés, but something a bit more interesting, and maybe even more powerful. I'll give you a minute to check the link- and I won't be annoyed if you're not back after an hour or two. The site's a time sink.

Depending on your age and genre experience you will already have noticed that many advenure games tend to repeat certain puzzles.
You come across a locked door, with the key stuck in the lock from THE OTHER SIDE?
Just find some piece of paper and a long, thin stick.
Glow-worms fly around in the wide dark open?
Go and find a jar, because you will VERY SOON enter a dark place. If the designer took care, make sure to punch some hole into the jar's lid before you start walking.
A man seems obsessed with repeating some obscure words?
Write them down and THEN FIND A SAFE. The words will be the combination.

After some time you can feel solutions click into place just by remembering the earlier games you played. The context may change a little, but when we're totally honest there really are only so many things you can do with a crowbar, and when you come across one, you might just get a deja vu. This is especially true with indie adventure games, and I think I can name at least three reasons:
First, newcomers tend to like certain puzzles they saw in games and will try to recreate them for the fun of it.
Second, classic item-based puzzles are usually easier to script than, say, a multi-solution, dialogue-based one.
Third, if the designer is relatively young and hasn't played many adventures, he might not know that a certain puzzle is pretty popular.

I won't pass judgement here because I really think that adventure games are like street buskers. You know the trick, you know there's cheating involved, but you don't mind as long as it is presented well. I have no problem at all with getting another sticky object from a ceiling by turning on any sort of vibrating machinery in the room above it, and I will happily collect clues until I reach the state where I can, in a slide-puzzle sequence, piece togehter a combination for a locked thing.

But why not deviate a little?

Occasionally people come up with a totally new puzzle, or a variation of a known puzzle, that poses a major challenge for the players- yet it is logical, and after solving it (or getting a walkthrough) players slam their foreheads and hiss: "Ssssure! Man, that's obvious, you just... and then... argh, it makes total sense!"

And I bet one great way to achieve this is to TWIST THE TROPE. You design your game, you have a classic standard puzzle, and with some thinking you can (often quite accurately) anticipate what sort of solution the player will guess first.
Then, you do NOT make this the real solution. You will make the player character make a comment instead, stating that the idea is really good, but doesn't work. If you're mean, you can even make the player character scoff a raspy and hurtful remark for coming up with such a blunt plan (though this might break the fourth wall).
And then you create an alternative solution. Take care that it is a logical one, but also one that avoids the mechanics of the "known" solution.

Let's take the old poke-pencil-through-keyhole-and-catch-key-with-newspaper thing. Have a locked door, have the key in the lock, but on the other side, and have a nice wide crack where you could easily shove a newspaper. You know your genre-savvy player WILL try to do the ancient trick.

Now, there COULD be any amount of alternative ways to get into the room. If you can find one that is really really obvious, players will often fail to see it, blinded by the idea that the newspaper trick is SUPPOSED to work. Make the door look really frail, and maybe someone will just try to kick it down. Abuse WOODWORMS. Include an "unlock" spell- it really doesn't matter, as long as you stick to the game's logic.

People will not only need to leave trodden tracks, they will (afterwards) remember your game for playing with the trope. Always a good thing, staying in the player's mind.

Like Real Food But Is Fast

2009-05-19T02:26:00.001-07:00

Us Germans had to wait quite some time before we too could enjoy a proper breakfast like all the happy people in America do. I noticed that in the past three months, three major fast-food franchises started to introduce their stylish breakfast to us. Now, while I am German and therefor *always* late, I also live in a very, very small town, thus being always *extra* late. So it wasn't until the last WEEKEND that I ate a Country McGriddles. It has changed my life.

I have bad eating habits. I like meat, I like spices, I like sweets, and when it comes to meat I don't stop at the actual meat itself. A pig has far too many organs that are far too tasty to throw away. Sour kidney and mashed potatoes? LUVIN IT. My first trip to Scotland put me into the way of haggis, which I value immensely high. Vegetables are sort of all right in their own right, yes, and fruit is tasty too, but when it comes to eating I say: "Gimme." After I said that, I see what I was given. Usually with my mouth full.

Okay. So I went to the good old McDonalds last Saturday to get an early coffee and... ooo, they do breakfast? They do suspicious-looking burger thingies for breakfast? They... they do something with pancakes?

Nothing could stop me to buy the McGriddles. I have just written my last exam, and I recently started to use XNA. The word "fear" is no longer in my vocabulary, being replaced by "Flame Twister".
I looked lovingly at two squishy, syrup-filled pancakes. Like the curly brackets of a wickedly constructed if/then/else statement, they enclosed a sausage-meat patty dripping with fat, a slice of cheese, sticky and runny and yellow (extremely so), and a professionally folded strip of fried egg. It wasn't love at first sight, because I am an old man and not easily fooled by foodstuff, but I glanced at this abomination of fat and sugar with all signs of gentle care.
The teeth I am cursed to have dug into the soft combination of pankcakes, brutally murdered pig and chicken disrupted (and then whipped and fried). There was the tiniest sound of gristle splitting, fibres tearing and, of course, syrip dripping on my cool shirt.
Then, there was taste.
Sweet first, since the pancakes glued themselves to my gums and refused to let go, smearing all my tastebuds with their sticky syrup.
Then, after some heavy chewing, the spicy and salty taste of meat- the only taste, as we men of the world know, worth tasting- penetrated the sugary camouflage and assaulted the manly part of my gustatory sensors.
The egg, being egg, refused to taste of anything else, but did so in a friendly, benelovent way, as only egg can do. The slice of cheese helpfully added some texture to the dissolving matter in my mouth, making the taste last longer.
Then, after the seventh chew (because I've been brought up properly) I swallowed, and took a deep drag out of my cup'o coffee, and it was good.

Pancake, syrup, egg, meat, cheese. Putting all these things together wouldn't have occurred to me normally, but I can't say I find it in any way disgusting (as several of the people who saw me eating might have done). As a matter of fact, I am going to try and recreate this thing. It can't be hard, and I can use proper sausage. Should I succeed, expect the first Ghost's Glimpse Recipe post soon.

With PICTURES.

About Adventure Game Backgrounds

2009-05-05T18:29:00.001-07:00

Gone are the days where you could, with a few well-written sentences, summon a picture of a white house, the door slightly ajar. Interactive Fiction had no graphics at all- that's why you can play them today without feeling that the "graphics" are outdated. Indie game designers like you and me, however, usually have to pour a lot of work into our game backgrounds. And there's more than just one reason to do so.

It's hard work to come up with a nice character sprite in the first place, and then you will need at least basic animation- usually for three directions. A decent walkcycle. A talking animation. Then a pick-up animation, maybe an idle view, that's the basics. A time-consuming task for sure, but one that is often rewarded: People will very often point out good character art/animation FIRST (possibly because we know how much work even a simple walkcycle is).

I think the backgrounds of a game are just as important. Maybe even more important- because they define the game's WORLD. You can put a lot more subtle information into a single background than even the most elaborate character could contain. Quite a lot of DVD comments have comments like "We tried to make (the location) a real character, you see...". Sometimes this sounds like a cheap excuse, but more often there's at least some truth in the phrase. A location can be more than just a few flat shapes that give the character something to stand on. Allow me to present some random thoughts.

Bastard Architecture
Adventure game backgrounds aren't paintings, they are ultimatively some place where you want your characters to walk and do stuff. Locations usually have a point of view that's very similar to standing right in front of a stage, with the center pretty much in the "middle" of the screen. Scrolling works very well with such a perspective, at least horizontally, though vertically is not much of a problem either.
With this common perspective, you need to place objects with some care. The characters will normally have more "free space" to the left/right than they have to the front/back. That means that they should, theoretically, scale quite rapidly when moving "into" the location/come closer to the "screen". Then again, this mostly goes for outside locations.
A nifty trick is to compose your location with the main character as a direct reference. The central place of your location should be where the character doesn't scale at all, and has the most walking space. This is where you put the cool animations and interactions. This should also be the brightest part of the location.
From this center, you work outwards and add paths/door, and allow for scaling.

Spare Art?
When you play an adventure game- any adventure game- you will almost never find a location that doesn't serve a purpose. In each room there is something to do, some item to grab, some character who wants you to fetch him something, and so on. In each room there is "game". This isn't the case in many Interactive Fiction games, where a room is simply "made" by writing a few sentences, and the designers can create vast environments where some locations are just there because they make perfect sense. You'd expect a bathroom in a house, but how many puzzles can you come up with that justify the use of soap, water, and a key hidden in the toilet?
Drawing even a simple background takes time: Your time. And you, the designer, don't want to spend time on something that doesn't add to your game, right? So when you can't find a puzzle that fits into Location X, you just scrap it.
Slightly the wrong approach in my opinion.

Walkaround 1: You can at least hint that Location X is there. Make it funny (Zak MacKracken had an entire mega city "closed for renovation"), make it subtle. Have a window through wich you can see that there is actually a whole world outside that house in which the game takes place. It's cheap, just a window, gap in the wall, a wide stretch of land barried by a river.

Walkaround 2: Put the location in anyway. That way, you create a better illusion of a "real world", where places are where they are supposed to be. If there's really nothing the player can do/find/see there, so what? In real life, and even in most movies, the hero WILL sometimes just walk through a narrow tunnel without many interesting things happening. You can also spice the location up a little by making it extra pretty, so that the player, after a fiendish puzzle, gets a bit of a break and some honest "scenery porn". Do you remember the first maze in Monkey Island, a series of forest locations that you navigated with a list of dance steps? They were beautiful, each one a little different, so you wouldn't mind too much that you didn't figure out the puzzle first go.

Walkaround 3: Add a small item. There is always something useful you can shove into a location, and you've kept your face. From personal experience I'm inclined to say that this will happen anyway: At some point during your game-making, you'll come up with a new idea, a new little puzzle, a clever bit of dialogue, and then you will actually be happy that you still have that background/room on your hard drive.

It's Alive!
Outdoor scenes are a great change to add some animation. While few people will complain about indoor locations being mostly static, the outdoor often feel like frozen in time. Background animations: Rustling leaves, light playing on surfaces, wisps of smoke curling from chimneys, people bustling around the place... there is no limit here, and most games feature at least one really busy location that sticks out.
While all these small details will cost you time, you can cut down on that a little. If you have vast regions of outdoor locations, you can just create two or three animal "characters" and send them through the forest/desert/underworld at random intervals. Animated light and other small background animations can usually be done without separate objects. Just have the background frame animate with a clock ticking, a fireplace flickering, maybe a curtain moving. Still some work, but inarguably worth the effort.

Make It Emotional
A background can easily create atmosphere- with the benefit that you do not need the player character say "Oh, this is a creepy/funny/beautiful/strange place indeed!"
Perspective, colour, lighting: You can make a forest clearing wide, open, friendly or crammed, dark, threatening. Even the exact same architecture will look totally different in cold, steely colours or soft, warm, earthy tones.
While we are usually very good at "catching the atmosphere" of a place, we're also pretty bad at being objective here. What looks cozy and harmless to you may appear sinister and suspicious to others. Still, some general rules always apply: A light, colourful location will always contrast a small, glum tunnel full of spiky things with red stuff dripping from them.

Style Meets Interaction
Many newcomers to the adventure scene adapt a clean and simple sprite-look for their characters, but create backgrounds with gradients and all the eye candy they can get out of their paint program. This can work, but usually it's better to create sprites and backgrounds in the same style.
One reason are things-that-the-player-can-pick-up.
Let's say you have a bucket in a kitchen, a nice, antialiased, shaded, metallic bucket. Now your clean-sprite character picks it up... and one holding the other looks pretty strange.
DOTT shows a cool way to deal with that problem by having pick-ups that look cartoonish in the player inventory, and just a tiny bit more real when they are in their original location. It works by making the difference small.
Your character will usually interact with the background, by taking objects, manipulating machines, maybe switching the lights on. By having the style of all game elements matching, you spare yourself a lot of work.

The Power Of The Fourth Wall
A mainstay in background design is the use of a "fourth wall"- a silhouette that's just at the bottom of the screen, depicting some stuff, as if the camera way almost inside the location's wall. This adds a great layer of depth to the image, but why stop there? Do you know how many games actually had fourth walls you could interact with? I know two. DOTT had a strange machine in the future that was part of the fourth wall- you could examine it and try to put stuff into it. And Floyd had a car. I smell some wasted chances here.

All The Little Hints
Pictures, books, small gadgets, personal items, pieces of clothing... if in any way possible, make the more interesting things in your background at least "look-able". As said above, you can hint at many things in a simple background, but often it's more fun to walk the extra mile and write some responses for the good old "look at" action. That way, you already create a hint by just showing something, and then you deepen the player's suspection and, at the same time, have a chance to add some character to your hero.
The villain's lair has a large, over-the-top statue of the villain. In gold. That's cheesy, and we know it. Now Hero X comes around, sees the statue, and snarls: "I'll melt him down and mint him into coins... And then, I'll steal this statue."
Equally over the top, but a point has been made.
Also useful for "hinting" at abilities of the player character (she has a lot of books on C++, so she seems to be good with computers / he has lots of sports equipment, so he might be strong / there are crime novels all over the place, maybe the murderer used a method he read up).

See It As A World
You're in a hangar, all steely and modern and shiny. There is a door. You walk through the door. You are now in the inside of a gome's house, made of a small mushroom. Anything wrong with that picture?
In games that are not explicitly divided into a set of different worlds, it pays off to think about the "larger map". Again, in Interactive Fiction, you could draw a map by adding squares connected with little lines. They would measure up, so that you got a true map.
Think of all your backgrounds as a world. You walk trough a vast park and then enter a small shed with a window. What part of the park do you see from this point of view?
And when the island you just shipwrecked on has no harder material than wood, how come all the natives have finely crafted, steel-tipped spears?
The big picture: Materials you have, technology and knowledge, they result in a world. If all these villagers pray to Great Om, how does that reflect in their culture, and how does this, in the end, LOOK? Your chance to show.

Well, that were some random thoughts. I know that there's much more to say, and that this post would benefit a lot from pictures, but I still think I gave some useful pointers. If you want to check out screenies yourself, a Google Image search of most adventure game titles should provide bounty galore.
Have a nice one!

Random Lyrics Fitting The Mood

2009-05-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

I've got to keep running the course
I've got to keep running and win at all costs
I've got to keep going be strong
Must be so determined and push myself on
Iron Maiden, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

Exam's getting closer.

The Likes Of Which Have Not Yet Been Seen

2009-04-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'd be the first one to admit that I need a lot of time to catch up with trends. Okay, I'd be the fifty-third to admit that. But sometimes the OTHER SIDE has good arguments. And cake.

The first thing I ever used to make a game was Klik'n'Play. These days the feature list of this "world's first game creator" would impress not even the most naive user, but back then it was awesome to pull a small walking man into a scene and just tell him "When the player presses the left arrow key, you walk left. And when you collide with the wall, you stop moving." Klick'n'Play eventually evolved into a set of more advanced makers (Multimedia Fusion and the likes being the last stage of that evolution), so the concept seems popular enough.
I moved on, and after a twisted journey that would put old Ulysses to shame I arrived at my two mainstays, AGS and the trusty C++/Allegro. Being an old dog I stuck to C++ for a long time; I still wouldn't call myself a "die-hard programmer" but well, I know my way around the lingo and can code. Okay.
Being able to code is one thing, coding games is another, and as I already mentioned in a post some time ago, without a purpose all your skills are just good for getting laid at parties (yes, it HAPPENS, ask anyone).

Okay, a random thread reminded me of XNA, Microsoft's idea of providing a framework for game makers. When it first came out I was quite exited about it, then read their tech sheet and shied back. It just seemed to complicated, and I was a younger Ghost then, with less of a grasp on any sort of C.
The tread somehow hit a nerve. I love C++. I really love it, it is... a lot like me. Ancient but too gnarly, though, stubborn to keep its head down. It's too old to rock and roll and too young to die. Using XNA would mean to resort to a framework (not a bad thing, but it would mean giving up control), and it would mean a change to C# (on which I remain neutral, one C dialect more or less can't be troublesome).

Okay, I asked some patient questions, got polite and encouraging answers, and finally decided to give the whole thing a go. XNA 3.0 is a rather lightweight download, and I already owned the necessary C# Express Edition. If all goes pancake-shaped, I thought, well, there's always the uninstall option.

After two days of tinkering with XNA I understand why people seem so very positive about it. I still can't understand the C# craze (mostly because I haven't dived too depp into it), but let's not talk about that. When you've owned a chair for a long time and someone buys you a new one, it can be the most comfortable and stylish chair in the world, it will still NOT BE YOUR OLD CHAIR, and you'll be tempted to say you don't like it. C# certainly isn't too harsh a change, and many things I value in C++ remain intact. I stay neutral on the subject- the language is a tool.

XNA, on the other hand, is obviously a quite powerful little blighter. In the first hour I fooled around with it it gave me more useful, easily accesible functions than I had expected. Someone, somewhere, has done something right, and it seems that someone draws his wages from Microsoft.

Okay, I am no programmer, no code-monkey, no IT Ninja, and I never played Myst. I want to make games. Apparently XNA is able to remove a lot of overhead from my work. Even better, it is a framework, a collection of methods and wrappers and tools, but it is no game-maker.

The question bit hard, but I asked myself anyway: Do you want to jump to the trend?
Do you want to toss away somthing you learned for several years because of some new craze?
I then, to remain fair, turned the question around: Do you want to stick to the old thing for sticking's sake?

I think that last question is a remarkable bit of insight.

Mac users vs. PC users. Windows vs. Linux. C++ vs. C, Ernie vs. Bert. Two sides like something that has good and bad points, and the argument can go forever. Because each side knows that the other side thinks they're right, but they're wrong.

I smile and simply do not see myself as part of any dogmatic argument. I have found a new TOY. That's a good way to describe it. If I play with it for long enough it will become a TOOL, and once it is a tool, it will allow me to MAKE TOYS. And that's all I crave. How could anyone argue with that?

DarkBasic, Multimedia Factory, Torque, all the fancy game creators are good tools, since they allow people to make games. Even RPG Maker is a good tool because it made at least one good game. Laughing at a toolkit just because it is a toolkit is stupid- would I take someone seriously if he told me that AGS games can't be taken serious because they're made with an indie, free, homebrew engine? Sometimes you need to accept that someone CAN make good content with something you wouldn't touch with a long stick.
It's almost Zen, isn't it?

I know my old tools have taught me a lot. I also know that there are large parts of these tools I still don't fully understand, and I know I hate Allegro's string handling and LOVE its trusty set of low-level features. XNA is the new babe, I don't know her too well yet, but she's got an inviting smile and is (obviously) a redhead.
I'm interested in dating her.

So I lovingly pat my trusty Allegro and kiss it a gentle goodbye for now, remembering all the things I learned from it, and then forever move on, to make toys the likes of which have not yet been seen.

It's going to be fun, and all without a clash of philosophies. I wish real life could work like that.

C++, I still wuv you!

Web Finds Tomfoolery

2009-04-26T05:27:00.000-07:00

Please sit back and imagine a dramatic scene, as seen in so many movies. The hero has just defied several laws of logic to reach the villain's lair. He's been shot at, shouted at, he's been offered really suspicious food, his lady has been cracking jokes at him, and his dog, poor little Bonzo, is dead. Hit by a car. A yellow one.

He's down on his luck.

But he will face the villain. His shirt torn, his equipment wrecked, his gun holding exactly one bullet with a name on it.
He is about to make his final stand.

You got that scene? You see it before you? You smell the desperation and the last tiny glimpse of hope?

Okay. Now keep that image... the hero starts walking towards the lair... and the soundtrack fades in...

Here is is now... click this.

Don't Do That!

2009-04-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

You can easily get a couple of adventure games, play them and find some common themes, mechanics, rules. You can go and compile them into a "this will help you to make a good adventure game" list. And once you got a "good" list, its shadow twin, the "don't do that" list, also raises its dark and sinister head. Let's see what one shouldn't do. Nice read for the newcomers, and maybe a trip down memory lane for ancient fossils like me.

The Inside Joke/Contemporary Joke
You're making a game and suddenly remember that little joke a friend of yours always made, or you think you should really include a little snide comment about a certain celebrity you totally loathe. You think that it would be fun for your friends to see something in that game they recognise, and you think it would be pretty safe to do a shout out.
This can often backfire. If you base a character on a friend of yours, that's often quite safe because players who do not know you or your friends still are presented with a character who makes his appearance and thus is part of the story. It can work. However, if suddenly a guy in a red suit strolls into view, makes a strange remark and disappears (c'mon, we all now these guys), it's unrelated to the game and might just confuse the player.
Recent events are also trouble. These days it's safe to joke about something, but can you be sure people will get the joke a year later? It might be that your game outlives its time.

The Meta Knowlegde
I'm playing that adventure game and find myself in a science lab. Trapped. A lot of chemicals are there, and my character (a die-hard gumshoe) readily provides me with names like Quicksilver, Phosphate, Pleghstoniarium, and Sluth, and more. After three hours of internet research I realise that Sluth and Nitrate, when boiled in Cromatis, create a strong acid, which would allow me to get out of the lab.
This is meta knowledge. Puzzles in a game should never rely on specific knowledge on the side of the player. The acid puzzle itself is okay and even interesting- and it would be totally valid if the player character knew about these chemicals and would say something like "Oh hey... I remember how we made this strong acid in school using X and Y!". But forcing the player himself to read up stuff he can not possibly know... no way.
Including common sense/everyday knowledge should usually be okay.

The Fourth Wall
Adventure games are basically stories. I enjoy stories where I can really "be there", and the same goes for games. There are many ways to achieve a certain "suspension of disbelief"- to make the player forget he's playing a game. Do yourself a favour and think twice before you shatter it. SOD is hard to achieve, and what's worse than, after a scene where the player really IS SPIRITED AWAY into the world you so carefully crafted, breaking it all with a comment like "I bet the artist spent a lot of time on the boobs of that elven lady!"
It's a matter of taste, but crude breaking of the fourth wall is dangerous.

More to come.

M.O.A.N.

2009-04-21T02:32:00.000-07:00

There are days when everything, everything just goes wrong. This is such a day, and believe you me, I'll be glad when it is finally over.
Going in. Ye powers that be, be with me.

They're selling cartoon compilations in my town.
Here goes.

"Procedural Pal" Versus "Linear Lad"

2009-04-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Procedurally generated game content is something that's highly valued by many players. The main idea is to give the game some RULES, and then ask it to create stuff based on that rules. Dungeons, Mission Briefings, weapons, whatever. The benefit of such procedurally generated content is that, if you generator is good, you'll get much more game out of it than you put work into it. If your generator is very good, replayability can reach something close to infinite- see a lot of roguelike games (Diablo 2 being an almost perfect example), the original Privateer, Etherlords, Spelunky, and all Civ games.

Linear games are just what's on the label: They have their content created and fixed in their code, and the player can't expect any surprises when he starts the game all over. The shotgun will still be in that locker on Floor 3, the shopkeeper will turn his head each time you turn on the ventilator, the enemy AI will always attack your most powerfull city first. Linear games can still provide a good deal of real replayability if there are, in their fixed system, ways to experiment. System Shock, for example, allows you to play as one of three "archetypes" and later allows you to upgrade yourself with cool tech stuff, allowing you to create very specific characters that really play different. Even "simple" shooters like UT start to become a very different game with even small alterations ("mods").

Few adventures are anything else but linear. There is NO adventure that changes the architecture of its world, randomly gives you puzzles to solve, that creates inventory items with millions of different attributes. It just wouldn't make sense, would it?
Or maybe it would?

Let's say we have our classic adventure plot, the simpler the better. There's this guy who wants to become a figure of great respect, and he has to solve three tasks to become one. While doing so, he finds the love of his life, but she's kidnapped, and now he has to save her. He can't do that alone. He needs transport and a few people to help him, and he must learn of the kidnapper's weakness, and then use that weakness to beat him.
You COULD make Monkey Island out of that description, but also a goddamn number of other games- and even stories.

Adventure games often have simple plots and characters that are pretty flat. That's why we can put out own imagination into said plot and said character. Even well-defined adventure game icons usually have lots of empty space on the map that is their life. What do we know about Guybrush, or Larry, or King Graham (apart from the fact that all three will grab anything not nailed down, walk around a lot and invariably have a cool one-liner)? And how many super-detailed, unique twists are there in their adventures?

Let's say a designer was willing to put a good deal of extra effort into an adventure game- instead of one main character, there's a dozen. Instead of a manor with ten rooms, there are seven different manors with a lot of spare rooms, and instead of one fixed plot, there is some sort of general "shape of the plot", with many little branches and safety checks and clever code to insert a good selection of puzzles from a large pool.
And suddenly, maybe you're Hank Handsome on a quest to save his lady, Sally Shallow, from the clutches of Dr. Gangreene, who wants to turn her into a mutated tomatoe. Or, in the same game, Dr. Gangreene is the hero who must raise a huge amount of cash to buy the freedom of his pet dog. The general shape of the game will stay the same, but the game itself... not so much.

I daresay that today's technology gives us a lot of helpful tools. With a couple of
3D models and different skins, you could have a large pool of characters with only reasonable extra effort. And there are many simple ways to create branching story trees that do safety checks (I can insert a locked door HERE if I create a puzzle THERE where the hero gets a key to the door...). It could be done.

The question, however, is if an adventure game would benefit from such a change in gameplay. The final game would be much less of a "true, fixed story" with all things covered, it would feel more random and maybe less satisfying. "Wow, I played THAT GAME and totally loved how Bev kicked that daemon's ass!" "Who's Bev, I played THAT GAME too... you're a piece of tofu trying to escape from a fridge!"

With some care taken, however, I think *a little bit* of procedurally generated content could add to an adventure game.

x + y = nothing at all

2009-04-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you take two things and combine them and get something that's better than the sum of its parts. Consider ham and eggs, steak and kidney pie, action and adventure, princes and persia, and technically ANY sci-fi movie starring Gigi Edgley. Two awesome things just get better.
Sometimes it does *not* work out for any number of reasons, and that's when it's time to sit down and ponder what went wrong. Wanna see some "too awesome to be successful" examples? I'm going to show you.

Zanzarah
Pokemon are cool and hip and trendy, the pocket monster wave is right at its peak. Players everywhere carry their trusty cardridge around, but there's no such game on the PC. Zanzarah takes the Pokemon principle and dresses it up in nice graphics and a friendly fantasy fairy theme- and goes down almost unnoticed.
It had the mechanics, it has good combat, it has nice sound, it fails. One major issue may be that this type of game really needs a handheld; for a PC game, it's not much thrill to run, check a loading screen, fight, collect five coins and do the same again, and again... for hours.

Spellforce
Action role-playing games are all about developing a character from humble yokel to eternal godslayer, defeating an evil overlord on the way. Real time strategy is all about creating cool armies and win map after map, unlocking new units and developing strategies. Spellforce managed to combine these two key fun factors and was a mild failure. RPG fans didn't exactly shout wow because for them, there wasn't enough RPG. RTS fans missed the comfort of a true RTS. Those who liked a mix still found it hard to be totally enthralled because there really was a bit too much of everthing in the mix.

Divine Divinity
The open-ended gameplay of Morrowind and the tight, cool, epic story of Baldur's Gate2 rolled into one game- spelled disaster. DD looked and played allright but never really took of the ground. People say they didn't like the name. I say shizcakes.

Etherlords
Magic the Gathering + turn based combat on a cool map, sort of what Heroes Of Might And Magic would be if all heroes had cards instead of large armies. Intriguing idea, beatiful looks, a really fun mix of creatures and spells. Instant mediocreness, and can't say why.

And why are pinball sims so dead?

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: Meet the Lady

2009-04-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

Let's return to the Dungeon with a picture. It shows the main character of Dungeon Hijinx, vaguely referred to as THE LADY. And here it is.

She won't appear that detailed in the game, of course. We're talking about a Roguelike here, and that means rather small (not to say crude) little pixel graphics, but hey, and that one of the most sex-ay @-substitutes you ever saw?

Game Boy to Game Man

2009-04-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

When I purchased my current PC late in 2007 I thought it was a big step up- switching from a P450 to a 1.6 Gigahertz machine. And indeed I was very, very pleased to see how my trusty PS and Cinema4D ran nicer and smoother and indeed more speedy. And of course I went to town and purchased a set of games I never dared to touch before due to speed issues. And of course I ran into the bottleneck that was my onboard graphics card.
That new graphics card I now own (thanks to OneDollar again for set-up tips) made me re-install some of them games, and also some new ones. Wanna go for a game ride? Probably not, but it's a nice day and I have some free time, so let's check.

Prince of Persia: People tell me it's evil to like this game. Especially when you're old enough to have played the original PoP (and I am, oh yes). But what's not to like about a game where you are the uber-master of acrobatics, the master of time, and also have indestructible harem pants? It's an easy game and rather short, but it's slick and well presented.. the oriental equivalent of a Ben304-game, you might say... and just cool.
ATI Factor: I played through this game with ease on my old machine using the lowest settings and accepting a stutter here and there. Now it's max settings and frames all the way to the sky.

Pastry Passion / Fishdom: They are nice casual games. I like them, but they are not taxing the hardware, so let's just say that they are reat games and a fun way to waste half an hour. They're Match3 games, and Fishdom doubles as my screensaver. 'nuff said.

Tomb Raider Legend: I was there when the hype started. I went to a shop once asking some clerk "when that Other World lookalike would come out", and he said, "Huh? Tomb Raider, never heard of that!". I was there. I even played the original Tomb Raider without Voodoo support. I witnessed the downfall of Miss Croft and her new advent that was marked, indeed, by Legend. Made by the guys who also made Pandemoneum. I can't say I am all impressed by the revamp- the story's kitsch and the secrets sometimes unfairly hidden- but I love the way Legend tells its story. The greatest moments in Legend aren't in the (rather simple) JnR sequences or the (downright boring) firefights, they are in the cutscenes. Small gestures and great voice acting. Legend isn't legendary, but it's back to the roots of making a good game.
ATI Factor: My old machine had me playing at medium settings in the lowest resolution. Now it's max settings (not NextGen content though) at 1024x768, and it's looking suuuuu-weet. Jumpting through the jungle in the small black has never looked so good.

Far Cry: I totally hit the bottleneck with this one and can now play it as it is meant to be in the first place, and I am enjoying it a lot. A solitary A-Team guy on a beautiful island who can shoot at things, there's nothing not to like.
ATI Factor: Finally playable!

Doom3: I really cannot like this game. Each time I start it I think of the frenzied speedruns I did through Doom and Doom 2, and Doom3 just can't keep up. Nice to look at, yes, nice sound, oh yes, but the monsters are downright ridiculous and the story just gets in the way.
ATI Factor: Doom3 still eats my computer, but it's nearly smooth at 640x480 with medium settings.

The Sims: Yes, I play the Sims. My personal goal is to create a mansion full of hot girls that are totally in love with each other and where there is only one bed, one whirlpool, and one plushy chair. Oh wait, I already did that.
ATI Factor: Much better loading times and sharper textures. Worth the ride.

Spellforce: A pretty obscure RPG/RTS hybrid that I will blog about soon. I had the original game from some cover disc and again fought the evil onboard graphics card bottleneck- it just wouldn't get a decent frame rate. After I played the first three missions I went and bought the Platinum pack, it was that good.
ATI Factor: Playable with max settings.

Civ4: This one's a legend indeed, and I am still discovering new ways to play it. If you don't know what Civ4 is, please stand up, switch of your computer RIGHT NOW, then go and buy it.
ATI Factor: Faster loading, a real blessing, and I can use hires textures now.

Sacred: This game shouldn't be taxing anyone's hardware but it does. A shame since I really liked it- in some parts it beats Diablo2. Fortunately I had some save games and can now return to the ridiculously huge world where every two steps, a dragon appears from behind a bush.
ATI Factor: No more stutter.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh... my fingers may be useless sticks locked in eternal cramps, and my eyes may be bleeding, and my mind may play tricks on me... but I'm no longer a game boy. I'm a MAN now!

!!!!![Insert Hydralisk Warcry Here]!!!!!

2009-03-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

When I go to my local baker and ask him for some bread, he'll happily tell me why this certain bread is better than the other, or what cake will suit my desire for a sugar rush. When I go and buy some glue or other craft-related material, I'll also be advised and helped. Heck, my local butcher even knows the name of some of the meat he sells me! But when one happens to buy a new graphics card, the clerks seem slightly annoyed that I don't know too much about them. They have all the rights to scoff at me, but when all's said and done they, the providers of goods, get money from me, so shouldn't they at least make the effort?

I am no good at buying hardware. I must be using computers for a good twenty years now, I work and play at them and I know a lot about the internal workings. I even build one or maybe two complete systems. But I am the first to admit that I like to buy a complete PC when the hardware seems decent and am quite happy never to open it. When I saw that neat little ATI card on the shelf, though, I wanted to have it. The scarcely-clad lady on the box, together with a robust feature set and a really good price were just too good. My current PC has an onboard graphics card, and for the 30€ I'd get a decent middle-class card with its own RAM and stuff. I was set, it was to be mine.

The following scene is taken from *life*.

Me: "Hi, I'd like to buy that HD2600Pro."
Teh Guy: "Yes."
Me: "Er, I got a few questions though."
Teh Guy: "Duh."
Me: "See, I got an onboard graphics card now, and, well, how do I get the new one to work? Do I have to deinstall or deactivate the old one, or..."
Teh Guy: "Do you know about computers?"
Me: "Yes, I'd say I do."
Teh Guy: "Much?"
Me: "Well, I never installed a graphics card when there already *is* a card in the PC, but apart from that, I'm not too bad."
Teh Guy: "You just put it in."
Me: "'kay."
Teh Guy: "It's bulk. There are no drivers. You need them."
Me: "I got internet."
Teh Guy: "Good. 30€."
Me: "Do I need any cables, or something? It's only the card?"
Teh Guy: "I need to serve that guy over there."

Okay, I went home. I found me a nice "how to change graphic cards" article on the nets, together with the drivers, and also the manual for the card. I failed at getting it to work.
[Insert Hydralisk Warcry Here]

I did everything right, and the card is even recognised by the PC, it's just that all the settings the card accepts and confirms are not applied to the screen, which stays at 8bit 640x480.

I fear I have to face Teh Guy again. I won't have a 30€ dust-collector in my room. I already own Phantasmagoria.

Now you're thinking with...

2009-03-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

...no, this entry is not about Portal. It's about languages, and how they can make you think different. It's pretty bland stuff though, so you may not derive the usual entertainment from the following flood of words. But it has some nostalgy in it too, so well, it's actually not a bad read.

I'm German, but I have lived in the wide ocean of the 'net for so long that the internet's lingua franka, English, has become something of a habit. I know I'm not perfect in it, but I am pleased when occasionally, in a chat, someone says "You, from Germany? I wouldn't have guessed!" It makes me proud that I seem to have grasped the language. Of course I had a lot of time to work on my skills; long gone are the days when I didn't understand why I died in ZorkIII when I "kicked" a bucket.
Heck, I even know that over there in Britain you do *not* order a coke light, but a diet coke. Few Germans know (possibly because they prefer beer and kraut. Hah! Now the joke's on me, eh?)

I think that programming languages work in pretty much the same way, "real" ones like C or Basic and also those provided by toolkits such as Inform or our beloved AGS. You stumble into a new, undiscovered realm of syntax and vocabulary, can't make head or tails out of anything much at all. You go through three stages.

- First, you have no idea what to do. You know there's literature out there to teach you all of it, but you would, metaphorically speaking, not even be able to order a menu at the next McDonalds. You fumble with the help files, references and start to cobble together a crude first understanding. This is the time where you learn about variables, what a function is, and how your IDE works.

- Second, you have enough knowledge to copy crude first sentences (allowing you to read a little note very slowly: I... want... a... BigMac... with... fries. Pfew!). You start to see the rules. This is the time where you can follow simple examples in a given language, and where you can read code good enough to see what it does. You're not too good at the language though, and couldn't write anything too impressive yet.

- Third, you have mastered the vocabulary, at least you're above average. You can now apply syntax rules and stuff, you can start to work on your own ideas. You still need some time to get complicated stuff done, but still, you're good now.

And the next thing is the mysterious "You know a language when you dream in that language" factor. Knowing the vocabulary, the grammar and the strange little rules of a programming language is one thing, now you'll start to develop a style.

Interestingly enough, I think I went through all of these stages in any game maker/programming language I ever wasted some time on.

Inform was the first of these languages, and when I dived into that I was way out of my depths. I was too young, to simple, to inexperienced (and not good enough at English) to master this powerful tool for text adventure creation.

DIV, a scripting language and game IDE from Italy (or Spain) was the first "programming language" I ever really mastered. It was simple and elegant, but never too popular- the forums died almost seven years ago, much to the shock and surprise of almost 50 devotet, long-time members. It was the first time I got good enough at scripting to write games without thinking about the syntax. I could actually solve small problems as I went along.

AGS, sure, was a bit easier for me because I already knew some programming now. I think it took a year to get into good scripting habits, but I felt like a man learning a new dialect, not an altogether new language.

And now the C++ craze I'm currently going through, I think I finally managed to get into Phase 3 here. Today I completed my first game framework. A true little "engine" with a lot of useful tools, many of which will be pretty handy in Dungeon Hijinx... But the cool think is, in order to develop this framework, I actually wrote a small game. Is that cool or what? Well, I won't lie, it's complete and utterly boring standard stuff (Spaceship shoots asteroids), but it's there! I wrote it! Whoo!

Yes, now I'm thinking with... er, pointers?

Ghost In A Game Chest: Descent

2009-03-26T10:24:00.000-07:00

People say they can't play Mirror's Edge without feeling seasick. Whelps! Ever played a good solid hour of DESCENT? No? Then greet that tatooe lady from this Ghost, who already puked on his sheets when it was novel to own a Voodoo1 3D accelerator.

When the original Descent was released, true 3D was NOT common as a game environment, though there were first experimental ideas to extend on the semi-3D that was offered by the (then leading edge) games like Doom and System Shock. I won't lie, graphically it wasn't the hippest thing on the planet, but with the truly 3D world there came a new freedom. The freedom of movement.

In Descent, you played as a nameless pilot, a "material defender", hired to enter a series of meteorites and asteroids. Man had build great big mines there to get precious ore, aided by robots. Aliens had reprogrammed all robots to be hostile. Now you were sent to blow them up. And your little spacecraft really was able to strafe, turn and accelerate in full six axis movement. Gravity simply was no issue in this game- you could dash down a corridor and enter a large cave where the water apparently defied the laws of physics and flew upwards... until you realised that all the time you've been moving heads down.

Descent was a fast-paced trip through complicated mines and highly enjoyable, but it was DescentII that really made it to the Hall Of Fame- with robots that actually seemed to have a sort of personality. I won't forget the "Bandid" (who stole your equipment and hightailed it with ridiculous speed) or the agressive, erratic "Spider" any time soon... nor the doggy "GuideBot" who doubled as your personal guide and light source.

Descent eventually died... most cruel, by the way, by having its engine being recycled for "Descent to Undermountain", quite possibly the only game that beats Deathtrap Dungeon in terms of being complete, utter censored words.

I secretly hope that some papercrafter out there will sometimes release a few Descent models, by the way.

When I'm Thirty-Four...

2009-03-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

It's been my birthday today, and it has been a good day for several reasons, namely the fact that so many peeps over at the AGS boards took their time to drop a quick line or a little PM. Thanks a lot, all of you, and here's an old Ghost toasting to you.

SPELUNKY or: I Dies A Lot

2009-03-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

I am always late to the parties. I tend to miss crazes. Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, Cave Story, you name it... I always pick those stuff up just a little too late. With the possible exception of Cake Mania, where I was a trend setter, I often accidentally discover new stuff and get very excited about it, and have people laugh at me for being such a dinosaur. Anyway, in the case of Spelunky, the craze is still relatively fresh.

Take the collection of treasure, the whip-lashing fighting style of Indiana Jones, the overall cave exploration theme and NetHack's procedurally generated content and you've got SPELUNKY. It's Rick Dangerous on crack and, from a gamer's point of view, either a case of very very bad design or sheer genius. I tend towards the latter.

Okay, there's this little Indie-lookalike who happens to run around caves, grabbing treasure, fighting monsters, rescuing ladies and searching the exit. That's a game in a sentence. Spelunky, despite the cute name, is badass hard. There are traps by the dozen, the pacing is fast, bordering on frantic, and death is almost instant and always permanent. Romping through the deadly caves doesn't get boring any time soon though, since the levels are randomly created, and the game allows some creative ways to interact with the environment. Blowing up solid rock with bombs, disarming traps with whatever you happen to be able to grab (a stone, or even a young blonde lady will do), luring monsters into the way of crushing rocks- if you can remember all the keys and have the reflexes of a ninja monkey, you're bound to pull off some great stunts. You always die too soon, but usually it's your own fault if virtual permadeath claims your soul. And a quick restart is only three steps away...

Spelunky should have a Death counter instead of score. It's hard, it's actually pretty complex, it's great fun- a bit of a hidden gem that everbody but me already knew about, so I don't quite know why I write this. Sometimes you need to praise the things you discover.

What really amazes me is the clean, crisp and stylish looks. This is another game that does well with a small palette and actual 16x16 tiles. It's a tribute to all that is arcade. And, even more amazing, it was done in Game Maker- a tool I dismissed a long time ago. Apparently the latest version is versatile enough to allow the creation of PGC, and that's something I value in any toolkit.

I... I gotta go, sorry. I hear the ladies scream for help, and I just bought a pistol and have a little meeting with a guan-ji.

Goin' down.

Ghostmind or: What's It With Those Names

2009-03-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

The first thing one does when he takes the path of the indie programmer is to think hard about a cool name. It's an interesting fact that few people actually stick to the label their parents stuck on them when they enter the wonderful world that is the world wide web.

You may use your own name for your eMail adress (or at least the one you need to reveal to some ignorant people who don't dig how cool lulz@webadress.com is), but that's really it. Join a forum, create a game, this is where we recreate ourselves. And those of us who make them hobby games, well, occasionally see the need to create a "company name".

In many cases it's fake. We don't have a company. It's more like a label, and considering how many hobby programmers there are, it's hard to come up with something that's unique. Add to that the amount of actual, commercial, lawyer-covered studios and you can be happy that you're not sued because you used the letter "i".

But oh, we want that label. It's part of being "complete", somehow. A logo, a name, something iconic. A recent thread over at the AGS boards already offers a patient and pretty helpful discussion about the urge to have a logo/name.

I remember my own quest for the iconic thing that'd make people recognise me. I came up with a logo pretty easily by following basic rules and a hidden obsession with cat girls.

Official Lost Craft logo

It has been part of me for several years now, used on cards and as a wallpaper, used whenever I made a small doodle or sketch for a friend's web page. When I released my first game I used it too, and now it's part of my game history too. All I had been aiming for was a logo that could easily be scaled, printed, re-created, and for me it had the staying power.

Why hobbyists keep longing for a logo is a mystery, but it's so totally logical too- get the icon right, and you transport a message. Or do you? What does a stick-man holding up stars have to do with adventure games? Why do we all recognise the shape of Max in all those game backgrounds? Why do we all shout Duu-du-dudu-dudud-dud-u-do!
when we see the Batman logo?

An image speaks louder than a dozen words, obviously, and making a good logo means making a logo that invites to wonder about the hidden meaning. Sensible, plausible? Yup, I think so.

Ghostmind or: There's No Limit!

2009-03-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when you're designing a game, you face a certain problem, and these are not always of the "technical kind" ("How do I pass a double pointer" or "Can I be sure the user HAS three gigabyte of free hard drive space?"), but more... of the artistical side. Often we sigh and call it a "limit". I totally disagree.

Game design occasionally faces you with serious problems, and not always are these related to code. Sometimes you want a certain look/feel for your game- and just KNOW that you can't have it. There can be any number of reasons. Maybe you would love to have a lot of animations but know that you can't churn out that amount of quality artwork in one life. Maybe you really wish you could have voice-overs for your game, but neither your equipment nor your contacts enable you to have it. Maybe you want
3D but can hardly cope with 2D code/can't make models/have no experience with animation. Whatever it is, it's often something that "limits" your idea. In teams these situations are a bit more relaxed, because teams are able to add their resources. Lone Wolfs have it all their way, but also always the hard way.

But why call something you can't have a limit? Well, because we do not want to be limited, and seeing it in the "negative way" reflects our state of mind. There is something we want, but we can't have it, and that is annoying. These days everything seems so very much "in reach". We have the internet and libraries and simple newspaper shops where we can get any amount of literature and toolkits and whatnot- so why can't we have everything? We're a bit like spoiled kids. We download a toolkit and expect it to create the next killer game with great looks and game play for us. But it's okay that there ARE limits. They make us think.

I have started to think very positive about limits, and that because of two little events.
The first one was a little game called ANNIE ANDROID, which I had the pleasure to beta-test. The game's designer decided to do the whole game in a very, very small palette, meaning: In about six colours. Yellow and blue, each colour allowing for very little hue variance. I found it very limited at first but then noticed how thoughtful he had laid out his game world, cramming a lot of details into this oh so limited palette. It felt as if, as soon as you had adjusted to the "limit", you viewed the game world differently, adding hues and detail.
The second one was a small "mock-up" game screen I made a few hours ago. I was trying to come to grips with Allegro's "alpha blending" routines and found that they are very slow. Workarounds exist but require some knowledge I apparently lack, which made me unable to use alpha blended sprites in a larger number (if you don't know yet, alpha blended sprites allow you to change the transparency of each pixel of an image, so that you can have "soft" fading edges instead of sharp ones. I found that very annoying but then thought, hey, maybe you can come up with a cool style that doesn't NEED alpha blending.
So I tinkered around and lo!

Not too bad!

So instead of seeing a problem and thinking "Arg, this frikkin' limit is totally limiting me, limit that it is, and I hate it!", a better way of thinking is "Hm. I can't do it that way... maybe there is a BETTER one?"

In game design there ARE no limits. There are only things that we can do different- and by making that a style, we actually remove limitations.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: SAVE me!!!

2009-02-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

Up to now all of my dungeons were pretty fragile structures. There already was a lot of space for things to happen, and there already was a lot of code written to make that space, but... a simple press of the ESCape key, and gone was the dungeon, gone the rooms, gone the, well, everything. This day saw the end of that.

Up to now all my randomly created dungeons were created and existed for exactly the duration of one game debugging session. That was enough for me to check if I could indeed get that spaghetti code of mine to make me a small environment, but as soon as I terminated the program, well, it was away.

I actually thought that, if I could create a compact structure, there would be a "save it all to disk" command somewhere. My bad, there isn't.

The rewrite I mentioned a few entries before, together with the migration to the Visual C++ Express IDE brought forth Igor, a sort of "Dungeon Master" who creates one single dungeon, which in turn creates x levels, which in turn create x rooms, which finally hold information about the position of monsters (currently 1- "George"), treasure (currently a pile of gold), traps (currently a pink rectangle that does nothing but being pink) and, of course, the LADY (currently being awesome).

I am very proud of the way it all works, mostly because I figured it out all on my own, and also because I can create "game worlds" now. Okay, much of it is pretty empty right now, but it works. And by the rules of class hierarchy, IGOR is the master of it all and should be able to cope with a simple "saveToFile" and a matching "loadFromFile" command.

There isn't such a thing as a convenient "save it all". The dungeon contains a lot of different data- integers and strings and a couple of vectors- and, well, today I dug out that Allegro help file and puzzled over the cryptic packfiles.

Packfiles are basically Allegro's replacements of the standard C++ file operations, and my experience with both of these equals zero. AGS never wanted me to write file saving routines. Div Pro neither. RPG Maker, neither. Game Maker, neither.
I suppose there IS a difference between a toolkit user and a programmer. But packfiles apparently are quite simple. It's all about creating one, and then storing all the info you want, by hand. File writing and reading actually means you come up with a clever way to sort your data, then put it into a file, and later getting it back in the exact same order. That, however, means that with a very random thing like my dungeon (where number of levels, rooms per level and size of a room are totally variable) I needed to write an awful lot of stuff- and that with one broken finger.

But I got it up and working, in hardly more than 30 minutes. It wasn't that complicated, to be honest, but I feel- good. A dungeon with 16 levels, containing a total of about 420 rooms, each with a size of 16x16 and filled with goodies, by the way, is hardly 290k in size! Okay, it's raw data, there isn't any "state saving" now apart from the architecture, but we're talking about a complete game world here.

Coming soon: "I'm the LADY, and I own the pointer to a data struct with a dealDamage function, AND I AM NOT AFRAID TO USE IT!"

Ghost In A Game Chest: ProPinball TimeShock!

2009-02-21T17:43:00.001-08:00

There was a time when pinball sims were all the rage on ye good ole PC. But it was the ProPinball series that changed the genre forever, and that remains the last important series of pinball games ever. And of the golden crown that the series form, TimeShock! is the master gem.

Pinball games these days have the graphics and the physics, but apparently they are no longer loved by today's gamers. But I always keep my TimeShock! disc handy because, well, it's an awesome game. They don't make them like that these days. What's so special about TimeShock!, you ask? Nothing, really, it's just quite possibly the most accurate, most elaborate and most feature-ridden thing you can install if you do *not* have the money to buy yourself a true machine.

TimeShock! even has a little story- a time traveller somehow managed to shatter time, and now it's the player's task to visit several different time zones, retrieve fragments of a crystal and create an anti-time-shock so that we all can live in peace. Or live, at least. It's not important, it's all about slamming metal balls araund a beautiful table, collecting points, points, points. It's still a demanding game, but you might as well allow your brain to take a shower while you hotwire your fingers to your eyes.

TimeShock! has some stuff build into the green-yellow layout that really stand out. The central "time crystal" and the fully functional little time machine are key to "time jumps" and a sold four-ball multiball mode, and as you can see from the screenshot, you can travel from present to ancient rome, to the future, to prehistoric age. Each time zone has several little mini games, a catchy theme and even hidden goodies. The game's fast-paced and allows you great control; the table can be nudged around, the ball can even hit the glass, and the overall physics are very realistic.

The main menu may not look like much, but the (very interesting) in-game menu is structured like a true pinball ROM- meaning that you can alter a lot of settings to your hearts desire, from tilt sensibility to ball settings. And just like a true machine TimeShock! keeps track of all of your games.

This little gem is not really in the Game Chest. It would not remain there for long, it's a constant guest on my hard drive. If you happen to find a used copy or even see it on a budget shelf, do not even ask yourself once if you should buy it. It's gaming gold.

What I Learned From Video Games

2009-02-21T07:57:00.001-08:00

When I am seriously hurt, I only need to walk over a medical box and will instantly get better, or even super-better. Unfortunately, me walking over the box also causes monsters to appear.

When I take a spray can and hold it against a wall, a full-size grafitti will appear, and no matter what colour my spray was, the grafitti will be multi-coloured (and also look awesome).

Any secret door I ever find in my live will open if I touch it and say "Hrmph".

Mana is always blue, Life is always red, even if my real-life experience is still hesistant about the use of mana.

Should I ever find a portal into another world/dimension/realm of existence, I will instantly step through because on the other side I will automatically become the saviour of said world/dimension/realm of existence.

Should a fat guy in yellow start to swallow pills while close to me, I should be wary, for he is now able to eat Ghosts.

Should I ever be eaten I will be reduced to my eyes until I can find a square room.

Slender, acrobatic brunettes can put any amount of stuff into a backpack that shouldn't be able to hold more than one sandwich (without cucumbers).

All you can do in a theme park is jump, say "Whee" or throw up.

Should I ever break my skateboard, a new one will inexplainably appear in my hand.

Should I ever find a room full of weapons, ammunition, strange glowing stuff and, this is important, the last part to complete the one weapon I am already carrying but couldn't use (because said last part was missing), I know that the next door leads to the source of evil.

There are no women on the internet. The internet being a reflection of the world, there are also no women anywhere.

All people always jump exactly the same height and width.

Apparently the world is tile-based.

You Be Traitor, Ghost!

2009-02-19T13:50:00.001-08:00

As a long-time user of Microsoft Windows, I consider myself entitled to curse the OS any way I like. If you grew up with DOS and saw the rise of Windows, you have EARNED the right to spit it in the eye (in very much the same way anyone who lives in any country is allowed to say he hates it, but outsiders aren't).
Believe it or not, the OS doesn't care as long as it sells.

DevCpp is a freeware compiler that works great with C++ and Allegro, and the only stumbling stone is that it is a beta. It will never leave beta I think, it's been in its last iteration for several years now. And apparently it hates certain aspects of class browsing and code completion, something I am using a lot. So recently my steps into the dungeons have been a stakkato of crashes.
The trouble is, I really LOVE DevCpp. First, it's the very first IDE I ever used, and that leaves a mark. Second, it has a useful feature that can automatically install and link any addon you care to name, including Allegro, and I want to write games, not study a page-long online manual about how to include all that fancy libs and bins and whatever. But let's face it, I needed something a bit more stable, maybe even a bit... more... ugh... comfortable?
I hate myself now, but it's true, I want a nice snuggly IDE.

And then I read that many Allegro codemonkeys use Visual C++ and have quite some praise for it, and THEN I found out that you can actually have that program for free, by LEGAL MEANS!

MS giving something for free? To me? I normally touch free offers via internet only with a very long stick, but heck, I tried it out. You can get a neato iso file from that link and burn yourself your custom installation disk. I love having physical evidence of software, so I was sold.

Installation took almost 20 minutes, which made me very, very wary. Then it started, after quite some loading, but apparently that's a first-start issue.

Then I prepared that ghostly fiddlesticks of mine to write the famous Hello World program. It was the first time ever I touched a programming IDE made by those guys who also sell Windows.

I am loving it. They got it totally right; about the only complaint I could place is that the IDE takes a while to load, compared to DevCpp. Well, it would, wouldn't it, it's huge.
Setting up Allegro wasn't too much of a headache too, so now I can type my code in a fancy new IDE with quite some cool new features. And since I'm no longer using DevCpp's "DevPaks", I even got an updated Allegro.

Apparently sometimes the commercial guys *have* the cutting edge. And they didn't include the animated paperclip assistant. They did include stuff I really can use:
* perfect code completion and preview for Allegro, something DevCpp never managed
* nice structure to sort my files, watch their relations and dependencies
* ability to "collapse" long blocks of code, making files easier to read
* pretty quick code jumping
* nice suppot for auto-comments
* and most importantly, it uses F5 for running the program! Like AGS, everyone's most favourite adventure game maker! DevCpp used F9, and I don't need to tell you how often that confused me!

On the danger of losing my readers (all five of them), I'll stick to that IDE. The Dungeon's now officially upgraded.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: The First Rewrite

2009-02-15T13:09:00.000-08:00

There are those who say "Code is like wine, as it grows older it gets better."
They have a point.

There are those who say "Code is not like wine but like spaghetti; as it grows old, it gets all yukky and sticky and tangly and, huh, glues itself to the dish, you know, and strange stuff happens inside the big tangly ball of..."
They have a point too.

I made the first rewrite of the DH code today, taking a terribly messy affair of code and distributing it into three classes (all in their own files of course). It says something about my previous efforts that the new code, even with the additional overhead, is about 120 lines shorter. And I'm just talking about dungeon creation code here.

I made a simple mistake. I thought that, if the game takes place in rooms, which are part of a level, which are part of a dungeon, it would be best to work from the bottom up: Make the code to create one room, then the code to make one level out of rooms, then the code to make one dungeon out of levels. It sounded logical and sensible.

A better approach would have been, of course, to make a dungeon, with one level, with one room. That way the complete structure would already have been there, and the only thing to extend would have been the actual number of stuff created. Well, lesson learned, and all it took me to prune the code was a lazy sunday afternoon anyway, so nothing lost here.

I learned, though, that OOP holds some snares that seem non-existent in the traditional, procedural approach. When designing a class you need to pay a lot of attention, otherwise you still end up with a lot of duplicate code (or at least code similar enough to be considered duplicate), and with a lot of strange names.
Now I got it sorted out, I'm quite happy to describe the DH dungeon builder. I call him Igor.

The first thing Igor does is get a few things straight. Igor wants to know how deep a dungeon he must built, and Igor wants to know who his master is. Igor can have four masters: A mad wizard, a mad scientist, a mad politician and a mad evil overlord from hell. Igor also wants to know the year he's currently in.

Igor starts work on the DUNGEON. He divides the number of levels he is asked to build by 5, because that's the number of themes the game has. So the player will go through five differently themed environments with X levels. The DUNGEON now holds a list of empty levels of a certain size. Igor knows that sometimes the number of levels he's allowed to build, divided by 5, will be odd. He simply creates secret levels from that leftover levels then, and smiles diabolically.

Igor now goes down level by level, trying to please his master by building stuff useful for a mad wizard (libraries, pens, arcane stuff and so on), a mad scientist (laboratories, gearshops and the like), a mad politician (lots of splendid meeting rooms and torture chambers) or a mad evil overlord from hell (all of the stuff, but totally evil). Each LEVEL now has a lot of ROOMS. Igor takes some time to make sure they are all connected so that his master can go from the top to the bottom in one swift go.

Igor saves his work (believe me, that was a pain to figure out how to do!), and then... well, time seriously passes. By the time the game starts, the dungeon can be anything from 100 to 10.000 years old, so some decay has to be considered. The game goes through the rooms and collapses the odd wall or removing stuff, littering the halls with corpses of past explorers... yes, and then, it's time for THE LADY to enter.

That's what I have now. I basically have what I already described a few posts ago, but in a much better and readable way.

IGOR is a Singleton by the way. I am so proud I figured out how to do them.

Ghost In A Game Chest: Ghost Master

2009-02-10T14:14:00.001-08:00

In my cellar there's a plastic crate full of what you might call "freebies"- those games that are part of a magazine, that are grabbed from a sell-out shelf, that a friend lend you and you never got around to giving back. Every so often I'll climb down and make my way past the spiders, and marvel at the oddities I accumulated there. Let's start a sub-set of articles: Ghost In A Game Chest, where I review some of those oddballs.

Ghost Master is one of the most unique games I ever played. You're a dead entity tasked to haunt and scare the population of a layback town in several very zany missions. The gameplay was described as "the anti-Sims" but is more like a strategy game. You have a couple of different "haunters", each with a set of scares and spells and each belonging to a certain type: Ghosts. Elementals. Undead. And so on- this is important because your job is to find places to link the haunters to, so that they can go on with their job. A water elemental can be bound to any source of water, and a poltergeist can only be linked to a child and so on and so on...

The detailed 3D environment of each mission looks and navigates a LOT like Sims 2, which says something about the looks of the game. But each level is an actual mission with a set goal and quite some tactics involved- and they all offer references to classic horror movies and cliches. "Poltergack", for example, is set in a house that was build on a chicken slaughterhouse where the souls of the chicken have sworn revenge on the family that lives there. "Summoners not included" is set in a remote hut in the woods where a certain book in the cellars holds the key to summoning a demon...

Your job is mostly to scare people until they run away- tricky, because some peeps just don't care about ghosts and need to be "nudged" into that belief first hand. Some people are scared of certain things- the Scutterclaw ghost that manifests itself as a swarm of spiders, for example, is a must in any mission where females are involved. Sometimes actual puzzle elements come in- you need the humans to do certain things for you, so hypnosis and luring may be useful.

In every level there are also "trapped" haunters- and if you're good, you might figure out how to free them so that they can join your ranks. In the very first mission there the old "Weatherwitch" trapped in a- wait for it- vacuum cleaner. Link a Gremlin to the machine to make it burst, and you will not only get some scares out of the household members, you'll also gain the witch.

The missions play interestinly open-ended and have a nice, slow pace. You start with very little "plasma" which is needed to link the ghosts, so you usually scan the place, make a few weak scares to build up power, and then get out the big weapons. The music constantly reflects this power-play: As the humans are unaware of your presence a slow, calm jazzy theme plays that turns into a wild Elfman-style crescendo as you build up belief in the peeps and make them shiver with fear.

The spells and powers of the ghosts- as well as their looks and animation- are all awesome indeed, and while I never got around to make a perfect game, I often reinstall and while away the time with this little oddball.

Three Articles Of Interest

2009-02-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

I usually put my own content into this here blog, but I recently found a few related articles I really wish to share, so read them at your leasure while I come up with the next post. It'll have the LADY in it.

One day a guy decided to make a game in 40 hours, which is what he estimated to be a "working week"- without a budget, without an engine, without help. It's an impressive journey indeed, and much can be learned from it.
Hackenslash

Programmers apparently have their own sense of humour and pride, and this little gem sums it up pretty well. I smiled when I read it, because at that time I already had my personal black triangle.
Bacl Triangle

Ever played Dungeon Siege? Well, I found a postmortem on it and was fascinated by the sheer amount of stuff one apparently needs to think of when designing a game that turns out more of a tech showcase than a truly game-play revolution. Check it out, there's lots of long words in it.
The Continuous World Of DS

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: If I Only Had A Brain...

2009-02-02T18:48:00.000-08:00

I'm constantly fascinated by the way programming and game design gives you a certain way to think about things. Let's take this old issue: "Believable Monsters".
In Doom, I went into a room, faces three dozen imps and a cacodemon and just knew what to do: Select shotgun, shoot in teh head, sidestep, reload, repeat. It wasn't that the Doom monsters were stupid, they had their AI all right, but frankly, they were dangerous due to their numbers.
Forward a few years, and the press hailed the monster AI of Unreal into heavenly spheres- the Unreal baddies could use elevators, sneak and backtrack, everything. The tradeoff was that they needed so much processing time that you only ever had two or three monsters in a larger scene.

Now I know, in a rough-and-ready way, how one would program an AI. It's a matter of explaining to that Undead Skeleton that it can not walk through walls, that it has a certain amount of hitpoints, that it is supposed to attack the player... it boils down to explaining the rules to the monster and let it work with them.

My recent test Skeleton (nicknamed George) knows what a wall is, it knows what the player is, and it even knows the exact position the player is at. I'm making good progress with some simple commands here: Each time the player moves, George also moves, trying to get closer to the player. This usually doesn't take too long (the Dungeon Hijinx rooms are rather small after all), and George knows that when he would reach the player's exact position with his step, he doesn't move, he attacks. This is a terrible affair right now because all George does is playing a THUD sample. The LADY is not impressed by that. Stuff to add later.

What I have, in programmer's terms, is a simple A* pathfinding system (stolen from an Allegro book). That's not enough, that much is sure. I want more than dumb Skeletons (sorry, George) decreasing distance and dishing out THUDS.

What would you expect from monsters in a simple dungeon crawl game- and how much will I be able to code into their brains?

Let's think about this logically, not programmer-cally.

A fierce undead skeleton with bloodlust and vengance in its hollow eye sockets, well, that would just prowl around and attack mindlessly. Simple.
A golem type monster, however, that has no sight... now that would remain dormant until it hears the player, wouldn't it? So maybe a sound radius would be in order.
What about rats and wolves and other "pack" hunters: Would they react differently if they were alone or in a group? For sure!
Position. If an enemy KNEW that the player's armour is strong enough to make his attacks useless, but that this armour isn't as strong at the back... how cool would it be to see George sidestep and try to get into the LADY'S shadow?
Following. Let's say the player retreats from combat, leaving the room- will an enemy just blindly follow, or take the chance to reform a strategy- and what options are there? A wolf could howl for the rest of his pack...

And... and... so much more...

Here I stand, fumbling with ideas. I shall be happy if I can make at least some of them real.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: Dance of Death

2009-02-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

As I danced with the dead my free spirit was laughing and howling down at me
Below my undead body just danced the circle of dead
Until the time came to reunite us both
My spirit came back down to me
I didn't know if I was alive or dead
As the others all joined in with me.
Iron Maiden, "Dance Of Death"

The dungeon's no longer a safe place for THE LADY- recently, the undead have started to haunt the place, and the thing about undead is, well, they are undead. Meaning they're just alive enough to kill THE LADY dead.

I think Dungeon Hijinx has officialls stopped to be a "nonofficial nonproject". It's defenitely a project now. I still won't even start to think about anything like a release date, but it's a sure thing that, one day, it's going to be real.

I think there are one or two readers out there being happy to hear that, so, heh, I just said it.

Smells Like Game Spirit

2009-01-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

How do you rate games, and what types of games are there? And why are there some games that are so clearly different from others? Let's do an analysisthingysomething.

As far as I am concerned, there are bad games, good games, outstanding games and, for a lack of a better word, "instant classics".

Bad games aim to be something and fail, it's as simple as that. They give me a promise and do not keep it. Ultimatively I play a game to be entertained, and if for some reason the game doesn't provide me my entertainment due to objective flaws, I consider it a bad game. The important thing is the "obbjective flaw". I can't blame a game for being not my genre/theme/thing- but bad games have bugs, poor quality, too little content, and that makes them bad.

Good games, well, they are good. They deliver what they promise, and thus I like them. They may be flawed but heck, what isn't these days? I'd play a good game any time there's time.

Outstanding games are rare, and quite often they are "genre milestones". I consider Diablo 2 a very good game, but Diablo is really outstanding. Same goes for Baldur's Gate 2, the original Doom, Insaniquarium and Planescape Torment, they are just better than good, they are definitions of what a game has to be, they are simply awesome.

And with this "set" of game quality I have a rough guideline. But I think there's more to evaluating a game. Why is it that players of my generation so often talk about the "old times" as if they were all that much better? Why do our memories so readily provide a dozen games that we still talk about, that seem to have no worthy sequel, that somehow STICK?
For one thing, I dare say the old times really WERE better- it was possible to do something totally new. And a totally new concept will always stick and become, over the time, a legend.
Dune, Thief, Jagged Aliance, U.F.O., Doom, Diablo, Lemmings, Monkey Island, Etherlords, Tomb Raider, to name a few, are living legends (and they are not even the most ancient titles I can think of), they did indeed discover new ground, did something unique and delivered it well. For a game that establishes a genre, there is often praise, but a game that establishes a genre in a really cool way, there's instant fame.
These games can't be remade, can't be beaten. They can be added to, but they will always remain the legend that they are. Our minds will happily tell us that they looked awesome, played awesome, were awesome impersonated. Playing them on modern hardware can become a matter of ingenious abuse and lengthy emulator-search, but when we do it, we can actually look past the ugly graphics and limited gameplay, because for us, it isn't there.
Could you make a new Lemmings these days? I daresay no.
Could you make a better Doom? Compared to the thrill of Doom, Doom 3 fell totally flat for me.
Could we remake the Incredible Machine? Well, actually no, because the original had everything the concept needed.

There are those classics, those ancient gods of gaming glory, and they are forever bound to our memories. I think that today's more spoiled, more jaded gamers will, in a few years, think in pretty much the same way about their favourites.
The difference is, there seems no way these days to define a new genre. And that's what made some of those ancient games so very unique.

I'm proud to be an oldie, really, who actually played Pitfall all the way through.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: Teh Listorz

2009-01-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

My game-making is as erratic as a highly erratic thing, meaning it is, well, very erratic. Patchwork all over the place- whenever the mood strikes me I manage to get good bit of work done on a project, or even start another one. That, however, means I am constantly treading water in a pipeline of games to be made.
And you know what? I love that.

Dungeon Hijinx has finally reached a certain structure. The code is still a mess and it can't do much more than generate simple, empty dungeons in which my heroic LADY walks around, but that was the most important thing. I did it all myself, without checking the code of others. It was the proving ground, and now that I stand there, victorious, in my empty random dungeons, I compiled a little list of gameplay elements I wish to implement. The RogueLike People tell me those lists are important, and they are wise people who already made their game, so listening to them can only help me.

* Turn-Based, Jagged Alliance Style Combat
Meaning that the LADY will move freely, in "real time" as long as she's alone, but will enter a turn-based combat mode as soon as she spots enemies (or vice versa). This TBC will be pretty strategical- weapons have a range, armour may have different protection depending on where a hit makes contact, large distance will make shots vary in both accuracy and damage, and so on.
I fear this will be a major effort, but still, I made small experiments and am quite confident it can be done.

* A Free For All Character Setup
There are no classes in Dungeon Hijinx but a rather detailed set of attributes and skills, akin to Arcanum. By "buying" attribute and skill boosts, you can create almost any kind of character- the LADY can be made the archetypical fighter/mage/ thief, or she can become something very unique. I love this kind of system since it does away with so many apparently random gameplay limits (wizard who can't use a sword), and as an avid Fallout and Arcanum player I've learned to understand how to create such a setup.

* A Resource Based Environment
There will be plants, animals, monsters and other stuff in the dungeon, and whatever there is, the LADY will be able to use it in one way or another. Alchemy allows you to create potions from different resources, like monster brains and mandrake, and Crafting allows you to create or modify items.

* A Super Simple Spell System
Magic is a trademark of most RogueLikes, and Dungeon Hijinx has magic too. It's a very archaic system players of Might&Magic will find hauntingly familiar: Spells are grouped in different elements, and you need to buy/learn a spell before you can use it. In Dungeon Hijinx, we have the traditional elements Fire, Water, Earth and Air, and the abstract elements of Mystic and Alchemy, Order and Chaos. Spells need to be learned by seeing them in action often enough (!!!), or by buying their books, or by being trained by old hermits that live in the dungeon.

* Steam Punk
Firearms and metalworks are part of Dungeon Hijinx, resulting in the LADY'S ability to build cool stuff out of scrap parts. With some gears, a broomstick handle and a broken rifle she CAN build her own boomstick.
You need to have boomstick these days. They are l33t.

* Static Environment
The game world is created and, when altered, will stay that way. Monsters you kill remain dead, stuff you break remains broken. This limits your resources and enforces process downwards to the heart of the dungeon.

* Conducts
NetHack challenges you to finish the game as a pacifist, illiterate or vegan, and Dungeon Hijinx too will keep tabs on your action. I love these "hidden" challenges.

* Totally Editable Graphics
In addition to the *pak format I invented to create a "solid archive" with all the DH graphics, players can create their very own tilesets. The game will check if a replacement has been made and then exchange all edited graphics. Meaning if you just replace one monster, the game will use that monster and supply the rest of the graphics from the *pak. If you want to go overkill, you can replace ANYTHING you like.

* LUA brains
LUA is a scripting language that works well with Allegro, and I am currently working on creating simple AI with LUA. That means, of course, that anyone who doesn't mind reading a manual can edit monster brains.
Hmmm, I said brains.

* Four Environments
Recent Ruins is where the game starts. From there it goes all the way down into the Caustic Catacombs, down into the Perilious Pits and finally, the Hollow Heart (of the dungeon).
I also have eight "mini-themes" for each of the game elements for small "side levels". The Fire Floors look very nice indeed, even if I say so myself.

That list sounds vague but should keep me busy for a while. I am also open to all sorts of suggestions as long as they don't involve the LADY'S hemline, because she's wearing trousers.

First Credits Of The Year

2009-01-16T14:59:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh. 30 hours and 29 minutes playing time, countless presses of all ill-suited keyboard layout and quite possibly the most cliche-laden outro I ever had the change to watch trough. Yes, I finished my first game of the year, a strange little odd-ball called Grandia 2.

I picked it up middle of last year and played it a little, but apparently the keyboard-configuration tool for this console-port is a bit buggy, and I was thinking that the game was buggy because it didn't respond to my commands. I picked it up again a few days ago out of sheer boredom. I manged to figure out that the keyboard configuration needs to be reconfigured pretty selective. And thus I plunged into my very first truly japanse RPG (I never owned a console, apart from my game boy).

I witnessed the story of a young mercenary, a snobbish songstress, her inner demon, a philosophical beast-man, an unsettlingly female-looking prince and a cute gray robot girl first unleasing, the collecting, then fighting and finally overcoming a pretty evil god. The story was stale yet well presented, celebrating small moments in very, very lengthy cut-scenes. The game's focus on story was slightly hampered by the fact that quite a lot happened in the general sense of the word, but in rather oversized chunks seperated by lengthy, not actually challenging combat.
Still, I fell in love with the combat system and the visual presentation- fighting bad guys in Grandia 2 means to watch and coordinate the superbly animated characters move around a small battle arena, pulling off great moves and mighty magic, and generally looking great.

I cherish this game, it was truly one of a kind.

Now where to find software to create papercraft models from Tio?

Old Music's Got Some Wisdom To Share

2009-01-14T11:26:00.001-08:00

Yea, indeed and verily, sometimes you need to dig out that ancient "Somewhere In Time" album, brush off the dusty crust and listen to Mr. Dickinson's throathy, manly voice. Does me some good, and there's wisdom in his texts- in my long-gone rebel years my English skills were not that good, and hardly did I realise that Iron Maiden (a name that would make my parents go pale in fear for my soul) actually had a lot of songs with thoroughly lyrical texts. Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, To Tame A Land, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son... gee, there's good stuff in those songs. I suggest you hit the U'tube and do a brief search, ignore the totally 80s leggings of the guys and have yourself some good metal.

It's nice to see how music can return to you after a long time, now appreciated for the sheer power of words and melody, and not only because it's cool to shock your elders. "Time is always on my side", as the good Mr. Dickinson kindly sang.

Ghostmind or: All Over The Web Like A Scrambled Egg

2009-01-10T18:25:00.001-08:00

Since quite a lot of my day consist of waiting at train stations and then riding said trains, I do own a lot of time wasters. The basics, as you could say, namely an MP3 player, a GBA and, er, books. A friend of mine usually teases me for being so oldfashioned and never misses a chance to show off his mobile, which apparently combines all these things in one tight package.

The internet is a similar, strange hodgepodge of specialised little areas. I mean, I do have a blog, but who hasn't? I mean, really, there are sponges with a blog. But there are so many other areas of more or less creative outlet, and these made me spread all over the net. There's no choice; once you have more than just one interest the net technically drags you into all sort of communities and groups and whatnow.

I am a member of the AGS community, and that's the place where I go when I need some scripting help, wish to discuss a game that's in the making or just want to meet some friends.
I also frequent two other forums that deal with game design at large, and while I'm not there as often as I see the blue cup, well, I see myself as part of it.
Then there is that homepage of mine where I post on those rare occasions that I made progress in my game-in-the-making.
I also have a gallery at deviant art. I post pictures there and browse for reference material or, let's face it, cutely drawn girls.
Then Gamehouse. Yeah, I'm there far too often. My registry already creaks under the weight of all those trial versions.
And that's just the places to go regularly. Add to that the forums of several webcomics I read, friends' galeries and other peoples blogs, and you're (or better, I am) soon all over the web, leaving traces everywhere.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of picture all those traces would paint if they were followed by someone who doesn't know me at all. Imagine that, someone sees my nick or avatar or even my (gasp) real name somewhere and starts some googling and then puzzles together an opinion about who or what I am. Or am like. Or whatever.

Dear web detective, let me at least assure you that the thing about the cucumbers is, in its entirely astonishing depth of meaningful wisdom, totally, utterly true.
I'm not really a ghost though, should you get any ideas.

The Gaping Gap.

2009-01-04T13:42:00.001-08:00

The circle of creativity, as many will know, is actually a vicious circle formed out of the pagan elements known as Nostalgia, Caffeine, Fuzzy Logic, More Caffeine, Random Thoughts and Too Much Caffeine. Draw it well, stirr it up and chant the holy words: "Iiiiiiiii gottttannnnideaaaaa forrrra game!"

I wanted to post something more coherent, but I failed. Instead, have a look at a theme park I've started to build.

Tic, tic, tickin'...

2008-12-30T22:56:00.000-08:00

2008 is almost over, and the happy new year (2009, that is) is already waiting in the doorframe of time. Good bye, 2008, you've been a nice and fun year, and you've also been a troublesome year, and, well, you've been a lot of things.

I found a cool new author and a neat series of books: Derek Landy, who writes the "Skullduggery Pleasant" novels. Great stuff, pacy and filled with dark humour.

I also saw TMNT and, heck, will happily admit that this flic made me hum the turtle tune again. Rocking movie.

I started doing Papercraft- a hobby that complements my otherwise quite hectic days nicely. So far I made a Wall-E and a whole cast of "Pencil Birds", and I think this year will also see me starting on that Warcraft tree guy.

I completed Baldur's Gate after purchasing the english "Complete Collection". The german translation (and sound) always put me off, but I did already play through it, so I tried to be a complete bastard this time, and yes. It worked.

I started this blog, met some new faces, made some new contacts. I even made some progress with my game-making, and that's also nice.

I found what I consider to be one of the most interesting fake videos ever (I BET it is fake), right here. Quit the year with a slight chill ;)

And so, hey, join me in saying "Goodbye" to 2008, which was a great year, and let's see what the new guy's up to, eh? Here's to us!

C++ Capers: Classes And Objects

2008-12-29T17:05:00.000-08:00

Now that we know what “OOP” is, let’s have a look at the next two keywords, namely “classes” and “objects”. They are rather easy to explain, but will soon be further complicated.

A class is a sort of blueprint that holds all the information about the thing is defines. There are all the attributes (or the “data”), and there are the methods (the “functions”). Once you have a class you can create instances of it- copies, you could say, that you can work with. These are most commonly called the “objects”. So each object is based on a class. Think of a factory that is given a blueprint exactly once and can then supply you with an unlimited amount of things based on that blueprint.

This is why OOP is ideal for games, where you often have no idea how much of a thing you will need, or where the number of things can change a lot. All you need to do is make your template, and then you can “order” any amount of the stuff.

Even better, classes have this useful feature called “inheritance”. This means that you can create a class based on another class, and it instantly has all the attributes and abilities of the “father” class, plus its own attributes and abilities. This can be very, very useful.

Let’s take your typical role playing game, where the player can collect a vast amount of weapons. Would you really want to go and write a function for each of the 100+ tools of destruction you designed? No. This would be stupid- a lot of tedious work, and also a great opportunity for bugs, and a hell to test.

Now let’s think in classes. We could make a “sword” class. Swords “are” many things, and they can “do” some things too. A simple sword class could look like this (no actual code!)

Sword:
Attributes:
is 1 m long
is made of iron
is not magical
costs 120 gold
has a durability of 250
has a damage value of 10
Abilities:
deals damage to 1 target
wears down after each hit
breaks when hitting something stronger than iron

Pretty neat. With such a class we now have a “factory” that can make us as many iron swords as we like. The player can now buy swords, sell them, and with some added data you can make stronger swords, or swords made of different materials. But oh- wait, we also want axes!

Axe:
Attributes:
is 1.20 m long
is made of iron
is not magical
costs 500 gold
has a durability of 50
has a damage value of 20
Abilities:
deals damage to 1 target
wears down after each hit
breaks when hitting something stronger than iron

Now these two classes look very much the same! In fact, all the difference is the name, and some of the data…
Now, while we know that a sword is not the same as an axe, in terms of their attributes and methods there is very little difference. If we were to create additional classes for spears, staves, daggers and whatnot, we would write a lot of duplicate code, and that’s what we wanted to spare ourselves.
In terms of game play, swords and axes and daggers are actually just weapons, and what they look like and what they are called is rather trivial. So it would make much more sense to just write a class “weapon”. All we need to do is include all the stuff that matches all weapons in our game. They all have a name, a damage value, a price etc. You sit down and reduce the “thing” that is supposed to be your class to the minimal data that will be true for all its objects. This works best by replacing actual data with placeholders- so instead of saying "deals a damage of 12" we would just say that weapons deal damage:

Class Weapon:
Attributes:
damage

Then, later, we can go and say that a sword IS a weapon that HAS a damage value, and this value is 12. And axe could be 25. And so on. You generalise.

But sometimes you find differences. To stick to our example, all our weapons so far are for close combat. Their range is small. What about bows? Think.
One way would be to add a “range” attribute to our class. But bows use ammunition, while daggers and swords don’t. So that makes two differences. Hm.

Now, with class inheritance, you can simply make a new class RangedWeapon and BASE it on Weapon. Read carefully: If you do so, you just need to write:

RangedWeapon (based on Weapon)
Attributes:
has a range of 10
Abilities:
fires projectiles
reduces its ammunition after each shot

The new RangedWeapon class will now have all attributes and abilities of Weapon (like damage, material, price), and all the abilities of Weapon, but also the new ones. This is called “class inheritance”, and you will use it pretty often: The hero and the monsters of a shooter game share enough data to have a base class, but also differ enough to justify subclasses. The same would go for all the cars in a racing game.

So now you know what classes and objects are. Next we’ll deal with how these objects relate to each other, and why this is so very useful.

C++ Capers: Introduction To Classes

2008-12-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

A few posts ago bicilotti asked for some general tips on class design, and I'm all for giving that. If it is true that writing programs makes you understand a problem (because you need to break it down into bits small enough for a computer to understand), then maybe writing something about Class Design will make me a wiser man, too. If someone finds this interesting enough to be made a longer tutorial, don't hesitate to drop me a line here. I need the word count.

Computer programs (and games too) can be reduced to writing code that solves a problem for your- problem in the mathematical sense, as in “something I want to get as a result”. And basically there are two ways to write such a computer program.
You can either concentrate on the tasks your program needs to do, and write functions to deal with those tasks. This will result in you breaking down the “problem” into small steps, and writing functions and putting those into loops. Your program will then be “task-based”.
Or you can concentrate on the “things” your program needs to manage, and how they relate to one another, and what they are and need to do. This will result in you creating the things your program consists of, and giving them the ability to manage themselves. Your program will then be “object-based”.

Small programs usually are simply easier and faster to write as task-based. Take a calculator, for example, where all you want is to perform a task (a mathematical operation) on a set of numbers. Task-based code just needs a couple of functions and a controlling structure (while/if/for loops), and you’re home and dry.

But complex programs often fare much better when designed object-based or “object-oriented”. The main idea is that your problem involves several “things”, and that these things have a certain functionality. This is almost always the case in a video game, but also in most advanced applications- like the word processor I am using to write this document. Apparently my text is a “thing”. It is a file that can contain text and graphics, and even have fancy effects applied to the text and so on. I created this “thing” when I selected “New Document”, and now I am working on it. It is as if there really was a “physical object” involved, as if I would be writing on paper.

Now computer games are full of such “things”. The shotgun that dropped from the zombie when you kicked him? A thing (as well as the zombie)! That car on the road? A thing! There are things everywhere!
When a game is made, a lot of time is spent by very clever programmers to break their game down into “things”. Once they have a list of all the things their game is made of, they see how these things affect, interact, relate to each other. And finally, they create the things and tell them “what they are” and “what they can do”, and leave the bulk of the work to the things themselves. So if a “player” thing knows that it can stand on “brick” things and that it takes damage when it hits “spike” things, you no longer need to write a lot of code dealing with tasks like “standing”, “walking into spikes” and “dying”. The player just walks around on bricks and dies horribly when he falls into spikes.

This is, basically, what “object-oriented programming” means: You do no longer tackle all the tasks a problem involves, you thing in “objects”, as in “physical objects”. Abstraction is the key- the data of objects and what the objects do with their data becomes more important that a lot of different, task-based functions. Another side-effect of OOP is that, since the “things” you create are usually self-contained and self-reliant, you end up with code that is (ideally) both flexible and maintainable.

Almost all of today’s programming languages support OOP. C++ was apparently the first programming language to introduce a system of classes and objects (it was called “C with Classes” first), but today, you see OOP everywhere. Let’s dive deeper.

Post Of The Day

2008-12-23T23:37:00.000-08:00

I wish you all a merry Christmas (or Xmas)!
Frohes Fest!
Felis Navidat!
Natale!

Have a good time out there, whatever you are ;)

This goes especially to Francesco, Ben and James, to Boyd and Kevin, and to Elke and her cats.

Let there be a slew of turkey, pudding, pie and good stuff with sparkle.

Boost: U Got Philter Powerz Now!

2008-12-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

I prefer to make my comics colourful with the help Photoshop, mostly because science has not yet given us paint, markers or ink with an undo function. And let me tell you something, drawing a strip is fun. Scanning a strip is the quick and painless work of a few seconds. And putting colour in your strip is great fun too and can make them really shine.
But I hate, hate, HATE doing the flats.

You see, there are these things called layers, and they are perfect for colouring a strip. All you do is keeping the black lines on one layer (set to multiply so that the black is always black and the white is always invisible), and the colours on another one. Or several ones, your choice. And in order to keep your work simple, you usually start out by creating the "flats". You take all the parts of your strip and give them a certain colour. The background, the clothes of your characters, a car, all that is given a crisp hard flat filling. Looks like this:

Once this is done, you can select any element of your pic with a simple magic wand tool-click, make a new layer and colour away. Since you always get to keep the flat, you can always return to your selection. It's totally logical and a great help.

But doing the flats takes a lot of time and is the most mind-numbing thing since... well, Pong. Or a game of Curling.

If you are still reading, and even understand my whines, and always thought that doing flats is boring too, listen up, because this will quite probably change your life.

Some guy made pretty neat PS plugins to reduce the boring manual making of flats to about three mouse clicks. I tested them today and heck, I am so totally impressed! They are very, very good, and they really speed up the work. I once told a friend how it always bothered me that I could draw a strip in a nice half-hour and would then spend another hour just to PREPARE the same strip for colouring, which took about ten minutes. Now there is some time-saving tool!

Some caveats are to be considered; the filters work best when you have mostly (only is best) closed lines, and you may need to scan at a rather high resolution for whole pages full of detailed lineart, but still, this is really all the "bad" I can say.

Cartoonists out there, rejoice.

Strip Tease

2008-12-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

I felt like posting a picture. What can I say, I did.

Insolence! You dare defy the tools?

2008-12-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

Er. Hi. My name's Ghost, and I don't believe that tools make the art.
There, I said it, see?

An idle ten minutes of browsing brought me to a nice little topic on the AGS forums, one poster linked to a tutorial, that tutorial linked to some OTHER tutorials and one of those linked to this.

Articles like these make the hair at the back of my neck stand straight, so that I feel like a porcupine with bad drinking habits. Because i totally wish to believe (to the extreme) that my TOOLS do not MAKE my ART.

Okay, here's what I went through. I started drawing and sketching and doodling quite early, ignorant even of the existence of pencils with numbers like "3B". I tought a brick shape was a perfect shape for an eraser. I mean, seriously, these things are to erase, you don't want to decorate your room with them. Okay. So I totally understood that a pencil was an important thing to have, but I wouldn't have gone on a shopping spree to find Teh Pencilz.

And how I read, in a rather lengthy article, once again, that you must be careful what to buy, and that certain brands will automatically improve your art.

Ghost (the idealist) thinks: "No way!"
Ghost (the realist) thinks: "Hey, there is some truth in there."
Ghost (the guy behind the keyboard) thinks it a bit strange that I refer to myself as Ghost so easily.

But really, what does it matter if my pencil's jet black, shiny and from a certain brand X? I can agree that a soft pencil will perform differently from a hard one. I totally *know* that there are cheap splintery little toothpicks out there that are not much good because they snap after an hour's use. But I can't get my head around the "different pencils will improve your art" thing. It's like the old myth that once you know what brand paper/ink/rubber an artist uses, you can totally draw like him.

Dear Santa, please make the world a place where it's me who makes my art, and not my pencil.

Comic Boost: Weak-End Warriors

2008-12-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

Weak-end Warriors was a lucky stoke to find. As usual, the actual FINDING was easy; all I needed to do was entering the web adress. But as to how I found it, well, that's a long and very boring story which I will not tell here.

Weak-End Warriors is an old webcomic about an unusual topic. It's refreshing to find a webcomic bold enough not to include a geekish couple passing remarks about video games- instead, this one is about PaintBall.
Yes. Paintball, which must be a popular sport somewhere. We hardly play it here because it seems to involve... what was the word... fun.

Okay, it's not the bestest strip in the world, but it nails down a good amount of cartooning very well, and I enjoyed browsing through the couple dozen strips a lot. It has good linework, and while the jokes are sometimes hit-and-miss, it's really a nice little oddball.

Now to look up what a squeegee actually *is*...

It's that time of the year again...

2008-12-16T20:18:00.000-08:00

... no, not Christmas. It's a few days until we can open our presents... but we've got ourselves a newcomber over at the AGS boards who renders my StarCraft Syndrome post useless. Treat yourself to a little taste of internet newbieness here.

Hurts the eye, doesn't it?

How does a forum work? You start with a product that is worth a forum (AGS in this case), and then people will appear, register and eventually form something like a "hard core". Senior members will usually start to help out newcomers, who in turn learn, advance and add to the forum. It's a huge social beehive or anthill or, I don't know, possibly GUMBO. If the product is around for long enough, the hard core will not stay the same; the newcomers of today will settle in and add to this core.
It's alive.

Over the time, members will start to develop a certain style (if they don't have it from the very start) and will be known for it- when I ask for some complicated code I can usually place a fair bet that it'll be answered by the likes of SSH and Khris, questions involving music will at some time also involve mods, dualnames, kaputtnik and Nikolas. Need quality spritework? We got some of those too. We have specialists for everything, even for BANANAPHONES.

And all the time, newcomers pour in, keeping things fresh in the best and leaving a mess in the worst case.

The unspoken deal is that a newcomer asks and understands that he's being helped. A forum is no constant hotline but a place where users exchange. The main thing is still the procuct (in this case AGS and the games made with it).

Is it wrong to take some pride in the games you made, and the skills you developed, and then feeling put off by being ranted at because you mistyped a command, guessed the meaning of a fractured sentence wrong or plainly are NOT ABLE TO READ A MIND?

Nope sir. We're all game makers, we're all human, we all made mistakes but, and this is important, we are working on our skills. We try to figure out stuff and indeed take some justified pride in making a fully functional SCUMM for the first time, make a cute animation, make a game.

Don't you hurt that pride too often, newcomer, least you will see the old men turn their backs. And then we see it again, us oldies: How someone tries to kick down the place, makes a nuiseance of themselves, leaves and is just as soon forgotten.

Happens, even with bananaphones.

They got it exactly right this time!

2008-12-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

As a proud owner of the original Game Boy, I know the "Arkanoid" genre by heart. These games have all the hallmarks of the true "casual game": Simple, easy to pick up, and, if done right, quite addicting. The last google run came up with almost 234.432.122.098 self-made Arkanoid games, and that's the short of it: These games have been done to death. In pretty much the same way that people lost interest in the acrobatics of Lara Croft after TR4 (until the glorious resurrection in Legend),
the base reaction of the average player to an Arkanoid game was: "Groan. Moan. Booring!"

I found a promising remake when I grabbed Magic Ball from the shelves. The game had the quite novel idea to build actual THINGS out of the bricks, and smashing these levels was like building a lego building and then tossing marbles at it- strangely addictive and satisfying. Unfortunately they totally overdid it in Magic Ball 3, where the designers apparently simply wanted to BUILD COOL STUFF. The gameplay suffered because a) you couldn't really see where anything went and b) nobody even wanted to destroy the intricate suildings. The music was also pretty annoying.

And now they did it totally right in Action Ball 2. Yes, here we have a "back to the roots" Arkanoid game with the traditional gameplay and some interesting new features. Listen up, for here's my first true casual game review.

Most action games are pretty grim, but AB2 creates a pretty whimsical plot from the very start on: In order to humiliate heroic Captain WhatsHisName, military robots kidmap his cat. Yes, that's right. It's totally clear that we are tired of saving princesses, nations, worlds and entire universes, but a cat, that's personal. The perfect excuse to man a spaceship and smash a ball into as many robot fortresses as possible! Is that hilarious or not? I like it.

Gameplay is invariably the same: The hero's ship (paddle) can be moved vertically and is used to knock a ball into an intricate alien robot structure (bricks). Destroy them all, and the level's done. This would be brain-numbingly boring were it not for two things: Nice if simple graphics and fun powerups on the one side, and the robots on the other.
The levels are created out of metal pipes, steel blocks, bombs and so on and often have moving parts. While the "tileset" is a bit limited, the levels themselves are quite clever, often giving the illusion that there really is a working machine in front of the paddle, with rotating gears and steampipes. Occasionally powerups are dropped from a brick: Mostly genre standards like multiball, magnetic paddle, larger paddle, shrinking balls or extra lives, but also some quite unique little extras that make the ball blink in and out of sight, bricks jumping away, or launch a meteor shower. Since this is ACTION Ball, the ship can also mount several weapons with limited ammo and very volatile behaviour. There's plenty of eye candy.
Additionally, robots roam the level. Some fire random missiles that can deflext the ball or destroy the paddle, others do the good old kamikaze and try to crash into your paddle, and others again repair blocks you've been smashing or rebuild the structure with sturdier pieces. Knocking these bots out with the ball is also the best way to get extra lifes.
Every few levels you'll get a boss fight against a larger, meaner robot. Again, you use the ball and powerups to defeat these, but it may take some time to memorize the sometimes quite complex mode of attack and movement pattern.

Another thing I've not yet seen too often is the ability to constantly upgrade the paddle: Each destroyed thing is accounted for, and after collecting enough "damage tokens" you can increase the paddle's size, ammo storage, damage and protection. You can also select one of four different paddles. I wish this whole section would be a bit more relevant- protection, for example, seems to have very little effect while a larger ammo slot is obviously useful.

Still, there's a lot of levels, a nice presentation and some simple brick-smashin' fun in this package; I suggest you try it out.

Am I allowed to link here? Shucks, why not?
Demo here, 60 minutes to play.

Sunday Sundries

2008-12-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

The week has been full of working hours, stress, more working hours and too much coffee. Now it's friday evening, and you're home, and you feel that... itch.
Need a distraction? Need a way to while away a few boring hours? In short, need a hobby? The internet has it all.

One cool thing about the wide wide web is that, with some patience, you can find an enourmous amount of cool stuff to spend your time on, and here's Ghost's Glimpse on Things To Do When You Have Too Much Time.

For the steady-of-hand craftsman (or woman):
Papercrafts are all the rage these days, and let me tell you, once you started building your own little Wall-E or your very first RommyToy, you'll want to get more.
What's a papercraft? Well, it's basically a lot of premade parts you cut out and glue together to assemble a 3D model of something. As a hobby it's quite convenient because all you need is internet access, a printer, some heavy paper and a sharp hobby knife. Give it a go- either google your way or check out these nice "collection sites":
PaperCraft Museum
Cool Haunted Houses
Rommy

For the creative pencil warrior
Start a webcomic, a gallery, or whatever takes your fancy. Don't worry if your art isn't top notch, because there are many websites where you WILL get fans. I suggest a DeviantArt account because these guys happily accept doodles of all quality. And who knows, maybe you'll get a fanbase or a way to improve your skills. Should you ever get really rich... my bank account's number is... ;)
DeviantArt

For the Wannabe Game Maker
You've got that cool idea for a game, but get scared when it comes to learning a proper programming language? In short, you'd love to make a game but without too much "real programming", and with tools that don't cost you dear? Fear not, that's totally possible!
Construct- free alternative to Game Maker
Adventure Game Studio
Lite-C, a simple and free 3D engine
Game Maker, the "classic"

For the Verbose Self-Reflective Man Behind The Keyboard
If you have FAR too much time, just start a blog. It's fun ;)

Name The Game / Game The Name

2008-12-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

Adventure games are, by default, games that follow a strict set of "game play mechanics": There's your main character, something must be done, and then it's up to you to look at, pick up, use, talk to and whatever else at things. Since they (the adventure games as a genre)have been around for such a long time, seasoned players will add that even the puzzles started to repeat after a while, some of them becoming "standard".
But still there were so very, very many adventure games, and people fell over to play them! WHY? The game mechanics wouldn't be able to surprise them- because the rules were and are always the same. You click stuff and make stuff happen.
So why buy a dozen different adventure games?
The answer is, of course, extremely simple: You play these games for the story and for the characters. Asking why someone would like to own a lot of adventures would be like asking someone why he would like to own more than one book, since they are all a lot of pages with the same few letters on them.
Adventure games rely on their quirky, funny, broken, cynical and/or incompetent heroes and the (often much more interesting) supporting characters, the plot twists and the puzzles. Taking all adventure games ever made would give you a set of rules hardly 50 words long, and a pandemoneum of interesting characters.

Okay, now consider casual games, the "newest genre". A lot of things I just said about adventure games are true for them too: When stripped down of small individual features you end up with a very small pool of original ideas (Match 3, Hidden Object, Marble Poppers, Time Management) that are extremely easy to understand and play. Still, people will buy games of the same genre without feeling too bad about it because of... something.
But how many memorable characters are there in the total of all casual games, and how many of them are able to carry the game?
Would Diner Dash be a different game with a different mascot, and would it be more or less successful? Would Peggle benefit from more elaborate characters? Would you buy the next Hidden Object Game and start looking for pineapples depending on the hero?

I daresay no. And sometimes I wonder why this is. Quite often the characters that are part of a casual game are quite nice to look at, and they are stereotypes that are easy to relate to.
Why are they so forgettable? I feel something could be learned from that knowledge. I don't know what... but still.

The Starcraft Syndrome

2008-12-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

This post is a direct response to an eMail. I would like to make clear that it's no general criticism, only a point of view. There are many more.

The first version of AGS I downloaded was 2.55, and by the time I entered the scene, the toolkit was already very, very powerful and versatile. As I struggled to master the wide range of commands I did so as someone who had little of a "true" programmer's background, though I had used several other toolkits and skripting languages before, and I found the learning curve to be quite moderate. After all, you could logically divide any game into a set of basic building blocks, like rooms and characters and hotspots, and it was quite sensible that a hotspot, which was nothing but a "defined, fixed region in a room", could not move between rooms while a character could. I think I felt comfortable with AGS after about a month- by that time I had already made a small demo game and several "test room games" to try my skills.

However, CJ (Lord of the Onion Ring and the creator of AGS) continued to improve his program; I feel honoured to have witnessed the introduction of several cool features: Some of them technical (higher resolution, 3D acceleration and the like), but most of them offering more and more commands to manipulate the game framework. AGS was already able to do all the things a classic 80s game could do when I entered; todays newfangled version 3.1.1. is a Camero with complete Transformer mode: Cool, snazzy, powerful, highly customizeable, a bit more resource-hungry and oh so cool. The games that have been created with AGS no longer are restricted to simple adventure games. People have proven that you can script totally out-of-the-box stuff: The console-like "Man Boy" or "Sky Cap", jump'n'run games like "Plumber Boy", "true" puzzle games like "ColourWise" or the extremely nonlinear "Quest for Yrolg" are the living testament that AGS has stopped being a simple toolbox for adventure games.

And we long-time users are now facing the StarCraft syndrome. No- not the unconscious heart attack each time we hear "We need more Overlords!". We've grown with AGS- when new features were included, most of us already knew the core features and could see their advantage. We already had designed a few Gooeys and muttered "Oh, if only we could...", or wanted to make a high-res game, or wanted to have a VerbCoin, and suddenly we could. Todays StarCraft players are so good that the original game is no challenge to them, so patches were made to change the game's balance and make it, once again, enjoyable to them. Newcomers to StarCraft, however, wonder how anyone can actually ever WIN a mission because it's so freakin' hard.

I sometimes sit there, coding up a tricky puzzle, writing scripts as if I'd never done anything else, and then visit the forums and read posts like "How can I make a door?", "How do I move a character from Room A to B?", "How can I make it so a key unlocks a door."
And the resposes are, often, a bit patronizing. Because we're the seasoned StarCraft players, looking down at the n00bs. Huh, look, he's trying a Zerg Rush. Doesn't he know the are totally moot? t00l.

I think we shouldn't forget that we had a lot of time learning and polishing our skills. We're good, yes. We've been willing to learn or had some background experience or just were obsessed with the idea of making a game, and that helped us through, but mostly we had time. AGS today is harder to learn, while at the same time it has become more attractive to newcomers. Sometimes "Read the manual" isn't enough; sometime we should remember that we, too, once wanted to know "how to make a door".
Newcomers, however, should also respect that their attitude plays an important role in *any* internet communication, and using numbers for letters is yet another StarCraft Syndrome.

It rears its ugly head...

2008-11-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

Almost a year ago I released my first fully-fledged adventure game "Once Upon A Crime", with (modesty aside) good sucess- despite a few quirks and shortcomings, the game was quite well recieved, and especially the graphics got a few really positive comments.
Within the next month the sequel to OUAC will be released. I never really intended OUAC to be a series, but sometimes a tale takes a life of its own, and I found the making of the sequel a very satisfying and rewarding experience. There's more to tell, there is a lot of story in the little fairytale parody I summoned. It's no cheap cash-in, it really is a good new plot, and I am quite sure it will stand true to the spirit of the original.

A few days ago I achieved the magical milestone of "code freeze", meaning that the scripting is all complete; currently I am adding graphics, double-check the code, and insert all the small details. This also meant that I reinstalled the original game, played it through...
and groaned. A lot.

Everyone who ever made something (not necessarily a game- a picture, a poem or a nice papercraft is just the same) will know the feeling of taking said "masterpiece" after a while and looking hard at it. You see all the shortcomings so much clearer. You remember how nice it all seemed when you did it, and wonder how you could have overlooked all the small errors.
In my case, it was the sheer BADNESS of the controls, the PALE palette and the RIDICULOUS amount of small bugs. I really think that, once OUAC2 is released and reviewed a little, a revamp is so totally in order.

And that, once again, makes me think. OUAC was done in a very short amount of time. I was sick of perfectionism and forever delayed announcements, so I just sat down and wrote a small game. I scripted as I went along, with a small checklist of all the actions, I made the animations as I needed them. The whole process was quite satisfying and meant that the game was created in about a month, tested within three days, and needed two bugfixes to get rid of crashing bugs. OUAC2 took longer, but mostly due to a tight shedule of school and internships. I could recycle very few parts of the original game, but once again went for the "script, code, puzzles, checks, animations, detail-work" approach. When I keep my shedule, OUAC2 will have a development time of about three month.

That's not very much time. The good thing is that in such a short time, you can hardly change style, and you cannot "settle in trodden paths". What you do feels "fresh".

But it's a very small game we're talking about. I would love to know how the professionals deal with time and its effect on content. When a "long" game like Indy 4 or Simon the Sorcerer is made, there's bound to be a long production time too- do the professionals, too, feel that a year after the release, they'd just love to create a huge patch that automatically brings the game to the state they'd love to have it, NOW?

Anyway, despite the flaws I now see, I couldn't help but smile when I played that first release of mine. I remember how I sat awake that night, waiting for bicilotti to do his first run through the game; I remember how I read the first crits, I remember how exited I was to find the game reviews on indie sites. Because that is what seperates the designer from the player: We will always remember more, and keep a special spot in our battered hearts even for our most ugly creations.

Me, The Cluttermonkey

2008-11-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

Every once and then I decide my computer suffers from the "too much stuff installed, uninstalled, screwed up and clogging the registry" syndrome and prepare a "makeover evening". I actually enjoy those.
I fetch all my software, drivers and stuff I know I'll want to have ready after the good old "format c".
I brew a nice cup of coffee, do a backup of my most recent projects.
I reinstall, and wait patiently while Windows updates itself with the about 240"updates" it insist on needing to have.
I really enjoy having a clean machine, or at least the illusion of a clean machine, for about a week. Because then I'll usually have found a new casual game, cool tool, nice game or whatnot and- and this buggers me- I'll once again have more files in the Land Of Junk.

Look at it- the Land Of Junk. It's where I keep all that stuff that I once needed, or thought I would need, or that I merely collect. There's a whole archive of webcomics, reference screenshots, old game projects, sounds and midi files, old stories, ideas, animations. There are at least 16 almost playable versions of DITA in there, and a dozen notepads that claim to are the best notepad one can ever own, and casual games I always want to buy but never can raise the money for, and and and.
Computers are, unfortunately, pretty good sinkholes. I know that one day I'll need to check and sort my "Cool Images I Found (pr0n too)" folder. I fear that day, for it will probably show that there are dozenz of double images. I feel like an old lady collecting string because one day she may need it.

We really need a new type of file manager. One that can check if a file is a buplicate regardless of its name. One that can sort projects into categories like "Will never work unless you master pointers in C" and "Really, do you need this backup?".

Still, I feel kind of awesome knowing that I posess the last existent copy of the uncracked "Legend Of Fairghail", though no emulator can play it.

Ghostmind or: The Betrayed Player

2008-11-22T17:52:00.001-08:00

Adventure games are often compared with stories, and for a reason- they *are* stories. Their plot is fixed, the gameplay usually highly linear. Other genres are more dynamic or "non-linear" but also have stories to offer. Role-playing games, obviously, and several real-time strategy games too.

I recently dug up my slightly dusty Warcraft3 box and noticed a strange thing. The game makes me feel... uneasy. It's not that I have a problem with commanding blocky cartoon units, it's the plot. The whole "human" campain is about the downfall of a paladin- each victory screen gives me that slightly bitter taste that my victory wasn't a noble one.

Or, since we're talking Blizzard games, what about Kerrigan's death in StarCraft? Was that a famous, glorious victory? Nope, I felt sorry for the redhead, and totally understood her general desire to get some revenge. And then she got it and went megalomaniac all the way to galaxy domination, plotting, sheming. I didn't like to see that.

But adventure games are usually bar of any great surprises. There's no doubt that Guybrush and Elaine will have a romance, and there's nothing that'll get in the way of three little Gobliiins to save their kingdom. Stories may be dark, but we, the players, are usually the "good core" of the story. Things develop the way they can be expected to to.

This wasn't always so; I remember some games where things defenitely took a strange turn. The short indie game "Four Of Clubs" makes me murder several people because I lost a game of cards against them, and the uneasy yet triumphant feeling of "achiving victory" will forever haunt me. The ancient text adventure "Infidel" made you an archeologist raiding an egyptian tomb, and the last task was to get the "treasure"- which triggered the following sequence:

As you grab the staff, the ceiling crushes down, buring you under it.
***You have died***

You have won the game!

This is classy. It's something you wouldn't have expected, it's a "bad ending", but it totally fits the tone of the game, and it actually is the only ending you can ever get.

This made me wonder a little- how much can a designer risk to "betray" the player? How much plot can there be that goes totally against the established expectations? Would we like Gabriel Knight if he'd sacrificed Grace? Would we still talk about Guybrush if he'd cowardly left Elaine forsaken? Would we continue the adventures of Malcolm in Kyrandia 3 if he really was a bad-ass instead of a cynic, cartoony jester?

We know that, shortly before the credits roll, the hero gets the girl, buys a round and is celebrated. Could a game make the hero fail and still be considered to have a "good ending"? I am not quite sure... But I find the idea intriguing if you could sneak little abuses of genre into a plot...

A last example from the old role-playing-game "Anvil of Dawn". It was your generic dungeon crawl and tasked you to defeat evil itself, but you could only do that by grabbing the bastard and haul him over a cliff into a magical whirlpool, which meant that you, too, would die. There was a side-quest that earned you a magical artifact able to restore your body after death.
Now, when you did have this artifact and defeated the boss, a very heroic, very beautiful and very over-the-top final movie showed you being given all graces, all hailings and also a statue.
However, if you didn't have the artifact or forgot to equip it, a more solemn scene was shown, where an old priest sat next to a gravestone bearing no name, and telling the masses that someone- no-one knew who- sacrificed himself, or herself, to rid the lad of all evil.

Somehow, the last ending always seemed the better one to me.

Ghostmind or: Spit, polish and a lot of jobs

2008-11-18T15:49:00.000-08:00

This night I met an old friend while waiting for the train, and we had a nice chat, summoning the old times at university with all our old hobbies- roleplaying, Monty Phyton movies, cheap takeaway food and, eventually, game making.
"How's it, are you still doing that", my friend asked.
"Yes. And this year I released my first real adventure game, too, and I plan another one quite soon", said I, and he grinned.
"Must be great. Must feel good", he mused.

This got me thinking. I may not have released a great deal of games, but there are several projects in my pipeline, so you can say that I am *making* games for almost seven years now. Eight if you count the few maker-games. And I know what I feel when I release- I am nervous and happy at the same time, content and already a bit scared that people will spot errors I missed, or may not like my work.

But what do I feel in that time I spent on actually making a game?

You could say that making an adventure game (any game, actually) casts you into a lot of different "jobs". You have an idea and plan it, like a director or author would do. Then you either need to write a basic engine or find a suitable toolkit, like a film crew would need their equipment. You "cast" your characters. You set up your levels like a stage-hand. You do a lot of different things, some of them more to your liking than others. But I never feel like a director or stage-hand. I never see myself outside the picture.

Personally I love and hate the initial "plan it all on paper" phase. The good thing is that paper's patient and can hold a lot of ideas, the bad thing is that I always feel I limit myself. I know that it is important to know your plot and features, but basically I go for the "buy a ledger, put a lot of sheets in there, and add stuff any old how" approach. Poison for some, a good way of keeping flexible for me. I do not like to have a "Game Design Bible" with everything set in stone. I saw great examples, and know I do not have the stamina for that. So I often start working with a rather clear idea but- this is important- at the same time knowing that everything can be totally different next week.

I love the programming of a core engine/Gooey. I feel like a clockmaker, assembling an intricate design out of small parts. I really feel this is a craft- making a sleek, comfortable, smooth interface that looks nice and plays well. I take some pride in the home-made "Daemons In The Attic" Gooey and must've spend a few month on perfecting it, figuring out a lot of heavy scripting all on my own. It's technical but also very creative to first think about mechanics, and then dress it in fancy graphics.

The same goes for graphics, I once again feel like a craftsman, painting scenery and refining rough placeholders with nicer, final graphics. Puzzles click into place, and all the time, you see your creation shift under your hands.

I feel like working on an ornate box. You start with a rough cube and add layer after layer of fine carvings, polish, inlays. I think I connect game-making with pretty down-to-earth things like crafting, filing, polishing, assembling. I feel good because I know I practise a craft.

Yes. That's what I feel while making games.

Unveiling the strip

2008-11-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Heh, having such a blog isn't half bad- paolo's comment actually triggered something, and a quick search confirmed that the name's not in use yet, so that really was bull's eye.

Cafe au lait. "lait" sounds totally different but, in print, looks a lot like "late". And when do ghosts appear? Late at night.
Get it?
Lait at night. I like the sound of that; it isn't too specific, it has a pun in it, and it is easy to remember.

I even found a name for my little ghost, based on what I told bicilotti about her- that a friend of mine did a glum prophecy that the concept wouldn't work because of her jaw-less skull. "No skin, no eyes, no jaw, how will you give her any expression? It'll look boring!", he said.
I don't think so, it worked quite nice. But there's this form of theatre where actors are required to use almost no expression: "Kabuki". A nice name, I think.

Little teaser taster for the masses:

Ghostmind or: What's in a name

2008-11-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

My inability to come up with names annoys me. Here I am, a well-read, educated man of easy leisure... or at least a constantly broke eternal student who read a lot of Terry Pratchett... unable to find, even at knife-point, a good, catchy name for a character, a project, a cartoon. Anything. Even my two budgeriars are named The Blue One and the Yellow One. They are, obviously, blue and yellow budgeriars. I once had a turle name of 6 Centimeters, because that was his *size*. I mean, how sad is that?

Back in the days I used to browse my vast bookshelves and combine names of authors, and that was okay but bound to end one day because there are only so many combinations you can get when you own a dozen books.

And while names are BAD, titles are, well, super bad. Downright evil. Archdemonically, in the true Doom sense of the word.

I think I am trying to say that I want to find a good title for a comic strip about a ghost who lives in a coffee machine, and have no ideas.

Someone please hug me.

Bet Entry #5: Robbi, Tobbi and... FlyMobile...?

2008-11-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is a special bet entry, and it may need a little prelude. As mentioned before, I'm German, so I grew up with German television- still with me? And we had two things back in my youth that were, well, hallmarks. We had the Augsburger Puppenkiste, which did famous marionette shows, and we had cheaper shows, also with marionettes. You can say that my first TV idols dangled from strings. I'd very much like to make this bet entry about a purely German show- it has never been translated and seems not to be too popular, but I loved it. It had a robot in it, too.

Young Tobbi likes to invent things on paper and draws a sketch of a vehicle that can swim like a boat, drive like a car, and fly like a helicopter. He calls it the "Fliewatüüt" (Flying, honking, swimming car) and, one night, is visited by a robot who calls himself "Robbi". Robbi has build the Fliewatüüt, following Tobbi's sketches, and offers the boy to go for a ride with him- a ride, it turns out, that is also a series of tests for the robot to prove his skill. Together they need to find a striped lighthouse, a triangular castle and visit the North Pole.
I found the episodes on YouTube recently and was baffled how very, very BORING they actually are, and how cheap the puppets were made. Most of the time you see the back of Robbi and Tobbi against a bluescreen showing water or landscape, the two of them talking all the time about regional "fun facts". It was, more or less, educational TV. Not bad though, I learned my first two words of Inuit from that show.
Here's a link, should you like to watch what I am about to resurrect:

Intro

The soundtrack is teh roxxors, and I want to bring the adventures of the boy and his robot friend back. Today we got better stuff than paper mache, eh?
Rewind, puppeteers ready? Then: action!

Robbi, Tobbi & the Fliewahtüüt (I won't translate it again- it hurts!)
Let's go for an animated series here, I wager some cell-shaded, simple look will look extremely cool. Robbi is a very blocky, oldfashioned robot and extremely assymetrical- he has two different arms, for example, and one red and one green eye. He looks like the kind of robot you could build out of a shoebox and some spare bike parts: Friendly and harmless in his childish design. The Fliewahtüüt is more or less a helicopter; we should redesign it and make it look modern; today's children won't draw a bulky helicopter but something sleeker.
No lasers, though.

As for the story, this could really span a series of tests. The original Robbi had to answer three questions and, accordingly, had to visit three places; why not take this approach and extend it a bit? A mini-series of twelve tasks, maybe, all of them a bit whimsical and funny (I loved how Robbi had to count the stairs of the striped lighthouse- his legs were so short that he had a hard time climbing them all, and as a result, he teached his human friend some simple maths so that they could just measure the height of the lighthouse, and find out the number of stairs- as I said, educational TV).
The two could visit several lands/continents, and maybe even other planets, passing some facts, but the story should have a bit more drive. Some more action. Maybe a simple side-plot could be inserted.

And to make the change that is part of my bet rules: Well, Tobbi did not only invent the Fliewahtüüt, he also build Robbi: He found a sketch of a robot and build it out of spare parts, and when Robbi woke up he explained that there is a whole society of robots, all build after these strange sketches. The show's final would (of course) have to show the place these robots live.

Five tales told, several to go ;)

Old times, new times, circle closed.

2008-11-04T08:20:00.000-08:00

Around 1988 (yes, that is a date- one that's pretty far in the past) the internet was sort of nonexistent, computers were state of the art when they had the processing power of what we would call a cellphone today, and I was 13, and the undebatable method to make a comic went, more or less, like this:

You thought up your comic and wrote down a story
You drew the comic with pencil or, if you were in on the secret, with a blue pencil
You inked over your pencil lines
You erased the original pencil when you were not in on the secret of the blue pencil
You photocopied your comic, wrote or typed your speech bubbles, glued them on, did another photocopy...
and you had a comic.

Yes- that's how the average '88 teen made a comic. Colour was very hard to do- watercolours looked pretty pale when photocopied, felt pens were prone to fading, and no three weekend jobs could get you the money for a set of Pantone markers (which were extremely rare those days anyway). I still have the slightly grubby original pages of three selfmade comic "books" somewhere in the attic- full of little ink blots, chinese white, an unfortunate lemonade stain and typos. I value them immensely (the pages, not the stains).

Today it's so much easier- with a scanner, a graphics tablet, a decent paint program and a computer full of neat fonts, it's so much more safe and simple to make a comic page come true. For quite some time I used to do only the sketches on paper. After that I scanned the sketch, made the "ink lines" in Photoshop, added text and speech bubbles there, too, and coloured the comic. Printing still needed some trial-and-error until I had found a colour swatch that looked good on monitor and paper, but all in all, our modern times are heaven for any artist who ever thought "Pencils need an undo function". The advantages of being able to move your panels around, scale them, re-use art, try out different colour swatches, simply type your text with a stylish font- that really sounds too good to be true, eh? Who'd go back to the old days and do it all by hand?

I did- a week ago I started to return to the old school of making strips. I had a silly little idea and just the right character for it, and I had it in school, far away from my computer and all my nice high-tech tools. So I sat down and did it all by hand. I even hand-lettered the strip, something I never really thought wise because my handwriting is pretty bad. And it felt... good. Okay, it was black-and-white, but I always liked that. Okay, it was a mere three-panel-gagstrip, but it was, once again, something whole. I think I felt like an engraver compared to the operator of a moveable type machine. It was just satisfying to do it in the old way. Sounds strange? Heck, who cares?

I am currently working on the bane of each cartoon, the "buffer"- the mysterious amount of strips you wish to have before starting to post, in order to make regular updates. All by hand, apart from the lettering, and you know what?

I enjoy every single panel.

Sunday Sundries

2008-11-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

Another week's gone by, and here is sunday again. Time to dish out sundries and baffle people with insights into a mind that... well, minds.

Here in Germany it's still possible to have the following dialogue:
Ghost: "Hey, I now have a blog!"
(The german word "block" means notepad and sounds exactly like "blog".)
Guy: "Oh, okay... That must be very, very cool for you."
Guy runs away.

Four weeks ago I started this blog with a lame excuse for a bet, and since then, I've taken care to post more than once a week and also touch more than just one subject. I am a bit surprised how much I like blogging. I'm normally not too much of a "modern" guy. I still consider the internet a tool, not a personal playground. But now that I blog, and have met some new people, and got a better insight into others I still knew, I must admit I could go on forever. I don't even mind who or how many read my little blog. I could, but, well, why?

It is great fun, and also a nice way to get some stuff off your mind, and it can yield odd surprises, like really funny games about gherkins.
I love teh interwebz. These are great times.

Bet Entry #4: Men With (steel) Hats

2008-10-30T01:20:00.000-07:00

I am not feeling that well. Heavy attack of flue, and since I doubt I'll recover soon, I might as well post this week's bet entry. It's not the best, but still valid. Hope you can make something out of it...

Another pretty futuristic cartoon I loved back then was Saber Rider- a cartoon with a very interesting history by the way (in Japan, the blonde Saber himself was NOT the main character). Truth be told, the idea of some people sttering a robot and fighting evil has since then been done to death, but Saber Rider was really the first show I saw where a spaceship would transform into a giant robot cowboy. Let's rewind time, add some spice, strip the mechanics and make an action movie out of that.

Our ingredients: The team of four spaceship pilots. We can really stay true to the formula here- a noble and heroic commander, a "Dead-Eye Flint" kind of gunner, a hot-blooded engine wizard and a lady that looks good and has no other function than doing just this. We'll allow her to be super good at setting up com-links, okay?

More ingredients: A truly neat-o space Wild West. Something steampunky would fit, but I could also imagine the more futuristic setting as shown in other gems such as Brave Starr and Galaxy Rangers. (Note to self: Potential bet entries, both of them). United under the Onion Jack, mankind has populated the universe, found nothing else but desert rocks there, and started a new gold rush.

Important ingredients: Baddies. The outriders of the original can safely be replaced by something more menacing- a truly vicious race of energy-consuming, space-travelling interdimensional beings.

Now for the twist: When the Star Sherrifs set out to fight the outriders the very first time, they have only a standard spacecraft. A nice and impressive one, indeed, but only a spacecraft. It has guns, but it is *not* a robot in disguise. Their first clash with the outriders, however, orces our heroes to enter their dimension, which is very much different from ours, and there, their technology warps. This is how the Ramrod is born.

Stew and stirr until done: From here, we can settle for standard action flic fodder. Search for enemy leader, slightly romantic love affair, wisecracks, smaller fights, some explosions, big showdown that seals the outrider's portals to our world, all outriders give up but one, so that we can have a sequel. Curtains, cheers.

Game Boost: GlaDOS would play it

2008-10-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

If video game characters could sit down and play video games, which games would that be? It's a sure bet that Shodan would play Minesweeper- a game so thrilling that she actually made a clone of it and left it lying around for the player to find, so that her minions could sneak up on him and shoot him in teh head while he was distracted. But there are sweeter games around. Some of them are so sweet that I feel my manlyness seriously drained while playing them, but playing them I do.

Cake Mania is my personal combat ground. I played the first Cake Mania when none of my friends knew it. And I liked it a lot. The second game was a bit disappointing, but now the cutie that makes everyone happy with cake is back. Each time I try to tell somebody about the game, they stare at me and my beard, and then ask me if I played with barbies when I was a kid. No sir, He Man puppets, all the way.

Thanks to all those portal sites that allow me to have a game for free with advertisements, I just spent a happy few levels in a wizards home and made everyone happy. With cake. It was like playing PORTAL, only without the jumping and snide remarks by a mad AI. Only the cake remained.

The game itself is simple yet compelling, a typical "time management" game where you serve customers. I don't know why I like it. I just enter this... trance and revel in my ability to remember shapes and colours, click quick and conquer swift, leaving cake all over the screen.

Casual games have one thing slap bang on the money: They can celebrate their little moments. With simple gameplay comes a sort of freedom; you can actually spent some time to design all these little eye catchers. A flashy effect or some cool music. Something that just makes the player go *wheeeee*!

Gotta go, make some more cake. Not a lie.

Sunday Sundries

2008-10-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

Sunday again, and time to put on the dunce's cap and thrill the audience with random ideas concerning life, the universe and... fishes.

I don't like fishes, much, apart from those fishes that happen to be part of a spicy meal. But I like casual games, and- coincidence or not- that can change your view on these slippery little gill breathers.
I own about seven casual games that have fishes in them. I raise fish, breed fish, sell fish, put parts of fish on burgers, I even defend fish from aliens that invade their tank. And (and this is a bit emberrasing) there's this game that is actually nothing more than an interactive screensaver, with fishes, that has become a permanent guest on my hard drive.
What's it with casual game programmers and fishes? Okay- they make good enough game content. They are colourful, they are simple to animate, and they are so simple little creatures that they can be fit into almost any game mechanic. They are also extremely undemanding in terms of voice-overs. But hey, so's a lot of other stuff. Gherkins, for example. But do we see Gherkin Tycoon, or Gherkinsanity, or Jenny's Gherkin Shop?
No.
Let's rock the casual game world. I hereby challenge any able programmer to come up with a nifty game featuring gherkins.
Come on, it can be done!

Comic Boost: Least I Could Do

2008-10-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

I love finding new webcomics. Screw that, I love finding new webcomics that have been around for some time, because that means I can browse a nice, well-stocked archive. The reason being: While I am catching up, the artist is already hard at work, adding new strips. For quite some time, I am trying to catch up with a moving target. Of such constellation reader's heaven is made.

Least I Could Do is another project by the guys behind Looking For Group. At first I dismissed it. The first few dozen strips are very simplistic, and the story alone kept dragging me further... but hell, it catches on.

LICD is about Rayne, a macho man in extremo, and that's about it. I can't say what keeps me reading. It's just... nice stuff. Hey, I don't need a reason. I am that shallow. Stuff I like, I keep bookmarked. So, want a nice little read? Nothing spectacular, but amusing? Here you go; I even selected a strip that sums it all up nicely ;)

http://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20030812

It's nice to see that strip evolve, from black-and-white to colour, from stickmen to a more elaborate style. The wallpapers are neat, too.

Bet Entry #3: The Infamous Five

2008-10-24T06:03:00.001-07:00

Enid Blyton has been a constant guest in my bookshelves ever since I've been a kid, and when all's said and done, I must've read worse stuff those days. Better stuff too, sure enough, but well, there is something about kids always being cleverer than adults. When you're a kid, you really like the idea that you're more powerful than trained cops just because you're small enough to fit into a trunk. I'd like to see them famous five again, but this time, as some sort of tongue-in-cheek slapstick. Because we all know that you can't fool criminals any more by dressing up as a wax figure and listening while they are, patiently, explaining all their plans.

The Infamous Five: Don't Do This At Home, Ever!
The setup of our show: Each weekend, a colourful criminal will sit down in his secret hideout, staring into the camera, patiently explaining what he's about to do. Over the top stuff like taking the Statue Of Liberty hostage, painting the whole of Ameria with pink paint, whatever. There will always be some part of the scenery being revealed as a hidden camera/microphone by a henchman, resulting in the criminal being extra careful because he now knows that he bets cop of the world will soon try to foil his plans.
Now the top cop (some Jonny Good-at-all) will give chase, and his nephew and his best friends (all total brats, with runny noses) will soon decide that they need to help their uncle. Since the kids are all totally bad at anything, they will soon get themselves into all sorts of danger, being saved only by sheer slapstick coincidence. Any amount of stupendous chase scenes, exploding volcanoes and tap-dancing pets will show up. In the end, it will *always* be the kids who solve the crime, yes, but only by leading their uncle to the hideout, where he can smack down the criminal. The final lines will always be:
Criminal: "Ah, those brats surely foiled my plan!"
Jonny Good-at-all: "But they didn't do anything!"

Yes, this is it. Pretty sarcastic, but I didn't say I'll bring back those old series to a better version, did I?

Three tales told, 17 to go.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: Dost Thou Speak Code?

2008-10-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

There is this nifty thing I learned from a tutorial site that makes my programming nights a bit easier. It's called pseudo-code. I am currently writing it to get an overall shape for the dungeon generator and the game's main structure. Pseudocode is fun: If you tried to compile it into a program, it wouldn't work (that's why it's called pseudo), and I think no person in the right state of mind would ever try to use it (that's why it's called code).

You can break down any program, game or not, into a couple of statements. Writing statements in plain English is rather simple, and you can transfer those statements into C++ quite easily:

"As long as you are hungry, eat tasty stuff."

while (player_hungry) {
player->eat_tasty_stuff();
player->check_appetite();
}

Easy as pie (and almost as tasty). And here's my current pseudocode for the dungeon generator. Read and comment if you can make any sense of it, and win a free response!

Ask the player for small, medium or large dungeon

As long as levels are to be build,
pick a theme for the level,
load the themed tileset,
load the themed furniture set,
select matching monsters,
create the empty level,
set a random amount of rooms,
As long as rooms must be build,
pick a cell in the grid,
create an empty room in the cell,
randomize the room architecture,
create matching furniture,
drop random treasure,
place monsters,
place level entrance and exit
save the room,
select exits,
if an adjacent room can't be build
pick another cell,
save the level,
save the world structure,
Place the player at the first level's entrance.

Easy to read? Defenitely. The code for this spans three files and counts roughly 450 lines now, and is far from perfect, but well, I can watch empty dungeons. In three different sizes. There is fun to be had.

Dungeon Hijinx Diary: Dungeon 1408

2008-10-19T14:47:00.001-07:00

As horror movies tell us, rooms can be alive. For a dungeon, this is certainly not true, but after teaching my "room class" how to create itself, well, I think it started to develop personality, and now waits for me to go to bed, so that it can hog my internet and play Diablo with its friends Room 1408 and that Silent Hill appartment.

Writing code in C++ is mostly a matter of creating clever classes. Classes are these user-made packages of data that can also have their own functions. Well written classes have all the stuff they need to do build right in.

Now, what does a room in a Roguelike need to do on its own? As I am typing this, my room can do the following: It can create itself, it can build its wall outlines, and it can display itself. This is all very basic stuff, but useful to have.

My room starts as an array of int[width*height], and when a room is created, each tile is set to 0. 0 means "there is no tile at all, only empty space. The room then does call some of its own functions, namely:

makeArchitecture(int seed, int varity);

This is fun. The room takes the seed variable, which is a number between 1 and 7. It also takes the varity variable, which is another number between 0 and 4. And then some magic happens. For seed times, the room creates one of varity shapes and places them inside the empty void. My shapes are currently "square", "rectangle", "L", "circle" and "cross". The room takes these shapes, selects a size at random and then creates floor tiles there. The results are very random and quite often really look like some old, rotten room with irregular, erratic outlines. The only thing I need to take care of is that there is one structure of empty space left that frames the whole room. This is done by simply never altering y 0 and height-1, and x 0 / x width-1.

createExits()

Now, the room checks how many rooms there are left to be built for that level, selects a valid direction and then makes a hole into the wall that "leads to the next room".

createOutline()

Solid rock is nice to look at, but to add some contrast to the walls I wanted to teach my room a technique called "autotiling". That means that it can, automatically, create a coherent outline. This was something I have seen in so many games that I wanted to have it, and I had no idea how to do it. None at all. But the main idea was that I would only create ground tiles, and the room would be able to create the walls for me.

It works like this: The room changes every square of empty space to contain solid rock without a frame. Then, from top to bottom, it makes every frameless rock piece check its neighbour tiles. North, south, east, west. If any direction has not solid rock there, but a ground tile, the solid piece will chenge to a graphic that has frames in those directions. This does require me to have a tileset with all these graphics (22 in total), but it works a charm.

I am well aware that a more experienced programmer will see all kinds of flaws in my descriptions. I bet there are far better ways to achieve the same result (which is, right now, nothing but an empty room-like thing). But I did it all alone, figured it all out, and it is pretty fast code too. I bet I can improve it as I go along.

And that's how a room is created up to now. Next time, I might have to tell you something about heros. And their class.

Sunday Sundries

2008-10-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to Sunday Sundries, a weekly column that enriches net culture in a thousand different little ways.

I love my DVD collection. I am that kind of guy, I can watch a movie dozens of times. I like to watch a lot of different genres too, but one that I always will return to are horror movies. Good horror movies. I have a theory that everone goes through three stages with horror movies.

There is the "cool kid" stage where you watch them because frankly, you rebel against all the people (mostly your parents) telling you you shouldn't do it.

Then there is the "cheap thrill" stage where horror movies are rated by the amount of blood (in litres) and carnage dished out. It's the stage where we are proving to ourselves that we do not blink when grisly gore happens, where we ensure ourselves that this doesn't shock us at all.

And then there is the "personal" stage where we do not need to know if a movie is supposed to be a horror movie- we discover the fear because we are a bit more mature, have made experiences, and can now see why someone is scared. We have understood fear.

Not at all surprisingly, this is when monster gore becomes a laughable issue, and fear of loss, insanity, obsession and personal conflicts become all the more unsettling. That's because chances are very small that we will ever face the legless zombie under the bed, but we will, or might already have, faced the loss of a close person, the fear of being left alone.

Funny. Monster movies start to get the laughs then, and movies we would've considered pretty dull stuff in the "cool kid" and "cheap thrill" phase suddenly get very intense. The focus also shifts. We no longer need to rebel, and we don't need to prove ourselves. Maybe we need to remind outselves, by means of a second-hand experience, that we are not alone.

Bet Entry #2: Future And A Techno Track

2008-10-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

He could do everything. He had a cool name. He was always the best at what he did, and he did, well, almost anything. He was the hero unlimited. He also had this totally cool uniform that made his chest look just a bit like a washing machine.

Captain Future. C'mon, hum the theme, you know you want to do it! You remember him, too, don't you- the bravest, most intelligent, most loyal, slightly macho, perfectly perfect renaissance man of the... future. It wasn't that easy to come up with a modernisation of that tale because, frankly, it was so much over the top that it can be well considered ahead of its time. But well, here we go- let's think about how Mr. Curtis became the Captain Future we all know. Origin stories are usually good for anything, and I want a little twist here. Because Captain Future- wait for it- comes from the future!

The Man From The Future
In the year 2525 man is still alive and has also made some solid progress on space travel. While planet colonization is still hesistant and expensive, large space station hover between the once empty space. No sign of aliens though, and mostly man plunders space for resources.
One day, a young scientist recieves what he thinks to be an alien message. Heavily disturbed static noises, a few coherent voice patterns, that's all- but at least he can track the source of the transmission all the way to Mars.
Against all odds, he assembles a small team and travels to the big red planet, and there the four of them find an anomaly- a tiny black hole, emitting the strange message over and over again.
As our scientist comes too close to the anomaly, he recieves a blast of blue lightning, enveloping his whole body, and heavily wounded he falls into a coma.

He regains consciousnedd three years later. Shocking news await him. His team is gone, the anomaly swallowed Mars, and instead of the red planet, there is now an icy blue crystal planet. And he himself feels strange- he suddenly knows about things that have not yet happened. He also has enormous knowledge about programming, technology, electronics. He knows how to build light-speed spacecrafts, robots with superior AI... he has the knowledge of several future events and inventions.

While Curtis recovers, messages about attacks from the "crystal planet" become daily news. An unknown race of techno-organic aliens starts a conquest from their new base in our star system. And Curtis knows that these creatures will eventually destroy earth and conquer most of the known galaxy.
He knows, however, that this early, they can still be stopped. The man with the knowledge of things to come gives himself the name Captain Future, and sets out to alter a history that hasn't happened yet.

Two tales told, 18 to go.