Going to keep this short and sweet, can’t stop and reflect too much.
What went right:
Web editor – having a web editor where I can make changes and just re-launch a level for testing was incredibly useful
Music – the non repeating drumtrack for in game music works really well wit the musical queues
Title screen fire – Damnit particles just make me happy.
Pathfinding and combat – while it’s not the most dynamic combat (see what went wrong) it’s fairly well balanced.
Flexibilty of code – adding new UI elements and restructuring how combat works 4 days from launch and not a glitch.
Game website – Im really happy with the new http://www.drakkheim.com website.
What went wrong:
World rendering – having to re-write the world map rendering took a whole weekend of progress and as such required that things like traps, and ranged combat got cut. no Elves or Kobold archers.
Fun – the last minute changes to combat really improved the moment to moment gameplay elements, but really it’s not something you’ll be playing over and over.
lack of animation – lack of variety – essentially more time to create art assets would have been really nice. I have a feeling this will be a recurring theme.
Broken analytics – I totally messed up and forgot to install analytics on the website until 4 days after launch.. so I have no idea if anyone has even played it.
Another long week. I’m finding as the game gets tighter and tighter I’m spending more and more time re-doing things that don’t work. While they make the game better, it’s not ‘fun’. Mainly it’s actually pretty depressing to throw away hours and hours of work. This is the part of the project where I guess I usually get bored/frustrated and stop. But Not this time.. This time I’m too damn close! New Playable builds available here: http://drakkheim.com/january/play
So what did get accomplished?
Bug Fixes
Lots and lots of bugs and glitches. Revisions to prevent button click through and proper input handling seem to have been the biggest culprit. The most common rendering bug / crash bugs centered around parts of the rendering loop continuing even if the monsters, enemies or any of the other arrays change size to 0 or trying to access things after starting to switch to the victory / loss screens.
Game Balance
So as of last week.. it wasn’t any fun. Because once you discovered you can stack units and stack 3 or so units they’d instakill anything they encounter. So the player winds up making a stack and then just sitting back and not doing anything. This was because monster combat is resolved first. So I changed that. Even though stacks can still instakill most things, the attacks are calculated simultaneously. This suddenly meant that you have to constantly manage your monsters. Which lead to a HUGE Problem. How do you select a monster in the middle in a stack. That leads us to ……
InGame UI Changes
A major revision to the in-game UI made it much easier to keep track of your monsters. The only downside is that you now are limited to 20 monsters. (I’ve never even come close to that, so this shouldn’t be a problem. I also was able to tack on simple little health indicators beneath then portraits. All of a sudden things were a million times more fun. Then a quick tweak to the map renderer means that I can now reserve the bottom part of the screen to prevent sending creatures to whatever is beneath the UI. This alternate method of selecting units has a second unexpected benefit, It’s playable on Android again!!!! ok so no android build today, due to a some more event click through issues… but that should be fixable.
Tack on some interface sounds and things feel much more crunchy.
Base Levels
The base levels are in place. Still need to tweak the hell out of them
Particle Friday
so over at http://www.reddit.com/r/onegameamonth someone started a particle Friday event. The intent being, blow off development and put in place some gratuitous particles. So I did, on the home screen, there’s now Fire.
Whats Left
Ok.. seriously.. with 4 days left.. too much. So the real question What Essential things are you missing?
That list, luckily, is much shorter.
Combat Sounds
Level tweaks and balance
Right Click / Drag issue that can cause monsters to go to unintended places.
Holy hell, that’s not a lot of time to get the last stuff done.
BUT, the last few days have been pretty productive, I must say.
Music is in, particularly proud of the main level background music manager that has a pool of music tracks and randomly assembles them together on the fly.
Removed a bunch of the debugging information and such making things run a bit smoother
The final (for jan) menus are in, Figures that I finally grasp how Scene2d.ui and its components work..just as I get to the point where I don’t have time to do anything with it.
I got it so you can now enter your own Code to play your own custom levels.
Rounds of enemies are now defined by the editor and passed to the game. This means that playtesting a level is as simple as hitting save in the editor and then hop over to the window with the game in it and playing it in the game…
And the BIG HUGE brand new website look for the main http://www.drakkheim.com/ site that will hold this and future releases. WITH video! 🙂
And here’s the remaining to-do list:
Final Levels
Sound Effect – Combat
Sound Effect – UI
Main Game – escape = pause and show back to menu button and quit to desktop button.
Gameplay – Balance
Optional Goals
Title Screen Image
Revise in game UI Look and feel
Make Android Playable
So that’s not so bad.
3 of 5 levels are pretty much ready. And with the ease of starting and stopping rounds now, balancing is easier.
Lots of new functionality got put in this week. The biggest of which is clearly the pathfinding which.. in all honestly was a pain in the butt but has been rock steady since I got it working. The map on the other hand.. I must have re-re-rewritten chunks of the rendering for it so many times these last few days. That and tile picking (still a wip) have both turned out to be deceptively huge pains in the ass. The primary cause is that the world coordinate system and visible coordinate system and the map tile grid are all different and finding out what correlates to everything else is a pain.
Luckily I seem to have it mostly sorted out for now. Well except the map renderer… that’s currently working on a sheer brute force approach, so I’ll have to limit the map sizes in the Jan build.
Other notable features
Select creatures (indicated by yellow glow)
Buy new creatures by clicking gold wolf button in the lower left.
Track, gold, stage and Dragon Egg’s health
2 Monsters (goblin and Orc) and they can move about.
Monsters can be equipped with better weapons and armor.
er they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here’s an annotated screenshot.
More goodness to come later this weekend, pathfinding, creatures.. and hopefully a UI..
But the hosting company had issues for a while so I took the downtime (no website -> no map server -> no debugging) to knock out the basic goblin an orc creatures and an upgraded version of each.
So a quick twiddle with the new goblin sprite for January
Gave me a neat mockup of what the January game will look like 🙂
And I was happy.
Then I added a shadow behind the goblin.
And that looked funny.
So I moved it up 1/8 of a tile and drew a flat plane below it to give a little bit of an isometric feel.
Well… THAT looked pretty neat. But now the difference between the floor and the wall looks odd. How about a little gradient to imply depth and ambient occlusion.
NOW we’re talking! But now I’ve got to run those shadows all around. And Indicate Terrain types.. and calculate all the possible corner scenarios. (Which I know EXACTLY how complicated it was for ONE terrain type, Here I’ll be having inside & outside (and possibly other) types as well.
But man.. It really gives everything the look and feel of what I want. Kind of an ‘anthill’ meets Dungeon Keeper feel.
So here’s the part where I make myself sad.
It’s not gonna be January. Absolutely no way.
.. Maybe February (depending on the release of Spine) or March. April at the latest, because I intend to be adding digging at that point and the map rendering needs to be pretty gelled by then.
Well It’s been a good week for progress 🙂 I’ve got the html based web based level editor, saving to the database and shooting JSON encoded levels to the game proper.
The game loads screens and their assets based off of manifest files that are easy to update and maintain. The ‘loading’ level shows a progress bar and fetches the needed assets for the next screen and makes screen transitions clean, simple and easy.
I’ve knocked out a basic Logo and Title Text (seen above) and the core tileset is mostly there for the features I need in January’s Game. As indicated above, the January game’s subtitle is ‘Invasion’ . Focusing entirely on building and defending your dragon’s egg from the invading heroes. I hope to have 4 levels to choose from by the end of the month. (and hopefully make it so you can play your own level from the editor)
The game runs at a nice 5,450 FPS when not vsync’d on my desktop and a nice smooth 60fps even on my POS T-Mobile myTouch phone. (not sure how to unlock vsynch on android :-/ so i don’t know how much leeway I have)
Right click drags the map about on PC and a two finger drag on Android. Overall I should be able to manage fairly massive levels without much overhead as it’s never looping the entire array just the elements to be displayed. But the biggest bottleneck is probably going to be pathfinding…. shit I hate A*..
Which brings me to the next week’s goal.. Monsters and pathfinding. (no animation this month) Buy a goblin and tell him to go to a spot. Maybe basic combat/collisions.
And away we go. Looks like 2,600 devs have signed up on www.onegameamonth.com now. Which is pretty cool.
So I got the basic website up and running over at Drakkheim.com and a rudimentary level editor is up and running and saving and loading from the database. http://drakkheim.com/jan/ Here’s a screenshot.
Yeah.. ok so not real exciting.
Ok I was working ahead over the holidays 🙂
Made some progress on the basic tileset, however I’m keeping January’s game very simple and more of a focus on getting the basic framework set up.
On the graphics front, it looks like a couple guys are developing an animation tool called Spine.
It’s very cool. And it will support LibGDX right out of the box. Which is perfect since that’s what I’m using. I backed Brashmonkey’s Spriter spriter animation tool and hoped to use it.. however they’re running behind schedule and there’s no real progress on a java implementation and frankly I don’t want to write one.
So Spine.. as soon as they launch their kickstarter and whatnot I intend to start using that for the character graphics. In fact here’s a screenshot of a simple goblin figure I’m working with.
So hopefully that’ll be the big update in march 🙂
Other than that I’ve got the basic Game app working, a good start on getting an asset loader implemented and a loading screen that caches the assets and handles the scene transition. And last but not least, I’ve got it pulling in a level by shortcode in as a JSON object.
14 days to go before start of the http://www.onegameamonth.com/ challenge. (just shy of 1200 peeps now!) And it’s time to get my head back in the game making state of mind. So, as I usually do.. I’ve been making lists. There was a nice discussion on reddit/gamedev about prep work and I’ve gone ahead and created a new user and made sure it’s got access to the tools I’ll need (and hopefully fewer of the distractions). So here’s a few lists of tools I need etc.
Tools:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Audition
Eclipse
LibGDX nightlies
GIT
Magix Music Maker 2013
GWT and various browsers.
So having that all squared away it’s time to look at the big picture. My overall goal, the 10,000′ view, the grand plan, the whole burrito etc etc..
In short I want to walk away with components that I can use in ‘Drakkheim‘ the big dream game that’s been percolating for a couple years and have mastered LibGDX. So Ideally I can break each of the 12 games down into just using a teeny tiny subset of all the features that I anticipate needing in the long run.
Which, of course, necessitated another list…
Features to Use:
Scalable & Draggable Massive Tile Map
Spriter / Spine Characters
Tile sidescroller pathfinding
AI
Economic Model
food. availability vs taste vs risk + individual’s taste
Effects
Parallaxing Backgrounds
Tile or blend based lighting
Line of sight
Dialogs
Multiplayer?
particles
multiple scale UI
dynamic / generated character profiles and lifespan.
music
mods / community content
extensible data formatting
save /load games
world generation
server/account auth
self updating / version check
Whoo.. the more I think.. the more things I come up with. But that’s a good start.
So now I’m getting a concise picture in my head of what tools I have to work with, which I find make it easier to narrow down something to make into a game.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
It’s either that or analysis paralysis setting in.
Maybe I’ll sleep on it.. or just sit here and wonder just what I’ve gotten myself into.
Next year. Damnit.. Next year I’m going to MAKE something happen.
Luckily I’ll have (as of now) ~700 other people in the same boat. http://www.onegameamonth.com/ is a really neat idea and promises to be an interesting time. The basic premise is.. It’s easy to start a game.. But it’s really rare for indies to actually FINISH something. So hopefully this will be a great learning experience on several fronts. a) Finishing something into a playable state b) Rapidly developing and reusing code blocks c) Judging Scope… yeah… that one’s gonna need some work.
So I’ve got 2 weeks or so to build a clean development profile and get all my tools laid out and possibly start making plans.
Overall.. excitement level is crancked up to 11 right about now.
Been an exciting time here for the last couple months.
The biggest news is the dayjob has changed so now things are looking like the available time for development work is paying off in spades.
I plan on wrapping up 2 projects within the next month.
1- proofSite – a super simple photography solution for photogrphers to present their proofs to clients without a massive complicated web backend and infrastructure. Details on that should be coming shortly, it’s being rolled out real soon to the first couple photographers to beta test.
2- ultraShow – still keeping a few things under wraps about this, but it will be, easy, powerful, and non flash based so it’ll work everywhere. Still not sure on the pricing model for it.
Oh yeah… and More mobile web and android news coming soon.
There’s something to be said for being slowly roasted alive every time you step outside… usually something along the lines of ‘you idiot get back inside, are you crazy???!?’
It also has the tendency to bake the willpower to do extra projects out of you.
So, in short, it’s been real slow going. Consulting work is in full swing, however. Lots of new and fun small projects. Which got me thinking..
And then I had to grab a cold drink…
then I thought some more.
Small projects. Bite size things. Sexy, whiz bang, fun things.
So I’m making a list. Checking it twice. Scratching out things that can’t be done in a week’s worth of the two hours of time I have after the tiny terrible terrific tot of terror passes out in his bed.
First up. Project Ultrashow. But as usual, paying work comes first.. so next Thursday looks to be the first day of available freetime.
There’s just something about the summer here in Texas that just completely sucks the drive out of you. Even if you spend the day indoors in an office, just walking to the car and driving home, by the time 8pm rolls around any desire or motivation you’ve got left is a shriveled little mass of ambition that’s trying desperately to get into the shade and take a nap.
However, you’ve just gotta work through it, right? Right??
So in the fine tradition of starting more projects…
There’s 2 new things in the works.
1 – Some really cool web/app/mobile/ fun in a techy sort of way.
That currently looks something like this:
2 – Something to get me away from the computer more and let myself switch gears completely.
That currently looks something like this:
Finally:
You’ll notice a new look for the site.. a slight decrease in the emphasis on games, and a bit more on development and consulting work.
Oh and a quick update on the Barnyard Bonanza Development, It’s been real slow due to the really cool bit of consulting work that’s eaten every spare waking hour for the last 40 days. However it looks like the launch has been pushed back from Jul 28 to some time in Feb.. So I’m taking a deep breath and re-introducing myself to the codebase.. It appears that there’s been a significant couple of updates to LibGDX in the meanwhile so I may decide to tackle that, but seeing as I’m using large chunks of the Scene2D api that’s been completely rewritten.. I may just cross my fingers and skip em for the initial release of BB.
