What have I been up to in the meantime? What am I doing now? Well from what I can gather, this:

- Over the holiday period, Unity decided to have a competition to promote their new version with Flash exporting. This is a fantastic idea, until you realise how many undocumented bugs are lurking within their, still very beta, Flash build process. Robert Yang and I thought it would be a great opportunity to expand on our Polonius game, which (we thought) had a simple enough conceit to make something quickly out of. On the day of submission, we came across several bugs I just could not fix in time. Once Unity 3.5 has a final release, we’ll go back and finish up a webplayer build, but in the meantime, feel free to try out the standalone.

A telenovela/spy story. Infiltrate a quinceañera. Find out what’s really going on with this family…

Download( Quinceañera : Sangre y Amor v0.9 ): OSX | Win

- #SOPAJAM!!!

As part of the many, many protests against SOPA/PIPA (possible Internet-killing and ineffective “anti-piracy” laws) I whipped up a quick game for Ludum Dare’s event. “The (Free) Internet” is my attempt to make the proposed laws into a game, i.e: confused, rambling, non-sensical, and uncomfortable to everyone involved. Have a play, it’s short I promise, and then take a look at some of the other entries (Richard Perrin’s “Delete” isn’t a game, but he’s clever and you should listen to him)

The (Free) Internet : Webplayer

- coming soon…

This weekend I’m taking part in the Global Game Jam at NYU

Next month I should hopefully finish a game I started on a plane then forgot about. Hint: inspired by a tweet from Jim Rossignol.

Then, I’ll be attending GDC (say hi if you’re there!) and flying back home to NZ.

And after that…

?

Talkback radio (talk radio in the US) today has a very rigorous formula. The audience, usually politically conservative, listens to a point of view they already agree with. It is understood that listeners will then call in to agree with/congratulate the host or answer his (and it is almost always his) leading questions (“Do you want foreigners taking your jobs? Your children’s jobs?”) Every now and again, some curious radio owner may decide listen to the show, disagree with the content, phone in to complain, and then get shouted down for presenting their own opinion. An entire family of mostly similar shows that, along with their audience, are baffling and often hostile to outsiders. Sound like games yet?

The host or hosts (the game designers/writers) craft a script, and the callers (players) phone in with their expected input. In most games there is an understood set of actions that players ‘know’ to take. If you act outside these bounds, the game stops responding, or it decides that it’s had enough and kills you/blocks you. Players in an FPS know that running backwards won’t get them anywhere, so they don’t. In pretty much every open world game your character is killed if you leave the safe area. If players, or listeners, don’t input the expected, they get a slap, the dissonance shocks them out of any sense of engagement, and eventually they stop trying or even stop playing. This doesn’t make these games inherently ‘bad’, but like talkback, it caters to a certain audience and alienates others. How many times have you watched/suffered a non-gamer playing something you love? If they can even work out the controls, you’ll often hear “Why can’t I do this?”

So how do we avoid falling into the same pit that talkback radio has? Talkback doesn’t fully realise its interactivity. Sure, listeners are doing stuff, but their input doesn’t change the majority of the show. They get their bit of feedback, and then the host continues. Their actions aren’t the performance, the host’s are. In Call of Duty you decide to start shooting a squad-mate. The gun fires and you get the same immediate feedback as shooting anywhere else, but the teammate isn’t injured, and in the next cutscene he will still fistbump you.

Farmville can't punish you for this

Now, this way of thinking may mislead you into believing that you need to anticipate all player actions and change the narrative to fit them, which is impossible. The problem lies instead with the authors insistance on making their narrative the one ‘true’ narrative. Minecraft can cope with any player input, you can’t spoil the game by running in one direction for an hour. Another solution is to restrict player input so much that they don’t even get the opportunity to spoil the game. Facebook games cater to an enormous audience of non-gamers, perhaps in part because they can’t get frustrated by the game telling them they’re “doing it wrong” if they click in the wrong place.

Essentially, talkback radio doesn’t really listen to its callers. Don’t let your games ignore its players. If a player wants to leap around and get all up in Alyx’s business while she talks at them, allow it, or even better , acknowledge it by having her remark on it. Don’t ask your players leading questions by forcing a good/bad moral choice on them. Let players make their own choices and have the game react as best it can. Don’t hang up on the crazy caller because you don’t know how to respond.

NOTE: This is reposted at AltDevBlogADay, a site full of some very clever game-devs.

For those on the west coast, TIGJam is also this weekend, so NO EXCUSES

UPDATE : Gamejam complete. See results here.

]]> http://grapefruitgames.com/2011/10/20/iheartny-babycastles-parsons-gamejam-this-weekend/feed/ 0 EddieC Gamejam http://grapefruitgames.com/2011/10/18/422/ http://grapefruitgames.com/2011/10/18/422/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:24:55 +0000 Eddie Cameron http://grapefruitgames.com/?p=422 ]]>

…forthcoming…

It’s the final stretch, we have to make this mess of loose mechanics into something worth your time. Daunting! We had until Sept 30th to finish. But will we?

DAY 9) I ended up hacking in a pathfinding system that will need to be extended later, but at least we now get a better idea of how to move the abduction van around, so improvements can be made. Essentially, I restricted the van’s movement to go either to the cult drop-off location, or anywhere within the town’s bounding box. Between the two is a single waypointed path. Serves our purposes for now, but will need to bite the bullet and put in full pathfinding soon.

DAY 10) Put in better FBI spawning. It now spawns humvees that travel along one of several paths to the plantation, and then spawn FBI agents. To make the presence of agents a bigger issue to worry about, there is now an ‘Investigation’ progress bar that advances when FBI agents find their way to your cults HQ (a barn). If the FBI completes their investigation, you lose. This acts as a natural game timer, but is far more dynamic and, if we can balance it right, leads to scrambles in the end game as you become overwhelmed by agents.

DAY 11) Robert improved the GUI, added a launch screen, and put in a swish notification/tutorial system. Along with some quick and dirty ‘focus on event’ code, it really helps bring mechanics together. We had to pick a game title for the logo, and ended up sticking with our working title plus a few bells a whistles, to get ‘Super Cult Tycoon 2 : Deluxe Edition.’

DAY 12) We still needed the abduction mechanic to be more active, and settled on the idea of FBI road checks, which hold up your van and increase FBI presence. Since you now needed to be able to choose different routes back to base, I had no choice but to put in a pathfinding system. But first, procrastination. I cleaned up bugs I’d been putting off for a while (like followers that would slowly rise up as they wandered around. Believers may call it ascension, I call it sloppy) and put in a couple minor aesthetic features.

DAY 13) I decided to use the pathnodes + A* implementation I had already written for Muckraker. The problem we had was that our forest has nothing to block line of sight, so my old LOS based method of finding node connections would create paths through trees. We didn’t want to manually place LOS blockers, and really didn’t want to manually draw paths. After talking about a whole bunch of complex ideas (like sampling the texture/detail map to avoid pathing through forest, or raising the height of the terrain in forests by a tiny amount) we realised we were overthinking it. I put in a simple distance check, so nodes that are close to each other will always be connected. We have no scenario where nearby nodes wouldn’t be connected, and no changes in height, so it fits our needs perfectly. After doing this, it becomes trivial to find a path from any valid location to any other valid location through our good friend A* (I may post my general & super-simple implementation on my blog for anyone interested)

DAY 14 ) Pathfinding implemented, spent a while ironing out some bugs. Also had to put in workarounds for a couple of cases. Each time you try to place a building it will check whether there is still a valid path to HQ, and if not you won’t be able to build. It will also check if any NPCs paths will be interrupted, and if so, repath. All major coding is now complete, and although we probably won’t be ‘feature-complete’ until release, we have the basic game loop down pat and will mostly be refining existing features to focus on the game’s strengths.

DAY 15) Playtesting, and then more playtesting. Honestly, I’ve played this bloody thing so many times I’m starting to worry it’s affecting my sanity (it’s the ice cream truck music’s fault) But each time we play, we see something that should be changed. A bug perhaps, a GUI niggle or very occasionally, a peek at the ‘core’ of the game and perhaps a way to expose it. We got rid of the multiple vans, instead you upgrade the one vehicle. Most buildings no longer need to be staffed. Put outline shaders on the van and agents, so they can be seen behind buildings…

DAY 16) CRUNCH MODE. Reality struck. There is no way we can get this polished in time. We decided to finish an ‘alpha’ build for the pageant on the 30th. This alpha is really just a demo of the systems, with gameplay not implemented fully. Importantly, it forces us to hammer down showstopping bugs that we had been putting up with. Robert added a wonderful intro/tutorial, as well as an ending scene. I added some feedback where needed(such as the ‘money rain’ when bribing) and cleaned up features. We vowed to have it finished by Sunday, but at 5am Monday (the 3rd) decided to post an updated build and wait a few more days weeks, since releasing a game that crashes half the time isn’t so professional.

DAY 17 – ???) Just polishing now, the most frustrating stage since it seems that all you’re doing is fixing your mistakes. I spent a long time fixing a series of related crashes, as well as writing the end so it can land you back at the front menu (to play again perhaps???) Tweaking balance as I go. This game is small enough that we don’t need any complex balancing rules or spreadsheets, and lets us experiment with changes rapidly. Really want to get this out soon, since a couple sites (Kotaku, PC Gamer) had already posted about our unfinished/crashy alpha build, which doesn’t make such a good impression. But at last…

…we release! Have a try of our v1.0 at Altercation. (Webplayer, Win, Intel Mac)

Feel free to ask any questions about the development, or point out my mistakes. We used Unity3D, Photoshop, Audacity and Maya.

NOTE : This is reposted at #altdevblogaday

DAY … 4?) After a few days break, I came back with a mission, to put something actually ‘fun’ into the game. This was foiled however, as I had  a whole bunch of maintenance to do. Robert made some more building models, which I needed to put into my building prefabs to replace my placeholder cubes. Unfortunately, Unity freaked out about the whole business, and my existing prefabs got corrupted and started throwing all kinds of crazy errors. I just had to make my prefabs again, but it was still wasted time.

(schedule got kinda messed up, so I’m making up the days now)

DAY 5) Grumpy after yesterday, I thought I would do some fun programming. As in, get some sort of system going in the game. The old method of acquiring followers, by parking a van in the town and preaching, was kinda boring. Instead, we made the van into an abductor, where you park the van in front of an unsuspecting citizen and brainwash them. This also wasn’t too exciting, so we added the risk that another citizen will see you kidnap someone, raising FBI suspicion of your cult. Also did some tidying up, like stopping people walking off the edge of the world.

DAY 6) What’s a cult without people trying to escape? One thing players have to keep an eye on is how loyal their devotees are. If loyalty is getting low, some radicals may try to escape back to normal society. To stop this, you need defences. We thought about having minefields or fences and the like, but Rover is much more fun(and easy to model!) I programmed him in, and will maybe include more defences later.

DAY 7) Implemented the Kool-Aid resource, which you build a stockpile of to increase loyalty, and to use on ‘Judgement Day’. If loyalty is getting low, you can drench your followers in Kool-Aid, temporarily raising loyalty. We’re also thinking of recruiting people via Kool-Aid, so in the late game you can mass-recruit by using some of your stockpile. The FBI also now has an effect, as they wander around your base, buildings they ‘investigate’ will  become inactive for a time, so you need to direct them tower-defence style, or bribe them away.

DAY 8) Pathfinding. I had been putting it off, since it always leads to days of bug hunting, but we’re getting to the point that cars driving through buildings starts to look odd. Unfortunately, since we have dynamic building placement in the cult plantation I can’t use a plain old navmesh. I have a couple options.

The first and simplest is to only lay out waypoints along the road between the town and plantation. You can only control the exact position of the van when it is in the town, it is otherwise just travelling along the waypoints or waiting at the plantation. This may be counter-intuitive, but will focus the role of the van (it doesn’t need to be moved around the plantation)

The second is to lay out a grid of nodes in the plantation (and elsewhere), and when a building is placed, I disable those nodes, so when a unit is looking for a path it knows it can’t go there. This will be slower and harder to implement, but if we ever want units to be controllable in the plantation it’s really the only method. I’m open to other possibilities, so if anyone knows what might work…

That’s it for now! Check back in a couple of weeks, when I will be going over the (hopefully)final stretch.

Go to Part 3

NOTE: This is reposted on AltDevBlogADay, which is full of interesting articles by devs of many flavours.

As the ‘programmer’ on this game, this dev diary will go over code techniques and structures I’m using, and some of the lessons and tips I’m learning, in the hope it will help, or at least be of interest, to somebody. It will mostly cover basic practice, but may delve into more advanced stuff if I end up going that way. Also, since this is a somewhat different breed of game than what I usually make, I’m coding it almost entirely from scratch, so I’ll be experimenting as a go along. For more up-to-the minute progress reports, see our thread on the Club’s forums.

DAY 1) Implemented camera movement. Scroll via sides of screen or keyboard. No plans for rotation or zoom right now, and cam height is locked. Gameplay will mostly be about buying/placing buildings, so I’m also laying out the base class of buildings. Have logic for selecting building from GUI and placing in place.

DAY 2) Robert has finished first bunch of models of the town that you must recruit people from. Putting in the essential state-logic, like cash reserves, followers, and FBI interest. I’m laying out the base class for all the people, and putting in the basic logic for the ‘Recruiter’  class. With delicious beer in hand.

To minimise redundant code, I’m using interfaces and inheritance more heavily than I usually would in a Unity project. Usually the component/gameobject structure makes it less necessary to use such constructs. For an FPS say, you would have a Gun component, of which you would change properties to change the gun type. In  this project, for example, I have an abstract building class that handles placement, while each  building type has it’s own code to do whatever it is that the building does. In a similar vain I have a plain ‘Follower’ class, from which inherits the various classes of character. Interfaces are useful for, say, selectable objects.

Putting in first hint of gameplay, the loop of sending recruiters out to convert people to your noble cause. Setting up building placement and basic AI (wandering, conversion, allocating amongst buildings…)

DAY 3) I work (my day job) and get wet in this horrible NYC weather.

More crying will come. Feedback/questions are more than appreciated, and if any one wants to join in, you have until the end of the month, so give it a shot! Ask around on the forums if you want t o help another group/person, or be brave and try something yourself.

Go to Part 2

NOTE: This is also posted on AltDevBlogADay, a wonderful site for blogs from gamedevs of all sorts.

Fucking Run is a first person ‘dodge the obstacles’ game, where you have to dodge pits as you run down a corridor. The ‘twist’ is you have to keep looking behind to avoid the big flashing cubes creeping up on you. I’d give it 5-mins before it gets too hard/boring. With that glowing endorsement, try it out here!

- Web (needs Unity plugin) (113KB)

- Win (6.9MB)

- Mac (13MB)

Anyway, look out for a beta for Muckraker as well as a “Dev Diary” of sorts in the next couple of weeks.