LD48 Art Update

In my last post, I vaguely waved my hands across the features and process. In particular the art process, as I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I also knew it would be better to show than tell.

Layout, Sizing, & Painting "runes" with Kids.

This was the first thing on the list of scope and it's done now. It was a moderate mess and there was some bathing and time with the washing machine, but the results are awesome.

Here were some Art Theme elements mentioned in the previous design post:

• Inspirations : kids toys, pb&j sandwiches, northern european runes and stone tiles, little kids finger paint art
• Game Element Colors : Yellow, Red, Blue, Green

And here's how that turns out in practice:

 

Drawing the runes..

Using the Norse Futhark Magickal Alphabet...

 Here they are spelling Crafty...

 Taking pictures at each step...

 Untouched rune...

 Placing base colors...

 Professional assistance... (if this disqualifies my artistic integrity then oh well.)

 Finished product... and now you see what is Beneath The Surface.

LD48 Game Design

Ludum Dare 48 : Beneath The Surface is underway, nearly halfway done, and I only just finished my design. That was sort of intentional. I have two young kids and I was probably up early enough this morning that other LD participants were still awake (6am...nice sleep in for me.)

I considered doing a Dig Dug Retrospective, where you drill down into the ground and find dinosaur bones and old game references that were from the same year as the original Dig Dug. Would be fun and pixel artsy, but there's no real "game" creation there.

Writing a short song

The art and craft of making games is like other forms of art creation. If you want to write a song, you don't start with an 8 minute power ballad. Try making some 2 minute ideas that have a short solo section and simple lyrics. I did that for awhile and it was great. So I'm approaching LD48 in the same way. It's super compressed already so there's a discipline in scoping.

In fact, one part of how I thought of this is like a two minute song. If someone can play my LD submission for 2-3 minutes, get some delight and joy out of it, then mission accomplished.

It's a game not a place

So what is a game, right? Beneath the Surface is a great theme, but I believe that approaching it as a location or a noun is incorrect.

Games are all about verbs. Finding something beneath the surface is about exploration -- one of the oldest and greatest game themes. Exploration it is. And that is exploration of mechanics that take you below the surface of something.

A lot of my brainstorm came while dealing with the kids, eating pizza, making sandwiches and watching them play. Kids play naturally. It's all about fitting things, and moving things, and how things open and close. It seemed interesting to me to compose those elements into a short puzzle experience that adds the element of things beneath the surface to a tile game.

 

Part of the joy of the game is the discovery (exploration) of the mechanics, which are intentionally not spelled out. That increases the whimsy and reduces scope for me. I took the time to compose all the elements of the game, from colors to fonts to verbs to programming elements.

Part of this game is going to be discovery for me too! I intentionally did NOT design the risk/reward elements. I want to get the core verbs working and then discover where things are myself. I know iteration and polish are what will make it good, so I am not going to worry about that. Again, this is like writing a great song. Leave the solo for later and let it come on it's own. Don't force it!

A good game has three elements: Information, Randomness and Risk. I've got the Information part mostly sorted. Randomness should be easy in a tile puzzle game. And Risk is going to be balancing. Notice that I am not focusing on Reward. That is usually just good animations and ching ching noises when you win and particles and such. I'm not saying it's not important, but it is polish. And the real stickiness comes from good design that leverages those things.

Here is my Game Design. This actually means something to me. I'll drop the scope below that. I estimate 13 hours of work, which is already too much. Oh well.

Crafty - a tile puzzle game

Theme : Beneath the Surface                                                                   
Mechanic : Exploration, Puzzle with several layers on tiles                                   
Personality : Crafty
Game Scope : Tile Puzzle Game where tiles have multiple levels of verbs and imagery           
Name : Crafty - a tile puzzle game
Verbs :
    Slide
    Flip Horizontal
    Flip Vertical
        Fold Open Horizontal
        Fold Open Vertical
        Fold Open FourWay
            Stay As One
            Split Into Two (two ways - vertical or horizontal)                                
            Split Into Four (three ways - double vertical, double horizontal, or four way)    
Art Theme :
    Size : less than 320 x 480 (iPhone4)                                                      
    Font : Antenna if I can get it, and a Runic font                                          
    Inspirations : kids toys, pb&j sandwiches, northern european runes and stone tiles, little kids finger paint art
    Crafty Animations : things open and close and fold and such                               
    Game Element Colors : Yellow, Red, Blue, Green                                            
    Neutral Color : Denim Blue, Grey                                                          
    Foreground Color : Cream, Off-white                                                       
    Hilight Color : Mushroom Red                                                              
    Tile Shapes slightly rounded off squares                                                  
Tech : DART
Design Elements :                                                                             
    Board Size : 1x1 (start), 3x3 (first real level), 5x5, 7x7 (mushrooms), 9x9 (eggs), 11x11 (final level?)
Design Iteration Elements :
    Rewards : Mushrooms and Eggs - not sure how this works yet, but drop them in the board at start of new levels.
    Risk System : cost system. there has to be failure. don't know this yet. how can it be "crafty"?
    Compulsion : it needs to be satisfying to do every verb [in a crafty way] - likely animation and sound
    Scoring System : very important - TBD but need a score board
Programming Elements :
    Basic 3d Rendering with textures
    Mouse or Touch Input
    Simple Animations
Polish :
    Particle System or Short Animations
    Sound on Clicks
    Background Music
    Ability to separate data from code - load new levels

Scope:

Total: 13 hours
o  4:00 : making art
    o  0:15 : doing layout and sizing
    o  3:00 : painting "runes" with kids
    o  0:15 : getting photos loaded from phone and sized
    o  0:15 : cleaning up textures
o  3:00 : making sound
    o  1:00 : making sound effects
    o  2:00 : writing and performing background music
o  2:10 : basic framework with tiles
    o  1:00 : basic dart framework visible
    o  0:20 : board with background, title, copyright
    o  0:10 : board with six board sizes (1x1 - 11x11)
    o  0:20 : render a basic tile
    o  0:10 : ability to change rendering color/texture
    o  1:00 : simple animation system
    o  0:10 : simple scoreboard
o  2:30 : gameboard verbs:
    o  0:15 : slide square
    o  0:10 : slide rectangle
    o  0:05 : slide double rectangle
    o  0:20 : flip
    o  0:20 : fold open
    o  0:30 : fold open four way                                                              
    o  0:20 : split
    o  0:30 : change board size
o  2:00 : polish
    o  1:20 : better animations : fades, pulses, etc
    o  0:30 : sound on clicks
    o  0:10 : background music

#LD48 Ludum Dare "Beneath The Surface" underway.

I promised myself (and Mike) that I would finally do a Ludum Dare. I've been wanting to do one since I first heard about them, but always crunching on professional game projects or family obligations. Note, my 3 year old has already interrupted this blog once.

But it's going to happen. I will take a shot at this, and for your pleasure, I will outline as much of the design process as I can.

A couple gamer buddies want to do it as a team, but we are going to do the solo competition instead and keep each other up with morale support. Maybe next time we will do a team. But for my part, I have so little time this will be an exercise in restraint and organization.

What I do have going for me:

• Years and years (decades really) of professional and personal game development experience.
• I can code.
• I can write.
• I have kids who can do art...ahem, I mean you won't be able to tell the difference.
• I promised both myself and Kasprzak I would do it.

Next post will be my design thoughts, and you may find them a little different than what you've seen before. Enjoy...

Happy New Year all you Imps.


Zero Punctuation - Imp Hoody design @ ©

Doors

Well, we are in the midst of the holidays. Everyone is sick. And work is getting ready to gear up for the New Year crunch. I finally had a moment at a coffee shop this last week, while waiting for someone, and got in a quick 20 minutes on the WishfulRPG! That's the true beauty and fun of this ridiculous project. It's only 20 minutes stints.

Doors. I implemented doors.

They are a deceptively tricky game feature to do. They essentially amount to all sorts of special case code dependent on events and so forth, but this is exactly the kind of feature you want to implement to see if your game code is structured correctly.

In short, mine isn't. Yet. But I know what to fix. For now, it works, and working goes a long, long way when you are rapidly prototyping things. You are better off throwing things together quickly and getting them working, than spending hours or days or weeks pontificating on elegant designs.

Partially, this is because elegant designs unveil themselves with experience. And partially because when making digital creations, we are not making physical castles. It's easy to change things and throw things out (provided you haven't accrued too much code debt.) It's also very easy to over design something before you build it.

So doors are working, crapfully.

The problem is that all the terrain is tiles, but a tile is just a sprite that can be rendered. And there is a collision model provided by pygame. Really, what we want is a snap-together component model for game objects. That is to say, you can add on the ability to collide to an object. Or an object can be a tile. And it can be a trap. And a animated particle system. And it can play a unicorn fart noise when the avatar steps on it. Etc and so on.

So this means a fundamental rewrite and some foundation work to get a component system going for all these attributes and event responses and so forth. But I am going to put that off, and instead implement some portcullises, and sliding blocks, and triggers and other things. In a nasty and messy way. This should let me have an idea of just how I want everything to be cleaned up. So once I have some non-trivial stuff working, then we can fit it to a more elegant weapon for a civilized age. I should probably put a mob in there as well.

Company Killers

It's been a little while since I put up an update. I made a huge amount of progress on the last prototype, getting a nice set of basic needs features in and cleaned up. Also, I set up a local code repository so that I have some history and won't worry about making changes or losing code. More on that another day.

This is a quick post on the nature of RPGs with regards business. Part of this blog premise is that everyone -- and by "everyone" of course we refer to a small set of Games Industry people who grew up with a deep seated love for one or another great old RPG, from the most dedicated junior QA guy to the jaded exec producer who has seen it all -- everyone wants to make an RPG.

Whether the concept is the classic quartet trope of fighter-priest-archer-mage or a "innovative" romp into the realms of a futuristic science fiction "twist" never before seen that turns the RPG on its head, they are all laden with scads of items and weapons and toys and rods and monsters of every shape and dimension and hidden villages in the obligatory lava-ice-forest-desert locale.

The key word here is lots. If you indulge anyone about their pet RPG, it's almost like asking about their D&D character. "Let me tell you about my dark elf ranger...." "Let me tell you about my Japanese demon RPG idea..."

"It's got LOTS of cool monsters and LOTS of great weapons and armor and LOTS of..."

When doing design on any game, you can usually spot poor design discipline in the concept of "more is better". If something is cool, then two must be cooler. And hundreds is mega-cool. RPGs are famous for this. Diablo is one of the best examples, and in those cases it really works.

But let's talk budget for a second. RPGs have monsters and locations and items and weapons galore. Often they will add skills and spells and mounts and classes as well. Each one of these systems takes time to design. And they take art to create. And they take programmers to implement. And if you are trying to do anything more than the most basic sprites with color changes (red slime, green slime, blue slime, meme slime), then this budget gets wildly out of hand super fast.

"Oh, but Square does it all the time", you cry! And what about Blizzard!?

Well these companies have nearly unlimited budgets. And truth be told they have extremely good design discipline. There are a lot of internal checks and balances. And they are also, simply-put lucky.

The title of this post is "Company Killers" which is the Industry slang term for RPGs. They are considered company killers because they suck such massive resources that the end result rarely is able to pay back the cost of development. There are lots of stories of otherwise healthy companies that have had a string of successful (critical and/or financial) games, embarking on someone's personal RPG (or more commonly these days MMO-RPG) and that is the last project that company attempts before closing it's doors.

So grab a mug of ale, join in on the wishful RPG meme, and raise a toast to all those past companies that tried and failed and are no more.

Of Serpents And Apples

I'm a big fan of python.

It's a great language that just about anyone can learn. I often recommend it as a good first language for young programmers and for designers or professionals who express a desire to learn programming.

The language is elegant and powerful, but doesn't bog down in a lot of the typical quicksand that people get stuck in when trying to get something working. So you get a lot done quickly, and that motivates you to stay with it. It's not an ideal performance language, but it's "good enough" for most non-critical tasks...like say writing a Wishful RPG in a few 20 minutes weeknight sessions before bed.

For making games, there is a great module called PyGame. It's what we're using for WishfulRPGs.

Another great thing about Python is that it runs on a mac. While I have used every type of computer under the sun, and at work am usually limited to a specific platform for the kind of development we're doing, for my personal computer I have used Apple powerbooks for ... well since they were called the Apple IIc -- the c stands for "compact".

Years ago, I had a seminal Apple buying conversation with my friend Quinn. The topic of size came up, and the best advice was given: (paraphrased) "Get the smallest Powerbook. The 13". It's more convenient to carry, so you'll take it more places, and thus use it more."

While some of the larger ones are kind of cool, it's easier and better (and cheaper) to get a large separate monitor. That said, I never need it. And again always have a large set up at work. My laptop goes with me everywhere, and I am cozy and happy tip-typing on a couch at home or a comfy chair at the coffee shop or on the train, etc.

The point is one of convenience and joy. All those little 20 minutes sessions can add up to a lot of good creative output. In game development, the key is little iterations and experiments. You'd think that the name "game" development would tip people off to the fact that the only way to be successful is to "play".