A Long Textual Explanation of the Game I'm Making

Hello lonely reader of my blog (I refer to myself when I say this) here is an update about what I'm doing. I've thought long and hard trying to find the perfect design for my game this summer (all the while working on a basic 2d engine as I said before) and I was struggling. Like I said earlier, I believe in video games as a medium perfect for emotional expression as well as artistry and I really wanted to try doing something in that vein this summer. In the end I've decided against it. Though I really want to create something which a player can feel emotionally invested in, I also believe that the gameplay absolutely can't suck (I'm looking at you hordes of retro flash games with touching storylines, haunting music and boring gameplay). However, this is a big task, finding a tale, a feeling that you want to convey and then creating meaningful gameplay that brings those things to the forefront. I am confident in my ability to do this and have narrowed out some basic ideas, but with such a limited time span and a workforce consisting of only me (have I mentioned I am unbelievably god-awfully bad at drawing anything even remotely more complicated than a scribble) I don't think I could make something that would not fall in the trap of just being not at all fun to play.

This is why I have decided to take another route, I'm focusing solely on the gameplay, building an experience that is just purely fun and challenging, letting everything else come second (hey, maybe I am good enough to do everything, only time will tell). The game I'm making is a platformer (yes, the indie dev FPS) that is a cross between a room based puzzle game (think Angry Birds or The Company of Myself ) and a more expansive platformer style like Metroid or Castlevania or Cave Story or Knytt or etc... The idea is to have semi-large explorable worlds as self contained levels that need to be completed one after the other. I have quite nailed this part down yet, but the game the way to beat each level is likely going to be to find all of the collectibles hidden within it (they would be sparse, easy to see, but hard to reach).

The primary tool given to the player is (apart from jumping) the ability to shoot two different colored shots out of his gun. These shots do not affect enemies, however they affect the environment. One color raises any block that is shot and the other lowers it. It's like gravity suddenly turns on for that block in the direction corresponding to the type of shot the block was hit with (note that I haven't decided any kind of setting for this game yet as I am focusing on gameplay, meaning the player may not have a "gun" and gravity almost certainly won't be the explanation given behind his level manipulation powers). Every part of every level in the game can be manipulated in this way, however given that the player can only shoot either left or right I have found it easy to make it so that the player can't fundamentally break the level (by removing the floor for example). Enemies must be squished to be killed and platforms must be rode to success. This is meant to be both a puzzle and action game.

Reading that last paragraph I realize it makes just about zero sense, or at the very least is hard to follow without some visual aid. I would embed the basic prototype here, which would make this post make a hell of a lot more sense, but I'm planning on making an awesome post about the camera system tomorrow, and I don't want two posts with the exact same embedded prototype. Since I don't have any readers, nobody will be here to witness the one day this explanation is without the prototype to aid in clarification.

More to come tomorrow on camera's in open-world 2d platformer games.

What I'm Working On

So, here it is, the game I'm working on this summer. I'm proud to announce: nothing. What I mean is I'm not quite sure yet what it is I'm going to make. I've toyed with a few design ideas, but so far nothing is completely set in stone yet, and thus not something I'm going to talk about.

See, here's what happened, I did a bunch of research right before the summer trying to decide what platform/development environment I wanted to use for creating this game I had in mind. I chose Unity for it's ease of use, built in multiplatform support and because I wanted to try out a more visual editor for a change. I also used the 2DToolkit add-on in order to support sprites (it's awesome by the way). After quite a bit of learning, and some quick prototyping of an idea I had, I came to the conclusion that for what I was aiming to make (a simplistic 2d game), Unity was just too good. That is, it had many built in features that I would never use, and I just felt like I was wrestling with the program trying to make it abandon all it's built in physics and collisions so I could just write everything myself. Sure it is doable, and I definitely want to use Unity in the future, but for this simple 2d project it simply wasn't the right fit.

So now I'm using FlashDevelop and Flashpunk, coding everything in ActionScript 3. So far it's been really awesome, allowing me more easily accessed low-level freedom and due to my familiarity with this sort of framework it's really sped up my workflow.

Now, as to what I am actually making, I can't quite tell you, as I'm not entirely sure myself. Thematically, I know where I'm going, and I have a few basic gameplay interactions floating around in my head, but I don't have anything absolutely concrete yet. Now, I'm not just twiddling my thumbs, in fact, the reason I don't have a clear design right now is because I spent so much time prototyping another idea in Unity that failed miserably (it was thematically identical to what I'm doing now, so I won't talk about that part of it). Let's just say I could not get the underwater-based movement to feel anything but absolutely floaty and arbitrary (you controlled the player character based on increasing/decreasing his weight). As a firm believer that in most cases, moving the player around the world needs to be a fun action, I abandoned the idea for now (maybe one day I can try to understand fluid physics better).

Just to clarify, I'm a big proponent for games as a medium perfect for emotional expression, and that's what I'm trying to do here (but sadly I'm going to have to try with bad art). That's why when I say that thematically I know what I'm doing, I mean I know the style and emotion I'm trying to bring across, but it's integrating it into some sort of meaningful gameplay that is actually fun that is slowing me down. Oh well, I love this process.

So for now, I'm making a 2d tile based engine in flash so that I get something done while I keep refining my ideas. As of now I've completed the level-editor, which is way more comprehensive than any editor I've made before. It's really cool in that it allows levels to be made on the fly during gameplay (pausing time in order to do it) as well as dynamic saving and loading during run-time. This will allow me to quickly test different level design ideas very rapidly and is also just super cool. Right now the editor only supports placing static "blocks", but adding different entities as they get made is trivial as the whole thing is modular and easy to build upon. Also, the levels are saved as xml's because, well, I like xml's.

So here are some screenshots, and yes, that is the sprite from Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (awesome game) and the blocks are from Metroid (both are obviously placeholder).

So here it is in "play" mode

And this is "edit" mode, toggled with escape

Why Maps in Games Suck (Especially Minimaps)

Hey, another update here, I'm not going to go into talking about my game yet (which may or may not be the main focus of this blog) as it's not quite ready yet, but I do have something else to talk about: minimaps.

So, this might sound absolutely completely random, and to be fair it is, but it's something I was thinking about recently. You see, I was playing Rage the other day (yeah, I know it came out a while ago, but I found it for 15$ at Walmart) and I noticed something irritating about how you navigate around the world. The game has 3 fundamental level types if you want to call them that (and I do), open-world wasteland, cities and linear gameplay segments (either racing or shooting). The navigation issue I noticed was with the first two levels types.

You see, the gameplay in the wasteland pretty much exclusively consists of commute, that is, going from the city or linear area to another linear area. The issue is this, the wasteland is huge and, while very pretty, everything looks the same. This makes it very hard to situate yourself in the world and makes it impossible for the average gamer to have any idea where the Wasted Garage or an other particular area they are being told to visit actually is in relation to where they are. This problem isn't specific to Rage, having plagued open-world games since their very beginnings, and neither is it's way of addressing it : the minimap.

The minimap in Rage is immensely useful as it has this little dotted line GPS-style thing that tells you where to go. Many games have this. It sucks. This type of system means that you are playing with your eyes on the minimap, following the little dot that is you make his way along the dotted line until you either meet enemies, or get where you wanted to go. Again, this sucks. Nobody wants to play GPS the Interactive Experience, it's just no fun. Not to mention it represents a colossal waste of manpower making the world you travel around so pretty. I've beaten Rage, but for the life of me, I can only vaguely remember what the wasteland looked like. I can, however, make you a detailed drawing of the minimap if you wanted me too. Now, Rage didn't take the worst possible solution, there are significantly worse ways of doing this, Burnout Paradise for example worked exactly the same way, except there was no minimap, only a full scale map in the pause screen. It was tons of fun to just idly drive around, but the race from point A to point B segments might as well have been called pause screen segments, as you had to check the map on said screen at almost every intersection.

Follow the dotted brick road

Now, what is the obvious solution? No minimap, that way people will have to learn the way of the land and end up feeling like they know where they are. Problem is, as Rage's map-less city sections proves, unless your world is expertly designed to be easy to navigate (and typically this means it needs to be relatively small), you just get lost all time and end up endlessly  running in circles.

These navigation issues might sound like a minor inconveniences (ok maybe not that last one), but they seriously hurt the experience in just about any game plagued by these issues. You always either feel completely, hopelessly lost, or mindless, blindly following the minimap-road to success.

Now, some games do this type of thing much better, though none of them do it perfectly. The open world Bethesda games have an awesome compass system that points you in the direction of things, allowing you to wander with a vague idea of where you are going (you can pull up the map if you are really lost though). This type of system promotes exploration and slight path deviation and, more importantly, actually looking at the screen. The problem with this system is that it works best in very open environments with very few things that can block you from making a straight line to to your destination, but not so well in other environments. This is very evident in Skyrim, with it's huge mountain ranges. I can not count the amount of times I trekked for a very long time towards the little indicator on my compass only to realize I had made a wrong turn 20 minutes away that now had me slowly circling the foot of a mountain to get to my objective which was exactly on the other side.

This thing is seriously awesome

Other games take a different approach, Red Faction: Guerrilla had a really cool system where the aforementioned GPS minimap trail would show up holographically over the roads as soon as you sat in a car. This is awesome, because your get to actually have fun looking at the world and driving the car rather than staring at a minimap. Unfortunately, even though the GPS adjusts when you go off course, the system still seriously hurts exploration, as you know the fastest and most correct way to get where you are going and have little reason to deviate from it. I never played the third or first one, but I know Fable 2 had this kind of system as well.

I couldn't find a picture of the Red Faction Guerrilla GPS trail, but here is the one in Fable 2

So what is the ideal solution? I don't know. Maybe it's creating smaller tighter worlds with more memorable landmarks which allow the player to know where they are at all time simply by recognizing the locale. That's cool, but lets face it, Skyrim was awesome because it was a whole country, Skyrim: Whiterun Edition, wouldn't of been that great.

Well, who knows what the answer is, but at the very least it's something interesting to think about, a game design puzzle, I know I'll be thinking about it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Hello World

Welcome to the inaugural post of my game dev blog, here I'll talk about what I've done so far in game development and what I plan to do in the future. My name is Paul Suddaby and I'm a Computer Science major entering second year. I'm spending the summer making an as of yet unnamed game and this blog is where I'll talk about that game and my creation process, mostly for myself, but for those reading, you can enjoy it too.

But first I'm just going to show you guys the projects I've previously done (at least the ones that aren't on my dead hard drive).

So, first off, I took part in the 21st Ludum Dare (my first and only Ludum Dare so far) and made a game called Followed, which you can find the competition entry page for here and I blogged about it on my Ludum Dare page. I was pretty happy with the results, as I got 8th in fun and tied for 15th overall. Here's a screenshot.

Next I did my part in a team during the 2011 Great Canadian Appathon where we made a cute little fishing game that next us a beautiful 1000$ in prize money for winning Best Application Concept and placed us in the top 10 in canada. I have a screenshot for you (P.S, it's also a part of the blog background), but the rest of this project got destroyed along with my old laptop (which a friend of mine jumped on). Also, it's on Windows Phone 7, and statistically speaking, it's safe to assume you don't have one.

Last but not least, there's my Global Game Jam entry for this year, also with a team, that ended up becoming Solstice (again, it's a competition page). We tied for first place in the competition, so I was definitely happy. One of the artists, Wilson Yeung and I turned it into this. It's a flash game, but it was never fully prepared for publishing as it doesn't have an ending so the files are still scattered. All you need to do is open the zip file you'll download and then drag the swf into any browser. 

There are also some XNA projects I worked pretty hard on, including my Metroidvania engine with a player levelling system and the element-shifting-phase-walking puzzle game that I personally really liked, but those are unfortunately lost in the abyss of my destroyed hard drive.

So, that's pretty much me, keep on reading in the coming weeks to hear about my next badass project. I promise the posts won't be this long. This blog is sort of centred around being a forum for design discussion, as that's where my true passion lies. If you have any comments on this or any future posts, do not hesitate to reply below or send me an e-mail at psuddaby@gmail.com. Blogs are only as good as the readers, so guys and girls, it's on you.