As I mentioned before I spent my weekend participating in the global game jam at NYU. Long story short I found a team and we made a game although one that isn’t quite as fun as I’d like. That game is Dead Sea, a puzzle game about trying to eliminate the fish populations of the world using only two tools, harpoons and predatory species. Overall it was a great experience and was unlike any of the ludumdare competitions that I’ve done before. So without further ado here is the postmortem.
What went well:
The first thing that I think went well was that I spent a bit more time than most people trying to find a team. With over a hundred people at the event there were a plethora of ideas to choose from including standard genres as well as ideas that I never thought would work in a million years. I bounced around between several groups where I heard lots of ideas for platformer, dinosaur and zombie games before finally meeting up with a bunch of other people who were undecided. We all pitched our ideas and broke into several groups instead of being roped into making a game that I wasn’t fully committed to.
The next thing that went well was paper prototyping our game. After deciding on the initial plan for game having two people playtesting and refining it constantly was extremely helpful and freed up a lot of time for me as the programmer to work on implementation without worrying if what I was doing would be fun. I think that the fact that all of our levels require a fair amount of thought once you understand the game mechanics and can be won or lost without taking trivial actions is a huge achievement even if we didn’t provide enough feedback to the player about their actions.
One core idea we kept throughout the entire development process was keeping the game simple. While additional gameplay ideas crept in over the course of the weekend the core of the game did not change since early in the day saturday. This gave us a fallback in case we had to cut anything or switch to working on graphics or sound then at least our core gameplay was intact.
What didn’t go well:
It’s always a challenge to complete a game in 48 hours and there are several things I would have done differently if given the chance. First of all while I like the simplicity of having a single programmer it would have been nice to have a split between two people one working purely on gameplay and the other on interface graphics and sound. If this were the case I would have been able to squeeze in several more gameplay elements as well as xml level formats so that we could have done more playtesting of the compiled game without having to make a new build each time. Also I think this would have allowed us to increase the feedback we provided to the player. Animated arrows for actions as well as action sounds would have gone a long way. Unfortunately these things had to be cut because there isn’t enough time to do it all.
The next thing that I wish had gone a bit differently was our team composition. What we had was good but it would have been nice to have had a dedicated artist as well as a sound guy and possibly another programmer. The art and sound assets we did get were great but I think that without the addition of another programmer it would have been difficult to squeeze anymore in. As it stands we already had to cut most of our sound assets.
The final thing I would have done differently is to not try and use a new library at the last minute. I’ve been meaning to move to openal from fmod for ages and I decided to try and fit it in with an hour and a half left to go. After failing to get it working properly I had to revert back to fmod. It would have been nice to not lose those forty five minutes so that I could have gotten more of our sounds in the game.
To wrap it up this has probably been the most fun 48 hour competition that I’ve participated in. Even though we didn’t win any of the categories I had a great time and met a ton of great people and overall I’m very proud of what we managed to accomplish together. I’d like to thank Margaret Moser, Ricardo Delgado, Nathaniel Chambers and Chirs Makris for their part in creating this game. And now before I forget you can download the game here(source code is included) or at our game jam page here.
The post on ld about which tools should be allowed in the competition has inspired me to try and create better tools for making my own games. I typically develop with c++ but when it comes to gui’s and rapid development it isn’t my first choice. So I decided to try throwing something together in c#. Thanks to the tao framework I was able to get a opengl window up in running in a windows forms app. Right now I’m just fooling around and haven’t committed to making anything specific but hopefully this will let me make better editors than notepad in the future.
Just wanted to post a few screens I took while playing around with L-systems. Not sure how much application they have to games but you could make some pretty nice trees or randomized levels with them. I’ll probably try animating some bracketed L-systems next.
I was bored while waiting for a friend at Starbucks so I knocked out a quick implementation of Conway’s game of life. Was really easy to do quickly and it’s very fun to play around with. While playing with it, it accidentally created a glider as well as a giant oscillator. Anyways, here’s a screenshot because I like posting them.
I also did a bit of work on some other games but I really don’t have much to say about them. Going back to writing code for research so my output here may drop off. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to participate in the latest LD14 because of exams.
It’s been too long since I’ve worked on anything game related so I decided to start working on a city builder. Not sure if it will ever amount to anything or if it will just get filed away never to be seen again like so many of the projects I start. I guess the goal would be to mash it together with a tactical turn based rpg. Anyways, here’s how it looks at the moment.
Wow, it’s been a while since I actually did this playtest but I guess I’ll go ahead and post it. So, I decided to give non-computer game design a try.
The game ended up playing a lot differently than I expected. I think the largest shock was how far off my estimates of playtime were. We ended up playing through the first third of the game twice(because the last 2/3’s weren’t finished yet) and each game ended up taking 45min to an hour which is just under what I would like the total playtime for the game to be. It was also nice to get constructive feedback early on.
Here’s another picture:
What I would do differently:
I would schedule another playtest about a week after the first one. Just from playing games I know that they play differently after you play them a few times and differently again later on when you master them. Also, from writing computer games I know it can be a humbling experience when after you’ve playtested your game to death and maybe had some friends play it, that some complete stranger just doesn’t get it because you aren’t there to hold their hand while they learn. I’d like to see a playtest where I’m not involved in playing the game at all. It’s still in the early stages where every turn I want to tweak the gameplay in one way or another after every move and this came up quite a bit in the initial test.
I still have plenty of prototyping supplies sitting around and I do intend to finish it one day but who knows when that will be.
Doing hardware accelerated vector rendering has been something I’ve been interested trying for a long time so I spared a bit of time to get started with it this week. So far I’ve been able to render quadratic bezier curves in closed paths and ellipses which you can see in the screenshot below.
I’m still working on getting cubic beziers and stroked paths working but so far I’m very happy with the results. Because the curve is drawn using a pixel shader I never have to worry about zooming too far or having my polygon approximation of the curve be apparent which is currently the case with my gravity game. Also if you haven’t seen it check out masagin. Here’s a video if you don’t feel like downloading it, but you should because the video doesnt do it justice.
As far as I can tell he just approximates the curves with polygons and doesn’t use a shader to evaluate the actual curve. It still looks excellent but you can see that the curvature isn’t perfect when the camera zooms in really close on some of the elements. I’m working on parsing svg files at the moment so hopefully I’ll have some more examples soon, including the svg tiger.
Also here’s a zip with a few papers I’ve found if anybody else is interested in messing around with this stuff.
And alliteration in my titles. Made some more menus for my gravity game with some cool transitions. Sol’s interpolation tutorial was helpful but ultimately I didn’t end up using any of the methods he went over. Instead I used a pair of cascaded low pass filters. You can set the damping ratio and frequency and get a range of interesting behavior out of it.
Level select screen:
And the options menu:
And here’s a download link if you want to try it out:
And now I’ll go back to starting more projects I won’t finish and self aggrandizing, but that should be fairly obvious by this point if you’ve kept up with my blog.
Dead Sea Postmortem
