Monday 31 July 2017

Drug Enforcement Astronauts

DEA is a pixel-perfect 2D platformer with tight, responsive controls, fast-paced decision-making and a huge arsenal of gadgets and weapons - all in the realm of couch co-op multiplayer. The game features  a mixture of puzzles, platforming, wits, and high octane face-offs with hundreds of enemies onscreen at once. You have the freedom to choose exactly how you beat each stage - hoarde devastating weapons, strike from the shadows, re-wire electronics, deploy bait and traps, mind-control creatures, mount people and ride them, boss it with your mad free-running skills or mix up your build!

The future is a bleak dystopia. The galaxy as we know it has been populated by beings from far and wide. With the ever increasing stresses and complications of the intergalactic lifestyle, drug dependency  started to soar higher than ever. The people are addicted to drugs. The animals are addicted to drugs. Even the drugs are addicted to drugs. Now, ruthless, iron-fisted drug cartels own over 40% of the galaxy. A group of militant ex-law-enforcers form an underground movement - aptly naming themselves the DEA. They have taken the law into their own hands.





Monday 3 July 2017

Wiring and Colour Coding

It's been a while since I've updated the blog, so I thought I'd share something that's been a consideration for a very long time. The game now incorporates a wiring system, allowing players and enemies alike to activate and deactivate props throughout the level. This system also gives players using the editor a vast amount of control in level design! Anyone can make complex, logic-driven levels using a simple and elegant design.

Crazy things happening
Essentially, all of the interactive props in the game (bounce pads, doors, traps, spikes, turrets, etc) are colour coded in red, green, blue, yellow or purple. Props can either be activated or deactivated, determining whether they follow their programmed behaviour or not. Hitting any kind of "activator" of the same colour will toggle all props of the same colour - inverting their state. This allows users to create their own puzzles using the editor, and also gives me the capability to create more puzzle-themed levels.

Pressure plate puzzles involve some teamwork

Smash plates act like pressure plates, except they stay active


A few of the elements married together

This concept is still being developed on, and I soon hope to add more combinations of logic, so people with knowledge of programming or electronics can build even more complex systems! :D



Sunday 5 March 2017

Choice of Arsenal

I want players to feel a sense of complete agency when playing DEA. I don't want the player to feel like they are forced to rely on a particular weapon set. Furthermore, (in my opinion) I feel like by creating a "best" weapon, you are pushing the player to preference certain weapons and gadgets over others. In a game without an RPG-like progression system, this takes emphasis away from all of the other options for the player. DEA will feature a ridiculously large arsenal of weapons and gadgets, each with three abilities which manifest themselves as firing modes, passives, aura effects, utility, and more!

Here's a sneak peek at some of the items the players will have access to throughout the game:

(The formatting of this post has gone horribly, awfully wrong. The preview window looks nothing like the published post. I'm working to try and fix this.)

Fruzi 

This is a light and compact crowd-control weapon which has won over the hearts of human rights activists all over the galaxy for one reason: Fruzi uses quark-manipulating technology to freeze and slow large mobs without causing any physical harm or serious permanent brain damage. The thawing just causes mild permanent brain damage - a step up from the alternative treatment doled out by law enforcement, commonly referred to as "death".

Venorama 

Venorama was secretly developed in an underground bunker without view from the public eye by a group of militant ex police agents. When discovered, they were immediately imprisoned, and it was banned on a galactic basis for being deemed ‘too cruel for use’. Venorama is part biological life form and part weapon. It secretes hallucinogenic poisons, and emits incomprehensible wavelengths of sound and light to completely debilitate foes.

Flow

When Flow was first announced, everybody wanted to get their hands on one. ‘A bracelet that can turn you into a chimp!?’ people would exclaim. Flow allowed the user to morph into different creatures and forms at will. It was a hot piece of tech, and everybody had to have one. However, Flow was gradually discontinued, as the bracelets were linked to serious cell mutations, diseases, and in rare some cases, people could get stuck in their morphed forms forever.


Newtron 

Newtron looks and feels like a magical staff. From its swirling crystal ball to its polished mahogany finish, the whole design is simply a facade to persuade people of magic and is purely aesthetic. Newtron is nothing more than some very powerful technology with an authentic and robust finish. Whoever wields this gadget is able to fling themselves in different directions at will, becoming almost impossible to hit.


Gatecrasher

Gatecrasher was custom-made by a team of engineers against their will, under the order of Sorkoth the heroin clown. When the weapon was completed, Sorkoth had them all executed, and grafted to the weapon to his arm, claiming that anybody wanting the weapon would, quite literally, have to pry it from his cold, dead hands. Gatecrasher releases large balloons which can be ridden, or detonated, to release a blast of noxious gas.


Kronos 

Kronos is the ultimate tactical weapon for stake-outs. It’s also hilarious for pranking people. The bullets, when released, stay dormant in the air, waiting for a signal from the host Kronos. The user can then rewind or play the stored trajectories of the bullets, giving the agent an heir of unpredictable stealth, like a deadly spider waiting in its web, except the web can be manipulated outside of time.


Excalibridge 

It’s standard practice for a security guard to carry Excalibridge. Used to protect the galaxy’s celebrities and VIPs, Excalibridge may look like a large sword, but the inside is packed full of priceless hardware. This allows it to function as a mighty blade for fending off the paparazzi, a mighty bridge to shelter the fragile celebrity, and a mighty distress beacon when things get too hectic.

Vegas 
Vegas is feared and worshipped for its ability to control what the layman would call ‘luck’. Vegas has the ability to spray out flurries of energy which can distort the natural order of the universe – unstable energies can burn through hordes of enemies, destroying all their loot with them, while other (less damaging) wavelengths can extract maximum loot at the cost of pitiful damage.


Capitalism 
Capitalism’s name is derived from the very ethos of modern consumer-capitalism. When powered, it sucks the money from the very pockets of all around it - regardless of their wealth. However, Capitalism is very pricey and hard to obtain, so therefore this act is completely justified, since you worked so hard to attain it.

Nimbus 
Even Zeus would be all, like, totally stoked, and stuff, to be able to get his mitts on this state-of-the-art piece of technology. Nimbus grants the owner the immense power to traverse over clouds – clouds which can emit devastating bolts of lightning at the user’s command.


Vinculum 
Revered and admired by mathematicians and murderers alike, Vinculum is your ultimate solution those impenetrable brutes of flesh and armour. The projectiles are fraction shurikens which alter the physical composition of the target, rather than directly damaging it. The Vinculum refers to the division line you would see in a fraction. Charging up the blast of this weapon causes the denominator of the fraction to decrease, removing that proportion of health from the afflicted target.






Progress Update

Over the course of the past few months, I have found it difficult so balance my social, physical and mental well being. In fact, it's my belief that by improving one aspect of your life, you can damage other aspects. As a developer, it's safe to say that physical health is at the bottom of my priority list, and because of the copious amounts of coffee and sugar going into my body on a daily basis, I save valuable time that I can pour into social and mental aspects of my life. 

I would argue that these aspects of our lives then branch out into more complex systems. We need financial security, hobbies, dreams, aspirations and more! If you then factor in the fact that you need money to stay alive, it can be very difficult to pour all of your attention into your aspirations, and these can end up taking a back seat. WELL, NO LONGER, I SAY!!

I've left my job, saved up some money, made some tough choices, and I'm now ready to pursue game development full-time. This means that I'll be able to keep the blog updated much more frequently and also receive more help on my project than ever before, receiving consultation about the topological design of my game from a more abstracted level, getting the groundwork right, and lastly, starting the whole project from scratch... again.

Due to life's responsibilities, Steve and I will not be able to work on this project together, and we cannot both afford to work the same hours, so instead, I shall be consulting him now and again about my design to get his input. The idea was originally to do a 50/50 split, but to do this would require him leaving his job, turning his life upside down and setting up shop where I live, which is quite a big ask!

This means that I shall be taking on 100% of the development responsibility. I'll be doing the coding, soundtrack, sound design, animation, writing and art work - a hefty workload for one person! However, this leaves me with total creative freedom to create something that I personally feel happy with!

Let's get Schwifty! :D




Tuesday 1 November 2016

Super loading / resolution independence

Recently at the DEA headquarters, Steve implemented a fantastic level-switching mechanic which allows all potential levels to be loaded into RAM (basically how normal developers do it), except because of a few technical thingies that we pulled, we're able to have absolutely loads of maps, blistering with enemies, traps, props, and more, all instantly loaded into RAM and ready to switch. This will allow instant map switching and results in virtually zero load time at the moment (There are lots of empty maps here too (hence the blackness)):




Apart from that, I've started re-hashing the backgrounds within the levels. I've been able to deploy parallax backgrounds for a long time now, but now these need to be made resolution-independent, meaning that they will always originate and shape correctly regardless of whether the player is using an old monitor, or a brand-spanking new 40" HD TV. As of now, I've just chucked in some abstract floating shapes, which will be the basis for full backgrounds, such as forests, citites, planets, etc:



Wednesday 25 May 2016

What can we learn from Mario Maker?

Mario Maker for the Wii U has been getting a lot of attention recently - and for good reason! It has a thriving community, threads dedicated to legendary levels, and an interface that is just absolutely stunning. It may even be appropriate to say that for something so simple in design, this may be the best level editor I've ever stumbled across.

(You should check out this guy's channel by the way. He puts up some awesome videos and he's a ninja at Mario)


So what exactly can we learn from it? Well, for a start, this is just so much more than an editor. Nintendo have created nothing short of absolute genius software here. Tiny little details are littered all over the place. Grabbing icons makes them rhythmically dance and play little sounds, giving some great feedback, and the whole thing looks so friendly and easy to grasp. There's nothing bland going on here. Perhaps one of the coolest things about this is how Nintendo will have had to inevitably re-code almost everything about Mario. The sheer scope of what is possible in Mario Maker creates situations that were never possible in any of the previous Mario titles. It's no coincidence that every object on the screen interacts seamlessly and perfectly - it's all been thoroughly thought out and devised and re-hashed over a huge period of development.

One thing here that I have massive respect for is Nintendo's processing allocation. Over the years, we see developers trying to create games with the best graphics, but with all this processing power available in new consoles, it's nice to see Nintendo use this processing power to create something much more interesting - a huge sandbox that can support hundreds upon hundreds of of complex objects which can interact in ways that Nintendo (probably) did not even foresee. The result gives players the ability to create Mario courses that don't just par with old Mario titles, but actually exceed them in most ways. Check out this example below:


As this video gracefully demonstrates, pretty much any object can be paired with any other object to create some incredible combinations. The interface of the editor is absolutely brilliant. Its simple drag-and-drop interface almost knows what the user wants to do before they do it and cuts out so much work for the creator. As you see the video above, it may seem like a Rube Goldberg Machine of this calibre would be an absolute nightmare to test. However, Nintendo have got you covered. The editor provides instant and seamless switching between the game and the editor:


Have you noticed how you can also drag something into something else to change its contents? You can also stack enemies on top of each other, or attach things together to create things never possible in previous Mario titles. For example, I've seen somebody place a Goomba, then drag a mushroom onto the Goomba to increase its size, then attach wings to the Goomba, and it just works right off the bat.

It is also worth mentioning the smart move played by Nintendo. Levels that people create in Mario Maker can easily be shared, so players are always trying other people's levels whilst sharing their own. This results in a thriving community and keeps the game constantly fresh and evolving. This could, however, lead to people spamming impossible levels. Nintendo aren't silly though, and they designed the editor so that in order to publish a level, you must first complete it yourself to prove its validity. Genius I say!!!!

After keeping a watchful eye on this title for the past few months, we've decided that we need to strive to make our editor better. After all, an editor is essentially a piece of software that takes a very long time to build, but works as an investment, as every level you create afterwards will be created in a fraction of the time! In this day and age as a developer, there really is nothing better than keeping in close contact with your community and allowing your community to express their individuality and talent. We want to create a similar experience where users can share their levels with jet fast speed, teensy file sizes and total ease of access through hopefully integrating with Steam Workshop in the foreseeable future!

In our previous game prototype, we would simply press debug and the game would run for us to test. This created all kinds of problems, such as having to stop debugging, breakpoint, find the error, run it again, then rinse and repeat. After meeting a few long-term developers, they generally say that if your project seems tangible enough to need a debugging system and/or editor, it probably does need one. Because of this, we have created this new solution which runs the game by 3 separate states:

1.) Player Mode
2.) Debug Mode
3.) Editor Mode

Now, as we develop, we can switch between different control states and get fast and responsive information about the game world. This takes us away from the constant cycle of jumping from code to run-time and back again, keeping us in our creative flow without pauses. So, as the game is running in Player Mode, it essentially simulates how the game would look to a player, not allowing for any cheats or hacks, and displaying the full level of graphics.

In Debug Mode, it is very different. Debug Mode shows all of the collision rectangles, displays information everywhere about the game, allows us to tweak and toggle stats and inventories of entities, move them around, change the game rules, etc. At any point, we can switch back to Player Mode, and the game will continue to run with these new changes in place:

Switching between debug and real-time game-play
Just in the same way as Mario Maker, using this system, we can really let our creativity flow. You could, for example, take a huge running leap, then just as you're about to fall, pause the game, switch to the editor, and add some floor under the player, then carry on your run and see if you get a good sense of undisturbed flow. We aim to have this 3-pronged system fully functional in the upcoming month!

Thanks for reading, and check out Mario Maker if you haven't already!

Adding hundreds of Squiddies mid-game - because why not? 

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Embracing change

Thanks again for taking time to read this blog! Hopefully you can learn from a few of our mistakes and save yourself the pain and torment that we caused ourselves. I'd like to talk about scope and ambition, and why this is such an important topic. First of all, I'd like to introduce you to the team:

This handsome chap is me. I'm currently the game designer in charge of the aesthetic direction, story and game-play mechanics. I'm also doing the art and some of the music/sound design for the game. In programming, I specialize in the physics, geometry, collision, animation, interaction and hierarchical structure of code.

Name: Tom
Favourite Colour: new Color(255, 165, 0);
Hobbies: Long walks on the beach, Mojitos and Sex and The City.


This fine specimen is Steve. We've been besties since day one of university. Steve is an absolute programming maverick and can help consult me out of the most dire situations. He specializes in audio engineering, XML, file management, optimization, game flow structure and memory management.

Name: Steve
Favourite Colour: new Color(50, 205, 50);
Hobbies: Bare knuckle boxing, knitting, tap-dancing, horse impersonations, taxidermy.


We've learned a lot over the course of the past five+ years. For one, we learned that starting on your most ambitious title ever is not a good idea if you don't know how to code. Trust me on this one.

I've been making RPG maker games, board games and Game Maker games for over a decade, which has taught me a lot about design. However, when it came to programming something from scratch, I knew nothing up until university. Steve and I sat around in our little student hovel discussing game ideas. We wanted to create something really fun to play, but also something that wasn't ridiculously technical and over-ambitious, like Crysis for example. However, we were in for a shocker!

It turned out that making something as simple as the NES Mario début or even Tetris or Pong was well out of our scope, let alone the idea for this whole game. We were still figuring out how to draw rectangles on the screen and make them move. What would now take us a few minutes would take hours back then! When we finally did implement something we liked, such as a physics-based weapon, it was so horribly implemented that it just couldn't be worked with. So it's safe to say that we've re-hashed this project a good few times now.


My first EVER XNA game - all in a single CS sheet!

The biggest problem with ambitious projects the the tendency to hit a brick wall. For example, if I wanted to hypothetically create an enemy that resembled a Lakitu in Mario...


A Lakitu, in case you've been living in a cave for the past 3 decades
I could quite easily hard-code a fully functional Lakitu in an hour or maybe even less. I could code its movement patterns, behaviour, etc, and have it working pretty much the same as one you would see in a Mario title. Easy lemon something. However, everything in our game runs through specific hierarchies for a few reasons which I can get to a bit later. Because of these hierarchical dependencies, I would have to create a Lakitu which inherited from the Entity class that we devised. This class handles multiple death animations, gibs, responses to damage, bullets, passives, aura effects, has an inventory, complicated physics and more. To add that simple behaviour where the Lakitu swoops from left to right and pursues the player, occasionally dropping Spinies, is simple - but once I had to override the AI Director / Control Manager present in every entity, it soon became clear that this seemingly simple behaviour directly conflicted with the underlying code in the base it inherits from.

This presents us with a forked road situation. On one hand, we want to make a game with lots of enemies, so, for example, say an enemy has a reaction to a bullet, and that reaction is to die, we have to code the appropriate behaviour which causes the enemy to die. Now imagine we create 30 enemy types - We want all 30 to react in the same way to bullets, so do we write that exact same code 30 times? Hell no! We make a base class that has a method inside which handles bullet behaviour, and we only code it once, then we make those 30 enemies all inherit from that base class. It's simple enough, but once we start adding all the complex base behaviours shared by all enemies, we also limit what is now possible for child classes of the base to do, as they must now follow strict guidelines derived from the base class. 

A huge problem that we run into from my personal experience, and the experience of many bloggers I read about, is that programming in itself is fairly easy. Once you understand it, you just create the logic and it does exactly as you tell it (eventually). The hard part with projects like these is doing it in the most efficient way and managing huge mammoths of code. This entails creating a harmonious balance of code that is:

1.) Optimized (runs quickly and efficiently + cheaper hardware can run it + more processing available to add more features)
2.) Cohesive (easy to change and work with + less/neater code on screen)
3.) Flexible (we want cohesive code, but we like flexibility that allows us to break out of these constraints if need be, so that we do not limit game-play variety)

As a general rule of thumb, the easier code becomes to work with, the easier it is to also fall into a false sense of security that your design will scale well. You have to hit a delicate balance between code that is nice to work with as developers, but that also doesn't require heavy CPU/GPU processing. If I was hypothetically creating a title for the PS4 which, when finished, ran as a constant steady 60fps, then why on earth would you bother optimizing it? It does what it says on the tin, and it does it well. The PS4 is not modular in design, so the frame-rate will not vary if it has a few to spare and is well tested. Optimization issues strike hard, like a vicious lemur, when your playability and frame rates inevitably take a hit, usually due to the huge budget next-gen graphics bla bla nonsense games. If the game was running at around 50fps, and you had not bothered with any optimization, then there would be an incentive to further optimize your code to hit that nice clean 60fps mark.

PC hardware is very different to consoles. If you have something running at 60fps on a PS4, you can guarantee with 100% certainty that the code will execute exactly the same on every PS4, whether it's a PS4 from Mumbai or Hong Kong, and that variation in game-play will be from only the inputs being fed to the game. People have such variation in PC specs that you're going to have to code in a way for PC that accounts for multiple screen resolutions, varying hardware and multiple control systems. Because of this, it's nice to get a rough idea of what PC hardware the majority of people are running. By creating a game that pushes the limits of graphics, you're limiting your audience to the "elite" players with the £2000+ Alienware PCs. On the converse, by dropping the bar too low, you're losing the interest of people who expect a certain standard of graphical quality. It's up to you in your design how you choose to approach this, but I'm one of those nerds who prefers a good frame-rate over nice graphics. Of course, if I had the money, I'd choose both.

Anyway, in regards to the cohesiveness / flexibility balance, there is no easy answer, but it certainly helps a lot to research design patterns. From my personal and fairly limited experience, I would say that you develop a "feel" for what works, and this "feel" can only be gained from hands-on experience - so get yourself involved in every programming jam and part-time project you can. In regards to code structure, would it be better to use a hash table lookup or a simple list? It depends on the context. Is it better to use inheritance or polymorphism? Depends on the context yet again! I can't tell you what works best, because if there was always a single best solution to all problems, then why would any of these tools exist?

What I would recommend is to not get wrapped up in these problems while you're entering the world of game development. You've probably heard this disheartening advice before, but it IS better to work on lots of small projects than to dive in head-first to the most ambitious project you could ever imagine. The beauty of this is that you don't hit these "brick walls". If you get stuck, you can probably find a really sloppy way of making it work. The code looks awful, for sure, but you've finished a project, you have something to show, and for the player, it does not matter how the code is structured when they are playing your finished project.

So to apply this in a real world example, let's say that you wanted to create an online twitch-based first-person shooter such as Quake or TF2. This is already a behemoth of a task. Let us have a look at just a miniscule fraction of some of the tasks involved with creating TF2:

1.) 3D models / rendering
2.) Shaders
3.) UDP networking
4.) Lag compensation
5.) Online user account management
6.) VAC Anti-cheat measures
7.) Menu systems
8.) Making eyelids move
9.) Making chins move
10.) Hats
12.) Hats
13.) HATS!!!!


My face when I play TF2
Oh yeah, did I mention the engine they used? They freaking built it themselves. (The Valve Engine, in case you've been exiled to the sewers)

There's probably another thousand things that could go on that list, but for simplicity's sake, we shall stick with these few! Rather than cracking on with that stupidly ambitious first project, you should create seven separate games. Each game could use just one of these elements. One could be a simple 3D display of an animated model, the next could be a simple menu-based RPG, another could be a simple client-server architecture. This way, each project will eventually be completed with enough perseverance, and you won't feel like a failure for not completing one single mammoth of a project which encompasses all of them at once. This also helps target the indie programmer's main weakness: MOTIVATION!

This also gives you the freedom to use sloppy code. Sometimes sloppy code is good just to help you get used to the way things work. I mean, it's not good, it's awful, and you can be ashamed, but it's a small project so you can worry about refining it later. Once you have all these moving parts in order, putting them together is the next big task.

I have found that just because all the pieces work separately, it does not mean that they'll integrate nicely together. This is where prototyping comes in to play. One you have all the pieces of the puzzle working nicely, the next thing is to piece them together into a well-oiled machine. I would always recommend re-writing your code. This may seem like a big middle finger to your hundreds of hours of hard work, but this gives you the opportunity to perfect your art, and also reflect in sheer disgust at how messy your code used to be. You also have to remember that the most time spent coding something from uncharted waters is simply figuring the problem out in your head. The actual physical pressing of keys to write code is just a physical manifestation of your logical reasoning in your brain, and the code produced a reflection of one's thoughts, preserved until the end of man? Who knows? Went off on a bit of a tangent there. On each successive run though, I can guarantee that you will write cleaner code than before, and that you will do it significantly faster than the first time. It's all good fun. I love programming!!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!




Since you cannot foresee the complications of your game (even if you think you can), it is a very smart idea to prototype. This is the process of putting all of these ideas together and then testing the product to see if your idea is actually fun or engaging. Along the way, you will also learn a million-and-one ways to structure your code better. Once you have tried a few of these ideas out and got a general feel for the game you want to make, it's again time to throw away all of your beloved code, no matter the sentimental value, and start over. I hope this has helped any newbies struggling with code structure and programming patterns!

This is our justification behind why we re-wrote the entire game engine. It's been a total pain, but we see it as a worthy long-term investment which will make future development of the game so much easier. I hope that some of you have at least got something from reading this and can hopefully dodge a few brick walls I hit myself.

The FEAR