Pixelles Week 6: Game Over!

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

So, I just sent in my game to the ladies over at Pixelles. I have an essay to write and I can do no more! So I figured that it was best to ship it off and then take a quick break to write to you about the past week’s experiences.

This week, I implemented a larger level in the game and tried to make the rules work towards an at least slightly challenging gameplay experience. What I found this week were bugs, bugs, bugs! There were events that contradicted each other and a lot of interdependencies where if I changed one thing, I had to change a whole lot more. My biggest problem is timing: I realized that my character was invincible for a small margin of time and so wasn’t getting damaged the way that they were supposed to. When I removed the invincibility, all of a sudden the player’s life was depleted in seconds! I had to entirely change the type of event that I used to create my decreasing air bar.

I also ran into a problem where, in the screen with the larger level, I couldn’t just tell the actors not to go off of the screen width. I needed the characters to be able to move around in a larger scrolling level – but not just a scrolling level, one where you had to exit back from where you came from.

It also took me a long time to tweak the level score to make sure that achieving the high score was doable, but not too easy. I don’t know if I’ve quite got it perfect, but I keep having to remind myself that the project was, in around 4 hours a week, for six weeks, to make a basic game. It’s short, but it’s got basically all of the elements that I wanted to include except for multiple levels and a couple of the more challenging conditions of diving such as currents, dangerous objects like fishing line, etc. I also had a weird bug where if the player got caught between two other actors, the game would freeze. I hope I’ve fixed that by making one of the actors a sensor that the player can pass through.

So, while it’s not the most challenging or sophisticated game yet, I did make it all myself. That feels good. And I feel like people seeing it for the first time might feel differently than I do about it, since I know every detail and objective and a new player will have to discover it for themselves.

If you want to play the final product, come to the game showcase on March 9th! I’ll see about finding it a home on the internet after that.

I couldn’t leave you with nothing, though! Here’s the background of my one working level:

The Background of my one working level.

The Background of my one working level.

Pixelles Week 5 Homework

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

This week is Concordia’s Reading Week, so I took off to a cabin in the woods for a few days and didn’t have internet access. So, late post! The Pixelles homework this week was just to work on our games. Out of my new goals for last week, here’s what I got done:

– The aforementioned feedback page/end of level/score page needs to be created.
I created a very simple end of level page that displays the score. I wanted it to count the number of objects collected and the amount of HP left and add that to the score, but I’m not sure how to do it. This is a stretch goal if I have the time.

– Now that I have a functioning score system, I want to add more challenges, obstacles, and ways of earning points to the level. Time will be a factor but right now there’s nothing preventing the player from collecting points. I need things to get in the way!

I didn’t get the chance to do this but found the levels too small – so I remade everything in 800×600 and kept the characters and objects the same size. This did introduce a problem though: my world-map stuff isn’t where I placed it, and even when I replace the objects, they always end up to the left of where I placed them. I need to figure out what’s going on there this week.

– Linked to the above is level-creation. I have a pretty-much empty test level right now. What I want to do is add objects and backdrops to that – hopefully implementing these as part of the challenge of the level.
Still working on it! Limited internet access meant limited means of looking up solutions to my problems.

– Colouring/refining my sprites both to differentiate them and to make them look nicer.
I did get to do this! I’ll save showing you guys until it’s time to show the whole game though.

– Creating at least one fully playable level with everything that I want to implement.
This is not yet done – I think when I’ve accomplished this, I’ll have finished the simplest version of the game.

– Right now, there’s a small problem when you exit the level (which should be fixed by having an end-of-level screen): upon re-entering the test level, the air for that level resets but the score doesn’t. So, that’ll need to be fixed.

This was fixed by means of a kind of “cheat” – now that there’s an end-of-level screen, exiting the level finishes the game and displays the player’s score.

Okay, so this week’s goal is to finish the game. That means:

– Fixing the bug with my map – I think I introduced this bug by changing everything to 800×600 res, but I have no idea why even recreating the level didn’t fix it. ???

– Creating a fully playable level with at least a little bit of a challenge to it – obstacles and such. Maybe some kind of maze or a stricter time limit will help.

My Stretch Goals (if I have the time) are:
– To add the air remaining at the end of the level to the player’s score.
– To add two more frames of animation to my diver’s motion.

Next week, this’ll all be over and I will have created a simple game in six weeks while juggling my other responsibilities. What a cool challenge!

Pixelles Week 4 Homework

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

So, the homework for the Pixelles Incubator Follow-Along this week was to continue making our games. Last week, I posted a list of things that I wanted to do and didn’t get the chance to, and things that I wanted to do but didn’t think I’d get the chance to. I’ve decided to check goals off that previous list (and report any other progress) and create some new goals.

Last week’s lists
What I had hoped to accomplish but didn’t this week was:
– Having a scene transition when the player pressed enter around an object on the world map – like the submarine or airplane, which are going to be my two playable levels for the purpose of the Pixelles incubator.
Instead of pressing enter, what now happens is that when the player enters a region surrounding (in this case) the airplane, they transist to another scene. Right now, that scene is my test scene. You can also exit my test level back to the world map screen.
– Having a second diver sprite who would follow around my main character.
Yes! I reused the same sprite, and for some reason the sprite can’t turn around (when I go to the left of my screen, Buddy follows me fin-first :/) but I’ve accomplished the following-around part!
– Having the fish move in a set pattern (right now you can push them around the screen if you want to be mean to them!).
They now move around like sheep would in a random pattern within parameters that I set.
– Assigning a points-value to the fish and some other objects that would then be added to the score when you interacted with them.
Yes! In fact, the fish have a points-value and you can only collect points once. The other objects also have a points-value but can also negatively impact your air consumption! (So some objects add to your score but decrease your HP…in this case, my air meter.)

What I didn’t expect to accomplish but still need to figure out (and that I expect to be fairly challenging):
– Assigning different rates of air consumption at different assigned “depths” – I might just make it vary with the level.
So far, my solution for this is to make it vary with every level. The levels are going to be relatively small until I do something about it, so I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.
– Assigning a faster air consumption rate when the character is carrying something (oh, and making those objects carriable, period).
Instead, I’ve made the objects disappear like coins when you pick them up, and they automatically decrease your air supply but up your score.
– Actually creating a decreasing air bar!
I did it! What I did was create a health bar, and every second as the game updates, the health bar takes damage, thus decreasing the air.
– Actually creating a way to accumulate points.
Yeah, this was primarily about learning to use the Stencyl resources – it’s strange to me that they can all be opened in several different views. But now you can indeed collect points in my game.
– Creating a feedback page after each level where The Divemaster tells you what you did well and assigns bonus points and such as described in my design document.
This is the only one that I didn’t manage to do, and I imagine that it’s going to be fairly simple once I figure out how to end a level properly. Right now, you can die though – and there’s a quick message which then takes you back to the title screen. I need some kind of score-saving tool/points screen.
Oh, and I also decreased the level of text at the beginning down to two screens…hope that’s short enough.

Okay, so new goals!

– The aforementioned feedback page/end of level/score page needs to be created.
– Now that I have a functioning score system, I want to add more challenges, obstacles, and ways of earning points to the level. Time will be a factor but right now there’s nothing preventing the player from collecting points. I need things to get in the way!
– Linked to the above is level-creation. I have a pretty-much empty test level right now. What I want to do is add objects and backdrops to that – hopefully implementing these as part of the challenge of the level.
– Colouring/refining my sprites both to differentiate them and to make them look nicer.
– Creating at least one fully playable level with everything that I want to implement.
– Right now, there’s a small problem when you exit the level (which should be fixed by having an end-of-level screen): upon re-entering the test level, the air for that level resets but the score doesn’t. So, that’ll need to be fixed.

Here, have a test-run of what I managed to implement this week!

My Take on Gaming Beyond Screens

indie, playthroughs, Process Writing, research, talks

So, I didn’t take place in the two-day workshop before the Gaming Beyond Screens symposium and arcade, but I was privileged to hear four great gamemakers talk about motion gaming and then had the chance to play their games. Here are some thoughts.

(If you missed the Symposium, there is a video here – if you missed the arcade, I can’t think of any other time that these four games will be presented together in the near future – sorry! Lucky for you, I took pictures, and there’s also this great video of some of the gameplay, but as we’ll see, it’s the opinion of at least one motion game creator that you can’t judge a motion game by watching somebody else play it.)

SYMPOSIUM

Jim Toepel

First up was Jim Toepel, one of the lead developers of Dance Central 3, and also actually an ex-rocket scientist. I thought that was pretty cool. Jim’s talk focused primarily on the actual development of motion gaming: common pitfalls, misconceptions, what makes a motion game fun, and quite a few tips on how to develop one that won’t drive the creators crazy while they do it.

Jim emphasized the challenges that motion gaming controls present, because the kind of input that players are, well, putting in, is much more complex than it ever has been before. While many people complain about the input devices themselves, the truth is that the range of movement and possibility attached to a human body is about a thousand times more complicated than pressing buttons with your fingers and thumbs. This problem is compounded when we consider that, while mostly you can expect everyone to be able to press those buttons with their hands, there are a lot of different levels of ability just when it comes to moving our bodies.

Jim’s point about the difference between playing a motion game for yourself and watching someone else play was also extremely well-taken. It is almost literally the difference between being out on the field yourself in a team sport versus sitting the bench and watching other people play. We enjoy movement – and we also enjoy learning. Those are two things that motion gaming combines very well – learning how to play is part of the pleasure of motion gaming – and of course there’s no such thing as motion gaming without movement.

The other points that I took away from Jim Toepel’s talk were about avatars and voice commands. Not to be oversimplistic, but avatars can make people uncomfortable as there’s a kind of uncanny valley feeling to watching an avatar move with you on-screen. Also, Jim says that people who play motion games like the idea of being themselves, so avatars may not be working to a game’s advantage – there’s the risk of alienating your players. And lastly, on voice commands: the Dance Central team found out fairly quickly that if they told people what to do via voice commands, they were a lot more likely to correct the aspects of their play that the voice commands told them to correct. And so, Boomie the anthropomorphic boombox was born, voice-acted by an in-house artist from Harmonix.

Kaho Abe

Next up was Kaho Abe, creator of Hit Me (amongst a slew of other amazing games including Ninja Shadow Warrior, where you get to hide behind things and your score is posted to a tumblr, and one called Mary Mack 5000 where you get to play patty-cake games to rock versions of the songs that go along with them). Kaho’s topic was Costumes as Game Controllers.

To start off, Kaho discussed how she built Hit Me out of hacked doorbells and cameras, and her interest in face-to-face games such as Hit Me.

Kaho talked about where her inspiration for her games comes from, especially for her upcoming game about lightning bugs. There’s a Japanese children song about lightning bugs that was the genesis for the initial idea. She talked about the gesture of handholding that persists throughout a game like ICO, an art installation about becoming a bird, cosplay/LARP, and also about shows like Kamen Rider, where putting on a costume, coupled with acrobatic feats, signals transformation. Kaho discussed how when people put on costumes, they become powerful – as in the case of Wonder Woman or Iron Man.

She also discussed her prototyping process for the glove from her upcoming game. She showed off the prototype at different stages – and it was really, really neat-looking. Kaho also talked about her interest in cooperative gameplay between people wearing different costume parts. The example that she gave was one player wearing a backpack that acted as a powersource, and the other player carrying a gun that is powered by that backpack. The players would have to collaborate to be able to shoot.

Doug Wilson

Doug Wilson of Die Gute Fabrik and one of the creators of J. S. Joust. Doug talked a lot about folk games, the playground, and subversion of the intended use of games technology. In an auspicious start, Doug talked to us about Dark Room Sex Game, which was a game that he and a team created for a game jam a few years ago. He told us that one of the greatest successes of the game was the awkwardness that it created without the release of catharsis. Dark Room Sex Game is a game that has basically no graphics – and Doug says that that helped increase the awkwardness. Since there was no cheesy animation to laugh at, catharsis was blocked by the fact that the action of the game took place within the mind’s eye, making it all the more effective.

One of the highlights of Doug’s talk was when he discussed new folk games that are coming out of Denmark, such as “Sneaky Lance” – a game where two blindfolded players move in super-slow motion until one of them is able to whack the other with a wooden spoon. You can bet that I’m going to give that one a try.

On the subject of subversion, Doug talked about the rhetoric of progress: how technology (such as motion gaming technology) is often marketed as making things (especially games) ever-better. Doug seems to think that technology is maybe taking itself a little too seriously. He prefers to think of motion gaming as slapstick comedy. The thought is appreciated – it’s true that motion gaming can put us in awkward positions, and that’s part of the fun.

For Doug, part of the fun of creating games is subverting technologies and their intended use. For example, in his game, B.U.T.T.O.N, he has turned a non-motion gaming Xbox controller into a motion gaming controller just by telling people to leave the controller and walk around doing what the game tells them to – eventually, they are all called back to the controller and the first person to press their button wins the game. Naturally, this creates a mad dash to the controller where people might bodily throw each other around or get into a fight in their attempts to reach their button. Lately, he’s been working on a trampoline game – which he says is cheating at game design because trampolines are already so much fun on their own.

Bart Simon

Bart Simon is one of the developpers of Propinquity and of course the current director of TAG, as well as an associate professor at Concordia. Bart’s talk was about his impulses as a game creator concerning the kinds of games that he would like to create, and how he thinks about motion gaming in particular.

Bart began his presentation with this quote from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which is, by and large, one of my favourite plays, and also a really excellent tea from DavidsTea):

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

By framing his talk with this image of “the bodying forth” of imagination, Bart reminded us of the visceral qualities that motion gameplay, in his opinion, could possibly have. For Bart, this “bodying forth” makes imagination seem like something that the body does as a kind of reaction or mechanism. The kinds of games, then, that Bart would like to produce, are those that would allow players to appropriate the game as a bodying forth of imagination.

Bart, like Jim Toepel, is interested in the learning curve behind motion gaming. Rather than the expert motions of someone like John Cleese performing a silly walk for a Monty Python Sketch, Bart is interested in the joyful motions of say, teenagers mimicking John Cleese doing a silly walk. Bart thinks that the second movements are much more fun, and much more interesting. Case in point: the Star Wars Kid, and the playground antics of basically every child who has ever seen a playground (or a Star Wars movie) and wanted to pretend to be a Jedi. It all comes back to the fun of joy in the accidental, and pushing the limits of our coordination and our daring.

I am really, really sad to have missed getting a shot of Bart playing with the retractable lightsaber that he brought along for the occasion.

THE ARCADE

Talking about these games is not the same as playing them, so I don’t know how much I can say that’ll be all that interesting to anyone who wasn’t at the arcade. I brought along my tallest friend (6’5″) to play Hit Me with, and he basically proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Hit Me is the tallest player’s game. I also finally got to try Propinquity, which I have been wanting to do since I heard that it existed, and I really wish that I could own my own copy of the game. I had so much fun – and I would love to develop some alternate play conditions – or really just get the chance to play around with it again. Dance Central was excellent – it was a lot of fun to play as part of a crowd instead of just with a crowd watching. The same is true of Joust – I didn’t get to stay until the Joust-in-the-Dark part of the arcade, but I had a blast in the round that I did play.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to a video of the arcade. If you’re curious about the kind of live-tweeting that I did for the event, you can visit @jekagames.

Without further ado, here’s the gallery of pictures that I took during the arcade.

gbssmall-24

Pixelles Week 3 Homework

adventures in gaming, indie, pixelles, Process Writing

This week’s Pixelles’ homework was a lot less defined than other weeks and so I think my focus ended up being a lot more diffuse as well. I guess the easiest way to track my progress this week is to make a list of the things that I did and the major things that I still have to do before I have a working prototype of the game.

This week, I worked a lot on art and basic movement. I made a title screen, a set of instructions, a world map, and an interim level (not one that’s an actual destination but one to test). I also made several sprites – the animation isn’t perfect but I feel like that’s in the details. I made a scuba diver who moves in two frames, a pike, a sunfish, a weight belt, a snorkel, a submarine and an airplane.

For your viewing pleasure, here they all are:

My animated diver.

My animated diver.

My weightbelt object viewed at 1000%.

My weightbelt object viewed at 1000%.

My sunfish sprite viewed at 1000%.

My sunfish sprite viewed at 1000%.

My submarine viewed at 1000%.

My submarine viewed at 1000%.

My snorkel viewed at 1000%.

My snorkel viewed at 1000%.

My plane viewed at 500%.

My plane viewed at 500%.

My pike sprite viewed at 1000%.

My pike sprite viewed at 1000%.

On the world map, the character is able to move around without going out of bounds and the same is true for the diver in the interim level.

I’ve uploaded the game here so that you can give it a shot. For the first couple of screens, click through with the mouse. But don’t forget to move around and run into my submarine and my airplane on the map!

I also made a sound effect – it’s a scuba diving regulator and then the expelled bubbles. I used resources from creative commons and freesound.org and a program called Audacity to adjust the pitch, tempo, speed, and the fades.

scubabreathing

What I had hoped to accomplish but didn’t this week was:
– Having a scene transition when the player pressed enter around an object on the world map – like the submarine or airplane, which are going to be my two playable levels for the purpose of the Pixelles incubator.
– Having a second diver sprite who would follow around my main character.
– Having the fish move in a set pattern (right now you can push them around the screen if you want to be mean to them!).
– Assigning a points-value to the fish and some other objects that would then be added to the score when you interacted with them.

What I didn’t expect to accomplish but still need to figure out (and that I expect to be fairly challenging):
– Assigning different rates of air consumption at different assigned “depths” – I might just make it vary with the level.
– Assigning a faster air consumption rate when the character is carrying something (oh, and making those objects carriable, period).
– Actually creating a decreasing air bar!
– Actually creating a way to accumulate points.
– Creating a feedback page after each level where The Divemaster tells you what you did well and assigns bonus points and such as described in my design document.

If I can achieve this by the end of the Incubator, I will be ecstatic. If I have to simplify, that’s good too. After these goals, I think I’ll feel free to better the game art and animation at my leisure and create new levels when I have the time.