Roblog

I found a stack of old Game Developer Magazines.  I’m planning on going through them the next few months and seeing if any of them still contain any relevant information.  I’ll let you all know if I find anything.

Just started working on a new prototype for the week.  If you’ve ever played the web game Psycho, you’ll have seen my inspiration for this weeks prototype.  It’s a stylized side-scrolling kamehameha game.  You’ll see what I mean.

I finished Prince of Persia and played a few more games in the last couple months that I’ve been silent.  I’ll give you guys a run-down of what I thought was working in those titles.

We’re gettin’ close to 2010 and a whole new year of gaming and projects.  Should be a good one!

~R

Currently playing: LEGO Rock Band, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, LEGO India Jones 2: The Adventure Continues, The Beatles Rock Band

Hey all.  I took a break for a while to be lazy and unproductive, but I will be back to posting in the next day or so.  I’ve got some new prototypes I’m working with and the ol’ Jumping Bean is still on the plate.

Stay tuned!

~R

Currently Playing: Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Mafia Wars, Fallout 3

Image by Tom Martinez Jr.

My team and I have decided to promote the Jumping Bean prototype to full-on game status!  We’ve started an eight week production to create a full iPhone game based on the constant jumping theme of Jumping Bean.

We’re starting with the simple concept of Super Mario Bros. with the jump button on auto-rapid fire.  The game will feature designed (i.e. not procedural like the original prototype) levels with playful graphics and a classic platformer feel with the auto-jumping twist.

Iteration #1:

The first iteration of this concept exists here and includes a level based directly on Super Mario Bros. level 1-1.

The comments for this iteration included:

• Need some enemies
• The jumping feels floaty under ceilings
• The control feels a little too precise, giving the player little to master in regards to the platforming
• We’ll need more complex levels, including moving platforms
• Could get a sense of depth by adding parallaxing

Some of this feedback was implemented in iteration #2.

Iteration #2:

The second iteration (found here) is actually starting to feel like a game and is almost as good in quality of many of the free games on the iPhone, which means anything we add from here on we can charge for ; ).  We added some simple enemies, adjusted the feeling of the jumps, and added to the game a concept Tom drew up for our lovable amigo.

Some of our feedback at this point:

• It’s time to start thinking about the game’s color palette
• Should think about having a way to get rid of enemies
• More variety in the enemies would be good
• Restarting the whole level every time the player makes a mistake is probably a little harsh

I’m feeling really good about the progress on this one (of course we have Unity3D to thank for that) and the type of game we are shaping up to make.  It will be exciting to see how it progresses over the next eight weeks!

~R

Currently playing: Super Mario Bros., Jumping Bean

Capsule Defense

I present to you: Capsule Defense

To Play:

• Move the turret by moving the mouse left and right.
• Fire by pressing the mouse button.
• Go here to try it out.
• Come back and add a comment on this page telling me what you think.

About the Process:

This week’s prototype comes from the mind of my little brother . . . though it doesn’t nearly do the original concept justice.

My Brother’s Concept: Let’s make a tower defense game like Plant vs. Zombies where you get to build your own weapons from parts you earn each level.

What Actually Happened: I only managed to get done with a single gun and a mindless capsule target.  So today, before writing this post, I added a little swivel and a Mindless Capsule Target instantiator and made a sort of Missile Command clone.  Yay!

You might have detected a discrepancy between concept and result.  That would be from not putting enough time into it to do the concept justice. C’est la vie.  Perhaps another week we’ll get a more fleshed out version.

~R

Currently playing: The Beatles Rock Band

Tonight I present to you last week’s prototype: Jumping Bean.

Instructions:

• Arrow keys <- and -> will move the bean left and right accordingly.
• Refresh the game’s page to get a new level (each level is created randomly).
• Go here to play.

How this came to be:

Jumping Bean came about as an exercise in creating a procedural 2D platforming game.  I still want to come back to this one and create a fun Mexican jumping bean theme for the art . . . “Next time, Gadget . . . Next time!”

I started with two platforms to develop the basic collision between the platforms and my capsule character (gotta love the quick and dirty programmer art).  The “bean” has a simple script based on Unity’s built-in FPS Walker script that limits the player to moving in only two dimensions (with the arrow keys) and jumping (with spacebar).

After I felt good about the way the bean was jumping around I created an instantiation script that created a given number of platforms along the x plane.  As it created each platform the instantiator would set the platforms length randomly based on a range inputed in the Unity editor and created a gap based on a second range.  This gave me a nice line of platforms that varied each time the game was restarted.

I tweaked the gap and platform sizes a bit until I got something that felt pretty good, but realized that the game was still pretty easy.  I wanted to add a little challenge so I played with a few different ideas until I hit one where the bean just continually jumped on its own.  (To be honest, I was inspired by an iPhone game I’d been shown a while back by my buddy Tom.  I don’t remember what the app was called, but it is quite addictive.)  This gave me something pretty fun where the player only had control over where the bean jumped but not when it jumped.  It also simplified the control scheme, which I’m always a fan of : )

So now I had my jumping bean and a single row of platforms.  I wanted to make the levels more interesting so I added two more platform instantiators for a middle and upper row of platforms, too.  This made things more interesting to look at and jump around on.  I wanted, however, to make the player have to be conscious of where they were jumping, and the game wasn’t doing that quite yet.  Plus the player had no reason to be jumping around, so I added . . . duhn duhn DUHN . . . little white dots.  MMMMMM.

Since we had something good and yummy to collect, I wanted something bad and not so tasty to avoid.  Thus the little red menacing mines were created.  Both the dots and the mines were sent to the platform instantiators to decide randomly where to put them, giving the player a different experience each time they reset the game.

This one was a couple/few afternoons of work . . . I have yet to manage a full week on one, but I’m hopeful for the future!

~R

Currently playing: Prince of Persia

I will be posting weekly game prototypes soon.  The purpose of these prototypes is twofold: 1) to quickly try out gameplay ideas in an effort to find something cool that people will enjoy playing and 2) to practice and improve my game development skills.

The idea comes from my time at the Game Developer’s Conference last spring.  I attended the Indie Developer Track and in many of the sessions the successful developers talked about how much rapid prototyping they did.  The guys who put together World of Goo found the idea within a prototype called Tower of Goo that they put together in a graduate course.  The goal of the course was to put together a new prototype each week of the class.  Crayon Physics Deluxe came from a prototype called Crayon Physics that turned out to be an extremely popular prototype on its developer’s page.  The developer decided on his own to put together monthly prototypes (inspired, I believe, by the aforementioned graduate class idea).  There were several other examples of developers who did regular rapid prototyping “discovering” successful game ideas, making me realize that one of the advantages that independent developers have is their flexibility and freedom to blow through dozens or hundreds of ideas quickly.

With all that said, I’ve started my own weekly prototyping schedule.  I will be posting my results each week for all to try out and comment on.  Some will be fun, some not, and hopefully one gem of a concept will surface that really shines for people.

~R

Currently Playing: The Beatles Rock Band, Guitar Hero 5