Computer Games – Brian Crick

Catch ’em All

I love sets of things. On some level, perhaps we all do.

When I was growing up, my family had those Time-Life book collections. 23 books talking about the history of flight. 20 books about different countries of the world. 20 volumes on astronomy. Every now and then, we would get a new book in one of these sets in the mail, and excitedly add the book to its collection. I remember scouring flea markets many weekends with my dad, trying to find the last few records in some Time-Life music collection we’d gotten used. Our set was incomplete.

This could not stand.

Sets are fun. Sometimes, it’s infuriatingly difficult to know when you’re done with something. You wonder if you’re definition of complete isn’t complete enough. You want to add one more thing. You worry that there might be something out there you need, something that you don’t know you don’t know exists. But with well-defined sets… you know what you’re missing. You know what to look for. Most importantly, you know when you’re done. And it’s just such a satisfying feeling to know that, finally, something of yours is complete. Finished. And you can move on with your life.

I have started thinking about game developments in terms of set collection.

* * *

My still-in-development Global Game Jam game is all about finding new ways to traverse a world that doesn’t make walking from place to place very easy. So my first job, as I saw it, was to design a complete set of power-ups that let you move in new ways. I will know if my set is complete if you ways ways to:

Move, laterally, farther than normal, across chasms.

Jump up higher than normal.

Fall down greater distances without dying.

Move through things you couldn’t move through before.

Walk on things that were once hazardous to touch.

Skirt around and below things that were once dangerous to approach.

In very general terms — if you think in terms of what axes you can move on and where hazards are in relation to you — there are a finite number of ways one can move around one’s environment. I will know I have a workable, complete set of player upgrades if my upgrades cover all of these movement cases. And once I have those upgrades designed, I will be able to move on — because at that point, I will be done. And while I may tweak my upgrades throughout the development of this game, I will feel confident knowing that the vast majority of my conceptual work is done. I finished my set.

* * *

My wife recently alerted me to a simple approach to figuring out what scenes you need in your story:

Write down every major character, setting and concept in your story, in a big circle:

Then connect all of them.

Every one of those lines is a possible scene.

Write a scene developing Rey and Kylo’s relationship.

Write something exploring what Finn thinks about this whole Force thing.

Write a scene showing how Poe and Finn meet.

Write scenes with each of the characters doing something interesting in or around Starkiller Base.

Once you have scenes for each of those lines, each of those relationships, you have a good start of a story. You have a complete set.

* * *

I am working on a board game where you wander around a fantasy world exploring fun and interesting locations. I’ve been having the hardest time figuring out what those locations should be. So I forced myself to think about it in terms of set collection.

I made a list of everything I wanted the players to be able to do in the game, in general: they should be able to find clues about the main plot somewhere. They should be able to buy and sell items somewhere. They should be able to heal up somewhere, and investigate suspicious characters somewhere.

I ended up with some 15 items: a complete set of things I wanted players to be able to do. Then I shuffled them and put them in groups of three. No matter what ended up in what group, my groups would represent a complete set. Each group would become one location. Some of them were… odd.

What kind of place would you go to heal up, sell your old gear, and get clues about the main plot?

I don’t know, but that sounds like a really interesting place.

* * *

I tend to express my design requirements in terms of feelings. I want my players to feel like they’re excitedly exploring a fantastic world. I want my players to feel nostalgia. I want my players to feel like they can fly.

This doesn’t really help me find the specifics I need to do real development work.

Expressing my requirements in terms of sets has been immensely helpful. I have a specific destination: a filled bucket. I know what I’ve done towards reaching that destination: what’s in my bucket. I know what I have left to do: the empty slots in the bucket.

The bucket is filled, or it isn’t. I’m done, or I’m not. I have real requirements with concrete, measurable criteria for completion.

And if it’s not measurable, it doesn’t exist.

Alien: Isolation Thoughts

Finished Alien: Isolation! Yay! It, uh, only took 35 hours to get through it. 😛 Spent 21 hours on Regular difficulty and got only halfway through the game, then restarted on Novice and spent another 14 hours and finished the whole thing that time.

Let me just get this out of the way first: I really, really liked the game. I consider that 35 hours well spent. Well, maybe I should have restarting and switched to Novice a lot sooner. But anyway it had the most memorable, most beautifully realized science fiction game environments I’ve ever seen, the controls were easy to pick up (forgetting the controls from session to session tends to be an issue for me), and it was by far the scariest game I ever played.

The things I didn’t like are things I don’t like about most video games. I didn’t care at all about crafting. I’d just as soon you didn’t have any weapons and didn’t kill anybody. The characters weren’t very memorable, and it felt kind of long and repetitive sometimes.

But one thing in particular kept bugging me, and again, this is not specific to this game: if the titular alien is the main obstacle in your way, what is it that you’re doing that they’re an obstacle to?

See, drama is all about conflict, right? But conflict isn’t just obstacles. Conflict is trying to do something, and then there’s an obstacle getting in the way of it getting done.

I’m wondering what it would be like to start with a totally nonviolent game with fun, fully fleshed out mechanics for the day-to-day work you do when aliens aren’t trying to eat you — like, I dunno, you’re farming. Or trying to power up your spaceship, solving wiring puzzles. Or collecting resources in unexplored lands and building a colony. And you spend a couple hours doing your job before the alien attacks. And when the alien attacks, you still have to harvest your crops or power up your spaceship or build your settlement or whatever. You had a goal and the alien came to eat you and your friends… and your goal remains the same. The alien is just an extra complication, and in many ways I’d think the presence of the alien should steel your resolve to do your original job.

In Alien: Isolation it never felt to me like you had a goal and the alien was getting in the way of you accomplishing your goal. It always felt like running away from the alien was your goal. Sure, I ran around flipping switches and unlocking doors but those things just felt like arbitrary mission checkpoints rather than necessary tasks I needed to do to reach my end goal of building or harvesting or fixing something. I really didn’t have much in the way of motivation.

I’d be so much more motivated to power up all those generators and hack all those doors in Alien: Isolation if I felt like there were generalized mechanics behind everything and it was up to me to figure out which switches to flip and which generators to turn on in order to complete my totally-not-alien-related goal for the game…

..if, you know, I were making this game…

…oh hey, I think I might have a concrete, solid structure for the spaceship-based parts of Tinselfly.

Project Update: Null Wave

So I went to this year’s Global Game Jam with the intention of making something I’d want to work on later, and… it’s been almost two weeks, and I’m still working on the project! This may be a first.

Been making lots of improvements, both big and small.

The waves in platforms are circular now — no discrete tile grid with squares disappearing and reappearing anymore.

You can make shield walls.

You can make skipping stones to jump on.

You can swing from a grappling hook.

The great thing about this project is, I can describe it to people. With Tinselfly… people ask me what Tinselfly is and I can’t answer. It’s kind of like Myst. But without the weird arbitrary feeling puzzles, empty, lonely environments, and… those other things that make Myst Myst. It’s kind of like The Longest Journey or Dreamfall. But with, you know, a completely, completely different approach to game mechanics and character development. It’s kind of like La La Land… if La La Land were a video game… with swordfighting! and spaceships!… and… Mia and Sebastian wanted to be spaceship captains, not stage performers?

But with Null Wave (I’m sure the title will change) I can immediately say it’s like Metroid Prime but lighter and happier. And that’s pretty accurate; a simple x-meets-Y elevator pitch here will do. Yeah, there are pretty huge differences in my goals here — less shooting, less dying, more platforming, more whimsy — but despite all that, Metroid Prime is a perfectly good starting point for talking about it.

Better yet, being able to say that helps me figure out where the project needs to go from day to day. You will explore a strange, alien world, collecting items that let you move in new ways and get to new places in said strange, alien world. And that tells me I need to come up with some fun, cool items for you to get, that let you traverse your environment in fun, cool ways. I know things like the grappling hook and half-pipes and invisible platforms from Metroid Prime are a good place to start, even if they’re most likely not a good place to end.

So working on items and their mechanics is what I think I should do next. I have a template to follow that tells me so. If I’m doing things right, I’ll be thinking of my template in terms of structure, not specific items or levels or aesthetics. The real value in the template is knowing what kinda of questions to ask myself. Already, I’m wondering about the following:

Metroid Prime has a map screen; do I need one, though it will certainly look very different? (Probably.)

Metroid Prime has this whole concept of visors that let you see the world in new ways; do I need that? (Probably not, I’m not big on hidden information.)

Metroid Prime doesn’t, to my knowledge, have any kind of built in hint system you can use if you’re lost; should I try to implement one? (I think so, but I don’t know what form it would take yet.)

Because this is based on Metroid Prime, I know that after I’ve got some power-ups to play with, I can lay out a totally linear, compressed level wherein I figure out what order you get the power ups in, and then I know I can take that and lengthen it a bit and make it loop back on itself like a spaghetti noodle so the game doesn’t feel linear and that’s how I’ll make my game world.

I know I have a plan.

I don’t know if it’s a good plan or a bad plan, but it’s a very concrete plan, and I need practice coming up with those right now.

Postmortem: Global Game Jam 2017

Yay, another game jam is done! If you want, you can download my game for Windows (and the source) over at the Global Game Jam website.

Before I get into my postmortem here I just wanna say thanks to the Cleveland Game Developers organizers for putting on such a wonderful event. I’m so grateful this group exists and that I found it.

So this was — I think — my eighth jam. And I hate to say it, but in none of the previous seven jams did I produce something I thought was interesting enough to continue working on or even continue really thinking about after the jam was over.

I’m very happy to say that, with this jam, I’ve finally made something I want to explore more, despite it being very unfinished and representing only 11 hours of work (more on that later).

So, on to the analysis!

the plan

My plan, before the jam started, was to force myself to work in a well-defined genre, probably a platformer or shooter. That way, I could relaxe and make a game that had more of an emphasis on fun and less of an emphasis on high concepts that always ended up being more interesting in concept than execution.

scraps

I’d been playing a lot of Alien: Isolation, so stealth and creepy environments were on my mind. My initial plan was to make a ghost story stealth game. Set in an abandoned, deliciously decrepit Art Nouveau train station, you would play a ghost who would simultaneously see the train station in both its decayed state and in its original, pristine form. It would be a melancholy meditation on nostalgia and the acceptance of loss.

There would be various objects of personal significance scattered throughout the station, each of which emitted spherical ‘pulses’; wherever the edge of a pulse-sphere was, you would see–and be able to interact with–the original, shiny version of the station.

There would be other, malevolent ghosts in the old, decrepit version of the station. But if you stood in an area where the original station was visible, you were hidden from the bad guys. You would have to strategically place the emitters in such a way that you could follow the waves they generated past obstacles and whatnot.

Since the old and new versions of the station would be lit differently and contain different objects blocking your path, this involved modeling everything twice, writing some custom shaders and image effects, and filming the scene with no less than three cameras-one for the old station, one for the new, and one for a pulsating mask that would be used to blend the old and new.

From a visual standpoint, this was all mostly working a mere three hours into development. You could see the two scenes blending together, and there was the start of mechanic involving moving around other pulse emitters that would react to the position of the first.

Saturday afternoon, I took a late lunch and tried to list out all the things I needed to do to complete the project.

It was a very long list. I needed to reduce the frequency of pulses. There was a ton of modeling to do. Art Nouveau isn’t exactly my strong suit. I had a lot of questions about how exactly the game mechanics and physics would react to the pulsating, changing reality around you.

And stealth isn’t really a game genre I understand. I haven’t played many stealth games.

The project was completely out of my reach. So at 2:30 on Saturday, I scrapped it and started something completely new, a relatively simple concept i thought of on the drive back from lunch. There would still be spherical pulse emitters, but they would do nothing more than hide simple, discrete tiles in a simple platformer game. You would have to jump over the voids created by the emitter waves.

Scrapping the ghost story project was probably the best decision I ever made at a game jam. I didn’t fail early, in an absolute sense — but I realized I was in a failure state well before Sunday, which for me is early.

take two

From a purely technical standpoint, the basic mechanics for the new game came together pretty quickly. The pulses were working, temporarily erasing tiles in their path, and the platforming was working too.

Despite being a 3d game, the platforms behaved like platforms in a 2d one — you could jump up through a platform above you and land on it, and you could jump down to a platform below you. It felt really fun and unique.

By early Saturday evening, the basics were there.

And then I had to re-do all of it.

My custom character controller didn’t react well to collisions, the tiles looked terrible when there were multiple levels in the scene, and any change to the way tiles disappeared made it impossible to jump through platforms — the two systems were too highly coupled together.

By Sunday morning, it was all working again. I used a stock Unity character controller, simplified the tile disappearing logic, and completely rewrote the platform pass-through stuff.

And then — as usually happens, I realized there was no game. There was no conflict. There was no goal.

So I decided to add in shooter elements.

There would be bad guys firing projectiles at you, which you had to jump over. You could shoot back at the bad guys, but wherever your shot landed, it would cause one of those tile-destroying shockwaves. So you had to be careful to aim precisely and fire from a long range so you had time to react to the resulting wave.

It felt really good. It was fun, it was unique, it was pretty, it had simple gameplay based on existing game genres, but with a twist. It was starting to hit my goal of making a fun game in an existing genre.

By 1 p.m. on Saturday — an hour before the jam deadline — I had started on level design.

levels

Needless to say, there isn’t much level. What I have here doesn’t do a good job at all of showcasing my mechanics. There’s no reason to jump up through platforms, or keep an eye out for platforms below you that you could jump down to. There’s only one instance of each of two opponent types. There’s just a lot of missed opportunities here.

The last two game jams, I had my wife with me doing level design while I was working on graphics and mechanics. Sadly, she couldn’t make it this year, and I really missed having her help.

But in many ways, this was a good problem to have. I want to work on this more. I want to explore these mechanics more. I think these mechanics are worth exploring.

This way my eighth game jam, and this is new to me.

complications

For the most part, what slowed me down was the basics. Writing custom shaders for water and scene blending and seeing platforms clearly displayed through other platforms was easy for me. Despite having to do it twice, writing the logic for the shockwaves and 3d platforming went quickly. What I got tripped up on was the basics: character controllers, shooting projectiles, being hit by projectiles, remembering how to use Unity’s physics components.

A few days before the jam I started doing super basic Unity tutorials, and I need to continue doing that.

I also need to remember that modeling and texturing takes time. Yes, I’ve gotten more efficient there in the last couple of years, but ‘fast’ still means a couple hours per model for something I’d find merely adequate.

conclusion

Despite having another unfinished game, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with a game jam. I set myself one goal — to make something with fun mechanics worth playing with — and I think I hit that goal. The mechanics were there, even if my level design didn’t showcase them at all well.

Now, I just want to make a level that does. And see where that takes me.

Shadow Boxes

I’ve been replaying Alien: Isolation lately, and I’m really noticing the visual and sound design this time around.

I love this room in particular:

If you haven’t heard of it, Alien: Isolation is a game about, well, being scared. There’s a scary alien running around who wants to eat you. There are scary malfunctioning robots who want to beat you up. And there are scary humans who think you’re another scary human who wants to steal their stuff. A lot of the game involves you sneaking around and watching out for bad guys.

And this is a scary, scary room in which to do that.

On the right side of the video here you can see all these shadows moving about the room making it feel a bit dizzying. It’s just a little bit harder than usual to tell what’s going on and see who might be hiding behind a box or around a corner.

And what I love about this is the simplicity of it. On the right side of the video, you can see that there are oddly shaped, spinning bits of debris just outside the window, moving right to left. And they just repeat over and over. If you stare out the window they don’t really make a lot of sense when you think about them, this endless parade of identical bits of debris. But they work so well. I would never have thought to add a detail like this to add more atmosphere to a room.

But, now, I will. 🙂

Good Skeletons

GDEX is coming up! It’s a game developer’s conference right here in Ohio, which I’ve been looking forward to since, well, the last GDEX I was at, back when it was called the Ohio Game Dev Expo.

I’d been meaning to get a new, knock-your-socks off Tinselfly demo ready, and… I won’t have a new Tinselfly demo for GDEX.

Instead, I’ve started working on Gemslinger again. It’s a nice, small project I can tinker with while also keeping room in my life for random board game contests and spending time with my family.

* * *

I drew a football player character the other day for that contest. I’m trying to improve my people-drawing skills, and this is where I’m at right now:

Part of this endeavor is learning how to do a good sketch before diving into tracing and coloring and whatnot.

See, the last time I tried to do character art, I had little stick figure sketches, like this:

I was proud of me. The skeletons all had different poses. As far as I could tell, I was ready to start layering bodies on these skeletons.

And then, I realized, my skeletons were too skinny. Sure, they looked fine on their own — they looked how stick figures should look, basically — but once I added my character outlines things started to look strange. My characters were all unrealistically thin, there was little space between the lines of the skeleton for the character’s bodies.

Generally speaking, I need to learn more about how to make a good skeleton, and more importantly, know a good or bad skeleton when I see it.

* * *

The reason I entered that board game contest is, I have no idea how to design a board game.

Sure, I can come up with mechanics and test them and make character art, but these are just… activities related to board game design. There’s no formal process here.

I started off by trying to streamline one of my favorite board games, Arkham Horror. Which seems like a decent place to start, but it feels a little like trying to learn to draw people without ever studying anatomy. Studying the surface shapes of faces and arms and legs and drawing those surfaces is nice, but starting with a skeleton and thinking about the layers of muscle and skin on top of the bones is way better.

My board game has no skeleton, and I don’t know what a board game skeleton–or video game skeleton, for that matter–looks like.

* * *

So.

Gemslinger.

When it comes to the story and tone of this project, I think of it in terms of this one fantasy book.

In this book, an ordinary, modern-day teenager gets sucked into a fantasy world. Told in first person, she discovers the first few pages of a magic tome left behind by an old sorcerer, and she learns to cast spells herself. She wanders this world, learning about its inhabitants and the old sorcerer and seeing all the world’s wonders, collecting more pages of the tome and growing in power… until finally she can cast a spell that takes her back home. And when she gets home, no time has passed and she can’t cast anything… but she’s, you know, learned a lot about herself while on this adventure.

Pretty typical fantasy-based travelogue+coming-of-age stuff.

There are lots of illustrations in this book, but they’re not pictures of the unfolding story. They’re more like drawings the main character drew herself, as if you’re reading her journal, interspersed with notes and fold-out maps and sketches with vellum overlays. And of course, it has reproductions of the pages of the magic book the heroine is collecting.

The book is kind of an artifact of its imagined world; a pretend-non-fiction reference book like The Starfleet Technical Manual, Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, After Man or Dragonology. The production values are amazing, the story is a fun, easy read, and every time you look at the maps and creature sketches you notice a new detail.

It feels like more than just paper and words. It’s a book, but it hints that there’s a world hiding within it, if only you can find it. It feels like magic.

I love this book.

Trouble is, this book doesn’t exist. I’ve been looking for things like this book and they don’t exist.

It’s an imagined combination of fantasy narratives I read as a kid, narrative-less fantasy reference like the Starfleet Technical Manual-type books I mentioned above, and the Ultima V game manuals, cloth map and plastic Codex of Ultimate Wisdom thrown in for good measure.

But… this is my skeleton.

I like this skeleton.

The details of this imagined book are pretty specific. The main character’s arc, the way the old sorcerer’s story is a counterpoint to the story proper, the way collecting pages drives the narrative, the way pages in the book can surprise you with fold-out maps and envelopes containing hidden surprises.

Imagining this game as an adaptation of a book is expressing something novel in very old terms, very concrete terms, terms I can easily imagine. I can imagine holding this book in my hand. I can imaging flipping through the pages and I know how the illustrations look. I know exactly what the experience of reading this book is like.

And I know what the video game adaptation of this book should look and feel like, and how it should deviate from the book.

rays-28-october-2016

I want it to feel a little magical.

* * *

But, you may be asking, as I’m asking myself, how is this a better skeleton than starting off a board game design with another board game?

My source material for the board game is still very specific. I’m still thinking in terms of adapting something old and concrete, and adapting it in a novel way.

So what’s different? Why am I uncomfortable with the board game skeleton?

I think it’s about being able to see or edit the skeleton if I don’t like it.

My imagined fantasy book is malleable. It didn’t always have an old sorcerer character. It didn’t always involve collecting pages of a spell book; at first it was just pure exploration.

This imagined Gemslinger book is constantly changing, based on the direction Gemslinger the game is heading. I can re-work my imagined book and shape it and it is soft: I can mold it and remove parts and add parts to it, and as I do, I feel its hard skeleton underneath its pliable skin. I can’t quite describe it verbally and I can’t quite think about it consciously way, but I can feel it. I know it’s there.

Arkham Horror will never change based on what I’m doing with my board game contest entry. It’s static. It’s hard. When I touch it, I can’t feel what’s underneath it; I only feel its surface.

I can’t feel its bones.

Mainstreaming

A couple years ago, I got a new computer. It was my first computer with a discrete graphics card. And I was all excited, because I’d finally be able to play graphically intensive, visually stunning, modern PC games as they were coming out, rather than always playing games that were several years old that my friends had all already finished and forgotten about.

Every game I played on this computer was bought on Steam or Amazon — so I can see all the games I played, every one.

And looking over my list of games here there’s maybe one game there that I thoroughly enjoyed, start to finish, that I thought was worth the time I sunk into it.

One.

Just one, out of a couple dozen critically-acclaimed games.

There were, of course, fun and memorable moments in every one of those games, but I think I’m kind of done with modern, mainstream PC games for now.

The last one I played was Alien: Isolation. I’m not sure how to describe the feeling I had playing it, but… for lack of a better word, I found it rather alienating. Like it was designed for someone with way more experience with games than I had and wasn’t really interested in training up new people.

(Yeah I’m not touching Bloodborne with a 10 foot pole.)

I have nothing against mainstream stuff in general. I love summer popcorn movies, listen to the local ‘adult hits’ radio station and even look forward to the occasional meal at a chain restaurant.

And I really have nothing against mainstream games, their existence or their themes or their fanbases, in general. But I’m pretty sure mainstream games are not for me.

I think part of it is competition. Not competing with real live other players, but, like, a competitive mindset.

I don’t really have that.

I’m not at all interested in maximizing the combat strength of my character or solving particularly devious puzzles or leveling up or leaderboards or achievements or, in general, beating games.

Saying you beat a game implies to me that you saw it as a competition. Player one, game zero. I’m more interested in the experience. You don’t beat a movie or beat a trip to the park.

There was this official Braid walkthrough which wasn’t really a walkthrough, but a thing encouraging people not to use walkthroughts. It said the following.

“Some of the puzzles will be hard. But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. Don’t rob yourself of that feeling by reading a walkthrough!”

And, you know, I finished Braid and didn’t find it very rewarding. I’m all for challenging myself, but the challenges in games just aren’t things I find rewarding. Not everybody feels that way. I like to challenge myself in other ways.

(I recognize that there are people who could take up the challenges I set for myself and find them completely empty, upon completion, and that’s fine.)

Thankfully, there are a lot of indie games I like. Sure some of them are differently alienating, but I like shortness and simplicity and overall sense of fun I get in many indie games I’ve played.

So I’m going to try harder to find indie games out there that I like, and see where that takes me.

Someone once suggested that maybe I’m just using the wrong platform; I might prefer games made for platforms like 3DS or Wii. And they’re probably right; that’s something to try as well.

I’m not giving up on games. I’m not even giving up on big-budget games; I’m just taking a break. In a year or two, maybe I’ll check back in and find something there that I find really worthwhile. I’d like that.

Call me shallow, but I really like cutting edge graphics in my games.

Global Game Jam 2015 Postmortem, Part 4: Great Unknowns

(Last in a series. You’ll probably want to check out Part One, Part Two and Three first.)

Yay, more things going wrong!

So now I’m going to go into more things going wrong with our Global Game Jam entry, specifically the sort where I was doing things I’d never done before.

Level Loading

Marie and I always talked about our game as being something with multiple levels. And yet, it didn’t occur to me until I started implementing level switching that I realized I’d never done anything with multiple levels before — most importantly, I didn’t know how to persist information (in this case, what item you’d picked up previously) from level to level.

I think the proper way to do this is with SerializedObjects in Unity… but that’s not what I did; I didn’t know about those during the jam. Instead, I made it so the player object wasn’t destroyed on level load.

It was a hacky solution, but it worked.

If I were doing this on my own, I probably wouldn’t have done multiple levels. I wouldn’t have thought of in in terms of, ‘oh, I haven’t done this before, so it’s too risky’; it would have just been an instinctual avoidance of this. So, once again, I was very glad to have Marie around here — much better to run into this kind of roadblock during a game jam than to run into it during a real project.

Page Flipping

Going back to the book for a moment… you were supposed to start with just a couple pages in your book, and as you went to new places, you pages would be added, giving you clues about where to go next.

Didn’t implement that at all.

There’s not too much to say about that, really; the book system wasn’t, well, a system. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you could add pages at runtime and have the book game object be updated for you. Just a bit of poor planning there.

Wrapping Up

I can’t emphasize this enough: I’m really, really glad I went to the Game Jam with a partner this time. What I learned this time around wasn’t a new algorithm or modeling technique; what I learned was the value of partnership. It’s great to have another person around, using your building blocks in unexpected ways, questioning your assumptions, and taking you to places you wouldn’t ordinarily go.

We’re already talking about doing Ludum Dare together when the next one comes around. 🙂

Global Game Jam 2015 Postmortem, Part 2: Building Blocks

(Part of a series. Check out Part 1 if you haven’t seen it yet, where I talk a bit about pregaming.)

So Marie and I had come up with several approaches that might work for a game jam… all we needed to do then, was wait for the theme announcement and come up with an appropriate game idea that fit both the theme and one of our chosen genres.

The theme was ‘What do we do now?’.

I was not feeling particularly inspired by this theme.

Luckily Marie was coming up with story ideas so quickly I could hardly keep track of her:

A driving sim where you were tweeting about events happening outside the car, while simultaneously trying to maintain control of your vehicle, a commentary on what we, modern society, do now.
A Myst style puzzler where the world is destroyed by aliens and you have to collect artifacts from your lost civilization, using your own journal entries as a guide to finding collectibles.
A platformer where you play a tin soldier and ballerina doll who get fused together.
A post-apocalyptic platformer where you’re a Cleveland steel worker.
A dating sim that starts after a video game hero has rescued a princess and realizes the princess just isn’t into him.

I found #1 a bit mean-spirited for my tastes. #3 and #4 would have involved character modeling and animation, which I wasn’t at all confident I could do in the time we had. So after much debate, we decided on the Myst puzzler, since it seemed to have the most interesting narrative possibilities and best distribution of labor. We would go with a hybrid of our pre-selected genres: it would be Myst-like, with journals written by Marie, but instead of having me do all the level assembly, we’d do it tile-based. So I could make generic building blocks and Marie could assemble them.

Blocks!

I started modeling blocks immediately.

Like our test project, my goal was just to get some basic shapes out quickly, so Marie could get started on level design as soon as possible. I did the large cube and stairs seen above, plus some flat ‘street’ pieces. Then I moved on to texturing, and Marie started placing blocks in her level, which was a bit sloggy.

Thing is, I was looking at all this the wrong way.

I was thinking in terms like, what are the most generic, useful pieces I can make? when I should have been asking myself, what sorts of things will Marie find fun and exciting? The thing with blocks is, blocks are for playing with. For exploring ideas. They’re not just generic pixels, and they shouldn’t be overly specific, either.

Later in the game jam, Marie asked for a half-arch piece, and once I made that, she was much more excited about level design. It was a fun piece to play with. It added tons of interest to scenes. And Marie was able to use the arch piece in ways that I wouldn’t have expected: in building details, broken bridges and this one really cool aquaduct-like structure.

Texturing

I was very nervous about texturing because, as a post-alien-invasion Earth, you’d expect lots and lots of junk. Rubble. Rebar sticking out of things. I had no idea how I was going to do this. But I started out trying to make some realistic asphalt and concrete textures for my street tiles.

It was kind of boring work, and people walking by seeing what I was doing didn’t exactly find it exciting.

And then I realized that it didn’t have to be realistic. I could make blocks that expressed a feeling of a burned-out city, without being a burned out city.

What I ended up doing was using the same, totally procedural texture on every single building block, a sort of glowing wood-embers texture. This turned out to be a great idea. It gave the game unique look, while simultaneously reducing the amount of work I had to do.

Overall

I’d say the whole building blocks thing worked well — once we had the right building blocks. And on future projects, whether I’m working with someone else or on my own, I think it’s good to remember that sometimes it’s best to make building blocks without thinking too much about how they’ll be used — sometimes, the way they can be used can surprise you.

Global Game Jam 2015 Postmortem, Part 1: The Approach

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I participated in a game jam. It was my sixth (I think), and her first.

So it’s time for a postmortem. Since I have lot to say (as usual), this will be broken up into multiple posts.

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You can download PC and Mac versions of our game here. (Note: the goal is to collect objects by clicking on them, and then click on the rocketship. Sadly, that’s not explained anywhere.)

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Like all game jams, I wanted to approach the jam with a mindset I hadn’t tried in a jam before: this time, I was going to go in planning to work with someone else — that someone else being my wife Marie.

Marie and I have been married thirteen years. Our first date was in 1996. Which is all just to say, we’ve been together a very long time and are already a working team of sorts. There was no question in my mind that we would get along as game jam partners. (Not that I didn’t occasionally imagine big scary robots coming to destroy us if we were not an effective team.)

The big question to me was, could we figure out the logistics of completing a project together?

I’m happy to report that the answer is yes. 🙂

Pregaming

A few days before the jam even started, we tried to come up with ideas for projects we could theoretically work on together, regardless of theme. I started by looking at the skills we were likely to use, the skills we each use on our own side projects: I do modeling, programming and music composition; Marie is a fiction writer.

My first thought was, we’d do a text adventure. I’d write an engine and parser in HTML/Javascript or something, and Marie would do the story planning, written scene descriptions, dialogue and wiring… it seemed like a perfect fit; Marie is a writer, after all…

…and then, much to my embarrassment, I realized I was underestimating Marie. We could do something more ambitious than that.

Marie is a software developer.

Just like me.

She doesn’t program for fun like I do, but Marie is a professional unix sysadmin and web programmer. And while I think of Unity, the game engine I use, as something you use by yourself, it is very well designed for shared, team projects. So we could collaborate on a more modern 3d video game here. With that in mind, we came up with the following options:

A text adventure. Still an option, as mentioned previously: I could do the engine from scratch and Marie could do the story and writing.
A Myst clone. I would produce a level — models, set up in Unity, almost everything visual — and separately, Marie could design puzzles and write the text of the clue-filled journals you get in Myst games.
Something tile-based. I would produce generic ‘building block’ type assets for a game world, with settings and wiring points that Marie could adjust. Marie would then do the level design, set-up in Unity and any writing/dialogue that was needed.

With all of these options, the workflow (from my point of view) would be similar:

Marie is in charge of game & level design.
Marie requests new assets or changes to existing assets.
I produce assets in a sandbox level in Unity.
As soon as they’re remotely functional, I share new assets with Marie. (And any previously existing assets I’ve updated in my sandbox get automatically updated in Marie’s real game level.)
Marie uses the assets to construct the real game level in Unity.
Repeat 2-5 throughout the weekend.

So we set up a free SVN repository on Assembla and started on a simple maze test project just to get used to the workflow.

By the time we were done, it looked like it was going to work. Marie got to lead the project, and I got to make pretty things without worrying about level design. We could work on our separate laptops, in separate Unity levels, and update to or from SVN whenever needed. It was simple and pretty frictionless. I was very excited about our options — and more excited about doing a game jam than I’d ever been before.