Archive for November, 2007
Mouse based walking
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 28, 2007
This morning I added the ability to use the mouse to walk around dungeons. This should solve the diagonal movement issues for laptops which don’t have a numpad! The mouse walking is essentially the same as in Ultima7 – To do it I get the mouse position and I calculate a vector to the avatar in the centre of the screen. Then based on this vector I calculate an angle. And based on this angle I change the mouse cursor to point in the direction that you want to move in. Brillant.
Although I do have to make the directional cursors smaller, and I keep wanting to click on the monsters to attack them, diablo style – rather than just walk into them. I’ll have to add an ‘attack’ cursor. Overall I think the interface is begining to sharpen up quite nicely.
The Geek Documentry, the new genre in film?
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Geeks and Toys on November 27, 2007
There have been a few interesting looking movies turning up on my radar lately. And it occurred to me that they all share something in common – They’re all totally niche, and about… Well, odd ball stuff. Stuff that, in some strange way or another I find interesting, and in some way or another I find compelling. They’re all about real people, people whom you might not recognise at first, but they are people who have all in some way changed the world we live in.
The films I’m talking about are all Geek Documentaries.
The first film I purchased was Project Aardvark – A story of four interns who take on a summer job at Fog Creek Software. Owned by the legendary Joel Spolsky. Who was probably one of the first technical bloggers, before the term ‘blog’ had even been coined. The movie itself pretty good, although not super amazing. But it does have its moments.
Since then, there have been some other solid looking titles.
Helvetica - A movie about a freaking font? Who’d a thought it even possible to get a movie made about a font, let alone get people to see it? And whats more, to enjoy some pretty good success. It’s even been doing screenings at various film feastivals in like, you know, a real theatre.
In Search of the Valley – A story of three friends journey from London to Silicon Valley, where they meet up with and chat to many of the valley’s living legends, including Steve Woz – creator of the Apple and Apple II computers as well as a whole host of other people. The trailor can be viewed on youTube here
GetLamp - A look back at one of the long lost (commerically at least) art forms. GetLamp is a documentary about the text adventure game. An interesting look at one of the first convergences of art and technology. The movies not out yet, but a trailor can be seen on youtube.
8Bit – A look into the art and music of 8bit computers, synthesisers and videogames. Also not out yet. Trailor here.
Are we going to see more and more of these niche titles coming up? I certainly hope so, with the realitively low cost of todays digital video hardware and software. Combined with leaveraging the internet as a distribution medium. It could be realitively inexpensive for budding young filmmakers to produce movies about their own passions and interests. No matter how oddball they are, there’s probably at least a few others in this great wide world who’ll appreciate the work.
Magic does happen
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 26, 2007
Got the first batch of spells working alongside some crappy particle effects. I’ll do them better when I get around to it.
The first few spells include good ol’ heal, bless, fireball and town portal - The cornerstone of any adventurer’s arsenal if you ask me, wouldn’t leave home without ‘em.
I posted that the first public alpha would be december 1st. I’m going to push that back a week ’cause I feel it’s important to get mouse movement working correctly as well as some other stuff, such as a quiver – Having unlimited arrows is a little bit too unbalanced it seems…
In other news, I’ve been enjoying Eschalon. I’ve racked up 10 hours so far and I guess I’m about halfway through it? And no, its not the reason why I pushed the alpha release date back a week. Not at all – Why would you say that?
The Weekend and Eschalon
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Uncategorized on November 23, 2007
I just purchased a copy of Eschalon and I’m going to be spending the weekend playing. It’s a 100MB download so I’m going to go out and get some pizza. Let the geekend begin!
Eschalon Book 1 – Demo Mini Review
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Indie Games on November 21, 2007
I spent this morning playing the demo of Eschalon : Book 1 from Basilisk Games – And it kicks serious butt!
It’s been along time since I got into a single player RPG. The last one was Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and before that the all mighty Fallout. I didn’t even really like Baulder’s Gate that much… What Fallout, Arcanum and Eschalon all have in common is that they feature turn based combat – I’m a sucker for turn based games.
Infact everything in Eschalon uses up a turn. Movement, drink potion, try break down a door, cast a spell etc… But because the game provides smooth animations and particle effects the gameplay just flows nice and smooth, giving a sense of continous play. The turn based combat provides for some interesting tactics and your enviroment becomes important if you wish to secure an advantage. Fighting in doorways always provides protection from being overwhemed – And if you want to escape from monsters, shut the door on them.
The plot doesn’t seem to be too revolutionary, and involves the player awakening in a strange land with amnesia, not knowing who he was or why he was there…
But the combat and exploration, as well as the stats-driven character development is where the game really shines – It just Ooozes old school cool with modern UI developments. Which is the area I feel fails alot of indie games. The graphics are well polished and are slightly reminisent of commerical 2D games released sometime around 2001, which appeals to my senses.
The Demo Provided me with about 3 hours of gameplay, which was enough to decide that I like the game. Usually If I play any game that I’ve downloaded for longer than 20 minutes, it means there’s something special holding my interest.
The only thing I felt that let it down is that movement is a bit too slow. I’d like to see the ability to run, sometimes walking from one side of the map to the other it can take a bit too long – Also, if you want the automap to actually work you’ll need to spend some of your precious skill points on the ‘cartographer’ ability.
The team at Basilisk games have done a really good job and have really raised the bar as far as Indie CRPGs are concerned. If I wasn’t totally skint for cash at the moment, I’d purchase the game no worries.
You can see the game trailer on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqSkCka_Ijg
Size limit for browser based games.
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 21, 2007
As I’ve been developing Caverns of Underkeep I’ve been keeping an eye on the size of my game. So far I’m coming in at under 440KB – Originally I didn’t want to exceed 1MB but I’m not sure if thats going to happen. I’d still like people on slow connections to be able to play the game – And for every 1KB saved, that means I pay less in bandwidth fees.
Ways I have kept the game small:
No Music – So this doesn’t work for all game styles but for mine I’m pretty confident I can get away without having any music. The alternative is to use .mid files (which sound horrible) or compressed digital audio (which sounds good, but takes up lots of room) or to use tracker files (.mod or similiar) which are like midi, but they use samples for the instruments. Tracker files can find a nice balance between size and sound quality if your musician is skilled enough you can get about 1/3 the size of a traditional .mp3 of the same length.
PNG compression – I use pngs for almost everything, but I check if .jpg produces better results without losing quality. When the UI gets redone by a much better artist than me it’ll most likely be .jpg that compresses better for images with many colours – for low colour images (such as my monsters) .gif or .png work a treat. I like png because it has a built in alpha channel – which (if you’ve ever had to do sprites with masks before) you’d know saves a ton of time.
In order to optimize my .png files so they are the smallest I can possibly get I use a tool called optiPNG which runs my images through several different optimisers to pack them into as little space as possible. Remember, the less colours you use the better you can compress image, try to use less than 255 colours per image. That way you can save your images as 8bit pngs. The gimp has a useful tool for reducing an images colours, whilst reducing graphical artifacts.
SFX, 22khz or 11 khz mono, again not for every game, but for mine SFX just have to be there, they don’t have to sound amazing I haven’t programmed the SFX stuff yet, so I haven’t decided on the exact compression I’ll be using – but you can be rest assured that it ain’t going to be 44khz stereo.
Proceduraly generated content – Well, randomly generated dungeons anyway. Algorithmically generated stuff takes alot less disk space than traditional data driven games, if you’re thinking about making a webgame maybe you should think about ways in which you can offer good gameplay and variety through procedural generation.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to save on space, I’d be glad to receive any suggestions.
New monsters
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 19, 2007
Here is a preview of some more monsters. I drew 5 of these little beasties and thanks to a friend of mine, who created the rabbit, the alien and the goat there will be even more stuff for you to kill (And be killed by.)
And the x2 zoom below
I’m particularly proud of the Rock Golem and the Green Ghost.
So far I’ve been keeping up with my draw one monster or item a day so there should be a good amount of content for the first alpha, which is due in like less than two weeks. Eek! Got to get on to programming spells and spell effects.
The basic shops are now operational and in the town – that is the Healers, the weapons/armour store and the magic shop. They need to be skinned and made to look nice, but at least they’re functioning.
10,000 lines of code
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 16, 2007
Global Summary (243 KB, actual: 199 KB)
———————————————–
Number of lines of code: 8110
Number of directive lines: 0
Number of empty lines: 1249
Number of comment lines: 901
Number of empty comment lines: 128
——————————————-
Total number of lines: 10388
———————————————–
68 file(s) processed.
So Caverns has passed the 10K lines of code mark. Compared to any major software project thats not many at all, but for a game that I’ve been programming myself its not too shabby. Judging from some other posts at the IndieGamer forums I’d say that I’m probably about one third of the way through the programming.
I’ve been having a bit of a go at doing more art, specifically monsters and items. I’m not the greatest artist in the world, but I figure if I have a go at drawning one item and one monster everyday by the end of the year I should end up with some usable stuff. Surely I can only get better right?
Release Date for Alpha Version
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep on November 13, 2007
On the 1st of December I’ll be hosting the first alpha of Caverns of UnderKeep. Meaning I’ll be soliciting some feedback by various people on the game programming messageboards I frequent. That means I have about three weeks to put things togeather. Theres little to do in terms of architecture, although I have lots of ’stuff’ and ‘features’ to implement. I’m going to try posting a weekly blog entry detailing my progress until the first alpha is ready.
Things that got implemented in the last couple of days:
Traps: There are traps littered around the caverns now.. they are hidden until you stand on them, if your intelligence and dexterity are high enough, you just might spot them before you walk on them. You can also attempt to disarm traps, with an XP reward if you do and a small bit of damage if you fumble.
Pink Blob Monsters: When killed, blob monsters spawn acid on the ground, try not to walk on it unless you’ve got protection.
Leveling up: Thats right, kill enough monsters, get enough XP and you can become bigger, badder and more buff. Which your choice of stats to increase, choose from strength, dexterity, constitution or intelligence at each level.
Thats it for now, many more things coming up.