Tiny Frog Software

This weekend I took part in the 48 Hour Global Game Jam – This year 138 locations around the world took part in the competition and within the 48 hour timeframe 967 games got made.

NINE-HUNDRED AND SIXTY SEVEN GAMES!!

Ok, so alot of them aren’t going to be very well polished and more than a few will probably downright suck. But it’s an awesome experience and a great chance to meet new people and to try something completely different. If you have even the slightest interest in making a video game, and even if you’ve never made one before you really owe it to yourself to give it a go next year.

Last time I participated in the Game Jam I produced the prototype for RoboFortress which I later remade without too many modifications in flash in order to place it on this website. My experience from last year was very different from this year. Last year I worked all by myself because I wanted to see if I could complete a game from start to finish all on my own. This year I decided to work on a team, which was very different. To tell the truth I think the optimal number of people on a team for this competition is 2 or 3 – Any more than that and you really need to have a dedicated producer who is responsible for managing the project and is final arbitor on any decisions that need to be made.

My team was quite large (5 people) and alot of time was spent just trying to communicate with each other. And sometimes it can be very hard to communicate an idea when you’ve had very little sleep and have been living off red bull and greasy takeaways.

Next year I think I would like to participate in a group of 2 or 3.

So what about the game we made?

Well, it was a point and click graphic adventure game and you can play it here (Plays in a browser – Silverlight plugin required.) The goal is to get onto the roof and find what awaits you. The original plan was far more complex let me assure you

I’d never made a point and click adventure game before and I wanted to give it a go, which I suppose is what the Global Game Jam is all about.

I think I’d like to make a larger graphic adventure at some point, but now I know what I’d do differently.

PS: Please do not look at the code – It is a complete hack job

The last few days I’ve been playing around with XCode, OpenGL and objective-C on my new mini-mac (which had previously only been used to watch DVDs) with the intention of porting Attack of the Meeplings onto the iPhone.

Above is a picture of my very unfinished port of the game running in the Apple iPhone Simulator.  I’m back at work on monday so I’m going to try to get as much done as possible over the next few days.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can get the game out.

I’m going to set an internal target date of March 31st 2010 to have it finished by, if only to help with motivating me to complete the project in a reasonable timeframe.

Here is a list of my favorite games that I played during the years 2000-2009.

Note: This is not a best games list, or any other such nonsense – Just a bunch of games that I enjoyed the most. My favorites if you will.

For more than half of the decade I was a student so I didn’t have nearly enough money to purchase all the games that I would have liked to play and even now I don’t own any of the latest consoles – Only just last year did I get a PS2 and only just this year did I get a Nintendo DS, so the selection made here is from games that I’ve played that I had the most fun with.

• 10) Platypus - (PC, Horizontal Shooter). Anthony Flack’s game made entirely of clay reminded me just how much fun arcade shooters could be. This one is exceptionally well polished and has great visuals, it’s also a blast to play with friends. (There is an XBox live version available)

• 9) Shin Megami Tensi : Persona 3 – (PS2,  jRPG) – The Shin Megami series has been long running in Japan, but only recently has it crossed over to western shores. Persona 3 is a very dark game, and is set in a modern day Japanese school. Persona 3 showed me that not all jRPGs are just Final Fantasy knock offs. (It took me 70 hours to finish this game, which is why I haven’t ordered the sequal, even though I’ve heard that it’s better.)

• 5 Days a Stranger and the rest of the John DeFoe quadrilogy – (PC Freeware, Adventure) – A series of free point and click adventure games that pay excellent tribute to the adventure games of old, but also provide a very grown up and rather scary story. The games are all free, if you have a PC this is a must play.

• 7) Arcanium : Of Magick and Steamworks Arcania – (PC, cRPG) At the turn of the decade I was looking for the next Fallout game, hardly any RPGs featured turn based combat any more and jRPGs just weren’t quite what I was into. Enter Arcanium, developed by some members of the original Fallout and set in a steampunk universe. The game is flawed and the graphics rather dull, but it was the closest thing to what I wanted at the time.

• 6) Heroes of Might and Magic III - (PC, Strategy) Technically this game was released in 1999, but I didn’t play it until a few years later so I’m including it on this list, and boy did I play it alot. This is my favoriate in the series. IV sucked, V is pretty good, but doesn’t have the charm that III has.

• 5) Gradius V – (PS2, Horizontal Shooter) This game is freaking awesome, and looks great on the PS2 – Its very challenging and requires alot of practise, memorization and skill to get through the game. (I haven’t managed to yet.)

• 4) Mario and Luigi : Bowsers Inside Story – (Nintendo DS, Action RPG) This is probably the best looking game on the DS ever made, It was only released a couple months ago, but I’m already prepared to put it on my favoriate games of the decade list. I’ve not played any of the other Mario RPGs, but I’m tempted to take a look at them after I finish up with this one.

• 3) Portal (PC, First Person Puzzle Game) – It’s Portal, one of the most quirky games ever, what with its short play time (2-3 hours for a first play through) interesting and original puzzle concept, insane computer and catchy poppy end song. What’s not to like?

• 2) Cave Story (PC Freeware, Adventure Platformer) I originally dismissed this game after only playing it for 10 minutes and then quiting. But, once you get out of the first cave the game takes on a life of it’s own and it probably one of the best games I’ve ever played. Developed by one man over a period of 5 years, this guys got talent. I think an updated version is coming to wii-ware soonish?

• 1) Psychonauts – (PC, PS2, Xbox, 3rd person Adventure Platformer) – Best game ever, great characters, dialog, story and freaking awesome level design. Tim Schafer is a genius. Pity he only makes one game every 5 years or so.

There you have it. My own personal list of my favoriate 10 games of the last decade.

What were yours?

Its been about a year since I started on rQuest and it’s come to my attention that I don’t have all the necessary resources to pull it off just yet. As I keep fleshing out the game / tools / platform, the feature list keeps growing so do the required resources ie: time and money.

So I’m pausing on the idea of doing a single player RPG (For now) – I will definitely be doing one sometime in the future, I’ve been wanting to make one for – oh too many years now.

But – I do want to revisit some of my older games and return to doing a couple of web based games. So over the next few months I’m going to play around with Flash. If anyone’s got any tips for me, or knows of any good resources let me know!

This story contains no information of interest to anyone what-so-ever.

But it annoyed me, so let me vent.

I was already over my time-estimate, and I had a bug. It was strange, the system was sending out two emails and one had an exclamation mark; just randomly right in the footer – But the other was fine. After staring at my code and deciding that there was nothing wrong I decided to view-source in the browser – Yup, email had an exclamation mark right in the middle.

But I wasn’t putting it in there, and the code to attach the footer to each email was exactly the same. However only one email was displaying an exclamation mark.

See this project was in .php on a linux server – I’m not a php guru, nor a linux expert – previous to last month I had written approximately 50 lines of php code, and I’ve run linux, well never.

So I was convinced it was my bug, something I’d done wrong, something about the php_mail() function that I didn’t know about – It didn’t help that the server hadn’t been patched since 2004 and was still running php 4.2 so I couldn’t use any of the email libraries that kept being recommended in my google searches and promised to make my life easier.

So I entered a new test order into the system, and I got my two emails – One with an exclamation mark and one without, but this time the exclamation mark had moved. My previous testing at always shown it in the same place.

Test and measure, it’s the scientific method.

So I try entering a new order, this time adding exactly 4 characters to the address on the order form. This time the exclamation mark has moved exactly 4 places to the left.

Ah ha, I’ve got something! – I thought to myself. The system was no longer random, no longer chaotic, I had something deterministic – I had no idea why but the length of the email was causing an exclamation mark to be inserted

I modified my code output the email to the browser before sending it to php_mail() – No exclamation mark, formating all correct, everything fine. But when I recieved the email – exclamation mark.

It turns out that sendmail inserts an exclamation mark into an email if it receives a string that is too long without a line break. Why? I have no idea.

Because I was sending HTML I wasn’t bothering to insert line breaks ‘\n’ into my string before passing it to php_mail() – Instead I was using <br>

So some programmer, somewhere at sometime working on sendmail decided that if a string was too long they would split it up by inserting an ! character – This is probably some strange legacy thing from eons ago before HTML was even invented.

And only one of the emails was inserting an exclamation mark because the other was under the threshold for the maximum length before sendmail inserts an exclamation mark.

So that’s a boring story about how I lost 4 hours of my life and one of the stupid reasons why software is often over budget and over schedule.

!

I’m taking a break from working on my game this month. Mainly because I’ve been terribly busy at the day job. But I got a nice raise this year – So that’s good.

I have been thinking about trying to port the engine to C#/Mono – If I can deploy it with the mono runtime and not require a seperate download I think it will be the way to go.

C++ is nice for what it’s good at, but I don’t think it’s a very good fit for my project. I’m far more efficent with the C# language and given that I program mostly in C# at work – If I can get a proof of concept hello world app out, it will help with the context switching overhead so I don’t have to reorganise my brain to remember how C++ does things.

I’ll also have to see if I can get Lua and SDL working with mono.

Of course, getting all these different libraries to work togeather might be more trouble than its worth.

(Oh, I guess that means I’m buying a mac)