Archive for category Game Design
How to get artwork for your great game idea
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Game Design, Indie Games on December 2, 2007
Danc over at lost garden has just posted a very good article on “How to bootstrap your indie art needs”
If you’re a newbie, hobbiest game developer, semi-pro, or seasoned indie you should add lost garden to your RSS feed. (If you haven’t already.) Most of my RSS feeds on my list are from various programmers, but lost garden’s focus is more to do with art/design issues and it’s nice to see the view from the other side once and a while.
Go read the article, but briefly the summary is, in order to get art assests for your game you should either:
- Design a game that doesn’t need professional art i.e Pick a project that complements your own artistic ability
- Use free/stock graphics where possible
- Set up a rational budget/savings plan to hire an artist
I’ve been thinking about my next project after Caverns (which at the moment is using method 1 with a little bit of 2, and will hopefully progress onto method 3 by about the time the game is mostly finished. I’m doing most of the graphics myself until I have some money saved to get it over-hauled.)
I want to tackle a project where I can do the majority of the artwork – which means that it can’t be anything ultra difficult. I’m leaning towards doing a semi-retro, semi-abstract 2D shooter because even though there’s lots of things I can’t draw, most paint programs come with a circle and a square drawing tool.
Lessons Learnt from Starcars – A Post-Mortem
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Business of Software, Game Design, Game Programming on July 17, 2007
I’m a big fan of reading post-mortems on game development. If that sounds somewhat morbid to you, a post-mortem is basically a post-production overview of what went right and what went wrong. And any insights gained after the product has shipped out the door. Whether your product was an amazing success or an absolute bomb, either way, there is always something to learn. Enough time has transpired that I figured I would reflect upon my debut game Starcars.
Starcars – The History.
I came up with the idea to do a skyroads inspired game sometime in 2003 when I was looking for a small scale game that I could produce by myself, with no money and no previous experience. It seemed (at the time) that it would be a fairly easy project to do, but how little did I know back then. Game programming is not trivial and there are challenges present in even the most seemingly innocuous of ideas. It was going to be the first (and so far the only) game that I would see through to the end – hopefully that will change one day as I get started on the next project – albeit with more experience this time round 
I released the game sometime in 2004 (I was really bad at keeping dates or recording any kind of logs) with the intention of selling the game online. Due to a pretty poor performance in this regard in 2006 I decided to just release the game for free.
The game was written in Visual Basic 6.0 with DirectX 8.0 using the Bass.dll for music and SFX.
Before we continue I’d like to thank Daniel Radford for providing testing and contributing some levels to Starcars as well as some of the 3D models that are in the game.
What Went Right.
The game got finished - This seems rather obvious but I would like to point out that just finishing can sometimes show that you’re in a different league. After all anyone can start a project. Finishing on the other hand is a completely different story. And ultimately, that’s what counts. Similar to the “you can’t succeed if you don’t try vein” – If you don’t finish you can’t succeed either. I am happy I actually managed to finish the game to release upon the world.
I learnt a lot – Programming a 3D game can be a bit of a brain bender. Especially since I started Starcars before I had ever taken any university level math classes. In fact, I still don’t know how the collision detection code works Its patched together and hack-it-till-it-works ugly. But that gives it a kind of amateur allure that I’m rather fond of – although I would do it properly if I had to do it again.
The game really tested a lot of my programming skills – which where pretty poor back then on retrospection. GUIs are not trivial to program – yet I managed to hack one together; In my next project I’m spending a lot of time reading up on how to create effective GUIs, both in design and in code.
Global variables are all over the place and there’s very little in terms of object oriented design. In other words the code base is a mess and is very unwieldy – in other words its probably quite representative of anyone’s first attempt at programming a game.
I also learnt a lot of other things that have almost nothing to do with the programming side of game development which are important in other ways, like how to setup a website and get an account with a payment provider, how to get a press release done and how to setup a pad file for download site submissions.
I got a small budget retail run – This was a rather random experience, based on the initial press release I was contacted by someone who represented a game publisher in Russia, they handled all the localisation and converted the game into Russian. In return I was paid a modest upfront fee – $1000 US which came in very handy as I used it to purchase my bass that I play in my band.
What Went Wrong.
It didn’t sell - I guess this is the big one, I only sold a handful of copies through direct downloads from my site. I never did try soliciting to portals, but I have the feeling that I probably would have been required to do more polishing to the game anyhow. There are numerous reasons why the game never took off or made me much money, but the main reason I think would just simply be inexperience, much like it is highly unlikely that the first song you ever write is going to be a number one hit, the first game that you ever make (even if you finish it) is probably not going to be very good.
It took a long time - 18 months all up. That was part-time and in-between studies with large breaks where I had exam periods, or just didn’t feel like working on it. Large blocks of that was just working out how to do one particular aspect of the game – such as collision detection, projecting the ships shadow, or implementing the GUI – All three of which had to be re-searched, re-written and re-worked several times over.
Game design flaws - There are quite a few design flaws that I can ultimately take the blame for. One was doing the UI graphics myself, the fonts and menus have the distinct mark of an amateur. A professional designer can work wonders in this area. If you have downloaded any of the recent casual games you can see examples of just how good some people are at making menus. However I had no budget, nor any previous experience with even getting an interface working in code, so I got by on what I had.
Two other game flaws were locking the frame rate at 25 fps – I wanted all computers to run the game at the same speed and I should have used frame rate independent motion. But it was too difficult to retrofit after I realized that [that] was a far better option – blame my difficult to manage code. The other mistake was not providing a windowed mode option. Before I was working on a 17″ CRT and the game looked fine. But after moving to a 19″ LCD I can see the benefits of providing a windowed mode. Not providing a windowed mode runs the risk of annoying the player by not letting them play on their own grounds – something you don’t want to run the risk of doing.
A few of the online reviews commented on the lack of any physics within the game. It was my intention from the beginning to create an arcade game more than a spaceship/racing simulation game and I deliberately left out inertia, and kept in ability to move left and right whilst in the air to keep the ‘responsiveness’ factor up. This would have suffered if there was more inertia involved.
Unclear target market – The Field of Dreams – ‘Build it and they will come’ is not a very good marketing strategy. Although I don’t really know what I would have done differently should I have made the same game again. Maybe designed some kind of mascot as the main character? Who knows, it doesn’t really matter anyway as my next project is going to have a lot more thought going into ‘who the player is and what would they like to see’ right from the beginning – at the game design stage. This will let me focus on the game design as well as the marketing at the same time.
Summary
Hopefully this post-mortem didn’t come across as too depressing – It’s easy to point out flaws after the fact. I enjoyed working on Starcars, making a website and attempting to dominate the world. And even though the game didn’t make me much money, it gave me good experience and I learnt things that I would never have learnt had I not at least attempted a game.
My next game is going to do a lot better
The full version of Starcars can be downloaded for free at http://www.peachysoft.com/?p=4
Book Review : A Theory of Fun
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Book Reviews, Game Design on March 9, 2007
A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster.
I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading ‘A Theory of Fun’ by Ralph Koster. This book explores the very essence of what fun is all about. Every page of text is accompanied by an entertaining cartoon. And the topics explored in the book are on such diverse subjects as Psycology, Game Theory, Pattern recognition, Flow, Music, Personality types, Emergence and Evolution. How and why those topics are important to games, gamers and game designers is covered.
A short synopsis on Ralph’s book would go something like this.
Games are essentially about learning a particular rule set, and it is this exploration of the rules that we find fun. If the game is too easy, then it is boring for us, and we seek a different game. (Think of the last time you actually enjoyed playing tic-tac-toe) And if it is too hard, then we don’t have that much fun either, rather we just get fustrated and grumpy and call the game derogatory names.
The fun we experience when playing a game is all about learning the game at a pace that we find acceptable. The corollary of this is that every game is destined to become boring once we have mastered it. This is an interesting notion for Game Designers, because it means that one of the objectives to keep in mind when designing a game should be to delay for as long as possible complete mastery.
But you can’t do this just by making it hard. Because no one will play it. One must offer many variations on a common theme. The games that have been with us for a long time – Chess and Solitare for example, do this kind of thing.
Who would have actually thought that learning was fun?
Ralph’s book is highly enjoyable, interesting and I recommend every game designer gets a copy for their bookshelf.
Filling in the details : RPG Writing Part I
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Game Design on February 4, 2007
When I was in High School a couple of friends and I set out to create a short film. We had some pretty cool high level ideas and some neat visual gags. We had good concept art and a basic plot outline etc.. but when it came time to constructing the actual script and in particular writing the dialog we got pretty stuck.
No one on the team had written a script before.
So this is what we did.
And I bet it works for writing RPGs too.
First of all we wrote up backgrounds for each character and gave them a personality with likes and dislikes. If any of the characters knew any of the other characters prior to the time-window of the film we defined what that relationship was. Were they long time friends? Enemies? One-way crush perhaps? If any of the characters were parodies of inhabitants from the real world we would write that down. If they had any qualities loosely based on some of the people we knew in real life, character traits or the like, we’d write that down too.
Once you have all the relationships between the characters sorted, it is very easy to create dramatic tension simply by playing the “What if” game. “If this character said such and such to so and so, how would they react? What would the consequences be? What would they say back?” If you’ve done all the background stuff it’s pretty easy to come up with several possible scenarios. And the construction of dialog can flow much much quicker.
How to use this technique to create quests.
Fleshing out this kind of detail for your NPCs can offer up all kinds of possibilities for quests. For example: Lets say we have a village in our game and two villager NPCs. We can decide that there is a relationship between these two villagers – Say they’re brothers. If we like, we can also decide that their parents died sometime not too long ago – maybe less than 5 years. And the oldest of the two brothers recieved more than the lions share of the estate – inheriting a large prosperous farm. The other brother only inherited a small shack on a not-so-productive-much-smaller piece of land. The reasons why the inheritence where split up this way is largely unknown. Needless to say, there has been some kind of tension that exists between the brothers since that day.
There are a number of possible quests that can come out of this small bit of information that largely consists of A) A relationship and B) Background history. Note I haven’t even gone into any sort of detail concerning the character traits of the individual brothers, but doing so would offer up more specifics and would flesh out the quests in more detail.
Some possible quests include.
- On hearing of his parents death. The elder brother broke into the library of records and altered his parents will so that he would inherit the lions share. The player can discover this by visiting the library of records and showing the forgery to the key administrator.
- The smaller piece of land has some special significance which was discovered by the parents but not reveiled. For example it might contain an access point to a long forgotten mine. The parents obviously thought that this special extra would offset the seeming unbalance in the inheritence. Its the players job to find this special extra and reveil it to the younger brother.
- The brother who inherited the larger piece of land did so because the other brother never really had much to do with the family and was a bit of a trouble maker. This ‘evil’ brother killed his parents in order to get his hands on the families fortune (for whatever reason) only to find post-humously that his inheritence amounted to little because of his rougish ways. He is now ploting to kill his brother, the player may choose to help him or hand him in to the authorities.
There are many many other possible senarios and quests that you could devise from this kind of technique. And these kinds of quests can be a lot more interesting than playing postal deliveryman. It can also offer a much more rewarding experience for the player, who can probe deeper into your world and through their actions actually change the lives of your virtual inhabitants. Not just by stopping foozle the evil magician from destroying the world. But also by getting Jimmy, the blacksmiths son into the Royal Academy just by putting in a good word with the administration.
Why I’m choosing 2D
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Game Design on January 12, 2007
The other day I was asked why I had decided to make a 2d RPG and not a 3d one. Because for some reason most hardcore players think that 3d is somehow inherently superior – It is an additional dimension after all…
Note: This hasn’t go anything to do with the tired old argument of 2d vs 3d. I’m not anti-3d in any way. I like a lot of 3d games I have even made one 3d allows you to do a whole lot of things that 2d simply cannot do. And I’ll probably re-visit 3d in the future. But for now I thought I’d share my reasons on why my RPG project going to be 2d.
1: Technology
In the fast paced world that is the technological rat race we have encountered a rare phenomenon. There have been pretty much no advances in 2d graphics in the last 5 years. Anti-Aliasing, Real-time Lighting, Alpha Blending, Stretching, Scaling and Rotation combined with 24-Bit colour images and high resolution is a pretty strong arsenal for the 2d artist / level designer. And many of those technologies have been around since the days of the SNES.
It’s my prediction that 2d is now a fixed medium (much like oil painting) where the technology no longer matters, all that matters now is the skill of artist.
2: Timelessness
I get annoyed with some indie developers who display messages on their websites about how they’re all about the gameplay and you don’t need good graphics to enjoy a good game anyway. That’s rubbish, style never goes out of style – sure you don’t need the latest wizz-bang shader push-the-polygons-to-their-limit technology, but you do need to have a good sense of design and aesthetics because that’s all part of the player feedback and reward system.
3d graphics currently date really quickly. In a podcast interview, Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame) shared a vision that one day, maybe in 15 or 20 years time, game graphics technology will lock-down and become a fixed medium (similar to the way film is today.) and anybody with the appropriate mixture of skill, determination and business acumen will be able to create a computer game.
And I am claiming that is true today. Provided you want to use 2d of course.
The neat thing about RPGs is that they are essentially stories about characters (Ok, I admit – not all, but lets just pretend this is the case ok.) Good stories about good characters are timeless. If the graphics technology is essentially timeless and the art timeless and the story timeless. Then there’s no real reason why it isn’t possible to create a timeless computer game. Imagine creating a game that will sell for 10 years or even 20! Jane Austin novels have been around for a long time, why can’t a computer game enjoy that same kind of shelf life?
3: Branding
The end goal for computer graphics technology at the moment seems to be Photo-realism. Once we reach that advancement the problem is going to become a major branding issue. Imagine flicking through a computer magazine and seeing a few images of the latest photo-realistic games on offer, what? can’t tell them apart, sure they look amazing, but because they’re all photo-realistic they’re all going to look the same. Character design and Art direction are going to become increasingly important to give games a visual point of difference in the future. I can brand my games as Retro 2d RPGs – Someone will be able to take one look at a screen shot and see exactly what type of game it is.
4: Totally sub-saturated market
Almost all the big players, Bio-ware, Bethesda, Square, Blizzard, etc have either moved to 3d RPGs or massively multiplayer RPGs. Mainly because that’s where the big money is, but when they all left, no one really filled their places, there are a couple of contenders of course, Spiderweb Software and Amaranth Games, but there is room for a whole lot more players in the game.
Additional Reading
Ron Gilbert Podcast Interview
Future Proofing Game Graphics – At LostGarden.com
Game Balance
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Game Design on December 18, 2006
I’ve been trying to balance my hex strategy game and its turning out to be alot harder than I thought it would be. The two main problems I’ve come across so-far have been:
A) The game has no random elements what-so-ever, so if there exists a perfect strategy for a particular map, the player who gets the first go is more than likely to win, essentially reducing it to as much fun as tic-tac-toe. I’ve come up with a couple of strategies to help guard against this but I won’t find out how effective they are until I solve the next problem.
B) I don’t have anyone other than myself to playtest with at the moment. Everyone is busy with the christmas season. This means I can’t anticipate which strategies people are going to discover or are likely to use. I thought about quickly coding a multiplayer feature into my prototype so I could play it with friends over msn, but I decided that I really needed the face-to-face communication, to both explain the rules and to receive feedback. So I decided against that move. When christmas is over and university goes back I’ll be able to find a few volunteers, I’m sure.
What has come out this this small game experiment is that I’ve developed a much greater appreciation of people who develop board games and games that have fully revealed open-states to both players – it’s alot harder to do than you might think.
Five games that really really inspire me to create an RPG
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Game Design, nostalgia on December 8, 2006
Below are what I would consider to be the defining RPGs that I played when I was younger that really helped cement the idea that I wanted to program computer games for a living.
Quest for Glory I & II
This, I think was the first game that got me REALLY interested in computer games. My first encounters with computer games were mainly the arcade video games of the later part of the 80s. Space Invaders, Bolder Dash and Gauntlet clones, all pretty cool, but nothing compared to what I was about to see in the form of Quest for Glory. You see QfG, was the first game that I saw that used the EGA graphics card, a whole 16 colours. Not much, but EGA was an order of magnitude better than it’s predecessor, which only boasted 4 colours. Not only was it graphically superior to anything I had seen at the time, but the gameplay was superior to anything I’d ever seen also. The world seemed huge and the possibilities endless to a child of 7 years of age. I’d played a couple of the other adventure games from Sierra before, but they were previous generation titles, QfG was the first game I played that used Sierra’s SCI engine.
The game just seemed to open up worlds that I had never before seen in a computer game. I’d never played a role-playing game before but I was hooked from the begining. I used to imagine what things I might find in the forest, or maybe there was some way to get over the mountains and explore new areas of the game. (There wasn’t, but at least I had an imagination back then.)
Admittedly I wasn’t very good at the game. I pretty much asked my step-dad what he had found in the game and copied his findings, but I was only 7 after all, and the game was one of those parser interface adventure games where you had to type in what you wanted to do, so being seven years old my vocabulary was fairly underdeveloped, and often I wouldn’t know what I could do because, I’d need to know what a word meant before I could use it in a sentence, of course. (And spell it correctly too, which was never my strong point during my school years.) But never the less, I had heaps of fun just wandering around the game.
Later on I got my hands on Quest for Glory II : Trial by Fire. I think I was around 12 maybe, this game remains one of my favorite games to date. I would estimate that I’ve played the game all the way through at least 8 times. The three different character types you could choose added lots replay ability. (As well as the ultimate goal of achieving the status of Paladin, which was obtained if you always acted honorably and completed some of the non-essential quests.) The Arabian Nights style setting also gave it a unique flavor compared to some of the more generic fantasy games. There is a remake project at http://www.agdinteractive.com which should be out any day now, and I definitely intend to play this version of the game through. There is also a possibility that a collection of the entire series will be reissued. I’ve heard rumours about Kings Quest and Space Quest series being re-issued, but I haven’t seen them on the shelves yet.
Ultima 7 The Black Gate
Ultima7 : The Black Gate and Ultima7: Serpent Isle are my only real encounters with the legendary Ultima series and I have to admit, I’m in absolute and total awe of the geniuses who developed this game. How they fit it into 20mb of Hard disk space and 4mb of RAM is totally beyond me. The game featured a huge seamless world where the player could interact with just about anything – If it wasn’t nailed down, or heaver than a desk, then you could take it.One of my fondest memories of the game was ‘pretending to buy a house.’ Now, you couldn’t actually buy a house in the game, but you could kill the occupants of a dwelling that took your fancy and then proceed to fill it up with your own trophies and loot. Actually, finding loot was another great pastime, I remember having competitions with my friends to see who could gather the most glass swords or powder kegs.
I didn’t like Serpent Isle isle as much because it was a lot more linear than The Black Gate. It was also harder to steal things, which was a lot of fun in the first one.
Ultima7 was coded with some pretty fancy trickery. There would have to have been to get that much data into memory, so it doesn’t run on modern machines. But There is a sort of engine remake project going on called Exult. The Exult project is a rewritten engine that uses the original data, graphics and scripts. Unfortunately I’ve long since lost my Ultimate Ultima7 Collection CD.
Land Stalker
I had a Sega Megadrive when I was a lad. In fact the Megadrive was the last video game console that I ever owned. Because most of my favorite games were available only on the PC, I never really wanted a Playstation or anything like that. Landstalker was Sega’s Zelda, an Adventure / Arcade / RPG type game presented in beautiful Isometric graphics.
The game was released in 1993 which places it towards the end of the Megadrive’s life cycle and is by far the most impressive game on that system. From both a technical standpoint and a game design standpoint. The game was full of dungeons to explore and clever puzzles. Not to mention the fact that it was a huge game, I believe that even with a walkthrough it took me a week before I got right to the end. The game was mostly linear, but considering the limitations of the system it was designed for, and the fact that it wasn’t really until too recently that any console games where non-linear. My hat goes off to the development team.
It was announced that a remake project was underway for the Sony PSP. Something I’d be quite keen to check out.
Fallout
Ah, Fallout. The yardstick by which all other RPGs are compared. The first time I heard about Fallout I thought that it sounded interesting, but I didn’t really know what to expect. Here was this RPG that was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. When I saw it in the bargain bin at my local computer game store I grabbed it. It was school holidays and I had nowhere to be and nothing to do. What ended up happening is that after getting home and installing it I didn’t emerge from my bedroom for 5 days.
It was obvious from the beginning that setting of the Fallout universe had a lot of thought put into it. It seemed that the designers, once agreeing on the setting, just let the ideas pour from that one central idea of a post-nuclear world following the near destruction of civilisation. Cows with two heads, mutants, radiation, Nuka-Cola, bottle caps for currency. In other words the design of the entire world was congruent.
Two elements of Fallout I really enjoyed where ‘Character Creation and Development’ with all the perks and skills that were available it meant that the game could be played many different ways depending on how you wanted to play your character. I never really played it through more than once because I lent it to all my friends, I just had to show them this game because it was just so cool and they would often discover things that I didn’t simply because they chose to play different style characters. The other element I enjoyed was the ‘Turn Based Combat system.’ Fallout has my favorite combat system of any RPG I have played – targeting of specific body parts lead to more than a few chuckles.