Prototype, Prototype, The Saga Continues
August 28th, 2008
First of all, let me apologise for the title of this post, as it is a reference to a Wu-Tang Clan song. Phew, with that out of the way, let’s move on.
I will get to more news on the ongoing prototype work, but first I wanted to point you to Cliff Harris’s blog:
- Cliffski’s Blog (positech.co.uk)
Cliff has been on a lot of gaming sites recently because of his recent open discussion with game pirates. Cliff runs Positech Games, which is his one-man indie games company based in the UK. Recently on his blog he posted a request to people who pirate (steal) his games. He asked openly and honestly why they steal his games. He promised that he wasn’t going to get angry or try to press charges, he just wanted to know how to make his games better so that people would be more willing to buy his games. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to check out the link above as it’s quite interesting.
You’ll notice that I’ve added a link to Cliff’s blog on my side-bar on the left. I’ve followed Cliff’s stuff for quite some time. I first started following his work after I played the Democracy demo, which I really enjoyed. The other reason I wanted to post a link to his blog is that Cliff is one of the most open bloggers in the games development community. He has frequently posted detailed sales data about his games and posts great little blurbs about challenges and problems he encounters in his day to day development. Not that I want you to stop reading my blog, but I wanted you to be aware of some of the people who are willing to share their experiences with the community.
So, back to the prototype!
In my last post I mentioned that my next steps were:
- Adding mouse support to the prototype
- Adding some simple animations to the prototype
Adding mouse support turned out to be much easier than I had expected. I already had the guts of the game accepting abstract events from the game controller (e.g. “Move Left” instead of “User pressed Left Arrow Key” to trigger an event), so connecting mouse movement to those events turned out to be quite simple. The Playfirst SDK also helped a lot in this regard. They provide easy access to mouse events.
With mouse control enabled I was shocked at how differently the game played. The gameplay is now much closer to what I originally saw in my mind. Using the mouse removes a barrier between the player and the game in this case. It allows the player to do what he/she wants instead of having to think about each keypress that will get them to that point. I’m very happy that I put this in at this point.
Animation turned out to be a bit of a bigger challenge. I spent the majority of my time (about 3 years) in the game indrustry as a lead user interface programmer, so I’m quite familiar with building 2D, sprite-based animation systems. However, it’s always a challenge. Here I kind of broke my rule of “fast and dirty” for the prototype and kind of architected something a little nicer. It took longer, but now I can drop animations into the game pretty easily. The animations are code based, but I should be able to make them data driven pretty easily with this system.
At any rate, the animations have helped make the prototype feel much more like a game. When “success events” (we’ll call them for now) happen, now the player is provided some feedback that something good happened. This allows time to take stock of what’s happened and provides the necessary feedback that allows the player to learn and become better at the game.
All-in-all it’s been a fairly successful few days. I also fixed a pretty major bug in the core game logic, so I was happy about that. I plan to spend most of the rest of today playing the game and taking notes on what needs to be done next. I’m hoping, within the next few days, to have a decision about whether this is the direction I want to pursue for the game or not.
Owen