Another Game Nearing Completion – Development Details

Happy Saturday everyone. I hope you all had a merry Christmas!

I managed to put in five hours of frequently disrupted development and research time after work today. I feel very productive even if life won’t let me focus. The major stress of having a physical fitness test the day before Christmas has passed, and since then, I have been able to drill down to the important things. Today I want to talk about the details of developing this latest game: Snake Clone. It is a very original name, I know.

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Technical Development Details

As I said before I was finished with the core gameplay a couple weeks ago, but there were a number of things that needed additional attention, and a few more touches still need to be done before I can call the game finished. I want to cover some of the changes and improvements that I have made as we near the deadline for December’s OneGameAMonth entry. The last hurdle to releasing the game has been setting up a functional user interface.

Universal Input – I wanted players to be able to use both of the major keyboard input formats, “WASD” and the arrow keys. This area of coding was relatively simple. It just involved separating the code that handles grabbing the user input and the code that updates the states of the object that needs to be moved. The benefit of the separation is that I can also add controller support without changing much, if any, of the base code of the game as well as using the same input code in future games.

Title Screen and Pause Menu – The rules for OneGameAMonth are that the game needs to be fully playable with a beginning, middle, and end. A beginning in this case would be a functional title screen. The main issue with the title screen was attention to detail with both making and placing those sprites. Along with that, most games are expected to have pause functionality of some sort. Thankfully GameMaker: Studio has a tutorial that goes into setting up a pause screen which I modified to work for this game.

High Score – Today, I set up an external file that will keep track of the local top high score. This aspect of programming gets into file handling and encoding. Since this game is so simple, I probably won’t extend that functionality to track multiple high scores, but depending on how the data is structured, that functionality can be put into the next game with relative ease.

The game still needs basic sounds, an options menu, a game over screen, an icon, and credits. All of these are minor tasks that will just take time to implement. The game will be complete by Dec 31st and next Saturday I will make sure to post a link to it.

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Non-technical Development Details

Because I am already going kind of long with today’s post I will keep this section short and expand on it another week. Today I went around to the various game development circles that I was interested in and established some sort of presence there. I want to start getting to know other developers/artists and getting my name out there a little bit better to potential readers/future players. Check out my updated About page for links to the other places I will be sharing content. So far only the Twitter and OneGameAMonth accounts have anything to look at, but that will be changing shortly.

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Thank you for spending this time with me and feel free to leave any comments you might have about what I’m doing or the structure of these posts.

See you next Saturday!

Games and Giving

Happy Saturday everyone!

I was looking at the economy for video game content in the US recently, and 15.4 billion dollars worth of game software and digital add-ons were sold in 2013, according to the annual report by the Entertainment Software Association. For a comparison, the US yearly box office gross revenue was 10.9 billion dollars, according to pro.boxofice.com. Financially, the world of video games is here to stay. I am glad that I will get to be a part of something I love that is a stable player in the US economy and a quickly growing one in the world economy. As we approach the Christmas season, I’ve been taking more time to reflect on what I want to do with my future in the gaming industry.

While I haven’t gotten it all boiled down into a simple little business slogan yet, it is a fundamental question that will drive how I grow as a developer and the way I interact with the gaming community as a whole. The gaming industry has been a growing inspiration for me as I look into the charities that are run by and funded by game companies and individual gamers. Just to name a few, there is Child’s Play which supports hospitals and domestic violence shelters with consoles and age appropriate games for children, Extra Life which supports Children’s Miracle Network hospitals with the donations pledged by the gaming marathon supporters, and Games Done Quick which will support the Prevent Cancer Foundation with its event in January. I want to support these kind of charities in the future.

There are many more charities, companies focused on designing games to support people with autism and PTSD, and game makers pursuing social causes with their games. Other companies are in the industry to promote better working conditions for game designers.  I don’t want to make games solely for the purpose of making money. I want to be a part of making things better either through my games themselves, engaging with the community, or some other aspect that I haven’t even thought of yet. I fell in love with games because they are fun, can get us involved in stories that we wouldn’t have imagined on our own, can be a platform of common ground to make friends, and allow us to experience worlds where the rules are fair for everyone. I want to have fun doing what I love and make a small impact on who I can in the process.

Next week I will go over what I have been learning and my progress with finishing my game for this month, the Snake clone.

Why do you love video games? I would enjoy to hear from you in the comments.

See you next Saturday!

Work and Holiday Parties

Happy Saturday everyone! Hopefully your Saturday has less to do with work than mine does. Working every other weekend is a bit of a bummer at times.

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Life

I don’t have an update on game programming this week primarily because of the extra hours at work this week. Becca also wanted to do a holiday party yesterday and that further limited the time I had for working on programming. I am still not quite back to my normal health, and I have been out of energy to do much other than help around the house or play games and watch movies. It also felt like a good time to spend a bit more time with the family overall. Thankfully, I said that we would talk some about the video games that I am playing these days.

Let’s go back to the holiday party for a bit. My wife absolutely loves to bake and decorate cookies, especially when she can do it with a group of friends. What better time is there to do a little cookie making than the Christmas season? We had five young boys, three mothers, and myself in our small apartment kitchen and dining room turning sugar cookies into Christmas trees, stars, snowmen, the Cookie Monster (ironic?), other Sesame Street characters, and ginger bread men. Our son isn’t old enough yet to actually decorate but he did get to eat a cookie and play with the older boys for a few hours. The crowded space wore on me pretty quickly, but we all enjoyed the time together.

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Video Games

So being a gamer that has been around for a while, I have tried out a good selection of games old and new, both good and bad. Some have been a huge time and money sink for me (League of Legends…), while others have been play once and never touch again for various reasons (Mass Effect 3 multiplayer…). I want to share a little bit of my current taste in games. Maybe one day I will try to put together a complete list of every game I have ever played, but that will be a pretty long list.

My main games right now are Lord of the Rings Online which just got on the list last week, League of Legends, Mass Effect, and Risk of Rain. They each have their different aspects that I like about them, both in what they bring to their genre and their worth to me as games. LOTRO has one of the best MMO communities I have ever seen, game puts you right in the middle of the story, and you can explore the world in a lot of detail. League is my love/hate game that always brings me back due to my competitive nature; I am a huge fan of the MOBA style games, and League essentially defines the genre right now. I am slowly getting into Mass Effect because of the story even if the ending of Mass Effect 3 is a let down. Risk of Rain is one of my pick ups that lets me see the success of an indie developer using GameMaker: Studio to bring a nice game to the market.

Below is a short categorized list of the games I have been playing recently with the first in each section being the one I’ve played most recently.

MMO – LOTRO, SWTOR, TSW
MOBA – LOL, DOTA2, Strife, Infinite Crisis, Smite
RPG – Mass Effect series, Fire Emblem Awakening, ChronoTrigger
Action – Risk of Rain, Diablo 3, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Other – Super Smash Bros for 3DS, Fantasy Rivals, Starcraft 2

For anyone interested, my League name is NewbDaddy. Feel free to shoot me a game/friend invite.

My rambling has continued long enough. I will see you all next Saturday!

Some Sickness and Success

Happy Saturday!

I am still trying to figure out the general size and format of these posts. So I will likely be trying different approaches over the next number of them before I settle on a standard that I like. Today let’s break things up into sections.

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On Life

The family has been sick for at least a week now. Overall, it is minor, but it drains a lot of energy when combined with working full time on my part and mothering a 15 month old full time for Becca. We have difficulty getting moving physically even though we are motivated to get many things accomplished like cleaning the house before we have a holiday cookie baking party. I’ll just be there to eat cookies since I am not good at the cooking or decorating parts.

My wife and I have enrolled in Liberty University Online. She is going for an associate’s degree in accounting which would put her in a good place to manage the finances of the game studio I am planning to start in the future. I’ll be working to finish a Bachelor’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies within the next three years since I have credits across various fields already.

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On Game Development

Last week, I completed my second game for the OneGameAMonth challenge. It is just a simple clone of the classic Pong.since using GameMaker: Studio. It is a simple exe file that just runs the game. Because I know people are hesitant to use exe files from random people, I am also planning to convert my simple games into HTML5 to be played in a browser without needing to download any files. So far the game file has been added to my public games folder on google drive where I will continue to place my completed free and demo games until I have a better solution setup.

For my month two game streak, I am making a Snake clone. Again it is a simple clone of a classic game. In fact, I am finished with the core gameplay and just have to put the closing touches on the game to make it acceptable like menus and a game over screen. With how close the game is to complete already, I will most likely make it public by next Saturday and move to working on another classic game this month.

I got the idea to do a progressive development challenge from an article on gamedev.net: “Your First Step to Game Development Starts Here“. The plan is to get a number of small games under the belt while learning new techniques with each game that can be used for future projects. While I do have ideas and plans for original games of all types and sizes, starting small and actually finishing what I can do just beyond my current ability each time will eventually get me to a place that I can feel confident in working on a more ambitious game for the market.

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That is all for this week. Next time we will probably talk about some of the games I’ve been getting into lately. See you next Saturday!

A Return from the Shadows

I am sorry. I have falied in the area of good second impressions by committing to a weekly blog and immediately disappearing after the first post. My wife and I have been struggling with depression silently for years and have just recently managed to work our way beyond that through lifestyle changes and support from friends and family. That depression was a huge strain on our marriage and our situation to where I ended up losing sight of my goals in life and runnning on autopilot.

The past year and a half has been eventful and stressful, and I want to give a brief overview of that period of silence. Our son Hezekiah was born in September last year. I was selected to serve in Korea for a year without my family. Soon after getting stable in Korea I was sent on a no-notice three-week training exercise where it was very difficult to communicate with anyone. Just after that exercise I was sponsored to have my family with me in Korea, and had to move out of the dorm, fly back to the states, move the family out of the house we had lived in for four years, and return to Korea within the span of three weeks. My wife and son returned to the States for a first birthday visit with family, and during that time some friends gave birth to their daughter. We have had a whirlwind of changes happen over the past two years and, looking back at it all now, we are able to see that it has been a positive outcome.

The future for our family is wide open. As it stands now, I will be looking to go into independent game development once I separate from the military in a few years. Over the past two months my focus has been on learning as much as I can about game design and the business of the gaming industry. I have started using GameMaker: Studio as my primary development platform to build up a portfolio of small complete games to gain experience. To accomplish this long term goal, I am committing to the OneGameAMonth challenge and recommitting to this weekly (at minimum) blog to remain accountable and get in touch with the community of gamers.

Who I am hasn’t changed at the core and I still want to bring joy through games to those that I can. I am looking forward to what the future holds. See you next Saturday!

Who am I?

2 Sa 7:18 Then David the king went in and sat before the LORD, and he said, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?

New American Standard Bible: 1995 update.

LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

After the prophet Nathan shared the words of God with King David declaring that his kingdom would last forever through his descendants, David’s humble nature immediately brought him to give thanks for all that God had done. A man at the heights of human power still acknowledged God as the source of all accomplishment made me realize just how much more I can grow in my own relationship with God. I have no delusions that I will become some great warrior for God, but I do desire that people will be reached through my life, faith, and actions, perhaps strengthening or awakening their own walk by faith.

For my first post I felt that it would only be natural to answer that question of who I am and look at my purpose. I’m a Christian, family-man, gamer, and member of the USAF learning about life, game programming, and business. The early years of my life, before I found my focus and faith, were largely spent without goals or dreams worth pursuing; however, I did meet the lady that would later become my wife during those years. Once I realized that my purpose was to serve, I joined the military to serve my country. After a few years I felt a greater call and invited God into my life. It has been a blast serving Him and I want to share that joy. This is my purpose behind game programming: to create games that are friendly to the Christian worldview and explore areas of the faith in new ways.

In the future my posts will be a weekly journal sharing my experiences, thoughts, accomplishments, and failures. I will discuss some of my goals and the plans to move towards those goals. I also hope have a conversation with you, the reader, about enjoying life through God, managing money, learning to program, love, and anything else that happens to come up that week. I look forward to hearing from you, and will have another post for you next Saturday.