Challenge Failed – Learned Much

Hello all! I hope you’ve been having a good week.

I’m a little sad to report that I have failed the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge this week in the primary goal of completing a game within those seven days. Once I had declared that I was taking part in this challenge, life decided to interrupt early and often. I didn’t get much sleep at night the first few nights due to our son waking up and being noisy. Then there were a number of events that my wife wanted to go to, so I had more baby duty than normal. My typically low stress days at work were fairly busy leaving little energy to get any coding done afterward. There were a number of other small things that served to drain my motivation to work during what free time I did have. And finally my wife is coming down with what is potentially strep throat. Individually these problems would have just been minor setbacks, but all combined during this past week created a pretty hefty wall to try to climb over.

With the goal of learning about new things, I had a lot of success. When I was really interested in procedural generation, I tried making a roguelike following a tutorial. However I quickly ran into a number of roadblocks and ended up putting that type of game out of my mind for a while.. This 7DRL challenge got me to think about those issues again and I managed to design the code in a way that worked this time around. The main areas I was having issues were dealing with high object counts to slow down the game logic each step, separating the camera from the game world, noticeably slow draw times, and designing a Graphical User Interface system. I have working solutions to these areas now and will have that code base to work with on future projects including next year’s 7DRL. Along with that, some old ideas that had been lying dormant for years have resurfaced; I will probably end up working on a game inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem in the future.

I look forward to seeing you all next week!

First Game Jam

Hello everyone! Are you having a nice weekend so far?

Today I am participating in my first game jam ever, the 7 day rogue-like (7drl) challenge. Starting now I have 7 days to make a small but complete rogue-like* game. This is going to be a very interesting experience. I had started a rogue-like project a couple months ago, but ran into a bunch of coding and design snags, and eventually had to put that aside. I am excited to start over with that and hopefully be able to have a finished and working game by this time next week. A bonus to this challenge is that it lines up with my short work week, and so I will be off and free to get busy on “winning” this challenge.

Last night, with the help of my wife, I’ve finally upgraded to a real desk. It is weird having a clear space for all of my computer equipment and an open desktop space. I actually want to sit at my desk to work again! My wife is happy about that since I was hogging the use of the laptop that she prefers to use for the past week or two. It is also slightly safer for a walking toddler to be around; the dinner tray setup that we used to have was fairly unstable and would tip over if he used those for balance at the wrong time.

I will provide daily updates to my progress through twitter at @renauddmarshall. Next week’s blog will potentially be delayed until Sunday so I can announce my success or failure and what I’ve learned. You can also see how much time I have left on this countdown timer

See you next week!

* Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video games, characterized by procedural level generation, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, permanent death, and typically based on a high fantasy narrative setting. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

Color Combat Alpha

Hello everyone, it has been an exciting week!

Last time I introduced my original game idea to the world and started developing it. A few days ago I also decided that this game is going to be my first commercial game release. Whether this is a commercial success or a complete flop, I will get that experience that will start taking me beyond being a hobby game developer. The game is starting to develop a life of its own as well; what started as a fairly basic idea has quickly been growing into a detailed list of goals, mechanics, designs, and themes that I will need to make a reality through the year. So far I’ve been blessed with finding the people, answers, or assets that I need to take the next step with the game right as I realized that I needed it (or even an hour before I realized it in one case).

I am planning to have daily or near-daily mini-updates on what I’m working on through twitter @renauddmarshall. There will be an update blog/patch note post on the IndieDB game page for Color Combat every week or two, probably on Saturdays to line up with Reddit/Twitter screenshot Saturdays. I will also keep this weekly blog going; since the patch note post will be more of the technical side of things, this blog will cover the rest of the stuff going on in life. Soon a page similar to the IndieDB one will end up on Desura and there I can start setting up alpha and beta testers.

On another note, I am moving into my last week of language class which means I’ll have more time to work on game development and marketing soon. Next week I’ll talk some about my plans for handling the business side of development.

See you all next Saturday!

Another Day Another Failure

Yet another Saturday has arrived!

I have failed and learned a lot in the process. I plan to fail again soon and repeatedly. In fact, the goal is to continue to fail while attempting to recreate these classics or create original works by my own hands. Eventually the failures will lead to a worthwhile product or a realization that what I had intended is too far beyond what I am capable of at that point. Today I was supposed to say that I have a game ready to release but unfortunately I don’t. A few hours after last week’s blog post the entire family got pretty sick with a stomach flu of sorts. I’ll spare you the details, but I ended up getting way behind on school and work, and that didn’t leave much time for working on game programming. The good news is that even if I fail to get a game out this month, I will get one out next month. We aren’t failures in the traditional sense of the word because we fail; we become failures when we stop trying. I won’t let failure be a taboo word for me now or in the future. I will encourage others to fail and fail often, and get up to fail again! Future game designers and developers, please understand that creation is an iterative process; no one gets it perfect on the first try.

Along with that, I am putting my previous game design goal of working through 10 classic games on pause for a bit so I can work on an original cheesy idea that came to me recently: Color Combat (working title). A pixel is trying to spread color to the ever growing numbers of dark pixels. Can it succeed before it is overrun by the forces of darkness? Here is an album with screenshots of the game as I have it so far: Color Combat – Imgur

I will see you all next week!

First Steps

Happy Saturday everyone!

This week I’m bursting with a father’s pride. Our son has been taking his first steps on his own. It has been amazing to watch him grow and learn. He has been really getting good with some baby sign language and is able to communicate fairly effectively in his own way now. He loves being read to and even flipping through his books on his own. I am so glad that I can see his growth like this. He’s definitely got his own little personality (that reminds me more and more of his mother, haha), and I can’t wait to see what he will learn and start doing next.

I’ve been fairly busy myself learning new things. I’ve wanted to learn about procedural content generation a lot lately, and this past week I have been working on a project that will help me get started on really understanding how to make game systems with it. I have also been working on developing my coding style to be cleaner, more descriptive, and more portable, which will help me grow a code base to work from as I continue making more games. Slowly but surely my coding and designing skills are getting closer to where I need them to be to make the games that are constantly floating in my mind.

For anyone looking for video tutorials on GameMaker: Studio, there are a number of really good ones out there. If you want a tutorial that gets into the nuts and bolts of every function of the software without being game specific, Let’s Learn GameMaker: Studio is pretty much the only one out there, but his videos are outstanding and detailed. If you want some tutorials that walk you through specific basic games then Shaun Spalding, HeartBeast, rm2kdev, SlasherXGAMES, and RealTutsGML are the best ones to check out currently. There are a number of new channels that have started within the last 4-5 months about this same topic but they don’t have much content yet.

That is it for this week’s update. I hope you all have had a great start to 2015 so far and see you next Saturday!

On The Social Aspect

Happy Saturday everyone and Happy New Year!

I wanted to have this ready to go first thing in the morning like I have been for previous posts but it didn’t work out that way. Today’s blog will be on the shorter side. I just want to talk a bit about what I have been doing to interact with the community a bit.

With the release of two games, I’ve been able to experience customer feedback first hand now. The first lesson I can learn from that I need to work more on improving the user interface and user experience as it approaches time to release future games. The second is that I can spend more time testing before making games public. The games don’t need to be perfect but they also shouldn’t have major issues or be missing visual cues that indicate the rules of the world. A new general rule for me is the game isn’t finished until the customers are satisfied. Along with that, my goal is to respond to all feedback and address any game issues brought to my attention if I can. I want to keep the conversations with the community open and honest.

Snake Clone has been played almost 1000 times in just four days and Pong Clone has gotten 127 in five days, which makes sense due to it being a less exciting game. For someone like me with only a very small following, I wouldn’t have been able to see numbers anywhere near this without actively doing some marketing. Looking over some of the stats from different sites that I have been spreading the word on, Reddit has come in as my best source of views by far, primarily because I don’t have a large number of followers up front. For this blog, the Reddit marketing has been responsible for 60% of the views, and for the games, Reddit accounts for at least 80%.

I am very thankful the attention that my game development process has been getting so far and I hope that things continue to grow. To all of my friends and family that have been supporting me, thank you again for being there and for your words of encouragement. 2015 is looking like it will be an amazing year, and hopefully, I will be able to keep this going for years to come!

I will see you next Saturday!

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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!