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No, not really. Headline got you going though… April Fools!
In reality, I have been concentrating more on Gametactics and the Podcast more than this, I really should work more on the game…
Filed by Malcolm at April 1st, 2008 under Codename Menthol
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Cocaine? Heroin? Marijuana? These are all drugs that are banned. They’re probably less addictive than World of Warcraft, which has sucked in more time from me than anything else, despite my slowness.
And that is my excuse for working so slowly on SOW related stuff. WOW. And Geometry Wars. And the fact that I’ve pre-ordered Bioshock too.
I’m going to attempt to get at least something done on Menthol this month. Even if it means putting Bioshock to one side to do it.
Filed by Malcolm at August 14th, 2007 under Uncategorized
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There are various crisises… crisesis…. crisisis… crisisorations… problems, that are plaguing my current life. These are fairly big problems, but they have allowed me to look at my life more and think about what I’m doing. Including, weirdly, this Stick of Wrong thing could really work.
And so, with the confidence still in me, I decided to make things more organised with the project(s) that are under the Stick of Wrong banner. At the moment, it’s a large collection of lists all over the place, hastily written out plans of things that have a chance of success, but are all organised in a way that really just flat out sucks. I don’t have any scheduling sorted, no real task lists, nothing except random bits of paper and half-wiped whiteboards.
Cue me buying phpOverlord. It’s a management/organisation system that allows Joe Ordinary Programmer into King Bacon McCheese of Game Development. Ok, not quite that far, but it’s a quite handy way to keep everyone on a team (or a solitary individual) on track, with deadlines, lists and tasks that need to be done. Joy!
The other thing I decided on, in a fit of random “Should Do That”-ness, I’ve also made a logo for Stick of Wrong. It’s a red square, with a white “Stick” off centre. It’s stupidly simple, and hopefully will be easy for people to recognise. If they ever bother to look at it, that is.
(Side Note - Hot Fuzz rocks!)
Filed by Malcolm at June 16th, 2007 under Game Production
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So. the tasks completed list…
Colours/Types: Checked if multiple types of enemies can be placed. How to do that in the simplest possible way, with my atrocious art skills? Go in and change the colours on an existing enemy, and give it a newer name. So now I have both red and blue flying ships. And keeping them with the same class names, it saves having to rewrite any of the collision stuff. Great!
Perfecting enemy weapons: The red ship has been fitted with a 3 shot firing timer, with 3 closely timed shots straight forward. The blue ship has got a large, slow moving ball of plasma, aimed directly at where the player is when it’s fired. It’s also rotating in the air, to make it look less like a static sprite moving through the air. Still programmer art, but at least it’s a good hefty step in the right direction.
Enemies now have enemy-independent scoring, weapon choices, weapon firing delays, speeds, and even the change of actual bitmap. What fun!
All I have to do now is work out how to do prescripted sideways movement of enemies. You know, “Swooping”. Great.
Filed by Malcolm at May 22nd, 2007 under Codename Menthol, Game Production
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This week has been fairly productive. And by “Fairly”, read “if I were doing this full-time, I would be fired from the lack of progress, but it’s good enough based on the current life situation”. This is partly due to Paul Mckenna’s “Instant Confidence” book and CD, which seems to work well and also gives the extra benefit of an excuse for a nap in the evening.
This week has been focused on Spawning and Enemy Weapons. What fun.
Spawning - I implemented a temporary invulnerability timer when you die. Usually the order of death is Death > 2 Second Timer > Alive, but this sometimes meant that you would spawn on an enemy and die instantly, or would be positioned such that death is inevitable, and would just be unfair. That’s now been changed to Death > 2 Second Timer > Alive but Invulnerable > 4 Second Timer > Vulnerable, giving you a few seconds to move out of the way of instant death. The ship is also semi-transparent in this time, to show it’s ghost-like nature, but shooting functions as normal. Your Capital does go down when you respawn to this new invulnerable state, so you won’t enter it unless you can actually afford to do that.
Oddly this also means that there’s a variable called “isZombie” in the game now, since I can’t reliably spell invulnerable without a spell check, and I know it would be a pain to have to check the spelling constantly.
Enemy Weapons - Enemies now have a timer that triggers when they cross the line and become “Active”, whereby they shoot when this timer expires. This is independently set on a per enemy basis, allowing for a variation in enemy shooting times throughout a level. You know, some shooting when they appear, some shooting when they’re about to exit the level, etc.
I’ve also set up the enemy weapons to be selectable too. Since each enemy will have a different firing pattern, mostly with similar weaponry types, it makes sense to define each type of weapon in the game, and the different ways they can fire, as individually selectable weapons. The test was for a missile to not track the player (as opposed to purposely targeting them), and fire at double the speed of normal. This test worked, and logic follows that everything else in that weapon profile can be edited to fit. Fun.
Thinking about it, there really isn’t that much left with the game in terms of the basic framework. Anything GUI related, the ability to change levels, pausing, ending game when out of lives/Capital, and Bosses, and that’s it. Then it becomes a case of making everything pretty and building the levels properly.
I tell you what, seeing a mostly complete game that is all your work is a fantastic feeling…
Filed by Malcolm at May 7th, 2007 under Codename Menthol, Game Production
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You know, it’s amazing what a solid 7 days of Real Life work and Real Life work related issues can do for your productivity on your day off. Yesterday I did practically nothing, save for recording a podcast, whilst today I did a ton of stuff relating to Menthol. Here starts the work list, and it’s mostly to do with scoring…
For a start, I’m doing a weird and slightly confusing scoring system. On-screen will be 2 counters: Score and Capital. You start with an amount of Capital, and the Score is set to 0. Whenever you shoot something, you lose Capital for the weapon firing, but you gain back the value of the enemy as more Capital, and your Score goes up as well. If you’re harmed, you take a Capital-reducing fine, reducing how much you have available to spend on Ammo. If you can’t pay for a respawn, or you can’t afford to fire a weapon, you can’t do that, and the game is possibly over (except if you died and can’t afford to come back, in which case it definitely is over). Although the Score increases, it never decreases, thereby giving you a measurable rank for the High Score Table (TBD)
To Clarify, you lose Credit by:
Dying
Shooting a Weapon
You gain Credit and Score by:
Killing Enemies
Picking up Bonuses
Credit can fluctuate in value and is essential to survival.
Score only goes up, is unusable mid-game, but shows performance.
Make sense? Good.
On a secondary note, I found a tutorial on how to get the game’s starting images to show on starting the game up. You know, the company logos you see elsewhere. Like the Epic logo at the start of UT2004, followed by the nVidia animation. As part of the licence towards the Torque engine, indie games are required to show an engine logo at the start of the game. I now have my own versions showing, and they’re even click-through-able too! Aren’t I swish…
At one point, I even kicked out a test version of Menthol to make sure it’s working fine, then sent it to the local gaming centre to see if they can run it on their machine. And it does. Seeing this game in a vaguely done way is a great inspiration that I really can get it done. With so few basic jobs left on the title, all I have to do now is suddenly learn how to draw…
In other news, Torsion rocks. That is all.
Filed by Malcolm at April 29th, 2007 under Codename Menthol, Game Production
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Over the weekend, Stick of Wrong was moved to the Dreamhost hosting, if only because it saves a ton of money to do so, especially since there’s multiple sites on the same hosting plan. All the sites collectively use about 1% of the bandwidth and disk space allocations, so putting SOW there/here doesn’t harm it at all.
As for the game production side, due to the scheduling in my work, I didn’t have much time to do stuff on the current project, so I did something the guys at Indie Velopment did. Recorded rudimentary sounds and put them into the game to replace at a later time with higher quality samples.
I felt silly, sitting at my computer, going “Pew Pew Pew!” and “Woosh!” into a microphone, but they would do until something a bit better gets done after the game goes through Alpha (programming stage, not the transparency I mentioned in the past…). I’m not putting music in yet, as that would annoy me each and every time I run the game. For the release, I could probably kick out some music from Garageband (Reason for the Mac 28)
As for getting it into the game, the “Pew” and “Woosh” now get played each time a weapon is fired from the player side. They can overlap each other, handily.
File formats are interesting too. WAV files work immediately with the engine. So do OGG, a format that I basically understand as “Like MP3s, but not”. MP3s, however, didn’t work. This is no biggie, as in-game music could easily be OGG files instead. Also it prevents me from using anything within my normal music collection, since I would have to convert the files, and I’m a lazy, lazy man. At least it stops me from using a commercial work in the game accidentally, and prevents me from being sued by the RIAA. What fun.
As for the name of the project, I’m gonna give it a codename. I don’t like calling it (Unknown Title), and referring to it as “That shooter game I’m doing” doesn’t quite work. Also, since the visual style of the game hasn’t been decided yet, I can’t choose anything that will become the actual finished product name. The word that springs to mind is Menthol (Had a shower, it’s in the shampoo), so that will do. At least now I can say the name in conversation without either explaining the whole damn thing or using the phrase “Unknown Title”.
…I still can’t get that damned Pew Pew Pew out of my head now.
Filed by Malcolm at April 23rd, 2007 under Codename Menthol, Game Production
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It’s been a long time coming, but here’s the waste of time post to make this blog seem less empty.
The shooter continues to be made. Although slowly. And I’m doing things to prove the techniques work before going into full blown game production. Here’s an example of the really, really, really slow work I’m going through:
Player Piano Roll Enemies (Done) - No, I can’t think of a good name for them either. Basically, I’m using Torque Game Builder’s (TGB) strengths of object placement, by lining up enemies above the camera’s position and allowing them to glide downwards towards a trigger point just above the camera, then go at full speed as in-play, destructible, active targets. It should make plotting multiple levels much easier to do, saving time when creating content. It will also make the levels predictable. The enemies should glide with specific timings, and aside from enemy weapons that use tracking (See below), The levels should play the same each and every time a level loads.
Weapon Selection (Done) - Pressing a key rotates through the weapon selections. Amazingly. The massive test weapon list is: Small and Fast, or Large and Slow. The selection doesn’t matter, what does is the fact that I can now independently select and fire multiple weapons, cycle through them, and alter each weapon’s firing properties.
Enemy Tracking (Done) - A trigger or event allows an enemy to fire. The enemy can fire in 2 ways: A pre-scripted trajectory or trajectories, or, a firing pattern that takes into account where the player’s location is. The wiseness of allowing variance and targetability compared to strict scriptable weaponry is an essay on it’s own.
Hit Points - Usually, it’s a case of one hit, one kill in these schmups. However, there is usually one major exception to the rule. The Boss. The boss usually requires a life counter or something similar, but it’s a pain to have to program one specific style of life for one thing then a completely different style for something else. The easier way? Give every enemy a life counter, just not visible. Every life counter defaults to 1, with the main boss having considerably more. Fantastic idea.
Multiple Enemies - More than one enemy image, more than one way to move, more than one way to shoot. This will need a bit more expansion, since there’s too much for one simple point on a list.
Who knows, maybe I will be able to do one of these “Small” bits by the end of the month.
Filed by Malcolm at April 17th, 2007 under Codename Menthol, Game Production
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(Initial apologies - Last night was an allnighter at Crossfire, a gaming center in Swansea, UK. I attended it, got home this morning and slept from 12pm until 8pm. My bodyclock is shot, so coherences may be a slight problem, but bear with me though…)
It’s December. It’s the Winter season. That means only one thing: Using up all the last bits of holiday time I haven’t used up this year in the last month, but with everyone else doing the same thing it becomes a great big scheduling bunfight.
I have, by some miracle, only have to work 4 days between today and the 17th, which means more time off than I should normally know what to do with. (They haven’t given us the schedules in work for after the 17th, since they are not ready yet. Fun.)
How do I intend to spend this overabundance of free time? Quite simply
- Work on the 2D game of death a bit more (Been slowly doing more stuff. Need to do art and crap)
- Work on PHP game (The book has arrived from the US version of Amazon. I won’t get it until tomorrow sometime, which is a pain)
- Get the various things I have to do for Gametactics.com done.
- Read the business and game programming books I have half-read.
- Clear my bedroom of clutter (or “Tidy” it) since I will be in it for quite a while over December working on the aforementioned stuff.
I really should post more when I get some more stuff done…
Filed by Malcolm at December 3rd, 2006 under Game Production
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It’s become a painful time to be me. After many months of moving, I’m almost into the new house. Granted, I haven’t got much room to move around in, but at least it’s a room. At some point this week, the landlord will put extra shelving onto the wall itself so I can get rid of a ton of stuff from the floor, and I will put together another shelving unit from Argos on one of my days off. At least my new desk is up and running.
My new PC has arrived as well. A slight problem with powering up occasionally, but generally it’s A-OK. Damn fast too.
SOW studios will be moving to a new host at the end of November, so the website will be shifted over with not too much trouble (It’s 99% static at the moment). The new hosting will give me more freedom in what I can do, for example moving the blog over to Wordpress and making it become more integrated into the site. I’d also have free reign over subdomains, and one idea has had work started on it already. Now all I have to do is wait for the site move to happen.
As for the game: The mac still exists, the game is still being worked on at a slow pace, and I might leave it to one side whilst I work on these other projects that have more chance of being finished compared to the game (Project #1)
Hint towards Project #2 - 2 PHP and SQL books. And a detailed study of some online stuff. And a pillow.
Psychonauts is fun!
Filed by Malcolm at November 7th, 2006 under Uncategorized
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