Pollushot Timelapse + New Crazy Over Goo Art

My iOS game now has a working title, Pollushot. Here's a video of me making a new enemy from scratch. No editing was involved, this is the speed at which I actually work. Stick around to the end to see some regular-speed gameplay footage.

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MEANWHILE, after a number of comments on Crazy Over Goo flash I underwent an epic adventure that involved redoing all of the graphics in the game in the span of a couple weekends. PHEW. The new art style takes after the one I implemented for Pollushot, and will hopefully turn our luck around with getting the kind of bids we're looking for. Here are some screens of the new style.





It took a lot of time and energy in a painfully short period of time, but I'm really happy with the results.

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Hey, you guys remember Prophecy? The dude who made the soundtracks to Escape from the Underworld, Assassin Blue, Dubloon, Crazy Over Goo, and Wolf? Well he's now AKA'd as Jason Covenant and he's launched a new site after being mostly inactive on the internet for several years.

I urge you to check it out.

Oh, and did I mention that he's got some bangin' new music with new track due weekly? Yeah.

The Problem(s) With RPGs

I got Game Maker in May 2005, and shortly thereafter, one of the first games I started working on was a role playing game, better known as an RPG. In fact, you can still see the original posting (though the download links have long since been removed). I spent over a year working on it and the game was never finished.



Now, compare that story to this one: I started Dubloon in May of 2009. Less than a month later, I'd already made more progress with Dubloon than I had in the entire development time of my first RPG. It also looked better, played better, worked better, and was easier to work with.



Basically what I'm getting at here is that making an RPG is hard and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. I'm not saying it's impossible, but in terms of game making RPGs pose way more obstacles than any other genre of video game I can think of. So as part cautionary tale, and part "developer's journal" sort of thing, I'm going to talk about what I've learned about making RPGs and some of the pitfalls in designing them.



One of the first thing people always talk about when it comes to this topic is the amount of technical expertise you have to come in with. This one should seem obvious. When you talk about the inner workings of a role playing games, you're looking at a lot of data that has to be organized, computed, crunched, what have you--constantly. You'll be handling inventories, character statistics, battle calculations, and so on. It can be hard to keep track of, especially when your development team consists of one person. You need to be adept with things like arrays and data structures and all that fun stuff--this should go without saying, but I programmed my first RPGs without these, and it sucked. Hard. Projects like RPGs don't exactly go by quickly, either. The code you write needs to be functional, annotated, and organized enough so that you can come back to it even a year later and still know exactly what it does. When new game makers start off by saying they want to make their dream RPG, as I did, this is usually the reason why they're told that they can't.



RPGs aren't just difficult to build technically, but also--if I may--artistically. Unlike games in other genres, the expectation in a legitimate, fully realized RPG is a pretty high playtime. Most independent games can be beaten within an hour, easily, if not 15 minutes or so. To account for that huge difference in playtime, you need to come into RPGs with a truckload of gameplay mechanics and ideas to keep things varied and interesting. The problem I find with a lot of RPGs is that they become too comfortable falling into boring patterns... explore dungeon, griiiiiind, fight boss, move to next dungeon. Nowadays games move very quickly, and game designers have a lot more responsibility to battle to keep the player's attention. Don't let your game grow stale! "RPG" should not be synonymous with "boring," and if you actually put some thought into how your game is paced and feels it's still entirely possible to put together a very fun, engaging RPG.



That said, it's become clear that RPGs nowadays aren't as well received by players as they once were. I was rather painfully introduced to this fact when Dubloon went up on IndieGames back in July 2009. People had posted pretty slanderous comments--"just another RPG"--without even having played the game. RPGs just aren't as appreciated as much these days, and you can see that trend in places like Indiegames' "Best of Features" end of year lists. Most genres got 15-20 games listed under them; RPGs were lumped in with 2 similar genres and together all 3 were able to produce 10 "best" titles for the year. When it comes to the independent games "market," it takes a lot of promise to convince people these days that your RPG is worth their time. Maybe I'm reacting too strongly to a minority group of haters, but it's never a bad idea to try and innovate. Be mindful of your game's image: how will players see it? There's a reason why lists like these exist and it's important that you familiarize yourself with what the genre cliches are... so you can break them.



Are RPGs dead? I don't think so, not at all. They're very good at giving players a very particular sort of experience, one where they really feel character growth and adventure in a way no other genre can quite deliver. What's important when making a good RPG is knowing what they're good at and what they're not so good at, and using those qualities to your advantage. When I started my first RPG, I started it just because I wanted to make an RPG, and I don't think that's the right way to approach these things. An RPG simply isn't interesting just by virtue of being an RPG. When I started Dubloon, it was because I wanted to make a game about pirates, and I decided that the best game to deliver that sort of pirate "experience" would be an RPG. Let the genre be your tool... don't be a tool of the genre.

Forest Pirates

Hey, everybody! In the last week I've gotten a couple of messages/emails asking if I'm still alive. It certainly has been a little while since I posted anything. Personally, I don't like to make blog posts until I have a LOT to write about, so that each post is meaningful. But, starting from tomorrow and for the next 10 days, I'll be out of country on an exciting trip and so I probably won't be able to put up any updates. Before I go, I want to talk about what I've been working on.


Riley and Ricky, the heroic townboy and his loyal monkey, make their way through a maze-like forest...

Of course my main work has been on Dubloon. I hit a snag designing it, and that lead to a near 2 weeks where I did almost no work on it. I'm usually a very dedicated worker when it comes to my games, so a break that long is unheard of. The issue stemmed from the design of a particular town and the puzzle it was based on; I kept on trying to create a puzzle whose solution was too boring.


A slightly updated battle HUD now displays MP

Originally I wanted to include an item-trading kind of quest where you needed to talk to the right people to trade items until you ended up with the one you needed. My second attempt was even more absurd and involved finding a wig/makeup item and equipping it to cross-dress and then seduce the right person. It wasn't until my third design of the town/puzzle that I hit something that really worked for both me and the game.


When you set sail, rather than a plain old text menu, you select your destination via this large colorful map. As you progress through the game, your map will fill up with islands and the world will seem to get bigger and bigger!

Now the current issue I'm facing is more on the plot/story side of the game, as I'm trying to justify a particularly weak plot point in which an important character is killed before he's even introduced. I'm hoping to find the right solution to that as once I've sorted out all that plot nonsense I'll probably put out another major update. At this point the game has an added 20-30 minutes of playtime from before, though this varies greatly based on how much extra exploration you do.

The farther I get into the game, the more exciting things become as I introduce new ideas and game mechanics. The game as it is now is definitely my largest and most ambitious project to date, and it's not even close to finished yet! When I do finish it, it'll be a momentous achievement, for me and possibly even for the Game Maker community as a whole...

On Inspiration

I'm getting a little jealous.

Every time I take a moment to look at what my indie game designing peers are doing, I see really fantastic ideas for things we've never been able to do in a video game before. They make it look so easy! I for one, have never been a terribly innovative game designer. I have rarely if ever strayed far from genre norms and my games haven't really introduced anything brand new in terms of game mechanics. My ideology has always been to take existing game mechanic tools and use them to build something sharper than what came before. I often wonder if not being able to invent something completely original makes me a bad game designer.

An example; Wolf, a project I finished last year, was a story-driven adventure game which played almost identically to a 2D Zelda game. It didn't try to mask what it was; the game was very bluntly trying to emulate the experience of playing a Zelda game. But the original Zelda was made trying to emulate Miyamoto's childhood excursions into the wilderness around his own home. You see the crucial difference here: by portraying a real-life experience, I think Zelda comes out feeling more "pure." And Zelda was, at the time of its conception, a completely revolutionary game experience. I used to explore the wilderness around my house, too, but until recently it had never even occurred to me that I could translate that experience into a video game, one that could be entirely my own.

What I'm saying here is that I think if we want to find real innovation, we really ought to look not at what other games are doing, but at our own real-life feelings and experiences. When we can portray emotions entirely with game mechanics, the results are bound to be innovative, in the same way that each person's life experiences are unique.

Looking at Wolf again, it's a game about a girl with the werewolf curse, who unknowingly transforms at night and kills all her friends and neighbors. She deals with the loss of her humanity, guilt, and worst of all, she knows that as long as she lives she's still a threat to the people she loves. Those are complex emotions. So then, looking at the game purely from a game designer's standpoint, why did I choose to complement that story with gameplay originally crafted to portray outdoor exploration? To truly do justice to such a story, the gameplay and mechanics too should have portrayed the same conflicted emotions.

Having said that, I have no idea how I might go about doing that. Maybe I wasn't born with that necessary genius, or maybe I'm just inexperienced, but I--like many other game designers--still haven't learned to convey complex ideas or experiences with a video game.

That's not to say that my games lack all emotion whatsoever. Assassin Blue's story is a simple one, about an assassin who gets fed up with mindless killing and turns on his employer. The gameplay, too, portrays mindless violence as you fight your way through hordes of ninjas and samurais, who explode in a shower of blood when defeated. But while the game's end seems to condone such violence, the actual game rewards it, so the story ends up failing to really connect with the gameplay. Dubloon, I think, might be my game that most closely connects its story and gameplay. It's a game about pirates, essentially; and to complement this, the game features a balance of open-world exploration and hidden treasures, combined with a battle system that stresses teamwork within your crew. But these aren't very complex ideas either, and certainly ones we've seen in a game thousands of times before.

I've heard people say games themselves are simply not capable of portraying particularly deep feelings, and as such have limits as a form of expression. I reject that. I want to believe that we can take complex emotions and turn them into a new and compelling game experience. This is something I want to take with me as I continue my pursuit in game design.

And So It Goes

It's been a little while since I posted up an update! Not because I haven't done anything, but mostly because I'm not sure what qualifies as an update. I don't want people to think I'm dead, though, so I decided to share what I've been up to.

Dubloon: (Peppered with some miscellaneous new screenshots)
Dubloon's very much been a big piece of my work since the last blog post. I actually ran into and overcame some difficulties in working on it. After I put out the first level and boss, I began to feel a sense of misdirection with the game as I continued my work on it.


The new file select screen, allowing for multiple save files.

Ideas that seemed so good before suddenly didn't seem to work, my level designs felt uninspired, and I started to question if the game was really shaping up into anything. I think this kind of crisis can be common with any creative work, especially games, which involve so many different pieces to make a single cohesive work. I took some time off, forced myself back into it, and started redoing a lot of the new maps from the ground up--and I think it worked. As of now I'm back to working on it full-speed.


A town...

So, what's new in the next section? The game will start to open up more and feel a little less linear. You're presented with a clear objective, but I made sure to include some things to do outside that. Players who take a little more time will find some cool extra treasures and even fight a bonus boss battle. The characters still don't have a ship, though, so you're restricted to just one island.


The new map screen. Mouse over colored rooms to view a description.

iPhone:
I recently got my hands an a new MacBook and the iPhone SDK (Software Developer's Kit). This has been an interest for a while, but now I'm finally going to try and learn how to develop games on the iPhone. So far it's been admittedly tough, but I'm determined to make it work. Ideally, I can start making a little profit selling low-cost iPhone games once I have a handle on the development process. Any breakthroughs I have with this will definitely end up on my blog here, but for now I'm still trying to learn the most basic of basics.

Facebook!
Just one last thing! I decided to make a page for myself on facebook to see how many fans I could get. If you're a fan of my work, why not consider joining my page on facebook? The link's here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Banov/91620497321?ref=mf

Not sure how to end this post, so I'm going to just end very abruptly, sorry.

Yellow Goo Love Update

It's been a little while since I talked about Yellow Goo Love, eh?

The truth is for a while I was stuck in a rut. I ended up spending too much time trying to polish the game and fix bugs rather than design new levels, and eventually each time I came to work on the game I'd end up quitting in frustration over something I couldn't get just right. Luckily, I think I've polished it to the point now where I'm ready to move forward a little more.

I don't think I've talked much about the concept yet, either. In the game, you use a mouse to launch around an elastic ball of goo that drips and splatters every time it hits stuff. The control and movement feels really physics-based, but the levels are all designed as very short platforming puzzles.

Basically the game's main focus is really gimmicky, short levels that make use of a large variety of different mechanics. As you play the game you'll face a really constant stream of new level pieces, but only in bite-sized bits. It's kind of like the game has ADD. You also have the option of browsing through levels with the left and right arrow keys, so you can beat levels in whatever order you feel like, perhaps skipping ones you're stuck on. It's very casual in that way.

And here are some screenies for those who are curious...


In a blue zone, you can jump even while midair... essentially giving you limitless freedom of motion.


In this level, you have to time your way through the razors which open and close at regular intervals.


The black line extended from the circular blocks spins around and around like a really fast clock hand; you can attach yourself onto it by jumping onto it, then launch yourself by clicking again.

My Next Game...

...Looks like it might be this!



No title yet, but this is some kind of puzzle/physics/platformer thing. You hold down the mouse to aim and release to fling the little yellow goo ball through the air. A lot of focus will be on different level gimmicks/mechanics, like blocks you can stick to.

I've been playing around with this for a couple days now, don't know how much time I'll have to work on it in the coming days/weeks. I might skip the WIP release and just put this out when it's finished, at the rate it's going.

Assassin Blue: Behind the Scenes Part 1

If you're here now, it's probably because of the recent popularity of my game, Assassin Blue. When I made Wolf I included my commentary as an unlockable feature, but there was no such thing in Assassin Blue... so I've decided to talk about the game's development here.


The Origins of Blue

Blue was a character I actually conceived of 2 or 3 years before I even started work on Assassin Blue. He wasn't called Blue, either. At the time I'd been working on a classic-style RPG like Earthbound or Dragon Quest, and I was coming up with character designs for the party. These images have been previously unreleased...

Walking animation

See the third character? That's Blue! And for the record, yes, the fourth party member is Kylie, the one and same heroine of Wolf.

His original design was virtually identical to the one he has today, down to his character. He was a boastful show-off with a strong moral compass, trapped in a promiscuous line of work (in this case, thievery). In addition to having the flashiest sword attacks, he provided healing spells for the party, making him one badass cleric.

Around the time that game was being developed, a big game idea was forming; why not make a Super Smash Brothers game using game maker characters? I was among the first to submit a design...

This was his first time being sprited for a platformer. I think the idea stuck.

Even though he hadn't actually made an appearance in-game, I tried to get him into the Smash Bros game. But as history tells us, both the Smash Bros game and the RPG were eventually discontinued and the mysterious Thief was never known.

...Or at least, until another game came along, called Wolf.

Wolf, my Zelda-esque adventure title.

The story of Wolf involves Kylie, a nice young woman, who inadvertently becomes a werewolf and kills just about everyone in her village. Now the game ends there, but originally I had some ideas for how to continue it. I had plans in particular for my old friend the Thief...


Blue as he was going to appear in Wolf.

His name was Hiro now, a twist on "Hero." He was to act as a foil to Kylie. Officially, he was a monster hunter who caught wind of Kylie's curse and pursued her. He was radically different from the Blue we know, however; he was interested only in his own glory and fame, and thought nothing of justice or the right thing, solidifying the irony in his name "Hiro."

I had his first appearance worked out, too. Kylie was to run into a lady being attacked by monsters, but just before rushing to her rescue--SHLINK! Blue appeared from nowhere, killing the monster and trying to impress the two ladies with his arrogant gloating.


The lady he saves, infatuated with her savior. Kylie was wise to him from the start, though.

But I decided to keep Wolf short and simple, so I cut out Hiro and released the game. Months later I began working on Assassin Blue, focusing the game on the hero I'd spent so many years working with.


Getting the Game Going

Getting the game off the ground proved to be nearly impossible. I spent two short weeks programming the basic engine in April or May 2008, until I had a demo that looked like this...



With the balance of combat and platforming, I knew I was on to something, but I lacked the spriting skills to make decent tiles for the game. So I put out at least 5 team requests across various forums, looking for someone to join up with. I got an early response from a guy called Kindred, who worked with me to make some tiles for the game's level 1.


The original level 1

The game was looking to be awesome, until Kindred suddenly disappeared off the face of the Earth. After he was gone for a month I put up all my team requests again, spending weeks looking for a response, slowly losing hope... To keep myself interested, I programmed the first boss, Riley, but even after he was finished I never got a response. Frustrated, I discontinued the project.

Then in July I found the old editable, full of potential but missing decent backgrounds. That was when the idea hit me; if I can't sprite the backgrounds, why not hand draw them? And so was born the Assassin Blue we know today:


The game's very first official release looked like this. Compare to today's:


After about a week of backgrounding, level 1 was finished and was met with great success. With another week of work I turned my very first original demo into level 2, squoze the already-made Riley at the end, and the game's first 3 levels were done. The rest is history.


One Last Fun Fact!

This was Red's original character design. Seriously.

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That's it for now. Next time I think I'll be doing something a bit more analytic, studying the game's level design or story...

Super Mario 64 is Better Than Mario Galaxy

I often see people claim that Super Mario Galaxy is a better Mario game than Super Mario 64, if not the greatest Mario game to date. I completely disagree, and I've always wanted a chance to talk about why in full detail. So here's my two cents on why Mario's first 3D platforming outing is still far better than his most recent...


Super Mario 64

Presentation

Graphics-wise, both games are/were pushing the limits of the system and treading new ground in their respective times. I don't think I need to spend more time on that particular matter.

But when considered as a whole, Mario Galaxy wasn't as universally appealing. With its cutesy bunny rabbits, cheesy talk about stars and frolicking in fields of flowers, Galaxy is decidedly girly and childish (an opinion only further made popular with the infamous U R MR GAY discovery). I felt outright embarrassed to be playing it at certain points. Mario 64 certainly was no GTA, but it didn't border on this level of girliness; as a young child and as a young adult today I still have fun playing it, and not once does it feel too "kiddy."

Mario Galaxy also got a lot of praise for its complex, epic orchestrations. I'm not going to argue with that, the music was big, loud and adventurous, and it fit. But the N64 cartridge they stuffed Mario 64 could never hoped to achieve that level of orchestration anyway. What Mario 64 gave us were a lot of really catchy, memorable tunes, songs I still remember today very clearly. What about Mario Galaxy? How many tunes do you remember from that? In all its powerful orchestration and big sound, it lost something. I'm not saying a game has to have memorable music to be good, but Mario 64 did have some classic videogame melodies and Galaxy didn't.


Super Mario Galaxy


Gameplay:

Mario Galaxy brought some new cards to the table in the gameplay department, that I won't deny. It's high point--for me--were the really great new powerups. Ice Mario? Boo Mario? Yes please.

And of course it got a lot of talk going about its crazy physics engine, right? Mario could walk around the surface of an entire sphere! But as cool as that was, it created some problems, too. The game's gravity rules weren't universal: sometimes you could walk around the bottom of a a planet, sometimes you couldn't, and there was never any indication of whether or not you could. There were a few good handful of times when I died because I assumed I could walk off the edge to the underside of a platform.

Mario 64's level design was more fun, too. Yes, you read correctly. Mario 64's open, explorable levels were fun and exciting, and they totally captured our wonder, totally helped us understand what a 3D game could be. Mario Galaxy's levels are almost all linear; the only path is to go from planet A, find the launch star, get to planet B, etc. And even when it did offer some large explorable areas, they never felt as open and exciting as in Mario 64. Really my biggest gripe in Mario Galaxy was that they reused level maps. I repeat: They took one level, copy and pasted it, and called it a new one with a little recoloring. Don't believe me? Look:
Wow! What a cool level!
Hey, wait, isn't this a little familiar?

I don't care if they had some differences here and there, if the missions were different, whatever. This was a HUGE game, destined to be a trend-setter for all Wii games to come. It was Mario's newest platforming adventure in years. How is it that nobody, at any level of this game development, saw level repetition and thought "This is great"? The game already has a few dozen maps, I'd rather have one less than the same one again.


Is Mario Galaxy a good game? Yes, it is. It was fun, certainly among the best of the Wii's offerings. But it isn't at the same level as Super Mario 64, and I can't agree with anyone who thinks so.