Ola interwebs!
I would love to be telling you about how the paper prototype went. However the only thing I can say for certain is that engineers ata kegger are a less than ideal test group, and things being a little hectic, I only got one play through completed.
So the plan is to bring the prototype to the next gamedev club meeting and try it out when everyone is sober. Probably better for a strategy game anyway.
As it stands though, I did learn a bit from the one test.
The rules are not inherently intuitive. It's difficult for players to associate the orders a unit can carry out with the unit itself. The order submission is also unnatural, but partly because it is unique to this game. I think I can fix this in the digital version with a change in the UI metaphor. The order association is also easily fixed in the digital version where a mouse over is possible.
For the future prototype sessions, I need better rules documentation to explain the rules. I think I also need to establish set forms for the orders. I had hoped to base this form on the orders the testers created on their own, but a little bit of restriction could do a lot to lessen the confusion when the orders are being written. I think I'll let people free hand them at gamedev then narrow down the forms for the next test session. Next project is going to have to be a set of typed rules in a logical order.
I also think I need to alter the balance, but I think that's better left until after a bit more testing.
So that's the story so far. I'll have part 2 up after Thursday.
Later.
Tuesday 31 July 2012
Saturday 28 July 2012
Good Morning pt2
Hey interwebs. I'm back.
I took that shower. Then a trip to the liquor store, a bus to cady bay and several hours to finish the project from last night.
So it's been longer than I meant.
Anyway, the project from last night was to build a paper prototype for sratagem to answer one simple question. Is this game fun?
I know this should be self evident, but as designers, we get attached to our own ideas and often don't sufficiently scrutinize them. This can lead to a situation that one of my colleagues has found themselves in. After 5 years of development, they are in the process of user testing and perfecting the tutorial and are only now starting to ask, with some underlying desperation, wether the game is fun and if and why someone would buy it.
The worst part is that the answers seem to be "kind of", and "probably not" respectively.
I don't want that to happen to me, so I am trying to answer the question now. To that end, I cut out about 24 pieces and threw together a grid and I have been able to start running test games with the other partygoers here.
I would tell you how it went, but I'm not done yet. So results to come in a future post. Bye for now.
Good Morning pt1
Good morning interwebs!
Admittedly not the morning from the last post, but hey, an entry is an entry. I'm getting it out there.
Last night was oddly productive. Especially for me. Thursday I had wrestled flash onto my mac and came to the conclusion that future users of flash should make a point of mentioning flex, the sdk that basically is flash from a programmers view. Anyway, the point is, I can now write actionscript programs on my mac from the command line and any text editor I feel like. That's a good day, but we're not talking about that day.
Getting back to last night, while zoning out in front of the national and the escapist and randomly googled "Ruby graphics" and just for good measure, appended "mac" (mac users will be familiar with that last step. It's usually mandatory). I came up with 3 promising hits: Rubygame, Gosu, and Shoes. Shoes showed itself more as a gui library and didn't have the level of documentation I was looking for. Rubygame was a nice idea, but it had some issues on mac with Rake and I didn't want another massive file hunt on my hands. This led me to Gosu.
The installation was pretty easy. Gosu is a gem, which means the Ruby gems system can handle the installation on its own. And that it did. It even cam with an example game as a tutorial. The whole game was in one file, ~3 pages (ish. I can only judge from vim scrolling time). I tried running it through the Ruby interpreter and presto! There it was.
Two thoughts occurred to me at that moment:
Firstly: God I love this language!
Secondly: God I don't want to figure out that example without a half decent IDE.
So part 2 of the project became the setting up of a Ruby plugin for a half decent IDE. I had eclipse handy, so I went with that.
Now when I did this with c++ it was kind of a nightmare, but the subsequent python install went pretty smoothly. So I had no idea how this was going to go. Consulting the internet, I found the plugin I needed was called DLTK. I have no idea what this stands for, but with all the batman hype lately, I choose to believe it stands for Dark Like The Knight. Anyway the Knight's installation was pretty smooth, save one exception. On of the things you rely on as a programmer is the standard out feed on the console for debugging purposes. This Ruby plugin's only problem was that where other programs printed something, it printed nothing. When a one line hello world program fails to print, it's a sad day. A little more research revealed that this was a unix eclipse bug and that it had been fixed in the next version. After I downloaded that it was a breeze.
Now there was only one hurdle left: get the tutorial file to execute through eclipse. I hit a bug on my first attempt to run it. But I didn't really look at the error message. I was instead focused on a mysterious point at which eclipse misread a '"' and proceded to colour the rest of the program as a string. A little trial and error, and I discovered that under the right circumstances, an escape character is needed for a '/'. Of course that didn't fix the error. The program was failing because the code was here and the images and sounds were in a media folder back in the gem, bu that was easily fixed. After that it worked perfectly. I'm almost waiting for something to go wrong.
But it hasn't yet and it didn't last night. I was up late working on a more important goal for today, but I'm saving that for another post. I think I'll type that one up after I get back from the shower.
Anyhoo, to sum up: Ruby awesome. Ruby on eclipse awesome so far. Ruby and Gosu on eclipse freaking awesome. Last night amazingly awesome. More posts to come. Soon
Until then, to paraphrase a more interesting man: "Stay bored my friends."
Admittedly not the morning from the last post, but hey, an entry is an entry. I'm getting it out there.
Last night was oddly productive. Especially for me. Thursday I had wrestled flash onto my mac and came to the conclusion that future users of flash should make a point of mentioning flex, the sdk that basically is flash from a programmers view. Anyway, the point is, I can now write actionscript programs on my mac from the command line and any text editor I feel like. That's a good day, but we're not talking about that day.
Getting back to last night, while zoning out in front of the national and the escapist and randomly googled "Ruby graphics" and just for good measure, appended "mac" (mac users will be familiar with that last step. It's usually mandatory). I came up with 3 promising hits: Rubygame, Gosu, and Shoes. Shoes showed itself more as a gui library and didn't have the level of documentation I was looking for. Rubygame was a nice idea, but it had some issues on mac with Rake and I didn't want another massive file hunt on my hands. This led me to Gosu.
The installation was pretty easy. Gosu is a gem, which means the Ruby gems system can handle the installation on its own. And that it did. It even cam with an example game as a tutorial. The whole game was in one file, ~3 pages (ish. I can only judge from vim scrolling time). I tried running it through the Ruby interpreter and presto! There it was.
Two thoughts occurred to me at that moment:
Firstly: God I love this language!
Secondly: God I don't want to figure out that example without a half decent IDE.
So part 2 of the project became the setting up of a Ruby plugin for a half decent IDE. I had eclipse handy, so I went with that.
Now when I did this with c++ it was kind of a nightmare, but the subsequent python install went pretty smoothly. So I had no idea how this was going to go. Consulting the internet, I found the plugin I needed was called DLTK. I have no idea what this stands for, but with all the batman hype lately, I choose to believe it stands for Dark Like The Knight. Anyway the Knight's installation was pretty smooth, save one exception. On of the things you rely on as a programmer is the standard out feed on the console for debugging purposes. This Ruby plugin's only problem was that where other programs printed something, it printed nothing. When a one line hello world program fails to print, it's a sad day. A little more research revealed that this was a unix eclipse bug and that it had been fixed in the next version. After I downloaded that it was a breeze.
Now there was only one hurdle left: get the tutorial file to execute through eclipse. I hit a bug on my first attempt to run it. But I didn't really look at the error message. I was instead focused on a mysterious point at which eclipse misread a '"' and proceded to colour the rest of the program as a string. A little trial and error, and I discovered that under the right circumstances, an escape character is needed for a '/'. Of course that didn't fix the error. The program was failing because the code was here and the images and sounds were in a media folder back in the gem, bu that was easily fixed. After that it worked perfectly. I'm almost waiting for something to go wrong.
But it hasn't yet and it didn't last night. I was up late working on a more important goal for today, but I'm saving that for another post. I think I'll type that one up after I get back from the shower.
Anyhoo, to sum up: Ruby awesome. Ruby on eclipse awesome so far. Ruby and Gosu on eclipse freaking awesome. Last night amazingly awesome. More posts to come. Soon
Until then, to paraphrase a more interesting man: "Stay bored my friends."
Sunday 22 July 2012
The Pitch and the Pitfall
Hello again interwebs.
I speak to you now, after a long day of cleaning with roommates and DnD with buddies. I meant to post something earlier this week and now my friends have been asking why nothing else has come through, so, seeing as how the couch is currently occupied and therefore unavailable for me to sleep on, I thought I should take this moment to level with you.
When it has come to my ideas for games in the past, I have tended to be tight lipped. I am constantly worried that anyone I tell could imitate the project, and hastily finish it faster than I could, and thus beat me to the punch. In software, this isn't an unreasonable fear. The industry moves fast. Often the first person to an idea will be able to get a better hold with their product during the short time during which they have a monopoly until a competitor gets a product released. This is part of the reason that Facebook and the iPhone are so established today.
So naturally, this fear has been in the back of my mind regarding this blog. I'm not so much that worried a triple A studio will run with the project (it would be WAY too risky), but more that a fellow wannabe like myself who was more motivated, more skilled, and have more time, and thus a better chance of realeasing the game. Long story short, I really don't want to have my game cloned before I can even get a demo out the door.
This leads to my current dilemma. I want the blog, and I want the game, but how much of the game am I comfortable sharing with the entirety of the internet. Do I share only the underlying programming and creation process? Or do I show the game I am trying to build on top of it and explain why I am building the systems I am? At first I was going to try to go the former route, but after talking it over with a couple friends, a few things became clear to me.
Firstly, the internet is REALLY big. My grandpa had a trick for when he was going into a coal mine and feared its collapse, since it could happen at any time. He simply reminded himself that he wasn't important enough for the mine to pick that moment to come crashing down. Likewise, my humble blog is unlikely to get the kind of attention that would be necessary for even one person with sufficient malice to pirate the entire project. And my ideas, as much as I love them, are not solid gold. There's no reason to think I have anything really worth stealing. I'm just not that important.
Secondly, a lot of designers are as attached to their own ideas as I am to mine. They have their own dream projects and aren't likely to drop them so they can steal mine instead. The passion just isn't there.
Thirdly, I can't really claim to have invented any of these mechanics. Other people have played the same flash games and strategy games that I have, and may have just as easily found the same inspiration as I did. Anyone still could. So treating them like I somehow own them doesn't really hold up.
Lastly, constantly trying to hide what I was creating would make my writing dishonest and really difficult. It's hard enough to describe things to someone who's never seen the game (which is everyone at the moment), but trying to describe making it without telling them what it was, that's just a headache. I want this to be fun.
So I've decided to take a leap of faith and take the second option. Here goes:
Stratagem (actual name pending) is intended as a medieval strategy game (which there are already plenty of) in which players will control a small squad of soldiers by submitting their orders concurrently, as in Diplomacy, then watching as the computer resolves the orders one by one. To be successful, a player will have to predict their opponents actions, and plan their own accordingly.
And that's the gist of it. I guess that wasn't so hard. I could go into greater detail, but it doesn't make much sense in this context. For now, I think it's best to just give out the details as needed, for brevity's sake.
That's all for now. I should have another post up pretty soon to talk about what I've been doing the last week, but I wanted to handle this separately.
And to you indie designers out there, this probably goes without saying, but please, don't burn me on this. I'm going out on limb here.
Anyhoo, the couch is finally free , and I'm dying to go to sleep. Night!
I speak to you now, after a long day of cleaning with roommates and DnD with buddies. I meant to post something earlier this week and now my friends have been asking why nothing else has come through, so, seeing as how the couch is currently occupied and therefore unavailable for me to sleep on, I thought I should take this moment to level with you.
When it has come to my ideas for games in the past, I have tended to be tight lipped. I am constantly worried that anyone I tell could imitate the project, and hastily finish it faster than I could, and thus beat me to the punch. In software, this isn't an unreasonable fear. The industry moves fast. Often the first person to an idea will be able to get a better hold with their product during the short time during which they have a monopoly until a competitor gets a product released. This is part of the reason that Facebook and the iPhone are so established today.
So naturally, this fear has been in the back of my mind regarding this blog. I'm not so much that worried a triple A studio will run with the project (it would be WAY too risky), but more that a fellow wannabe like myself who was more motivated, more skilled, and have more time, and thus a better chance of realeasing the game. Long story short, I really don't want to have my game cloned before I can even get a demo out the door.
This leads to my current dilemma. I want the blog, and I want the game, but how much of the game am I comfortable sharing with the entirety of the internet. Do I share only the underlying programming and creation process? Or do I show the game I am trying to build on top of it and explain why I am building the systems I am? At first I was going to try to go the former route, but after talking it over with a couple friends, a few things became clear to me.
Firstly, the internet is REALLY big. My grandpa had a trick for when he was going into a coal mine and feared its collapse, since it could happen at any time. He simply reminded himself that he wasn't important enough for the mine to pick that moment to come crashing down. Likewise, my humble blog is unlikely to get the kind of attention that would be necessary for even one person with sufficient malice to pirate the entire project. And my ideas, as much as I love them, are not solid gold. There's no reason to think I have anything really worth stealing. I'm just not that important.
Secondly, a lot of designers are as attached to their own ideas as I am to mine. They have their own dream projects and aren't likely to drop them so they can steal mine instead. The passion just isn't there.
Thirdly, I can't really claim to have invented any of these mechanics. Other people have played the same flash games and strategy games that I have, and may have just as easily found the same inspiration as I did. Anyone still could. So treating them like I somehow own them doesn't really hold up.
Lastly, constantly trying to hide what I was creating would make my writing dishonest and really difficult. It's hard enough to describe things to someone who's never seen the game (which is everyone at the moment), but trying to describe making it without telling them what it was, that's just a headache. I want this to be fun.
So I've decided to take a leap of faith and take the second option. Here goes:
Stratagem (actual name pending) is intended as a medieval strategy game (which there are already plenty of) in which players will control a small squad of soldiers by submitting their orders concurrently, as in Diplomacy, then watching as the computer resolves the orders one by one. To be successful, a player will have to predict their opponents actions, and plan their own accordingly.
And that's the gist of it. I guess that wasn't so hard. I could go into greater detail, but it doesn't make much sense in this context. For now, I think it's best to just give out the details as needed, for brevity's sake.
That's all for now. I should have another post up pretty soon to talk about what I've been doing the last week, but I wanted to handle this separately.
And to you indie designers out there, this probably goes without saying, but please, don't burn me on this. I'm going out on limb here.
Anyhoo, the couch is finally free , and I'm dying to go to sleep. Night!
Monday 16 July 2012
Day 1
Greetings interweb!
I feel there should be some kind of introduction to this thing, but I don't want to go into too much detail as to who I am. So here's a short rundown of my life at this moment:
I just cut my hair for the first time in over two years. I am still experiencing a phantom ponytail.
My roommates just got hitched (to each other). Much love to them.
I'm on a co-op making facebook games of no consequence to this blog, and I will be returning to UVic for another two years to finish my degree in Software Engineering.
But why am I starting a blog you ask.
Good question.
You see I am a middling game developer, and a small presence amongst the local gamedev seen at UVic and in trying to figure out my goals for the next year or so, I came to something of an epiphany this morning.
I have been trying to figure out when ad how I will go about learning/practising javascript, HTML5,HTML(not 5),CSS,MySQL, and the most recent addition to the herd, Ruby. I need them all to develop games in the future, but how will I learn them now, and which should I learn first. That is the conundrum.
Anyway this morning, the answer hit me right on the head.
The web based strategy game I have had on the brain in various forms for a couple years now (currently codenamed "Stratagem") would need all of these components to function properly, so why not just learn all of them as needed. And if Yahtzee, Notch, and my good friends at Gnar Games have taught me anything, its that every great game NEEDS a development blog.
So here we go. More details on the game itself and much more to come.
For now, I have only one more thing left. I mentioned that I cut my hair for the first time in ages and having done that, I feel it wasn't nearly the occasion it should have been. I hastily got it cut on Saturday morning because I had promised it would be short for the wedding that afternoon. So to make up for it, and to motivate me to actually finish this game, I pledge here, tonight, to you, my readers, that my hair shall not be cut again until "Strategem" is released. Hopefully that will be before I wind up looking like the wolfman.
Now I have to go. My fridge is empty, and it's WAY to hot!
I'm Lambwatt, and this is Day 1.
I feel there should be some kind of introduction to this thing, but I don't want to go into too much detail as to who I am. So here's a short rundown of my life at this moment:
I just cut my hair for the first time in over two years. I am still experiencing a phantom ponytail.
My roommates just got hitched (to each other). Much love to them.
I'm on a co-op making facebook games of no consequence to this blog, and I will be returning to UVic for another two years to finish my degree in Software Engineering.
But why am I starting a blog you ask.
Good question.
You see I am a middling game developer, and a small presence amongst the local gamedev seen at UVic and in trying to figure out my goals for the next year or so, I came to something of an epiphany this morning.
I have been trying to figure out when ad how I will go about learning/practising javascript, HTML5,HTML(not 5),CSS,MySQL, and the most recent addition to the herd, Ruby. I need them all to develop games in the future, but how will I learn them now, and which should I learn first. That is the conundrum.
Anyway this morning, the answer hit me right on the head.
The web based strategy game I have had on the brain in various forms for a couple years now (currently codenamed "Stratagem") would need all of these components to function properly, so why not just learn all of them as needed. And if Yahtzee, Notch, and my good friends at Gnar Games have taught me anything, its that every great game NEEDS a development blog.
So here we go. More details on the game itself and much more to come.
For now, I have only one more thing left. I mentioned that I cut my hair for the first time in ages and having done that, I feel it wasn't nearly the occasion it should have been. I hastily got it cut on Saturday morning because I had promised it would be short for the wedding that afternoon. So to make up for it, and to motivate me to actually finish this game, I pledge here, tonight, to you, my readers, that my hair shall not be cut again until "Strategem" is released. Hopefully that will be before I wind up looking like the wolfman.
Now I have to go. My fridge is empty, and it's WAY to hot!
I'm Lambwatt, and this is Day 1.
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