I was pretty pleased with how Bad Puppy turned out, so I hoped that my placement in the rankings would be higher this time than my previous entries. I did see a modest improvement in my scores overall.
Bad Puppy LD25 Ratings
Ranking
Category
Score (out of 5)
Coolness
100%
#70
Humor
3.55
#274
Fun
3.04
#312
Audio
2.57
#426
Innovation
2.71
#450
Theme
3.00
#490
Overall
2.76
#526
Mood
2.47
#636
Graphics
2.18
The 70th place (out of 902 Compo entries) in Humor is the best ranking I’ve had in any category in an LD compo game so far. So hey, that’s something. I’m in the top 10% in the Humor category.
Comparing to my previous LD games, here’s how I did:
Category
LD23
LD24
LD25
Coolness
56%
100%
100%
Overall
2.76
2.82
2.76
Innovation
3.41
2.58
2.71
Fun
2.62
2.58
3.04
Theme
3.34
3.20
3.00
Graphics
2.75
2.22
2.18
Audio
2.07
2.60
2.57
Humor
2.07
1.86
3.55
Mood
2.68
2.70
2.47
I’m a little surprised that I didn’t do better in the Graphics category this time around, since I actually had animated sprites in this game for the first time. And they were pretty cute, I thought, if primitive. But I am pleased to see marked improvement in Humor and Fun, which were the things I focused on when I made Bad Puppy.
Recently, I wrote up a design analysis of my game for Ludum Dare 25, Bad Puppy. Mostly, I had positive things to say about what worked about the game design. Having continued to develop the game since then, and having played many more hours in testing and for fun, I’ve noticed some flaws in the design, too, so I feel like talking about them.
Difficulty depends on display size
I did all of my game development on a 1680×1050 screen. When I developed the game, I wanted it to play in fullscreen mode, with the room scaling up or down to fill the display. I coded a routine that dynamically sized the “room” to the exact size of the display. But, although the room changes size, the player and enemies do not. Since they do not scale up or down, this means that on a larger screen, the player has much more room to run around and avoid the enemies, which makes the game much easier; conversely, on a smaller display, the game is much more difficult. I felt like the game was about “just right” at 1680×1050, which means that above that size it’s probably too easy, and below, too hard.
This also means that high scores are not directly comparable on different systems. I will have to keep this in mind when I eventually implement the online highscore system. Either I’ll have to standardize the room size, which involves its own trade-offs, or I’ll have to create different scoring categories for each screen resolution, and then do some order-by stuff with the query that displays the rankings, which fragments the player community.
Another shortcoming, on the Instructions screen, the text cuts off at the bottom if the resolution is smaller than 1680×1050. I need to fix this, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Safe Spots
Safe spots are places in a game where it is impossible or dramatically harder to get hurt. Many games, particularly in the NES era, featured “safe spots” as a kind of strategic place where you could safely attack certain enemies, especially bosses. Safe spots can ruin gameplay if they make the game too easy. The worst offenders are games where you can just sit in one place, and hold down the attack button, and win. There is no difficulty to such a game, beyond finding the safe spot in the first place. Many games have temporary safe spots, which are better, because they give the player a short-term advantage that they can exploit, but they still have to remain actively engaged in order to prevail, and usually learn a pattern, or a behavioral trick that they can use to manipulate the AI to make the enemy do something stupid, like get stuck or attack in a way that always misses.
Bad Puppy does not have a static safe spot where you are always safe, but it does have a certain amount of exploitable AI behavior that gives rise to a dynamic safe spot. Because of the way I constructed the hitbox for the AI petters, if you walk upward you can avoid taking “damage” most of the time, as long as you can avoid walking into the bottom of a petter who is above you. The AI will continuously home in on you, so you always have to keep moving, but if you can run around the crowd of petters, they get herded into a bunch, and if you then stay above them, escaping through the top of the room when necessary, it’s pretty easy to avoid petting.
A skillful player should be able to discover effective tactics and use them in order to play for a better score. As a designer, I do want there to be ways to play that the players can discover through trial and error that will lead to improved scores. Ideally, though, the gameplay should be rich enough that there are a variety of valid approaches, and not one dominant strategy that breaks the game.
One of the weaknesses of Bad Puppy is that the gameplay is a bit shallow in this regard. I noticed this early on, so my very first post-compo improvement was to add a bonus pickup system. In retrospect, it was a pretty glaring omission from the original design. I wanted a retro style, and bonus pickups are a very common trope in retro arcade style games. Even though picking up the bonus items is completely optional, it still seems to dramatically change the way people play the game. People want to grab the bonuses, and are willing to take risks to get them, even though all they get is points, and even though it is safer to just concentrate on avoiding people and herding them.
Still, a frequent suggestion that I’ve received from players is to add additional mechanics to the game. They want the puppy to bite, or pee, or do something else besides just running and barking. So while the bonus pickups definitely added some depth, I’m not sure that they are enough by themselves.
What next?
All the other post-compo features that I’ve added so far have been cosmetic enhancements — adding a female petter, varying the skin color and clothes colors. They help make the game less visually monotonous and add flavor. I haven’t added any new gameplay features since adding the bonus system because I’m not yet sure from a gameplay standpoint what the game needs. The game feels a bit one-dimensional, but, aside from that, what’s there feels pretty balanced and fun, so I’m not sure what I should add next, or how it could integrate to the whole that is there already.
One of my goals with the You Are The Villain theme was to create a harmless villain, because I just couldn’t stomach making a game about a being a villain on the same day of the Sandy Hook shooting. And my original concept was to make the puppy a reincarnation of Hitler, who was weak and powerless, all bark and no bite. I liked the idea of a powerless Hitler. I didn’t want to make the puppy so bad that he could actually hurt people, and I’m not clear how either a pee or a bite mechanic would add depth to gameplay. The existing gameplay, while shallow, is pretty solid, and new features should not feel “tacked on” or ruin the balance of existing play mechanics.
When adding gameplay features, I think it’s important to be gameplay-centric in your thinking. The suggestions I’ve received, I think, have been character-centric; the feedback feels like it came from asking the question “What else do bad puppies do?” In my opinion, merely adding features to the puppy to give it more attributes of a real-life puppy would not be good for gameplay. Better, in my opinion would be to make observations like, “I’m running away all the time. I find myself wishing I could get the upper hand.”
One thing that could lead to deeper gameplay would be a mechanism that resulted in some sense of advancement. It would need to be necessary — something the player has to do in order to keep playing, and that gives the player a secondary goal and sets up internal conflict between barking/running and whatever the secondary goal is. I plan to explore this idea and see what I can come up with.
So, last weekend I made Bad Puppy for Ludum Dare 25. I didn’t realize it as I was making it, but it seems that I’ve come up with a game that is really pretty fun. I’ve gotten many compliments from people who’ve tried it, and the more I’ve played it, the more it’s grown on me.
I think it’s worth analyzing the game to identify factors that contributed to it being fun.
Mood/Humor
Bad Puppy is cute. Everyone loves puppies, they are irresistible. So this makes the game inherently enjoyable — if the puppy works. I think I did a good job with making the puppy cute enough, using just a simple animation and some basic sound effects. The running and wagging animations are winners.
One of my most frequent feedbacks has been that the “graphics could use a little polish” — I agree. But I also don’t want to lose the charm of the simple/crude 8-bit pixel art aesthetic. I think the style works for the game, but it could be enhanced by more variety. That’s why I added an enhancement to make the sweater color random. I’m also planning on doing something similar to vary the skin tone of the person, and maybe create a selection of hair styles. There will definitely be a female person too, as soon as I’m able to create her.
The graphics for the pickup bonus items are rather crude, and I’d like to improve them as well. I’ll probably try something subtle, like adding shading and shadow to them, and see whether that works.
I’ve also thought about doing something with the drab grey background color, but I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with that yet.
The barking sounds, panting, and “good boy!” are also cute. I just recorded myself barking and manipulated the sample a bit in Audacity to make it sound 8-bit. Something about the lo-fi, crude aesthetic seems to enhance the cuteness.
Gameplay
Bad Puppy is a very simple game. It is also a relatively fast game (in terms of short play times). A typical play usually doesn’t last more than a minute or two. Short play makes the game enjoyable to repeat.
I made the game short by increasing the difficulty, and by providing no means of regaining lost meanness, or gain extra lives. This means the game must inevitably end, and a play is only as long as the player is able to make it with their skill. When you play a short game and the length of play is determined by skill alone, it tends to make you want to play again, because you just know you can do better the next time.
Controls
The controls are very simple. You run around, and bark. The controls are simple enough that they could be done with a 1-button Atari joystick. The game doesn’t need anything more than this.
Despite being simple from the user input standpoint, the motion that is governed by the controls have a little bit of polish in them. First, you don’t keep moving if you release the controls, but you also don’t stop immediately, either. Rather, if you are not pressing an up/down control, your speed in the y-axis decelerates gradually until it reaches 0; and the same for left/right and the x-axis speed. This gives the puppy a slightly “slippery” feel, makes the motion feel like a more natural curve, rather than orthoganal directions, and “de-diagonalizes” the motion so that the only way you move diagonally is if you are pressing in both the x and y axis simultaneously. It is a motion mechanic which feels natural as well as puppy-like.
Strategy
The play mechanics and strategy are something I’m proud of. I can’t say I designed this from an ingenious flash of insight, but the way it came together, it felt very natural and like things were coming together in a way that felt right, and following my instincts to do the least complicated thing that seemed necessary worked well.
With the gameplay, there are a few things that stand in tension against each other, which result in a kind of dynamic equilibrium that makes the game fun.
To bark at someone, you have to be close to them. You don’t get points for barking at someone who is too far away, you have to be a certain distance away from them or nearer. This means that you can’t be just anywhere in the room, and have to move in order to be in a good position to bark for optimal points. It also means that you have to put yourself at risk, because…
When a walking person gets too near to you, they start to chase you. They don’t simply walk a predetermined course, unresponsive to your position. This creates a sense of adversary, as opposed to uncaring/ambivalent people who just walk and don’t react to your presence. It makes the game more interactive.
Chasers give up if you get too far away from them, and go back to horizontal walking. This gives you additional incentive to run from them. But it can also influence the player to not run too far away from them, either, if you are trying to lead/herd them. Keeping you closer to the people makes the game riskier, and keeps the player on their toes more.
You are faster than the people, which is good because if you weren’t, the game would end too quickly. You need to be able to get away. Puppies running faster than people is natural and feels right, and is in that sense realistic.
The room wraps. You can take advantage of this to escape at the edge of the screen, rather than get boxed in by the edges of the room.
People will wrap horizontally, but due to the way the homing AI works, someone chasing you will “lose” you if you wrap off the edge of the screen, effectively giving up chase. However “normal” walkers who are not in pursuit of you will continue to move in the direction they are heading in, and wrap. Since there’s no visual way to differentiate between these two modes, it makes the enemy AI difficult to predict, and forces the player to react rather than anticipate.
People do *not* wrap vertically, and mostly do not move in a vertical direction unless they are in pursuit mode. After playing a while, a player can pick up on this and use it as a strategy to evade a group of people when they are surrounded.
To bark at someone, you need to be facing them — barking does not increase your score if you are facing away from the person, even if you are close enough to bark at them. This means a strategy of always running away while barking will not work; you need to repeatedly turn around and bark toward your pursuers. Coincidentally, this is very puppy-like behavior, running away and then turning around and running back, but trying to stay out of reach.
An effective strategy is to try to “herd” the people by taking advantage of their pursuit response, in order to get them to bunch up. When bunched up, there is a lot of room to run around and avoid petting. And you can bark at the entire herd, which multiplies the points you get per bark. Having an effective strategy available to the player which they can discover through play makes the game more fun, because it rewards them for playing and making the discovery, and gives them a tactic through which they can feel they have achieved mastery over the game.
To effectively counter the herding strategy, and prevent people from bunching up too much, I added an AI behavior, whereby a person who has been barked at too many times (which is randomly variable) will run away. Run away mode is mostly identical to walking mode, except that the direction is always away from the player, and the trigger distances to return to normal walking mode puts them a far enough distance from the player that they will not immediately revert to pursuit mode. The result of all this is that after a short time of successful herd-barking, the tactic’s reward diminishes as people start running away, and the risk increases because the retreating people spreading out makes the room more crowded, and it becomes harder for the player to avoid petting.
The original version of the game lacked bonus pickup items. I realized quickly that with the player having only one thing to do, the game was a bit too one-dimensional and did not offer enough of a replay value. Adding the bonus pickups gives the player a secondary objective of collecting the bonuses.While this is completely optional, the game really seems transformed by presenting the player with temptation and giving them something else to do. Without the bonuses, a player can focus completely on avoiding petting, and will tend to last longer. With bonuses, there’s just enough temptation to try to pick them up that they become willing to take risks which will result in them getting petted a little bit, and the attrition wears the player down over time, reducing average play time. A clever player might see through this and decide that the way to get the highest score is to ignore the bonuses and focus on defensive play, trying to score only through barking, and picking up bonuses only accidentally. This might well be a better long-term strategy, but the value of the bonus items increases dramatically over time, which puts the value of going after them at a level where it seems worthwhile if you’re trying for a high score.
A few players have suggested adding something more to the gameplay, but I’m not sure what changes might improve on this without disrupting the dynamics of the core mechanic. I’ve thought of a few things, and will be experimenting with them in time. But sometimes knowing when something is complete and when not to add more is where the real design talent is.
I think there are many opportunities to polish what I’ve built so far without touching gameplay — an online scoreboard feature would be a great way to enhance the game and get people playing for global bragging rights, for example.
I’m interested in feedback, so if you’ve played the game and have something to say, please drop me a comment below or at the LD submission page, or tweet at me.
One of the more memorable and innovative titles on consoles and home computers in the early 80’s was Mountain King by CBS Electronics. I knew it on the Atari 2600, but it existed on other platforms also, including Atari 5200, Commodore 64, Vic20, and Colecovision. It was atmospheric and spooky and mysterious and inspiring, and one of my favorite games of all time.
There were a number of things that made Mountain King special, and examining them in detail is worthwhile.
Non-violent, Yet Scary As Hell
There was very little death or injury in Mountain King. It had a theme of exploring, not violence. The biggest threat in the game was the clock running out. Things that would hurt or kill you in another game imposed a time penalty on you in Mountain King. Fall too far, and rather than die or take damage, you’re stunned for a length of time proportionate to the height of your fall, and slo-o-o-o-wly get back on your feet. The wait could be agonizing, making seconds seem like hours. On certain difficulty levels, there are time limits for accomplishing certain objectives, and in any case your remaining time rolls over and is added to bonus time which dwindles with each re-claiming of the crown, so you are always under significant time pressure and there’s a feeling of speedrunning when you’re playing for a high score.
There is one deadly threat in the game, a giant man-eating spider that inhabits the lowest levels of the mountain. You can’t fight it, only run from it, but it is not normally necessary to descend to this level, so it is mainly in the game to provide a sense of fear of the depths. If you accidentally fell to the spider level, the scuttling sound of the approaching spider would fill you with panic and dread, and make you scramble toward safety with new urgency.
Audio Innovator
Most home videogames of the day did not feature music at all, or if they did, it was little beyond an introduction jingle that lasted a few bars, or a repetitive loop that quickly became annoying. Mountain King not only used music, but integrated it into the game in a novel way. A special theme plays when it is time to find the Flame Spirit, and the music gets louder as you come nearer to its location. A mostly-invisible entity which blinks sporadically, can can only be seen in full in the beam of your flashlight, using the music volume to triangulate and home in on the location of the Flame Spirit was one of the more novel mechanics in a videogame, and holds up well to this day.
Upon taking the Crown, a well-done TIA chip rendition of Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King plays, signaling your time-limited escape run to reach the Perpetual Flame at the top of the highest mountain peak in order to advance to the next level. The music created a sense of frenetic pace and urgency as you raced to the mountaintop. During the ascent, bats appear, which (similar to the Bat in Adventure) would rob you of the Crown. To avoid them, you sometimes had to hurry, and sometimes it was better to wait. This heightened the tension and anxiety you felt as you tried to make it out without losing the Crown, a setback which normally left you with insufficient time for a re-attempt, and meant an inevitable game over. More than any other feature, possibly rivaled only by the scare factor of the Spider, this made the game memorable.
Mountain King used silence to great effect, as well, for most of the time you are exploring the depths of the diamond mine in pitch dark and in complete silence, apart from the sound effects of picking up diamonds and the squeaking of bats. And if you fell, the sound effect — a simple descending tone — effectively conveyed not just that you had fallen, but how far. When you fell so long that part of the drop was in silence, you just knew you were going to be in for a long recovery time.
Each of these audio elements combined superbly to create a great mood, one of the best on the Atari 2600.
Mystery
Mountain King’s themes of mystery and exploration are enhanced in a number of ways. First, the instructions don’t tell you exactly what you need to do — rather, they hint and allow you to figure things out for yourself. Enough information is there to figure the game out, but enough is left out that it leaves the player with a sense of mystery and discovery. The Flame Spirit and the Skull Guardian and who placed the Crown in the mountain are never explained, leaving the player to wonder and speculate.
The game reinforces the mystery and discovery directly in game play, by making a number of things invisible — black sprites on black background, discoverable only by shining your flashlight everywhere. Treasure Chests, which are worth a lot of diamonds, are not essential to find, but are common enough that you are likely to encounter a few of them as you collect diamonds. The Flame Spirit is unique and critical to the game, and normally invisible, but the combination of the musical theme and its occasional flickering into visibility make it findable even without the flashlight, but by learning to use the flashlight to find Treasure Chests to boost your diamond score enough to find the Flame Spirit sooner, the game leads you to use it in discovering the Flame Spirit as well.
Glitch World
These mysteries are fine enough, yet pale in comparison to the Glitch World that hangs high above the mountain itself. It seems that not much is known for certain about the Glitch World, whether it is truly a bug in the game, or whether it might have been placed there by the programmers deliberately for unknown reasons. But there are platforms high above the mountain which are just barely reachable if you make a super jump from a specific place on the mountain.
I discovered this all on my own quite accidentally by jumping around aimlessly, and it was one of the most exciting things I had run into in a game before. In an era that predated the internet, there was little chance of learning anything about this but by discovering it yourself, and the excitement of this, and the intimacy of learning a secret that, for all you could know, was known only to you and (maybe) the programmers of the game, was very special.
In the early pre-Nintendo 80’s, kids would talk at school about accomplishments and discoveries they had made in video games, often times to incredulous schoolmates who would demand proof, or claim to have seen the same thing on their Atari. There were a few books and magazines out there, even then, but we didn’t have access to information the way we do today, and it gave us the opportunity to discover things ourselves. There were of course some kids who became notorious for lying and making up something in an effort to seem cool and special, as well, but the fact that you couldn’t 100% disprove a claim, and everyone would insist that they were not making stuff up. The only way one could verify extraordinary claims (in a still mostly pre-VCR-era) was if you witnessed it firsthand, so this made the rumors and secrets surrounding videogames something extra special, and if you were a witness, it made you special. I fear that era is gone forever, changed irrevocably by the Internet Age.
And for me, Mountain King might have been the most mysterious. Warren Robinett’s Adventure Eater Egg might have been cooler, but because it gave you a message, it seemed to have a purpose, and however cool it was, it just didn’t have the same mystery that the Glitch World in Mountain King had. We never found anything up there, no matter how high we climbed, but we never doubted that if we could only find some way past the impossible point, and get just a little bit higher, some great secret would be waiting for us, and all would be revealed.
Last night I noticed a trending Twitter hashtag, #1reasonwhy. A large number of the accounts I follow were using and/or retweeting this hashtag, and earlier today I noticed that it had managed to become the top trending hashtag in all of twitter. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to read the hashtag as “One reason why” or “Number one reason why”. But the hashtag is being used to address sexism in the game industry (and by now appears to have spilled over more generally to include the tech industry.) I think the idea is “1 reason why I (a woman) am sticking it out in this sexist industry” or something close to that.
Sexism is definitely a major issue in the tech and gaming industries, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. It’s not just evident inside the games industry, it’s blatant in the products themselves, and in how they are marketed. Not everything about gaming and tech is sexist, but sexism is rampant and unabashed, and has been for a long, long time.
I think it’s great to see conversation stimulated on this topic, and exciting that so many women are stepping forward and asserting their right to a place in the gaming world, whether as players or creators, and demanding that the industry change to become inclusive. It feels like right now we could be witnessing a historical moment, a turning point. I hope so.
I don’t have a whole lot to add to the discussion for now, apart from recognizing the importance of this discussion and encouraging it. For now I’m preferring to just sit back, and listen and observe, and think about the things that are being brought to light by those who are speaking out right now.
I have (so far) been unaffected by this issue, and am unaware of what triggers it or who might be affected. From reading the story over at Gamemakerblog, it seems that it may have to do with Steam, but details are still unclear.
This is a good time to re-emphasize the importance of good backups. If you don’t have something to restore from, it’s sad, but you really only have yourself to blame for not having better backups.
GameMaker Studio even incorporates source control features that allow you to store your project resources in a Subversion repository. Anyone who uses subversion with their GameMaker projects should be pretty safe, as long as they have a version of their sprites checked in prior to the images being corrupted.
As well, it’s a good practice to maintain your graphics resources outside of your gamemaker projects. While useful, the built-in sprite editor is rudimentary, and many graphics artists prefer to work in a more robust professional quality tool, then import into GameMaker. If you work this way, you should still have your originals intact, and won’t be as badly affected by this problem.
I really hope that this incident will spur Yoyogames to look at its anti-piracy philosophy and find other controls that they can use to curb unlicensed use of the features that they reserve for paid licensees.
I have been busy and feeling somewhat burned out and have taken a few weeks off from updating the blog here. I’ve actually been quite busy, though, and have a lot going on that I want to talk about.
GameMaker Studio Book
First, Packt Publishing had approached me a few months ago, asking if I’d be interested to author their upcoming book on HTML5 game development using Game Maker Studio. I considered doing this, but in the end I decided against it for a few reasons, the main reason being I would rather put my time into actual game development than into writing tutorials.
As well, I believe that there are already a lot of good resources for learning Game Maker basics, and the book Packt wanted me to write seemed to ignore this, preferring to focus on the admittedly wider audience of GameMaker newbies. The book that I wanted to write would have been something more advanced, targeting intermediate and advanced Game Maker devs who have been through the built-in tutorials, read the helpfile on a regular basis, actively use the GMC forums and wiki, and are looking to do things at the next level. Since GM:Studio is aimed at professional developers, it seemed to me that a book for newbies would be better off using GM:Lite, and that in any case, re-hashing existing material wasn’t an interesting project for me, or useful for anyone.
That said, Packt came back later after they found an author for the project, and asked me if I’d be interested to contribute technical review to the book manuscript, and I’ve been helping them out with it. So far, the book is looking pretty good.
Direction, Goals, Priorities
Considering this book opportunity put me in a position of having to think about my goals and priorities and how I’m devoting my resources to this indie game developer thing, and I concluded that I really want my focus to be on making games. While I’m good at writing, I consider it to be a byproduct of my game development efforts. And right now, I really want to have more completed games to show for my efforts.
I write articles and tutorials for your consumption here, mainly as a byproduct of teaching myself something new as I’m working on my own projects, and I think it really helps me to solidify my understanding of what I think I know. By putting my knowledge out there, I create an opportunity for peer review to take place, and hopefully get useful feedback from readers who know more than I do or see a mistake somewhere. But also, I hope that it helps people who haven’t learned something yet that I have.
I’ve always looked at this blog as a free service, which I’ve been happy to provide because I enjoy it, and because it benefits me to do so, in that the more I learn and write about what I learn, the better I get at what I do. And because other people can see my progress, it gives me a little bit of reputation, and increases my visibility so that I can potentially make friends in the game development community and maybe even collaborate with people on projects. This has been enough of a benefit that I have not needed any further incentive, in terms of money.
I’m going about pursuing any professional or business development goals rather passively, mainly by putting myself out there and letting interested parties approach me, as opposed to actively approaching others with proposals and ideas, but so far this has worked for me, and I’ve actually gotten more success from this than I would have expected. Perhaps that’s just because I’m extremely humble and my expectations have been very low, but I’ve appreciated all the interest and offers that I’ve received, whether I’ve taken advantage of them or not. But I’ve always felt that in order to have any kind of viable career as a game developer, I had to focus first on obtaining the skills of a game developer. I have prioritized this above developing skills as a business entrepreneur. And, knowing what sorts of activities make me happy, I feel this has been the right choice for me.
And while I’ve considered doing things with the website to try to bring in revenue, I haven’t cared that much about doing so, because it would take me away from doing game development, and would introduce new headaches as well (taxes, dealing with advertisers, setting up e-commerce, increasing my security vigilence, etc.) Since I’m only one guy, and work full time, I have to choose where I put my time and energy, and the blog itself already takes up a large enough chunk of what I’m able to devote to my game development efforts.
It’s a conundrum. On the one hand, if I had income from game dev related efforts, I could probably justify putting even more resources into it. On the other hand, a lot of those resources would go into things more on the business side of the house, and actually take me away from making games. And because the business income would in all likelihood be less than what I’m currently earning, for now it makes more sense to keep working fulltime and do the game stuff on the side. If there were a bridge to take me from here to there, I’d be really happy, but for now that doesn’t seem to exist for me, and I don’t know how I’d go about building it for myself, and rather than devote time to figuring that out, I’d rather just make games as best I can with the resources I’m able to devote with my current means.
Over the last two years, my primary focus in becoming a game developer has been on programming. I’ve made a lot of progress with my programming in the last two years, and I’m very happy with that, but I’m starting to feel like it’s time to balance that out by leveling up in other areas.
As a “game developer” I have to be proficient in a lot of different skill sets. My greatest strength, and how I see myself primarily, is as a designer. I am a designer who can program, draw, and to a very limited extend, do audio. No matter what I do, the more time I spend on doing it, the better I get.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like getting back into graphics. I find that when it comes to 2d video games, the stuff I have always loved the best has been low-res bitmap graphics, what has come to be known as “pixel art”. Pixel art is deceptively simple. It’s not easy to do well, and it requires a deep understanding of how shape and color work when the constraints are turned up almost as high as they can go.
I’ve been reading a lot of tutorials on how to do pixel art better, and I’m starting to try my hand at it. Now that I have a better understanding of what goes into good pixel art, I’m starting to feel less frustrated while working and enjoying the results more.
I’m at a point now where I feel like I won’t be embarrassing myself by sharing my work, and I really am interested in getting feedback from people who appreciate this kind of stuff, so I’ll be posting completed works and maybe some works-in-progress, along with my comments about it all.
Last night was one of the more interesting Cleveland Game Developers meetups that I’ve been to in a while.
IGDA Ohio Chapter starting up?
We’re discussing becoming an International Game Developers Association chapter. Coincidentally, on my own initiative, I became a member myself just recently. I haven’t gotten very much use out of my membership so far, so I’m definitely welcoming of an official chapter starting up!
CGD member and Stark State College Computer Science and Video Game Development instructor Mike Geig, who is leading the initiative, says he is definitely working on starting this up, and the only question seems to be whether CGD would like to officially fold itself into this group, or remain an independent meetup group. Things are in the very early stages, so he’s still trying to figure out pretty much everything at this point.
A new face showed up at our meeting and introduced himself as Jay from Exploding Rabbit, of Super Mario Bros. Crossover fame. He and his wife Iggy moved to Ohio from California recently, and have settled in the Cleveland area. I am glad to see more people who are working on serious projects coming to our meetings. It’s very cool to have people doing high quality work in the area.
