Category: games

Game Maker Wave Motion Tutorial

Best Of, development, GameMaker Tutorials, games, programming, Tutorials
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Following up on my motion and position tutorial, I present a tutorial on wave-motion. This was something I wanted to include in the original article, but I realized that there’s enough complexity to this concept that it merited its own separate article.

Wave Motion

Wavelike motion is any motion that involves periodic oscillation, not just linear undulating motion. (Other types of wavelike motion include pulsing and concentric ripples, for example.) But we’ll talk mostly if not exclusively about linear undulation, since it is easiest to understand, simplest to implement, and the basis for many others.

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Ludum Dare 24 Enhancement Postmortem

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I spent the last month doing post-compo enhancements to my Ludum Dare 24 entry, Karyote, and I have to say, I am actually becoming pleased with the way my game has come together. I’m surprised, really, because for the longest time I felt that the game just wasn’t very good. (more…)

YoYoGames Announces GameMaker on Steam

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This is some big news. YoYoGames is now distributing GameMaker Studio on Steam.

Apparently, this also will enable GameMaker developers who use Steam to release their games directly on Steam in the future. I have to look into this; I’ve been wanting to find a way to get games into the market for a while now. This might make it a whole lot easier

Update: It is possible to distribute games via Steam, through the Steam Workshop, but not for money. Sadface. :(

Come on, YoYoGames/Valve, let people who create content with your tools derive income from that content! It will incentivize content creation! It’s a bit strange to be selling a $500 professional software development suite to game developers and then make it more difficult than it needs to be to generate income with it.

GameMaker Position and Motion Tutorial

Best Of, GameMaker Tutorials, games, programming, Tutorials
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Motion is critical to just about any video game. Nearly every game has moving things in it, and how they move is a vital part of the game. Learning how to program motion and control it effectively is one of the most important parts of a successful game. There are a number of possible approaches to handling position and movement. Learning how these work will help you make better games.

This isn’t absolutely everything there is to know about motion, but it’s a great overview to start with, and covers everything I’ve learned with respect to motion in GameMaker Studio.  (more…)

Ludum Dare #24 rankings

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Voting is over. Rankings are up.

I wasn’t expecting great things for Karyote, and I got about what I expected.

Karyote Ratings:

Ranking/1406 Category Score (out of 5)
Coolness 100%
#253 Theme 3.20
#301 Audio 2.60
#335 Mood 2.70
#449 Humor 1.86
#459 Overall 2.82
#489 Fun 2.58
#492 Innovation 2.58
#628 Graphics 2.22

Comparing to my LD23 game, I ended up doing about as well as last time. I’m a little surprised, because I really didn’t think this game was as good at deadline, and I struggled during most of the compo, both to come up with ideas for the game, and to implement most of my experimental ideas, and I probably put in 10 fewer hours over the weekend on this one.

Category LD23 LD24
Coolness 56% 100%
Overall 2.76 2.82
Innovation 3.41 2.58
Fun 2.62 2.58
Theme 3.34 3.2
Graphics 2.75 2.22
Audio 2.07 2.60
Humor 2.07 1.86
Mood 2.68 2.70

Really, both games are fairly similar if you compare them — they both are about microorganisms. I guess microorganisms are easy to do games about when you don’t have any good ideas ;-) I hope I have a game idea for LD25 that doesn’t have anything to do with microorganisms!

Now that I’ve worked out a lot of the kinks in my post-compo version, I think Karyote is a lot better than it was at deadline, and I wonder how the enhanced builds I’ve been working on over the last two weeks would have rated. I’m two major features away from calling it complete now, and I am hoping it won’t take me much longer than the next two weeks to finish it up.

A Viable(?) New Business Model for Indie Game Development?

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This article has also been posted on Gamasutra blogs.

So, I was thinking about making games, and why I do it. I’ve always said that I don’t care if the games I make generate income. I’m doing it because I love it, and while that’s enough motivation for me, any money I do make will help justify doing it more.

Then I thought about business models, and piracy, and copyright, and all the pain that goes along with that, on all ends of it. And I thought about the “pay what you feel like” model, and the crowdfunding model, and the way some AAA games get pre-ordered so gamers can reserve a copy at their retailer. I kindof like pay-what-you-feel-like. But then I thought of something innovative, that combines the strengths of these approaches, and takes them to the next level.

It’s a secret to everybody

So here’s my idea: All the games I release are free/pay-what-you-want. There’s no DRM on any of it, you can play it as much as you want, share it with whoever you want. I think most will agree that DRM sucks, and I don’t want to spend time or resources trying to come up with some copyright enforcement mechanism that will only be broken hours after I release the game, or tie the game to some online service that will mean that if the company ever goes out of business, all the games will become unusable. I don’t want to inconvenience legitimate owners of my game and then have to offer a quick patch and a lame apology for it later. I want people to play my games — and share them with their friends — why would I want to put an obstacle between them and the game that I want them to play? I’ll even put in social features that help you share it with all your friends and tweet about how much fun you’re having playing my game.

Let’s play money making game!

Here’s the money-making part of the plan: You pay for me to make my next game. Whatever it is. I’ll announce my projects and work at them at the pace that I can sustain. If I have to work a lot at some other job in order to pay my bills, then I spend more time working, less time making games, and the game still happens, but probably not for a long time, and maybe not ever.

This is, after all, pretty much how Kickstarter works: you pay up front for a thing to be developed, and you wait some time until it is ready to be released. And like Kickstarter, pledged funds would not be collected until the goal has been reached. And it seems to work well, at least for established names who have a reputation and fan base. But how does an unknown attract The Crowd and convince them that they’re worthy of funding? Anyone can start out small and build their fanbase over time, assuming they are dedicated and talented and put in the work. I know of no other way to build a fanbase than to release high quality games and distributing them as widely as you can, and ensuring that people who get to play them learn how they can get to play more awesome games even better than the one they just played. And the best way to ensure the widest distribution is to release for free. Once you have fans who believe in what you are doing, enough of them will gladly pay to see more.

If I finish the game before it has reached the money goal, I hold on to it until my fundraising goal is met, and taunt you with YouTube videos showing how awesome it is, and asking for money to release it, and otherwise marketing the game. Once I hit my revenue goal, I release it, for free, no DRM or anything, and the game becomes an advertisement for my next project which I am happy that you share with anyone and everyone.

So, if you like the games I make, and you want to see more of them, give me more money, and the more I get, the more time I can spend making games instead of doing other things that make me money.

I like it. It’s straightforward, it completely eliminates any concern about piracy or DRM, because you can’t pirate what hasn’t been built yet, and in fact my games’ popularity is aided by people who enjoy the games spreading the word about them, and getting more people to play them, it basically de-fucks copyright and performs its original purpose — To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts — and, if the money comes in, it encourages me to make more, better games faster.

Learning from previous business models

During the shareware era, the proposition to the market was: “If you like this game that you just played for free, pay the shareware license for this game, because if you don’t then I’ll go out of business and there won’t be any more games.”

But most people ignored this. Revenue from shareware releases was always a tiny percentage of the total number of people who used the software. Users don’t like the nag screens and the guilt trips, and they’ll hack the binaries to eliminate them. They share the activation codes or crack whatever license controls you can think of, and you end up spending more time researching anti-piracy and fighting the spread and popularity of your game than you do making more cool games. It’s counterproductive.

But with this new approach, where the developer is explicitly saying: “This game is free, play the hell out of it and share it with as many friends as you can!” but also, “Here’s what else I have to offer, and you can help make it happen by contributing money to the project.” Kickstarter and IndieGogo have proven that this is viable. So, we’ve fixed all the problems of the old model — although the difference is subtle, the business model is crucially different, and addresses the failings of the previous models, and turns them into strengths. All the games are free upon release. Suddenly, there’s no longer an adversarial relationship between the players and the developer: I do what I love and make games, and you do what you love and play them. And if you want to play my next game sooner, you help me out by funding it.

By itself, I think many, perhaps most gamers would still ignore and pay nothing, like always. I mean, sure there’s always going to be leeches in any system. Leeches gonna leech. But that’s fine, because in my business model, they’re performing a valuable service: they’re doing your marketing for you, if you get out of their way and let them. Some people would pay because the idea that they’re helping to create the next game sooner holds great appeal. It’s that hipster “I was into X before X was cool” prestige. But there does need to be enough of those people. I think Kickstarter and IndieGoGo and others have established that there are indeed enough of these people. So, there just needs to be ways to encourage and incentivize gamers to fund your next project.

We’re already seeing this done with the Kickstarter model. A pitch video, a tiered system of rewards, regular, open communications between the creator and the backers. That’s part of what was missing from the old shareware model. In the shareware days, the developer was faceless. But today, the developer’s on the web, on youtube, on Twitter, in your inbox. You have a relationship and they’re more responsive to you than ever before. This makes you much more likely to be willing to spend some money. Because you know who it’s going to, and you see what it does.

To encourage people funding me, I would have a progress bar tied to my income stream showing the actual money raised, making that information public. And some kind of goal showing what my expenses are. We’re not just talking direct project expenses, but the funding level needed to buy me out of my job and go full time indie.

There could also be a progress bar for each project I have announced, or each feature, showing how many hours are needed to complete them, how many hours are funded in the next week, and how many dollars need to be raised to fund more hours.

That way, you could see things like:

  • How much I’m making
  • How much I need in order to not have to work on anything but game development
  • How much the money you’re paying towards my projects is helping me to get them done
  • What projects I have announced
  • How much progress has been made on each project
  • How soon you can expect my next release to be

I’d also establish a relationship with the players of my games, through active blogging/tweeting of what I’m doing with the game projects, and where my time is going, why it’s not going to game development, and stuff like that.

I figure if people see the person creating the games, it will tend to humanize them, and make it clear that the developer isn’t a faceless corporation with huge revenues that won’t notice if their money isn’t added to the giant swimming pool of gold that we all splash about in.

Plus, if gamers know how much money a game is making, it will tend to disabuse them of the idea that wealthy corporations are raking in all kinds of money hand over fist, that they can’t possibly be hurt by people not paying anything to enjoy the games. And by tying the money paid directly to new projects, it’s easier for them to see what they’re getting for their money.

Actually, hell, I could turn it into a web service and let any indie dev sign up for an account, and they’d each have their own blog, their own projects page, and their own “fund this and it will happen sooner” button. Maybe an API that they can tie into their games, allowing them to meter usage so they can show “X number of people played this game X’ times in the last 1|7|30|365 days, and collectively have kicked in Y dollars to fund my next project, an average of just Y_avg cents per play, which means that I am in H financial health, and so my next project will get delivered in Z months.” And here’s an appreciation leaderboard showing the G most generous, loyal fans, thanks so much for your patronage.

I’d love to develop this idea into an actual business, but I’d also gladly work with an e-commerce services provider who could set up a system that would work this way.

Ingenuity Fest

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This weekend is Ingenuity Fest in downtown Cleveland, held this year at North Coast Harbor. Cleveland Game Developers has a space, and we’re hanging out, demoing games and promoting our projects and talking about our craft. A number of our members brought tech demos and projects to show off.

One of the most fun games I’ve seen in some time, BaraBariBall, is on display here in our space. It is not, unfortunately, one of our creations, but it is a lot of fun. It’s a bit like Super Smash Bros., but simplified and with a graphical style reminiscent of the Atari 2600. I really like the graphical style. The animation is particularly well done. And the controls are superb. I never could get into Smash Bros. due to its overly complex controls. Any time I played it, all I could do is mash buttons and hope for the best. With BaraBariBall, the controls are greatly simplified, and this makes the game much more fun. It’s now more of a contest of reflexes and tactics, and less about memorizing and mastering strange controller contortions that unlock special moves.

I can’t wait for this to come out so I can buy it.

We also have JS Joust set up. Again, this isn’t something one of our group created, but it’s fun. It uses the PS3 ice cream cone controller and a Mac OS X computer.

Cleveland Game Developers Matt Perrin, Brian Gessler, and Jarryd Huntley have all brought in projects that they’re working on.

Matt Perrin whipped up an interesting project just for Ingenuity, which he calls Monster Sumo. You draw your own graphics on a sheet of paper, then take a photo with a camera phone and upload your monster to a server. Then you can do battle with another monster created by your opponent. I suggested that this would be a lot of fun to play with a Kinect interface, but for now it’s just controlled with a more traditional input device — I’m not sure if it’s keyboard, or gamepad, or possibly either.

Brian Gessler brought a prototype game that uses Kinect. He described it as kindof a reverse Breakout, where you’re trying to push the wall up and the computer is trying to break holes in it. It looked interesting but unfortunately the laptop he was running it on was having trouble playing it at full speed. Brian promised to do some performance optimization before bringing it back tomorrow.

Jarryd Huntley had a game rigged up to play on an Oscilloscope, in homage to Willie Higinbotham’s original ur-pong, Tennis for Two. Unfortunately, his oscilloscope died just before the festival, and he is trying to source a spare on short notice so he can demo the game.

The Wii U. Texting while Driving?

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Nintendo officially announced the launch date and pricing of the Wii U today. We’ve known a few things about it for a while, now, specifically the new controller with its built-in high resolution color touchscreen.

Secondary screens have been done before. The Sega Dreamcast controller had a built-in module that docked in the controller and provited a tiny low-resolution monochrome display, for minigames and private information for multiplayer games. And Nintendo has on occasions done Game Boy/Game Cube crossover games, where part of the game is played on the handheld system and part is played on the TV.

Wii U represents a maturation of the concept, and the first time a very high quality screen was put onto the controller. There are a lot of interesting possibilities that come out of this, succinctly summarized as “asymmetric”, which is fancytalk for “Thing A happens on screen A while Thing B happens on screen B.”

The main strength of 2-screen gaming is this assymetric aspect. Of course, network multiplayer gamers have had this for quite some time. The Wii U seems even more geared toward multiplayer gaming, where the multiple players are together in the same room. One difference I see is that the Wii approach lends itself more to a “shared data/private data” game. While technically this is the way it usually is with network multiplayer gaming, the sharing now becomes more literal.

Most networked PC games give each player “*My* Thing A,” where whatever that thing is, it’s essentially the same for all players, just their view of it. For example, their avatar’s first-person view of the map from its position on the map, with their private data for their health and inventory. Wii U has the potential to give each player a unique “Thing”. A great example of this is given in the recent Penny Arcade strip, depicting a hypoethetical computer-aided role playing game on the Wii U. Unlike the typical computer RPG genre, where the computer acts as the game master, and the world and storyline are all pre-programmed, the Penny Arcade concept shows a DM using the Wii U as a world realization tool, but controlling the world in a more interactive way.

This is great stuff, and I hope we’ll get to see it, but it makes me wonder how the Wii U serves the single-player game. To me, the first thing that occurs to me is that a single-player dual screen game is very much like texting and driving. Diverting attention between two screens is a challenge, but maybe not a rewarding one. There’s definitely potential for novel, interesting new modes of play, but I’m not sure yet how it will take shape.

Hopefully today’s press conference will have shed some light on this. I’m looking foward to finding out later today.

5 Stars of Ambiguity

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Originally posted at my Ludum Dare blog

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Game Review: Iron Tank (NES)

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Iron Tank (1988, SNK) is a mostly-forgotten title for the NES, but deserves more recognition than it’s gotten. I think of it as a spiritual companion to the other great NES WWII Shooter, Capcom’s 1943.

Many of its features were successful in other popular games, but it has enough of its own unique strengths that it can stand up proudly as an innovative game with an experience you will find similar to many other games, but still feeling original and well done, not generic or derivative:

  • Radio communications screen for narrative elements (Bionic Commando, Metal Gear). The radio will sometimes give you warning about upcoming challenges, or some mission background to explain why you’re here and what you need to do. This is mostly inessential because the mission is always “Stay alive, destroy enemies, and advance, and destroy a boss.” but it still gives the game a story of sorts. Often the radio message will be “too late” advice, warning you to be careful about a challenge you just got through. Toward the end, the enemy starts broadcasting to you, threatening/begging out of desperation to get you to turn back. This boosts your ego, and is a neat reward for the player.
  • Configurable power up system (many NES games featured this, but Iron Tank’s is unique in its implementation, but perhaps could be described as a combination of Mega Man and 1943.) Your main gun has four different types of power boosts — Long range, Rapid fire, Armor Piercing, and Bomb shells — which you refill through pickups.The pickups are odd in that they are letters which sometimes don’t have an obvious relationship to the power boost they represent. L = Long Range (ok, fair); V = Rapid (velocity?); F = Armor piercing (huh?); B = Bomb Shells (right). Rather than remain enabled until expended or a timer runs out, you can enable/disable them on a sub-screen as needed. This means there’s strategy to the game — you can save up your power and use it when you hit a really tough spot in the game. Managing your power-up resources is critical to winning. Knowing when you need them, and deciding what you need at a given time, and balancing that against the yet unknown challenges that lie even further ahead makes for a cerebral game that layers on top of the action game. There are times when an obvious approach of using power-ups isn’t really necessary, because a subtler strategy will enable you to get by with a stock configured tank, and it often pays off to take the harder challenge now, conserving the power boosts for an even more difficult challenge later.
  • The most interesting power-up mechanic is the [R]efuel tank, which gives you a secondary life bar that extends your primary life bar — but only if you choose to have it enabled. Another interesting thing is that you can both shoot and run over foot soldiers — and the game seems to encourage you to run them over, as doing so gives you a tiny but vital boost to your main energy.
  • Infinite continues, and a password save feature, allowing the game to be longer than would otherwise be practical to beat in one sitting, and not punishing the player too severely for not being able to make it through the challenging parts of the game, and allowing therefore for those parts of the game to be even more challenging.

Basic gameplay

There’s a very good “Let’s Play” series on YouTube, if you aren’t familiar or need to get reacquainted. You are Iron Snake, commander of the Iron Tank, invading Normandy and liberating Europe from an implied but unnamed Nazi occupation. And by “liberate” I definitely mean “blow the hell out of.” Actually, there are occasional resistance fighters and POWs who you’ll rescue throughout the game, as well.

Controls

Controls are often a weak point in games featuring tanks. Not so in Iron Tank. Your tank features an aimable turret, which allows you move and aim independently. The way this was implemented on the standard NES gamepad was effective — hold button B and the D-pad controls the turret. This takes a little getting used to, but is very effective and you can be quite nimble with practice. Being able to aim to the side or diagonal and strafe is an important tactic, and makes the game more realistic and more fun.

Graphics

There is a huge variety of tile-based backgrounds, for simulating the European countryside, cities, docks, airplane hangers, the Normandy beach, cliffs, trees, roads, paths, rail tracks, fortresses, you name it. Even for the 8-bit NES, these are a little rough in spots, though never truly bad, and the variety makes up for it.

Music

The music in Iron Tank is really first rate. It is heroic and epic, evokes both the military marches and the WWII era, adds drama and tension, and provides cues to when more challenging areas are up ahead. Most of the music is in the lower and mid octaves, which gives it a characteristic unlike most other background music on the NES, while seeming suitable for a game about tanks.

Enemies

There really isn’t anything in Iron Tank sophisticated enough to call AI. The enemies all move in basic, simple patterns and pre-set routes, but a lot of variety makes the game challenging. Some tanks sit still, others chase you, while others seem to stand off at a distance and duck and feint, and still others will enter, make a quick attack, and then retreat before you can retaliate.

There’s also a great variety of enemies: infantry, officers, tanks, train guns, fortresses, turrets, and boss tanks called “Think Tanks”. I guess they’re hard enough that you need to think about how to defeat them? You even do battle with airplanes and submarines. Of course tanks are the star of the game, and there is a satisfying variety of enemy tanks, different styles of light, medium, and heavy, which vary in their speed, armor, and armament. Some are barely any threat to you, while others necessitate caution.

This variety of enemies invites a variety of tactics, which keeps the game fresh and challenging. The key tactic is avoiding being in range of the enemy cannons, flanking the enemy’s turret when you can, or when that isn’t possible, waiting for a pause in their fire and placing a well-timed shot to take them out. You can also sometimes use your long range shots to safely take out enemies before they’re able to engage you with their own armaments. Individually, their cannon fire is usually not too hard to dodge, being limited to 8 directions, resulting in predictable pie slices of safe zone. It’s not too hard to take out enemy tanks when they don’t outnumber you too badly and there’s plenty of room to maneuver. Sometimes moving slowly and cautiously, taking out the enemies one at a time, picking apart their defenses is the best approach, other times it’s better to just run for it.

Terrain

Some terrain is more open than others, however. The variety of terrain matches the variety of enemies and enemy tactics, and itself influences the tactics that will be most effective in a given area. Although the game is 2D, there are simulated ledges, cliffs, and rooftops where placed guns can harass you, sometimes out of your own reach unless you have some power boosts enabled. There are walls and buildings and natural barriers that can constrain your movements, but provide cover in return. Water likewise blocks your path, but leaves you exposed to fire.

There are wooded areas where the tree canopy foregrounds partially obscure the action beneath them. The NES didn’t have a capability of alpha channel, but they still made the forest sprites partially see-through, so that when you go under them, you can see the unobstructed part of your tank (or lurking enemies) through them. This is really cool.

Insta-kill anti-tank landmines will block your progress along otherwise open and inviting pathways. They blink, being invisible half the time, so can be difficult to spot.

Destructible terrain

While not dynamically destructible, there are enough buildings and walls that you can blow up to uncover secrets or alternate paths that it’s worth mentioning. Being in a tank and not being able to destroy these things just wouldn’t feel right.

Multi-path map

I don’t know of any other NES game that did this, so Iron Tank deserves special recognition for this design. At several points in the game, you’ll encounter road signs that point out a fork in the road. Depending on which path you take, you’ll proceed to a different level, with different terrain and enemies. One path might be more difficult, but you have no way of knowing before you make your choice. This means that in order to experience every bit of the game, you’ll need to play through it multiple times.

Map x-wrapping

Instead of having an edge, the map wraps on the x-axis. There are certain places on the map where there are no side walls, and you are unbounded in your horizontal direction, but in these locales, the map wraps around. While not exactly realistic, it does make for some potentially useful tactics, as you can return to an area by continuing in one direction, without needing to double back.

Overall

Iron Tank is a solid effort from SNK. The game integrates a lot of the features and design elements of successful NES classics, and does it well. While mainly an action game, the story elements provided by the radio communiques and the configurable power-ups give an element of strategy almost like a proto-RPG. It’s one of my favorite lesser-known games on the NES.

See Also

If you liked this game, you’ll want to check out 1943, Guerrilla War, Commando, Jackal, Heavy Barrel and Ikari Warriors. All have a similar WWII/war theme and vertical scrolling shooter gameplay.