GameMaker Project Rot

development, programming
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My recent project, Genes, had a bug in it which didn’t really matter too much: Male creatures were supposed to seek the nearest available female, re-targeting every few seconds. And so too with females. But for some reason, the males were not re-targeting any longer once all the females had become pregnant.

I spent some hours trying to debug this before I released it, and I suspected something about the instance_change() method, which I used to change a female creature to a pregnant female, was to blame, but when I tried running a few tests to see what was going on in the code, it was apparent that the pregnant females were truly turning back into normal females after birthing, and also that the male’s re-targeting clock was resetting, and that they should have been seeing these females as available but for some reason they just weren’t.

It wasn’t crucial to the Genes demo, since the female homing worked well enough to get the breeding cycle going, so I gave up and posted it as it was. Then, I updated GameMaker Studio on Saturday to 1.1.929, and re-ran the game and all of a sudden the males are exhibiting the correct behavior now.

I started reading through the changelog to see what might have fixed it, and noticed something else that was enticing to me: Blend modes have been added to WebGL!

I haven’t touched the project files for Karyote in since sometime late in September, when I finished working on the post-Ludum Dare compo enhancements for it. My great disappointment with the HTML5 build of Karyote was that the pretty color blends that I’d come up with for the Windows build weren’t able to be rendered.

This had really soured me on building HTML5 games. But now I could see if it would be worth while to release a new build.

I tried opening up the project to rebuild it, and GameMaker said it needed to do something to the files in order to continue, and when it did, the project was corrupted, and all my project assets were missing. :-(

Fortunately, I have backups.

I restored the project folder from a backup and tried opening it again, and this time it worked. That is, it didn’t corrupt the project this time, at least.

But when I ran the game, a number of things were still off. In the Windows build, for some reason, the player’s sprite isn’t drawn correctly. The script that composites the player’s sprite no longer correctly centers everything, so now the body is off-center from the tail and the particle effects. And the HTML5 build no longer renders enemies at all for some reason. You just start out in an empty universe with nothing every appearing apart from the player.

Worse, the player sprite seems to be drawn correctly in the HTML5 build. So, it appears that the runner is not behaving consistently, depending on the build target. Which means that despite promising to allow you to develop projects that you can build to whatever platform, you (still) really can’t, because the behavior will not be identical across all platforms. I can only hope that this inconsistency will be rectified soon. It really sucks to have a tool that advertises itself as giving you the capability to easily develop for multiple platforms with a single project, and not deliver on that.

I’m sure with a little investigation and a bit of time, I might be able to fix these issues. But as a developer it sucks to have to sink my time into tasks like this, rather than doing new development.

This is something I’ll need to look into further, but I have to say that it is dismaying not to have confidence in Game Maker updates. If an update can ruin a project like this, it makes me very nervous about upgrading. Any project that I’ve put serious amounts of work into, I don’t want to introduce bugs into because I updated the development environment. Of course, I also don’t want to be stuck on an old version of my development tools, either.

I don’t know what techniques programmers use to protect their project code from changes to the underlying framework or environment. I imagine a unit test suite would help, but it doesn’t seem feasible for GameMaker projects.

Apart from that, I am not sure what else professional developers who work in GameMaker do. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time

Best Of, games, reviews
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I just watched The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time, a documentary about the golden age of video games, and the stories of a few collectors of arcade games who are keeping them alive in basements and garages and museums around the country.

A heavily nostalgic look at the games, people telling their stories and what the games and the arcade experience meant to them. It wasn’t as heavy on history, research, and data as I would have liked, and being an enthusiast who lived through this period I didn’t feel like I really learned anything, but I feel qualified to say that the film is accurate in its treament of what it covers, and it is quite enjoyable to watch if you love the the golden age of arcade videogaming, or if you want to learn about that period.

The film did focus mainly on gamers who grew up in the late 70’s/early 80’s, and did not seem to include any interviews with people from the industry — designers, programmers, company presidents, or anything (although, a number of the collectors they interviewed do work in the computer technology field in some capacity). So it’s very much a gamer/fan oriented story, and not an insider story. But you’ll come away from it with a good feel for what the games meant to the generation who came of age during their heyday, and a lot of cabinet envy, if nothing else, and perhaps a desire for more wall outlets in your basement.

Strangely, the actual game Space Invaders seems to have been largely ignored by the collectors who shared their stories. For serving as the inspiration for the film’s title, it’s a bit odd that they didn’t spend a little more time talking about the game somewhere in there.

It’s available as an Amazon Instant Video, and if you watch it through the link below, I’ll get a little compensation through their affiliate program.

The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time

Genes

Best Of, games
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I’ve created a demo for a genetics mechanic.

This is not a playable game, as it isn’t interactive. It’s just a demo of a breeding mechanic.

To explain what’s going on a bit: (more…)

GameMaker: Studio Master Collection discount for Professional licensees

development
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As covered by GameMakerBlog, YoYoGames has announced a special 60% discount sale for developers using GameMaker: Studio Professional only, allowing them to upgrade to Master Collection for $199. The special discount extends through 3/31/13.

This limited-time special offer is apparently in response to a situation affecting Professional licensees who had no cost-effective upgrade path to allow them to convert their existing investment to a Master Collection license. Following the recent release of the Ubuntu build target module, a paid upgrade for Professional users, there were complaints of unfair pricing affecting Professional licensees.

The big advantage for owners of a Master Collection license is that any future Game Maker build targets that happen to be released are automatically included as free updates, while GM:S Pro licensees have to pony up more cash for each piecemeal upgrade, thus making Pro a much more costly way to get all the features available in the Master Collection. As the Master Collection grows (and we don’t really know how much more, or if, it will grow), this disparity will only increase.

While this is a fine gesture on the part of YYG to respond to Pro license holders who asked for cost-effective upgrade path to the Master Collection, I still think it makes more sense for YYG to make it part of an ongoing pricing strategy, similar to the “Anytime Upgrade” option Microsoft made available to Windows 7 users, which would enable them to upgrade to higher product tiers for the difference in cost from their present tier, at any time. Hopefully YYG may yet make such a change to their licensing model — if you’d like to see that happen, I encourage you to send them feedback.

For now, this seems to be a good opportunity (and perhaps the only one) for any serious GameMaker Studio Professional users who may want to upgrade to the Master Collection.

Packt Publishing announces HTML5 Game Development With GameMaker

development, games, programming
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Packt Publishing has announced an upcoming new book, HTML5 Game Development With GameMaker, by Jason Elliott, tentative publication date in late April 2013.

I provided technical review/editing of the book, and so I can say that it should be a good book if you’re looking to get into the newer features of GameMaker Studio. While the book focuses primarily on HTML5, almost all of the book is generally applicable regardless of what platform you wish to target.

Highlights include:

  • Facebook integration
  • Pathfinding and Artificial Intelligence
  • State Machine design pattern
  • The new Box2D Physics system
  • Particle effects for any game
  • File I/O and HTML5 local storage.

Leveling Up as a Game Maker Dev

Best Of, development, programming
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Something that interests me greatly with making things is the process by which the maker transforms from a novice to a master. This is a process of learning primarily by doing and through experience. Things like reading about a subject, interacting with peers, or watching others demonstrate, or abstractly thinking about a topic all contribute to learning, but none so much as actually doing things.

To the greatest extent possible, one should endeavor to spend their time doing and making. Get outside of your head and make. Do not exhaust yourself while making and doing; give yourself opportunity to observe what, how, and why you are doing what you are doing, and take time to examine and reflect on these things. Then apply what insights you gain from this into your next doing and making.

As I have progressed in learning GameMaker, I have observed a few distinct phases in my development. I don’t know that I’m at the highest level yet, or if there is a highest level. But as a gamer I like being able to categorize things and assign levels to them :-)

I really wish that I had had something like this to guide me as I made my progress, so it makes me really happy to have written this. I think it can help a less-experienced developer have some idea of a criteria of competencies so they can figure out how to get better, things to look for that can help them get there without having to figure it all out for themselves. It can also help a mentor recognize where their protegé is at in their development and help them identify areas where they should focus in order to improve.

Here’s a summary of my progression as a GM Dev to date:

Level 0

Complete ignorance. It’s a struggle to do anything.

All you can really do is follow instructions in a tutorial, most likely doing things with drag and drop actions. And sometimes even that is frustrating.

Despite the instructions being clear and straightforward, you still have a hard time following them because you have questions that are so basic that the people who wrote the tutorials don’t even realize that you would have them.

If you’re trying to follow written instructions, you wish that instead of still images, you had an animation showing where to click and what to type. The instructions use terms for user interface widgets in the IDE that you aren’t familiar with yet, leaving you to guess until you figure out what they mean.

Six months or so later, you think to search for tutorial videos on YouTube, and find a bunch, although they’re not really much better because of amateurish production quality, and by this point you’re well beyond needing them anyway. Still, there’s a few good ones on topics you’re not yet clear on. (more…)

GAME.Minder Expo 2013

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Last Saturday, I attended and spoke at GAME.Minder Expo, held at Shaker LaunchHouse. after taking ill in January and missing the 2013 Global Game Jam, this was a great day to jump back into the Game Dev scene.

It was a relatively small event, but still probably the biggest local game dev event that I’ve been involved with to date. Organized by Handelabra to promote their studio’s mobile gaming efforts and the GAME.Minder podcast, and local area game developers in Ohio. Turnout was almost 40% higher than expected, with the official attendee count at 136. The Keynote talk was presented by Ian Schreiber, a co-founder of the Global Game Jam.

A bunch of us CGD people had dinner with Ian and his wife, and he said that we are getting big. It has been wonderful to see the local independent game developers organizing and building up our community and create a scene, and to be a part of making that happen.

Members of the Cleveland Game Developers meetup were well represented. I gave a brief talk on GameMaker, Jarryd Huntley talked about Construct2, while Brian Gessler and Justin Demetroff delivered a talk on Unity3D. Ian Faleer and Stephanie Frankiewicz gave a talk on the Art of the Game. And the folks from HashTag Nerd had a booth set up. There were a few other presenters as well. Videos are still being uploaded, but a number of them are already available on GAME.Minder’s Youtube channel.

The evening event was a screening of the Kickstarter-funded documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang. The movie was excellent and inspiring.

GameMaker: Studio Builds to Ubuntu

development, games
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YoYoGames announced today that they have released a new build target for GameMaker Studio: Ubuntu Linux. It’s great to see YYG supporting Linux as a target platform, even if GameMaker does not embrace opensource principles. To add the Ubuntu build target to GM Studio Pro, it’s $99; if you have a Master Collection, it’s a free addition.

Master Collection is becoming an increasingly good deal with all the additional components provided and any new ones that come out entitled to Master Collection licensees.

Any time YYG releases a major new feature for GameMaker, I revise my wishlist for what I’d like to see from them next. Here’s what I’d like to see in future releases of Game Maker:

  1. An upgrade path for developers with Professional to Master Collection.
  2. Native IDE for Linux and Mac OS developers. The day a Native IDE comes out, I may not need to boot Windows anymore.
  3. Flash build target. (I know HTML5 is supposed to be the future, but Flash is still a relevant platform.)
  4. Support for other source control, especially git.
  5. Integration of some standard, cross-platform GUI widget toolkit like Qt or GTK to make creating user controls and forms easier.
  6. Native XML support (not relying on extensions)
  7. Project templates for common types of games, eg platformer, rts, etc. with library or namespace-like built-in classes for common objects already implemented

Recent site problems

administrivia
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A few days ago, I noticed site traffic had suddenly dropped.

Graph of recent site traffic stats for csanyk.com

Day 1 and 2, I didn’t do anything. I had noticed that the traffic was unusually low midway through the day on the first day, and thought it was curious, but I didn’t really worry about it. I was pretty busy those days and didn’t have time to look into things. I figured it might just be a fluke, much like I will occasionally see a traffic spike, and that it might correct itself.

After the second day, I wondered what was up. Had I been de-listed from google? I checked, I had not. I started googling “sudden traffic drop wordpress” and read a few articles.

Then I noticed that wordpress wasn’t serving the site properly. I had only been in the admin console and didn’t check the actual site, but when I went to read the home page, the web server just spat out a bunch of encoded gunk.

At first, I wondered whether the site had been hacked. I logged into the admin console and now WordPress reported that one of the plugins I use was giving an error. I disabled the plugin, and the site started serving properly again. Phew! I removed the offending plug-in entirely, and things seem to be back to normal.

Traffic bounced back almost immediately — yesterday I lost about a half day’s worth of traffic because I fixed the problem around the middle of the day. Today, at around 10am I already had a little over 50 hits, which seems about normal. By the end of the day I’d expect to have somewhere over 100 hits, which is back within the normal range of what I have been seeing in recent weeks.

I’m still not 100% sure about a few things.

Site stats during the “outage” days were very low, but still not zero. If wordpress was serving corrupted junk, I would expect that the stats should have been exactly zero. Stats for those days show that certain articles were still able to be reached, albeit by a much smaller number of visitors than previously. So, I’m not entirely sure when the plug-in error began or when it resulted in wordpress serving corrupted pages. It could be that stats counting is off somehow (wordpress documentation suggests that it is somewhat inexact, although I don’t fully understand the causes), or it could be there’s some other explanation (does a visit to a google cache of my site somehow increment my stats, perhaps?)

I think it would have been nice if WordPress could have been a little more active in notifying me of the error. I liked that it displayed an error message when I logged into the admin console, but it didn’t do that until three days into the low traffic — I think probably because the account I normally use to log in with is just an authoring account that doesn’t have full administrative privileges. When I logged in with my account that had admin privileges, I saw the errors, and it immediately told me where the problem was so I was able to fix the problem quickly. Which, is great and all, but even better would have been if WordPress had sent a notification email to me, so that I would have been aware of the problem right away, without having to log into the site.

Game Jam 101 Lightning Talks

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This Saturday, I’ll be at a Cleveland Game Devs meetup, where we will be giving lightning talks in preparation for the upcoming Global Game Jam happening later this month. I’ll be giving two talks, one on setting goals, and one on keeping the momentum. Following are my notes for the talks.

Game Jammer Goals

How to decide what to shoot for in your next weekend sprint.

A weekend is not a lot of time to make a game! To get the most out of your weekend, you need preparation and mental discipline. Having goals will help you focus and get the most out of your jam weekend.

So what should your goals be?

Have you made a game before, ever?

No?

Your goal should be to make a game! Easy as that.

Really, though, it is best if you have at least some game making experience before you try to fly solo. Do look for a team to join, and see what you can offer them. Focus on delivering a skill from your repertoire of strengths, and integrating well with the team. If you can get anything back from the team, hopefully it will be insights into skill areas where you are lacking, techniques that you can apply in those areas, or exposure to new tools that you can start to learn.

Yes… but never in such a short time!

If you have never made a game in a weekend before, likewise your goal can be to complete a game. It can be done, as proven by thousands of people. Before jams became popular, most people thought it took months or years to complete a game project. We know now that this simply isn’t so, and the amount of work that can be accomplished in a weekend can be incredible. Still, like running a marathon, it’s hard to believe until you’ve done it yourself.

It feels really good to have this accomplishment under your belt, so if you haven’t completed a Game Jam, this should be the only goal for you.

Even if you don’t make it this time, but still want to keep trying, then focus on learning what you can from the experience. If you weren’t able to complete the game you wanted to make, why was that? Did you lose track of time? Did you plan for more than you could possibly deliver? Did you struggle to implement something that you felt you could do, due to inexperience or pressure? If you couldn’t figure something out in the weekend, don’t give up – keep working on it after the jam until you figure it out. That way, at the next jam, you won’t be stopped by that failure again.

Don’t be afraid to fail, but try to fail early, and always fail at something new.

Yes! I’m a Jam veteran!

Then you can make a few more choices… completing the game may not necessarily be the most important thing once you’ve proven that you can do it. Be willing to take greater risks.

Once you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it, if you enjoyed the experience enough to want to repeat it, you should keep going on to bigger and better things. Participate in as many Jams as you can find time for, and make it a goal to do more with each new game, always improving on your last effort.

Where should you focus your goals?

This is a personal choice, and it depends a lot on where you’re at, where you want to go, and what your strengths and weaknesses are. Here’s a few areas to consider.

Learning/Experimentation. It’s only a weekend. If you fail, it’s no big deal. You only lose a tiny amount of time, and you can learn so much. So take risks. Try something you haven’t done before. Make your focus learning and experimentation.

Be willing to accept a failed concept, incomplete game, or failure to complete a submission. Ideally, you still want to make a game so you can show off what you learned and receive feedback on it, but it’s less important to have a good game than it is to learn from the experiment. If you want to have the best chance of having a finished game by deadline, limit your experimentation to one thing only. For everything else, stick with what you know.

I don’t recommend picking up a new tool to experiment with. Rather, do something different using a tool you know well. To complete a game in a weekend, you just don’t have time to learn a brand new tool that you’ve never used before. Using new (to you) tools won’t get much you recognition, but new game design concepts often do, even if they are not successes.

Still, if you really want to try a new tool, it can give you a taste of the tool, enough to give you a sense of whether it’s something you want to devote time to mastering.

Ideas for domains to experiment/learn with:

  1. Graphics
  2. Sound effects
  3. Music
  4. Controls
  5. Game mechanics
  6. Genre
  7. Setting
  8. Mood
  9. Story
  10. AI
  11. Level design
  12. Randomness
  13. Procedurally generated content
  14. Physics
  15. Particle systems
  16. Network
  17. Multiplayer

Each of the above is still quite broad – don’t be afraid to get much more specific when coming up with your ideas for experimentation. But do decide on the specifics late – once the theme is announced, and you are starting to come up with concepts for your game is a good time to narrow down the specifics of how you will experiment with in a domain.

Teaming. Step up and be a leader. Try to organize a team.

Or just be on a team. A team needs more than just leaders.

The thing a team needs most is do-ers, without ego, who can communicate. Never forget this.

Leadership does not mean making decisions for the group; it means helping the group to come to agreements about the decisions it makes together.

Community. When I say “community,” primarily I’m thinking of all the participants in the jam who are not part of your immediate team. This could be other groups at your location, or they could be other groups anywhere in the world.

The jam is when everyone comes together to make something and show off and share with each other. This is the best time to make new friends (or grow existing friendships), and get to know the community. Play and review games made by other groups – make note of who created them, and follow their projects. Make it a point to get to know the people and learn about them. Follow them on twitter, visit their web site, and learn about their other projects. Who knows, they may live nearby! Drop them a line and let them know you like their work.

The essence to community is giving. The community is indifferent to most of its members, but it recognizes their greatest contributions. To stand out, give the most. Exchange your knowledge and skill – be willing to sacrifice a little dev accomplishment for a little knowledge spreading. Make a game so you can get feedback from the other jammers. Give feed back on the creations of others. Write tutorials. Build and share your own tools.

Winning. If you’re a true pro, and your team is functioning like a well-oiled machine, this is what you should go for. Make the best game you possibly can in the time allotted. Go for it, try to win! Learn how the event is judged, and try to do well in those areas where you feel strongest. Focus on your strengths, or if you’re working with a team, let each team member focus on their strengths, once all areas of project have coverage. Your experimentation should be minimal – stick with what you know you can do well, and know will work. It’s all about coming up with a good design quickly and executing.

Take a balanced approach. Try to do a little bit of everything. After all, it’s pretty hard to complete a game without doing a little bit of everything. But still put an emphasis on one area or another.

For me, I try to take a balanced approach. I stick with what I know well for about 70-80% of the project, but try to make learning something new an important goal on top of simply finishing a game. I don’t care about “winning” the jam, but I want to do better than my last jam. I also try to be involved in the community in order to get inspiration from what other developers are doing, and to build reputation as a designer/programmer.

Be Flexible. The weekend will surprise you. Be adaptable to the surprises, because they offer you opportunities. The best things about a weekend jam are the things that you couldn’t have predicted beforehand. Don’t set out on a mission to complete a rigid list of goals, but have a number of potential goals in mind, and be willing to drop one in favor of another if the right opportunity comes along. If you try something and see quickly that it’s not going to work, or that you wouldn’t be able to finish it by deadline, it’s OK to drop the idea and go with something else.

Weekend goals vs. Long term goals

A very good use of your time in a game jam will be to incorporate your longer term goals when choosing your goals for the weekend. Successful people tend to set long term goals and work toward them by taking many small steps.

Use the SMART criteria:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

  • Specific: Don’t be vague. Focus on a specific goal. If it is too general, you will rationalize and bargain with yourself that the goal has been met, rather than focus and work harder to achieve the goal. You can still be flexible with your goals while being specific, but if the situation dictates changing goals, try to change from a specific goal to another specific goal.I want to complete a game in the next 48 hours is pretty specific already. If you can, though, go further – I want to complete a game that incorporates teleportation. Or, Complete a game that uses the mouse for controls. Or, Complete a game that causes fear by imparting a sense of helplessness and sudden, surprise danger. You get the idea.
  • Measurable: If you can’t measure it, then you don’t know how well you did. Pick things that you can measure. This gives you something to aim for, and lets you re-calibrate as needed.Game design is hard to measure. How do you quantify fun? Still, there are things that are quantifiable. My goal is to rate 256 games for the compo. Or My goal is to place in the top 25% of entrants in the category of [x]. Or Create sprite animations for 8 different poses in the next 2 hours.But don’t try to make your goals based on arbitrary numbers. Try to pick numbers that are meaningful. It’s better to have a smaller number of well-done features than a larger number of weak features. What’s better, a game with 10 boring levels, or 1 really great one?Often, the easiest way to measure may be simple binary: either you achieved it or you didn’t.
  • Achievable: Don’t set yourself up for failure by picking something that you can’t hope to accomplish. You should have an idea of what you’re capabilities are. It’s fine to challenge yourself, but don’t set the goals unrealistically high. If you don’t have any clue at all how you’ll achieve a goal, step back and set a more realistic goal that you can achieve, which gets you closer to achieving the too-hard goal.
  • Relevant: Don’t pursue extraneous goals. Focus on what is most relevant to your larger goals.In a weekend jam, there’s just not a lot of time to waste. Focus on the essential features of the game you want to make. Don’t waste time on extraneous things.
  • Time-Based: Give yourself a reasonable window of time to achieve the goal. Assess yourself at that time and decide what to do next. But also check yourself before then to see if you’re on track.During a Jam, time is constrained as it is. You know you have 48 or 72 hours to build a game. I encourage you to subdivide this time and assess periodically where the project is at, and decide whether to drop or modify features in order to make the submission deadline.

 

Game Jamming 365

How to keep the momentum

  1. Be obsessive. Think about game development all the time. According to the Bureau of Unverifiable Statistics, men think about sex on average every six seconds. As a game developer, you should think about game development even more than this.
  2. Be persistent. Don’t give up. If you can’t figure something out, show off what you have been able to figure out and ask people for help.
  3. Set small goals. Pick small projects. Do things that are within your capability to complete quickly. Do simple, mini projects that aren’t full-blown games, but are good development exercises, or that can be useful reusable components in a game.
  4. Make time. At a minimum, set aside one night a week to be your time to devote solely to your projects. Arrange your calendar so that you can do this. Work over this minimum any time you can.
  5. Fill every possible moment. When you get into your project, you won’t want to stop. Find ways to put time in on your project. Carry a notebook around with you to draw and write up your ideas. Write yourself notes whenever you have a few seconds – at the bus stop, on the train, waiting for an appointment, in the elevator.
  6. Get back on track. Life will always intrude and take you out of “the Zone.” When that happens, figure out how to get back on track as quickly as possible. Deal with the distraction effectively and efficiently, and go back to development. If it’s a true life priority that’s calling you, then give it the attention it deserves, and resume your game projects when you can.
  7. See the Game in everyday life. Look around you, everywhere there are systems that could be seen as games. Teach yourself to recognize these patterns and then apply them in your projects. Art imitates life. Make up games about brushing your teeth, or walking your dog.
  8. Take a break. When you get exhausted, when you get stuck, when you’re not feeling it, when you’re wanting inspiration. Step back and give yourself time to recharge. Work on something else. Just relax. Meditate or exercise. Watch a movie. Hug someone you like.
  9. Play. Play games. Follow your favorite developers’ new releases. Return to your old favorites. Visit them with a fresh eye, think about what makes them successful.
  10. Release. Put your work out there for people to see. Give them easy ways to provide feedback to you. Use achievement statistics to collect data on how players play your game. Analyze the data to figure out how to make better games.