Bad Puppy is my submission to the Ludum Dare 25 compo.
The theme, You Are the Villain, was a fun one. You play a “villainous” puppy who barks at people. Avoid getting petted for high score.
The more I play it, the more it grows on me.
Influential Games: Mountain King
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.
DNS Registration
Back when I registered this domain in 2010, I used GoDaddy, mainly on the strength of them having a special deal where I could register a domain for very cheap. I’d been wanting for a while to get my own domain and web host so I could play around a bit, and saw a deal advertised on slickdeals.net for $1 domains, so that was my excuse to finally do it.
I had heard the GoDaddy name quite a bit, thanks to their marketing, and they seemed reliable. And, from a technical standpoint, I never did have any problems with my domain name resolving, or getting hijacked, or anything like that. So for that much, they were fine.
There were several thngs I didn’t care for about GoDaddy: their sexist TV advertising, the fact that at one time, prior to the public uproar over it, they had backed SOPA and PIPA, and then they had a high profile security breach a few months ago, which didn’t seem to affect me one way or another, but made me lose confidence in them.
They also had some other issues, for example, they would email me an awful lot, to the point where it was really spamming me. And the experience of actually registering my domain with them involved a great deal of very aggressive “upsell” and e-checkout spam that made the entire process annoying, about as annoying as trying to order anything from Dell, and it was unclear what many of the additional products they sold even were, let alone what they did, and whether they were something I needed for my purposes, or a good idea, and so on.
So my registration finally came up for renewal, and I opted to transfer DNS to 1and1. I didn’t do a whole lot of comparison shopping, just asked around and people who’s opinions I regarded highly said they were OK. A few people said DNSimple was good, too.
Transferring this domain to the new registrar was not entirely easy, but I managed to go through all the hoops and set things up. The name finally transferred over today, and for some reason at first 1and1 seemed at first to be using my hosts’ name servers, which was good, but then a little bit later, this updated and they were using their own nameservers, which caused my site to go down for a few hours. I had to log in to my account and reset them back, but it still took about two hours to resume resolving properly :-( I’m not sure whether this was my own mistake, or theirs, but it’s resolved now.
Hopefully this will be the only problem that I have.
WhileTrueFork and TwoBitArt release Oregon Whale
WhileTrueFork and TwoBitArt have teamed up to produce a game called Oregon Whale. It was released yesterday to much fanfare.
While I do not presently own any iOS devices with which to enjoy the game, I did have an opportunity to look at it during a recent encounter with Sam of WhileTrueFork fame. Gameplay is rather simple: you can choose to dive or jump over obstacles as your whale tries to reach Oregon before dying of an unfortunate malady such as tuberculosis or malaria or dysentery or ennui.
It’s the sort of game that people seem to enjoy on mobile devices, a nice causual distraction, with graphics and sound that are quite charming and well done. The music by Ian Faleer is just perfect.
It is currently available on iOS through the App Store for a mere $0.99, and the soundtrack is also available through Ian Faleer’s bandcamp site. A release on Android is planned.
New Page: Recommendations
As an experiment, I’ve created a new page for the site, Recommendations.
Here, I provide a list of recommended books, in no particular order, that you should read, and will probably broaden this in time to include movies and games that I think are good, too.
I’m using Amazon’s Associate program for the links, so if you click them it’ll get me a little money, which is always a good thing.
Accordingly this also marks my first step toward monetizing the content on the site. I don’t really expect this to be a big money maker or anything, but we’ll see how it does. Mainly, I’m just interested in getting people to read stuff that I found useful or insightful, and sharing a bit of opinion about it.
GameMaker General Tutorial
Indie Game Developer Jesse Freeman has written one of the most concise and well written quick-tutorials for Game Maker that I’ve seen to date. If you’ve never used GameMaker before and are looking for a good place to start, this is a great read.
#1reasonwhy Tops Twitter Trends, Exposes Sexism in Tech, Gaming industry
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.
DRM bug afflicts legitimate Game Maker Studio licensees
Game Maker Studio users should be advised of a potentially disasterous bug that can permanently disfigure their graphical resources.
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.
General update
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.
Pixel Art: Boss Borot/BoboBot
Notes:
- I actually had to put a face on this one!
- Bobobot was the comic relief in the Mazinger Z series. This robot actually had facial expressions that changed according to the pilot, Bobo’s mood. This image, I think, makes him look a bit expressionless and almost zombie-like, in contrast with the cartoon’s very human-like expressions. It’s so difficult to capture emotion and expression and personality in just a few pixels, which is why I’ve refrained from trying to draw them.
- Generally, I feel that it’s better to go abstract and just convey the impression of the overall person, rather than try to convey facial expressions at the resolutions I’ve been dealing with. This serves as a good example of why. It would take a great deal of fine tuning and high-resolution finesse to get the nuance in the expression just right. If it’s critical, it is worth it, but it is a lot of extra work, and takes a true artist to pull off well.