Tag: Boobie Teeth

Boobie Teeth 0.17, CBNA SmartLight, and Google Translation

games, programming
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I’ve spent the last few days getting back into the Boobie Teeth project, trying to figure out how to do a couple things that have had me stuck for longer than I’d care to admit. I’m far from giving up, but I have come to the conclusion that hacking away at the problem isn’t going to be as fruitful as reading up on the problem.

At any rate, here’s a video of what I managed to pack in to today’s release, 0.17:

The major accomplishment for this release was the addition of a transparent gradient in the foreground, which enhances the background gradient that gives the illusion of diminishing sunlight at depth. For now this is just a cosmetic feature, although I already have ideas for tying it into the gameplay.

The other thing I worked with in this release, but dropped for now, is to implement some basic AI. I want the fish to get hungry and start chasing down prey. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be, owing to limitations of GameMaker’s instance handling. My usual approach of coding a little bit and seeing what I get, then coding a bit more once I’m sure what I already have done is working hasn’t gotten me very far. I’ll be researching and studying until I figure out an approach that works.

While researching, I came across a beautiful video of some lighting effects done in GameMaker which blow my simple foreground gradient away completely:

I noticed of course that the video appeared to come from French-speaking authors, but that didn’t dissuade me from tracking down the package that enables these effects and downloading it.

Let me just take a moment to say that I am absolutely amazed by the quality of google’s translation service from French to English. Seriously, click this link and you’d hardly even know that you’re on a French site. This impresses me even more than the lighting effects. If you happen to spot a mistake in translation you can hover over text and see the original, and provide feedback to google directly through the site that they’re translating for you. The translation is extremely fast, almost real-time, too.

It’s going to take me some time to work my way through the examples and tutorials and translating the documentation, but if I can get this SmartLight to work with my game project, it’s going to be well worth it, and make the game look way better than I had originally planned. I really want to get some AI going in my game though, so it’ll probably be a while before I get into re-doing the lighting effects.

Design crossroads

design, games
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So in Boobie Teeth 0.15, I created a surface for my ocean. The way I designed it, if you breach the surface of the water, gravity takes hold of you and you fall back into the ocean. Beneath the surface, no gravity.

I didn’t realize it until I played for a while, but if you breach the surface and wiggle the controls, the input seems to give you extra momentum, which can keep you above the water indefinitely. This wasn’t what I desired, but I wondered whether I should do anything about it. Should I consider it a glitch? Should I leave it in, and let the player discover it? Gamers like to discover things like this, and it’s kindof fun, if useless, to fly about over the waves. But if I leave it in, I should give it some purpose.

I have to think about it for 0.16. Maybe something will come to me. Maybe if you fly about enough, you can get someplace secret.

I don’t like when I design something and it doesn’t work the way I conceived it in the beginning, but sometimes I like the surprise. Even when I do like the surprise, I like to figure out what went wrong and figure out how to make it work the way I originally intended. Maybe I’ll keep it in mind for later.

So I figured out a way to fix the problem, it was easy enough: just set the controls to be disabled when you’re above the water. This causes your above-surface trajectory to become purely ballistic, but at the expense of not being able to control your direction at all. Conceivably this could cause you to leap out of the water, only to be doomed by your trajectory to land right on a big fish that will eat you when you plunge back into the water.

That seems so much less fun than being able to fly out of the water for as long as you care to wiggle the stick. On the other hand, I don’t want there to be a cheap, easy way of avoiding danger indefinitely.

There may be another way. I might just need to find a way of making the simulated gravity increase each step of the game engine until it can’t be resisted. Then you could still wiggle, and might be able to gain a little bit of extra effort air while out of the water, and affect where you will splash down somewhat, likely enough to evade big fish near the surface. I’ll have to play with it and see. Sometimes this experimentation ends up being fruitless, other times I can figure out something useful and understand the tool or the model better than I did. Usually the experimentation is time consuming. But generally, it’s worthwhile.

Any time I run into a design crossroads like this, I think the solution is easy: it’s like Yogi Berra said: “When you hit a fork in the road, take it.” Keep all interesting variants, and make them configurable options. Play through the different options and keep them for as long as they make for interesting play. Some options may make it into the final game as official options, some may be used as hidden easter eggs, others may end up disabled. But keeping the options around as long as possible makes for a more agile course through the development process.

Boobie Teeth

games
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I’ve made enough progress with my first game project that I’m releasing a build to the public.

Boobie Teeth is a game I designed as a six-year-old in 1980-1981. The title derives from the term “Booby Trap”. The game is about a voracious fish with jaws like a steel bear trap. Swim around and eat all the fish that are smaller than you. The more fish you eat, the more you grow. The other fish will eat smaller fish too and will grow as they eat also.

This is a very early non-feature-complete alpha build that demonstrates the core play mechanics. Built with GameMaker Pro 8.

Download it on the Releases page.

Game project

development, games, programming
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So I’m working on my first serious attempt at a GameMaker project.

The thing with working personal projects is balancing how much you talk about your project with how much you work on your project. You can’t be all talk and no action, obviously, and you probably shouldn’t simply spring a new project on an unsuspecting world, either.

I’m not yet sure how to do this right. I don’t want to spend a bunch of time describing something that doesn’t exist yet, especially if I may change my mind about particulars a bunch of times before I decide to release it. On the other hand, not talking about it just drives me crazy. I’m into my project, and it’s interesting and exciting to me, and I just have to talk about it.

The other thing that’s hard about talking about working on personal projects is talking about it with a proper level of authority and confidence. I’m doing things that are new to me, for the first time in many cases. But most of what I’m doing is technically not all that difficult or sophisticated. As much as I want to be excited about figuring out something, I don’t want to make myself look dumb by blogging things that are the equivalent of what “Hey, guess what I just figured out? When you have a plus sign between two quantities, that means they’re added together!” would be to a math blog.

What I do like about this project so far:

  1. The fact that I’m doing something that I’ve wanted to do my whole life.
  2. The fact that I can do it.
  3. The fact that I am doing it.
  4. That the progress thus far has been fairly steady.
  5. My process: planning, building experimentally, testing, documenting. I feel like I’m going about this in just the right way.

In fact, I really like my process. Here’s what I do:

  1. Sit down and think about what I want to do. Brainstorming. Create a list, prioritize it. This becomes my backlog.
  2. Work an item on the list until it’s done to where I’m satisfied with it for now. This involves building and running it to test it, over and over. I try to conceive of my solution first, then build it, starting small and simple, and building off of what I just did. I’m more tentative with things I haven’t mastered yet, but that’s the natural way of things.
  3. Write up what I did in my version history. Update the backlog, to either remove the item from the list, or more likely, update it to reflect the next level of refinement that I want to get to with that item.

So far, so good. I have a ways to go yet before I have something that’s worthy of an alpha release. I might have it out in a few weeks, we’ll see. What I have right now is playable, but not interesting as I’ve yet to implement any enemy behavior. I expect that the enemy behavior will be very interesting to work on, and probably one of the trickier aspects of the game and thus may take me longer than what I’ve done so far.