Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Hey, I'll Play Your iPhone Game

I'm looking for something new for my iPhone 3gs. Since you're a reader of my blog, maybe I can return the favor by playing your game? I can even give feedback, public or private, brutally honest or not-so-brutal, as you like. 

Maybe you'd even like me to try something that isn't released yet. I'm not sure if I have the technical ability to do that (not an iOS developer here, yet) but if I can I will.

Comment or e-mail (jdfristrom@gmail.com) if you'd like a player.

Videogames *without* tropes that are offensive to women

Tropes vs. women and some backlash against the Auro trailer (because apparently their only female character is the 'foxy mama') motivated me to ask on Twitter and G+ : hey, what games actually get it right?

The answer seems to be very few:

Portal

Mirror's Edge

Beyond Good & Evil

And one I haven't played - Avodon - though it's not clear from their marketing materials, and I'm not ready to drop down the $20 to see if I agree.

So. Is that it? Any women or feminists out there have more answers?

Numbergun! is finished!

Okay, "finished" - Because I'm out of time. Managed to get a better tutorial, scoring system, particles, and harder levels in there in the last few hours.

Here's the project page: http://7dfps.org/?projects=numbergun

Or play it here: http: //jamiefristrom.appspot.com/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

 

Numbergun! #7dfps

We here at Happion Labs believe in family, particularly when they can provide us free labor. Presenting Numbergun with art by Sofia Fristrom, 7 years old. And programming by Jamie Fristrom, 42 years old.

 

SO - this is our Seven Day First Person Shooter, or #7dfps as the kids say - and if it wasn't for the thing ending tomorrow I would say it's way too early to ask for feedback, BUT. SO. If you had just a couple more hours to work on this, what would you do?

Not only is it cute - there's the beginnings of a novel game mechanic in there.

PLAY IT HERE. THEN COME BACK AND COMMENT.

Auro

 Man, I think I'm addicted to Kickstarter. I might need to start budgeting myself.

One thing I backed recently that I have high hopes for is Auro - it's by Keith Burgun, the guy who designed 100 Rogues, which was my go-to roguelike on the iphone - and possibly my favorite roguelike ever. It was highly tactical - even though you're only playing one character, you have access to a lot of powers that can move you and the enemies around the board in interesting ways, which added a level of depth on top of (under?) the usual roguelike resource-management game. Also, it wasn't too long! It's the only roguelike I've ever managed to finish - because it had a reasonable length, I was able to play it multiple times with the different character classes. And the paladin's 'ask god for help' power was hilarious.

Anyhow, it looks like everything I loved about 100 Rogues is coming to Auro and then some. And it's a hex map this time. +1.

I love turn-based games in general. I get to savor the play in a way that I can't with realtime. And I have time to think. But the retail games industry has always said 'turn-based is dead' - even though Civilization has always been such a hit. Good thing we have indie games.

Keith is asking for hardly anything to make this game - he's already hit his goal of a mere $7500 - but, come on, what's that going to buy them? After shwag and overhead and taxes? Maybe a month of dev time for one person if they're in a place where cost of living is low? I'm hoping he raises a lot more.

 

sixty second shooter tournament results moving to Facebook

Although it's tempting to keep putting the sixty second shooter weekly leaderboard results here as a sort of continuous weekly prodding reminder to readers, "Hey, why don't you play some sixty second shooter?" I have to admit that most of the people who read the blog don't care. So I'll stop spamming y'all. 

If you still want to keep seeing the weekly sixty second shooter results, like it on Facebook.

I'm also going to get rid of the G+ fan page. Redundant fan page seems redundant.

What's The Point of Positive Feedback In A Game?

So, assuming you know all about positive and negative feedback in games. (If you don't, this is a nice visual.)

Mark Nau (@marknau), Tomo Moriwaki (@tomomoriwaki), and I were discussing sixty second shooter's game mechanics last GDC, and Mark said something that gave me (and I think Tomo) pause - "Why have the chain multipliers? It just increases the separation between the good players and the bad players." (Have you noticed so many of my game design posts begin with 'Mark Nau says'?)

I think I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Tomo said something along the lines of because then you're getting crazy amounts of points and it's awesome but didn't really put his finger on why it was awesome.

My instinct is that it's important, but maybe that's just me-too-ism. Games are rife with positive feedback systems.

• In Rockband, if you get a lot of notes right in succession, you get a bonus multiplier; if you get notes right in the right places, you get powerups. Thus a good player scores remarkably higher than a bad player. But why does that matter? Why not make it so you get one point per note, done? The good players will still beat the bad players.
• Similarly, chain multipliers in any fighters and shooters.
• Winner's Outs in basketball - you score a basket, you get to try again.
• Wargames often have you conquer territory, which gets you resources, which lets you build bigger armies, which lets you conquer more territory. At a certain point your victory becomes a foregone conclusion, unless there are also negative feedback mechanisms in place. If we simplified the wargames so it was just about war, we wouldn't need to balance with the negative feedback mechanisms. I don't see how you could remove positive feedback from wargames completely, though - look at chess.

So, I don't know. Maybe it's as simple as 'it makes the player feel like a hero' - and it seems less cheap than simply tacking a few more zeroes onto the end of the score. But I don't know. What do you think?

(I will say that the chain multiplier in sixty second shooter does create an interesting decision - it encourages you to save your targets for when you can take them out in rapid succession, and because it goes into Chain Reaction mode when you hit 50, there's something to be said for timing your shots to keep yourself in that mode - you can even use the spiral enemies as batteries to keep yourself in chain reaction mode rather than nuking them outright. I don't even know if that's the optimal strategy or not - it doesn't get much more interesting than that, when the guy who made the game isn't sure of the right answer.)

Twitter Late Adopter

I joined Twitter a while back, didn't get the point, and cancelled my account.

Since then, a couple of different people (Alec Shobin @alecshobin and Miguel Sternberg @spookysquid) told me, "Dude, you've got to have a Twitter account."

Alec said I needed one for PR.

Miguel said I needed one to touch base with the game art community.

So, fine, fine, I got one: @happionlabs. I figured, I'll get one, but I'm hardly ever going to read my feed, because I won't have time.

Turns out I read my feed all the time. And I've learned and discovered useful stuff. It's definitely a time sink, but maybe worth it? One thing I've done differently this time is follow a whole bunch of people.

So now I'm on facebook, linkedin, G+ and this. How do you decide what to post where?

EDIT: That wasn't a rhetorical question! Really - how do you decide?

Notes On Playstation Mobile GameEngine2D

So - what have I learned so far using Playstation Suite Studio?  (Playstion Mobile Studio?)

The GameEngine2D has its charms. I'm avoiding the tweens. I asked in the last post 'Why do I need a scene graph for 2d'?  And the answer is - same reason I eventually put one in Schizoid, but didn't call it that - so I can have hierarchies of 2d objects. And also so I can place my squares relative to the board rather than relative to the world. Turned out to be pretty handy.

To avoid duplication of data, I'm accepting that my game data is conflated with the sprite data. I have a 2D array of sprites and am toggling them visible or not to indicate which squares have already been set. Otherwise I would have had my 2D array and then had to propagate that information to the sprites. 

There's an Angle member built into the sprites, which I didn't notice at first - I want my tetronimos to rotate smoothly (I'll have to figure out the complications that'll cause when a still-rotating tetronimo hits the flat floor later) - and I jumped straight to rotation = new Vector2( FMath.Cos(theta), FMath.Sin(theta) ) - when there was this handy Angle thing there already. When you set the Angle, it seems to automatically clip itself, which caused some weirdness - I made it so the player can queue up a bunch of button presses, so if they spin the thing more than 360 clipping caused weirdness. I don't need clipping - I'm sure the user won't be able to spin the tetronimo so much that it'll cause precision problems in the brief time it's onscreen.

There's some collision detection built into GameEngine2D as well - the GetBounds() function on the sprites. Not pixel perfect or anything, but for my smoothly falling tetronimos it was useful after some jury-rigging.

When rotating, the sprites look aliased. No big surprise there. Probably have to put translucent edges into my sprite textures.

I'm not seeing any post-processing effects or render-to-texture in the GameEngine2D. You can pass shaders in to the sprite renderer, so, cool, that sounds like an easy way to make the background interesting. (I can use my purple smoke from sixty second shooter - though it's in GLSL and needs to be in CG.)

 

Action Tweens - What do you think?

So I'm looking at Playstation Suite which has a 2D Game Engine high-level library which seems cool because it includes a particle system - and the samples seem fairly slick - which is a cousin of Cocos2d. I've never used Cocos2d, but looking at both of these libraries I'm leery. Maybe somebody can explain why Cocos2d is a good thing.

My main worry is with the Actions that help you tween your sprites. On the surface it seems really cool - "Hey, with one line of code I can make this thing move beautifully from point A to point B." But the FP fan in me is like, woah, that seems really stateful. Seems like you're taking one of my least favorite kinds of bugs, the curtain problem, and making it an idiom. I'm imagining the fairly complex logic that might be operating on my sprites and thinking that these fire-and-forget tweens are not a good way to try to describe it.

So maybe some of you have worked with Cocos2d and love the tweens and are like, "Nope, state issues have never been a problem, because..." Let me know.

(Another thing I'm not crazy about is the way it mixes game mechanical state with rendering state. It looks like you're expected to subclass your game objects from the rendering objects. I like to keep mechanics separate from rendering if I can, something I did with sixty second shooter and the Richard Garfield game that we never got funded - I like my games to have a sort of document-view model, partly to ease porting and partly because it's just pretty. But I know that's my own weird thing. And why do I want a scene graph for 2d?)

All that said, it still might be worth going this route for the free particle system. I don't *have* to use the tweens. Or can anybody recommend a free particle system?