New Display

So I ... wait, I last posted a month and a half ago? Crap, sorry about that. I got a new job and my schedule got changed around.

Anyways, both Peter and I are doing triple-time at the moment. We both have full time jobs, we both are working on Darkened Dreams 2, Peter is doing art for another company in his spare time, and I'm working on a tool for editing sprite sheets for use in 2D games. Also, we're married (not to each other >_>) and each of us has a small child. That's why there hasn't been too much progress lately.

Not to say that nothing has happened! Peter's been getting me new art, and I've managed to speed things up. We had a problem with timid creatures grabbing a spot in an opposite direction from the hero and run through the path-finding code to find out how to get there. Unfortunately, because of the test map setup this led to a nasty problem. They would almost always choose something that was outside of the boundaries, use up some time trying to find a non-existent path until hitting the limit of places I allowed them to look, try a different direction which, likely as not, ALSO ended up outside the boundary!

If we had more than one at the same time looking like that it would slow the game down considerably. I started testing to figure out what I could do, then realized that I didn't even need to get them a path. They weren't trying to get to a certain spot, they were just trying to get away from the hero! The next problem is that since they didn't always run away from the hero (maybe they didn't see you or just don't feel like running) it was hard to tell if they were really running away or just happened to travel in a direction opposite you. Peter got me some recolored versions of the creature icons so I could give them a different color depending on what their AI state was. That's when I found out that timid creatures would run right at you! lol. Then run right past you as if you weren't there. I negated the direction and it all worked right and wasn't slow anymore.

The next problem is with the display. I have things set up so that there are a number of boxes that a creature can fill in depending on the size of the art. It's first come, first shown and they can't be kicked out until you get far enough away from them. This means that once you kill something the bones are just going to sit there forever (not doing any decay and respawning yet). Also, anything that's too big won't show up. I found out that the biggest monster that Peter drew doesn't fit at all, so that made me see I need to rework it.

I've come up with what feels like a good solution, and I plan to implement it sometime this week. I'll let you know if it works :)

-Califer

Invasion in an RPG

So I was playing Super Mario RPG and got to a point (near the beginning, not really a spoiler) where the mushroom kingdom was invaded by shyguys. There was a steady stream of them coming out of the castle, so it should be obvious that in order to stop this invasion we need to go and take out the main force in the castle. Is that what I did? Heck no.

See, this is an RPG. Big bosses and main forces will wait while I take care of small fry first. I avoided the main castle like the plague until I had visited every single house and cleared out the few enemies that were bouncing in place scaring people. Because I stopped in houses and defeated every static enemy I ended up with some items that would permanently boost my MP. I wouldn't have gotten those goods if I had rushed in, beat the boss while taking on as few flunkies as possible, and made all the bad guys run away. The people just wouldn't be GRATEFUL that way.

RPGs are great at this. Show something in the story that shows you probably won't be able to get back to this exact spot and it makes the players nervous about actually continuing for fear of losing out on things that they'll never be able to get otherwise.

I personally just think it's annoying to have to search everything all of the time just in case you won't be able to get things later, but what do you think?

Indie Game Night

Last night Peter and I went to an Indie Game Night at ITT Tech. There was a presentation about making games on the iPhone, free pizza, and a time to show off what we were working on.

The presentation was given by Chris Evans of Morphosis Games. He started with the history of the iPhone and went on to describe how big the iPhone market is. In order to become an iPhone developer you need an Apple computer, and need to pay $100 to register. Once you become a developer you get the iPhone SDK (software development kit) and you can put the programs you write on an iPhone. You can also sell your application in the app store, but remember that there are already TONS of apps there. Apple reviews each app before it releases it to the store, and apparantly if apple rejects it they sometimes won't give you enough information to fix it. Yay Apple!

So onto the money! Everyone hears stories about how some game or app has made the developers hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if you don't make $250 dollars you'll never see a cent of it. Also, Apple will take 30% of the money made from the app. That's not really that bad of a deal for a publisher. But you should expect to not make a whole lot of money developing for the iPhone.

Thanks Chris! Onto the games!

The presentation went a little long, so I didn't get to see very many games after I had done a little demoing of Darkened Dreams. Here's what I got to see.

Tusk by Jon
It was a space shooter that he made. A person from Germany liked it and wanted to put his art in it so they did, then Jon was able to sell the game to the German company.

Kiten by Josh Jones
Another space shooter, with an emphasis on the AI. The ships would change colors depending on what AI they were running. Blue for defensive, red for attack, and purple for a little of both. While I was watching the person whoi was playing it was getting slaughtered until all of the ships turned blue to give him a chance to rest and get some revenge. It was awfully nice of them :)

A dancing game by Les Pardew
I hope I spelled his name right. I can barely make out my own handwriting >_<. It's actually being developed on a console, and I was asked not to say a whole lot about it for that reason. In any case, the graphics look great, gameplay was smooth, and there were no noticable bugs.

Radioactive Joe by ???
The creator wasn't there when I got there, and it seemed to have some trouble running so I never found out what it was all about. Something about a redneck named Joe who starts the game in a toxic waste spill...

Tank General by ???
This game was broken when I came by, and the creator was too busy debugging it to answer any of my questions.

Jay at Rampant Games has a more detailed list of games, though what he says for Darkened Dreams 2 leads me to believe that he didn't see all the changes to the maker.

Drawing on forms

A month or so ago Peter was playing with the map maker and was surprised at how slow it was. I then responded, "Yeah, that's currently my wors.....my second worst bug."

The worst bug was how data was set up. This made it so that you couldn't delete anything, and it took forever to search through (yes, it's a fairly loose usage of the term 'bug'). That's what I've been working on for the past while, and I'm happy with the changes. Now it's time to tackle my new worst bug, the slowness of the map drawing in the maker! I've picked up quite a few new tricks since I started working on the map maker back in the beginning, and I'm already seeing some speed boosts. Just need to finish it and get the game working with the new save data (which should be trivial) before next Thursday. Thursday is the next Indie Game Night, and I don't want any more bugs cropping up like last time!

-Califer

How Enchanting!

I've been chugging away on the Maker for the last little while, and I'm getting near the end! I'm almost finished with the items, and after that I can go in and fix the map maker.

The reason that I haven't finished the items part of it (besides what I said in the last post) is that I never really had enchanting set up at all. Now it's all decided, and I just need to change all the item types that can be enchanted, as well as the items that do the enchantments.

-Califer

P.S. My wife's computer got a virus that deleted some windows files the day after my last post, and we had to format the drive. Thankfully, my friend Steve was able to save our most important files. There was no way we could have gone back and re-taken those baby photos! I was going to pick up the drive from him the next day, but then my car wouldn't start. My dad towed the car to the place he always goes to, and I had to tell Steve I couldn't make it. He was cool enough to not only come back with the drive and the data backed up on DVDs, he also bought us a pressure cooker to replace the one that exploded! Thanks Steve! The next day my car was delivered. It was just a battery that had shorted out.
P.P.S. I was mopping the floor and found the missing chunk of metal from the old pressure cooker a few hours ago. Until now I had thought it had lodged itself in the ceiling somewhere.

Note to Self: Don't Tell Peter...

Note to Self: Don't Tell Peter What I'm Planning on Finishing Today.

It never works.

Califer: "Hey Peter, I'm going to get all the items rewritten and meshed with the new game-maker."
Peter: "Cool!"
Later that day...
Wife: "I need to get some stuff done, watch the baby for a few hours."
Califer: *oof, that'll make it hard to finish what I said I'd do* "Sure."
A little later...
BANG!! HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Califer: "What the crap was that!?"
Wife: "The pressure cooker just exploded!"
:O
Luckily no one was in the kitchen when it happened, but the cat did suffer from a minor nervous breakdown as she wandered the whole house peeking around corners trying to find the alien fleet that attacked us.
So then I spent another hour or so cleaning green paste from the ceiling, floor, cabinets, walls, washing the stove, and then of course washing myself.

This was a more dramatic example of why I can never get things done after I tell Peter about them, but it seems that whenever I tell Peter that I'm going to get something done SOMETHING happens that makes it impossible.


Also, everything's been breaking ever since I quit my job. First to go was my DS. Then the fridge, the doorknob, the actual door, the lawnmower, the modem, Darkened Dreams 2, the garden hose...

Peter was nice enough to lend me his DS, since I'm a DS freak and he spends most of his gaming time on Neverwinter Nights now. I gave it back to him last week because so many things were breaking that I was afraid that the DS would be next, and if I had the money to replace his DS I would just get one of my own. So the DS dodged the bullet and the pressure cooker took it instead.

Wait, Darkened Dreams 2 is broken? Yeah. Sorry about that.

I think I mentioned that the maker had some serious flaws and so I was working those things out. In the meantime the data that I have is being converted to a different type so I can reach in and get what I need instead of having to load it all at once. Since the data is changed I can't run it in the game right now, so it's effectively broken. However, after I finish getting the items and the Map maper redone I should be able to get the game working again without to much trouble.

...

Do I get bonus points for my longest post ever?

-Califer

Game Artists (And Audio Guys)

In response to a comment in the last post, I'll add that there ARE in-house musicians at most big studios.

Audio Guys-This is a job for people good at mixing sounds. You may not need to play any instruments as long as you can put things together in the computer, but instrument talent always bolsters what you are able to produce. You don't just do music, though, you'll also be in charge of converting audio from audio libraries into different formats for use in different game engines and cutting audio into the usable/needed parts. And don't forget recording...Many games require voice and possibly other sound effects recorded with a mic. You might just work out of a small room with a little sound insulation, but that's all going to depend on where you go.

Artists- Let's break this up into parts, because there are lots of kinds...

The title "Artist" might apply to you if you, like me, work at a small operation and you pretty much do everything. Otherwise, at a bigger studio, you will get a different title.

Concept Artist-Concept artists usually are very good at using digital painting programs to make the kind of flashy stuff you all like to put on your desktop background. They need to take a few written notes from a design document about characters and environments and imagine the ultimate incredible scene as it might look in the end. They also need to expect the final product to look absolutely nothing like the awesomeness they envisioned.

UI Artist-Creates and designs the life bars, frames, menus, and buttons that go into a game's User Interface. Should be pro at Illustrator, Photoshop, and a little motion graphics like Flash or After Effects for some of the more polished, cooler stuff. Expect to redo the interface 2 or 3 times, since no matter how cool it is, by the end of the project, someone will get bored of it and decide that's because it wasn't as good as he originally thought.

Character Modeler-Must know Maya and/or 3D Studio Max typically, and have a knowledge of how to create characters that animate/blend well. You'll also want to know how to get your character to look amazing, even with a polygon count limit. For low-polygon models, that means less than 500 triangles usually. For hi-res stuff, you may get up to 2000, 5000, maybe even 7000. But you'll want to also understand mapping UV's for texturing, painting texture maps, painting specular maps, and painting normal maps. You'll be working with model exporters that are sometimes built in-house, because game engines don't use maya binary or max files directly.

Environment Modeler-Much like a character modeler, but you are expected to make environments that fit the poly-count limitations and keep everything within a certain art style for the environments. You may also have to do lots of environments very quickly.

Technical Artist-Can mean a number of things, but I think most common is for this person to be in charge of adding rigging (animation functionality) to character models. They also write scripts for 3d software that aids in production for the other artists (or themselves) to use to speed up those dull, repetitive tasks.

Animator-This is what I used to be...Usually means taking 3d modeled, rigged characters, and making them do all the actions they need to do in the game. Can also include cutscenes, but sometimes there is a whole other position for that "Cinematics Animator". I got to do a little pixel animation as well. The "funnest" part is trying to use animation exporters which turn your animation data into usable game data.

Storyboard Artist-This person visually plans out the game's cutscenes, he usually has to work from a script and he should have a great knowledge of cinematography (camera angles, types of camera movement) and he should be able to whip out cool drawings in all kind of perspective very quickly, showing lots of character emotion.

2D Animator-You don't see this much any more. I was just an animator and I did this a little bit with pixel animaton. 3D animation is much cheaper to make now, so learn the 3d stuff if you want to make games professionally. 2D is still cool though, so having this as an extra skillset will help.