2Dangerous Dev Blog

A+ City Planner

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:52:21 -0400

Hey, so short post. Today I went to the gym. It didn’t go well.

Other than that, I made something that, while doesn’t actually impact my games in any way, was a fun addition to the level editor. I added a feature that prints out a scaled down version of the current level, currently at 1/4th scale. With this I can stitch together all the different sections of a level and show you just how terribly the city of red metropolis is designed. Here’s a comparison between an older level, Chapter 1-3, and one I just finished laying out, Chapter 6-3.

As you can see I have not learned a thing about zoning, traffic flow, population densities, or whatever else goes on in planning a city. And you should probably note that these are my better maps, some of them bend space-time and overlap in multiple places. I haven’t put in any of the lighting, destructables, or other objects which fill up a map, as I’d need to include all those images, and then link them to each destructable and object… so that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this preview of Red Metropolis! See you guys next time.

All the bacon in the world...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:57:15 -0400

Well now that I’m in the divide between school and my new job in Seattle, I have nothing but free time on my hand. Oh, and loads of bacon, waffle parties are the best. Anyways, I should be finishing all the details of moving to a new city (or country, for that matter) but for the past day or two I’ve been working on adding the remaining levels to Red Metropolis, as well as drawing some art for RM: Run and hiring an artist for something else all together. And while I’ve made about as much progress as you could guess in 2 days time, I wanted to talk about my plans for New Game+.

New Game+ is mainly to add an extra challenge to people who have beaten the game but still want something to do. It’s also a blatant mechanic for lengthening the game with minimal effort, but more on that later. Essentially New Game+ will reset the story of your game, letting you keep your character, party members, and items. As well, enemies levels are set to start at end game levels to make it actually a challenge for well geared players.

Aside from the normal New Game+ changes, I’m also planning on adding some special events only available in New Game+ games:

Enhanced Bosses: Bosses will have an extra ability, and whatever changes are needed to make them that much more of a challenge.
Nightmare Missions: Each Nightmare mission will contain a warped, corrupted version of one of the bosses you have already played, with alternate abilities for an even greater challenge. Beating these bosses will give you quite a good reward too.
Bandit Arena: This may or may not make an appearance in normal games, not just New Game+, but basically is a colosseum type arena where you fight progressively harder opponents, either being waves of zombies, or a full on boss fight. Completing a wave will give you a money (material) reward, and every few waves will give you a unqiue powerful item.

And that’s pretty much all I have planned for New Game+. I’m hesitant to add in a new area for New Game+ games, as I feel things like that should be available in normal games as well. Well that’s all for now, I’m going to go back to planning out levels!

Evolution Simuwhatits.

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:24:44 -0400

Hey! Is this post going to be about Red Metropolis and telling you its 100% done and ready to go? Nope!

But seriously, ever since I took evolutionary computing a year or so back, I’ve been wanting to use what I learned in that course for something. For those of you who don’t know what evolutionary computing is, its basically all genetic algorithms and programs. Now, these aren’t algorithms that deal with genetics, its using the theory of evolution (The most fit specimens survive, each successive generation is more better then the previous, etc) to solve a problem, or at the very least come up with a really good solution.

One of the example problems we did in class was to make an algorithm that took a series of points on a graph and come up with a formula for the curve. The results were pretty cool, it would randomly assign a few formulas as a base case, all of which were terrible. It would then grade them and “mate” them (basically just copy and paste sections from each algorithm together) and in about 20-30 generations you had something that was only fractions off from the original curve. Pretty cool stuff.

Anyways, what I want to do with that is make a simplistic simulation of animals and see how they evolve. This isn’t really so much to model actual animals, but more just to see how the animals evolve and interact with each other. I think it will be cool to see if some animals become predators, or see if any develop any interesting escape mechanisms, or even pack behaviour.

Most genetic algorithms run against some sort of fitness metric, something to determine if the object in question is moving in the right direction. For this kind of simulation though there really isn’t a fitness metric I can think of, and it may not even need one. The goal is to create the best animal for the current environment. I guess the best way to determine that is how well the animal survives. If the animal is able to live comfortably (eg, get food) and live long enough (avoid predators) it will have more offspring than an animal that dies after its first offspring. That should ensure that fit animals prosper and lesser animals are either removed from the simulation, or evolve and adapt. Fun.

Now, onto actual metrics and how I plan to go about doing this. I want it to be as simplistic as possible while maintaining some key aspects, namely finding food, avoiding predators, exploring areas and finding a mate. Animals will be split into two parts, the physical representation of them (all the variables that deal with their body, eg: weight, speed, size, age, etc) and a decision tree that deals with the “brain” of the animal (its hunger, what it does in given situations, etc). I want to make everything the animal does count towards its fitness, for example, moving draining their hunger and increasing their muscles, etc. How well the animal eats should have an impact on it as well. Fat animals should increase in ability faster then starving animals. And to make things interesting in the brain side of things, I’ll probably set a limit on how many nodes on the tree are processed at once, encouraging it to be as efficient as possible.

Whew, long post. Now I’m not saying this is the next thing I’m working on, or if I’ll actually start working on it, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately. It would be fun to take a weekend and see what I can get done, so maybe I will.

Red Metropolis: Run

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:03:31 -0500

Hey, so instead of doing ANY of the things I said I was going to do, I made an android game set in the Red Metropolis universe. Well thats not exactly true, I did finish chapter 4 in terms of scripting the levels, but really not all that much else.

Anyways, Red Metropolis: Run is the first real android app I’ve made, and It was fun to experiment with mobile programming. The overall experience was good, with the exception of a few hiccups (wait, android comes in HOW many screen resolutions and sizes now?). If I come up with another idea I might try my hand at it again. Overall this took me around 3 weeks from start to finish.

One of the challenges I found with mobile game design vs traditional game design is what you have to work with in terms of controls. By now, most computer games have decided on a set of keys that work best for their genre (for example, WADS being the standard movement keys for 1st and 3rd person games). Mobile games are still fairly new, and with new technology coming out all the time it’s hard to settle for a standard control mechanic.

I’ve seen a lot of adventure style games where the “Controller” is a GUI overlay. I’m always wary of games that do this. Not only does it take up a large portion of the already small screen, it can be extremely frustrating on laggy or unresponsive screens. And so with this app I tried to simplify the controls enough to work reliably without sacrificing gameplay.

The game is a simple arcade game where -as every tester seems to do this in Red Metropolis- you run backwards while shooting waves of zombies. The controls for this game are very simple: tap (or hold) once to move, double tap to swap weapons. That’s it. The game automatically targets and aims for the nearest zombie, the only thing you have to focus on is which weapon your using and where your character is. Hopefully this will add an extra layer of strategy. For example, moving your character so your weapon arc is in range of multiple zombies, helping your auto aim by changing the angle to you and your target, figuring out which weapons work best on which zombies, etc.

Finally, the game can be found by searching for “Red Metropolis” on the marketplace, or by following this link here. Leave feedback either on the app page or email me at “andrew.solheim2@gmail.com.” I’m actually pretty interested in what you guys think about it.

I'm bad at naming these (Progress Report)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:45:13 -0500

With the script finished, making the remaining levels requires much less creativity from me. I’ve been averaging around 2-3 scenes a day, although that’s probably going to go down a bit because school is starting to be school again. But on the bright side the script is in for Chapter 4! Well, mostly in. I was almost finished the last level when my editor crashed and I lost all my progress on it (but thankfully not anything else in the level!). It still counts.

I think I might do another level design diary next week once I start chapter 5, as it’s a bit different then the previous chapters. Here’s a little to-do list to show you (and me, I seriously need to make these things more often) what’s left before I consider the script integrated:

Coding in ~50 cutscenes (both the dialog and the actors themselves)
Making ~5 shader effects
~8 Bosses, everything from drawing their models to coding their AI.
~4 New enemies, models, AI, etc.
~60 Doodads, Destructables, Environment Objects.

This should be a fun ~~month~~ months. I missed doing some actual coding while writing the script, so I’m looking forward to those bosses!

Crafting Example Done!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:45 -0500

Hey, so it’s already Wednesday, and I said I was going to do it on the weekend… but meh. Here it is!

I had the program auto generate 3 of every recipe. Using the approach I explained last post I’m able to generate any number of items, each with their own unique image. For the majority of them it’s just a colour swap, as making textures for the 100 odd materials I have in the example would take forever. Also I’m terrible at making textures. Anyways, you get the idea. These 128 images were generated from two base sprite sheets: one for the base images and another for the 6 odd textures I made.

Each item is made from two images. One with flat colours which the program uses as a key to determine what to replace, and another with all the details, such as outlines and shading.

Finally there’s the sprite sheet that holds all the textures used for the different materials.

And that’s pretty much it. It really didn’t take long to make either. About 15 minutes of doodling and another 45 minutes of photoshop during class. I’m sure if you had a real artist making the base images and the textures it would end up looking much better.

Crafting Example. Thing.

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:57:50 -0500

Another new post!? Within a few days!? What is going on here?

Boredom, mostly.

Well, actually now that the script is done, I was thinking of taking the weekend off and not starting the next big push (integrating the script) until Monday. I still want to code though, so instead of starting anything new I’m finishing up an old idea I had for procedurally generating items.

I’m not the biggest fan of the crafting systems you see in most games. They’re all basically the same thing: collect X, Y, and a few of Z, bring to a crafting station, presto here’s your new item! The problem I have with these systems isn’t in the fetch quest type mechanics, but the fact that I have to use X, Y, and Z. For example, say you had a recipe for making an Iron Flail. In most games you’d need some wood, some iron, maybe a chain to attach them together, and then you’d get your Iron Flail. But what if I wanted to make a Rat Flail? It’s not the most practical weapon, sure, but even if the game did allow you to make one, you’d need to find a brand new recipe to make it. Why can’t I just get some wood, chain, and a rat and make it the same way as the Iron Flail? I mean, it’s just a flail! If I’m using Iron or Bronze or the fresh skull of a donkey, it shouldn’t matter. And that’s where I got thinking.

I used a different approach to the crafting system that would suit all my Rat Flailing needs. The recipes you found wouldn’t outline specific materials you needed, just an outline of what types of materials you would need to make it. For example, I have a recipe for making Leather Armour. The recipe calls for 5 units of leather, 2 units of cloth, and 4 units of thread to stitch it all together. This means I can use anything the game thinks is Leather for my Leather Armour. Dog leather, cow leather, dragon leather, anything. Each specific material has its own stats. Dog leather might only give a small armour bonus while dragon leather would give a large armour bonus and fire resist, or something along those lines. Anyways, here’s where I stopped working on it.

Unfortunately, it’s lacking any type of art asset to go along with the item it creates. I suppose you could make an image to go along with each recipe, but that would be boring and confusing, especially when you have, say, a Rat Flail, Iron Flail, and Constantly-On-Fire-Why-Did-I-Do-This Flail. Now comes the procedural part of this system.

Having a fair bit of experience with editing raw pixel data in XNA, it shouldn’t be all that hard to create a texture for each new item created. All I need to do is figure out how I should go about making the image so it fits with whatever materials went into making it.

Here’s what I’ve come up with, but still need to implement:

Each Recipe has a Base Image. To ensure that a sword still looks like a sword and a flail is still a flail, I’ll need to make a base image for each recipe. The key here is that I need to know which parts of the image I need to replace with a given material. Instead of making a detailed image, each section of the image is a solid colour. Each colour acts as a key for a material type. For example, if the colour (128, 128, 128) is the key for metal, every pixel in the base image that is (128, 128, 128) will be replaced by the specific material used.
Each Material Has an Image Modifier. To change the base image to fit the materials used, each material is going to need some rules as to how to modify the base image. Currently, I have things that replace parts of the texture, fill with a solid colour/gradient, or tint the final image. This means that if each metal material has its own texture, it will replace the metal key on the base image with its metal texture. Filling with solid colour/gradients would mostly be used for things that don’t fit into a texture all that well, such as gems or bones. Finally tints would be used for materials that wouldn’t be seen in the final image, such as blood or thread. This is useful for items that use all the same materials except for those types, letting you distinguish between them easily.
Each Recipe Will have a Final Mask Image. On some items you may want to anti-alias or add some shine, both of which wouldn’t be possible due to the material keys. This image would be applied after each material has been applied as a finishing touch to the image.

Using something like this should make it so each item gets its own, unique image to identify it with, all for a relatively low cost. This system also gives the player much more freedom, allowing him to make things with whatever they have handy at the time. With even a few recipes and materials, you’ll probably end up with 100’s of combinations.

Anyways, that’s enough talk for now. If I manage to finish by Monday I’ll make another post. For now though, it’s off to work!

Script Finished!

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:26:34 -0500

So I finally finished the script a few days ago! It contains all the main story dialog, although none of the side missions (which don’t exist yet) or talking to the group cutscenes (also don’t exist). But it’s already an awesome 108 pages long! And roughly 80 cutscenes in total.

This also means the story is pretty much not going to change from now till release. The script gives me a good outline of how the levels need to progress, which means that making the levels will depend much less on creativity (which I was having trouble with before) and much more on how much time I have that day. That means that, hopefully, in about a month or two of work the script will be worked into the game and the story levels completed. Oh, I’m not sure if you guys have seen the picture comparing the GTA 3 script to the GTA 4 script… but I printed mine off and took a picture… I think I’m somewhere between a GTA 3.3 or 3.4.

I still have plans to add more after that, as having just the linear story would be a bit boring. I want to have this finished when I graduate (the end of April) so if worst comes to worst I’ll run out of time and wont be able to add in anything else. Still, 108 pages of dialogue and nearly 40 missions isn’t too bad. If I have time after integrating the script, here’s some of the things I might be adding:

Finish the Food system, letting you pick up and use food items to boost your character before a mission.
Add a Kitchen/Farm side quest with the School Kids. This was one of the first ideas I had for a side mission, and is pretty much the reason those kids exist in the first place.
Bandit/Raider arena side quest. Fighting off strong opponents for unique loot.
Research Lab side quests. These missions would be a series of puzzle rooms, rewarding one of your party members with an upgraded version of their weapon.
New Game+. I could probably make an entire post about adding a New Game+ (and probably will), but I had plans to add special boss fights (most likely just remakes of old bosses, sorry :C) for insane loot, as well as some special end game survival/arena type things.
Multiplayer. While I have multiplayer working to some extent… It will need some work before I even think about releasing it with the game. I like the idea of being able to play with friends, trade items, and explore end game content… However making a system to do that might end up eating up time I could use to add other things.

That’s all for this post! Now that I’m back to the old ‘endlessly making missions’ thing, you can expect some more Level Design Diaries!

The Workshop

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:17:42 -0500

So this week I’ve been working on adding in content again. The demo is at a place where, while still rather unpolished, is good enough for me to move on. One thing in particular I’ve been working on is the Headquarters, the base of operations for your group of adventurers. The headquarters is upgraded throughout the game, becoming more and more useful with each party member you find. The upgrade it gets in Chapter 4 (the one right after the demo) is called the “Workshop.”

The workshop lets you trade materials for upgrades to your gear. Not every part of it will be functional once it’s unlocked, which means you’ll have to upgrade the upgrade shop to get the maximum potential out of your weapons :P. Anyway, here’s the gist of what the Workshop will do:

Upgrade Weapons:

While upgrading a weapon doesn’t increase its damage or attack speed, it does increase the number of mod slots it has. I want weapons to be as modular as possible, so instead of improving the weapons stats it increases the number of modifiers that can be equiped on it. Think of it like adding sockets to an item in Diablo. Each weapon has a max of 6 slots, with each upgrade increasing in cost.

Upgrade Mod:

Every item in Red Metropolis has a certain quality. 5 in total, going from Common -> Superior -> Rare -> Unique -> Masterful. Upgrading a mod will increase that mod’s quality by one rank as well as increasing its stats. Item’s are capped at Masterful quality, so you wont be able to upgrade anything you find that’s already a Masterful item!

Craft Mod:

If you cant find a mod with the stats your looking for and you happen to have more material then you know what to do with, you can craft a brand new one! Crafting a mod will give it random stats based of what quality you choose. Keep in mind though that crafting a Masterful item will cost more then upgrading a Common mod all the way to Masterful.

This ended up being pretty interesting to work on. I wanted upgrading a mod to feel like its actually improving the existing stats, instead of just randomly adding new ones. I couldn’t just increase each stat by X% either, as some stats are worth more then others, or wont give a usable result (for example, if I was increasing a mod with +1 projectiles/Shot by 20%, do I say it’s +1.2 projectiles/Shot? Do I program it to give me 2 extra projectiles every 5th shot? those kind of things). So to fix this, I assigned each stat a point value based on how much I think they’re worth, and then gave the mod points based on what level it is. It would randomly assign points to stats until it runs out, meaning a mod with +5 damage and + 1 projectiles/shot could end up being +10 damage/+1 projectile or +5 damage/+2 projectiles. I also like how this keeps an element of random in the upgrade process.

The “Craft Mod” option works pretty much the same way. It starts by adding a single random stat to the mod, and then applying the above upgrade algorithm X times based on what rank you set it to.

Lastly, This is what will be occupying my time for the next few weeks, hopefully it will turn out awesome!

So Much Art!

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:02:10 -0500

Who knew that games take so much artistic talent to make? For a while the perception of making games (at least for those who don’t know about the industry) has been a bunch of programmers sitting in front of a computer typing 1’s and 0’s. Although now I’m pretty sure that should be changed to a bunch of artists locked in a room somewhere drawing endlessly. It certainly seems like that’s where the majority of work in a game comes from.

Actually, my example isn’t all that fair. It assumes that all artists involved in a game merely draw things. While that does happen, it would be wrong not to include all the writers, animators, modellers, voice actors (or in some cases actual actors), or even the more technical art of level design.

Anyway, games need art. Lots of art. For example, here is a collage of art from my game, all scaled down to fit in the picture:

New Demo!

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:06:00 -0400

So, it’s been awhile. I had a bunch of bugs and errors to fix from the pizza lunch testing, and I’m pretty sure I got them all, well all that I could remember anyway. Next time I’m bringing a pad and paper. Regardless, here is the new version of the game. I fixed a bunch of boxes, cutscenes, item bugs, added a bunch of art assets from my artist, finished (I think) the end of chapter 3, music, and a bunch more I can’t remember.

Get it here: Demo

Edit: It seems that if you don’t run Setup.exe, it doesn’t install any dependencies. So if your getting the black screen glitch, make sure your installing with Setup.exe

Pizza, the Best Tester

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:57:13 -0400

So at school yesterday I decided to trade pizza for testing. I went down to the Lounge and made an announcement saying I’d buy pizza for people who play my game for the next 30 minutes and test it out. Turns out this is a very effective way of getting responses. Much pizza was had by all, and the bugs they found was totally worth the 40 or so I spent on pizza. I think I may have to do that again sometime :D

Something Positive

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:48:28 -0400

I got bored during class today, so I decided to play my game. This has been the first time in a while that I just played it for the sake of playing, instead of the usual testing a new feature or trying to reproduce a bug. And you know what?… I actually enjoyed myself. I had just finished up some bugs I found with the demo, along with adding some new options, so I got to play around with those. There was actually one part in the second level where I was a hit away from being killed and getting off a lucky point blank headshot which saved my life. The item drops were varied enough to give me an arrangement of weapons, so I got to try out a bunch of different styles. It felt like I was playing a real game, and not like one of my pet projects… until it crashed, at least. So I guess there’s still a few kinks to work out!

Changes in the Demo

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:46:00 -0400

Hey, so I said I’d go over some of the changes seen in the demo. As you can see from my previous post the view has been zoomed by about 25%, but that’s not the only change! There’s been a bunch of new content, art, and other things.

Now that I’ve been steadily getting more and more art assets from my new artist, I’ve been able to put in some new and better looking things in the game, mainly in the form of animations. For starters, we have the new character model:

As well as some something new, weapon animations:

So far, I’ve made about 10 unique weapon animations, basically 1 for each type of weapon. They are a little rough around the edges right now, but it’s nothing a little trial and error cant fix. To go along with the new weapon animations, I’ve also added a bunch of new weapons and weapon Icons, so now you can actually see what weapon it is instead of them all looking like the hunting rifle. For example, we have the Modified Super Soaker:

The Frying Pan:

And the Bat with Nail in:

I think that just about covers it for now!

How in the Hell do People do Multi-Resolutions?

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:04:00 -0400

Hey, so I guess this is a continuation post from my previous post, and all the dwarf fortress style fun I had with changing the zoom.

When I was making this game, I had to take a moment and think about just how I was going about rendering things to the screen. I’m not talking about the what and how, but the where. I had always planned on having multiple resolutions available for the game, and thus the this problem arises: placing an object at (100, 100) when the resolution is 800x600 is quite a different place then placing an object at (100, 100) with a resolution of 1024x768. It might seem like the same location, both being placed 100 pixels from the top left corner, however if you think of it in % distance instead of pixels, it ends up being 12.5% and 9.7% respectively. Beginning to see the problem?

So I’ve thought up multiple ways around it, the first being a brute force, I-would-fire-you-if-you-did-this approach. Basically, whenever I would draw anything, I would use a switch statement and change the pixels based on what resolution it is currently set at. Please don’t ever do that. This is just an example as to a possible approach. I’m serious. Don’t. Anyone that sees your code will vomit uncontrollably.

The second approach would be to create my own helper functions and pass every draw call in as a % of the screen instead of a pixel location. for example, a 32x32 object that I want placed at (100, 100) in a 800x600 resolution, I would pass a rectangle a position (12.5%, 12.5%) with width and height (4%, 4%). Basically all the helper function would do is multiply those percentages by the current screen resolution, and then send the pixel locations to a draw call. This is a great way to do GUI’s and menu’s, however begins to get messy when you have a character moving at say, (573, 429). Depending on the location you could run into floating point errors, or something. I don’t know, but it can be annoying if your player is at (14.8643%, 67.429%).

Finally, the third approach (and the one I use in my game) is to assume that your screen is always in one resolution (800x600) and anything anyone tells you is a filthy filthy lie. Similar to the approach above, this would require you to make your own helper functions. The program would save a ratio between the assumed screen size and the actual screen size. For example, if your assuming your resolution is (800x600) and your drawing in a (1024x768) window, the ratio would be (1.28, 1.28). And so when the helper function takes in a draw call for (100, 100, 32, 32), it would multiply that out to (128, 128, 41, 41) and pass it to the draw call.

Anyways, it’s been 5 paragraphs so far and I’ve just gotten through the introduction, so onto the problem. Originally, my game assumed the screen size would always be (800x600). I am using 16x16 pixel tiles, which would mean that at that resolution, I could fit 50x37.5 tiles on screen at once. The problem arose when I wanted to make everything bigger, resulting in 40x30 tiles, keeping in mind I am still using the same 16x16 pixel tiles. This comes out to filling a 640x480 portion of the screen, which not quite 800x600, so I’d need to scale it… which.. well is going to be a pain. I’m left with two options, either rewrite my code so I assume a 640x480 resolution, or hack something together that applies a 640x480 resolution for levels and 800x600 for everything else. I chose the latter.

Basically, I have a boolean which determines if the game is running with a 800x600 screen size or a 640x480, and flip it when required. For instance, when drawing the level, it draws the ground, players, objects, npcs, well, everything but the HUD in 640x480, and then swaps back to 800x600 when drawing the HUD. This isn’t anywhere near ideal, and is basically attributed to a lack of planning when making my rendering system, but it works for the most part.

Anyways, that’s about it for my adventures through resolutions. I really think I’m not getting it, like how do companies that make games with many resolutions with many aspect ratios do it? Maybe this is about as easy as it gets. I’ll be making a post about some of the new additions in the Demo, but for now I should really be paying attention to the class I have been in for the past 30 minutes.

An Update, and a Demo!

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:17:00 -0400

So for a while I’ve been fiddling and changing the visibility, trying to find a situation that meets my requirements for dark and moody and also remaining visible enough to be fun. It’s been pretty hard to find a good balance, with some areas looking like its daytime, and other areas being impossibly dark to see, to the point that you lose sight of your character during a battle. It’s been a pain to deal with and I think I’ve finally found a solution.

I’ve noticed that the player takes up a very small percentage of the screen, and with a full party of 4, it’s hard to figure out who is who. I initially chose this because I wanted the player to have as much sight as possible, being able to see and react to things coming from the edge of the screen. But it just doesn’t seem like as much fun as it could be. So to fix these problems, I’ve increased the zoom, going from 50x38 tiles on screen to 40x30, roughly a 25% decrease in zoom.

The results are exactly what I had hoped for. The player takes up a much larger portion of the screen, enough to remain visible in dark areas. It also increases the number of pixels I have at my disposal for each character model, meaning I don’t have to take my artists amazing work and scale it down so you can barely tell. And while you can’t see as far as you could before, you can still see far enough to react to incoming enemies. I think it also adds a little excitement to the game in that you never know whats lurking around the next corner.

anyways, here’s some screenshots comparing the two different zooms, the top being the old zoom and the bottom the newer, closer zoom:

While there’s not a huge difference, I think it makes the game much more enjoyable, and it was a pain to do, so expect another post possibly tomorrow about it! Also, you can probably see a few changes to the HUD and character models, so I might as well make a post about those too.

Oh, and I mentioned a demo didn’t I? As I only recently got an artist, a lot of the art is still missing for the full demo, and while the demo includes levels up to about Chapter 3-2, much of the art is either temporarily copied from other models (eg every male and female character looking alike) or still giant magenta cubes (which you find in increasing numbers the longer you play). I should also note that while I believe the majority of bugs have been fixed, I haven’t been able to extensively play test it. Anyways, at the very least I can show you guys what the game will be like.

Edit: Changed a few graphical glitches/added an error log. Also added a feedback form!
Edit 2: If you get to a level and the entire world is black, try turning on Simple Lighting in the Options menu. For some reason the lighting shaders break on select video cards.

Here’s the download link: www.altqq.org/games/RedMetropolis_Demov1.rar
Here’s the feedback form: www.altqq.org/games/RedMetropolis_Feedback_Form.docx

If you guys find any bugs or have any suggestions email me or write a comment. Feedback like that is what indie dev’s desperately need, and it will result in the best possible game for you guys when I finish, so don’t be shy!

Not Dead! Only Mostly Dead...

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:57:34 -0400

I think I may have burned myself out. Either that or my immune system is the worst and gets sick from a 10 Degree drop in temperature. Either way, I’ve been sick (and still am… sort of) so work has been slow going. Hopefully I’ll have this demo out soon. Well, technically I could release it now, only 2 of the bosses will look like this:

I guess it would make the boss fights a bit easier… you can probably tell art is not my specialty.

So while I wait for more art from my recently hired artist, I’ll be working on more features and content, which you may or may not be seeing in the demo. This week I’ve made some weather effects that add nothing to the game but look pretty. Progress.

Class Preview: Scavenger

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:20:00 -0400

With the abilities wrapping up, and the demo release getting that much closer, I thought I’d give a preview of one of the possible classes I just finished making. I’m only about half way done all the icons for each ability tree (150 in total!), but its been a while since the last time I posted, so just imagine some really awesome looking icons when you see blank squares. Anyways, the class for today’s post is the Scavenger, a melee tank class.

Overview:

While every class can use a variety of weapons, the Scavenger’s abilities are much more suited for melee combat. With naturally high Guts and Brains, this lets him take more damage and dish out just as much (in the way of abilities, anyways). This can also lead to interesting play styles. For example, a Guts-focused Scavenger would be able to take a huge amount of damage but wont be able to use his abilities to their full potential, while a Brains-focused Scavenger would be able to take and deal a huge amount of damage, but only while he has energy.

Abilities:

His first ability tree, Robotics, summons a robot that follows you, attacking nearby enemies. It can be upgraded to deal additional damage, change to a burst fire mechanic, stun with shock damage, and finally launch high explosive grenades. This makes it useful for quickly clearing out many weaker enemies with its burst fire and grenades, or helping you deal with trickier foes by stunning them.

His second ability tree, Defense, Creates a shield around the player, absorbing some of the damage taken and dealing it to your energy pool instead. It can be upgraded to increase the % damage absorbed, how much energy it takes to absorb a point of damage, giving it a chance to shock attackers, and finally creating a shockwave when the ability ends or the shield breaks. This ability is perfect for getting close and personal, allowing you to take much more damage then you normally would, as well as stunning and dealing extra damage to enemies that attack you. Putting points into the shields efficiency makes this skill that much better for high-Guts players that wont have as much energy. Lastly this gives the player a chance to fall back if your shield goes down, as the shock damage gives a chance to stun enemies.

The Scavenger’s final ability tree, Weapon Mods, lets the player overcharge his weapon, increasing attack speed and adding shock damage to each attack. It can be upgraded to increase shock damage dealt, add a chance to deal AoE shock damage, increase crit chance and crit damage, and finally applying this buff to your allies. As this ability doesn’t increase your reload speed (at least not initially), It is much more effective with melee weapons and weapons that don’t need to be reloaded often. It is especially effective with fast attacking weapons, as it increases the chance of dealing AoE damage. Even if you don’t put many points into this tree, having this apply to allies as well can give you a quick damage boost during swarms and boss fights.

Well that’s about it for the Scavenger class, which you will hopefully be able to try for yourselves later this month!

Arc Brigade

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:42:00 -0400

Hey! It’s the weekend! Which means I get to sit back and not code anything at all (complete lies). Anyways, the point of this post is to tell you guys I’m working on a second game for an arcade box me and some friends of mine made.

Here’s some back story: Last year (well, really the year before that, but it didn’t catch) me and several other Andrews started a game development club at Carleton University. Over the year we did a bunch of cool things, like LAN parties and various competitions (writing AI for a top down shooter and “Scenes from a hat” style board game making) but I’d have to say the best thing we did was make an arcade box… well, we started making an arcade box.

Over reading week we were able to make the frame and paint it, and although I don’t have a picture of it painted (it has guys from sherman’s lagoon [because it looks like big kahuna] and space invaders, done by one of the Andrew’s awesome artist girlfriends) I do have a picture of us putting it together:

It’s made from 3/4 inch plywood, and may or may not be 30% iron. We could throw this thing off from the top of herzberg and it would probably bounce. It’s a beast, and weighs a ton.

Anyways, I finally got around to cutting the acrylic sheets for the screen and control panel, which should be finished by the time school rolls around. we already have a laptop and power supply figured out, so we just need to find a monitor that fits inside this beast. Well, that’s not all we need, we also need games, which is where I come in.

[A]rc [B]rigade ([A]rcade [B]ox, get it?? I am horrible with names) is going to be one of those oldschool airplane bullet-hell style of games. This game shouldn’t detract from my Red Metropolis project, as I’m limiting this to weekends and weekdays if I have already worked a full 8 hours on Red Metropolis. The development of this is going great now that I know what to watch out for. I’ve only spent a few hours on this and I’ve already have skeleton classes for just about everything I need. I’ll post some screenshots once my screen stops being the default cornflower blue, but here are some things I’m hoping to accomplish with this game:

Parallax Backgrounds (those backgrounds that are made of 3-5 images scrolling at different speeds)
Various weapons and power-ups
Two player coop
a non-arcade mode (like “rising mode” from Hard Corps) for people who download it online
Metrics tracking system for the arcade version (not really game related but I think it would be cool to see a bunch of stats like: how many plays a day it gets, what do people prefer to play as, how long do they play for, etc)

For those of you who go to Carleton, the arcade box will hopefully be up and running around campus sometime in September/October, probably in Ollie’s or Res Commons. For everyone else it’ll probably be up after a Red Metropolis demo is released.

Oh, and one last thing, the Arcade Box will be free to play (with a coin slot if you want to donate to the club), mainly because Coin-Ops are really confusing and way too much work.

Abilities are Taking Forever

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:06:00 -0400

Abilities. Good, I spelled that right. For the longest time Visual Studio’s auto correct would change ‘ability’ to ‘abilty’. Code Typo’s are the best, but not as awesome as Python typo’s. I digress, I’m supposed to be talking about abilities.

This Week, I’ve been working on the many abilities my game has to offer, and I’m starting to regret the way I’m implementing them. It’s not that I think they offer bad gameplay or take away from the game, it’s just they take a hell of a lot longer then I anticipated. My abilities are done differently then most games; instead of giving you a bunch of different abilities which you normally use 3 of, you get 3 abilities with their own talent tree. the ability’s talent tree lets you modify the ability to (hopefully!) suit whatever play style you have.

For example, one of the abilities I made this week lets you throw an IED at a location, which then explodes after a short duration. By changing different talents, not only can you change normal stats such as: damage, cooldown, and area of effect of the IED, you can add different effects like: setting the ground on fire, or slowing all targets hit.

Anyways, cool stuff. The problem with them is not only do I have to code the, you know, actual ability part, but then there’s the whole talent tree and all those effects to code. It’s not really that difficult, just extremely monotonous. It has also made me realize just how much more art I’ll need for them. For each ability, there are around 10 talents. Each talent needs its own icon image. Which means that having 5 classes with 3 abilities each at 10 talents per ability, that’s 150 different icons me or an artist needs to make… and that’s not even taking into account party member’s abilities.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m taking about, These are the abilities for the Scavenger class:

Some of you keeners out there may have noticed that there are 4 abilities on this screen. Well, there are actually 4 abilities per class, however one of them (Endurance) doesn’t have an active portion to it. It mainly contains passive bonuses, such as attack speed, dodge, critical, etc. It may also be exactly the same for each class… enjoy!