2Dangerous Dev Blog

A+ City Planner

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…

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!

Red Metropolis: Run

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)

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!

Script Finished!

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

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!

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!

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

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

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!