Two steps forward one step back.

Long time no update.

Following some more family and friends testing, a major problem with the tutorial surfaced.

The good news was that the tutorial teaches the control mechanics well, players understand how to drop new guys and drag them across the machine.

The bad news was that it seems that the current tutorial fails to teach the main mechanic of the game (triggers triggering same colored blocks). Faced with the first non tutorial level, almost all players needed further explanations in order to complete it. Obviously this is a major flaw, as most players give up on a new game if it seems too complicated on its first level.

I've started taking steps to mitigate this situation:

1) a second tutorial level. This tutorial level focuses on the trigger mechanics, and only gives the player instructions if he is stuck on it for a few seconds. Hopefully this will give players time to look at the level, realize they are missing some information in order to solve it (the trigger mechanic) and only then will they be shown the solution. So the new information will stick better.

2) "Stop the world" trigger animations. Triggering a block used to be instantaneous. A guy would hit the trigger, and all same colored blocks would change their states. Most new players would focus completely on the trigger and miss the blocks state change entirely. The solution seems obvious; make the state transitions more clear. There are however many ways to go about that. At first I tried adding a small visual effect (as one friend dubbed it "fairy dust") on a triggered block. But while that got the triggered blocks attention, it still wasn't clear that a state change has occurred. (As the fairy dust would trigger after the state change has already occurred).

My second attempt was one suggested by a friend and inspired by the Legend of Zelda games. In the Legend Of Zelda, when you open a door, the entire world freezes, player and enemies included, and only the door moves, this helps to make it clear that a state change has happened.

I've implemented a version of this system in Pachinguys. When a trigger is hit, the world stops, meaning that guys, bosses and effects stop running their simulations, and a state change "animation" plays. currently every type of block has its own state transition "animation", composed of programmatic manipulations of its sprite (triangles rotate into position, retractables change their inner color gradually etc).

Hopefully these two changes together would solve the problem. More testing is needed to verify this, and only fresh test subjects are suitable, so this may take a while.

As a technical side note, A new way to take videos of the game has presented itself. A combination of a Genymotion virtual machine and Fraps did the job. In this video you can see the triangle “animation” as well as the stop the world effect. You can also hear the games first sound effect: the trigger click.

Still with placeholder graphics

On another note, the third boss that was in development, the snake, has now been scrapped. It was far too random and did not fit into my design guidelines at all. I have some ideas as to a new boss, but nothing implementation ready yet.

the demands of work and side projects is as high as ever, taking its toll on Pachinguys development time, but development still continues at the quickest pace possible under the circumstances.

Play Testing Conclusions

I've recently had the chance to let a few more people play test Pachinguys, some of them adults and some children. Here’s what I've learned:

1) the tutorial only achieves half its goal, while it does seem to do a good job in teaching people the basic controls (what can be moved and how). It fails miserably to teach the core mechanic (drop a guy on the trigger to activate same colored things).

Possible solutions: I need to break up the tutorial over (at least) two levels, one for the basic controls (a simplified version of the current one) and one that assumes knowledge of the controls and focuses completely on the core mechanic. I'll probably have to add a graphic overlay explaining the interaction between triggers and elements. Hopefully graphics will help clarify the function of triggers. A big red button that screams "drop something on me" ought to do it.

2) The boss fights work, work well, and are not too difficult for children.

I was worried for a while that the boss fights were just too difficult for the target demographic (kids). However I have watched several kids (ages 8-17) play them and they all seemed to really love them, and (more importantly) all managed to solve them in a reasonable amount of time.

On a personal note, there is nothing more rewarding then overhearing a child playing the game saying "oh cool! I get it!”. This is a very positive sign that I'm going the right way about things and has renewed my resolve to actually get this game out to the market at some point.

3) The annual steam summer sale is terrible for productivity.

No new Pachinguys screen caps so you get this instead.

The demands of work and social life have increased a lot lately, leaving less time (and mental energy) for pachinguys. And there is still a lot of work left even before the dreaded graphics run. But thanks to some very positive and encouraging feedback I still have faith that the game will make it to the market in (hopefully less than) a year.

Lessons from the prototype graveyard - part 2

This is the second part of my overview of some (but not all) of my older prototypes. Part one can be found here. So lets move on, the prototypes in this part represent a departure from bad HTML and flash, towards actual programming in C# and JAVA.

5) Three cauldrons: first steps into XNA and C#, a twist on card battle games where your "cards" are created by combining color coded mana resources. (Here starts my ongoing obsession with color coding).

Placeholder graphics, oh so ugly.

Code: this was my first attempt at something resembling a game engine. XNA provided the game loop and low level graphics. Here finally I had separate update (logic) and render (graphics) calls each frame. The game logic was now organized in classes; input was aggregated and polled by the engine for the player. A drag and drop interface system was created utilizing interfaces and abstract classes. Card details were loaded from an external XML file. Code wise this was a huge leap forward from previous games.

Graphics: sprite sheets created using either Gimp or Photoshop (can't remember which to be honest).

Game idea and design: a two player game. Each player had 3 mana fields, a tower, and six battle fields.

Each turn the players mana fields would produce specific color coded mana resources (a red field generates red mana, blue for blue etc.). The player then placed 3 mana orbs into one of three cauldrons, the choice of cauldron and mana types would determine the spell (card) the player received. The player could then save the spell in a bottle (limited to 15 bottles) or cast the spell. Casting the spell would be like playing a card in a card game. It could place a monster or trap on the battle field, it could change the mana field types, and it could harm the other player’s tower and more. The players’ battle fields were connected and monsters placed on them would fight each other, with the winner damaging the loser’s tower. Once a tower is destroyed the player who owns it would lose. Somewhat inspired by Arcomage, which you should totally play. The thought was that exploring and learning what combinations produce what spells would be fun.

The good: data oriented approach to spell details, robust and modular drag and drop system. Actual thought put into the design of the software aspects of the game.

The bad: core mechanic was too cumbersome. Exploring spell recipes was fun but too slow and tedious. Grinding through the lower level spells at the game's beginning was really boring.

Status: abandoned a bit after the prototype stage. When abandoned it contained about 20 spells and a system for adding and changing spells on the fly for testing. A complete drag and drop based interface, and the core mechanic fully implemented.

What I've learned: some color theory (used in the mixing of the mana colors). The value of thinking through the design of the code (this was before I learned about class diagrams). Keeping up the motivation is hard and requires a conscious effort. It’s hard to judge a game about exploration and discovery when you know everything, external feedback and fresh testers are required. Over complication is bad.

6) Color walkers: I've mentioned color walkers before. It was the first prototype I made for the game programming course I took as part of my CS degree. It was a color based puzzle game with platformer elements, created using XNA.

Winner of the girlfriends' favorite prototype award.

Code: this game boasted a simple tile based engine with three controllable characters, the basic engine was written in two days (experience counts). The color related aspect of the game was also rather simple to code, putting to use what I've learned about color combinations from the previous game.

Graphics: this was a rapid prototype limited to circles and squares.

Game idea and design: the player controls three characters, one red, one green and one blue. the position of each character on the screen determines the color of the screens background (so if red is all the way to the right and green and blue are all the way to the left, the screen would be fully red).

The characters move and jump platformer style. Platforms are color coded. And when a platform is the same color as the background, it blends into it and can be passed through. Allowing characters to proceed. The goal was to move all characters all the way to the right.

The good: one of my cooler concepts. Reviews (both in the course and from friends) were really good. Implementation was simple and straightforward.

The bad: designing the one and only level took about a week. Once that level was completed, there was not much more to be done with the mechanic. Basically it was a great prototype that will never be a game.

Status: deferred. It is not fully abandoned as I hope to one day find a way to incorporate it into another game or find a way to expand on its concept. But for now no development is done on it.

What I've learned: rapid prototyping is a lot of fun and really puts the mechanic forward. Even a great prototype can be a long term failure.

7) Operation BOOM! This was the final project for the game programming course. It was a group effort. It has a devblog of its own so I will not repeat the details provided there.

Boom!

Status: completed.

What I've learned: working in a team is exactly nothing like working alone. For better and for worse. It is extremely important to work with people that you can trust, and can hold their own. Luckily I worked with three great friends. And more importantly, we managed to remain friends despite the project.

8) Pachinguys: First android game. Currently in active development. This devblog is devoted to it, read it!

That's it for this nostalgia / memory dump post. Next time I'll be back to rambling about Pachinguys, promise.

Lessons from the prototype graveyard - part 1

In Pachinguys related news: in the wake of this year’s Google I/O. the entire project has been ported to the new and improved Android studio. Moving to a new IDE takes its toll and it will be some time before serious progress can be made on Pachinguys again. The third boss fight is in active development at the moment.

I've also started using Trello to keep track of my progress on the project. It seems to be a useful tool, if I bother to keep it up to date. At the very least it revealed to me that there is still a lot of work left to be done before Pachinguys is released.

Following a conversation with a friend, I've decided to run down some of my old and unsuccessful game prototypes to see what can be learned from them. I will keep games made without code and various pong/breakout clones out of this to keep it (a bit) shorter.

Disclaimer: this post is long and mainly serves as a memory dump / nostalgia post, read (or skim and lose concentration half way) at your own discretion. I've split it into two parts as it grew larger than expected.

1) Unnamed platformer: this was the first real game I've ever made. It was made well before I knew anything about programming. It was my first motivation into the world of code.

Code: the game consisted of a single HTML page with some JS on it, as code goes, it was beyond awful: code repetition, no order, no structure, no documentation, just awful.

Graphics: black and white images made with Paint.

Game idea and design: there was nothing too complex about the game, it had four "levels" (screens basically). The goal was to reach the door to the next level, and it was achieved by jumping around the level, very, very basic.

However, the fourth level had an enemy, a rotating gear that would move around on a track of flat gear teeth. once the player beat that level, he got the gears ability and could use gear teeth tracks to pull himself to places he could not before, which allowed him to return back to previous "levels" and reach new places.

The good: nothing really novel or exciting. But looking back at the (primitive) tools I used for the job, I'm quite proud of the result.

The bad: the code, the graphics, the tools used (notepad and paint).

Status: game completed.

What I've learned: the amount of code repetition and lack of order in this game made me realize that "this can't be the way this is done" and start my long journey in the world of programming. I've also learned that making games (and especially completing games) is a lot of fun. I’ve also reinvented the wheel a bit with AABBs.

2) Unnamed RTS: my second (and last) HTML/JS based game. The intention here was to clone one of my favorite games (Dune 2).

Code: still rather ugly, structure was somewhat better, repetitive code relegated to functions, but still a single giant file containing all the game code.

Graphics: ZOMG color! Still static images made with Paint, but now in full color.

Game idea and design: a grid based real time strategy game with resource collection and unit based battles.

The good: more effort was put towards code structure.

The bad: the lack of originality and focus on graphics made me tire of this game rather quickly.

Status: abandoned at prototype stage. When abandoned it contained a scrolling map, selectable buildings and units, moving units and resource gathering (similar to spice collection in Dune 2).

What I've learned: basic concepts of scrolling tile engines, mouse input, path finding (A*).

 this game had a complex coordinate system used to handle mouse input and unit movement in a scrolling world map, while I was initially proud of mastering this difficult system, I would later come to understand that it was a result of bad systems coupling.

Sadly these two games were made on a computer that was not mine and are now lost forever.

3) Blob: my second stab at platformers. This time made with Flash, using action script 2, made during my first year in the university.

Code: that very early version of flash wasn't much of an IDE, but it was far superior to notepad and Paint. Flash abstracted away many of the graphics related issues and allowed me to concentrate on game logic. Some separation of interests was finally introduced. Not a real game engine yet, but a step in the right direction

Graphics: frame by frame animations and motion-tweens, created in the flash editor.

Game idea and design: the concept here was an alien crashing on a strange planet; where he has to absorb elements of the environment (enemies and static objects) in order to gain abilities that allow further progression (sound familiar?). The alien (named blob) would start off very under-powered (his first and only ability at the beginning was to crawl). And build up slowly as the game progressed.

The good: care was taken to separate the player code from enemies code. Frame by frame animations used for walking, turning and idle states. This led to the creation of a (primitive) state machine.

The bad: overreaching. The scope of the game was well beyond what I could accomplish by myself at that point in my learning process. Every new ability required new movement code and graphics. Time was spent on planning boss fights and levels that never got created.

Status: abandoned at the prototype stage. When abandoned it contained a crawling blob in a scrolling world, a single enemy leading to a victory animation and an upgrade of the blob to a walking blob. And many unused design sketches.

What I've learned: curb your enthusiasm. Build smaller games. It was clear now that I had to make sure I have the technical and time related ability to make the actual game before committing too much time to things like level design and animation.

4) Shadowport: another flash game. It revolved around a portal like mechanic that used the shadow of the character as the portal location. I was really excited about this mechanic and thought it would be loads of fun.

Code: much better than earlier games, this is now well into my university years. Mouse input is handled separately from keyboard input, which both feed into a central (game engine-esque) system that the player code polls for input. Also contained my first try at a particle system.

Graphics: simplistic black and white representations of the concepts, following the animation related quagmire of the previous game and the effort to separate interests, I've decided to make sure the mechanic works and works well before I devoted time to animation and graphics.

Game idea and design: the player controlled two things; a character was controlled with the keyboard and handled like a platformer. And a light source was controlled by the mouse. The positions of the light source and character changed the position of the character’s shadow. To which he could teleport using a mouse click. The goal was to help the character reach the level end door.
Death resulted in a particle heavy effect. A tutorial system was implemented to help clarify the mechanics for early testing.

The good: this was closer to the proper definition of a prototype then any game I made before, simplistic placeholder graphics, single level and a focus on a single core mechanic.

The bad: the mechanic turned out to be not fun. I've tweaked and I changed and still the experience was not fun. The control scheme was to complex, the timing required was too exact at some points and too easy at others, and this really brought home for me the value of prototyping. as the time it took from having the idea to realizing it’s not fun was about a month or two (keep in mind I was a full time student at this point and game making was a hobby).

Status: abandoned at the prototype stage. When abandoned it contained the completed teleporting mechanic, a simple input aggregation system, some basic math usage (calculations of where the line between the character and the light source hits a remote wall), a particle system and a tutorial system.

What I've learned: the value of rapid prototyping, the huge chasm between how a game plays in your head and how it behaves in real life, and that math is not as scary as originally thought.

Continued in part 2.

Boss fights? Boss fights.

My dear girlfriend mentioned that 60 levels of straight progressive puzzles can get somewhat repetitive. Others have mentioned this to me before, but she helped come up with a good solution: Boss fights. 

The basic idea is that every 20 levels or so the regular flow of puzzles will be interrupted by a special level that introduces unique mechanics and a greater challenge. These levels will be harder, faster, and more exciting than the usual flow of the game, while still using the core puzzle components introduced until that point. 

Seeing as boss fights are rather challenging, I will most likely add a "skip" button to them, as my main demographic may be a bit too young to handle that level of challenge. I will have to have these levels beta tested by as many people as possible, but I believe they are a great addition to the game. 

So far two of the planned three boss fights have been designed and implemented. the third will be the final level of the game and as such requires more time to plan and execute (your ideas are always welcome). 

These snapshots demonstrate the first two bosses, both of them keep the Pachinguys from reaching their goal in some way, and both create interferences in the Pachinguys way, which represent the first and probably last place where randomness will exist in the game. 

The development names for these bosses are hydra and runner. Hydra shoots fireballs from its many heads and runner shakes the world when he jumps and shoots lasers from his eyes (that last one may be changed to something that makes more sense when graphics and story are considered). 

With two more levels built and a third "taken" for the final boss I am less than 10 levels away from a complete game (including challenge levels, not including graphics and sound).

Generic Tutorial System

I've finally gotten around to implementing the tutorial system. It’s been a challenge as I've decided to make it as general as possible. But it turned out great.
It has three major components:

1) Hooks: places within the system that initiate some form of tutorial interaction. For that end I've created a new block type, the tutorial block, which is invisible, numbered, and calls the tutorial system when a guy passes through it. I've also added a hook on the start and finish of levels. 

2) Strategy: as part of a strategy pattern. The behavior of the tutorial system relies on interchangeable strategies. These strategies can be swapped according to the level being played to allow separation of the logic of different levels strategies into separate strategy objects. Currently only one level needs a tutorial but my goal was a general system so I've taken the time to implement it properly. 

3) Core tutorial system: this system is responsible for providing the methods for the strategies for placing tutorial overlays and hints on the game scene.
This system went through several design iterations. It started as a regular class. Became a singleton (first implemented as a java enum but later changed for several reasons). Until finally it became a truly stateless component (once the strategy pattern was in place) and thus implemented as a static class, much like the sound system.
The final product can be seen in these screenshots (the light gray blocks are the tutorial blocks, only drawn for debugging, will be invisible in the release version):

Tutorial overlay with placeholder graphic
explaining the players' goal.

A tutorial hint explaining
a specific game mechanic.

The main focus for me in the tutorial design is to minimize the use of writing. It serves the double benefit of avoiding the need for localizations, and opening the game for non readers (young and casual gamers). 

I'm very proud of the way this system turned out. It was a lot of work but it now feels right, is very open to enhancements, and is flexible enough to be used in future games as well.

Animation and sound infrastructures.

It’s been a while since new code went into Pachinguys. I've spent my time creating two infrastructure systems that will become increasingly important as time progresses, handling animation and Sound.

Animation system: contains mappings from animation names to their corresponding animated sprites, so, in essence I can just say "play the Pachinguy idle animation now" and have all the details abstracted. Every animation object gets its location, rotation, visibility etc. from a single parent sprite that serves as the model. So the existing static sprite system (the squares and circles) can be used as parents. In time every static sprite will have an animation object attached to it, and the static sprites will be made into Entities (all the data qualities of sprites but non drawable), so only the animations will remain. Andengines implementation of scene graph made this system very easy to implement.

Sound system: the sound system maps sounds and music to names. So again I can just say "play background_music_1 now" and have the details abstracted. It differs from the animation system in its implementation though. The sound system is static. Meaning there is only one "instance" of it in the entire game. This is because playing, for instance, two background tracks, at the same time, makes no sense. Having a single entry point for sound and music enables me to easily keep track of how many sounds are playing, and avoid noise clutter.

I found Andengines sound and music support to be lacking. The main issue was the lack of ability to check if a certain sound has finished playing (required to avoid playing the sound over itself). There is even no way to get the duration of a sound. Android's native MediaPlayer resolved that issue as it provides both duration and completion getters. For now both Andengines and native androids schemes are supported, only Andengines is currently used. This may change as the needs of the sound system become clearer (haven't really thought about sound until now to be honest :) ). 

the next thing on the agenda is some research into how Andengine handles asset resolution for different screen sizes (the 32X32 pixels textures used for the phone version would get stretched beyond recognition on a tablet so some way to use bigger textures will need to be found). Sadly it seems that Andengine bypasses the native android resource system which does exactly that, hopefully it has some other trick up its sleeve for this purpose. And of course the final levels still need to be designed.

A new twist on an old elemnt

After taking a while to clear my mind with some side projects, I've returned to the development of Pachinguys. A second "beta test" session with the kids in my family showed a positive response to the tunnel lines I've added since the last session. Hopefully the level design push will be done soon and I'll have some time to add more graphical enhancements like this. At the very least the plan is to bring the "guys" to life, give them some idle and active animations, and some reactive sound as well.

As the level design process grinded to a writer’s block type halt. I've decided to take a fresh look at my game elements to see what can be improved. The results are: Triggered portals. They are functionally similar to regular portals, but they also have a cover that enables/disables them, triggered according to their color as usual. A covered portal does not react with passing guys at all. And an uncovered portal reacts like a regular portal. A closed green portal can be seen in the picture below.

You may have also noticed that retractable blocks have been graphically changed a bit. This is also in response to some tester feedback (mainly saying the old graphics were too unclear). While the entire sprite scheme will change eventually, it’s still better to have clearer temporary graphics for testing purposes.

Some tweaks to the existing movement engine had to be made to enable portals that were opened when a guy was already on them to function properly, as this situation could not happen with any other block type until now. (Retractable blocks would only alert passing guys to changes in their state when they were above or below them to avoid guys getting "trapped" by retractables opened on them.
These tweaks open the door for other possible block types that may use this interaction type. Which may or may not be used as the creative process and level design continues.

One more element idea remains to be implemented if the current elements are not sufficient to complete my 60+10 level goal. So I'm now confident that the level goal will eventually be reached. As long as work and life distractions stay out of my way long enough.