• Participating in the “hey let’s make a game in 1 hour” minijam.  (We took 1.5 hours, but it was fun anyway.  We weren’t the only ones who went over.)  The inestimable Brendan Mauro handled the art, while Jim Crawford and I sat and stared at code.  We made a game about steadily expanding sumo wrestlers, and maybe when I get some time I will post it here because it is rad.
• Eating lunch with random indie people who were visiting from Canada, making jokes about how everyone in Canada knows each other, bringing up Kate Beaton as a shining example of Canadiosity, only to discover that not only does he, in fact, know her personally, but he used to be her roommate.  Inescapable Conclusion:  Everyone from Canada knows each other.  This has now been proven by Science.
• Admiring Brendan’s fine collection of Lego art, depicting various indie games.  (It is a testament to his lego skillz that they were all quite recognizable in spite of the transition between mediums.)
• Discovering over lunch that Brendan was into Celtic tunes, and I am into Celtic tunes, and I had my tinwhistle, and he had an accordion, and having an impromptu jam session out in the parking lot.  (He actually didn’t have his accordion with him, but serendipitously, someone else had brought one which we were able to commandeer.)
• Watching the epic Red Ice tournament on the big screen.
• Watching Team Meat give out Meatboy sound tracks, and then write terrible, terrible things on them, at peoples’ request.
• Seeing all the simply amazing things everyone else was working on.  There was probably too much to list, but the one that sticks out in my mind the most right now is probably “Eels being dicks” simply because it had a name that was both awesome as well as incredibly apt.

So what have we learned from all of this?

Jams are Awesome.

I've been making a game!

Well, it’s that time of year again.  IGF has rolled around.  And with it, a new game announcement!  From me! So while I’m sure in the coming days we’ll see an incredible deluge of amazing games by talented people on the IGF site, I figure I’ll take a moment and talk about my own humble contribution to the festival. A little something I like to call “The Elements of Magic”.

It’s true.  I’ve been working on a new game, and while it’s not done yet, it is at least far enough along that I don’t feel quite so embarrassed showing it.  In what should be no real surprise to anyone who has followed my games, it is another SHMUP.  And it doesn’t even have the strange mechanics of Negative SpaceCraft, or the weird role reversal from Boss Rush!  So what DOES it have?  Well, a few neat things.  Read on to find out more!

So this is a game I started writing a bit over half a year ago, in response to a very specific problem:  I like SHMUPS.  And I know a few other people who also like SHMUPS.  But I have an awful lot of friends who like to watch SHMUPS in action, but who don’t really feel comfortable playing them.  They look too hard.  They die too fast, and even if I try to play co-op with them, they end up dying a lot, stealing all of my continues, and then feeling bad about it later.

This is a game for them.

This is a game for everyone who has a friend who is good at SHMUPS, who wants to participate, without feeling like they are dragging the person down.  This is a game for everyone who likes the pretty patterns, but is too intimidated to try playing themselves.  This is a game with a stated design goal of “I want a SHMUP I can play with my Mom.”

I’ll save the details of how I’m trying to go about this for another post.  But meanwhile, here is a teaser video of the game in action!  (Which, sadly, shows off none of the multiplayer fun, since it was made on the day of the IGF deadline, when no one was around to help me multiplay it.  So it goes!)

First off, I was incredibly gratified to see this article.  While Hydorah was a shoe in for #1, I was incredibly gratified to see Boss Rush even made the list, let alone snagged a respectable placement on it!  (Also gratifying was that, based on the comments, some new people played it who hadn’t seen it yet.  And liked it!)

Second of all:  Final Form Games has snagged an honorable mention for audio in this year’s IGF!   Congrats fellows!  That is no small feat!

Finally:  Negative SpaceCraft!  Nearly released.  Once again, it has been done for a month or two, but I have been bogged down in sponsor-getting.  How do I keep doing this?  I need to not try to release games right before I go on vacation for the holidays, I think.  But it will be public soon.  Soon, I tell you!  Soon!

It HAS been about two and a half months since the last official word.  And at the time, the word was “any moment now, for real!”

So where is it at?

Well, happy news!  While there have been a few delays, it is still there, and still about to be released.  It is on a test server right now, and this is (hopefully!) the last week of pounding on it.

Also!

There is a new project in the works!  While it has a ways to go, it is coming along rather nicely, and is looking pretty neat.  It should be announced soon as well!

The tl;dr version:  Boss Rush is coming.  Something else is too.

Cheers!

And of course, because trouble never shows up alone, I’m wasted a couple of days before realizing that somehow their web support form wasn’t working, and I wasn’t actually in their support system yet. (Finally called them on the phone this morning, and the person was very nice, and it sounds like I have a support ticket now. I’ve heard good things about their customer support in general, so hopefully now that I’ve got their attention things will get resolved.)

Current issue aside, I’ve been fairly happy with the product so far. I confess, the personal/lite version is fairly limited though. If we can get this current problem sorted out, I am seriously considering upgrading to the standard or professional version, since I’m missing some of the finer control options that were present in the demo.

Anyway, delays, delays. Nothing to do for it now though, except wait while their programmers try to reproduce my problem.

Update: Big thank you to KindiSoft’s customer service!  They were extremely helpful, and have resolved the issue!  I’m back in business!

That last item is the doozy.

And… It’s over.

Whew.

The game that I have slaved over for several months is now off in the hands of the IGF, and I can finally think about something else.

I’m very happy with how it ended up! I didn’t finish everything I wanted – I still have at least 5-10 more ideas that would make great levels, that I never quite had time to do – but still, it’s a complete game experience, with at least several hours worth of content, and all-in-all, I’m pretty proud of it.

Now to take a few days off, before I start working on the actual public release!

Shine Get!

I’m hoping to put together a video at some point this or next week, which will mean that you, gentle reader, no longer have to make do with imperfect still images, but alas! That is yet in the future! And we must strive to live in the present!

That’s all for today.

So to make sure that doesn’t happen, I need to make sure that stasis is never reached.  And one of the easiest ways to do that is to gradually shift the game rules.  This gives me two advantages.  First, if they have found something that works, then as I shift the rules, there is a good chance that it will stop working at some point.  (Provided I’m shifting the right rules at least.)  Second, I can use it to effectively put a cap on game time by shifting towards something that is, for all intents and purposes, impossibly hard.

Tetris is a classic example of a game that uses this.  (Particularly the impossibly hard part.)  It gradually gets more difficult by making pieces fall faster.  At some point, the pieces are falling fast enough that it is not even physically possible to move them to the edges of the board before they hit the bottom.  At this point, the game is effectively over.  The player can, if high enough skill, put off the inevitable for a little bit, but the writing is on the wall.  The game is going to end.

So too in Boss Rush.  The little red ships eventually gain homing missiles as an upgrade.  If they survive long enough, this gives them the ability to hit you from just about anywhere on the screen.  This is important to me for balance, since it is my only real defense against strategies that involve bugging out my ship AI by trapping it in a corner somewhere where it can’t hit you.  (I have far more faith in players’ abilities to abuse my AI than I do in my own ability to foresee all such gimmicks and plan against them.)

However, here is where playtesting gave me some interesting insights.  It turns out that, while players don’t mind being hit by missiles if the little ship got them through power ups, they detest having the ship start out with missiles.  This feels completely unfair, and they generally feel (fairly correctly, really) that the game is effectively over, but for the screaming.

“Huh”, I said.  “That’s problematic.  I really kind of need ships to start getting missiles, as part of the difficulty curve.”  So as an experiment, instead of letting the ships start with better weapons, I instead cranked up the spawn rate of ship power ups.  It becomes somewhat absurd now, with powerups pretty much pouring from the sky in curtains, like some kind of weapon-improving raindrops.  The ships still get missile upgrades pretty quickly.

And yet…  It works.  Players (at least the ones I tested with) don’t seem to mind this nearly as much, even though the net result is the same.  Some theories as to why:

• Since it’s a familiar scenario (little ship vs. big ship) changing the little ship starting loadout feels like it’s breaking the metaphor.  We’ve all played shmups before, and we know, the reward for being blown up isn’t starting up again with full powerups.  It’s being kicked back down to weakling level, and having to claw our way back up.  So maybe this implicit break in the expected structure is jarring?
• Having the ships collect items feels like there is more agency involved.  It is still theoretically possible for you to stop them, or at least delay them from getting enough to hit missiles.  And if you can kill them before they get the missiles, then they have to start over.  So even though it’s hard, it presents the players with more of a feeling of “I have a chance”?
• The abruptness of the spike.  While missiles are only level 3 out of 5 possible power ups, they represent a significant increase in danger level.  Players tended to not care as much about ships starting with more guns, but once they started with missiles, it suddenly felt like they were on borrowed time.
• The two step process “it’s raining powerups” -> “he has missiles now, oh crap I’m dead” is better for the anticipation than just jumping straight to the “crap, missiles” stage of the game.

I’m still not completely sure what the exact motivation is here.  I still don’t feel like  I completely understand what is going on in my testers’ heads.  (Which, I suppose, is why I’m running playtests in the first place…)  It might be different for each person, and might not be any of these.  Even so though, I think I can draw at least a couple of useful lessons from the experience that I should keep in mind in the future.

• A slim chance that is almost impossible feels better to players than zero chance.
• Anticipation and telescoping are good.  (Valve talked about this at GDC this year in fact.  Hearing “rumblerumblerumble” and going “oh crap, incoming tank” is a more memorable experience than just “Surprise!  Tank!”)
• Attacks that are very difficult to dodge are acceptable as a punishment (you didn’t do XXX so now he gets to attack you with YYY) but not as an unavoidable part of a game.

Good stuff!  Hooray for playtesters, I guess!

I have a web site now!

Watch this space!