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Play BBQ Attack!

A couple of weekends ago, I participated in the Game/Play Jam at Melbourne’s NGV Studio, where local game developers were tasked with creating a game from a collection of drawings that had been made a day earlier, by participants who had visited the space.

It was inspired by Adam Saltsman’s Idea Bucket event, although luckily for us the collating and scanning process was undertaken by the Jam’s organizer, that indomitable champion of gaming Paul Callaghan.

It was an interesting day, and the first Jam of any kind that either I or my co-conspirator Russell Dilley had taken part in. While initially I was somewhat apprehensive due to my disbelief that anything could be made within such a short amount of time, I now feel it was a great experience, and one that I’d recommend to anyone interested in holistic game development.

Here’s a breakdown of the day from my perspective:

10:00 AM

Russell and I arrived, set up our laptops, and started working. We’d done a bit of preparation the previous day – creating a subversion repository for the project and making sure we could do some simple things in Flixel/AS3, such as rendering a sprite and loading+reading an XML file – but other than that, we were starting from scratch. While we chatted about what ideas we should pursue with the game, I began to convert the art to usable formats/sizes using the IrfanView batch utility, while Russell started working on the game states.

11:00 AM

After an hour we had the drawings rendering on the screen at the correct scale. When looking into scaling images in Flixel, we found that doing a dynamic scale (versus pre-scaling the image) was up to 10x slower. Even though we knew our game would probably not be an intensive program, we still decided to make sure everything was pre-scaled to the size we wanted.

We had decided to go with the idea of putting the characters in a bubble, and then having spiky things come at them from the side of the screen. Russell suggested we make it two player, and that a good way to use as many of the hand-drawn images as possible would be to allow the players to select their characters. This sounded good to me, so he began work on the character select screen state while I followed this tutorial and made a quick bubble in Inkscape.

12:00 PM

At this point Russell had added the intro screen and was partway into character select, while I had split the database into “hero” drawings and “enemy” drawings. As mid-day passed us by, we started to worry that we hadn’t started on the gameplay functionality yet, so that became my next focus.

1:00 PM

Nearing the halfway point, Russell had finished the first pass of character select and was moving on to the end-game states, while I got the player’s selected character and the bubble loading into the “play” state. During this time, I noticed that I’d incorrectly batched the images and they all had transparency issues, so I quickly went back, fixed the issue in the batch process and re-exported.

2:00 PM

After having ironed out the transparency issue, I grabbed Russell’s input code from the character select screen and got the player characters moving around in the play state. My next task was to get the bubble-like physics working and smoother character movement, while Russell implemented the second player and some game-specific input functionality.

3:00 PM

We now had input working and the players moving around in a bubble-y fashion, and bouncing off the edges of the playfield. With only two hours left, I began to look into getting the enemies in and working, while Russell started picking some sound effects out of Sound Librarian.

4:00 PM

After getting the first enemy in and flying across the screen, my next key task was to define a “collision area” for each enemy – we couldn’t simply use a big centre-oriented radius for the enemies like we had for the characters in the bubbles. I ended up doing this by defining a radius and offset for the collision within the XML files for each creature.

Having spent the previous hour preparing some great sound effects, Russell got to the point of putting them into the game and realised they weren’t in a format that Flixel/AS3 would play. We had a quick discussion about this, and decided his last hour would be better spent improving the 1-player win, 2-player win and intro screens, instead of hunting down a solution for the format issue.

5:00 PM

The last hour was a crazy rush of getting the rest of the enemies in, improving the timing for the enemy spawn speed and setting up the timing regarding when more difficult types of enemies would be spawned. At the last moment we decided to make the players collide, and to create a “bounce” effect that occurs when they touch – making the multi-player mode decidedly competitive, as players could now bounce each other into oncoming enemies.

Russell got the win states working for the single-player and multi-player states, and in a stroke of random luck found that he could place the characters on the win screen such that they look like they’re standing on the hill in the scene. We packed up and were ushered out before merging our final changes, but the game worked – we’d made a game in seven hours.

You can play a final version of BBQ Attack! here – it has had a couple of extra hours of work put in as we merged those last changes, tweaked the screens a little more and added a preloader, but we’ve made no fundamental changes to the build that we had at the end of the day.

As we travelled home that evening, revelling in the fact that we’d created a game in a day, we came up with three reasons why it was a worthwhile experience:

Possibility

All things considered, what we were able to achieve within those seven hours far exceeded our expectations. We now know that a prototype for any kind of (fairly simple) game should be no further than a few hours out of reach, and that knowledge is incredibly empowering for a game developer.

Cutting the Chaff

As a game programmer, especially when working on projects where you’re in charge, you can easily get caught up with developing the game how it “ought” to be developed, making sure each system you’re creating is modular, easily extensible and fully featured. This focus on excellence can be a great thing when working on projects for extended periods of time, but needs to be thrown out the window when prototyping.

We came a lot closer to distilling the process of game development down to exactly what is necessary, and realised that developing quick prototypes in an environment suited to it (such as Flixel or perhaps Unity) makes much more sense than developing them in other environments, particularly when you’re not familiar with that environment.

Bad Game Count ++

In any creative field, whether it be writing, painting, film-making or game development, there is a common mantra that is repeated as advice to aspiring creators – your first creations will be bad, but you have to push through and keep creating, and eventually you will have the experience and ability to make something good.

Regardless of your evaluation of BBQ Attack!, it’s probably not going to win any awards at the IGF (and not just because we didn’t submit it). But through making it we gained some measure of experience that will contribute to our next creation, and when we eventually do make something awesome, the experience of creating BBQ Attack! will have somehow informed that game’s development.

Thanks to Paul for organizing the event and inviting us to participate, our fellow Jammers, who were great to hang out with during the event, and the people of Melbourne who drew those sweet pictures that fill our game.

Before I became a programmer, I was an artist. From when I was six years old right through university, I was constantly writing, thinking up inventions or games, or trying to put my imagination to use in some other shape or form. I was full of ideas, wishing that I had the skills to bring those ideas to life, and slowly working towards that goal.

Now I see ideas for what they are. Ephemeral, transient wisps of thought winding their way through a single creative mind, before they evaporate into the atmosphere.

A common saying in the games industry is that an idea for a game, regardless of how good it is, is worthless.

The saying is true for the context that it is used in. People come to game studios believing that they have thought of the best game idea, an idea that’s going to revolutionize gaming. They expect that their idea is so good that we’ll drop what we’re doing and immediately start working on a realistic fire station simulator, or an MMO that where each player is a Greek god. The saying is used as a reality check – as if we don’t all have our own ideas for what would make great games?

It is also reflective of the level of craftsmanship that composes the art of game development. The process of taking a game from an idea to a reality is extremely in-depth, and 100% reliant on the skill and craft of those programmers, artists, designers and writers who are developing it. It feels, as a developer, that an accurate analogy for going from game idea to game actual is someone telling Steven Spielberg “Hey, a kids alien movie would be cool,” and him writing and directing E.T.

But the saying isn’t true in the context of being creative once you have spent time in the industry and made some games. If you have experience, if you intimately know the limitations of your platform, of your budget, of your team and your company, and have a game idea that is interesting, original, feasible and risk-averse within those constraints, that game idea is worth more than money, it’s worth making.

Further, anyone who has tried to develop a game from a bad idea knows that, while craftsmanship can turn a good idea into a great game, trying to make a bad idea into a good game is an up-hill battle (or at least, more of an up-hill battle than game development already is). The original idea for a game has knock-on effects throughout the entire process of development.

While the idea is for the most part a prokaryote from which the game evolves, many of the issues that arise throughout development and resulting ideas and design decisions would not exist without development being pointed along that track in the first place.

Unfortunately, thinking up ideas worth making is extremely difficult, and once you have that idea there are barriers to actually getting it made, such as convincing management it’s worth making over X license or Y sequel (often an impossible sell). But the toughest barrier lies before all that – the belief that ideas aren’t worth having, that it is impossible to have a good idea within the innumerable conflicting constraints that exists, that ideas are arbitrary.

A game idea is both a worthless wisp of thought in a creative mind, and a critical factor in a game’s development. We need to resolve this conflict, and realise the power of ideas, and how to wield them effectively.

What does it mean to be a storyteller in games?

I’ve talked here before about how each game is its own medium. This means that each game you make doesn’t equate to “a book”, “a movie” or “a song”; for each game you create you are both making the content and devising the delivery mechanism.

I can go into detail to prove this fact – I could point out the existence of Minecraft, or mods, or even multiplayer games in general, in which a limitless range of potential stories may be told.

Or I could discuss how the line that players draw between acceptable and unacceptable game design imitation is arbitrary only until you draw a corresponding line between medium and message. But it’s more important to talk about how we use this piece of information to further our work.

Big budget game developers understand this already or, not understanding, follow this principle and have been doing so successfully for years. The medium is the gameplay mechanics, the systems and the holistic experiential structure of the game.

The message is not just the theme, it is the content – it is everything that has been put into the game by the creator, and the experiences that are created through the player’s interaction with the mechanics.

Independent developers struggle morally with the concepts of imitation, mimicry and “sequelitis”, while seeing in the big-budget sphere that these processes time and time again have positive qualitative results.

Too many independent developers are attempting to reinvent the medium, being unable to separate innovating with the medium and creating interesting, compelling content. Count myself among this number.

This is not a call for acceptance of “cloned” games (ie. Fruit Ninja -> Veggie Samurai) – it is simply an idea to take under consideration – the idea that your medium does not have to be recreated with every game in order for it to be an original game.

Perhaps, through careful cultivation of your own personal medium over the course of many developed games, you could grow as an artist of that unique medium, and create ever more complex and nuanced works within it.

Warning: Early game spoilers

Assassin’s Creed II is great – but at six hours in, I’m never going to play it again.

I came to this decision just recently – having picked it up again and played it tonight for an hour or so tonight, I’ve finally found it in me to reject a solid, fun gameplay experience.

If you feel confused, don’t worry – I am too. I’ve enjoyed the majority of the time that I’ve spent with the game, and I feel like the experience is going to be as good as it has been (if not better) all the way through. Thinking of certain elements of that game (the Assassin’s Tomb platforming, the assassination missions), I feel compelled to go back. But I can’t. Because I don’t care.

I was trying to figure out the root of my indifference toward the game, and to the events that occur within it. Initially what came to mind was Michael Abbot’s analysis of Demon’s Soul‘s environments vs. AC2‘s, but although I tend to agree with his points, it’s not the root cause of the issue.

I must admit that, compared to other gamers, I’m probably more focused on story, dialogue and characters within the games that I play. And the more I think about it, the more I believe that it is that hook that is missing for me – I don’t care about Ezio, I don’t care about Desmond, or Lucy, or even poor Leonardo Da Vinci. I didn’t care about the deaths in Ezio’s family, and I don’t care about his uncle, his friends or his grieving mother.

Why?

Because I don’t know them.

I don’t know who Desmond is, other than that he sounds like Nathan Drake and enjoys lying around all day playing virtual reality video games. I don’t know who Ezio is, other than what could be summarized in a dry, emotionless paragraph or two in a game design document somewhere. I was never properly introduced to his father, so it didn’t matter when he died – there was perhaps the subtlest glimpse that there was something there other than a stuffed catalyst waiting to be strung up, but that’s only if I’m reaching. Half the characters I don’t even know by name. The other half I do, briefly, until I kill them.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I feel the game is a complete missed opportunity for interesting characterization and an interesting plot, because it never allows itself to dwell on any particular character or story. The cast is gigantic, and each character is only allowed a criminally small of amount screen time (and what time they do get is filled up with talking about you, Ezio, and gives you zero insight into their character). And as soon as the assassinations are over and Ezio meets someone new that he will interact with for a bit and learn about, the game instantly breaks, and flashes forward to when Ezio and the aformentioned character have skipped all the interesting parts of their relationship, and are now best buds (or worst enemies).

The pacing in that game is relentless. Gameplay-wise, it’s improved greatly since the first Assassin’s Creed, but the storytelling is lagging far behind. After meeting Leonardo da Vinci, I want to spend some time with the man! I want to find out what he was like (or, and this is still interesting, what some creative person who has researched him thinks he was like). It’s fine for him to become the source of upgrades – after all, we are playing a game – but if that is all he becomes, you’re reducing him and his life to being a cheery numbskull who helps out this crazy assassin, even though he really has no idea about who Ezio is or what he’s doing.

I understand that the game cannot be focused solely on the things that I would find interesting, and I feel like some people on the development team were definitely pushing in that direction – the fact that you can buy paintings in the game from the different cities is cool, and the way they’ve interwoven the in-game character histories with actual history is novel and works pretty well. But by throwing me these completely one dimensional characters in a game that feels totally constructed and contrived, they’ve turned me off enough to warrant me not playing any more, even though I enjoy the gameplay.

It may just be a personal incompatibility, but I do believe that these are serious issues that would affect most people who tried to emotionally connect with AC2 or its characters. I’m curious to hear if anyone else has similar issues – and I’d like to hear from people who loved the story and characters, because before playing I’d heard praise.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at at the moment. Finally got around to purchasing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, so I might give that a whirl tomorrow, if I’m not working on Shadow Field. Peace out!

Resurrection ahoy! It’s about the time of the year when I dust off my blogging gloves and list what’s been keeping me from doing stuff over the past 365 (or so) days.

The format is as follows: games in bold are ones I finished (to my satisfaction) in ’09, games in italics are ones that I plan to finish, and they’re sorted alphabetically by platform.

Let’s start with the Wii. The single and only game that I played on the Wii this year was… *sigh*

• Wii Fit

I spent a few hours on it at the start of the year – had some fun mini-games and stuff! However, doubt I’ll ever be going back to it.

DS

• GTA: Chinatown Wars
• Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
• Scribblenauts

I’ll get to them, I promise…

360 (thank the Maker for online played history)

• Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Bionic Commando
• Brütal Legend
• Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Geometry Wars Evolved 2
• GTA IV: The Lost and the Damned
• Mirror’s Edge
• Peggle
• Red Alert 3
• Red Faction
• Resident Evil 5
• Rock Band 2
• Splosion Man
• Scene It? Box Office Smash!
• Shadow Complex
• Super Streetfighter 2: Turbo HD
• The Saboteur
• Trials HD
• WET

Once again my preferred platform – however, the PS3 took up a large chunk of my time with some great exclusives…

PS3

• Demon’s Souls
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots
• LittleBigPlanet
• Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
• Valkyria Chronicles

PC

• Captain Forever/Captain Successor
• Empire: Total War
• Left 4 Dead 2
• RunMan: Race Around The World
• Spelunky!
• Time Fcuk
• The Last Express
• The Witcher

Similar to the DS, I didn’t really give enough time to my PC in ’09, despite getting decked out with a schw33t gaming rig. Will try and remedy that this year!

And finally, my top 5 for ’09 – a year that turned out to be pretty fantastic overall.

5. Demon’s Souls

4. Spelunky!

3. Valkyria Chronicles

2. Batman: Arkham Asylum

1. Dragon Age: Origins

With Uncharted 2, Brütal Legend, and GTA IV: The Lost and the Damned close runners up, and Dragon Age: Origins handily sneaking into first place in the final days of the year.

My goals for 2010? Turn quite a few of those italics into bolds, and to buy less games! My current plan is to buy one game a month, which is now looking like:

January: Mass Effect 2

February: Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams

March: Splinter Cell: Conviction

April: Red Dead Redemption

May: Crackdown 2

June: Alpha Protocol

July: Mafia II

Whenever Heavy Rain drops, everything else will probably be delayed a month, and Max Payne 3, Alan Wake, and The Last Guardian all look pretty exciting as well. From what I can tell so far, it’s going to be pretty hard to stick to the plan… but hopefully it’ll give me time to finish some older games that I’ve been meaning to finish for a while, and for (hopefully) spending some more time making games as opposed to playing them.