I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit lately trying to nail down the controls for my latest prototype. Everything is ready to move forward but I can’t help tweaking gameplay ever so slightly on an almost nightly basis. I think the point I left off at last night will be sufficient to move forward, but I’m worried that once I build out a true gray box first level and start scripting enemy AI, I’m going to get stuck in the mud again, endlessly reworking the control design. Because so many of my games never really proceed past this point, I lack the perspective of knowing whether this is time better spent on other aspects, or if it’s crucial to nail this down early. My instinct says, ‘gameplay must be fun, first and foremost’ but my experience as a developer tells me that eventually future level design will probably break whatever I’ve decided upon so far.
So that’s what I’m wrestling with right now, really no different than anything else I’ve encountered at this point. It’s still all about managing my time and being efficient with the little energy I have left when I get home from work. Probably not a good time to be working on my unfinished game backlog I suppose…
Busy, busy. To say my time has been diverted lately would be an understatement. Between work projects, home projects, my daughter’s birthday/start of preschool, Jury Duty, and a pair of toilets that needed complete valve replacements, game development has become a distant memory of my past. Hopefully, with all of that finished I will be able to dig back into where I was.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it in the past and I’m way too lazy this early in the morning to search my archives, but I’m currently working on a longer term project with a friend of mine. Details at this point are irrelevant, but I’m still using Blitz to program the various interactive parts. Moving forward, I’ve been researching a different type of play style, something a little bit non-traditional at least in the sense of how you interact with the game. Think Dragon’s Lair. In that sense, relying more on timing than anything else, my primary focus on the game lies in presentation.
I’ve championed the Blitz 3D Pipeline in the past and once again I find myself amazed with the amount of functionality packed into the system. For whatever reason, I never really looked into the Extensions that were available on export, but I’ve found the camera extension to be invaluable on this new project. I can directly export camera animation from Max, even when tied to a complicated rig of control points. Ideally, I will be able to build out the complete timeline in Max and use the exported camera to move exactly how I want through the scene. I should be able to build placeholder nodes to represent and possibly trigger game events, tied together by a simple scripting system. The actual interaction mechanism I won’t get into now, but should be relatively painless to integrate within this setup. But having the freedom to move a camera in a real time scene exactly how I want to, opens up a realm of possibilities I didn’t know were possible. In my professional work, camera animation is probably one of my stronger skills and something I enjoy immensely, so I’m really excited about the opportunity to integrate that into game development.
Believe it or not, I hate writing these vague posts as much as people probably hate reading them. It equates to me sitting at my desk and thinking aloud. With the little amount of time I’ve had lately, almost all of my game ‘work’ has been relegated to the time I spend driving to and from my job. The one benefit of having a long commute is I get in a good 10-20 minutes worth of focused thinking before someone inevitably drifts into my lane and forces me into defensive rage mode. This blog is usually just an extension of that process, where I try to wrangle as much thinking time as possible so that I’m 100% focused going into the night’s gamedev session.
I spent a few hours yesterday whipping up a prototype for a fun little retro game and am really happy with how far I was able to take it. I once again leveraged some of my older shooting code and was able to get the main level flow done in about an hour. It’s such a simple game concept, so the guts of it was relatively simple to establish. I spent a little time playing with lighting and level interstitials (ie. the fun stuff) so that was a nice break from constant AI coding. The brilliant thing about the game is, the title that inspired it is infamous for having brainless AI (if you know old games, this should be a dead giveaway…) so really there isn’t too much to do aside from setting up enemy shots. I’m hoping to knock out a majority of the art in a day or so as well.
My plan is to build a base game that is like 90% faithful to the original and then if I’m still motivated to work on it, I have a pretty good idea for how to take the gameplay in a bigger direction. I would probably have to create a level editor as well. But again, that’s a bridge I’m about 4 rivers away from crossing.
It looks like the lessons learned from Depth Charge have not been forgotten. The importance of prototyping I stressed in earlier posts seems to have resonated, as I’m rapidly approaching completion of my current test. I’ve found myself straying, thinking about ways of implementing little cool details and stuff, but have quickly centered myself back at the task at hand.
I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but I use Google Documents for almost all my planning and organizational tasks. I usually open 2 docs every time I start something new, one for pure ideas, and the other functioning as a to-do list. I try to outline what I think needs to be built to make a successful prototype and then go line by line categorizing by importance. As the prototype moves forward, I highlight a finished task in green and move it to a completed column. Things that are in progress get colored yellow, while other lines that I feel are not crucial to the completion of the prototype are marked in orange and moved out. Gone, but not forgotten. This is probably where my last project suffered, as I look back there’s a good amount of really unimportant things either in yellow or in green.
This time around, I find myself being very strict about what stays in. I recently cut something from the list that was probably one of my very first ideas for the prototype. They are by no means discarded, but let’s just say the backburner is filled with pots and pans.