Aught Nine

Aught Nine: Now Closed

2010-02-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

I've imported all my Aught Nine blog posts and am redirecting everything over to my own site:

Pick up my new RSS feed over there!

Farewell, blogger!

The End of Aught Nine

2009-12-30T12:32:00.000-08:00

Well, the year has come to a close. I started this blog knowing it would only last a year -- but don't worry! I'll be firing up a proper blog on my own website (andymoore.ca) soon. I'll make another post here to announce it, and I'll see about exporting these posts there.

Protonaut is an exercise in open development. I make a blog post just about every time I build a [working] update to the game, involve a lot of people in obtaining feedback, and have a lot of fun doing it! I haven't been updating recently because Protonaut has been on hold (dev ramps up again soon!) and I've been working on a new, top-secret project.

It's just an experiment: Switching from Open development to Secret development will allow me to get some perspective on how the two systems work with each other.

I think a retrospective is in order! When I first started this blog, I made some goals for myself. Here's how they shook out:

I will finish moving out of my house in this next week.
COMPLETE! I am now living with my girl, Aubrey, and have been quite happy.
I will sell or give away most of my material goods by February 1st.
MOSTLY COMPLETE! I have to say that living out of a backpack is quite liberating. When I only really own a backpack, clothes, and a laptop it simplifies life quite a bit. I have a few other odds and ends that I'm still trying to sell or holding on to -- a Wii and a Projector to watch the occasional movie on -- but I'm happy to ditch it all at a moment's notice.
I will continue working on my various web contracts to pay for my bills.
DONE! I've gained new exciting contracts over the last year.
I will make an effort to cut expenses.
COMPLETE! Aubrey has taught me the magic of making my own food (gasp, shock). I've actually got a handsome sum in the bank right now! I'm quite proud.
I will finish all of my half-finished projects by April 1st.
FAILED! I think this one wasn't destined to win through. It only makes sense to finish a project if I actually have plans or interest in them... What I ended up doing was take all my half finished projects, archive them, and promised not to look at them ever again until I'm sure I need them.
I will continue brainstorming at least one new application or game per week.
KINDA. I think what I was aiming for with this goal was to make sure that I was constantly thinking and working on innovation and revision, rather than focusing on and over-developing single (flawed?) applications. I think I successfully avoided this, but in a way I didn't expect: I ended up picking a single mechanic and constantly revising and innovating on it, often changing the premise of my application several times before completion.
I will select a Flash Game from my list and create it by November 1st.
LOL. I definitely succeeded here! When I wrote that goal, I had zero actionscript experience and had only toyed with Flash itself for a few hours. My first game was complete in 30 days (finished May 1st), and I've now made a few more.
I will select a travel location and get there by September 1st.
FAIL! Looks like real life got in the way of this one. Despite selling all my posessions and keeping my budget low, I don't quite have enough money squirreled away to travel somewhere with confidence in my long-term survival. :(
I will spend New Years 09->10 in a foreign country.
FAIL! As a successor to the above goal, it couldn't succeed.

It turns out I was quite a bit more prolific than I thought I would, with flash applications. Here's a bit of a timeline:

In January, I started this Blog with high hopes. I had done no industry research and had no idea what was going on, really; I was aiming for the future blind.
GDC March was the big turning point for me. I met up with the talented Greg Wohlwend, who I would later work with on projects, and got a massive dose of what was possible and how the industry worked in general. I was particularly inspired by Phil Hassey, Petri Purho, and other rapid-prototyping game developers.
Space Squid was my first game, finished May 1st, 2009. I gave myself exactly 30 days to learn Actionscript, Flash, setup a dev environment, and build a game. I ended up going through around 20 core-gameplay revisions in that time, and posted most of them to this blog.

I still look back at SpaceSquid fondly. There are several really good, fun game mechanic prototypes in it's development cycle. I'm sure I could turn the basic premise into a set of a dozen fun games.

Sadly, SpaceSquid wasn't picked up by any sponsors or portals (for money). The gameplay lends itself to a quick 2-minute playthrough, with little motivation to move on. I'm happy I only spent 30 days on it, and I look at it like an excellent learning experience.
Protonaut is still in development, but is my first mega-project. It has a lot of high hopes and future plans, but is currently in the last phases of development. Greg Wohlwend approached me to do the art on this one, and he's been an excellent source of collaboration for design philosophy and mechanic tweaking.

I'm still convinced Protonaut is going to be a successful title, earning me moneys. I really want the product to be juuust perfect though; it's only going to have one day in the spotlight when I decide to start marketing it. A test-run mini-launch later in the year showed that people enjoyed the game and the mechanics, but were ultimately disappointed in the level selection. I'm going to have to get in there and whip up some premium content...
GDC Austin was an absolute blast. Though the venue was a bit lacking compared to the San Francisco version earlier in the year, the people were awesome. A cozy, intimate set of indie devs all hanging out and having fun... Such joy. It was there that I met DanC, who I later started working with.
Military Contracts are fun and very high paying (military flash apps? lol). I have to give huge thanks to Greg Wohlwend for passing on this job and handing it to me; it's funding my next few games. :)
The Wooden Fleet is a game I designed for LudumDare #16, the 48-hour-game-jam. I wanted to try my hand at writing a game in such a small timeframe, from scratch, doing all the assets myself...

I ended up being pretty lazy about it. I watched a movie or two, I slept normally, and spent the weekend hanging out with my girl. In the odd hours of spare time I had, I ended up making a working game idea, but it is incredibly lacking in polish. Things like you can't move diagonally, your support ships spam out due to a bug, and your movement is way too slow.

I really enjoyed working on it though and perhaps sometime in the future I'll revisit the project and make it playable.
SteamBirds is my current Pride and Joy, and this should be the first time I've mentioned it to the public. :) This is my super top secret development, being made in association with Daniel Cook (DanC of LostGarden).

SteamBirds is really close to my heart because the game type, mechanics, theme, genre, content, and story are all things that I truly love. This is a game being written by me, for me -- obviously with modifications to make it more marketable. :)

It's currently scheduled to launch in January sometime. The first iteration is very near completion... I'm excited :)

There are several little things I left out from the list, and a lot of new projects and collaboration requests going down in the next few months. I daresay this is becoming a full-time gig!

All I need now is some bankrolling success!

In other news: My personal website, offering up my IT services, has resulted in zero business. I want to turn it into a proper site that showcases my work and houses a more permanent blog than this one-off AughtNine gig. I'll post some details once I get something lined up.

I just hate designing web pages, is all. :( Maybe I can pay someone to do it for me...

Protonaut gets Goombas

2009-10-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Protonaut has gotten universal praise on one thing, and one thing only: Shooting.

There isn't much to shoot in the game, and the feature is one almost stripped several times throughout development - but it's hard to scrap the one feature that makes people squeal with delight.

With some recent upgrades to the sound files, shooting is just getting more and more delicious - firing that cannon truly is an enjoyable experience. But I needed something a bit more to shoot at than the occasional Nitrogen atom.

Enter stage right: Goombas. Can you tell Greg has been busy for the last few weeks? :) My art isn't exactly befitting of the game :P

Goombas just walk left and right, and have pretty decent detection for obstacles and pits - and try to avoid them. I'm planning on make a jumper and a flyer of some sort eventually, but I'll see how this plays out in the next few builds. They kill you on touch and don't yet have any sort of projectile capacity.

Enemies might not end up in the final game. This production causes some fairly obvious problems, most obviously: the theme of the game is completely off with them. I'll see how things work out in terms of gameplay and see if I need to rework the whole thing.

It's too bad the Level Editor hasn't gotten more attention. I really feel like the level editor is a standalone work of art, and making things is incredibly easy and seamless - with tons of tools at your disposal. It's almost a direct correlary to my programming work not getting any notice, and the more artistic stuff getting the attention - nobody cares about the backend or the tools! It's like I made the best hammer in the world but I haven't found a carpenter to use it yet.

But such is the path of a programmer, I don't really have the ability to complain about that one. :)

Signposts: New feature on Probation

2009-10-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

Protonaut seriously needs a tutorial overhaul, and I've been thinking about how to best accomplish this. I originally envisioned putting "signposts" in the game, with static text on them - then the tutorial would be one big level with a lot of help along the way.

Before I had a chance to put in the signposts, I did a few tests - some people couldn't beat my tutorial level! It was long, too difficult, and not very rewarding. An utter failure!

The signposts never made it in (instead opting for an "introduction" paragraph), and I broke the levels up into 10 easier (and more fulfilling) chunks. After launch, the complaints I get were - retrospectively - obvious: You now only get tutorial text at level launch, before it becomes relevant or obvious as to what it means. You cannot recall the tutorial text except by dying or restarting. A lot of folks took the tutorial text box as a "standard dialogue" and simply closed it.

One thing that really irks me is when players don't read, and close the box that says "PRESS Z TO JUMP - THIS IS CONFIGURABLE IN OPTIONS" then complain that they can't figure out how to jump or that Z is a stupid choice. Of course, I would do the same thing if it wasn't my game, so yes: You, Sir Kettle, are black.

So, here is my proposed solution: an in-game signpost. You can test it here, though the text isn't modifiable at this point (I need Greg to whip me up an interface to do so). I'm really interested to know what you think! Chime in with any thoughts or ideas. Here are some features:

The intro-box will remain for two reasons: Need the Click-on-level-load to capture keyboard focus, and it gives level designers a place to put a little backstory up if they so desire it.
The signpost text appears on touch only - thereby not "giving away" level elements or cluttering the screen.
The signpost trigger box is sizeable any way the level designer wishes. As the text appears from the center of the box, this allows for some creative control on where text appears.
The text fades out at a variable length, dependent on the 200WPM average that people read at.
Linebreaks work and the resultant text box auto-resizes to fit.
The signposts keep track of how often they have been touched, which can be recalled with the %COUNT% variable. This can eventually tie into a badge or victory condition (in the distant future) - allowing for laps counters or other more creative ventures.
The signposts respect your keyboard control configuration with the %LEFT%, %JUMP%, %RESET%, etc. variables.
The signpost trigger box is not yet art-ed up, art is not final :)

Again, try it out here, and let me know what you think!

Protonaut Beta Launch: A Retrospective

2009-10-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly a month since launch, and it's time for a retrospective on Protonaut!

First up, I should explain away my absence for the last 30-odd days. I'd like to say I'm busy attending GDC and other business stuffs (which is partially true), but the actual reason has been crushing disappointment.

I really shouldn't be disappointed. My brain is telling me that everything is allright, and I know things will work out in the end - as I believe I do have a viable product here. The problem is, my heart doesn't handle disappointment well, and it's screwing up how my brain is responding. Just today I've managed to bundle up all the emotion and kick it out the door, and I'm finally ready to move forward.

Let's rewind a bit and explore what went wrong.

When I launched Protonaut, I knew I had a serious content problem. It's the classic chicken-and-the-egg scenario; I have a game that heavily relies on user-made-content to generate traffic, and contained very little user-made-content. All of my fancy level promotion and ranking tools are useless until I have mass traffic. I decided to launch an "open beta" of sorts, and get some traffic flowing.

Colin had a tremendous amount of luck with JayIsGames in the past, for his game Fantastic Contraption. The traffic was of the perfect demographic and seemed to fit with what I wanted my userbase to be, so I got a review up on there - then halted all media interaction immediately. I didn't want this to get out; it is still a beta, after all. The big release is yet to come!

And that's the traffic graph that pretty much overlays over the week I was at GDC. What's funny is I actually garnered more traffic than Fantastic Contraption did in it's first week, and I got more traffic from JayIsGames than FC did after the review went online. My entire problem lies in retention.

That there is a delicious pie chart of where people left my game for good, their IP address never to grace my website again. 45% of my visitors were lost completely before even loading a level. I then proceeded to lose around 20% of my traffic at each stop in the tutorial, to the point where less than 1% of total traffic finished the tutorial in it's entirety.

What's interesting, though, is that the average user spent over 10 minutes on the site, and loaded (or retried) levels on average 6 times each. A bit more digging shows me that quite a few people abandoned the tutorial partway through to get them to the user content. That's a lesson learned right there. Another lesson learned is that most of those people were restarting tutorial 1 over and over again - a sign that it's too hard, even in it's simplicity.

Sorry this one is unlabelled, but it is how many times each level was played - and essentially goes in order around the wheel - Tutorial 1, tutorial 2, tutorial 3, tutorial 4, etc...

Half the people that played #1 never got to #2. It could mean tutorial 1 is too hard, but it could also mean that the player has already decided "nope! this game isn't for me." A more engaging first-user-experience could correct this.

I'm a real slut when it comes to charts, graphs, and analytics. The average user only viewed/tried 6 levels, but sent me 15 hits to Analytics for clicking in various places on the screen. But the real blow to my pride was this graph right here - the one that everyone gets excited about, TOTAL CONVERSIONS:

Yes, that's right. I'm seeing a THREE PERCENT CONVERSION RATE! *balloons fall from ceiling, cue dance music*

Well, I did on that one day, anyway. If you average out the conversion rate since launch, it's at a still-respectable 0.4%.

Thing is, my traffic has been so low, that the numbers are heavily skewed. On top of that, I made 5 test purchases during development, and this graph is nothing but smoke and mirrors; I actually have made a grand total of ZERO sales of Protonaut after launch (except the one I paid my girlfriend to make).

Anyway, I'm putting my emotions aside now and gearing up to kick some ass. I'm going to rewrite the entire tutorial system and make the whole experience more engaging for a new user; I really want to ramp up my retention figures.

At least I'm getting "SSSL Unblocking" traffic from google!

Protonaut: LAUNCH!

2009-09-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

That's right, after months of hard work Protonaut is finally LIVE!

We've decided to launch the game in a sort-of open-beta format so we can continue improving it and adding features as we get more and more feedback. We have a lot of big updates and features planned in the future and we fully expect Protonaut to become an even better product as time goes on.

I have to give a big heaping helping thankyou to our Alphanauts, the earliest testers of our game and invaluable sources of feedback. Also big thanks to Greg Wohlwend, without whom I probably would have cancelled the project a month in.

I'd love to go on a big rambly launch wrap-up post, but this is just the beginning! (and it's also beerfest weekend here in Victoria, BC).

Don't melt my servers while I'm away at GDC! :D

Protonaut: Launch Day?

2009-09-10T13:46:00.001-07:00

Protonaut is on-schedule for release later today, likely sometime around midnight PST. Still waiting on some music/sound effects, and we have some shuffling of levels to do in the Trials, but otherwise the game is gold.

There will be one final build (before launch), so if you want to do us a favour and do some playtesting.. now's the time to do it!

Click here to play Protonaut.

PAX: Meh

2009-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

I attended PAX (The Penny Arcade Gaming Exhibition, aka PAGE; or at least it should be) this last weekend for the first time. People seemed to get so excited about it that I had quite high hopes.

And I was pretty let down.

I caught the Nerd-Cold that was being passed around PAX so I'm a little fuzzy-headed and not feeling my best, so I'll keep this contained to a few brief bullet points:

Post edit: Rambling fail. This isn't short at all.

You can meet and talk to the developers of the games!
Not really, no. Sure if you are lucky, or you rush in right at the buzzer, or if you catch one at a quiet moment. But mostly, the exhibition hall is so packed full of people - and the developers are so busy with their tasks - they don't have time to talk. The few developers I did manage to snag for more than a few minutes only had time to tell me that they had a lot of fun making the game (shock!) and that they had an interesting experience and would do it again (double shock!); all the while handing out pamphlets or t-shirts to passers-by of our conversation.

The typical meet-the-developer experience is to stand in line for 45 minutes and get spoken at with a megaphone. The words are usually empty; the standard press-fare you get around games. Everyone sounds like a talking press-release. Then you get a t-shirt for your patience.

I attended GDC, where I could (and did!) talk to some developers for over 30 minutes. Some even went with me out to lunch for for a beer. There was never a line.
You can play all the latest games!
Most of the titles at PAX have already been released. A few are on the cusp of being released. But then again, I don't really put any value in playing new games first. I don't really care about that benefit. I would love to (and do) participate in pre-release testing and sharing opinions to help shape the game - but when the game is pretty much gold and just waiting for the discs to be printed... all I'm doing is getting a sneak peak.

Playing games "first" simply means that the game hasn't run through all the review sites yet, and there's a much higher chance that it's a piece of crap. Kinda like how the new movie GI Joe wasn't screened to reviewers when it launched - going there on Day 1 means that yes, you are first... But odds of having a horrible experience? Pretty high, and you have no chance of being warned beforehand.

I really don't know where this whole "I got it first" mentality comes in. I'm not the kind of guy (14-year-old?) who runs to his friends and says "HAHA I PLAYED xyz BEFORE YOU!" and my friends get genuinely jealous. I'm a patient fellow; I wait until TV series are cancelled before watching them, for example.

Contrast this with GDC, where you get to play early builds of games that companies haven't even decided on release yet; prototypes; exploratory gameplay visions... It's quite exciting.
You get to see all the FUTURE... TODAY!
Again, I'm going to have to say GDC wins this one. A perfect example was the 3-D gaming concept.

At PAX was the marketable (aka Cheap) version of the 3D gaming experience. Showcased by nVidia, they alternate frames on the display for your left/right eye, and using specially sync'd glasses they turn off your opposite eye from receiving said information. Being displayed on a nice 28FPS LCD display, that equated to 14FPS, with a very heavy (and very annoying) flickering effect. The technology is cheap though - a big enough video card with a special jack for the glasses, and you're set. I watched Resident Evil being played in 3D, which I admit looked cool - but ended up making me feel a little naseous and the twinges of a headache. Plus you are tethered to your gaming box to keep the glasses in sync, or you have to keep swapping in batteries for the wireless replacement. Either way is annoying.

And I'm one of those guys that rolls my eyes at reviewers saying racing games makes them queasy. I'm pretty robust in that department.

GDC's version was Sony's booth. They had a new TV, where they essentially doubled the pixels. Yep, you have to essentially buy two TVs to get this to work. Half the pixels on screen show left-eye information, and the other half show right-eye information. You get the full 28-FPS experience from your television set, which means no flicker, no headaches, and more information. Since the left/right channels are permanently polarized, you can use any standard cross-polarized pair of glasses - no batteries, no tether. Technically speaking you can also get 2xHD resolution in 2D as well. Obviously expensive though - new TVs for everyone!
PAX Panels are awesome!
No they aren't. I was riveted to my seat for 3 days straight at GDC; I walked out of every single talk I attempted to attend at PAX. It's obvious in retrospect; the attendees are not game developers, they are game players. They don't want the straight-up insightful answer; they want to hear the generic bulk answer.

I'm also pretty upset that most of the talks I attended ended up being microphone-driven. That is to say, the panelists introduced themselves and immediately opened the mic to questions, and just answered them for an hour. This annoys me for two reasons. First, it implies that they really don't have anything to say or share on their own; the talk has no actual foundation. Secondly, the questions are soooo inaaaaaane.

Someone went up to the mic and asked the PAX10 panel if Microsoft's XNA framework supported multiplayer. (!!!!)

Another dude asked the PAX10 panel, "Now that you've released successful games on your own, have you been able to get good jobs at the bigger gaming studios?"... This one just blew my socks off. I suppose the average gamer dude doesn't realize that indie games are an escape from the corporate world, not an icebreaker into it. I guess I can't fault them for that, but all in all it was just a waste of my time.

I guess what I'm saying is, most of the things people attend PAX for can be seen a hundredfold better at GDC - minus the lines, the headaches, and the hassles. Of course, GDC tickets cost 10 to 20 times more.

I had a pretty good experience in another genre at PAX though. It wasn't all bad news.

I ended up spending most of my time at PAX playing boardgames. A crapload of them. And I had a ton of fun doing it - it was really interesting and exciting, playing a bunch of things I had never heard of before. I picked out one or two that I'd even like to purchase, and I had some long talks (and played games with) the staff of the creating companies.

Then the realization hit me: This must be what people are getting out of the video-game side of things. I'm fairly entrenched in gaming media - I subscribe to every gaming site I know of in my RSS reader; I read most interviews and watch a lot of gameplay videos. Everything at PAX I knew before I attended. However, I subscribe to zero board game blogs. I don't even know of any that exist (I'm sure there are though), and as such I was taken completely off guard by the scope and selection of awesome board games at PAX.

I therefore conclude one of two things:

a) PAX is for gamers that do not have the internet (and are not aware of upcoming or released titles),

b) PAX is for gamers wanting to expand their horizons beyond their favorite medium, or

c) Both A and B.

I fall into category C, I suppose. Video games were a complete bomb for me; but Board Games was an awesome experience.

I don't have any plans to attend a future PAX (I don't see there being another 40 new board games for me to play if I do go), but if I did attend I'd probably spend all my time exploring RPGs or figurine-games like Warhammer and the like (since I didn't get a chance to myself).

Seattle itself was kinda fun though. I was so exhausted and spent most of my time at PAX itself that I didn't give a good go of the city, but the few places I went to were great. Tried some decent beers and had a really good curry or two.

One Week to Go

2009-09-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Though technically launch date is somewhere around September 10th, I've got so much going on there's only around 6 days of actual work left for me to finish Protonaut. That means I don't have a lot of time to post here :)

Just launched Build 44 on the site which contains a very new introduction made by Greg. It's pretty wicked.

Other than that - polish, polish, polish! Now that gameplay is finalized it's just bug fixing and pretty-making. I'm about 95% finalized on the set of tutorial levels (now numbering ten), and I'm.. well, maybe only 10% done the actual game levels. I'll get there soon enough. I'd better.

Decimal or Integer to Binary / AS3 Code

2009-08-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

I had a need for this routine in Protonaut, and Ryan Madsen was gracious enough to pseudo-code this up for me. I then converted it to proper AS3 and to suit protonaut's needs.

It's modifiable easily enough, but here's the basic premise:

Input a decimal (say, the number 1) and request an array length in return (default 6 bits).

It will convert the decimal to binary, and store each bit into an array in reverse order for easy flag operation. Our example of 1 would then return [1,0,0,0,0,0].

  private function dec2bin(dec:uint, digits:Number=6):Array {
   var result:Array = new Array();
   for (var i:Number = 0; i <= digits-1; i++) result[i] = 0;    for (var i:Number=digits-1; i >= 0; i--) {
    if ((dec - Math.pow(2,i)) >= 0) {
      result[i] = 1;
      dec -= Math.pow(2,i);
    }
   }
   return result; // results are in reverse order... 1 == 1,0,0,0,0,0
  }

I used this code for retrieving a single ascii charcode to store the combinations of the various 6 keys you can press in the game. I googled around and couldn't find anything, so hopefully this will help someone else.

This is easily converted to outputing the Binary to String format, or reversing the Array, if you so need.

Working out Replays

2009-08-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

My current project, Protonaut, somewhat recently got a "Replay" feature. You can save your victories and share them with your friends! But how to execute the replay feature is really tricky, especially when you only have finite space and bandwidth to dish them out with.

Protonaut uses a level editor and a collection of Box2D parts - somewhat similar to Fantastic Contraption. Replays in FC are called designs, and all it is is a snapshot of the starting conditions. Since there is now way to interact with FC mid-design, you can safely let the simulation "play out" on your computer, and it will turn out the same. It's as if the fate of your contraption has been pre-determined.

I'm not able to do this obviously. You control the player character throughout, and you can change your mind halfway through playing a level - what with having a brain and free will and all.

After looking at a few options (taking a snapshot of all the objects in the level and tweening them for example), I decided to go with recording keypresses. While a replay is running, it's as if one of those automatic-piano-playing-rollers is over your keyboard. The game otherwise thinks it's you controlling it yourself!

Building the data structure was simple at first. I just wanted to get it done, and I wasn't thinking about storage requirements. Here's an example clip of the replay file:

[...] ,,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,,2,2,0,0,0,-1,10,0,,3,3,0,0,0,23,0,0 [...]

I used comma deliminators and the data is broken down as:

,,Array Index, Tick#, jumpstate, firestate, (other keys)...

Keystates could be At Rest (0), Just Released (-1), or Held Down (length).

There was several problems with this setup, mostly structural, but all my fault. It was possible to hold down, say, the fire button for millions of ticks - throwing huge numbers into the mix and making it a very big and clunky bit of code. To help smooth things over, I did ZIP the file - which shrunk things down nicely.

Yesterday I decided to clean things up. I realized that "just released" and "held length" could be programatically determined; If the last frame was > 0 and this frame == 0, then it means the key was down last tick.. but not this tick. -1 for release. So it was no longer necessary to store the actual keystate, but just an up/down 0/1 representation.

That means that the keystate could be summarized in a single 6-bit number, that has 64 possible combinations. From there it was easy to find a spot on the ASCII Character table that had 64 human-readable characters in a row, and just mapped the key value to that.

Then I stripped out the commas and dropped recording of null frames (where you aren't pressing any keys). Then I dropped the array indexes, because they were completely unused. Now the replay data looks like this:

...191J192Q200p201'202'203'204'205W300L...

Quite a bit shorter! All it is is "Tick#" followed by a character that represents the keypresses.

After running this through the ZIP algorythm, total space on the database was reduced to 1/20th of it's original size (using a speedrun on Tutorial #1 as a basepoint)!! I'm so very happy with this... I'm sure my database will agree with me. And my bandwidth bill.

Special thanks go out to Aubrey for helping me out with BitShifting and Ryan for writing me out a psuedocode Binary-to-String function.

FlexSDK 3.3 How To Make a Flash PreLoader in AS3

2009-08-22T13:44:00.001-07:00

One of the things that has been vexing me lately is trying to get a Flash PreLoader working for my games. I've tried Googling it, but there are too many like-terms: Flex Builder, FlashBuilder, Flex, CS3, CS4... The all have different methods, and my method is the least googleable: Flex 3.3 SDK, AS3 only.

I don't want others to run into the same problem, so here's a tutorial on how to make a flash preloader for AS3 with nothing more than notepad.

STEP 1: Why a preloader?

The first thing you have to do is arm yourself with knowledge. Why do you need a preloader?

As you may or may not know, every single SWF file is a movie. Even if it's a simple Hello World application, it is a movie with a single frame. It's hard to remember this sometimes, because working in the AS3 environment we don't have easy access to the stage's timeline, and everything we do happens on the first frame. Here's the key to remember, though: The entire current frame must be loaded before the frame starts to play. Most AS3 applications are built on a single frame (#1), which means your entire SWF must be downloaded, and loaded to memory, to display anything.

"But SWFs aren't all that big," you say. "Why would I need a preloader for that?"

The average connection speed in the United States is probably way lower than you think, or what you currently have. The fact that you are reading this blog at all probably means you have a 5mbps+ broadband connection. But that's how us geeks roll, and we only ever talk to other geeks. I'm on a 10mbps line with access to 50mbps if I wanted to pay extra for it.

The US has made several headlines recently beacuse the average broadband speed in the US is 1mbps. That is 128 kilobytes per second. But did you note the italicised term there? Over 60% of the United States does not have access to Broadband, so dialup is the connection type for many people. But what does that mean in real terms?

Here at Build 35 of Protonaut, the game is sitting at just under 600Kb - not counting audio assets. On the average broadband connection, it will take around 5 seconds to load and display the game to your screen. On a standard dialup connection, it will take over a minute. Many users will leave your page if they see a blank window for more than a second or two. 5 seconds of load time is absolutely painful, and is faster than the average connection!

STEP 2: Setting Up an AS3 Preloader

Allright, now that I've convinced you to use a preloader for your FlexSDK application, let's take a look at what is required.

First, you will need a whole new class file that will be your entire preloader. Here's some sample code for what I've used, and placed inside "Preloader.as" in the root directory of my project:

package {

import flash.display.DisplayObject;
import flash.display.MovieClip;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

[SWF(width='800', height='450', backgroundColor='#E5E5E3', frameRate='30')]

public class Preloader extends MovieClip {

   public function Preloader() {
       stop();
       addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnterFrame);
   }

   public function onEnterFrame(event:Event):void {
       if(framesLoaded == totalFrames) {
           removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnterFrame);
           nextFrame();
           init();
       } else {
           // Show your preloading graphic or animation here
       }
   }

   private function init():void {
       var mainClass:Class = Class(getDefinitionByName("Main"));
       if (mainClass) {
           var app:Object = new mainClass();
           addChild(app as DisplayObject);
       }
   }
}
}

It's a very simple application. It simply adds an event listener that waits until ALL frames have loaded, and once that happens it will launch your "Main" class. At this point in the game, we still only have a single frame, so it won't do much. In this case, "Main.as" is my main class for Protonaut and also exists in the root folder of my project. You will have to edit this to match the main class name for your project - use "BobJones" if "BobJones.as" is the primary class in your project.

I've placed a comment where your preloading graphic, animation, advertisment - or heck - minigame, should reside.

If you compile and run this code alone, without following the extra steps below - the preloader will "blip by" in an instant and not show up until the whole SWF has loaded. So we aren't quite there yet, but we're prepared!

STEP 3: Reconfigure Your Compiler

Now that we have "Preloader.as" in place, we want to move the rest of your application off of Frame 1 and onto Frame 2. This will allow the preloader to show itself first, and wait on the loading of the second frame.

Here's a slice of my compiling instructions:

    "mxmlc.exe" -frame two Main -file-specs="Preloader.as"

They key statement here is "-frame two Main". This tells the compiler to move the class "Main" onto the second frame of the movie, and thus preventing it from loading before displaying the preloader.

For advanced users, note that you can specify any number of frames this way - possibly breaking up your application into several loading chunks, which can silently load in the background while people navigate your menus!

THAT'S IT!

STEP 4: Correcting for Errors

That's it, Unless of course you were referencing the Stage a whole lot in your code. Now that the concept of the "stage" resides in frame 1, the stage is outside of the scope for your "Main" class on Frame 2. Any references in your code to "stage" will now return Null, and probably cause you some headaches.

There's nothing stopping you from passing the stage to Frame 2 as a variable, though!

I dove back into Preloader.as and changed:

    var app:Object = new mainClass();

To:

    var app:Object = new mainClass(this);

Then, in Main.as's constsructor, I had it accept this as a variable and stored it for later reference. Couldn't be simpler!

STEP 5: Basking in your Glory

Now it's about time to crack open that beer because you're done. If you had any questions, or if this helped you at all, please leave a comment! I'll try to update this with any answers to questions people have.

The Pressure to Release on-Time

2009-08-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

I am starting to wonder if I can get Protonaut out the door on time.

Greg and I set a goal to have the game in releasable form by September 14th - the date I'll be flying down to GDC Austin. I figured this was a good a date as any - might as well have your game done before going to a game conference. As of this posting, there is just about 3 weeks left. It seemed far enough away, at the time - and our progress on the game appears to be maintaining a steady pace. But then real life steps in.

I could start with the small complaints - tonight's programming timeslot was instead wasted fighting the first-ever porn-spammer on the Fantastic Contraption forums. I am still very proud of how the community held together and stayed sane for over a year before this happened, and I'm pretty sure this will blow over as well - but due to some technical difficulties my entire night was consumed.

I have bigger fish to fry than a single night, though. Some old chums I used to work with have roped me into covering some shifts at their new office next week. Sure, it's part time; I can work most (if not all) of it from home; and the workload is likely light. But it'll harm my train of thought fairly hardcore, and code will progress at a halting pace at best.

Then there is the last-minute ticket purchase for PAX. I've never been to the Penny Arcade Expo, but I hear it is a blast - and that's going to consume a hearty 4-day weekend, plus some recovery time.

Then there is the Great Canadian Beer Festival, for which I am not only attending both days - but am also volunteering for, doing the volunteer orientation, and doing the afterparty. The recovery time for this is going to be even longer.

Let's not forget that Colin Northway, old chum of mine and writer of Fantastic Contraption, is in town and we will likely hang out at least a tiny bit.

That isn't to mention my regular routines (Aikido, getting exercise on my bike, chores, harvest season in the garden, etc.) that pretty much slims my remaining working time down to just about 7 days worth of solid effort. It's suddenly gotten dark in here, what with all the foreboding-ness. I'm officially daunted.

It's not all doom-and-gloom, though. We've hit Build 35 in Protonaut now, which sports the first incarnation of music and sound effects, not to mention a few key tweaks and the usual barrage of new menu interfaces - which has really got me excited. For the first time, Protonaut feels like an unfinished game instead of a collection of parts that might amount to something someday. Roger Levy is now on board with Greg and I to do our music, and he produced a great 8-bit Russian folk-tune to fit the Red-theme of the game today. It reminds me of Monkey Island music, it's really sweet.

For more external influences, Greg posted to his blog about the success of his latest game, Fig. 8, and how the bidding war went down. It's a very interesting timeline and I think it does a good job at representing the value behind proper marketing, and putting your game in the correct (bidding) spotlight. Congrats to Greg & the others at Intuition. It's very motivating reading about other's success.

I suppose I just have to keep my chin high and my nose down to the grindstone. I guess I'll be coding inverted.

Thanks for listening. :)

Build 33: Protonaut Gameplay Finalized

2009-08-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

We hit a milestone this weekend, and it feels really nice. The gameplay is finalized.

That's not to say that the entire game is finalized - oh no. Still lots of work to do. But in terms of actual gameplay elements - how the character moves, how elements work, how levels are designed - that's all finalized. If you were to make a level in the game today, it would still work upon release.

This is very good news, as it means I can now start building levels for this beast.

We're up to Build 33 - check it out at www.protonaut.net .

Build 30: Epic Changes

2009-08-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

It's finally here!

I'm sorry it took so long to get Build 30 out, but I really had no choice. Exactly two weeks ago I put out Build 29, and things started changing so much that the game was relatively unplayable until just recently. I put in a final few touches tonight and I am left with a product I am happy to release.

I also wanted to make it a big one, since I'm turning 30 this year, and 30 is a big round number, and I'm hoping to have the game in a releasable state 30 days from now... It's just a nice convergence of numbers.

Here's the gist of things:

- Complete UI do-over. All the major graphics and art have been updated and replaced. This was the biggest speedbump - I couldn't release a game if you couldn't sign in!
- Replays. Yep, you can now record and playback your victories!
- A lot of gameplay changes - nothing incredibly major, but important nonetheless.
- New website uploaded.
- New forum software installed and re-built. Also hacked to accept user registrations right from the game.

I thought the old graphics were hot, but this new hotness is just... on fire. I love it, I love it to bits. I especially like how it looks sitting pretty in the new website. The notification boxes and level save boxes are all in place now too, and I've implemented handy new features like URL-copying-to-clipboard and other fun stuff. The entire graphical user experience is simply doublegood now.

It's getting pretty late here so I'm going to sign off for now. Updates and new builds should come more frequently now, and the changes will become smaller and smaller in scope as we start ramping up for launch day. Thank you, Alphanauts, for helping us get this far.

Check out the brand new website at www.protonaut.net.

Check out the complete changelog for Build 30 at this forum post. (It's a big one!)

The Indie's Lament

2009-08-06T13:08:00.000-07:00

I just hopped out of a steaming hot shower (where I do most of my thinking) and listening to The Decemberists when I started having conflicting thoughts on how big an Independant Games team should be.

The fella doing art for Protonaut, and my primary partner in this venture, is Greg Wohlwend (who has a wicked website). He's great. He works tremendously fast and is wonderfully talented. He has a good head on his shoulders about how the industry operates and has a good handle on games themselves, and gives very valuable feedback on how things are going on the code end of things. If I could buy stock in G.W. futures, I would.

I think one of the best things about having a single partner like Greg is the mutual motivation. Like a climbing plant seeking sunshine, I'm just a dude in search of a relaxed, lazy lifestyle on the beach. When I code alone, I can often lose multiple weeks of development time to a newly released game. I can get distracted with watching Firefly again. If the sun shines a bit more brightly today I might just go down to said beach. Having Greg around keeps me motivated - not just out of guilt for letting him down, but also by genuinely keeping me excited about the project. When he produces a new piece of art, I can't wait to implement it!

There is, however, a fleck of dust within that diamond. When I am motivated; when I am actually getting things done, I have a very one track mind. I get an idea, I iterate the code towards the utlimate goal, and I end up having an agreeable chunk of software - something to be proud of. During this process I'm often observed to decline food (gasp!) and push away beer (the horror!), and hardly move from my chair for upwards of 12 hours. I'm not complaining here, I'm just saying - this is how I do my best work.

Sometimes those coding sessions can go on for weeks.

By having a partner, it's pretty much guaranteeing an interruption. Sure, sometimes the interruption is good - feedback on the current project, maybe some hints or shortcuts to make me finish faster - but sometimes it can be a bit more trying. While I'm excited to accept new game assets (be it code, art, sound), and I know the game will be better for it; I think many programmers will agree: Dropping a project halfway through to switch to a new task is like trying to change gears without a clutch.

As each additional project member is added to the mix, this can occur more and more frequently. I believe this is observed even at the highest levels of corporate culture, where daily status meetings can end up being your primary export. More people to pay attention to, with a deteriorating level of productivity.

It's at around this time I start remember the recent Cogs Postmortem I read. They pretty much say the same thing, but quantify it with a graph.

As much as the businessman in me wants to run my own studio; as much as I want to have a team and command them to fetch me my surfboard; I don't think I can be what I want to be... a Programmer... In a team with much more than 2 to 3 people.

And with a team of 1, I'd never get anything done.

I guess that makes me Indie!

Protonaut Build 29: Finally, a Challenge

2009-07-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

I've found that in programming Protonaut, I haven't been particularly challenged. That's not to say that it isn't super interesting or fun, but it feels that I've been largely coasting instead of actually thinking.

I'm not talking about Math problems - I'm absolutely pants when it comes Math in the first place, so anything calculated is a smaller hurdle for me. Rather, I'm thinking more of the mental excercises -I haven't had to do any serious figuring on how to do something or even constructed simple algorithms.

Until today, that is.

I started off the day right today by not getting to bed until around 5AM. Then I had a series of ludicrous dreams, then I was woken up at 6AM by the lady next door asking "Is this yours?" and pointing to a dead cat in a box she had brought over (it wasn't mine, thank goodness).

After a robust effort at continuing-to-sleep-till-noon, I thought perhaps today was a day to do something different.

Forgetting to eat, I scanned my to-do list and tackled the most interesting sounding task: Copying all items connected to whatever you clicked on. For example, if you created a complex molecule in Protonaut's editor, duplicating the whole shibang, maintaining proportions, and moving them around the screen all at once.

This one is a bit more complex than it sounds, as I did a really good job of keeping my level objects... well, more of a theory than actual hard definitions. My level objects suggest that an item might be in one place, and if you did some hefty math and lookups you'd see that it was correct. Bonds are an excellent example; they have no X,Y coordinates or size definitions - they are merely the idea that a bridge may exist between two already existing elements. All the hard definitions I allow the physics engine to handle for me. It's this exact architecture that's made it really quite easy to write up this whole deal.

I ended up making my first Linked List in years (through lack of requirement, not choice), and designed some tree-traversal algorithms to find out exactly what was connected to each other, taking care not to duplicate entries.

Then doing up the math to keep the X,Y coordinates offset correctly as I move them all around the screen... Well, let's just say it was a fun several hours worth of code. I feel like I've just had a fresh code shower. Ho ho!

Conclusion: Very satisfying.

So here it is, Build 29. Coming up on the big three-oh! Recent noteable changes:

Several sets of tutorial level revisions
Lots of minor glitch fixes
A dozen updates to player movement rates, gravity values, friction values, and scenario behaviours (eg: fixed the I'm-pressing-on-a-wall-and-can't-jump-high hard-to-reproduce glitch)
A dozen updates to the level editor (see them all here), including molecule copying and whole-molecule moving.

How to make a Platformer Feel Right

2009-07-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

One of the big draws to a platformer-style-game is the feel. A good, responsive control scheme with some nice animations can make the difference between sluggish boredom and excitement.

I've never really looked into the mechanics behind character movement before, and when confronted with the problem of making Protonaut feel nice, I had to do some research. As it happens, William and Sly was released that very day, and I took it a whirl.

William and Sly is an excellent game where you hop around in a tile-based world as a Fox named Sly. I highly recommend you give it a try! Sly controls very nicely. He is immediately responsive in his left/right motions, and jumping is a quick, rapid motion. On top of some fluid controls, Sly animates a sitting position while at rest, has a very nice run animation, and bounds in an animated arc when jumping.

One game that stood out for me as an excellent platformer was N Game (later remade as N+ for consoles). It was critically acclaimed for having excellent controls, so I revisited it to take a deeper analysis. You can play it here.

N Game was interesting to me. You play the role of a Ninja that simply has to collect some items and avoid the badguys. The left/right motion is a big sluggish - the player accelerates as he moves, but it feels OK. The jumping seems a bit unpredictable to me and I had a hard time navigating even the first level - but I'm sure it's just me not being used to it. It seems a lot of other people liked the game, and again - it was hailed for it's amazing controls.

What really stood out for me, though, were the animations. The player character had an animation for pretty much any situation he got himself into - sliding down a wall, various states of jumping, and even death. It really seemed to make up for it.

I had to take a look at a really crappy Flash game too, just to see what else was out there. Being a large fan of the Indiana Jones franchise, my eye was caught by an unlicensed ripoff named - well, indiana jones. I'm not sure if the loss of capitalization was intentional.

This game is definitely bottom-rung in terms of control. Just give it a quick run-through and jump off of a ledge and you'll see what I mean. It's almost as if you controls are mapped directly to the keyboard in a hideous 1:1 ratio - it's obvious there was not much thought put into this at all.

But the artistic team put a lot of polish onto this game, and there it is making money being front and center on the #1 platformer-oriented portion of the gaming portal. This kind of crap really gets on my nerves, because I believe the gameplay can (and should) stand on it's own two feet first, and have graphics applied later to taste. I said so just a few days ago. This game is the polar opposite - polish, lots and lots of polish, complete with unlicensed rips and cashing in on a brand I love - with no thought given to gameplay.

To help clear the taste out of my mouth I did a quick mental revisit to Super Mario Brothers (for a quick refresher, there's a badly done flash version - again, without licensing).

Mario had some fairly descent, polished graphics for it's time. The controls were crisp and responsive, and things flowed rather quickly. I'm sure I don't have to preach to the choir about this one.

I took all I had learned and compared it to Protonaut and where it was currently at (around Build 25 at the time). Protonaut was largely based on real physics. The player is average human density, average human height, and other game objects (like floors and platforms) were the density of concrete. Gravity was fixed to a steady 9.81 m/s^2, Earth norm. Each object interacted with one another with as-accurate-as-I-could-find coefficients of friction. Movement was handled by applying a steady force in a particular direction, capping off at a maximum speed. About the only unrealistic thing was how high you could jump, which seems to be a standard in any platformer ever made. An earlier form of the game wouldn't even let you change direction unless your feet were on the ground!

I figured real-life objects interacting in a real physics engine in a real-life environment would be a pretty good, fun experience, and would save me a lot of effort!

Nope.

Turns out people's natural rates of acceleration are... Well, boring. People can't stop running fast enough. People can't run fast enough. In short, people are sluggish, unresponsive creatures, and have no place in a fun platformer.

I ended up going through all my movement code. I increased the player's rate of acceleration, I made the at-rest-friction levels to be impossibly high to make him stop faster, I made his movement in the air more responsive, and made a whole bunch of number tweaks and if statements. (As an aside: The next time I make a platformer, I am not going to use a physics engine if I can avoid it! The amount of work that went into these tweaks was much higher than I wished, and I ended up breaking a few rules (resetting player velocity manually instead of applying a force, for example).)

I found the gameplay immediately improved and was a lot more fun. Playing a dorky, slow marshmallow of a man isn't as fun as a nimble ninja jumping from wall-to-wall. But something was still missing. It still felt like everything was moving in slow motion; nothing quite felt right.

I did another tour of the previously mentioned games and found out that none of them had the same problem. All 4 of the previously mentioned games felt "right" in a way Protonaut wasn't achieving. After some searching and feeling it out, I think I put my finger on it: Gravity.

9.81 m/s^2 is fine and dandy in our lives, but it feels a bit too slow and sluggish when you're talking about a world of superheros that can easily jump twice their height. With our incredibly poor acceleration rates and reaction times, a box could easily fall on our head and crush it. But the box doesn't fall particularly fast.

Cranking the gravity up to 13.5 m/s^2 made the game feel much more response and smooth feeling. I guess the whole idea behind platformers is to exaggerate everything; all forces should be somewhere around double of what they would be in real life. I'm still churning out new builds with new tweaks, but I'm finally homing in on what can be called "fun, invigorating" gameplay.

And for those that are wondering - yes, Protonaut's level editor allows you to define the gravity vector. I just altered the default setting and re-applied the gravity settings to the tutorial levels, and tuned the player controls for that environment... If you reset gravity back to 9.81, the player will jump higher than he did before.

Protonaut Build 27: Gameplay Tweaks

2009-07-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

After showcasing build 25 I got a lot of good responses. People are getting excited about the game, and I got some important feedback on the tutorial.

Changes in build 26/27:

- The tutorial is now split into 8 distinct parts. This allows people to get the "rush of victory" pretty frequently early on, while splitting new ideas into easy-to-process chunks.

- The tutorials now have descriptive text that tell people how to play each stage.

- The Atomic Detonator now has a bit more control. Hold down shift to increase power, release to launch. It's sensitive - maximum power is reached in only half a second. But it feels nice, and allows you to easily get things nearby with a quick tap. The A.D. will auto-launch when maximum strength is hit.

- Atomic Detonator's maximum power is now 25% greater (can fling it quite far now if you want to).

- Increased player friction while at rest to a much higher amount. It's now harder to slide down things (if they are shallow enough of an angle to get your feet on the surface) and when you let go of the movement keys you stop nearly instantly. This helps make the controls feel more responsive.

- Decreased player friction while moving, again making the controls feel more responsive.

- Replaced most of the tutorial text again in Build 27

- Fixed a bug where Nitrogen wouldn't explode when it killed you.

- Swapped default controls to the arrow keys (you can switch it back to WASD from the options menu)

- Fixed the immediate wall-jump bug when standing next to a wall and jumping straight up, making you appear to jump 2x the height of normal.

- Also, wall-jumping now requires that you are travelling away from the wall you are currently touching (should have been like that from the start...).

- If you have a downward velocity while wall-jumping, the jump will now "stall you" in place thus giving you a chance to recover. This fixes the dreadful "I'm walljumping like a madman but still falling down into this chasm" situation.

- Made tutorial text disappear upon victory/failure.

I'm getting pretty excited. I'm feeling like I've hit the end of my prototyping and I'm moving into full-scale production.

But since my prototyping was polishing itself along the way, it's more like I'm late beta and about to go gold. Great feeling!

Mechanics more than Gimmicks

2009-07-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

I've often thought that the point, or the core concepts, of Protonaut have been lost because there is no good demonstration level - and all the levels submitted are by Fantastic-Contraptioners. It keeps the game looking like something it's not, so I decided to rectify that today.

But first, maybe I should talk about game mechanics vs. gimmicks.

Game Mechanics are the fundamental cores of gameplay. Mario is a platformer, and he squishes enemies by stomping on them. His various suits (fire flower, raccoon, etc.) offer up different mechanics you can play with, and they fundamentally change the game.

Gimmicks are the things that sound cool on paper, that look awesome, or are "neat" - but don't actually contribute to the gameplay in any meaningful sense. I like broadly lumping "realistic graphics" into this category. Sure it might look cool, and it might even sell a few extra copies based on game-footage and screenshots. But does it actually affect gameplay? No.

The thing is, it's really very easy to think up good gimmicky things. Camera tricks, dazzling explosions, distorting the image based on explosion shockwaves.. The list can go on and on. These are the low-hanging fruits of the feature tree.

I sat back today and thought about all the ideas I've been having. They're all largely gimmicky. I wanted the game to have a bit more meat to it - a bit more fun. Let the game stand on it's own two feet before I start swiveling cameras around. I think maybe I was overthinking the problem before, and I think I've hit upon a simple solution that fundamentally changes the game.

Previous to Build 24, all the round elements (Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen) were identical except for the graphics. Now, Hydrogen is lighter-than-air and has the capacity to lift things; Nitrogen is dangerously unstable and can kill the player. Oxygen remains inert and simply rolls around.

The catch is - you still have to "collect" (destroy?) all three of them. If you let the Hydrogen float away from you, the level can become impossible. Nitrogen is tricky, as you can only set it off with your little flingalbe sticks (rods of ice? TNT? atomic detonators?).

Carbon and Aluminum still remain, of course - Aluminum being very heavy and capable of killing the player by falling upon him (and remains indestructable in and of itself), and Carbon provides a more utilitarian role as a "wheel" (that can be destroyed).

Before now, the game was largely about grabbing items in the correct order to prevent the collapsing structure from burying you (or the target elements). Though this might have a neat puzzly aspect to it, it is much better executed with a simple clicking interface. Running around on the structure was largely a chore and not exactly fun.

Now the levels can have all sorts of dynamics - a Hydrogen isotope floating a chain of explosive Nitrogen towards the player, for example. Puzzles triggered by lifts and dangerous rolling elements to dodge. Stacks of Aluminum to anchor and weigh things down. Levers, pullies, platforming fun!

Now, this is a lot to add to the game. Even though the amount of work behind it was marginal, the impact it has is grand. Now, more than ever, I needed a level that was easy - quick to play through - had a low risk of death/restart - and demonstrated all the core concepts of the game. And thus was birthed the first incarnation of the tutorial.

In the level I demonstrate how each of the elements work. What needs collecting and what isn't collectible. I introduce movement, jumping, and walljumping. There is a few places where you need to use the throwing stick to grab Nitrogen. I slowly introduce the concepts of bonds, and give a small sampling of different effects and puzzles that bonds can produce. I even demonstrate some unique properties (ie: structural bonds go through terrain), and top it all off with a "boss fight" of sorts.

I think I was successful in demonstrating that this game can stand on it's own two feet on the basis of elements alone. Using bonds is completely optional and you can actually have a fun, puzzle-y time without using them, and just focusing on the platforming aspect of the game. Level designers should be focusing more on the "wall" item, and get used to what you can accomplish from that level. Use bonds as a method of enhancement, not a focus of design.

A few other folks have stumbled upon some unique designs that speak to the essence of the game - Ryan Madsen for example, and a few others. I can't link to them now, as these changes have essentially ruined their designs. I never claimed to be an expert level designer, though, and I hope my level can inspire others to create even better ones.

I am a very happy guy right now.

Walking Away

2009-07-17T04:35:00.000-07:00

Today I learned to walk away from a feature that was bugging me.

Stupid features.

First of all, updates have been slow in the last month because:

There is a plethora of sunshine and nice weather
SimCity4 got reinstalled on my computer
The Secret Of Monkey Island: Special Edition came out on Steam
ArmA2 came out, which is wicked fun (helicopters!) and has a scripting language (map editing!) so I've been getting my code fix through there

But above all of those, it's mostly been because this one particular feature had been really nagging at me. It's simple on the surface: Whichever way gravity points, direct that to be "down" on the Protonaut game screen.

As I chugged away at it, I started running into more and more problems. Lining the camera up with the player, keeping the player himself oriented correctly, orienting the player's bounding boxes, adjusting all the in-game vectors (throwing TNT "up" isn't so easy any more, and all the movement keys need re-working).

It was getting more and more difficult, and the more I dug at it the more often small "gotchas" would spring up. It really started to get on my nerves, and I was having a lot of trouble staying focused on the whole project because of it.

Tonight as I lay in bed around 1AM, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I decided to get up and do something about it. I spent an hour or two looking at all the code, taking stock of all the work - and then took a step back and said, "wait a minute."

"Is this feature even any good? Will it improve gameplay at all?"

I couldn't wrangle a "yes" out of that. It's a feature that's kind of neat on a technology scale, but as many things as it would make "cool", it would make other things impossible. For example, a few people have made levels where you are "on a train" that is colliding with the wall at a rapid speed. I don't have any moving parts in the game though - the movement is simply the gravity vector pointing a little more sideways than is normal, and the "train" is actually just "falling" downhill. If I rotate the screen to match gravity - it ruins the illusion and makes the control mechanism (hopping around on the train while it moves) impossible.

I was thinking I'd eventually have switches in-game, that would allow you to rotate gravity at will. Again, kind of neat - but I don't think it really fits this game too well.

So I walked away from the feature. I gave it two big middle fingers as I reverted back to an earlier fork.

In the hour since that reversion, I made a dozen changes and added some new features, uploaded a new version to the site, and made a few blog/forum posts about it.

I've gotten more done in the last hour than I have in the last month.

Anyway, build 24 is live on the Protonaut site if you want to check it out. New stuff in a nutshell:

The level editor now has cursors that indicate the current drawing mode.
TNT has been pretty much transformed into something not-TNT-like. It still asplodes, but with hardly enough force to move an ant. I might make them simply "fade out" eventually instead of exploding. It detonates after 5 seconds.
Nitrogen (as everyone knows) is unstable and will explode upon touch (in the fictitional microbial world of Protonaut, based on authentic Xiuuzn Universe Physics and Chemistry). I think this might be a big key to more-fun-gameplay, as it adds a direct-death challenge to the player.
Nitrogen still has to be collected/destroyed, though, so just hopping over them all won't work...
But "TNT" (or whatever it is now) can set off the Nitrogen for you. :) Hucking things around is now a required game mechanic! (if there is nitrogen in a given level, that is)
Some display glitches resolved, level name now appears, and included some network error catching for level loading.

Still Working!

2009-07-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Nope, the project isn't dying. Just having some technical problems on the code end.

For the last week I've been off-and-on struggling with how to best handle the "camera" of the game. Some (currently unpublished) changes to the gameplay have made some more dramatic alterations to the camera a requirement - I'm struggling with both selecting the optimal strategy, and executing it.

Once I settle on something it'll roll out fast enough.

It looks like I'll be attending GDC Austin in September! Colin got a speaking gig at the Indie Games Track which is really cool. There's a strong Fantastic Contraption following out there so I'm going to see about having a quick meet and greet or something.

Jumpin' Aluminum!

2009-06-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

Not many updates in the last week - I heard the game CitiesXL entered a closed beta and it got me all excited for city building. I rooted out an old copy of SimCity 4 and have been playing it to bits.

I'm also starting to work on my newer, faster laptop - so transferring everything over to it was a bit of a hassle. There's been some updates to the game though, and I'm up to Build 23 now. Check it out at the Protonaut website. I detailed everything in a forum post, but the big bullet points:

Realized I had been making aluminum boxes half the size they appeared as. They ended up being smaller than the box2D minima and were behaving erratically and were hard to stand on. People should find aluminum is now much more stable.
Pause-time is back! Tap space to freeze the world, and space again to unfreeze it. I think eventually there will be an transition animation on your character and you won't be able to control him in during it, and it might be toggled by an in-game object instead of the spacebar - giving the level creator some level of control. I'll see how it plays out. (Yes, this means slow motion is no longer available)
Jump height is now controllable - the longer you hold down the jump key the higher you go.
Wall jumping is in. If you are against a wall while in the air you can jump away from it (but you can only alternate walls - no jumping repeatedly off of one wall)
Version number now shows on the front page so you can be sure you have the latest copy. This one should say "Alpha b23" in the corner. If it doesn't, your browser is caching an old copy!
A bunch of small level-editor issues resolved.

Having Fun with Protonaut

2009-06-17T10:58:00.000-07:00

It has been a few days - all the changes seemed so minor over the last while I couldn't bring myself to mention them on the blog. But as a whole they've started to become their own beast. I didn't even mention Build 19, so here are the biggest bullet points for 19 and 20 (I logged everything in excruciating detail back in the this post and this post) on the Protonaut Site).

* Aluminum is now square. All metals will probably end up being square..
* Pressing "R" while testing a level from the editor will reset the test level instead of the previously loaded level
* New death, running, idle, and midair animations for the character
* Added a healthbar for gameplay. It works - trust me - it just taught me that I have to rewrite my damage code. :/

* Addition of some chunky bits of art floating around to help give a microscopic field impression.

* New level load/save animated boxes.

* You no longer take damage from terrain. That means being flung against walls by explosives no longer hurts you; feel free to rocket-jump!
* The player no longer physically interacts with the capturable elements (no more "bouncing" off of things as you capture them)
* Fixed the off-center zooming bug that's been driving me CRAZY for weeks now :D

It seems that the art and the UI gets closer and closer to perfection every day, which feels a bit strange since the gameplay isn't perfect yet. Isn't UI supposed to come later?

Oh well, having fun, I guess that's all that matters. :)

Greg made a summary post for protonaut over on his blog too.

Protonaut adds animated menus

2009-06-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Build 18 just went live on the Protonaut site, and it includes a discussion forum for the game. I'll put all the nitty-gritty changelog details in there from now on, and just summarize here. :)

The biggest change in this one is a graphical overhaul, animating all the menus to pop in/out on the screen. It's subtle, but I think it adds a lot of flash and flair to the game. I really like it.
A lot of statistics tracking events have been rewritten and the game/level/user stats will probably reset in the future. Since we haven't finalized the gameplay mechanic yet, I'm betting most of the ratings will be irrelevant upon release anyway.
Our beta-fan support is really great. Around 350 levels and approximately 1000 plays!

It's been a stream of constant work for the last few days - I still found time to chill out and socialize, but usually when I wake up Greg has a nice pile of work for me and before I go to bed he refills my inbox.

Not that I'm complaining - it feels like the project is picking up momentum. It's like I can see the finish line just cresting on the horizon!

DYN-O-MITE!

2009-06-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

I've been working pretty solidly this week on interface stuff, and sure things look slick - but the gameplay hasn't changed too much. This latest update fixes that - check it out at the Protonaut website.

There is now an indestructable "Aluminum" element. This should make level design a bit more interesting.
I made the Aluminum joints "stiff" so they didn't rotate - unfortunately the physics engine didn't handle it too well. I might revisit it later, but I think it'll do as-is.
Victory and Gameover screens have "Next/Previous/Retry" buttons on them.
You can now set your levels to be publicly visible or not in the editor save dialogue. This (along with the lock-edit button) aren't editable at this time but will be in the future. (Public visisbility doesn't affect the DB view yet, but will soon)
I now have a basic selection of levels in the level selection menu. They don't exactly speak volumes about the game, and may not be good choices at all. I just grabbed the top rated levels as of this writing and stuck em in there. As the game evolves I'll slowly figure out a nice level set.
A level tester is now in place - no need to save dozens of level iterations just to test it out!
The game now tracks two independant games - the play area and the editing area. You can swap between them freely.

And of course the big one...

DYN-O-MITE. No idea if this will stick in the game forever, but you can press "SHIFT" to toss a stick of dynomite, which will auto-detonate after 60 seconds. "E" will detonate them all early. Note that more than 1 stick of dynomite can cause.. irregular results. It's fairly weak but I'm thinking eventually you'll be able to "collect" things with it.

I'm attending a few events this weekend so it looks like it might be a relatively slow one for the game. Enjoy build 17!

More for the Menu

2009-06-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

Danged menus take an annoying large amount of my time.

Fixed an introduced bug where security rights were always being rejected (resulted in victory counters not increasing on the DB)
Added an animated dialogue box to tell you what's up (incorrect password, logged in, etc.)
Logout button
Checkboxes now have the correct graphics
Level editing lock now works.
Gameplay change: You now only need to collect gasses to beat a level. Solids will disintegrate upon touch, and metals are indestructable. They each have a unique visual style to help you along.
You aren't allowed to save levels if there are no goal objects (gaseous) in the scene.
Disintegrating/Collected elements now have an animation and sound effect.

I've nearly tapped out what I can do in terms of menu design, which has me really happy! There's no metal objects in the game yet (coming soon) but the functionality is all there. I think, once they make it in, it'll be time for me to sit down and do some good example levels and stick them into the level picker.

Since I have some spare time on my hands - I think I'll start work on the web-based level browser. Wew!

Ratings Live

2009-06-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

I hardly moved today!

I sat in my chair coding almost the entire day, start to end. It probably has something to do with being hung over.

Instead of introducing any new gameplay ideas I really want to work on nailing this interface and getting it out of the way.

Login and Signup menus now work properly (logout button coming soon)
Swap Controls toggle now works (in options menu)
Password change now works
"Next Level" takes you to the next incremental level number (even if it doesn't exist)
"Retry" button on gameOver screen works now
Rating buttons on the gameOver screen work now! You can only rate each level once (despite the buttons being there always...), and the rating not only reflects on the level, but on the level creator as well.
Implented security measures - valid username and password have to exist for all database transactions
Death graphic should now line up with the player graphics properly.
When dead you can't move and collect balls anymore. :3

I've got such a huge heap of data on levels, users, ratings, and votes now that I can start thinking about a level-browsing website. Should be interesting!

In bigger news: the game is now hosted on it's own website! Welcome one, welcome all, to PROTONAUT.net! (.org also works)

The latest build (now #15) is always live on this site and I'll be phasing all the older links from the previous blog posts over to the new domain over the next few days.

Now then.. it's 2AM.. time to get some sleep.

Original Title

2009-06-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

The latest build, #14, is looking a little chaotic. Greg drew up a bunch of wonderful art assets, but a lot of them had a tiny problem here or a tiny change needed there, so there's a bunch of things I haven't done yet but look functional, are half implemented, or are just plain buggy.

Things like the User Editing menu, the Level Selection menu, the Lock Editing button in the level editor...

I could work around the issues, but I'd rather leave them hanging like this until I get the new art assets, which won't be long at all. I'd rather just wait and do it right, than build some workarounds I'll just have torn apart by tomorrow anyway.

In this issue:

Victory and GameOver screens (the rating/next/retry buttons don't work yet)
Gravity Selector now works in the Level Editor (use keyboard shortcuts for fine control)
New wall art - looking for feedback on this!
New visible (if misplaced) mute icon shows status properly
A bunch of minor updates to visual elements and menus
Fixed death animation/sound

UI Progress

2009-06-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Been working long and hard the last two days. There's been many intermediate builds, but this is officially enough work to warrant a new numeral. Welcome, Build 13!

You are now signed in as the user "Anonymous" by default. He's a poor chump and isn't registered.
Unregistered users can't use the level editor.
You can now sign up for an account - anyone who signs up during the beta period is "registered"
Log into your account once signed up (to login, don't type an email address). Sign-in information is stored in a cookie.
Lost password doesn't actually send an email yet, but the UI and DB functionality is all in place.
The login fields will disappear on confirmation eventually, but until I get a status/response window up and running I just overwrite some text fields.
Press-and-hold spacebar is once again the word of the day instead of press-to-toggle (for slow-time)
I and O are two new zoom in and out buttons, to aid those that don't have a working mousewheel for zoom.
Level views and victories are recorded in the database now, to aid in determining difficulty and/or quality factor of the level.
I've added a back-end to receive level ratings.
Levels are now saved and credited to the user who created them (now that you must login to edit). Any levels saved before Level #186 remain uncredited, but can be manually adjusted if you feel it's important - drop me a line.
Levels record the originating level # to the database to help let people know if a level has been "copied" from another.
Levels have an "edit locking" flag to prevent others from editing it (no UI for this yet)
Many updates to the Editor UI and help menus.
New Gravity-Selector tool doesn't actually work yet, but it looks cool!
New death animation and sound effect. It's a little borked in this release but at least it exists!
Users themselves now have a ranking that is calculated as an aggregate of all their level ranking scores (again no UI for this yet)
A bunch of database optimizations and back-end work.

I feel like a steam-roller today, just plowing over issue after issue. It feels really good.

Bug: Destroyed

2009-06-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

Another entire weekend devoted to a single bug! I thought it was a seperate hideous bug from last time, but it was in fact the same bug in a different disguise.

After some help with the Box2D Community I was able to trace it down to a bug in the engine - and upgrading to the latest SVN (unstable) version fixed everything. There have been no intentional bug-fixing code put into place, but it appears it's all better now.

The really good news is my stupid hatred shunt-code I put in a few days ago is overwritten and no longer necessary. Hooray!

So now I have an incremental update, build 11, that just fixes the "flying around" glitch. :)

The FC community has been having some fun - there's now around 110 levels generated, and I've only made half. :) Several people are getting really excited about the gameplay, which is making me excited in turn. Whee!

Evil Birds

2009-06-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

So I woke up ultra early this morning, despite a notsogood sleep, because...

Stupid goddamn birds. Squawking and caw-ing outside my window. Arrgh!

So instead I made a few small updates, bringing me up to Build 9:

Element size is now static
Drawing bonds now snaps-to the destination and changes color to indicate a fit
Viewport auto-zooms to the player character at what I think might end up being the default view size. Have to fix the zoom orientation still though.. it's a bit off.
Made bonds connect to the outside of the elements, not the inside. This helps them freely spin a bit when falling apart (and reduces collisions, increasing performance)
I've made quite a few test levels now, and I keep making the default level my latest one. The current one is pretty hard to beat, yet simple!
Several fixes to the editor.

Sloooow Moooo

2009-06-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

That's right, Slow Moo!

I've just uploaded Build #7, which is just a slight modification from the blog post just a few hours back.

This time I've removed pausing of time - now you can just hold down spacebar and it'll slow down to 25% normal speed. You can play the entire game in slowmo if you'd like.

The object is still the same: Collect all the balls without dying! Every time you are clubbed by terrain it reduces your health accordingly (if the weight of an entire structure crushes you, you die in one hit. If you just get nicked by a single falling rod, it's less catastrophic). I really should put a health indicator on there or something.

Finally, Gameplay Beta

2009-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

And here is something I've been waiting a while to do: A gameplay beta!

No idea if this will end up being the fun times, but here is the changes done to build 6:

Removed your exploding ability
Normalized jumping to a lower height
Goal: Collect all the orbs
You will die if you experience significant crushing damage

Have at it!

I've Surgically Removed My Stomach

2009-06-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

Forgive me, Agnostic-friendly deity, for I have sined.

I've made a complete and utter hack in the Box2D engine to workaround the problem I had. See - the problem is - there is an internal counter in the Box2D engine. I have no idea what it's for and it doesn't appear to do anything other than count things. If this number goes below 0, it crashes the engine.

So ... I shunted in a nice little "if x < x =" 0">

Anyway, after two weeks of moving almost nowhere I felt the need to violate my code in this way in the name of progress. I've spoken with a few folks in the Box2D community; hopefully it'll be resolved at some point, but I just can't wait any longer (or figure it out myself. :/)

So here it is - what you've been missing - Build 5:

The gameplay hasn't changed too much but the interface has been given a complete overhaul, mostly thanks to Greg for all the artwork. Some highlights:

The game is now 16:9 (800x450)
New art for everything, including awesome-looking animated bits on things (and a very lively title screen!)
New menu icons that are persistant on the top right for ease of switching between modes
New level-editing interface with actual easy-to-use icon selection

A lot of other things have changed on the back end, but it's not fun talking about (or hearing about) that kind of stuff. ;) Some things that are yet to be decided:

What the player character will look like
How the player character will control
What the goal of the game is

But it's largely there - I kind of mused today that this is a game where you create a Fantastic Contraption and then have a player blow it to smithereens.

Critical Error

2009-06-03T11:57:00.001-07:00

I'm still working on the game. I've run into a critical crashing bug in the Box2D engine - and it's one of those ones that, if unsolved, it ruins the entire premise of the game. I can't put it off and work on it later, it's going to have to be resolved before I can move on.

I'm working with some folks in the Box2D community to figure out where the problem is, hopefully it'll be repaired soon enough.

Protonaut Progress

2009-05-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Greg posted a few things around town and got my name onto Offworld. Awesome. Here's a link to the article.

And here's a preview of the latest game art:

Since my last update I haven't done a whole ton of work. I had an entire week of insomnia and subsequently got hooked on the old game Mass Effect. I ended up beating it - I have to say my complaints about it are exactly the same as my complaints about Knights of the Old Republic. If you play a non-aggressive character, you get put into forced fighting situations that suddenly become very difficult.

At least they don't make you fight the final boss alone.

Anyway, I've done some updates to (working titles) Protonaut / Chemistry; here are my thoughts on the latest:

Spacebar now triggers the "pause time" effect. I took a while to get it looking just right - time slows down and speeds up before the pausing takes effect. It's actually quite complex - I have to store force vectors and turn objects into "static scenery" on the fly, which causes some hard locks in certain situations. I think I squashed all those bugs, and I think this resultant effect looks wicked cool.

Imagine a cool "fwwoooosh" sound effect as the time is adjusting, and maybe a matching animation to explain the jerkiness of the character while it happens. It'll get there eventually.
The "platforming" controls seem a lot more advanced;
I'm actually adjusting the friction of the player object on the fly - when you are in the air, your friction is zero, so you slide down walls quickly. When you are holding down movement keys, your friction is halved. When at a standstill, your friction ramps up to 95%. This gives your character a bit of a natural deceleration feel, but is tuned a bit extreme to keep it responsive for us humans playing it.
Your motion is now capped to a specific top speed. You can always move faster than that speed through natural causes (falling, being pushed by flying objects, etc.) but you can't get over a certain speed on your own momentum.
You now have some air control - 25% of your regular force. Seemed like a nice number.
Jumping could still use some work - jumping height/force isn't static and it can be frustrating not knowing how high you will go. You can also end up jumping very very fast upwards if you get a slope that's just right...
Friction makes running up shallow slopes difficult. I'll have to toy with the values a bit more to make that work better.

Right now Greg is focusing on getting some interface art up and running, so the Level Editor is actually useable instead of a secret set of keys only I know about. I am proud to say, though, that the level editor is fully operational and I haven't touched my level XML in ages.

That's the level editor as it is now. It's functional enough - it has copying and resizing abilities and full creation tools. It makes it a breeze to make things now (I still shudder when I think of hardcoding all these objects in). I can't wait to see what Greg turns it into.

And I'm really starting to like the name Protonaut...

Mid-Mortem: Space Squid

2009-05-19T13:25:00.000-07:00

Mid-Mortem time!

I don't like using the term post-mortem with things are still going on, but I thought I'd talk about April's game-of-the-month, Space Squid.

As this is my first foray into the business that is Flash game development, I wanted to get a nice scientific baseline sample for what kind of interest self-generates around a game.

I wanted to use a few tools and just let it stew for a while and see what happens.

So here's exactly what I did:

Throughout April: Blogged about the game, right here. I also posted the occasional link to IRC chatrooms and IMs to get some feedback from trusted sources. The occasional twitter and facebook status update.
April 18th: Posted the game to FlashGameLicense.com, clearly marked as "under construction and unfinished" in several places. I decided to post it early - just in case a publisher saw it and said "Hey, turn it into a SpacePenis and you have a deal!" - and I'd still have time to make some development changes before my May 1st deadline.
May 1st: Finalized the game and marked it "Complete" on FGL; filled in a game submission form at AddictingGames.com, and emailed all my favorite 10 indie-related blogs announcing the release in a very low-key way (and even offered an open invitation for an interview about rapid prototyping, indie development, and all that other nice stuff). I also made a forum post at The Independant Gaming Source (TIG).
May 2nd: Attempted to upload the game to GameJacket, Whirled, and Kongregate, but failed - GJ does not support games written in Flex at this time, and Whirled/Kongregate had some sort of malfunction once uploaded. Probably something like direct stage references; surely fixable if I put more time into it.
May 3rd: Submitted game to JayIsGames as a review request. They did such a great service for Fantastic Contraption I wanted them to have first stab at it.

That is all. I did not approach any publishers, I did not email-blast everyone in my extended family, I didn't lift a single finger to promote my game other than the above half-hearted effort. I wasn't trying to fail - I was just trying to see what kind of self-support the game would get just existing on it's own.

Here are the results of the above work, as of today (May 19th):

Three friends twittered about SpaceSquid.

Let's take a look at what went wrong, shall we?

The first and biggest problem I saw was a complex issue: A misunderstanding I had about how FlashGameLicense worked, a misunderstanding from their users about how it could be worked, and probably a poor design choice in the development of the FGL site. You see, as soon as you post a game as "visible" to the FGL-browsing publishers, it goes right to the top of their list as "fresh" and "new." It does not take into consideration the "incomplete" flag you set on the game, nor does it bump you to the top of the list once you do finish the product.

So what happened was I received 8 pageviews from publishers when the game was only half-done and the graphics largely placeholder. Here's a comparison: Final Build vs. The Build They Saw. It kinda makes me shiver that my biggest opportunities may have been seeing that fateful build.

I built a lot of data-mining ability into the game, with Google Analytics tracking level-loads and the game itself logging activity. Of those 8 pageviews from publishers - which seems to me to be an embarrasingly small number to start with - only one ever clicked "Play Now" and they closed the window after about 20 seconds. The other 7 never made it past the menu - and considering the state it was in at the time, that is probably excusable.

It has now been 19 days since the game was marked as finalized on FGL. The game has since been viewed twice by publishers, and "Play Now" was never clicked. Of the 10 total views, only one was from a username I recognized - AddictingGames.

On top of that, JayIsGames decided not to review the game (or the review request was lost in the trash - though I did speak to Jay directly about the game and he seemed excited to get to it). My AddictingGames.com submission form likewise did not produce any further communciation. The few people who did played the game enjoyed it, but not at length, and didn't seem to particularly pass it on.

Suffice to say, the game cannot support itself. This is completely counterpoint to the success that Fantastic Contraption enjoyed, and I can't altogether say that I am surprised. Lessons learned:

FlashGameLicense does not have many Publishers that use their service;
FlashGameLicense punishes you for posting your game before release;
The game must suck more than I thought it did, and I thought pretty lowly of it to start with.

Well, even a piece of crap can sell if it has enough marketing behind it. And the power of

marketing is now within reach to humble folk like myself, thanks to the power of the internets. I guess I'll have to give it a try and see if I can't turn 3 twitter posts into a financial success.

Yes, that wlil be me sitting there casually high-fiving someone over my bluescreened laptop with a briefcase so stuffed full of money it's falling out of the sides. Because that's how I roll.

Anyway, don't want to make a big to-do about it all - I have a new game in the works and I'm making a much bigger effort towards it than I did with SpaceSquid. Maybe that will be my golden goose.

Er, wait, a golden-egg laying goose. A golden goose wouldn't work at all, it can't even float proper! Stupid goose.

The Platformer

2009-05-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

OK, here's something I really hate. Coding how a player moves.

It turns out there's a lot of intricate guesswork going on behind the scenes of most platformers. For instance, did you know that many platformers change the amount of friction exerted on the player body depending on the current action?

Or that bodies accelerate nonlinearly?

There's a million factors involved and they're all fairly easy to code - but there's no easy math behind it; no science. I'm just going to have to continuously pull numbers out of a hat until I find something that feels right. It's quite frustrating - why can't it be as easy as just running and jumping?

My latest upload (public build #2) disabled movement while you're in the air. This is how I want the game to be, and this is exactly how to make it un-fun, which I guess means my opinion isn't worth anything in this case.

I haven't pulled any of the levers or pushed any buttons yet when it comes to acceleration or friction. The game obviously has a sluggish feel to it here but it take shape over time; patience!

The buid does, however, feature some of Greg's artwork actually applied to the assets in-game. I have to say it turned my game from looking hideous to awesome in a single build. I wouldn't take it as anything near final though - just yesterday we took the game in an entirely new direction (artistically) and the next build I post here will likely be altogether different.

(I think I'll post with more images from now on, because - let's face it - a blog post without pictures is like a whore without makeup)

I've Got Chemistry

2009-05-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

So I have two games I'm simultaneously making right now.

A pseudo-educational platformer where you learn about chemical constructs;
And a building-destroying platformer where you pause time.

They're both running on the same engine and is nearly a simple reskin between the two. I'm pretty excited to release both of them together and see what performs better. (but we all know what my initial plans turn out to be)

Hey, speaking of re-skinning - I'm collaborating with Greg Wohlwend on this project. He's giving a lot of input and doing the artistic work. You can see my sample level here (first released build of the not-yet-named chemical game) and you can see Greg's version here. Haha Greg, Mine is playable. :P

I've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on the engine - I've got a level editor up (that is neigh unusable for anyone but me because of the plethora of hidden function keys) and a basic shell of gameplay. It's coming together quite nicely.

The playable level when you click the link above is the chemical formula for Caffeine. I spent all night working on it. :)

The Game Commences

2009-05-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

I spent nearly the entire day today but I finally did it.

XML saves. XML loads. It all stores in a mySQL database. Check out this 150KB level:

http://www.andymoore.ca/satchel/?levelId=20

The level editor is functional, but only in the most basest of senses. You can make things; I recommend turning off gravity while you do so. Be sure to read the instruction screens.

Once I get things working a bit more robustly (resizing and rotating objects, object selection, etc.) I'll do up a proper sample level and we'll have a feel for what gameplay should be.

The only undocumented feature in this build is holding down shift will increase your explosive ability. Caps at about 20 seconds worth. :)

FrameWork Ends (For now)

2009-05-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

Argh, I'm getting quite frustrated trying to get XML recording going properly. I'm going to have to end up making a completely new custom XML class that uses only in-game previously-defined objects.

That is to say, I can't build a generic version that fits a framework concept at all.

With that said, I'm done work on my framework for a while! The last build I made was Number 5. I made the arena double-wide and turned on view focus by default; returned the pile of stoves; fixed up the zoom a bit more; and finally... Added a detonator. Just for kicks, press SHIFT to send out a shockwave. :)

I guess that means it's time to start focusing on my next game... Tentative titles: "Sachel Charge," "Time Bomb," and "Save the Day." No idea yet. Hm. What say a month for this one? Maybe 2 weeks? We'll see :)

Four small things

2009-05-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

Some things I fixed today:

Zooming now moves a bit more slowly and allows you to zoom all the way out
Fixed the "Jitter bug" that can happen on level load (also seen in Fantastic Contraption levels where the possible level size is maxed)
Semi-fixed the camera following the player object. It "leads" the player a tiny bit seeking the nearest wall - which wasn't my intention, but it seems to work out well for playability's sake. It will probably have to be fixed and smoothed at some point.
Added linear and rotational damping - very slight - to simulate atmosphere. I know it's a horrible atmospheric implementation but I'm not sure how else to do it.

I'm going to tackle level design this afternoon, I think. I'm going to start with a basic level editor - one that lets you draw rectangles, and save them to a DB. Should be interesting.

Progress?

2009-05-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

I've made some definite progress since May 1st!

I watched the entirety of Jeeves & Wooster for the first time. What a great show.
(Now working on the entirety of Black Adder for the first time)
Playing some OldSchool Civilization 4 with Aubrey during the evenings. Excellent fun.

Now that I'm coding pretty much full time, I'm finding I have a strange desire for routine. I'm not the type of guy that likes routine - far from it. I like variety and doing things at a whim. I don't like doing things for rote. But it feels like there's no structure in my life and I'm just kind of freewheeling - and it frequently ends with me just staring at blogs for hours each day.

To make matters worse, my physical condition has deteriorated rapidly in the last few months. Sitting in the same chair all day every day (Except to go to the pub) is really turning my body into a stiff-jointed blubberball. Not to say that I'm getting fat or anything - I'm still the pinacle of human development and women and men alike oggle me - I'm just losing any muscle I had and I'm farther from touching my toes than I have been in years. I haven't even gone to Aikido in ages (I sleep through the morning session and Aubrey works during the evening one).

So in an effort to be kinder to my body, and to put some structure in my life, I'm taking up a Morning Constitutional. I've always loved the term and I have a small (200ft?) mountain right across the street from me. Might as well go exploring, find all the nooks and crannies, and maybe do some ultra-lightweight bouldering. In any case, it's nice to get some fresh air.

I never thought that "walking" was a form of excercise. The body is tuned to walk well and it won't normally expend a lot of energy just moving about in this fashion. I walked to school around 1-2km every day each way as a kid, and I never thought anything of it. I hiked, I climbed, I biked, I kayaked... But last week I walked downtown and I was winded. Brought a small tear to my eye. I must fix this problem.

I'm also going to look into trying to drink 3 litres of water per day. When you mostly sit still and never leave the house I seem to have been getting by on about half a litre, and I don't particularly feel thirsty. Yesterday I choked down my first 3L alotment and it was actually a little difficult for me. Practice makes perfect!

But enough of me whining about my personal life!

But I've also made some progress on my framework. Again, nothing to really look at. I've included a few Box2D overrides (Boundary and Contact Listeners, for example) and added a "Keep camera focused on the player" mode. There's a scaling bug if you zoom in too far on the player but otherwise it works well (toggleable in case you want to visually explore of course).

I've also completely severed all ties from the display model (camera, handling, etc.) to the game world. For some stupid reason I did all the Box2D instantiation and world setup in the same class. That's quite fixed now, and it will open the door to a new cool feature I'll be blogging about in the coming week.

I spent the entire morning today focused on solving an XML importing bug, but it turns out it was just Flash caching a copy of Level3.xml it was supposed to import from my webserver. I'm very happy on one hand, as it proves once and for all that Flash will cache files such as my larger music files and sound effects. It makes me a little sad because I wasted so many hours on a simple "clear your cache" bug. I might want to look into a "clear cache" button or something somewhere. Not even sure if that's possible.

FrameWork Updates--

2009-05-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

Framework updates just aren't exciting. A lot of the work is back-end stuff you never see and as such is pretty dull. In an attempt to liven things up I added a lot of objects and started the game zero-g. That's kind of cool for 2 minutes. (Click here to give it a try - framework build 3)

Today I added a full-featured XML-to-Box2D importer, and a server communication library to pull the data from (either SQL via PHP or the direct XML files themselves).

My first semblance of a HUD is in place as well and you can see it loading the level and giving status reports on the connection. (If you have a speedy connection you'll probably only ever see "load complete", but trust me it gives you a percentage progress report if things are slow ;)

I still have to implement better error handling, though. If you have no net connection the game just dies horribly because it's relying on external server files in a few places.

Here is a sample of the XML file I used for this level (the stoves anyway). Depending on your browser you might just have to right click and "view source" to see how simple it is. Units are in meters/kg.

Next up is trying to figure out a way to generate new XML so that I can save it. Once that's in place I can start the mind-numbing process of building a basic level editor.

Framework V2

2009-05-07T00:17:00.001-07:00

Just finished adding some shine to my development framework. You can demo version 2 right here!

For those just joining us, this is just a basic shell of a game that incorporates many Box2D and interface elements. Features are:

Magic-number-free Box2D world generation. Just flag your SWF with the recommended dimensions and a scaling factor and the rest is done automagically.
Full camera controls, including zoom and pan, completely independant of the game world.
A Box2D Collision listener class with sample code for measuring load bearing
A GameMechanics class that adds objects, tracks health, and destroys objects when they get hurt (and can add "rubble" or "shrapnel" in doing so)
A GameWorld class that lets you play with gravity and other physical effects
A player character class that has its own keyboard hooks and graphics modelling, with examples on how to update graphics every tick to match the Box2D world
A menu system, including flippable instruction pages, a play now button, and a sound mute button. The menu pauses the simulation and pops up overtop of the game without ruining game state.
Full music/sound/volume/playback controls, including server-streaming MP3 capability
Cookie storage and tracking of user data (including mute status)
Pause button
Demonstration code for singleton classes
Craploads of comments so even Box2D/AS3 newbs can understand what's going on.

Unlike SpaceSquid, I'm trying really hard to get this code running quickly and done right. I'm hoping this framework will end up being the starting point for all of my future Box2D games, and as I learn new tricks I tack them on as modules for extensibility.

I still have some things to do - a server communication module and XML integration, a HUD module, and a few other odds and ends - but that shouldn't take too long, and it's in a very much usable state right now.

I'm still a bit posessive about all my hard work so I don't think I'll be giving it away just yet, but someday... Someday, I'll release the source and let the crowds go wild. I want to see more physics games and I think this is a good way to make it happen faster :)

Building a FrameWork

2009-05-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know if "FrameWork" is the right word, but I'm stealing it for my own personal use.

Towards the end of developing SpaceSquid, my poor programming was catching up with me. Writing code quickly != quick running code. I think I iterated through the entire world object list several times per tick...

Anyway, I wanted to sit down and actually write out a nice box of parts I could pull on to make Box2D games quickly and easily. Here's what I've come up with so far.

It's nothing to exciting, in and of itself, but the back end is cool. Some controls:

Mouse drag and drop to move the screen
Mousewheel for zoom
Keyboard arrows for moving the screen
Z/X to zoom In/Out
<> control the gravity.

The simulation doesn't really have much to it. The 4 objects that appear are representations; from left to right:

A cellphone (the minimum Box2D object size, 0.1m)
A person (6ft)
An office story (12ft)
A bus (the maximum Box2D object size, 10m)

For the time being I've given them all the density of water (1000 kg/m^2 [@ 4c]) and the gravity starts out at 9.81 m/s^2, so it's fairly realistic and should behave normally out the door.

To make things more interesting, however, I gave the 4 objects a restitution of 101%, so they actually gain energy anytime they hit something.

If you carefully tap the "<" key you can make it weightless and watch things drift around. Relaxing!

And thus it ends... And it begins again.

2009-05-02T00:25:00.000-07:00

Despite assurances from several different sources, not a single publishing soul has viewed my game since marking it 100% complete on FlashGameLicense.com. Perhaps I haven't given it long enough (24 hours! c'mooooon) but I'm losing hope fast. I won't give up on them completely until next Friday I think.

But that's OK - I sent out a dozen emails and posted the game to a bunch of websites. I've got at least one review in the pipeline and things will hopefully pick up over the next week.

While Space Squid slowly simmers away and attempts to make me a penny, I found myself staring whistfully at my laptop screen and remembering those heady times where it once displayed code. Yep, still got the programmer's itch.

I guess I'm officially announcing my second game! No idea for a timeline on this one (I'm going to take it slow for a few weeks at least, and I still have some Space Squid stuff to deal with) and I'm not positive on the name... I kinda like the feel of "Satchel Charge" but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I'll see what I think up. :)

Build #1 hasn't been made yet but I'll be sure to post as soon as it has.

SPACE SQUID GOES GOLD!

2009-04-30T21:54:00.001-07:00

aaaaaaand FINISHED!

What a ride this has been! I'm sure I'll post a retrospective or two as things progress with game distribution, but for now... It's time to take a break!

The last and final build of Space Squid will clock in as Build 48. Considering I only had 30 days to complete this project (starting from complete scratch! Never written a game before!) I'm pretty gosh-darned proud of that.

I put up a special credits page so those who deserve them get immortal props :) Check it out, there's some good links in there to some excellent people and some other great games.

Thanks to everyone who congratulated me via IM, eMail, and Twitter during the last few hours! It made the evening that much more stressful. ;)

I'll be contacting a few media places for reviews, interviews, and submitting my game to a bunch of websites tomorrow. We'll see where that takes us!

Here are the laetst, last-minute changes:

Removed the level-20 victory message
Changed the ink bar from red to black, and moved the bar up paralell to the word
Updated the scoring text to indicate the +5000 point bonus for beating a level without restarting
Made the level number reset to Level 1 any time you exit to the menu
Added a credits page (that looks like ass. Sorry Aubrey :( )
Made the game ping Google Analytics every time a level is started - will help differentiate generic or passing-through site traffic with legitimate game players.

Play the game on the official Space Squid Website!

Down to the Buzzer, Space Squid!

2009-04-30T19:44:00.000-07:00

Wew! 4 hours to go!

A very special thanks goes out to Ryan Madsen in this update. I've always wanted to have ink in the game, but could never find a decent mechanic for it to work out. Ryan thought one up on a whim and by golly it works.

Since I already had some art assets for ink in the game, it was fairly quick to prototype and test, and it's been uploaded in the new, shiny, Build 47. I really shouldn't be making sweeping changes like this so close to the deadline, but I really really really wanted ink in the game.

There will likely be just one more update to the game before release at midnight tonight with some quick bugfixes (if I find any). Here's what I've got so far in Build 47:

Ink now jets out of you when you hit the boost button... In fact, I renamed all references from "Boost" to "Ink."
The ink can capture stars. This adds a whole new layer of strategy to the game. Capturing stars this way will net you +500 points.
You still get +500 points for capturing stars with a full ink meter, so whether you use it or not shouldn't affect your score too much (directly). However, if used wisely, it can really decrease your time!
The ink persists in the game world for 5 seconds only - if it's underwater. If above water it doesn't start decaying yet.
You gain a 5000 point bonus for beating the levels in sequence without having to restart. Those who received this bonus are shown in Bold on the high score table.
The high score table was manually updated so those who didn't receive this bonus earlier now have it (and I lost my #1 ranking on several levels :( )

So now you can launch ink (use boost) in the air... Pros and cons there that add strategy to the game: You can use boost underwater, and get ink PLUS speed boost... Or you can use your boost in the air, and you only get ink... but the ink flies further and stays alive longer. A nice tradeoff!

Anyway... Almost there! Midnight, here I come!

12 Hours To Go - Score Revisions?

2009-04-30T12:31:00.001-07:00

I've got 12 hours left in my development cycle and I'm seriously considering switching one of the score mechanics. I need some input on this one! Hopefully I'll get a few responses from people in the time I have left.

When a score is submitted to my HighScore Database, it sends along with it a "legit" flag (also known as "Champ"). This flag is set "true" if you have not died/restarted/skipped levels since beating level 1, "false" if otherwise.

I put in this distinction as I wanted people to know if someone hammered away on a level, twenty times in a row, just getting lucky and nabbing the high score -- or if they "legitimately" played through the game and got those high scores due to skill.

This distinction is currently marked by the bolding of someone's name on the high score table. Here is an example of what I mean:

This high score table indicates that not only am I, weasel, in first place - but I attained first place on a single attempt through, utilizing my great skill and nothing more. You can further infer that both Pacifist (#2) and Hap! (#4) skipped directly to this level and attempted to beat my score that way, and failed (though it could also possibly mean they just died once somewhere along the way). Either way, this shows that my skill is to be celebrated even more!

With some discussion and thought it has occured to me that, eventually, the #1 spot on all high scores will no longer be bolded. The awe and aura of having a bolded name is good in and of itself, but it will not prevent human nature from just pummeling the digits column and attempting to elevate their score, regardless.

It is therefore my prediction that with this current layout, all worlds will end up having their high score tables dominated by scores flagged as 'non-legit'.

Here is my proposed solution: Give each user +5000 points for completing a level in a 'legit' fashion. This works out to be somewhere around a 25% boost to the average score, and less than a 10% boost for those pro-players in my current high score tables. It is still conceivable that the high score can be held by a non-legit holder, but doing things 'the right way' will give you a significant leg-up.

Thoughts?

What to do, Space Squid boo?

2009-04-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

As of this post..

T MINUS 33 HOURS!

As of midnight tomorrow I'll be done, so that I can get a good night's sleep and enjoy my Friday. If you have any gripes or suggestions, this is the time to submit them!

I'm finding it increasingly hard to work on the game because there simply isn't much more I can do with it. It's really come together nicely. Check out Build 46 for example - almost nothing much changed!

There's now a mute button on the Main Menu (that remembers your preference in a cookie)
Added an obscure, tiny donate button on the bottom left of the Official Space Squid Webpage. I might have to make this link more prominent.
One person reported an odd gamestopper bug - seemingly occurs at random, but the squid freezes in midair. I've not been able to reproduce on this end but I made some code changes as a precaution (I think it might have to do with an unhandled IOError event when streaming music).
Fixed a crash bug: If the ping to the high score server went slower than you restarting the level, the game would hang
Fixed a crash bug: If the ping to the high score server went faster than a single game tick the game would hang.
Made the date on the high score table actually based on Pacific time instead of Eastern time (why isn't it called Atlantic time?)

I'm also proud to say that all my webpages are STRICT-validated thanks to Aubreys hard work on my webpage. Hooray for conforming to web standards!

And yes, by saying the page conforms with web standards, I'm raising my middle finger to IE 6. Want to make something of it?

MXMLC Ruins FileSizes

2009-04-29T01:32:00.001-07:00

While working on Build 45 today I noticed something - that my file size for the project had almost hit 200KB.

That's a lot of KB. And considering a pretty big chunk of the population in the US is still on Dialup, it's an unacceptably large number of KBs. It was taking 2-5 seconds to load on my broadband connection; I shudder to think how many people would scare away from a slower network!

I took a look back through the history of the game, and took a look at how the filesize grew with time.

Build 1 was 2KB. This was built in Flash directly, not in the current framework I am using now.
Build 2 was 54KB. This was my first setup in my actual dev environment, with all the physics libraries and various plugins I needed. I call this my baseline - this is as small as my code will get. A lot of this - probably 45KB of it - is the Flex Framework.
Build 11 was still 54KB.
Build 12 was 90KB. You may notice very little difference between build 11 and 12; indeed, the difference is absolutely miniscule in terms of code or assets. The extra 40KB in weight is entirely from debugging statements.
Build 26 broke 100KB for the first time (109KB to be precise). It's not surprising either - it's the first build that includes graphics (albeit basic graphics).
As I added more and more art assets, the game ballooned to 158KB by Build 38. By this time the game is really starting to look like the final product, and some of the art assets are still in place in the game today.
Build 39 took the cake for the largest single asset size jump - hopping from 158KB to 176KB just for the new menu components.
Finally, build 44 weighed in at 182KB.

Build 45 was nearing 190KB when I first compiled it early this morning. That's when I noticed it, and started trying to slim it down:

I had been lazy and was importing files I didn't need in my source code. By removing these, I slimmed my code down to 169KB - that's 21KB saved just by commenting out a few lines!
I turned off debugging - Which got me 30KB back. 139KB!
Finally, I turned on compiler optimization, which apparantly swung me right down to 129KB - which is my latest upload to the server, and the version you are playing right now.

I'm OK with having 70KB worth of art. Mentally subtracting that from my total I'm left with that oh-so-familiar 59Kb - right where I started.

After much Googling this evening it turns out that this is the price I pay for using the Flex SDK instead of the proper Flash IDE. The Flex development framework has a bunch of "features" it includes to help develop things in this pure-code environment wheras the proper, paid-version IDE is a bit more on-the-ball with what you actually need. Up until this point I had not seen any good reason for using the Flash IDE - but now I'm wondering if it's worth the 50KB penalty to stick with the Flex SDK and MXMLC.

I didn't wonder too long, though. The answer is Yes. :) Big bloatware notepads-on-steroids is not what this industry needs! rawr!

There are a few other ways I can reduce filesizes - but to be honest, it's beyond me. I'm not even sure if I can make the suggested changes to this particular project. But let it be known, that there are mythic stories floating about the ether; proclaiming in a dream-like voice that a programmer somewhere... Somewhere far, far away... Has compiled a Flex SDK application in under 10KB.

I guess I have something to dream about at night while comfortably nuzzling my pillow with a smile on my face.

(For comparison; Colin Northway used the Flex SDK to build Fantastic Contraption, and it is 274KB - so I guess I should stop bitching. :) )

Edit: None of the sizes quoted above include audio assets, which are dynamically streamed from the server. For the curious, I have 63KB in sound effects and 2.25MB in music.

Minor Update: Security and High Scores

2009-04-28T20:58:00.001-07:00

I did a real quick update this evening - it's all backend stuff so I didn't increment the build number, it's still v45.

Thanks to Ben Fox for spotting HTML exploits in the PlayerName/WorldName fields. I had been focusing so hard on SQL exploit prevention I completely forgot. :)

There might be a hole in a place or two still on the site itself, but I'm fairly certain there's no more security holes in the application.

I finalized High Score display elements early this afternoon and as I write this Aubrey is doing me up some CSS to make it look pretty (should be uploaded shortly). One of the biggest features I added was Player Specific Stats. It's like a hockey card, except for a squid. :)

Polish Festival

2009-04-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

Mmm, Polish Sausages.

To avoid future ambiguities, Poland should start spelling with two Ls. "Pollish People Use Polish." Makes sense.. Poll -> Pollish...

I've been working on the big to-do list from my last post and I've gotten quite a bit done so far.

One of the things on the list was to make some new screenshots. That was a bit misleading; I actually need a 100x100 pixel "thumbnail" that encapsulates what the game is for easy browsing. Most flash games have this - an icon or a logo of some sort.

I really hate making these kinds of things - I'd rather people just play! But visual guides are handy and they sell well. Here's what I came up with:

Nice, simple, and to the point. Incorporates the Space Squid textual logo as well as the squid and the star, the two primary elements of the game. PLUS IT LOOKS OH SO CUTE, AWWWWWWW

Some other things I cleaned up in this latest update, build number 45:

Returned the main menu destruction and properly focused the game upon instanciation. I was even able to answer my own Stack Overflow question for this one.
Rewrote the main menu and all the instruction slides. Now it's more uniform and coherent.
Reworked the "Click for More" icon.
Fiddled with the colors of the fishtank - I'm not sure if I like this and might change it again.
I played with the yellow of the boost bar for around 20 minutes but I kept settling on the yellow again. I made the yellow bit slightly thinner just to say I made progress and left it at that.
Made sure the squid's cute little face is always the topmost component - no more obscuring his face with his arms. We wanna see that smile!
Made the first segment of his short arms a little thicker - they were narrower than the tips which made them look a little goofy.
Looked into the short arms "Drooping" - unfortunately I'm not going to be able to fix this by release date. I currently have buoyancy turned off for the arms - which means they just sag with gravity - but if I turn on buoyancy the swimming dynamic is completely thrown off for the rest of the squid. I'd have to rework all the weight and thrust values which will take me a long time. I figure it's a tiny detail - might as well let this one slide.
Changed the hud score display colors to a base blue. I really like how it looks this way! I don't know why I picked purple to start with...
Removed the border around the high score name input boxes and made them wider, and left-justified them so they don't act silly when you're typing away.
Turned off stats and rankings for "Anonymous," and replaced them with a sign urging people to sign in. It still records Anonymous scores and ranks them on the website though.
Replaced the story text with game mode description text. This will be more handy, and noone will read the story anyway.
It came to my attention that on any computer without the "Elements" font installed, the countdown timer and score displays were using Times New Roman. That's lame. I think I fixed that now though.
Made a new faded-yellow "Galactic Premonition" (preview star).
Made sure the EndGame boxes show up over top of everything else.

I'm going to spend a chunk of the rest of the day today working on the HighScore displays on the website, so those should be looking nicer and nicer as time goes on.

You can play Space Squid here!

I also realized that there is no real "industry" in Victoria and I don't know enough people to throw a launch party. So here's what it is: I'm going to the nearest pub, I'm going to eat calamari and get drunk. If anyone reading this wants to join me, drop me a line.

Never Enough Cartoons about Space Squid

2009-04-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

This one has been floating around the internets quite a bit recently, but it well descrbies the whole space squid phenomenon:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/there_are_never_enough_cartoon.php

7 Days, 6 Views

2009-04-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Space Squid has been sitting on FlashGameLicense.com for a week now, and it's been viewed by publishers 6 times.

And only one of them actually played the game - and they never beat (or lost) a level. I have no feedback and no other indication of any slight interest whatsoever. FGL even lists some viewing stats - two of the 6 visitors looked at my page for a total of 4 seconds.

One publisher - AddictingGames - viewed my game for 6 hours but never ended up clicking the play button. I think that's a telling tale - they just left the browser window open and FGL claims it as "interest." Very disappointing.

I'm really really happy I set up my own database so I could track what kind of gameplay exposure my potential buyers are seeing - because now I can see that FlashGameLicense might not be the be-all solution I hoped it would.

However, I'm not completely giving up on them. It might be because my game is listed (as of today) at "97% complete" - maybe some publishers only view 100% complete games? Maybe my thumbnail image isn't the best (it was from v.30 something), or maybe my description could use more marketing magic?

The primary turn-off point for Space Squid might be the Menu. It looks ugly and cluttered. The only thing I like about it is the title, and even then the red underline doesn't quite fit. And a bad impression right from the menu might turn some people right off.

So here's the plan for the last 4 days of this project:

Redesigning the menu from scratch with better readable fonts.
Make or find new vector keyboard icons - the current ones are crap.
Add spacebar to the controls list.
Take a suite of screenshots and work on a solid game description.
Return the destroy-menu code and implement the new focus code (stage.focus=this; - argh I wish I knew it was this simple! I think everyone that was trying to help me with the two-clicks-required-bug were overlooking the obvious and trying to think of what the larger problem was)
Redesign or recolor the cyan bounding box for the fishtank
Change the color of the boost bar - because yellow doesn't appear anywhere else in the game
Try a few color changes for the "Level/Score" display on the Hud.
Get stroke working on the countdown timer and score results so they better stand out from the background.
Fix the text input boxes on the main menu so they don't act and look retarded
"Anonymous" shouldn't get the score details in the victory/gameover boxes.
Put a border on the game so the squid doesn't fly off the screen and clip mysteriously
Finalize the highscore display and get it formatted nicely on the page
The victory/gameover boxes should appear on top of the obstacles and water, for clarity
Add descriptions for all the play modes (maybe popup?)
Make the website not scroll on a standard resolution such as my laptop
Shop the game around in a mass-email spam
Throw a launch party. Considering it's 4 days away that's probably not going to end up being too big. I really should plan it out better.

Ryan Madsen, who has been making several awesome suggestions for the game since I started writing about it here, just finished a Magic 8Ball responder for Twitter. If you ask a standard 8ball question he'll randomly pick it up and respond to you! Check him out:

http://twitter.com/8ball_

or his responses:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=@8ball_

(good for some random fun)

Squidlets

2009-04-27T01:36:00.000-07:00

Another late-night update brings us up to build 44 - nothing amazingly special this time. I figure as these last few days of April tick by the updates will become more and more inane :)

Play it on the fancy-new Official Space Squid website.

Sitelocking enabled; you won't be able to run the SWF on your local machine (or upload it to a shady site!)
After days of headaches I was finally able to fix the keyboard losing focus bug. It ended up being the "Play Now" button that was getting focus, and when I destroyed it on level creation (just trying to be tidy!) it destroyed the focus with it. I'm pretty sure this is not standard flash behaviour, but there you have it! My workaround was to make the PlayNow button invisible instead of removing it altogether.
Cookies! The game now remembers your name from site visit to site visit.
I would totally have a preloader in place - if only I were to put MochiAds in. The only working example I could find for a FlexSDK v3 preloader relies on it. :/ I'll find something eventually.

In unrelated news, I was rearranging furniture today and crushed a nerve in my back. For some reason sitting in this chair and typing on my laptop for a month isn't keeping my normally-ripped physique up to par.

While I waited for some drugs to take effect I took some time out to blow things up in Team Fortress 2 and followed it up with some Left 4 Dead. Ah, distractions.

I've downloaded Braid too but it hurts my head. I can see it's an amazing fun game and is awesome, but I don't really want to think right now. My brain is revving high enough as it is just getting this project done. I've shelved Braid for March sometime, when I can enjoy it properly. :)

Space Squid Sports a Shiny Site

2009-04-25T23:36:00.001-07:00

I have a super amazing build (number 43) and it totally would have blown your socks of if only Aubrey didn't launch the new website!

Check out the official Space Squid website here and bask in its glory. You can actually play the game ON THE PAGE!! wew!

The high score section of the site still needs a lot of work but the fundamentals are there for you to enjoy.

Hohum improvements to the game include:

Giving you score stats inside the GameOver/Victory box at the end of each round. I think this actually adds a lot of depth to the game.
Some minor graphical improvements (making fonts more legible mainly)
A new instructions page with some details on the "world" scoring mechanism
Made the endgame boxes interactable with the squid again (and slightly smaller)
A bunch of small tweaks here and there that don't affect gameplay (and thus the highscores)

Things to do:

Figure out how to save the username/world in a cookie so you don't have to type it every time
Get my domain-lock security in place. It worked once, just have to get it working again...
Solve the damned "have to click twice" game-loses-focus bug. I posted a help request for it at StackOverflow.com, if you want to help me out you can earn some karma points. :)
A loading page! The game is 182Kb and it takes a while to load now.

5 days left on the clock! It always seems like I'll have plenty of time but then I go two days without doing anything, so I really want to press on for this last little bit. Elbow grease and polish!

The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything

2009-04-25T16:34:00.001-07:00

Build 42 isn't a gigantic improvement. I've just added instancing for the high score tables! This update makes such big sweeping changes to the high score API that I decided to turn off score submitting for earlier versions.

High scores for versions 40 & 41 are still in the database and are perfectly valid, they just can't submit anymore.

I really wanted to make a high score solution that did not involve you pitting yourself against a dozen bored kids you don't know with too much spare time on their hands. I also wanted to avoid you scoring regularly in 400th-10,000th place in the globe.

My first reaction was to implement a 24-hour rule - your ranking is based on the last 24 hours of high scores. This is OK, but not perfect. What if a single office, group of friends, or school wants to compete amongst themselves, and only themselves?

I have to credit Ryan Madsen for the idea of instancing the high scores. This will allow any group of people to create their own set of high scores, and only have to worry about being ranked between each other. On the main game screen you can type your own custom group name in the "World" field - just that simple! The field will default to the domain you're currently playing the game on, so if the game ever gets sponsored by some Flash Portal you'll be playing against your friends there.

As a little side bonus I'm also tracking failures now, too. This only counts if you see the red "gameover" box - quitting to the main menu doesn't count as a failure at all.

Aubrey is working hard getting the new version of Space-Squid.com up and running and we'll see new stuff soon. Until then, keep racking up the high scores! I'm a fairly firm "king" in the space-squid.com arena. :)

Alien Invasion!

2009-04-23T15:59:00.001-07:00

I liked the gameplay of those asteroids-in-the-sky so much I made a whole new level out of it!

Now instead of "Easy" and "Hard", there is:

Normal hasn't changed from Easy - it's the same, easy to control, solid victory conditions game that you know and love.
Pro hasn't changed from Hard except for the graphics - the boulders that hover in the air are now alien spaceships.
Aliens! is a brand new game mode where you get as many points as you can in 120 seconds! Because of the scoring mechanism that probably means grabbing as many stars as you can. There's no way to lose (except leaving the arena), and running out of time will win you the game. Changing levels just alters the semi-random layout of the spaceships/stars.

I also turned boost back to a "hold down" key instead of a tap.

Check out Build 41 here or just visit the official Space Squid homepage (new site design is coming soon!)

E: Increased alien mode from 60->120 seconds and removed death-by-limb-removal. Didn't increase the build version for this change.

Space Squid turns 40!

2009-04-23T00:25:00.001-07:00

1,408 rows deleted. That's a lot of high score entries! Thanks, guys. :) I can't believe how much you've been plalying! I've reset the high score database to go along with this quite excellent new version. Let's rack it back up again!

Check out Build 40 of Space Squid here, or just visit the official space squid web page.

So what's new? Too much! Other than making Hard Mode nearly it's own new game...

I let squids continue to propel as long as their head is submerged - instead of going from the tip of the mantle. This basically means squids leap farther out of the water, making acrobatics much more fun!
I apply the turning force at a much larger angle now, so it's harder to do the "hover cheat" while increasing your turning responsiveness.
I put motors in the squid tentacles that auto-seek a straight angle. This will help your limbs from getting tangled up. The motor is only on the head-to-tentacle joint, and I don't have one in the secondary joints yet so they might still tangle a little if you turn really fast.
The squid can no longer touch himself - so his legs won't tangle in each other. This small change ended up increasing framerates quite a bit!
Played a bit with micro-changes to water viscoscity and gravity.
Removed the extra objects altogether in the later levels - they now only show up at the tail end of level 18, 19, and 20. Things were just getting too busy and processors were melting. :)
Level 1/2/3, 9/10/11, and 18/19/20 are all "theme" levels now. They only produce one type of obstacle.
Reduced the sizes of all the obstacles.
Made the sinking depth of the Space Urchin much more random (they were sticking a bit too close to the surface)
Updated the main menu with controls, story, and a scoring overview. Be prepared, the story is one of ultimate seriousness.
In hard mode, all rocks are static objects that get in your way - and should only appear in or near the air (with a random size as well).
In hard mode, all the stars appear in or near the air.
Stars now appear 100->350 pixels away from the previous star. No more overlapping double-grabs, and no more traversing to the far end of the screen.. but still close enough that you can still make multiple grabs in single jumps. Thanks to pythagoras for this one (and Aubrey for suggesting it).
Pause screen (spacebar) and ability to return to the main menu.
Made the GameOver/Victory boxes not intersect with the level objects, so you can still play in the background after the round has ended.
Boost now requires a tap instead of holding - this helps prevent you from burning through it too quickly. I'm not sure if I like this change and might revert it.
Made squid joints more robust (again).
Made easy-mode squid a bit smaller and lighter (faster).
Thanks to John Hughes @ Twune.com, Space Squid now has music. Hooray! It's a nice mellow tune to chill out to with underwater vibes. I'll have a mute button shortly if you prefer to listen to your own tracks while squidding.
I actually playtested this version so I know all the levels are possible. ;)
A bunch of other random small changes here and there.

Once again; check out Build 40 of Space Squid here, or just visit the official space squid web page.

Space Squid 39

2009-04-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

Made a few changes - mostly graphical - but I did reduce some of the objects that fall in the later levels. Some slower PCs couldn't handle it :(

Here is build 39 - and of course the link back to the (still ugly!) official Space Squid website.

Fair warning: I'm going to reset the high score tables on Build 40 (next update!) because the difficulty curve is changing so much between builds.

Edit: Looks like Level 10 and 11 in Hard Mode are neigh impossible. I'll have to fiddle with the numbers again - in the meantime, if anyone beats them I owe them a beer.

With Haste, Space Squid!

2009-04-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

Well, that was quick! Here I was pouting because I couldn't decide what to do... And a few hours after posting a to-do list I have a brand new build on the burner. Let's all say hello to build 38! (You can play on the official Space Squid website)

What's changed?

Created Hard Mode! Hard mode significantly reduces the amount of time you have to defeat each level; it makes your squid smaller, lighter, and faster; it reduces your boost capacity and refill rate; and it makes all the obstacles about 10% bigger than easy mode. If you find Easy Mode a bit too sluggish and want a challenge, Hard Mode will feel like a sports car... that falls apart very easily. :)
Easy mode now has a squid that is 40% larger than Hard Mode and around 20% slower. This should make the squid feel like a "minivan" that is much easier to control and learn the ropes with.
Reduced the number of levels to 20 (from 30). This ramps up the difficulty quite a bit faster - and counting both modes there's technically a total of 40 levels now.
Reduced the number of items that fall on your head in the later levels to increase framerates.
Made levels 1-5 have 5 stars.
Levels 1 through 3 have solitary obstacle types to introduce you to how each one works.
Added new GameOver and Victory boxes.
Found a new font to work with for the game and website - one that's legible!
Added a "Galactic Premonition" (purple blob) that indicates where the next star will be. This will eliminate some of the random guess work and really let you fly with your squid.
Added more sounds.
Changed boost to the Shift key - now you won't have Mac compatibility issues. :)
Touched up a few graphics here and there.

My to-do list suddenly got really short. :(

Stay the Course, Space Squid!

2009-04-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Just under a month ago I stated I would have this game done and released by May 1st. I still plan on having it complete by this date, and I am very, very proud of how far I've come so far. I have to say I'm a fairly amazing guy for learning Flash, Flex, OOP, graphics, and input devices - and making a game - all in a single month! We should all celebrate my genius. Feel free to name your babies after me.

I think I'll have to circle "April" on my calendar and be sure to celebrate it every year with copious amounts of craft-brewed ale.

So I have 11 days left to complete my mission - including the rest of today - and I really don't have that much farther to go in the game. Therein lies the dilemma - I'm not really sure which itty bitty problem I should tackle next. I'm used to finding the biggest issues and resolving them systematically - but when you get a product that's this close to "done," all that remains are naggling barely-issues that really aren't fun to solve. So I haven't done much work in the past few days.

I think to hunker down and get this done I have to make some decisions now on what has to happen - and once armed with this list I'll have an ordered number of things to do. Let's hash this out!

I have to ramp up the difficulty faster so the early levels aren't as boring. This will eliminate the casual player base - so I'm thinking I'll have to add a "Hard Mode" to the main menu. My first instinct is to simply make the timer 4 seconds per star right from the get-go; maybe that's too harsh. I'll have to test it out.
I will have to place a bunch more sounds in the game - grab-star, victory, game over, loss of limb, reset, and boost. Maybe a few more but that sounds like a nice set.
Settle on a font to use in-game and use flash's text rendering to put a stroke on it to help it stand out. The current font gets too narrow at points and makes it nearly unreadable.
Add some random fun-facts about squids in the victory message.
Add the top-secret "Game Over" object
Clean up the "fishtank" graphic around the border - it looks like a series of rectangles right now, for some reason.
Straighten out some of the mantle edges on the squid graphic - when twisting in certain ways he has sharp edges.
Change up the squid graphic on the menu to be an identical copy of one in-game. Flash's sprite compiling tool will nicely solve this.
Make a Mac version that correctly labels the CTRL key as the Command key on the main menu.
Implement some real music (see below for more on that). Right now the game streams in some copywritten music but doesn't actually play it (for legal reasons), so at least I know the technology works. :)
Do up a proper website for the game complete with integrated high scores.
Once the SQL queries are settled on for the high score tables, port them directly into the game.
Depending on who (if anyone) accepts the sponsorship, might need to work 3rd party API stuff into the game.
Throw a release party.

Once the game is complete I'm going to have to market and distribute it. Since this isn't really an epic game by any measure (and wasn't intended to be!), it won't really survive on it's own two legs like Colin Northway's Fantastic Contraption did. I'm going to have to go the portal/sponsorship route.

That really disappoints me. I hate ads, I dislike the whole idea of portal sites, and I don't want to wrap my head around the magic that is writing several contracts to cross several portal sites. To help me out I enlisted FlashGameLicense.com - Space Squid is now listed there for publishers/portals to bid on and help make my life easier. It might go nowhere, but I'm fine with that - this game isn't costing me anything. :) Eventually I'll have Cephalopod Heaven where you can play all your favorite squid games (as written by me) and I won't have to worry so much!

Through FGL I met up with John Hughes of Twune.com. We're currently working out a deal to get some in-game music going. It'll be some basic, happy, midi-style stuff - I don't think this game will be able to support a million hits on 10mb MP3 (FC proved the problems inherent with that!). Hopefully we'll have some nice sample music up in the coming weeks!

Fonts and Difficulty Levels

2009-04-18T18:03:00.001-07:00

Yes that's right, the latest build 37 has some exciting new additions:

Level 30 is now the official end of the game! Now that's a solid goal you can strive for.
I made some timing changes for the earlier levels; namely, 7 seconds per star instead of 8.
Over level 20 you start losing total time, culminating in the Level 30 battle where you only have 4 seconds per star.
After stage 15 on any level, you will have an additional obstacle drop.
At a few levels > 20 you will also get additional obstacle drops, culminating in a whopping 5 obstacles per star on level 30.
The stars now max out at 20 no matter what level you are on (so level 30 has 20 stars still).
I switched in some fonts that are - I know, I know - unreadable at this time. Going to work on fixing that up, but it's a placeholder for now.

I guess this means the game is really shaping up, except there's no excitement or spice in the first 15 levels. I guess I'll see if there's something I can put in around levels 8 and 12 to spice it up a bit.

Boost and Noise

2009-04-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

After playing for a few days (with the help of my beta testers), I quickly found out that nobody could beat anything past level 19 - that is, if you could ever defeat level 17. See the high scores here.

Here I was hoping someone would make it near the 30s somewhere...

I've decided to change the difficulty curve to aid this problem - and so we have Build 36 of Space Squid:

Instead of a minimum 5 seconds per star, I've increased the value to 8 seconds per star. This should allow entry into the 20+ to 30+ levels.
The 10-second-per-star bonus that degraded down to level 20 now extends to level 30, further making the 20s easier. Expect the hardest levels to be the late 20s to early 30s.
To aid in those epic jumps to the high stars in levels 16+, there is now a boost button! The boost goes *very* quickly but is refilled slightly with each star capture. If your boost meter is full you get a small amount of bonus points (500) for getting each star.
I've integrated my sound and music code, but haven't populated it with any data other than me saying "bonk" if you hit something hard. Sorry if that's really annoying, I'll have real clips in shortly.
Added the most frequently requested features: Star Remaining count.

Of course, all of these changes have pretty much made the old high score tables worthless. The new scores will all be much much bigger. :)

Update to the Space Squid Himself

2009-04-17T02:31:00.000-07:00

Lil' Squiddy got an upgrade today! Build 35, or play it at Space-Squid.com(and try to beat my high scores! I'm dominating the tables!)

Now his cute eyes and mouth are clearly visible, and I added some meat to his arms and tentacles! properly made graphics, ahhh...

I suppose the most exciting part, though, is his Mantle is now anatomically correct and he looks (slightly?) less phalic. Good news for everyone. :)

A few other minor changes - objects now fall in from off the top of the screen from varying heights, so that the water hitting speed can be greater (or slower); you don't actually have to click the green arrow after typing your name; changed next level to spacebar; the minimum time for star pickups has increased from 4 to 5 seconds (which hits at level 20+), and other itty bitty updates.

It was such a small update this time around I didn't feel like it warranted it's own blog post and updated build number, but I've recently listed the game on FlashGameLicense.com and they require I keep the game as up to date as possible during the build period. *Shrug* Hopefully we can make each other some money!

Cute Factor 7

2009-04-16T20:09:00.001-07:00

A minor update to Build 34 is now up.

Cuter beachball (now a Space Jellyfish!)
Non-angry Space Urchin
Happier looking Space Star
Heavier rocks (now they are hard to push and they will guaranteed take off some limbs if you get under them)
Space Jellyfish is lighter
Gravity has been adjusted down from 8.8 m/s^2 to 8.0 m/s^2. This makes level 17+ possible without cheating.
Some graphical changes in the menus and other places

I also found out that my flash player was breaking my site in FireFox for some reason, so I just put in a text link on space-squid.com.

Not-annoying High Scores

2009-04-16T17:14:00.001-07:00

I had some pretty horrible bugs in the last build. You couldn't have a name with "R" in it was a big one.

This build lets you type your name once at the beginning of the game (optionally) and it will automatically submit your scores while you play. Officially Build 33 - play it on my (ugly malformatted) site or directly, full screen.

If you head to my site, though, there is a quickly hacked together high score list. Now you can compete. :)

Build 32: First hint of High Scores

2009-04-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Build 32 is up on my new Space-Squid.com site!

Aubrey was saying my logo didn't look professional so I photoshopped the hell out of it:

Nobody, except... nobody, can complain when there is a lens flare.

The only real change in this version is between levels you get a dialogue for entering your name. You can hit "r" to bypass it or you can just use the default Squiddie name. This is a working high-score submitter!

I don't quite have the high-score VIEWER setup yet, but it'll be coming shortly and I need some data in the database first. :) Play your hearts out and save your scores!

I'll be working on some interface niceities (remembering your name, etc) in the near future, and cleaning up the screen a bit. Again this build is just to get some scores into the database!

Space-Squid.com is Alive!

2009-04-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

I'm going to keep blogging here, but the official website is now registered! As soon as your local DNS cache gets cleared at your ISP all the links will unbreak for you. :)

The advantage to having it on my site is now you just have to click the main page and get the latest version. Of course my site is very ugly right now - but at least it's in place.

Play Space Squid Here!

No update yet today - I'm working on high score tables. Almost done, I promise :)

What Aught to be 30

2009-04-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

This is the build I wanted to release as the big number 30.

I guess 31 will have to do!

In this update ...

Stars are now StarFish (still outer space because it has the word star in it)
Mr. Grumpy is now a Space Urchin
Mr. Grumpy is no longer nailed down and is neutrally buoyant
New beachball object that floats
New stone object that sinks
Increased water friction to slow you down
Doubled your top speed to speed you back up again
Increased gravity to help reduce those rediculously-long airtimes :) Speed increase means you'll get the same height though.
Made objects drop from a higher altitude as to impede your midair stunts (and to dodge falling rocks)
Removed most damage (stretching your joints really really far still results in a snap - you'll probably only see this if you wrap a leg around a Space Urchin and yank it off).
Tweaked the timer a bit

I have to do some resizing of some of the graphics (some look stretched) and redo the main menu still, but a step forward in the fun department, I think!

The Big Three-O

2009-04-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

Here it is, Build 30!

Unfortunately I don't have a huge update for this nice, big round number - just some minor gameplay changes.

Score is back! You get points for moving in general;
Plus 1000 points anytime you pick up a star with your feet;
Plus 1000 points for every second remaining on the clock when you finish the level.
Speaking of the clock, it's now level-based not stage-based. You get a set number of seconds to collect all the stars.
You get a base alotment of 5 seconds per star to beat the level with starting at level 20.
Before level 20 you get around 15 seconds per star and it slowly dwindles down as you move through the levels.

I'm not really a big fan of the points system, but it adds a level of replayability that the game otherwise lacks. Even finding out the best possible score on Level 1 is pretty fun!

I'll be looking to make a high score table in the near future. That'll add some excitement too.

What level can you get to? Do you think the later levels should allow more than 5 seconds per star? It gets fairly stressful after a while.

No Really, The Squid is in Space

2009-04-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

This update fixes a few things:

The stars weren't ramping up properly. They will now be underwater guaranteed for the first level or two, then will slowly creep up. Full screen stars start at level 20. Thanks to Aubrey for helping me out with the formula for that one.
Sometimes stars would overlap Mr. Grumpy. Fixed!
I played with some of the physics numbers a bit (gravity and a few others).
Your damage-taken bits now have a density and will float to the surface of the water. I think there might be some sort of gameplay to be had there but I'm not sure just what yet.
Because it was looking like it wasn't exactly space, I went ahead and made damn sure you know it's space. Background image in place!

One of the neat things about my random level generator is that any changes in the math completely change the outcome for the levels. Each build is like a whole new set. Exciting!

Build 29 is here .

My stats:

- First try, no restarts: 9.8

- Hardest underwater sequence: Level 13

- First death by damage: 16.10 (lost most limbs around 16.8)

- First death by timeout: 16.13 (lost a lot of blood here too)

- Most Heartbreaking Leap: 17.9. Mr Grumpy ruins me here.

- Closest to the wire: 18.19 (very hurt, 1 second left on the clock, trying to make a medium jump in close quarters... stressful!)

- High Score (with restarts): 19.12

Timed Gameplay

2009-04-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

It's the next day and I'm still pretty excited about the last build. I took a look at it and decided a few things needed to change:

The bloody bits isn't exactly inline with the "cute" message of the game.
Worrying about your health all the time is annoying
If you are good at steering the squid, the game isn't terribly challenging.
There's no "victory" message to give you that sense of accomplishment.
The skill level doesn't ramp up per-level.

With this in mind I made a few gameplay changes!

You now get frowny face balls for breaking parts off, no more bloody patches!
It doesn't end your game anymore if you lose parts! If you lose your feet, it simply becomes harder to reach the goals that are higher up in the sky. Additionally, for every frowny face you produce, your squid loses 5% of his acceleration. You won't be able to jump as high if you lose lots of parts (though this is slightly mitigated by the fact that you have less mass and therefore less water friction).
There is now a countdown timer in place to make sure you wisk along to your next star expediently. :)
There are now clear stages and levels. Every level you go up it adds one more stage on, to make the game progressively harder.
The countdown timer is mostly random, but the minimum value will drop over time. It will eventually bottom out at 5 seconds (around level 60 I think?), but will always have a maximum of 60 seconds.
The higher-up stars were hard to reach for some people so they also slowly creep up over time. They reach their maximum altitude around level 20.

I think this is really shaping up to be a fun game. Check out Build 28 here.

Eureka!

2009-04-14T02:35:00.000-07:00

Well I set aside two hours tonight to do a bit of an experiment.

How's this for a radical build. Number 27!

Water. You are still a space squid - there's stars and you are in a gigantic outer space fish tank.
Time/Score pressure is gone now. Take all the time you need - the game gets hard enough on it's own without this extra source.
Fun times.

I was thinking to myself, "if only there was some way to dampen the rotation force, like... that mushy feeling you get in water." Presto chango, water it is. And it worked very very well.

I am quite confident these same controls in this new medium is going to make gameplay that much better for everyone.

I really think this is it - this is going to end up being my first game. Heck it's fairly game-y as it is - just have to add some polish and shine to this bad boy and I've got a market!..

Then again, I'm posting his at 2:30AM and maybe I'm just a bit too excited about the new build.

SpaceSquid presents: Phallic Nightmare

2009-04-13T21:10:00.001-07:00

Up until this point I had been using Box2D's debug drawing method. I was kind of dreading the day when I had to incorporate graphics - but it really wasn't too difficult once I got down to it. Much thanks to Colin Northway for sending me a quick step-by-step email on how to best export images to and from Flash, and how to incorporate it into my AS3 code.

I am hesitantly offering up Build 26. It is fairly horrible looking - I'm just happy that I was finally able to turn off the debug drawing mode and get my own art in there. Even if it is scaled incorrectly and looks more like an insane penis than a cute squid. I'm pretty happy about the menu though, that load screen is killer.

There's no new gameplay elements today, other than some tweaked damage settings. Your squid is a teensy bit more robust now.

A few folks have asked me what I'm using for a development environment. Here's the breakdown:

Notepad++. Very simple notepad tool that does a bit of syntax highlighting for me, and that's all. I do all my AS3 work in this, and it's free to boot.
MXMLC / Flash SDK 3.0. This is a free command-line compiler for flash.
Adobe Flash 10 Debug Player - I use this to actually see my debug messages. As I'm not using a development environment I don't have a handy window to display anything that goes wrong. :) Free of course.
Adobe Flash 10 Pro (CS4). I only use this to draw the graphics - nothing else.

I use a few other odds an ends for file uploading and such, but nothing exciting. Quite simple really. In fact, up until my use of CS4 for graphics today, I had zero cost on software. Setting up the development environment would only take me an hour or so if I had to do it again, and that includes downloading, installing, and configuring everything.

If you have any questions about what I'm using or the development process, feel free to ask!

Late Night with SpaceSquid

2009-04-13T03:04:00.001-07:00

A small late-night upgrade.. Didn't take me a whole lot of work, but each item has some interesting consequences.

Fixed up the goal boxes so they fade out quite a bit more once they've been achieved. I toyed with removing them altogether but I kind of like seeing your achievements stay on the screen.
I made a (very) rudimentary random level generator. Switch levels with the square brace keys: [ ]. There are now over 2.1 billion levels! How's that for content? After playing with it quite a bit I found that the random levels make the gravity seem like... Well, like it doesn't really matter. I'm going to have to experiment more with maximum and minimum planet sizes and mass values for everything to see if I can get it back. Maybe random levels aren't the way to go? Maybe my generator just needs some tuning?
I made the squid size vary a bit (60-120%) randomly with the level. Because the forces don't scale properly, the larger the squid is the slower it handles. Conversely, the smaller squids are zippy little jetfighters! I really prefer playing with the small squids because of the fast responsiveness, but they are very touchy. Because I don't want to scare people away I made sure level 1 starts with the chunkiest squid. Level 6 has one of the smallest squids possible. Perhaps one day the smaller, lighter squids will be unlockables?
I put joint contstraints on each of the limbs. This has had some interesting side effects. I find the squid looks a bit more natural now - the legs attempt to stay aligned. There is even some natural motion, like the feet springboard off of walls to help propel you away from danger. The downside, though, is it drastically changes your vector on rotation. This seems to make the squid a lot harder to control (for me, anyway). I'm curious to see how other people find it, especially on the larger/smaller squids.
The goal areas have little countdown clocks on them, based on your keypresses. This adds another dimension of challenge to the game. After the game gets tuned I'll set these to a mildly challenging setting - they are mostly random with the level but will scale with your CuteFactor (to help you deal with the added obstacles).
There is no Victory message still. I think I might make it around CuteFactor 10, but again will have to tweak once I see how well people deal with the levels.

And there we go, up to Build 25 already. Don't forget to click on the SWF to give it keyboard focus.

My best score on any level so far is CF13. :)

Space Squid v24: Rob Edition

2009-04-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

OK, so maybe it wasn't all Rob's idea, but the way he pre-empted this version with his comment yesterday really makes me look guilty. I'd better give him recognition just in case ;)

Build 24 is up - a little half baked, but the concept is there. The screen should be fairly self-explanatory - make it to the green boxes!

(A future version will clean up the boxes and make the screen less cluttered.)

I can make it to Cute Factor 12 - but getting past CF9 is pretty difficult. Give it a whirl!

I Crash Flash

2009-04-12T19:59:00.001-07:00

Today was a fun day!

My lack of OOP experience meant I made several mistakes along the way. When I went to implement a few new features early this morning it became clear that I had to fix things.

I took one linearly-written 800-line-of-code file and split it into 5 appropriate classes. Then I learned that Flash doesn't have pointers (hello, referrers!) and I put my code into an infinite loop at some point.

I also removed all traces of Box2D's "scaling" from my code, until I realized it would hideously break things then I put it all back in again.

I thought I had it all squared away and was going to test out the new build - and I had to laugh. After a long day's work, the Squid's head feels as painful as mine does.

I should have a playable iteration up late tonight or early tomorrow sometime.

Easier Variant

2009-04-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

I took the game and pared it down to quite-a-bit-easier version just so people can get a feel for what an earlier level might be like.

It's not drop-dead tutorial-level easy; there's still one planet with a massive gravity well (that you can't escape if you get close enough), but there's a lot less to worry about. It still takes some finnesse to get your SquidHead in the goal areas too. But you can see the difference between this and the last build - the game, it's fun factor, and the skill required largely depends on level design.

Check out Build 22 here.

Double Goal Areas

2009-04-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm still toying a bit with gameplay but trying not to deviate from the original goal. Here's a double goal area style game with a minimum and maximum entry type gate; it's quite difficult but should pose a fun little challenge to the gamers out there. I've tried it about two dozens times and I've only beaten it twice.

Build 21

Please excuse the textbox bounding issues. I swear it's not my fault. :) Darned Box2D and their scaling factors.. I think I'm going to have to go through and convert it all back to pixels at some point soon.

I'm looking into getting a level creator of some sort made now. There's enough days in the month to get something in.. I have a few ideas... Well, you'll just have to wait!

Space Squid Sauce

2009-04-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

Right! Turns out I had to destroy the child sprites when I recreated the object instances of the Hud. Problemo solved-o!

And that of course opened the door to finally seeing the goal object in the game. That's right, you can now officially win!

When I have actual levels in place, I'll start out with something easier, but for now you've got a fairly difficult challenge. You have to get 5000 style points before you can enter the goal area. And once you do... What's stopping you from getting a higher score?

I'm really happy that such a big, simple gameplay change was added for the nice round number, Build 20. Enjoy!

And as usual.. let me know what you think. :)

Learning by Trial

2009-04-11T02:26:00.000-07:00

My Flash newbishness really shined through today.

I've had this bug that's been plauging me for about a week. I drew a goal object - even cut n pasted code from several sources - but it would just never show up. Well, turns out I had to not only addChild(crap I just drew), but you also have to addChild(object that drew that crap) and addChild(object that called that object). I guess I understand the logic behind it - one big chain of display objects linked together to the first Sprite iteration - but this is the kind of thing that you can't solve by poring over the API documentation or simple tutorials. Sigh.

I was very excited to fix this bug, as it allowed me to move all my other drawing code - ie, the HUD - out from the main file. I had some hideous hacks in place to get those score counters rolling. I went through my code and started OOP-ifying everything up and moving code bits out into their own files.

Unfortunately, this broke something else that I just can't figure out.

Now the Hud is it's own proper object. It works fine and dandy, until you hit the Reset button. The reset button creates a new instance of the world - which then in turn creates a new instance of the Hud. My traces show that the Hud is still receiving input and drawing things, but the screen doesn't update anymore.

My hunch is that this glitch is being caused because my textboxes still exist in the world (they weren't destroyed with the reset button) and I've just created new ones behind them or something. If anyone has any tips, let me know.

Some good news: The code I wrote for the goal area seems to work great. I have some coordinate conversions to do, but as soon as those are squared away I'll have a brand new form of gameplay: Get your squid to an objective without dying. :)

No really, sticking to the plan.

2009-04-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I didn't listen to myself!

Just two weeks ago I posted a blog entry entitled "The Art of Sticking to the Plan." And here I am veering wildly off the plan and adding bells and whistles - complicating a game that is fun because of the simplicity.

I put out a call everywhere - all the social networking sites got posted to - and all of my [important ;)] friends took a look at Build 18. Most people gave me some lightly positive encouragement, but the overwhelming majority was confused. Gameplay was frustrating, the concept was not clear, and overall - people didn't have fun. I should have listened to myself, I should have stuck to the plan!

I'm going to go ahead and blame this on gameplay experimentation and not really worry about it too much. I only lost two days development time on all these weird gameplay ideas, and at least I have a recorded demo of what the gameplay could be like if I ever want to go back and try again.

As the biggest complaint was the control scheme - which is largely a relic of the original (archaic) design - I have switched changed in the mouse for keyboard controls. Left, right, and up arrow keys now jet your squid around on the screen. I simplified the concept - now it's just stay alive! and you get points for doing so. You get more points the longer you stay alive, and you get bonus points for touching planets with your cute little feet - juts to encourage more dangerous gameplay. :)

So here it is - the simplified Build 19.

Arrow keys now control the squid. Be sure to click on the flash first to give it focus.
Lose health by touching things (your feet are safe though)
Gain style points by moving or touching things with your cute feet

My only issue with the game as-is, is it's fairly easy to put yourself into a geostationary orbit and just tap the up arrow once in a while. I think if I bring back Ink Bottles as a propulsion fuel limit it would make things a bit more fun.

Experimenting with Gameplay

2009-04-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

SpaceSquid is completely experimental. The game I had written down in my notebook weeks ago, is not exactly what I'd call "fun." A quick physics toy maybe, but not a game.

In an effort to find what is fun and what can be extended into a game format, I've been playing around with scoring and how things work. Here's Version 18:

Every time you move your cute mommy squid will let go of one of her cute little eggs!
As everyone knows, squid eggs are not affected by gravity.
Your cute factor will slowly increase with time (plus a few bonuses here and there)
You will get style points if your cute squid eggs touch anything. Your babies want to see the universe! Help them explore!
You get a style point bonus every time you move - this is multiplied by your cute factor, so the biggest points come from saving your ink for later!
You have a limited amount of ink that's used in propelling you around. Touching objects will decrease your reserves. Squids aren't meant to breathe in the atmospheres of planets, silly!
If you touch anything when you are out of ink, or if you lose any limbs because of rough handling, the game will end!

Try playing it here, and let me know what you think of this playstyle!

Slight Gameplay Changes

2009-04-09T10:23:00.001-07:00

It's funny how a tiny change can affect gameplay so much.

Changes in Build 16:

Gave the Squid his long-overdue mantle fins
Fixed the collision checker so it actually reports even light touches. This actually made the game horribly difficult so I disabled collision checking on the little club feet your squid has. Feel free to touch things with that!
I played around with a bunch of motors and limit settings. The squid should flow a little more naturally now instead of just tangling himself up every chance he gets (though he still will if coaxed)

My high score in this build is.. 156% Cute, 7 Friends. Try to beat my score! Click to play Space Squid!

A bit more Game-Like

2009-04-09T01:58:00.000-07:00

I spent a big chunk of the evening trying to get a goal area built into the game, but I've failed. :( I'm having trouble wrapping my head around all the Sprite objects and exactly where I need to put things to make them work. I'll figure it out eventually.

I've hacked together a bit more of an interface and tuned the level a little bit more. Here's the lowdown:

Avoid touching anything. Squids are very delicate and they don't like brushing up against planets or the edges! Sometimes they will be forgiving but usually it will end your game.
Propel yourself around with the mouse. Draw vectors - the longer the line, the more oomf! You don't have unlimited power, though. It costs you Ink Bottles to move, so use them wisely!
Build up your Cuteness by surviving for a long time! The longer you last, the faster your Cuteness accumulaes. You will also get bonus cuteness for using your ink bottles - the bonus is greater the later you use them!
As time wears on, your squid will get more and more popular with his buddies! See how many friends you can accumulate. This accumulation is linear.
If you lose a limb in a crash, you might make enemies instead of friends :(

I'm sure you'll quickly realize that proper usage of your ink bottles to attain the longest standing orbit is the call of the day. Try your hand at getting a top score!

When I get the goal areas in, they will "open up" at a certain cuteness level. Surviving throughout the level then making it to the goal area will be the main challenge. Soon!

Oh, and I also added a few light-duty motors to the squid tentacles. They wave back and forth a teensy bit now, just to destabilize your orbits. :)

Play it now!

Special thanks to Aubrey for the scoring formulas (I learned logs today!), and thanks to OfficiallyHaphazard for helping with Cosines for the tentacle waving!

Space Squid: The Game

2009-04-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

There aint no party like a cute squid party!

Objective: Don't touch anything! Make sure you get as many Squid Friends as possible (and looking maximal cuteness along the way)!

Careful though, you only have 100 InkBottles to propel yourself around the screen with!

If you touch anything you'll end the game, but if you end things catastrophically you will also lose Squid Friends!

Space Squid: RC1

2009-04-08T15:06:00.001-07:00

I like calling things Release Candidates because, though it has applied to be a candidate, it will not be the candidate. It has pre-emptively failed.

Anyway, BUILD 13.

I am really happy about this one. I put some instructions on the screen and even built a prototype level that acts as a neat little sandbox. The instructions are fairly easy: draw a vector with your mouse. The length is the strength. Things to try:

Beat the game as specified (touch the right, then left, wall)
Try it without losing any squid bits
Try it going fast
Try it going slow
Try tearing your squid apart completely (his head bits do seperate but is very hard to do)
Try knocking all the planets out of orbit (pro tip: hump the planet with your squid legs)
See how long you can drift without touching anything, not even the walls

I have some significant gameplay changes coming in the pipe that makes the game... much more a "game" than a toy. Stay tuned!

Nirvana for the Content

2009-04-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

At the pub tonight I had enough beers that would normally place me firmly in the grips of "drunk." However, the quantity of food I devoured (well over average) counter-acted the results and placed me in the ultimate perspective of contentedness.

I did not feel dizzy or lightheaded; I did not feel any lack of judgement; I did not feel any dampening of my motor functions; I did not slur my speech. In fact, if I woke up feeling this way I would have no problem getting behind the wheel of a car. If it were for not one little side effect.

Everything we glance at, we analyze - we spot a painting, we note it's size and shape. We spot a bottle and we note in our head that is it brown and contains beer. We glance at people and silently assign names or pointers in a split second of scanning recognition.

And I had lost all of these abilities.

I scanned the pub, the crowd, the things on my table, and I just saw shapes. The only things that concerned me where that who I was talking to and the pint in my hand. I had lost any ability to care for or note my surroundings.

The experience was in full force for around 10-15 minutes but quickly began tapering off to normality. I was really quite pleased with the experience and hope to have it again sometime!

Needless to say I did not touch the squids today. I am completely content with their progress from yesterday.

Incremental Updates

2009-04-07T02:37:00.000-07:00

I was reading some old, old blog posts of mine (from last week) and thought I'd update a bit on what's going on now. I've had a lot of thoughts in the past week that I didn't think were blog-worthy.. but when summed ended up being quite overwhelming. Prepare yourself!

I've been working on the game for a total of 9 days now. During that time I have been maintaining my contract work, which is my full time job. I have also taken many, many breaks that probably accumulate up to several days of inactivity. Slacking, really. But I want everyone to know that my progress is so rapid it's self-inspiring, and making me more and more motivated. I've gone from a guy who just two weeks ago was considering hiring someone to write this game for me, to being the guy who is actually doing it... and pulling it off well.

Er... Well might not be the best word. I'm shooting to get my game up and running ASAP. My implementation might look slick, but my code is a complete hack job and is not at all up to my own standards. I completely intend to rewrite this game from scratch if and when it becomes popular and demands further development. My main mission here: getting the game out, and getting it out as soon as possible.

I think I'll send a shout-out right now to Phil Hassey, the author of Galcon. Knowing he wrote such a fun game in such a short time (48 hour game jam!) really inspired into doing something similar(ish).

In the past 9 days I've stumbled, quite accidentally, upon 2 gameplay ideas. I intend to make these my Game #2 and Game #3. I've also revised and re-revised the gameplay mechanics for SpaceSquid. Not quite settled on how exactly things will go down, but I'm getting very close to nailing things down.

A while back I said I used distance-joints on my planets. I'm such a doofus. The next day I looked at them, all pivoting around on their ultra short sticks like balloons on a really short tetherball rope. I immediately converted them (after learning about how) to Revolution Joints and nailed them down to an invisible static object that sits right behind the planets. Much more stable, and I was even able to add a small motor force to the planets so they will slowly spin. This will look much nicer once I have planet graphics.

I blogged earlier about the "Bullet" property that bodies can have. They work fine on larger objects, but when I apply them to smaller things (such as the squid tentacles and arms) they start jittering the simulation quite a bit. I've been forced to keep the smaller squid bits marked non-bullet, but I've instead converted all the planets to bullet objects, as well as the clubs on the end of the tentacles, and the squids upper mantle, as they will likely be travelling quickly. There will still be some clipping, especially between the squid arms and the tentacles, but they won't be noticeable once I get the joint destruction routines into place... *evil grin*

I decided on a scale for my game, too. I still do a lot of testing in full screen mode, which is probably a big mistake... (*quickly runs and tests it in a smaller window*) I'm lucky, it's still looking OK in the smaller size. Official viewport is now 700x500, which is 6 pixels wider than Fantastic Contraption. Suck it, Colin. I resized my game arena to fit these dimensions.

I think one of the biggest chunks of developing this into a real game will be level development. If this becomes somewhat fun and looks like a feasible long term project, my first mission will be a level editor. For now, it's just going to be whatever I can come up with. I have sketched out 5 basic level designs that I think will work out well. I made sure my code can handle all sorts of wacky things like microscopic black holes up to ultralight gas giants (helium gas of course!). I guess it doesn't help that right now the squid is roughly half the weight of the biggest planet.

A few days ago I found the game getting a bit too twitchy. I slowed down the timestep by half, so there is now twice as many physics calculations per second. It slowed down gameplay pleasantly and still provided those "big crunch" events as the squid collapses into a planet. As I increase planet densities I might slow this down again.

Motion Captured: Or, setting up tracing sucks.

2009-04-07T02:04:00.000-07:00

I spent way, way too many hours today on getting some very simple things done. I had set myself a milestone, though, and by gum I would achieve it!

First, a shout out to my girl Aubrey who gave me a rundown on some fundamentals of Object-Oriented Programming that I had not quite picked up on. She also acted as a sounding board that really helped me pull through with a victory tonight.

Secondly, thanks to OfficiallyHaphazard for directing me on some simple vector things that I could have probably figured out myself if I hadn't had several beers. Also thanks to him for setting me up with Trace(). Good god programming with traces is so much nicer.

Speaking of Trace, I have a big beef. Actually, a list of them..

For trace() to do anything in your flash application you must first compile the application with debug mode turned on, which is off by default.
Finding out how to turn on debug mode is tremendously hard when you are using the Flex 3 SDK command-line jobby (and tremendously easy in retrospect).
You must also define two environment variables that aren't set by default in Windows Vista. Boy I love adding useless environment vars for a single application.
You must create, from scratch, your own configuration file. This file must be stored in your user directory. Wow, so convenient!
If you use Flash 8 or earlier, you can tell the config file where you'd like your tracelog to go. Flash 9 or later, it defaults to the oh-so-convenient c:\documents and settings\username\program data\roaming\macromedia\flash\logs\ . Woe betide the person who renames their documents-and-settings directory!
Googling how to do anything in Flash 3 SDK is impossible since "sdk" is such a generic term, and vastly more popular products "Flash 3 Builder" and "Flash 3 Framework" both experience all the same issues, but have different solutions.
Flash 2 SDK documentation is all on page 1 of the google results and Flash 3 SDK documentation is on page 4.

OK I think I'm done ranting now.

So today, I present you with a single build. Build #12. I was able to wrangle the code so that anywhere you draw on the screen, it will remember the force vector and apply it only to the squid. Hooray! This is going to be the basic gameplay element. Things will become more clear in the coming days as I solidify the complementing assets.

Build 12 is important to me though, because this is essentially it: This is the gameplay. I could call this the tech demo right now and call it quits... But I gave myself until the end of the month, which means I can turn it into a proper "game" with levels and a bit of an interface.

PS: Props x3 to OfficiallyHaphazard for finding the first ever bug. The unmapped key "d" will remove the squid's head (and therefore disable the mouse) for some reason. No idea why this is yet.

The Making of a Space Squid

2009-04-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

I spent the day making a somewhat realistic Squid object. I even researched some squid physiology to get the dimensions right. After my disasterous failure (in the last post), I went through several iterations:

Build 6 - with this build I finally got my spatial coordinates right.
Build 7 - this build is a further step where I made my squid with a retardedly huge head
Build 8 - my lil' guy is finally coming together and looking like a proper squid! I have his joints hooked up wrong but I'm pretty proud of him.
Build 9 - I fixed up the squids joints and made him affected by gravity.
Build 10 - shaped the head a little bit and prevents the arms from being affected by gravity. The long arms still are, just not the short ones.
Build 11 - changed weight distributions in the squid's body and placed a few new planet types.

A fairly productive day - even if it is just easy-peasy object building, it was a lot of fun and really renewed my enthusiasm for the project.

My next goal will be getting the interface running properly. I've never dealt with mouse/graphics interactions before so this is completely new territory, and quite scary.

Woops, Sorry Squiddie

2009-04-05T17:57:00.001-07:00

In my latest build, I attempted to create a fully articulated squid that is affected by the world physics.

I knew when I set out that I wasn't quite sure of the spatial dimensions of my screen, and I was pretty confident it would be pretty messed up. And boy was I off.

I did my first compile after linking my squid all together, and as you can see, it resembles nothing like a squid. It appears to have half of its body outside of the visible area, and everything is spaced light years apart.

Looks like calamari for dinner tonight. Sorry, squiddie :(

Tethered Planets

2009-04-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

It took me much too long, but I was able to make an incremental build today that made me way too excited.

It's officially titled "Build #4." I figured out how to make some distance joints in Box2D and tethered my planets down. On the backend I have "Pin" objects and "Planet" objects with easily callable functions, for ease of level creation. I also have a very sparsely populated "BuildSquid" function which just draws a circle. Can't wait to make that a proper squid with waggling tentacles all over the place.

The goal of the game so far is to get the little squid ball from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen. The next big deal I'll have to tackle is the control mechanism to allow you to do so. Right now you can just drag and drop him to the right side. I'll have to make it so you can set a launch vector and go from there.

I'm having some trouble deciding on a sense of scale. I'm coding all of this in a full screen flash window. Maybe I should decide on some dimensions early on and really nail down the size of my squid and planet objects.

Research

2009-04-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

I've been spending the last few days just researching - reading up on Flash forums and the Box2D common issues. I've learned quite a few things and have a better grip on how I'm going to implement this now.

One bug that Fantastic Contraption has always had, is the "Collision skipping." When an object moves too quickly, it will clip right through another object without triggering the collision detection. Box2D has a feature to prevent this - flagging your objects as "Bullets" will instead sweep the object and halt the simulation at the first collision intersection, then continue on with the new vector.

I imagine it reduces performance, as each collision requires a new step in the physics process, but my benchmarking tests on my game don't seem to have a large effect. I think I'll keep it in. :)

The Art of Sticking to the Plan

2009-03-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

So I ran into a lot of trouble with Flash yesterday. Seems that compiling from the Flex SDK (mxmlc.exe) produces different results from most compilations in any sort of framework. Great example;

variableA = 1/3;

variableB = 1.0/3.0;

In MXMLC, VariableA is equal to 0 and B is 0.3333. In IDEs (Flash, FlashStudio, etc.), the framework is smart(?) enough to evaluate both to a decimal value.

It is producing all kinds of headaches. Yesterday I swore off Flash and decided to not making games anymore. After a few beers this afternoon I was able to reconcile my differences and produce my first compilation.

I'll be honest here: That is nearly line-for-line written from a "How-to" tutorial and is just some cheap vectoring and nothing physics based. I ran with this code and made myself a nice start and finish line, and fiddled with some input commands.

Then I realized everything I was doing was a horrible idea. My end product will have physics in it - and tacking that on later in development, especially for a newbie like me, will likely result in me swearing off game development again.

I scrapped all my starter code and grabbed the latest Box2DAS3 set. This is an excellent collection of physics tools you can use in any flash application. A few quick mods, and learning from my previous mistakes, I was able to make a gravitational objects demo. Again, primarily me just compiling some pre-made code with minor edits here and there (it took me all of an hour to do), but it has helped me prove I can setup this dev environment properly.

It also served as a cautionary tale. I had so much fun playing the latest demo I spent a further hour tweaking it to be even more fun. The change ended up being relatively minor: removing friction from the ball surfaces. An hour. And this isn't even the direction my game is going.

I decided to blog about it, post a link, and scrap the code. I could spend 5 years chasing neat idea after neat idea... But for better or worse, I have a design in mind, and a time frame to adhere to. I can't waste time chasing these now. Maybe Game #2 will use these mechanics... But for now, I have to focus.

GDC Inspiration: Space Squid

2009-03-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have survived GDC.

I suppose the best thing to come out of GDC is that I've decided to make a prototype for my game, "Space Squid." I've given myself a deadline of May 1st for the release. That gives me just over a month to:

Learn OOP. I've got a pretty good handle on it already, and most of my non-OOP code has several OOP properties, so it shouldn't be too difficult.
Learn AS3. I'm a wiz at PHP and have dabbled in several other languages; I can pick up on syntax fairly easily.
Learn Flash. Flash's asset management confuses me and I'm not sure how I'd go about playing with flash-generated content. I do know how to draw rectangles and circles in AS3 though, so I'll stick with that for now.
Learn how to setup the coding environment. Knowing the difference between Flex and Flash and AS3 and Flex Builder and AS2 and what exactly compiles what things is getting to be a pain in the ass. I'll figure it out though.

I'm a coder that likes to "do things right" the first time, which means I'm way too ambitious on my projects and I'll spend 5 years on the framework before I get the game out the door. On the plane ride home from GDC I wrote out some very specific features I'd have by May 1st. I am going to stick to these and code really crappily to get it done on time. I WILL.