Update

It’s not fun. Awww.

Well, it happens. The good thing about prototypes is that if it happens, you didn’t waste all that much time on it. Plus, there might be a way to turn it into something fun still…

So, back to the drawing board, I guess.

. . . . . In Standby.

Prepare for more posts, maybe. There might be another prototype. There might not. This entirely depends on how much fun it is.

Are you excited? (You don’t need to answer, we know your answer. By now, we really only need to look in your eyes.)

Sorry.

For not updating. I know we should do that, but… you know.

It’s kind of stressful right now. This is a problem if you do this as a hobby. Always those phases in which you can’t work on it! Since gamecreation is something that you need to put a lot of time into, this means there isn’t much progress in code done by me, and I hate myself for that, considering that other people, say, for example, T, work on this – and with great success as well! I love looking at the shots and levels he creates! And even though he has a lot of stress as well. Which makes me feel even more guilty.

So… please consider this an apology to you, dear reader. Sorry for not providing you exciting information. This will become a lot better soon! So hang in there.

Running Food finished, no longer called Running food

Can you believe it? Pappenheimer has finally finished his new game Running food – although its now not longer called like that. You really should check it out, because that game is – there is no better word for it – fascinating. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the few who share a bit of the knowledge about all the code, material and hard work behind it, it boogles the mind to see the whole thing coming together so well. It manages a very nice balance of difficulty and accessibility, and its definately not on the same scale as most “educational titles”. But then, while also aimed at kids, there are so many elements in there that one might not fully understand unless one has reached a certain age – because some of his philosophical messages might just need those rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia – I really think that he managed to create something incredible.

Mind you, I haven’t completed the full game yet — but what I’ve written above is my impression of the playtesting I’ve done.

And with that… it seems that I am now the only one from the group of people I’ve worked with for a long time who hasn’t finished a full-scale project that you can buy. This results in a weird, hard-to-describe melancholy-kind-of-thing.

Siiigh. Oh well.

Merry Christmas! Also: Take part in a contest!

Merry christmas, everyone! Enjoy the holidays, have a great time, and enjoy the time away from all that stress.

Blah, blah, yaddah, yaddah, whatever. You know you want to torture challenge yourself to something as awesome as my very own Experiment which resulted in PROJECTION – the most amazing puzzlegame ever that you, along with, oh, the entire universe ignored . But whatever, it’s okay, nevermind that. There is going to be a contest this weekend – and it’s no plain ol’ boring contest – it’s a contest that encourages new, innovative games, quick prototyping, and on top of it all, we will see the different workflows of different people and engines. And to make it even better, there are cool prizes up to grabs! Follow this link and see the details – we’d love to see you on board!

Here is a quick overview:

How I learned to stop worrying and…

Currently, I don’t have that much time for the game (of the secret-mystery-kind), and that can easily be guessed from the amount of new posts (which is closely hovering around zero). Sorry!

I still have a lesson that I want to share. You see, I’m one of those “everything must be secret” types, which, well, can easily be verified by looking at this blog. Still, what I didn’t realize was how much this was actually hurting the game.

You often see people, beginners but also more experienced developers, asking for help, and thats okay, but they usually don’t tell much about the game. They say, for example, “We are looking for a programmer for our upcoming project“, or, if they’re really specific, “We are looking for a level designer for our shooter”. That’s… not much, is it? If I say “shooter”, that can still mean everything. Half-Life 2 is a [First Person] “Shooter”, but you still “shoot” in “Space Invaders”, and of course also in games like Ikaruga (that’s how you spell it, right?). The differences are great as far as the gameplay-style is concerned, but even more so when you look at the setting. Doom3 is completely different from Half-Life 2, which, again, is very different to Unreal Tournament. How am I expected to know what kind of game your “shooter” is?

Many are worried that people are going to steal their idea. All their creativity, hard work, all lost, since somebody else read of their idea, and was simply quicker. And it’s not an uncommon fear. After all, heck, I have it. And while others have elaborated on this very topic a lot better than I ever could, I just want to focus on the point of being just a bit more open with your game.

I used to not tell anyone, friends or people I’ve worked with in the past and still chatted with every once in a while, and, of course, I would never even mention on any forum that maybe I could be still possibly working on something resembling a game. But, well, not anymore.

I won’t go out and share the game idea with you (yet!), but I will say this: I’m now telling (some) people. Also, I’m more open for asking others for help when I can’t do something. I used to not ask anyone for help when it comes to code-related issues, and I also never considered buying editors for a few $, when it was possible for me to create that.

Of course, that’s not really a wise decision. Now I’m asking for help more often (might also have to do that I don’t have that much time anymore, and this gives me a higher production-boost per hour) and telling more people about this. And it’s great – I get a lot more feedback, ranging from the productive to the motivational, and of course, maybe someone will come along and solve that one issue. Who knows? All I know is that there are many talented people out there, capable of giving great feedback and help that I’d love to get. And how can they help me without knowing anything about my project?

Thanks, Shinobi!

I’ve written about the replacement of placeholders in the last post, and keen readers might have noticed that I mainly posted about the new level, and animations were more of an afterthought. This might give off the impression that the new level is a bigger factor, but thats not a fair description of the situation. The level alone already did a lot to get that feeling, but the reason I didn’t praise the animation as much was simple: I added animations, but those were only placeholder-animations as well: While I replaced the placeholder-model with the finished one, that model didn’t had it’s real animations, so I tried to do them myself, and since I’m no animator, I didn’t do all that well.

Fast forward a bit, and the situation has changed. Our good friend Shinobi (or visit the german page) kindly helps us out a bit when it comes to models and animation – and he’s incredibly talented as well. The main character was modelled by him, and it’s fantastic to see the amount of polish, and how well this characterizes and shapes the main character – true, it is the inside that counts, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to play kickass looking characters in games, right?

He didn’t only create said character, he also made the animations for another keycharacter that I modelled, despite some problems with the polyflow, so it’s even more amazing to see how good these animations are. While I don’t have all animations he made yet, I’ve seen them, and can’t wait to see the new, great-looking animations in the new, great-looking level. Seeing as the whole thing slowly comes together is an experience that is difficult to describe, and on such a larger-scale project, it is something that is somewhat hard to believe for me … I’ve created small projects before, but this is a whole different beast. Seeing our combined vision slowly coming to life like this – thats one of the moments that keep you going in gamedesign.

So… thank you, Shinobi! Don’t forget to check out his games, and buy them when he releases games for sale (something that is said to happen in the near future) – you are supporting a great individual!

“Graphics don’t matter”

Aaah, this might become a controversal topic. I can already see the dozens of comments telling me that I know nothing! … Getting that kind of comments after what feels like years of casually mentioning that it is possible to comment certainly would have a nice ironic flavor to it. But, that is, surprisingly enough, not what I want to talk about.

Recently, I switched from complete placeholder-graphics to something a lot closer to the real thing, that, in most cases, only needs a bit more polishing (and, in other parts, might require more). And, surprisingly, this is something that just amazes me. The difference is incredible – what was nothing more than a bland proof-of-concept, or just a test, suddenly transformed into … something more resembling a game than ever before.

I know that this might sound shallow, and I am aware that its always about the gameplay and not about the graphics. And, yes, of course, I know what people mean by that. However, what those often don’t realize is how much graphics actually contribute to the concept of the gameplay. For example, if a game is based in the real world, then graphics that mimic that more closely actually help the game and actually improve the gameexperience.

Or do they? I don’t think that is necessarily tied to the pure technical standpoint, but that it is more about the polish of these games. If everything fits together well – like the new level and the new models do, but the old testlevel didn’t – it suddenly becomes more than the sum of the parts, and to see this happening right in front of you is quite amazing.

It’s a good idea to start work with a testlevel and placeholders, obviously, but it can be demotivating since gameplay doesn’t change so much for that one part, and the graphics simply don’t hold up. However, when you do replace everything, it all feels fresh again. It’s quite the surprise. The same goes for adding animations: The moment you add them, it feels a lot more professional.

Sign errors

I don’t know what it is with me and math, really. I try to be friendly and nice, I’m always polite. I say, “Good morning math, how are you today? Did you sleep well?”. But math isn’t one of those, math isn’t normal, math doesn’t follow the rules us normal folks do. No, math must always get special treatment. It’s really friendly and helps you, but say one false thing and see it stabbing you in the back! Well, it’s not my fault, now, is it? Everyone makes mistakes. It’s natural, I’m a human being, I’m not a machine!

See, I made a mistake in that realtimefacialanimationcode. “Oh”, you say, “that again, it’s been a while”. No, don’t worry, I won’t bother you about it. The thing is, I noticed a bug in that code that takes care of correctly rotating the face when the head is tilted (since it’s three-dimensional, there are two parts to this, one that aligns it according to the face-normal (in simpler terms: Makes it look in the way the person looks), and one that rotates it around said normal). For some reason, when one of the characters lay down, his face would be rotated exactly the wrong way – his mouth was outside his head, and the eyes were the other way around.

AAAAAAAAAAAH! Animations!

Anyone knows good ressources and tutorials about that? Preferrably those for which you need no skill whatsoever to follow them, and you get an AMAZING result still!

Those don’t exist? Why? Oh, why! Truly, fate wants me to suffer!

Thankfully, T linked me to some quite good material, and it’s interesting what I learnt about the “walk”-cycle. Apparently, materials for aspiring cartoonists are also good information for us game developers. Now, mind you, I’m still far from capable of creating nice animations, but with a bit of tweaking, I managed a semi-nice-walk-cycle. That’s kind of a magic moment, right there. I found it very hard to get the timing right and to see exactly how much the leg moves or how much it twists from frame to frame, and seeing a clear example of this really helps. Of course, the arm movement must be considered as well.

Now, if only my extremely old version of our gamedevelopment toolkit would support several bones per vertex. Sure enough, they do that NOWADAYS, but who wants to switch engine generations in the middle of development? Not me, thats for sure! One of the usual updates I did a while backalready required quite some fixes, and I can only imagine what kind of nightmare an upgrade will be. Or maybe, it won’t be too bad?

So, thats it for the daily* news: I’m trying to animate the models I created before.

* not a promise for another update tomorrow