Finally something new!

• I guess the first reason I should mention for making SONR is to participate in a TIGSource competition.  If you haven’t done it before and have any inclination to do so I would highly recommend it.  You don’t have to be a coder.  You can do art, music, level design or even just play testing.  People often team up to work on entries.
• One of the requirements for the competition was that you had to use assets provided in the first part of the competition and you couldn’t modify them outside of code.  I thought it sounded like fun to do all the graphics manipulations and enhancements in code.  And it kind of was.  One of my goals with SONR is to make it look cool.  And I think so far it’s turned out looking pretty good.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  But I think going forward I might relax some of the requirements from the competition.
• I feel like my games so far have lacked something.  Depth?  Emotion?  Something like that.  I want this one to have more emotion.  I decided to use something Edmund McMillen said about making Aether and use some experiences from my own life.  Or at least some emotions I’ve felt strongly at one point or another in my life.  We’ll see how that goes.
• As mentioned previously, Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow ended up being much harder than I meant it to be.  I wanted it to be more fun than hard.  With SONR I’m going to try again for more fun than hard.  I’m hoping the visuals + emotion + exploration + easier movement and good combat + reasonable AI + having buddies to help you out = fun gameplay.  And I’m going to let more people test it than I did with NRWG.
• And finally, I wanted some of the stuff that I built for SONR to translate over into framework items that I could use in other, future games.  I’m hoping after coding some more games I’ll have a pretty good idea of what things I’ll want to reuse and which things I don’t.
• I guess another way to sum most of that up is, I want SONR to have, as Kurt puts it, “soul”.

So those are some of my goals.  After I actually get done I’ll plan to do a bit of a retrospective as I have for some other games and see how well I did.  In the meantime, there are a few things I’ve already learned and some changes I’m going to make going forward.

• Doing pixel-level collision detection really isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds, if you can imagine that!
• As mentioned above, doing all the effects and image manipulation in code is an interesting exercise, but in the end not terribly interesting.  I’d rather let someone who enjoys doing that write some tool for me (like the excellent Paint.NET) and just use that.  Much faster that way.
• Having a two year old son does terrible things to one’s supply of available game playing time, and even worse things to one’s supply of available game making time.  Though I was quite pleased that one of his new favorite videos to watch is actually this SONR trailer.  It gives me high hopes for his future video game playing and general geekiness levels.
• Sadly, after creating all the collision detection, image scaling and rotation and game loop code by hand, I think I’m going to basically scrap it all going forward and use a third party game framework.  At the moment I’m leaning towards Flat Red Ball.  It’s kind of a hard decision for me to make.  No one likes to throw away perfectly good code.  And while my code does work, it has some limitations that I’m not terribly interested in building solutions to.  I’ve decided I would like hardware acceleration, better camera support, better image rotation and collision detection, better framerate control among other things.  A lot of that comes for free with a game framework and doesn’t come for free if I have to code it.  I’d rather spend time making my game than writing multi-threaded frame rendering code.  Plus I think a good amount of my code will be reusable.  Most of the game logic and characters and stuff should be able to translate over fairly well I think.  So I’m going to try it and see what happens.  If I crash and burn terribly, I’ll be sure to let you know.
• My combat system still sucks.  It’s better than it was originally, but still needs some work.  Having buddies follow you around and help you makes it funner, but it’s still not where I want it to be.  Once I transition to a new framework, combat is going to be my biggest area of focus.
• So far I’ve only implemented keyboard support.  I think using a gamepad will probably make the game funner.  I want to avoid requiring a gamepad though, since I know not everyone has one.

Well, that’s probably enough talking (or rather writing) for now.  SONR still needs lots of code and it’s not going to write itself.  So let me know what you think of the trailer and the current look of SONR, and I’ll go write some awesome code.



P.S. All the footage in the video is current in-game video.  The video looks okay, but the actual game looks way better.  The video has a bunch of compression artifacts which the actual game does not (especially noticeable at larger sizes).  I need to get some better video editting tools than what I currently have.

I wanted to do a post about the game I’m working on, but I’m not quite there yet. I’m hoping to make a video soon, but you’ll just have to wait a bit longer. Sorry about that.

In the meantime though, I have this post. You’re probably wondering what the heck “Keyboard Sith” means, aren’t you?  Well, the story goes something like this: I’m a keyboard kind of a guy. I think using keyboard shortcuts makes me faster than always having to switch back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. It’s always fun to find a keyboard shortcut I can do in less than a second for something that to use the mouse would take a couple of seconds. When I came across a program named Keyboard Jedi, I knew it was something I had to try out. I actually really like it. Unfortunately, it seems to have some 32bit vs. 64bit problem and doesn’t want to run on my computer at work. There are some posts around about how to hack it to get it to work, but that seemed like too much work. And since the author of Keyboard Jedi doesn’t seem to have updated the application in a couple of years, I decided to create a replacement. And thus Keyboard Sith was born!

For those of you too lazy to click through to the Keyboard Jedi link, here’s the gist of it. The program locks the mouse cursor in its window, so you are forced to use the keyboard. You can turn the mouse capture on and off, just in case you really do have to use the mouse. But it provides a barrier larger than just reaching for your mouse.

Keyboard Sith is a little more limited than Keyboard Jedi in some ways. Keyboard Jedi has the option to capture the mouse only in Visual Studio or in all applications. Keyboard Sith always captures the mouse in all applications. Keyboard Jedi also shows you when you press special key combinations (basically, control or alt or shift plus anything else). That’s handy for presentations sometimes. Keyboard Sith doesn’t do that. But Keyboard Sith does have a nifty pop up notification when you disable the mouse capture, relating the Sith Code to the power of your keyboard. It also has an equally nifty notification icon that switches between a wussy blue light saber when the mouse capture is disabled and a powerful red light saber when the mouse capture is enabled. You can also disable the Sith Code notification via the notification icon (I’m assuming because you already memorized the Sith Code).

It’s not perfect, but it’s hopefully a handy little app that will help some people learn more keyboard shortcuts. And hopefully it will work on more computers than Keyboard Jedi. Embrace the dark side…

Download Keyboard Sith

P.S. The .NET Framework 2.0 or higher is required. But no installation is required. Just unzip the EXE file and double click it.

Since its release, Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow has enjoyed a small amount of public interest. I thought I’d share some of the places it has shown up (Google Alerts is my friend).

• Jay is Games – NRWG got showcased on one of their Weekend Download pieces. I got more hits from this site for NRWG than I have from any other site, by far. It’s like a giant mountain looming out of the plains of my normally tiny daily visitor count.
  
  
  It was cool to have something I created show up on such a well read site. I enjoyed reading the positive comments about NRWG. Some of the “this game is stupid and it sucks” type comments made Ninja Robot sad. But we’re supposed to use those as learning experiences, right?  My learning experience is that I shouldn’t use my own development gameplay experiences at all in determining game difficulty. That and even though rectangle intersection as your main form of collision detection sounds very precise on paper, it can lead to a frustrating gameplay experience for some. Overall, I think more people would have played and commented on NRWG if one of the other Weekend Download entries hadn’t included pixilated nudity. Oh, well. The next game will just have to have Ninja Robot in a bikini or something I guess.
• Nerd Fortress – My friend Kurt over at Nerd Fortress did a little review of NRWG. I liked that Kurt pointed out he appreciated me talked about my game design aims and tools that I used and such. I think I should do that more. Kurt brought up topics related to the difficulty, as well as a couple of other points that would have made the game better.
• Some German web site – I don’t speak German, so I’m not really exactly sure what this site is all about, but it obviously has something to do with games. Google Translate helped me with the actual game review page (the English translation is here if you’re interested), and it seems the reviewer liked the game, though felt at least some level of strikethrough-ed frustration. I’m guessing his/her frustration was again due to the difficulty.
• Cafe Press – This isn’t a review, but I thought it was pretty cool. Cafe Press lets you print random stuff you upload on to random things like shirts and cups and whatnot. My little sister pulled some art from the game and set up a couple of Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow t-shirts that you can buy!  From the screen shots of the shirts, it looks like she did a pretty good job picking art and resizing it and cleaning it up and everything. I can’t say how the shirts look in real life though, as I haven’t gotten one. I’m tempted, but I have loads of other t-shirts I already don’t wear, and I’m afraid this would end up one more on the pile. How’s that for a product endorsement?  Even the game creator doesn’t but the merchandise!

Last night I went to the quarterly Utah Indie Game Night, met some cool people, got reacquainted with a few others, saw some cool things other people had made, and showed a few things I had made, including NRWG, which will hopefully help it gain a little more exposure.

It’s been an interesting experience “marketing” NRWG. It makes me really glad I work as a programmer and not as a marketer. Actually getting the word out and making people aware of what you’ve created sounds hard, but is actually way harder than it sounds. I think I’ll primarily stick to nice easy topics like collision detection, AI algorithms, multi-threaded locking issues and source control management, thank you very much.

So I have two questions for anyone who might be reading: 1) Lots of people have commented on the difficulty of the game. Has anyone besides me actually beaten the game?  Was the time and effort I spent on closing credits and music wasted (not that I spent a ton of time, but some) because I’m the only one who’s seen them?  Just curious. 2) I’ve previously mentioned the possibility of other people designing some levels. I never heard anything from anyone on that. I just thought I’d ask again to see if anyone new might be interested. The level designer isn’t hard to use and isn’t horribly, horribly buggy. Just a little buggy, honest!  If you’re interested, let me know in the comments.

Can anyone else say, “About time!”?  I’ve had this almost ready to release for quite some time.  But I wanted to add some finishing touches to it.  There are more finishing touches that I’d like to add, but at least now it’s to a point where I feel like I can let other people download it, play it, and rag on it.

Before I give my blurb about the game, here’s a gameplay video.  If you’re a super anti-spoiler type person, it does show how to get past the first few levels.  They’re not that great of levels though.

So the idea here is that you can switch which direction gravity pulls.  I thought that seemed like a kind of robot-y, ninja-y sort of thing to be able to do.  I guess you’d classify this as a puzzle platformer?  I had a couple of aims in making this game.  In no particular order:

• I wanted a break from a bigger project that I’m embarking on.  With this bigger project I’m in the phase that requires a lot of thinking and not a lot of coding.  Since I like to code, this was a nice break from that.
• I wanted to try an exercise in simplicity of game code.  Being a software architect at work let’s me learn about all kinds of good programming practices.  I wanted to test applying them in a game (not that I didn’t apply some good programming practices in other games, I just wanted it to be more of an emphasis in this one).  I think it turned out pretty well.  The main game engine itself is only around 400 lines of code.  The executable is only 67Kb, most of which I’m sure is embedded PNGs.  I even added some unit tests.  They were sucky unit tests, and I didn’t create very many of them, but even a small number of sucky unit tests saved my bacon more than once.
• I wanted a snazzy level editor.  I ended up with a so-so editor, but it’s a better editor than I’ve made before.  All the level editing is done in the editor (no creating images outside and then loading them in or anything like that) and is WYSIWYG.  It even lets you go straight from editing to play testing the level.  Very handy.  It still has a fair amount of work before I’d release it to the general public, but at least it’s something I would consider releasing to someone else.

I’m sure there were some other aims too, but those are the ones I could think of right now.

So what’s in the future for Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow?  There are some improvements that I’d like to make at some point in the future.  I don’t know that I’ll actually make any of them, much less all of them.  But it’s a list, and we all like lists, right?  When and how many I make will probably depend on how many people ask for them.  So if you want them, ask for them.

• More levels.  I think the game as it is has 15 levels.  More levels = good, right?
• Going along with more levels, I’d like to release the level editor publicly.  Maybe let some other people make some levels for me.  I’m sure that there are many better level designers out there than me.  Someone who played the game told me that the levels were way too hard.  I thought they were way too easy.  I’m sure I could have a much better progression from easy to difficult.
• Revisit the music.  I like all the individual tracks that are in the game, but I don’t think they all go together terribly well.  I’d like to revisit the music and probably add more tracks.
• More death phrases and commercials would be good I’m sure.
• I thought it’d be cool to add an instant replay if you die in a particularly interesting way (determining what that means programmatically would be half the fun).
• Remember which levels you’ve beaten and let you resume the last level you were on even if you quit the game.  I didn’t think it was that important with only 15 levels (all of which I thought were too easy anyway, as previously mentioned), but with more levels it would be more important.
• I don’t like the sound engine I used much at all (more on that in another post).  I’d like to replace it with something better.  I encapsulated it away, so hopefully that will be easy to do in the future.

Is that a big enough list of improvements for something that’s just barely being released?  I hope so.  Makes me feel depressed. << MORE >>

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've had a big distraction lately. I've included a picture of said distraction for reference. (You can see the picture if you click to view the whole post. I forgot my blog host is rubbish. I really need to make the time to switch to something better...)

His name is Sam. And last night he learned how get himself stuck under the couch. He'll be six months old at the end of this week. So if you're quick with your mental math you'll know I've done a couple of posts since he's been born, but not many. It's not that I haven't had time to post since he's been born, I just haven't had time to work on anything worth posting about. Isn't the first rule you read on all those "How to make a living blogging" blogs that you keep posting whether you have anything to post about or not? Oh, well. I never claimed to be a good blogger.

Anyway, I do have something to post about now. I'm actually working on two projects. The first one is rather ambitious (as in I hope I get done one day) and as such I don't really have much to show for it yet other than some design notes and a tiny bit of code that doesn't really work yet. In working on such a big project that takes so long to make any progress, I realized that I still needed a creative outlet. So I decided to work on a small game while I'm working on my larger one. About a week or so ago I woke up with an idea for a game. I have the basics working and made a little video for your viewing enjoyment.