Over the weekend I noticed a sudden surge in traffic and I noticed most of it was coming from Agame.com. Turned out they had just stolen it and added it to their frontpage on Thursday and a lotta people were playing it. It’s nice to know people are still playing it after 5 years! haha. My favorite part is still reading all of the insightful comments like “cool ima pimp nigga“and “DONT STEAL HIS BIKE“. Mostly spam here, but the Newgrounds comments are still gold to me.

Thugjacker’s been our most popular game, by far. A great deal of it has to do with it being our first game, with Ricky and I spending so much time with it. The gameplay has a stickiness that keeps people coming back — I think it’s just fun to mess around and beat guys up. These days, it’s easy to be lost on Flash portals so it’s usually hit or miss if people notice the game or not. Thugjacker usually does well but LUV Tank usually gets lost. LUV Tank only really took off on Addictinggames.com for some reason, but it’s usually the game that the not-so-hardcore gamers tell me they like the most.

Yesterday I was working on the Donut game with David. We had started talking about Thugjacker and I showed him a lot of the stuff we cut out of Thugjacker Half — David wasn’t working with us on Thugjacker. There were cinemas scenes that I didn’t have time to finish and implement. A lot of the real story. It’ll all find it’s way into the game eventually. This Donut game will give another side of the story.

Bryson’s been pressuring me to post about Children at Play for a long time, and I kept telling him “I’m too busy working on the game!” But enough a’ that crap. I uploaded the video preview to YouTube and I’ll have a playable demo up here very soon.

I started work on Children at Play at the start of last winter and its eaten a lot of my time since then. I consider it a small step, but an important one, in the right direction. I’ll save any in depth discussion for when I’ve got the demo up. For now I’ll post some text I’ve put together for various submissions and whatnot.

Team:

The team would be my brother and I. He handles sound effects and any non-procedural music and I do everything else.

Description:

Children at Play is a physics based puzzle game with gravity as its core mechanic.

Players must fire a blue star through curved space and around obstacles, bending space-time and igniting supernovae to destroy a red star target and darken the sky that much.

A boy’s mother refuses to buy him marbles, but while pouting at home, his wish is granted by a sparrow. The bird only requires the boy to play a game.

Beautifully generated procedural artwork and spacey, harmonic music are the backdrop to an eerie story about hidden consequences and the nearness of all that governs the universe.

Does Children at Play do anything new?

The experience of Children at Play is most similar to that of puzzle and sandbox games, but it is unique in that it lends meaning to the puzzle/sandbox skeleton within the context of a world and story and its primary means of doing so is via direct analogy, which I consider fundamental yet uncommon in game designs.

(THIS PARAGRAPH OF SPOILERS HAS BEEN CENSORED)

Furthermore, while the qualification of any game as art is regularly challenged, even those that agree games are art would not expect one to discuss the puzzle or sandbox genres as such. This is unfortunate because it is these genres that lay at the heart of all video games. Every game with an objective boils down to some kind of a puzzle, regardless of how far removed from puzzledom a game may appear on the surface. I’ll cite Braid and its predecessor Oracle Billiards because they each take a genre that would never be considered akin to “puzzles” and create an experience that I would consider primarily puzzle-like by exploring the use of time within their genres.

The sandbox is of greater importance to me because its curiosity-motivated, exploratory experience is exactly what I wanted to achieve with Children at Play, however it is the least respected of all genres. Even the gaming community will write-off sandboxes as “not really games” because they don’t have a clear objective. I find this extremely problematic because it is only a step away from claims that games cannot be art. The game cannot be art because its experience is variable or, in other words, the objective is unclear in comparison to works of static art (in which the “player’s” objective is obvious: sit and enjoy). The freedom of a player, limited as it may be in some cases, is what defines a game regardless of the artificial moral judgments enforced by point systems or forcing players to retry levels the right way. In fact, the only reason I included a point system in Children at Play was because some players seemed very apathetic without having something to maximize (or minimize–I included both to encourage experimentation), but ideally a player would invent challenges spontaneously.

Hope that wets some appetites. More comin.
-Christopher J. Rock

I read about Indiecade accepting submissions for the 2010 game festival on Gamasutra. If  you read this blog, you might know that we went to last year’s Indiecade and had a good time. I told Chris and he’s down for action! He wants to submit his upcoming game. I think it’s unannounced…

I see this as a threat. He may be my friend, something of an ally, but I will never let him make me look like a chump by outclassing me at Indiecade. Never!

So I now announce that we are at War.

This ain’t no East Coast/West Coast thing. We’re both representing Los Angeles, no problem there. Nobody’s getting killed. This war is more of an arbitrary goal to provoke motivation, sorta like Obama’s car MPG requirements for 2016.

Chris’ game is looking great. It’s a physics based puzzle game, he’s doing all the art and coding as well. In addition, there will be some procedurally generated music. This guy is nuts, but it works. A demo for it is coming soon.

I’ve been forever working on my Donut game. It’s looking great but I’ve been neglecting it because I’ve been doing long hours on a game I’m doing for my day job. And I’ve been working on an update to the Sokay.net site. When things get back on track, I’m gonna knock it out.

Last December Chris tried peer pressuring me into doing this Global Game Jam nonsense.

“Come on Bryson, you wanna be cool don’t you?” -Christopher J. Rock

While I always feel obligated to elevate my coolness, I resisted. At the time I wasn’t interested because I felt that I needed to give love to my elusive Donut project. As January 29th approached I realized that the Game Jam is something I needed to do. After attending the Game Developer’s Conference and Indicade it’s become ever-so apparent to me that connecting with others within the same community builds deep bonds. And it dawned on me.

Independent game developers need a spot where we can kick it. A spot where we belong. Where we don’t have to get all dressed up and be Hollywood.

Something similar to a Thugz Mansion, but for game developers. Global Game Jam is our Thugz Mansion.

Global Game Jam is an event that took place at over 130 locations around the world where people got together and made a game in 48-hours. From Friday night to Sunday night. Each location is independently run. Some locations had competitions, but not the one we went to.

Chris and I attended the Game Jam organized by MEGAusc located at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I left after work so I got there a couple hours late. By the time I arrived, Chris had assembled an army.

We worked in a dorm lounge. Our home for 48 hours. (I went home to sleep though, haha)

We had Troy, a computer science student at USC that learned Flash in his “spare” time, and Gabriel, a local artist that had never made an all out Flash game before. Also we had Noe, Cameron, and Andy who intro game development students that had drove an hour or two to the event for some extra credit points. They hadn’t learned any development skills yet so they helped us out with ideas, taking photos and collecting text for game.

The theme for the Game Jam was “Deception.” By the time I sat down, the team had a solid idea. The game was to be about propaganda sneaking through the brain and dissuading its thoughts and beliefs.

Here’s the background I drew. Gabriel made some tweaks and made the bullet-man.

So I sat down with my MacBook and hit the ground running. I started a Photoshop sketch of an environment based on the ideas that were being passed around, this became the second stage — “The Reptillian Brain.” By this time, I knew it was a platformer within the brain. I imagined you were an invader in an eerie land, a neural forest of trees. Meanwhile, Gabriel began drawing out the “Eye” stage and character designs. After seeing my sketch, he went off and did all of the art for the rest of the stages.

At this time Chris and Troy were going over how they were going to separate and integrate their programming tasks. Chris was tasked to do the gameplay, he wrote a platformer engine from scratch. And Troy created the game shell, which included a menu system, in additon to creating a camera system for the game.

The focus for the first night was to define our idea and what tasks each of us will take on to make that happen. We had decided on a screen resolution of 640×480,  the gameplay elements, visual style and the story.

The second day I started by cleaning up my background, exporting every element as PNGs and prepping everything as Flash assets. After that, I scrapped together a parallax engine for the foreground and background elements. Quick and dirty. I didn’t want to worry too much about integrating it with their code so I just told them to give me a camera position and I’ll be able to do the math to offset the tree positions. I got stuck and wasted some time trying to do my code smarter, extending classes and whatnot, but I ended up copy & pasting because some timing problems were popping up.

After defining an art pipeline I worked with Gabriel to clean up his art so we can import it into the game. While he was focusing on drawing the character animation for the game — I took his backgrounds, exported them and brought them into flash.

The programmer guys, I didn’t know what they were working on. But I knew I didn’t want to be a part of it. Their SVN was screwing up so they had to resort to passing files with a Flash drive and trying not to break each others work. They lost a lot of time over that.

About midway through Saturday we grouped up and organized a schedule for the tasks that we had remaining. Scheduling is similar to a 4-letter word in my book, but I can’t deny how important it is to meeting any kind of deadline. Even though we were all in the same room, we were so busy looking at our own screens that we didn’t really know exactly what point each of us was at. The estimates gave us a good idea of whether we had enough time to implement all of the stuff we wanted.

Sunday was a mad scramble to get everything in the game. Gabriel stayed up all night working on the animations and making an intro movie. Troy and Chris were working to merge their code. I gathered together all of the game assets and started laying out stages. Troy had a homie in New York, Giancarlo, whip up some music for the game and it worked well.

The project went together frickin smoothly. Since Chris and I have been making Flash games for years and have worked together on projects before, we already had a style for building a platform game like this. It only took a little discussion to decide how I needed to prepare the art assets for the engine. When all of our pieces were together, they worked almost flawlessly. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to polish everything once it was all in place, as that 48-hours came to an end quite soon.

I enjoyed this project. I got to meet some random people that I’d be down to work with again. I love the exhilarating feeling of concepting on the fly and running with it, not having to deal with lengthy meetings and approvals. I appreciated everyone sticking with it for the long haul, 48-hours is a long time. It was an uncomfortable, inconvenient situation that forced us to cooperate and resolve differences which in the end resulted in a deep bond. Kinda like camping, haha.

I’m looking forward to Game Jamming next year!

Credits:

• Troy
• Chris
• Gabriel
• Bryson
• Giancarlo
• Cameron
• Noe
• Andy

Links:

• Triune Soldier Outline ( Gabriel’s outline of the game’s artwork and content )
• Triune Soldier on Global Gam Jam ( you can download the game here )
• Gabriel’s Blog
• Global Gam Jam website
• MEGAusc

I recently finished Kavalmaja by Tonypa. It’s an puzzle-adventure game that I first played about a year and a half ago. I had probably spent 30 minutes with the game, getting deeply involved with it. Something interrupted me and got sidetracked and never went back to it. It was bugging me that I never finished it — so I did. And it was worth it.

The game of Kavalmaja is a well thought out dungeon. The goal is to collect all of the “gold pieces” in the dungeon, acquiring abilities along the way to progress further along in your journey. The game is presented in an abstract fashion, requiring you to move around and touch stuff to see how it reacts. As you interact with the world you learn what its symbols and colors mean. So an area you passed through earlier will have a different meaning later on. It ends up playing similar to a Zelda game but there’s something special about its abstract nature. In a Zelda game it’s clear that if there’s a cracked wall you need a bomb to get through it, the world of Kavalmaja the connections aren’t that obvious.

It requires trial and error. I liked that about it, but felt it can be a problem sometimes. There’s a couple parts that require you to “die” to collect your gold pieces. I think that’s just one of the laws of game design, to never require the player to die. This kind of bugs me but it’s not as bad as preventing you from progressing through the game — you can’t get stuck. And given all the situations where you could possibly get stuck, it’s an amazing feat that Tonypa managed to make it work out as smoothly as it is. He said it took a long time to test all the possible positions and conditions. And I believe it.

I’m iffy about Flash game adertisement and the ads in this game really got to me. You see an ad every time you die, and that can be frequently when you get stuck somewhere. As frustrated as I got, seeing that Mucinex commercial over and over again, I was compelled to keep playing the game. I needed to solve the puzzle. So if a lame commercial can help support developers like this in making well-made games, maybe they aren’t so bad.

I had to resort to searching the jayisgames, walk-through thread for a solution to one of the puzzles in the game — the one with the teleporting rooms. I felt dumb that I didn’t figure out, but I also believed that he could’ve made a clue to make it a bit more obvious. I missed the one detail that would’ve help me figure it out. It might not be too bad to have a puzzle this difficult in the game given how easily one can find solutions on the net. It’s good to be stumped every now and then.

I’m just writing this because I think it’s a great and solid game. Even though it’s a Flash game from last year, it’s definitely one of the best games I’ve played this year. It’s inspired me to do an action-adventure puzzle game. And to think outside the box, maybe even a bit abstract.

• Play Kavalmaja
• Kavalmaja walkthrough (spoilers, duh!)
• Kavalmaja map (spoilers)

I’ve put it on Flash Game License. This is the first time I try out their service, but I’ve only heard good things. I’ll put a link up after the game’s live.

The soundtrack was done by my brother, Jonathan Rock. After the game’s out, I’ll put the music here for download.

The game is entirely blitted (using a single bitmap display instead of many sprites), which allowed me to fill it with action without any worry of slow-down. The framerate is a solid 30fps. It even seemed to run well at 60fps, but I didn’t want to alienate anyone on a crappy machine.

You can see in the screenshot that enemy movement is very fluid. That’s because I used timeline animation to guide everything. This was done with a ‘puppet’ system that updated blit data based on played movieClips even though they weren’t on the stage.

The background was generated from 4 different bitmapData objects. The 3 star layers were scrolled down (bitmapData.scrollTo(x , y)) by a given distance (their velocity) every frame and the gap left at the top was filled by an image of randomly generated stars using the setVector function which is extremely fast. The most efficient way to handle that was to constantly refresh the values of uint vectors with lengths fixed to exactly the value needed to fill the space of each bitmapData object.

There’s also a layer of perlin noise used to generate the smoky nebula effect that drifts by all the ships. Just as the stars were generated one piece at a time, the perlin noise was generated just at the top as a slice and then scrolled down as it ‘moves’. However I couldn’t use setVector to generate perlin noise, so I had to have a separate bitmapData object just for generating perlin noise that was only big enough to fill the space left by the constant downward scroll. Each time the perlinNoise function is called, it is passed an offset array so that the noise always represents the portion that should exist above what came before it. I ran into an annoying problem here until I realized that the ‘stitch’ argument in the perlinNoise function was set to true and should not have been. Generating perlin noise is very processor intensive, but I was pleased to find that if you generate it just a little bit at a time, you have no problems at all. I would like to use this same technique in the future to create infinitely large maps that are only generated one slice at a time as the player moves in any particular direction.

I based collision detection in this game on my work in the Bad Bones demo I showed at IGCW a couple weeks ago and found the bitmapData based technique to be very effective. Each ship filled a rectangular area which represented itself on a bitmapData object. They filled this area with a color that acted as an ID tag for that specific object. Other objects could then check a specific part of the bitmapData object to see if any other objects are there. The checker finds a specific color registered with a specific object and a collision is detected. The only limitations are that you cannot collision detect outside of the area of the bitmapData object and if you want collision detection for anything other than a rectangular shape, you must get a bit more complicated than the fillRect function (and lose some efficiency). This technique has proven to be so effective that I expect to make it a standard part of my game development process and recommend it to others.

Check back for the full game.

-Christopher J. Rock

I’d say one week as an indie game developer, but that title doesn’t feel quite right before completing at least one game independently. Shouldn’t be much longer.

Before I left my previous employer, I was spending nights working on Bad Bones, losing sleep, time with my girlfriend, and feeling increasingly frustrated by how difficult it was to fit my passions into my life.

Bad Bones is a concept I like a lot. One that bears many of my feelings and thoughts on games, but it also represents a great deal of compromise. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn is to effectively compromise my ideas. It’s hard because I’ve spent years teaching myself not to compromise. Too many artists are too willing to compromise and their work gets so diluted by the suggestions of others that eventually it’s tasteless. They take the scratchy, misshapen materials of their identity and sand down all the rough edges with what’s popular, what’s easy, what pays, or what some committee of peers finds palatable. All the sharp, rusty edges are gone and you get a nice, round blob. Nothing to poke anybody. God forbid you make something with meaning because somebody might be offended by it, or think its too artsy, too preachy. Every amorphous blob just tickles fancies and rolls away, disappears.

I don’t have to worry about any committees anymore. I’m okay money-wise with my savings, but that’ll end before long. So pay is on my mind. Monetizing games is a big deal these days with DRM dropping dead, microtransactions and subscriptions on the rise, Free2Play and so on. I’m keeping my fingers crossed hoping that selling a good product at a fair price is enough to cover rent. It’s all up in the air. Getting paid weighs as heavily as the work I’ve dreamed up that I can’t expect to earn me anything. And if I can get paid for what’s easy, that’s a temptation.

I thought about putting ‘temptation’ somewhere in the title of this post because I’ve only been on my own a week and that’s what I feel. It’s tempting to toss any sense of responsibility and burn up my savings working on whatever I want to work on. And it’s tempting to take a job with good pay (more than a lot of people can expect) and do secure work for years that I don’t need to give a damn about. It’s even tempting to pump out a string of crappy flash games, fill them with ads and build up a cash flow selling to every casual gaming site on the internet. Or to get some sponsors and spend my days skinning games for the new Maxi-Pads website or any number of toys looking for an online face. But instead of taking those, I’m sticking with limbo.

Offshore of nine to five, and surrounded by boatloads of freelancers, sponsored work, and full-bellied tower-defense developers, it is hard to dog-paddle without a number entering my mind that represents how long I think I’ve got until I’m treading water. That number is sitting down on my forehead, trying to suck up my stare. Make me cross-eyed. Weighs down on my nose, trying to flatten out the bend in my bridge. I’ve got a big nose. My nose is weird and I can’t breath right through it–never have. But I don’t need a damn number grinding the corner out of it. Smoothing my face out until I’m a big round idiot.

I’m trying an experiment. After IGCW, I put Bad Bones on hold to work on a small project. The idea is try to make a decent game as quickly as possible and sell it on FlashGameLicense. Try to form a development pipeline that can allow for quick, profitable games to supplement the larger, riskier projects like Bad Bones. My rough schedule is 1 week for 1 game. I’ve lost some time on a few things this week, but I’m doing okay. Not sure what I’ll have exactly by the end of this weekend, but I am doing okay. If this doesn’t work out, I guess it’s back to the drawing board. But that’s okay.

Don’t get me wrong about all this. If it’s not this pressure to find a pay-check it’s the pressure I felt before to be independent, doing good work that I believed in. There’s an element of madness in each one of those and each one will eventually drive you crazy if you let them. But there’s a chance here that I can kill both of these damn birds with one stone. I’ve got to give it a try.

It’s alright. I do my best work after throwing myself to the lion’s den.

-Christopher J. Rock

Bryson is still working on unit art, but here are a couple sketches I sent over to give him an idea of what I was going for with the game.

They’re called Boman and they like to eat and have babies. Stay tuned for more art and the Boman backstory.

I’ll be demoing my early version of Bad Bones at the Independent Game Conference West in sunny Los Angeles (Marina Del Rey) this Thursday and Friday (November 5th and 6th, 2009). If you’re around, gimme a holler and wish me luck on finding a bag of cash to fund my game.

Now I wish to direct your attention to some impressive figures! I expect that I can deliver good performance on map sizes at least as big as 1600×1200, and perhaps as large as 3200×2400. Dimensions like that are generally thought to be impossible in flash, but I tell you it can be done. My proof is that I have seen it! Though it was at about 15fps…Still, it can happen.

I can get in 1000 units if I’m okay with 15fps on a 1600×1200 map currently. After some house-cleaning I expect to run a solid 30 fps with 500 units on a 1600×1200 map and of course I’ll aim for higher.

Bad Bones represents years of pondering over the RTS genre. I might say that the first time I became a hardcore fan of a game was when I got into Warcraft. It was right around the time that Warcraft 2 was coming out that I found out about the series from a kid named Raphael in my 6th grade class. His description gave me a blind faith in its excellence, and at this crucial time in my gaming experience, I was not disappointed. My family had just recently purchased our first computer and Warcraft and Warcraft 2 were an immensely gratifying experiment in PC gaming for my brother and I.

However the suspension of disbelief perpetuated by the fantastic booklet art and its pages of story, the in-game text, cut-scenes, and characters could not last forever. Warcraft 2 was my first online multiplayer experience and I became immediately aware that the name of the game was micromanagement and rushing. The best players weren’t strategists or tacticians, they were factory foreman that knew how to pump out a basic unit fast and deliver it to the enemy encampment.

The player behavior motivated by Warcraft 2 was all wrong, and yet while DOS games were left behind, this definition of the strategy genre remained largely the same. I was pissed. So I kept a mental checklist of what I wanted to see in an RTS.

Here are some of my problems with the RTS genre and how I’ve sought to solve them in Bad Bones:

Micro-management: Micro-management ruined the RTS for me. Why is micromanagement considered a bad thing in a leader, but good in a game about leading?

Solution: Unit inflation. By keeping unit numbers high and making them relatively easy to obtain, an individual unit is worth very little to the player and it becomes very troublesome to click around on single units when you can command the group as a whole–like a decent commander should.

No Tactical use of Formations or Route of Approach: There are a number of RTSes out there that allow the player to arrange their units in formations. It is generally a very limited and ineffective feature despite being of grave importance in actual combat. This is in part because no importance is given to route of approach. In reality, a group of soldiers often must find a way to reveal their enemy’s rear while protecting their own (you can cut the innuendo with a knife), so the attackers route of approach is vital in determining the victor.

Solution: Units in Bad Bones are directionally biased. They have a front with “weapons” and a rear with “vulnerabilities”. If a unit’s weapons touch an enemy’s vulnerabilities, the enemy is destroyed.

That simple design requires a player to deceive his enemy into revealing vulnerabilities by arranging and maneuvering groups of units. In other words, you must use formations.

Your average RTS judges small-scale (1v1) combat based on stats and random numbers. Two units hack or shoot at each other until dice rolls have determined that one is the winner. If the game designer wants to introduce new unit features or rebalance the game, (s)he must tinker with the stats and random numbers. This process seemed too artificial, so I opted for a more stochastic approach which attempts to solve the large-scale problem of integrating formations with what emerges from the small-scale mechanisms of directional 1v1 combat.

I’ve done a lot of testing using classic tactics–different types of envelopments, outward facing defenses, oblique formations, etc–and the results are surprisingly accurate. The stochastic approach also acts to further diminish the usefulness of micro-management and I find that it automatically balances itself as a form of game combat.

No Tactical use of Surprise: Soldiers like to do stuff like hide and sneak up behind people because, as I understand it, if you want to kill someone, you should avoid letting them see you. This concept doesn’t apply so much to your average RTS.

Solution: The use of formations and unit directionality gives a huge advantage to any player that can surprise his or her opponent, but I still wanted to introduce a form of pure deception to Bad Bones.

The most basic way to do this was with camouflage. I’ve included forested areas in Bad Bones which allow groups of units to hide their numbers or remain nearly invisible.

I am frustrated by games like Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, which simulate camouflage with simple AI tricks requiring a player to wear a certain outfit to blend in with landscape A and another for landscape B. But I was impressed that it was difficult for even my eyes to identify Snake sometimes, and that’s the experience I wanted to capture. So I chose to place forests as a translucent layer over the units that a player can always see through, but only with great difficulty. Humans and AI alike are required to look closely to spot a band of troops moving through a forest, and both would find it extremely challenging to spot units as they remain still.

“Fog of War” is perhaps the best conduit for surprise in RTSes, but its usefulness is generally limited. I haven’t implemented it yet into Bad Bones, but I look forward to experimenting.

No Tactical use of Terrain: For centuries terrain has been considered the foremost determining factor in a battle, but its presence in the RTS remains underwhelming.

Solution: Maps in Bad Bones are currently divided into 4 terrain types: Mud, dirt, grass, and forest. Each of these effects the rate at which units walking on them move. Furthermore, the map is generated with altitudes and the more quickly a unit attempts to change its altitude, the slower it will move (as it may be moving up or down a steep hill). Because units move most quickly over grass and they can hide in forests, an army is most vulnerable at low altitudes in mud and dirt. What makes things tricky is that all the food grows in the mud.

Artificiality of Bases: Base construction in the common RTS is step 1 and step 2 is populating the base, but this seems counterintuitive. I wanted to demonstrate the organic emergence of a consolidated population. It is important as the reason for organized warfare, why there is generally a defender and an attacker, and why retreating has very limited usefulness.

Solution: Agriculture is credited for organizing and escalating war, and Bad Bones is meant to model that to some extent.

Units in Bad Bones must eat and reproduce. The process requires a unit to eat before becoming pregnant, after which point it must remain defenseless until giving birth. The offspring then remains immobile for a period, during which it must be defended. A player is motivated to consolidate and form bases because they’re simpler to defend, but the investment a player places in any given location is completely up to him or her.

Also, any unit is capable of spawning a new population anywhere else on the map that it can find food and safety. This approach seems natural and flexible to me while the common RTS solution feels artificial and arbitrary.

I used a lot of strange and unique methods to script these ideas into Bad Bones. It was challenge enough to meet the concept’s demands with something that can run in flash, and I haven’t even mentioned pathfinding, procedural map generation, and bit-blitting. How it was all accomplished I will explore in later posts. For now, I hope you’re interested and keep an eye out for me at IGCW.

-Christopher J. Rock

Play it at www.sammysamurai.com

In late November of 2008 I found a forum post on Flashkit that linked to a contest from Mochiads. I wasn’t too excited about the prizes, the runner-up prizes were almost a joke, but I saw this as an opportunity to rush and actually finish something. Winning would be a plus. I hadn’t released a Sokay game in 2008 so I felt it was my last chance.

So I wanted to plan something that I would be able to finish within a month. That meant it had to be a lot simpler than my usual grandiose visions. I passed up on the opportunity to work with the Donut game I’ve been working on because there was a lot of animation that needed to done that I didn’t want to think about.

I had recently been inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Tales from Earthsea. I didn’t think the movie was very good but it has some awesome background design and a few shots had some excellent parallax scrolling going on. The parallax shots were very quick but captured my attention. Thanks to digital compositing they were able to blend many layers without making it obvious where one layer ended and another began.

Tales from Earthsea. This particular shot caught my eye.

With this fresh in my mind I wanted to try setting up an environment with many parallax layers, to give the feeling of depth within the environment. I thought of Guardian Heroes for Sega Saturn because it had many parallax layers and the player moved in and out of the background. The ground’s a flat texture that’s warped to perspective, to give the perception of depth. While it was a sidescrolling beat ‘em up, there were 3 distinct ground planes that the player could hop between to chase after enemies, or avoid attacks.

Guardian Heroes for Sega Saturn. A Treasure classic.

Battletoads for NES. Stage 3.

To keep the gameplay simple for Sammy Samurai, I imagined something like the 3rd stage of Battletoads for the NES. The warp tunnel is a notoriously difficult stage, but mastering it makes you feel bad ass! On this stage you hop on these hover bikes and start flying through this tunnel. You have to move up and down to avoid walls, jump over barriers, and hit ramps to cross large gaps. The patterns get more intense and obstacles come at faster until it gets ridiculous. There’s no room for error, you make a mistake and you have to start over again. Pattern memorization and quick reflexes to make it through the game.

I have a habit of taking my ideas to the extreme and going overboard with my games. Great ideas, but I often don’t have to time or focus to bring it all together. Since I had such a short time to do that game I wanted to use the world of Sammy Samurai. I had completed a great deal of art for the game when I was in school, but didn’t get to a lot of the game stuff. I thought of Runner as an intro to the larger game I planned, therefore I could allow it to be simple and force myself to not take it overboard.

I started with a few thumbnail sketches and right there I knew this was going to be awesome.

My games are visually driven. I start out with a vision of how it’s going to look. I think of making games as building a world for the characters to live in, from there everything falls into place. One visual goal that I wanted to accomplish was a seamless transition from day to night, I knew this might be tricky given that the background was going to be scrolling continuously. One of the first steps I took was to establish the color pallete I was going to be working with. I created 2 comps to get a feel for what the layout of the game was going to be like. Although I had an idea of the colors I wanted, I used Adobe Kuler to find groups of colors that worked well with each other. Adobe spent a whole lot of money developing it so I figured I’d see if it had any value. Working in CMYK mode in Adobe Illustrator, I increased the K color values evenly to create the different shades I would need. Here’s the result…

I used these comps to set the color palettes and layout.Once I settled on the proportions I started developing a scrolling engine for this game.

In a few hours I came up with scrolling engine that would let me scroll as many layers as I needed at varying speeds. I think the game has something like 8 layers of parallax. From there, I finalized the artwork from the comps and brought them into Flash, hooking them into the scrolling engine.

For the gameplay I wanted to create something like a Time Attack mode. I was hoping to end up with something like a Ferry Halim Orisinal game, simple but keeps you hooked. I planned to have more elements like obstacles that had to be dodged, barrels that contained power-ups, and an elaborate boss battle. All nixed to hit the deadline, unfortunately. After launch, Chris threw in a suggestion to make the game about protecting someone behind you. A design issue that I had a hard time wrestling with was the ability to move up and down while slashing repeatedly. I initially was planning to slow down your attack speed, with enemies spaced far apart. The decision to make it the way it is was actually inspired by a bug — it just looked so cool to take out an entire row of enemies at once. I had to leave it like that. A problem I created with that is that it’s now too easy because you can just slash-slash-slash wildly the whole time, which is why I wanted to have emphasis on the score instead of surviving. One goal that I had was that it had to be possible to get a perfect score in the game if you were good enough.

Part of the requirements for the Mochiads contest was that the game had to use their version control system. This was an interesting idea to me because for the first time I was able to let bugs slip and be able to push updates whenever I needed. I had a few weeks with ‘open-beta’, updating some issues, tweaking the enemy layout, gameplay and adding features like the “Awards” system. This was my first game to have high scores so I was enthused to see the results everyday. These results actually influenced a design decision to include an “Perfect score” award, which I didn’t know was possible because I couldn’t pull it off myself — some dude in Mexico managed to pull it off.

In the End…

I didn’t win the contest, as the developers that won had much more elaborate games that were well into development when the contest started. Somehow I didn’t expect that, ha.

I wasn’t fully satisfied with the game itself. It’s cool and pretty, but it lacks the depth and challenge that I usually strive for. I ended up spending a lot more time than I expected polishing the interface and presentation, giving everything a smooth transition. So I ended up neglecting the actual gameplay. The valuable part of this project was the learning experience. It reminded me that I can complete a great game in a couple weeks if I can stay focused on it. The next Sammy release shall contain an updated version of this game, closer to my original vision.

You can play Sammy Samurai: Runner at www.sammysamurai.com .

Inspiration:

• Battletoads for NES
• Guardian Heroes for Sega Saturn
• Tales of Earthsea (Studio Ghibli film)

Image Gallery:

Go play Scarygirl, sucka!

The game’s finally out, been playing it for the last few days. Awesome stuff! I got into making Flash games to create experiences like this game so it’s major inspiration for me. It’s 16 levels with a built in save system, so you can come back and finish it anytime.

Check it out at Scarygirl.com!

Game by Touch My Pixel.