We’ve just released a teaser for our upcoming game, Donut Get! Watch it in HD on Vimeo.

Developed in Flash, it’s the story of greed going out of control. A cop catching donuts falling from the sky and his life spiraling into world of trouble.

• Character design by Ricky Enriquez
• Animation by David Rodriguez — drodder.com
• Music & Sound Design by Cryptic Circuitry — myspace.com/crypticcircuitrymusic
• Game by Bryson Whiteman — sonofbryce.com

Details will emerge as we creep closer to completion. Stay tuned into this blog and donutget.com .

I catch a lot of “game development tips from the pros” and am shocked by how many of them have the balls to say “make your game fun!” You can cite countless podcasts, articles and books for these quotes, “The bottom line is, a game should be fun!” You can tell they’re smirking like it’s so obvious and easy. “Just make it fun,” they say as if begging for an elbow in the teeth. I just pray that one day that elbow will be mine.

Need an example? No problem, because this rant was inspired by a recording of 57 flash game developers giving tips: http://www.flashmindmeld.com/. Don’t let my complaints lead you to believe that there are not numerous helpful tips throughout the mp3.

In the context of video games, fun is an ill defined term used simply to mean “good.” “Good” as oppose to “bad,” “+” as opposed to “-”, no more informative than a single bit of data. On a scale of 0 to 1, this game is a 1. Stop using it and learn some damn adjectives.

If you asked a chef how he goes about making food and his response was “Me? I make it delicious,” would that be acceptable? It’s as if start-up game developers have been deliberately making crap due to the pervasive misconception that a good game is one consumers never want to play. Who are they talking to? Who’s business model includes a step that reads “3. Piss off fan-base with obnoxious tutorial–PREVENT FUN AT ALL COSTS”?

Maybe I’m just out of the loop. Maybe Sid Meier spent years honing his approach to game development from “Annoy the hell out of Everybody,” to “Inspire Indifference,” before finally “If you give someone a good thing, they will like it.” Maybe there’s a person in a cave somewhere totally unaware of the very concept of a game, let alone whether or not it should be fun. Okay game academia, I guess you exist for a reason. There’s a dude trapped in a block of ice somewhere in Northern Europe that you need to get on your newsletter.

I’m not the type to complain without offering an alternative, after all the subject is constructive discussion. When commenting on a game, concentrate on recognizing your actual response to it and attempting to describe that response in detail–be introspectve. Don’t do what Donny Don’t does:

Donny Don’t: “It’s not fun…Why can’t you just make it fun?”

I actually heard that from a game designer for whom I was coding, by the way. It was completely worthless then and it always will be, like a coach saying “Just win the game!” A game developer doesn’t need to be told what to do, he or she is trying to figure out how to do it. You want high resolution feedback including emotional and intuitive responses.

Try doing what Donny Do does:

Donny Do: “I don’t want to watch the intro. It’s boring, and I can’t skip it. The tutorial is condescending, slow and I can’t skip it. The controls are confusing, I think because the inverse d-pad is unintuitive and I’m getting tired of button-mashing. The main character’s animation looks beautiful and cinematic and I love spell-casting. It makes me feel like a powerful wizard.”

If I heard this, I would know exactly where I had succeeded and exactly where I had failed for this player. I can effectively improve the game with this feedback: The intro and tutorial need a skip button, play with controls and/or offer custom configuration, augment cinematic strong points to further capture the players’ imagination. You hear some tips that are almost exactly like this in the Flash Mind Meld mp3 and they’re worth following.

Art is a science. Be precise.

It’s kind of hard to keep up with Flash game competitions. Every time I hear about one, there’s only a little amount of time left. And even if I know about them for a while, I decide at the last minute to enter! Here’s my last minute attempt to get the word out on a few.

2nd Games That Challenge the World Contest

Deadline: February 28th, 2011 at 23:59 est

Requirements: Make use of the Come2Play Multiplayer Api.

This is my first time hearing of this Come2Play system. From what I can tell, games that implement the API use a universal currency called ‘tokens’. You can check out the documentation to get started and Emanuele Ornella wrote a tutorial for implementing the Multiplayer Api that might be worth checking out as well.

Here are the winners for the 1st competition to get an idea of what the competition might look like.

More information at the Come2Play website.

Stanford Hackathon’s Flash game Competition

Deadline: Too Soon, February 13th at Noon PST

Requirements: Create a game with the theme of “benevolence”. Whatever that means…

Prizes: The best part is every submission wins a copy of FDT 4 Pure, the excellent ActionScript code editor. Which is awesome if you’re on Mac because you don’t have Flash Develop. Grand prize is Adobe Master Collection and a bunch of nice goodies. Check the page for the full prize list.

My homies the Super Fulton Bros. (Steve and Jeff Fulton) are judging this one, as they posted on their site. Jeff expressed concern for how subjective the theme is but that may make it more fun in the end! Part of what makes Apples to Apples so great — the other part being plenty of alcohol consumption.

More information at Stanford’s hackathon website.

Pico Day on Newgrounds

Deadline: April 30th

The yearly Pico Day event will be happening on Newgrounds not too long from now. It’s a while so there may be time to plan something! haha

If you don’t know what Pico Day is, it’s a where Newgrounds users submit a bunch of animations and games themed around Pico, the classic Newgrounds Flash game from like 10 years ago. It was a huge inspiration for me back when I was messing around in Flash 3. Gotoandplay genius.

Some info on prizing in the blog update.

Kongregate Monthly Competition

Deadline: End of the month! Every month.

I never knew Kongregate had a monthly competition. But it seems that they do.

More info at the Kongregate website.

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