I was looking into XML Tile Map editors a while ago and I found Tiled Map Editor. The site looked nice and was recently updated so I thought it looked like a good one to try. I recognized the demo maps displayed in the editor screenshots, they were from The Mana World. I contributed a few tiles to the project back in 2004, about midway through my journey through college.

During that time I was trying to figure out how I was going to be able to make games for a living. Although I was developing games like Thugjacker in my free time, I never believed there was a career in doing Flash games. I was preparing to become a 3D environmental artist, hoping to break into the game industry by designing a Half-Life 2 map. But I’ve always had the urge to explore different 2D art styles — I had a huge fascination with pixel art. During that time I would browse the Pixelation forum. The pixel art there was inspiring and I wanted to get in on it, but it was kind of hard with no direction. I just wanted to make some assets and learn the craft, not do all the characters and everything else. Shortly after that, I found a post recruiting people for The Mana World.

The Mana World is a free and open-source 2d MMORPG. It runs on the eAthena server, which is open-source software that emulates a Ragnarok Online server. I thought the game looked cool. It looked like Secret of Mana which was one of my favorite games growing up. It also reminded me of Ragnarok Online, which I didn’t play much but thought was super cool (I loved the art). So I jumped in.

Back when I first saw it, the game was super rough. Laggy. Buggy. But I loved being a part of it, the team was dedicated. It was exciting to log in everyday and see what changes were made while I was away. Most of the game development discussion was done in IRC chat rooms. There were many contributors. And good number of enthusiasts as well, which mostly played and gave feedback.

These are the tiles that I contributed to The Mana World.

I ended up dropping out of the project shortly after finishing these tiles. I had to devote more time to finishing school and my own projects. Looking back, it was my first experience working in a game development team that wasn’t just me and Ricky. I got some practice with working remotely with a team that was based in Europe. I got to feel the pressure of having to deliver game assets and the joy when everyone enjoyed what I contributed. It was also my first exposure to the concept of SVN — which saved me from feeling dumb when I first started using SVN at work.

I think it’s important to remember there’s always a game team out there that could use some help. People in school or just trying to break in the industry can look for these opportunities to gain some experience, and hopefully that leads to more confidence and some good portfolio pieces. From my experience on this project I knew that I could handle tiled pixel artwork. I wouldn’t revive this ability until 2007 on LUV Tank.

Peace!

-Bryson

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

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:

“I like to jump. You like to jump. My mom likes to jump. We all like to jump.” – My 6th grade jump instructor

Little Loki Escapes from Hell, which I developed at Liquid Generation, was my first experience developing a reflex based platformer game. It was the result of a bit of brainstorming and a good deal of freedom during the calm storm between projects. It was the type of project I’d been wanting to develop for a while and I dived in. I invite you to read about a story of its development.

It went something like this…

My coworker, fellow blog editor Chris Rock, had lost his mind and decided to make a platforming engine. “What are you doing Chris?” I said, ” Have you gone mad?” Apparently he had and said he was working on a new philosophy. A new way of life. He named his creation the Liberty Engine. He worked on it diligently, obsessively, while I twiddled by thumbs and spun around in circles in my chair. When I regained consciousness I found a new file on my desktop. An early build of the Liberty Engine, eg “Rock’s Platformer Engine 29 – 2004.fla”.

So now that I had an engine I wanted to make something to put it to the test. At the time we were trying to figure out how we could work together to code projects, which Flash tends to make a bit more difficult than it has to be. I came up with the idea for the game while driving home from work one day. I wanted to make a game focusing on jumping – something that was simple to play because of one action button – jump! – yet challenging enough for the skilled. I sketched out some thumbnails to layout the idea visually and decided that I could make it work.

Ice Climber for NES

I was inspired by Nintendo’s Ice Climber, one of my favorite games growing up, and this simple-yet-addicting Flash game I ran into – and quickly became obsessed with. Having these games as inspiration made it easier for me to understand what I needed to do to make my idea work.

It only took me a day to get a prototype of the game up and running. I didn’t have a definite theme for the game when I started so I decided on the formatting of the game and used boxes to serve as placeholder artwork. I had to think about how large I needed to make the character to give the art-team the freedom to make a recognizable protagonist while still allowing enough room to have a good portion of the stage on screen at once to for the player to know what was going on.

Before Little Loki was Little Loki.

From the start I had a goal of making a game that made use of a level editor. It can be a hassle laying out stages within the Flash IDE so I designed and coded an editor within Flash. The product was a Flash program that gave you a drag and drop interface to design levels. It didn’t turn out as “user-friendly” as I wanted but it made level design a breeze. The editor exports the stage layout as a text string containing the X and Y of every object in the stage. I had issues with figuring out how to format the stage data so that I could move it from the editor to the game for testing and back into the editor for revisions but in the end I figured out something that worked.

“Jump Editor” – click to enlarge

After the editor was finished, development was practically a breeze. I had to do some fine tuning by adjusting heights of jumps, adding in new enemies and props. Experimenting with levels and finding out what sorts of ideas worked – and what kind of bugs popped up.

The artwork came in after the game was basically completed. The artists had an easy time putting it together because I laid out an Adobe Illustrator file that served as a template for the game, with the dimensions for every asset. The green blocks became much prettier stuff and the transformation of the game was almost instant. The gameplay was exactly the same but the new artwork gave it a feeling.

Art Assets

While the Liberty Engine was a blessing, it was also a curse. Curse is a strong word, let’s say minor inconvenience. Early on there were a lot of problems that I was having from adjusting variables and tweaking the code for my game. It was the first time it was being used outside of the original development environment so I ended up discovering bugs that I prayed that would just go away. But it was convenient to have the author sitting at a computer next to me that I could whine “fix it!” at whenever my character fell through a platform or I needed some feature that wasn’t in there yet.

This project helped me to realize how much more fun you can have when you have a lot of the groundwork done already and can build off of earlier, or another’s, code. This game was done OG styles in Actionscript 1 but now we’re looking for ways to save and reuse code by using Classes in Actionscript 2.

You can play Little Loki Escapes from Hell here at Liquid Generation.

-Bryson Whiteman

That’s the latest game I’ve finished. We had to rush some bug fixes at the end which cost us some sound effects, but we’ll be updating it this week with the right stuff. The game won’t be any different really, so go ahead and give it a try.

Here are a few thoughts on the game and its development. I list some “lessons to be learned” at the bottom, so feel free to skip down to that.

The Thief Game with Thief Jumps

I just put up a blog on “jumps.” You’ll notice in this one I used a double jump (with stiff vertical acceleration). Originally, I was designing a game about a thief so I was aiming for the sense of high speed and agility that one would expect from such a game. Right after I had the mechanics figured out and finished programming the “attack dog” bad guy, it was decided that the thief idea was a no go. Sometime later it became The Breakfasat Club. So the basic gameplay idea and the attack dog character were both meant for a thief game and everything else was tossed in when the game’s story was more ambiguous. Hopefully I succeeded in creating the sense of crispness, speed and agility that I was aiming for, even though the game’s story didn’t end up adhering to that. . . .

But hey, that’s why we need some games at places like Sokay. And if you want to see LG embrace more “games for the sake of games,” please let them know it.

Playing with Interface

I ended up having way more development time than I first expected, but I was never quite sure when I’d have a deadline plopped on my lap. Because of that, after I finished with the mechanics and level designs, I focused on streamlining the game’s interface. This is the first time I’ve had the chance to play with that aspect of design and I liked it a lot.

I tried to make sure that anyone that didn’t want to waste time reading instructions, menus or watching cutscenes wouldn’t have to (because that often bothers me). I also never liked moving back and forth between the mouse and keyboard when I play a keyboard based game so I gave every menu a function that would go off if the player just hit the space bar. I realized that was a mistake on the start page because players can launch the game, then open a new window and check e-mail or something. If they start typing and hit space, that will initiate the game. I’ll probably update the game with that fix and make a habit of creating start pages that can only be left by a mouse click.

With other LG games, we’ve found that no one reads instructions pages before playing, but if you don’t read them you won’t know what’s happening. That led me to the exclaimation points ala Mario World.

Oh and I also popped in a little cursor timer that you hopefully won’t notice. If you leave your cursor still for about 10 seconds, it’ll turn invisible. When you move it again, it will reappear. I did this because I always hate having the cursor in front of my games, whether I’m playing them or watching others do it. It was a real nice way of removing the cursor without annoying a player that was trying to use the mouse.

I think the only real interface function I had no time to implement was an options menu that could change the controls. I actionscripted a foundation for one, but never built the menu itself. The game’s simple enough that it’s fine without configurable control schemes, but I’d have liked to have the experience of building one and finding out how many people actually use it.

Crashing

This game was the real test of my Liberty Engine, as I’ve so proudly named it. You might notice that in levels 4-1 and 4-2 there is a bit of slow down. It only shows up on some machines (pretty much only Macs) and on some the level even freezes. If you restart the game, the level will work just fine.

I believe this is because the levels are exceptionally huge (big enough that they went beyond Flash’s max length and width) and the game uses attachMovie to drop in hundreds of objects. I assume that the second time through the player’s computer cached enough of the game that it loads things in more easily and doesn’t freeze.

This form of the engine is a good example of some of its capabilities, but it’s a very inefficient form. While working on this game, I also worked on a level editor that can really push things along in development. It still needs some updates, but I’m hoping it will be able to offer unlimited level sizes and object numbers (by generating levels based on actionscript rather than vector images).

The only thing that allows the engine to run at all is the fact that everything that could be turned into a PNG image was converted into one. The backgrounds of each level are actually large, tiled PNG images. We couldn’t use one big image for each level because after images get too big, they freeze crash. The way it’s operating right now though, the images are always present on the stage, which is pretty inefficient. I could have removed them when they weren’t visible, but that was tossed aside like a lot of other possibilities in the name of completing the game on time.

I also implemented a sound manager created by my fellow LGer, Tom of EndGameRadio. Nice little class file that allowed all the sounds in the game to be easily actionscripted, which I believe made the game run much more smoothly. I’ve had sound issues with flash in the past, but this time implementing it was easy as pie and didn’t slow anything down at all. Thanks Tom.

Lessons to be learned: Use PNGs for everything you can, try to actionscript all your sound, watch your vector count, don’t get too close to flash’s max dimensions, use a loader system to spread your attachMovie’s over multiple frames (even just a few), expect Macs to run flash much worse than PCs do (even really good Macs), large games will load slow once and fast everytime afterward (thank you cache), INVEST IN INTERFACE (it may seem boring, but it’s half the player experience), oh yeah and set enterFrame to undefined whenever a MovieClip isn’t going to be doing anything anyway.

So that’s that for that. I’ll have to come up with a whopper for the next project.

-Christopher J. Rock