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’m happy that all of 3 games in the project are hooked into each other through the game scenario and most of the art assets are completed. We now have an even clearer idea of how the project is working so it makes the refinement process go much faster.

To the left are some game assets from the car game. I drew these cars in Adobe Illustrator, and made a few color variations. I’ve determined 11 variations aren’t enough so I’ll draw a few more and make additional colors to break up the visual monotony.

Since the last post, I’ve added Cryptic Circuitry’s music and sound effects to the game. It sounds great and it’s becoming more obvious what sounds are missing now. We need to take another pass at the sound now that it’s in. The sound is always the time consuming part that I spend little time at the end on. With the energy Cryptic’s putting into the sound design, I want to make sure it all works smoothly.

As far as the Sokay war with Chris Rock goes, I declare myself winning. As he is too much of a wusscake to post any news on his game. He claims his time “working on it” is much more valuable than posting on a blog. Pssh!

Here’s a bit of artwork I drew for the Donut game’s intro animation. It’s roughly animated so my man Cryptic Circuity can lay down some tunes for it while I tend to other areas of the project. My current focus right now is the top-down driving portion of the game. I should be showing bits of that part soon.

Chris has been touring Europe for the past couple weeks so don’t think the war is over. He’s just been readying the quiet before the storm. I’ve managed to gain some ground on him without having to sabotage his project, but his game was just about ready for a demo release even before he left. Regardless, both of our games are looking top-notch and I look forward to revealing more.

Peace.

I’ve been hustlin’ on the Donut game. In the past month I’ve been busting out on the collision for the car segment and the intro animation for the game.

I’ve been working with the other members of the team — Ricky, David and Cyptic Circuity — to organize our tasks. Ricky’s doing most of the game’s character art and animation, primarily the Car segment and the Donut segment. David’s doing animation for a Fight segment — he did LUV Tank’s in-game animation. Cryptic Circuitry is doing the sound, as he did with Sammy Samurai.

I’ve had an idea of what I’ve wanted for the intro for the game for a long time but I had been conflicted on how I could get the story across without it being too drawn out. As an introduction to the game, I didn’t want the intro animation overshadow the game itself. I also don’t want to devote too much time to it when I have a game to make! I want something that basically says “Here’s your character. Here’s your scenario. Now play!”

I think of my games as interactive animations so I’ll continue to explore this balance. I haven’t made an animation like this in a while but I’m having fun so I may grow accustomed to it.

The new site.

It seems I’m making one major site update a year, haha. This update has what I wanted to do with the redesign last year but didn’t get around to doing it. The major new content is each game having a subsection with images, a description and links.

Turned out to be trickier than I anticipated. I’ve been wanting to make the whole site XML based but since I don’t plan on updating it frequently I decided to go with a quick & dirty Flash route. I added SWFAddress to handle deeplinking for the site last year, but with subsections it becomes more useful. I also fixed a bug involving the back button not firing an update event (solution: make sure the SWF has an ‘id’ within the embed code). I’m also using a modified version of Lightbox for the pop-up images — I found it here (he’s got broken links and stuff so it’s hard to find).

So check it out at Sokay.net.

So I’ve been hard at work on this Sokay stuff but nothing much is ready to show yet. For the past month I’ve been cracking away at a new version of Sokay.net . It’s a bit of a subtle update, but I’m giving each game a profile page. I’m aiming to launch it with the release of Christopher J. Rock’s game, Rush Hour. He finished it a while ago and tried to find a sponsor but ended up starting work on a new game. He’s decided to release Rush Hour as a Sokay game, I’m proud to present it. You can read about it in Chris’ post about it.

I’ve been heavy in the art and interface of the Donut game, on and off for the past few months. I’ve finished most of the menu interface. I’m glad that’s together. Next I’m going to finish up the introduction game. The Donut game is essentially 3 mini-games tied together through a scenario. So far I have 2 of the 3 engines in prototype forms, practically alpha. A lot of the final artwork is in, but the gameplay’s missing a lot of features. I develop games heavily with the artwork in mind, so I tend to do more of the artwork upfront, which is the reverse of what many developers would recommend. I think they’re probably just more programmer oriented, rather than visually.

Here’s a sketch I drew for the game. Most of the art starts off like this.

So we continue, one step at a time. I look forward to showing ya’ll another game. It’s what I live for.

Peace.

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.

For a preview I’m just showing some line art from the game. Currently, this art is already painted and imported into the game. The background is my handywork and Ricky did the characters.

I began work on this about 6 months after doing LUV Tank. It was an idea Ricky had mentioned during the development of Thugjacker. My intention was to finish something small, we busted out LUV Tank in about a month and I wanted to get something else small out the door. We experiment with a different animation pipeline for every game and I wanted to define a more efficient system. When conceptualizing the game I got ahead of myself and ended up with an idea that was much more grand than I initially envisioned. I spent a lot of time debating whether I should extend the game, especially when I had ideas for other games that I felt more passionate about.

Since then we’ve jumpstarted a few ideas that haven’t come to light yet, and even released a new game — Sammy Samurai: Runner. My “meh” feelings about the gameplay of Sammy helped me to decide that the Donut game had to be more along the lines of the Epic Masterpiece that I envisioned. Competition is fierce and you’ve got to give it your all or get lost in the deluge of Flash games out there. The quality bar has definitely raised, and I’m glad it finally did.

I’ve finally started spending quality time with the game. I did a port to AS3 earlier this year and finished hooking the game into a framework to tie the games and screens together. So a lot of that boring stuff is done I’m gonna spend more time roughing out the game — creating artwork while prototyping the gameplay. I look forward to putting all the pieces together. David Rodriguez who did the game animation for LUV Tank is back and doing some animation for a fight sequence. Cryptic Circuity who did the music for Sammy is back with a soundtrack for this one.

Ok, time to get to work!

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