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

Just check out the art…

I really loved the graphic high contrast sections and the beautiful animation throughout. So smooth. Along with excellent staging and perfectly timed to a song that tells the story of Tarboy. Incredible stuff.

I also came across Comme un Poisson on the frontpage of Newgrounds last week when I was browsing randomly with a friend. Funny as hell, and some great animation. I really dig the style.

Comme un Poisson by Stamper

There’s some really quality stuff out there. It’s amazing we get all this stuff for free!

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)

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 also found this great GameSetWatch interview where the creative director Oliver Lejade discusses how the game came to be. From starting off as a PC tech demo, to becoming an innovative title making extraordinary use of the DS’s capabilities. Here’s a quote on why they had a hard time selling the game to distributers.

You’re saying, “Oh, this is a game about little girls, pink ponies, and you know that little girls are going to buy this,” it’s X number of units are going to go, it’s an easy sell. But when you come in with an original game, that they don’t have any clear reference to the gameplay of something that has been done recently, that has no license, then it’s a very hard sell. And if you have only five minutes? I can’t explain Soul Bubbles in five minutes. It’s not doable — and I made the game.

You can read the interview here:

• Q&A: Mekensleep’s Lejade – The Extended Soul Bubbles Interview

One of the things that he discussed is that many reviewers gave the game a low score in spite of how great the game was otherwise. They said it was too easy, as the game offers hint bubbles to help you out if you get stuck. The developers wanted casual gamers, which are the majority of DS audience, to be able to enjoy the game and make it to the end. So everyone could enjoy it. The point that the developer makes is that the clues are only user initiated, so if you don’t activate the help you don’t get any. Which allows the more hardcore gamers to figure it out themselves.

I found that developer video page on a GameFAQs.com forum post, where someone posted this in response…

“Thanks for posting that. I was curious about the game from an article in NP, but then they gave it a low review. I was not going to buy it until I came here and saw that video. I just picked it up from Toys R Us and brought it home. I’ll post more after I’ve played it.”

It definitely sold me on the game, I’ll have to hunt down a copy of it. The art looks fantastic and the effects looks great too. I’ll reserve my judgment till I play it, which may be a while as I work through a mountain of Xbox games, but it’s apparent that it’s well beyond the shovelware the DS is known for. I’m glad they took the risk and are able to continue making DS games.

• Soul Bubbles Official Website
• Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers (and I’m late to the discussion of course, haha)
• Soul Bubbles review by Games Weasel

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

‘Why’ is step one in any other art form, but Hecker is right. We don’t hear that question too much in games. It is my opinion that the earmark of great art is the purpose behind every choice involved in its creation. Even if that purpose is ambiguous at best, there must be justification for artistic decisions. But Hecker did a good enough job of making this point, so I’m going to say something that may be to the contrary.

I believe that many indie developers have already challenged themselves with ‘Why’ for some time, but there are other challenges. As Hecker points out, the way to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of games is not yet understood. This may explain why our ‘art games’ tend to be overly-abstract, even inaccessible, and still relatively shallow. Developers are forced into extreme formalism just to get over the steep learning curve.

I’m a formalist. I love formalism. But there’s more to art than form and frankly, I’m sick of abstract games. I want some damn content up in here. That’s why I call for developers to ask why less. As it stands, game developers are asking why for the wrong reasons. They’re asking why something is fun or entertaining, which leads to shallow, uninteresting answers. If they ask why in search of something deeper, that’s great, but I’ll set my expectations lower. We’ll get quicker results if we skip the whole why and go for an intuitive form of expression. I’m calling for something closer to improv. Stop looking both ways, and just cross.

When you forget about what other people think and just plop down what you gotta plop down, whether you like it or not, your work reflects who you are. Put yourself under pressure. Tie a gun to the back of your head and make sure that if you don’t finish a game–a good game–within the next 2 weeks, a bullet will go through your head. The definition of ‘good game’ will transform during those two weeks into two priorities: (1) What you can program quickly and (2) whatever comes to mind. The first priority depends on how good of a developer you are (which may be the flaw in this approach for many), but the second is what guarantees that your work will be artistically interesting.

Say you see a man with a unique wardrobe. That wardrobe can tell you a great deal about this man that he didn’t mean to communicate, like what he does for fun, what he’s up to now, the kind of work he does or how much he gets paid. You ask him where he got his shirt and he replies with 30 words. Out of those 30 words you might get an accent that tells you his place of origin. You might discern his political views or religious beliefs. You might discover he’s a racist, a reverse-racist, or that he’s just sensitive about the subject. You can learn any number of things from signals that are not designed at all to communicate the messages you are receiving. The man’s individual signature exists in every choice he makes–including the subconscious ones. If he is a game developer, his games will reflect his personality.

However, our expression can be stifled. As a staunch supporter of introspection and a sober, conscientious approach to art, I know there are times when action is more important than philosophy. We need games that don’t hold back and I believe unleashing our ideas is the way to make them.

Stream of consciousness game development. Maybe that’s impossible, but by working fast and flowing, we can get something close. Developers can focus on self-expression and proliferate. Games even be as short and simple as casual games, but the mechanics should have a context that makes them meaningful (which requires asking why, yes, but answer fast and start coding).

I would love nothing more than to see developers engaged in real philosophical argument about their medium, but right now that sounds like forcing sixth graders to study the Renaissance before you let them paint. Yes, they need to hear about Da Vinci, and yes, it will make them much better painters, but these kids don’t even know what they want to do when they grow up. Let them get their fingers wet, then assign some book reports.

There’s one problem with this plan. Games have been around a long time and developers aren’t discovering the same happy accidents that finger-painters do. That’s because of money. Hecker mentions that industry development is all about profits. So it’s up indies. What else is new.

Really, I agree with Hecker entirely, but I would hate to see indie developers slowing their productivity to find a ‘deep enough’ reason to make a game. Call me a devil’s advocate.

-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

Day 1 started out all-business, but just when I was beginning to worry that this conference would be all about revenue streams and marketing strategies, I heard a great talk by Aaron Vanderbeek on how the relationships between players in a game can influence the way they play. He found a correlation between the closeness of a relationship between two players and their tendency to cooperate vs. compete. Very interesting concept that can lead to many other discussions (and did).

Then John Master Lee held a fantastic discussion on indie game marketing and how even a single man operation can do the job without a publisher. A lot of his advice stuck with me. He suggested emphasizing individuality, indulging in the indie’s role as David fighting Goliath, and gave some interesting tips on creating a fan base. For one, Lee claims that long blog posts are a waste of time because very few people read them and they take a lot of energy to write. That’s too bad because I have a lot more crap to say.

Another interesting tip from John was to hold contests, but only for small prizes. His experience showed that big prizes (like a big screen TV or a Wii at its initial launch) attracted ‘professional contestants’ (he called them ‘Soccer Moms’) that had no actual interest in your site or product. Small prizes more closely related to your game and your audience’s interests could excite and attract people that are likely to stick around. I realized then that I had not considered myself to be a potential ‘contest holder.’ I’m used to being one of a million potential contestants, but then John’s talking about people getting excited over a $10 prize–a toy from your game, a poster, or whatever. That’s something I can afford and it doesn’t feel like a slimy ploy.

John Master Lee’s advice seemed to coincide with that of Day 2’s key note speaker  Chris Swain. As Co-director of the USC Games Institute, Swain’s approach was much more academic, but he reiterated an indie developer’s need for originality. One of his slides was a chart put together by Jenova Chen to visualize the relationships between different game genres (as plotted between Arcade, Strategy, Action, and Simulation) and their rates of development. I found much of the academia to be pretty dubious (my usual complaint when it comes to video game theory), but I can support his point that mainstream games were being developed safely within the limits of well known genres and independent developers could take advantage of this tendency by innovating outlier concepts.

Swain also displayed a graph if the iPhone’s long tail. A platform’s long-tail is the curve which illustrates that platform’s sales per publisher. Generally you see a high number of sales on one end (where all the big publishers are), followed by a steep decline and a ‘long tail’ of small publishers. Independent iPhone developers can expect to sit along that long tail, which means zero revenue. The curve was so severe that while the top 5 apps were raking it in, even the 1000th app out of a million would be lucky to make a dime. While there was once ‘Gold in them thar hills’ as Swain put it, the iPhone is now a very saturated market.

The rest of my Day 2 was spent listening to how everyone in the business wants to screw you. I came from studying film where you can easily find yourself renting the equivalent of a pipe for hundreds of dollars, so there wasn’t much new in that sense, but the details were good. Bryan Sawler of Muteki told a surprisingly personal story about his ongoing uphill battle as the owner of a small game company: the mistakes he made and why it’s worth the fight. I wrote down these quotes:

“Business is about having no choice.”

That reminded me of someone’s criticism of a facebook game during the Vanderbeek talk:

“There are no choices. It’s not a game.”

“Our games, somebody else’s games, we just want to make games.”

Sawler’s plea was framed by remarks about making crappy games that may or may not be paid for by the client.

And finally, Sawler quoted an employee on why he went from finances to game dev…

“I wanted to earn my soul back.”

A panel made up of  Bryan, John Szeder, Paul Foster, Margaret Wallace, and Mike Cartabiano made it clear that not only are publishers a lot of abusive pricks, but contracts in general are evil and so are lawyers.

I for one definitely have to figure out contract crap. Just one of those things that sucks about trying to make something big happen. If you don’t put it down in writing lousy with legal jargon somebody somewhere can find a way to smash the whole thing.

On that note, I had a good time. I’ll keep my eye out for next year.

Oh yeah, I showed Bad Bones at game demo night! That went pretty well. People showed interest and asked a lot of questions, took a lot of fliers. The game was really in too early a stage to do much with it, but I went in knowing that so it was no big deal. I’m looking forward showing it off again when more of the selling points have been worked in.

-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