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    SpaceOreMiner : Some random thoughts


    2010 - 10.14

    No blog posts except for boring patch notes 🙂 Sorry about that, I know you all value my wit over my boring patch notes 🙂  I’ve spent the dev time today modelling the remaining ores.  They need a bit of tweaking, and hopefully can get them in-game tomorrow.  Adding ores is currently a bit of a nightmare, for my uber vision of the game, I will need a much easier way of adding them.  Will have to ponder the best way of doing it.  Currently ores need to be present in two different prefab models, one for in game, and one for the inventory – this was my bodged way of doing it under the time constraints of the 19 hour challenge.  Know a bit more about unity now 😉

    Adding diamond to the game resulted in some interesting stats generated – I thought I had made them pretty rare, I’ve only found 1 during most of my dev work – but the stats talk for themselves :

    Diamond Stats ( in realtime! )

    Six found so far, and only two real active players 🙂 Both of whom are beating me score-wise!  Thanks for playing Greg and Vaolinx.  Seeing people actually play the game is a huge ego boost 🙂

    I’m not sure about the bomb at the moment.  I just put something simple in, which is why the blast is a square at the moment.  My ultimate goal would be some huge terrain shaking event SFX monster blast.  Which leaves a spherical hole, rather than looking like you’ve made a room.

    I’m also debating changing the name of project – maybe just adding the rest of the ores to the game and leaving SpaceOreMiner as is, evolving the code base into my grander vision – which alas, SpaceOreMiner doesn’t give the right impression of.  Well in my mind anyway.

    The problem is, I found, that 99% of decent names are already taken.  I come up with one, google search it, and then D’oh loudly.  Ah well, maybe someone can provide me with some inspiration.

    Oh and to the person who messaged me about Project Baphomet – I didn’t think anyone actually checked the html code of pages, take this as a denial 😉  There is no Project Baphomet!

    Annoyingly, as the site gets more traffic, the spam levels are increasing quite dramatically.  I now have more spam comments than real comments, and same applies to spammy messages from YouTube.  Thankfully the usefulness of the comment review system within WordPress is pretty sweet – nice and easy to control it from within the interface without the blog getting bogged down with spam.  Anyone who plays my game clearly needs no penis enhancement.

    Once again, before I end this post, my regular feedback begging paragraph :  Play the game, tell me what you love/like/hate about it.  Have any cool ideas about features to add? Tell me!  Always looking for new ideas.

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    New YouTube video : How to play SpaceOreMiner


    2010 - 10.12

    After seeing a lot more people getting a score in the game, thanks to the giant floating labels of knowledge, I thought just before I started rl work, that I would make a quick youtube video explaining how to play. Just to remove all risk of people getting confused by the gameplay aspects 🙂

    Watch the video, then play the game here :

    http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/spaceoreminer/

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    Facebook Games


    2010 - 10.10

    I mentioned in my first post my shunning of social networks. Let me explain further. Personally, I have avoided social networks, the exceptions being reddit and lurking on slashdot. Other than that, posting my mundane experiences to people I barely know, in some form of voyeuristic boasting has held no appeal. [Ironically I became addicted to twitter shortly after this. ED]

    I recently joined facebook, under an alias, to look at the games that I had heard so much about. I shall not mention any names or specifics at this point, but the entire concept of them being ‘games’ offended me. Maybe I should get out more 🙂

    1. Viral as necessary mechanic. This annoyed me the most. The spam on my wall, the pointless invite others to progress, spam your friends to show you are better, etc; etc;
    2. Viral as a need to progress. Hitting walls because I wouldn’t invite my friends, being negatively effected because I refuse to post about some random game event.
    3.  Click. I realise that clicking is a required operation. It’s quite essential for most computer interactions. However, having to perform mindless repetitive clicks over and over again seemed at best stupid, at worse a soul destroying activity which brought me closer to the brainwashed masses.
    4. YAY! BRIGHT COLOURS! I’M A CARTOON. Alas, if only this was confined to just browser based games, it might be tolerable. But, it has crept into every facet of gaming. Now, art style is a very unique factor, what someone might like, someone else will hate. I’m not trying to force my views on anyone, but, imho toon style sucks.
    5.  Click ( again ) and wait. When an entire game hinges on watching a percentage meter going up, or a timer going down I am very much reminded of the excellent work of Progress Quest. Other than that awesome code based comment on modern gaming, it really grinds my gears.
    6.  Buy our fake money and get better at the game! I may regret saying this in future, as micro payment systems do seem to be one of the best ways of making a living from a game ( which I would LOVE to do ), however, using real life money to increase my abilities during a game just strikes me as a pointless waste. Now, don’t get me wrong – I like shaking my epeen as much as the rest of the net, cosmetic enhancements, I have no issues with. Look at my new shiny thing! Bet you wish you had enough money to waste on such a fruitless sprite. A better player being proportional to a player who spends a lot of money is not a good game mechanic, no matter how rich it makes you.
    7.  You can’t loose! I know, I tried. On several games, I set out to loose, making bad choices, letting my timers expire ( oh noes! ). And found it impossible. At no point did I see a game over, or a ‘you smegged up big time, reset time?’. This largely removed any sort of emotional risk I would have with playing a game. To quote the tagline of my favourite indie game, Dwarf Fortress, Losing is Fun!
    8. Install our spyware/game enhancement! My god, I honestly didn’t believe people would fall for this. The information gatherable by any software installation ( esp into your browser ) is astounding. Agreeing to use a toolbar, no matter how innocent looking it is makes you wide open to all sorts of info gathering. You might not think your browsing habits are interesting. But I can promise you the market research company paying for your info thinks very differently.
    9.  Bloody Viral. Sorry, but this REALLY is a major urk for me. I get viral. If its done well, its an amazing traffic driver ( and some may even call it beautiful in its implementation). There are some awesome viral campaigns out there. You won’t find any awesome viral on facebook games. Spammy as hell. Repetitive annoyance isn’t good viral.
    10.  Lowest common denominator. Yes, I appreciate a large percentage of the facebook population are not gamers. This is fine. But when your facebook advert appears with text indicating that this is a game, that I, a gamer, will want to play, and it ends up being the most pointless click and wait fest ever, I’m gonna be annoyed.
    11.  Compare to your friends! Who cares how you are compared to everyone else? I want a challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing how my scores compare to my friends, bragging rights are always awesome. But what I really want to see is how good I am compared to EVERYONE who plays the game. I wanna be the very best! Like no one ever was! ( hmmm, maybe that reference goes against 4, but those games ARE classics! 🙂 ).

    Oh my, that was a more angsty rant than I thought it would be 🙂  Please, if anyone who has read this has an actual facebook game which is cool, feel free to comment.  I am very happy to be proved wrong with this 🙂

    tl:dr; facebook games suck.

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    Bump Mapping an Asteroid


    2010 - 10.10

    I found a really awesome post on the unity forums : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/63282-Bump-maps-for-built-in-terrain which links to this awesome bit of code : http://sixtimesnothing.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/bump-mapping-for-built-in-unity-terrain/. I’ve played around a bit with it, to see if it will fit SpaceOreMiner, and you can see the results below :

    Without :

    Without mapping

    With :

    With Mapping

    Still playing around with it, hence no updated web player – very interested to see what else I can use this for 🙂

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    Top 10 player list!


    2010 - 10.09

    Almost hit 100 games played in the lifetime of the project. It may seem low, but I’m quite impressed 🙂 I thought I just would add a Top10 and TopAllPlayers to the stats screen. Though as there are only five registered accounts, the TopAllPlayers is a bit pointless, hehe.

    You can see the top 10 here :
    http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/spaceoreminer/stats.php

    And to see all players scores :
    http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/spaceoreminer/all_players.php

    And for those to lazy to click on those links the top players ( and well, ahem, only registered players ) are as follows :

    Rank Name Total Ore Mined Total Score
    1. LamentConfig 164 60700
    2. GhostHunter 80 31100
    3. YouTube 98 24100
    4. rob 53 12550
    5. Inko 11 1250
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