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    Sigil : The Future


    2012 - 06.23

    Posted in Game, General, Random Thoughts, Sigil | No Comments »

    After the crazy amount of feedback I’ve had on Sigil, I’ve decided to carry on with it. Totally loved the first person shooter tower mechanic, so now I need to do several things to turn it from a 7dfps entry into a fully-fledged game. Below is a list of random ideas I’ve had. Dependent on feedback, I may drop some – need to actually write a proper GDD quite soon.

    •     Code Refactor – as a 7 day game, I have to admit, the backend is in a bit of a mess. All the AI is currently derived from a base class, along with the turrets. However, the GUI and spawning systems are a bit of a mess. This needs cleaning up.
    •     MOAR Turrets – I have so many ideas for turrets – I’m going to create a load, see how they play for people, then probably trim them down to the most useful ones. Current turret ideas :
      •     Freeze Turret – does exactly what it sounds like, freezes enemies in place so your other turrets can decimate them.
      •     Electric Turret – Arcs between different enemies, gradually getting weaker.
      •     Energy Gathering Turret – Does no damage, but collects energy automatically within a set range.
      •     Bounce Turret – causes the enemies to bounce backwards in a random direction.
      •     Elemental Turret – four different turrets doing different amounts of damage to the enemy dependent on resists.
      •     Mortar Turret – Launches an AOE projectile.
      •     ‘Lazer’ Turret – Does damage to one enemy, keeping it the sole target while it damages it, damage increasing over time.
      •     Poison Turret – Applies a DOT to an enemy.
      •     Decloaker Turret – Makes invisible enemies visible while in range.
    •     MOAR Enemies
      •     Elemental variants – similar to currently spawned ones, but with resists to the elemental turrets mentioned above.
      •     Cloaked Enemies – Originally the transparent cube was meant to be a cloaked enemy, however, with time constraints I had to drop this idea.
      •     Reverse Vampire Enemies – They start with 1 health, then as they move towards your Life Sigil they gain more and more health.
      •     Flying Enemies – exactly what it sounds like, will really confuse the current turret AI 🙂
      •     Buff Enemies – Enemies that speed up or heal surrounding enemies.
      •     Teleporting Enemies – They appear in front of you and stay there for 5 seconds, before teleporting closer to your Life Sigil.
      •     Ninja Enemies – not quite ninjas, but will try and work out a route to your Life Sigil by avoiding as many of your turrets as possible.
    •     Configuration screen – music/sound/mouse sensitivity/misc game options.
    •     Levels – More than one level, a set way to complete a level, proper wave system etc;
    •     Game Modes – The current game will become survival, I want a story line one as well. Also would like a craft mode, where instead of you using energy to make turrets, you build them from fallen foes.
    •     Graphic/Level/Model Improvement – the current art style sucks, very much need to move to a cooler look.
    •     Turret Upgrades – Very much needed, as currently the only way to survive is just to spawn more and more turrets.
    •     Online scoreboards – Would be epic, hopefully will start the implementation of this today.
    •     General polish – improve the GUI, overview map, etc; etc;
    •     Add different difficulty modes – including an unlockable one on completion.
    •     More effects – unity can produce some amazing looking graphical effects, I need to harness this for overall sexiness.
    •     MOAR EASTEREGGS – Seems no one has discovered any easter eggs in the current game – but I want to add more, as I love them 🙂
    •     Better tutorial screen and menu screen, along with a decent game over screen.

    As you can see, that is a fairly long wishlist – no doubt there will be some things removed and other things added. I’ve got the freeze turret already in my test build, along with a new enemy type that spawns other enemies. Once they are balanced and working properly I will add a global high-score list, which should be fun 🙂 I’ll branch the game at this point, keeping the #7dfps entry separate and focus on creating and updating the new instance.

    If you haven’t played the game – why haven’t you? 🙂 http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/sigil <-- see it is big and red, you know you wanna click it! Mac and PC downloads are both available on that page as well. Let me know what you think, either comment here, tweet me ( @beebug_nic ) or feel free to email me ( lamentconfig AT greenslimegames DOT com ). Looking forward to reading your thoughts!

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    #7dfps : some initial thoughts


    2012 - 06.04

    Posted in Game, GameJam, General, Random Thoughts, Sigil | No Comments »

    So, I’m quite excited about the thought of the 7 Day FPS Challenge. I’ve never actually written a first person shooter – most of the things I do tend to be abstract or in third person. So this gives me an excuse to play around in a new format. In anticipation of the event, I’ve been playing around with some ideas.

    The first one is procedurally generated levels – I’ve investigated a few ways of doing this. The first was using a procedural height map on a unity3d terrain object – and populating the island with different buildings. This was all well and fine. But I feel it has probably been done to death – esp with unity as a platofrm. I loved both Doom and Doom2, so felt maybe I wanted to focus on indoor levels. This lead me to using a tried and true cave generator algorithm with a slight adaption ( as I normally use it for 2d cave gen). After adding a couple of levels ontop of each other, the results were ok. Not very happy with it yet, but still mucking around seeing what I want to do with it 🙂

    3d level generation

    Definitely think I will be going with indoors levels – I may stay with this approach or use a series of prefabs linked together at run time. I want indoor levels because the second major idea I’m having is too make it a slightly scary game. Inspired by some of the feedback I’ve had on Trapped in a Box – I’m going for more box like characters – this is purely an art choice, and nothing to do with my lack of 3d modelling skills 🙂 ( Did I manage to pull that off with a straight face? )

    I put together this quickly in google sketchup ( not the best package for this kind of thing, but suits my prototyping skills nicely ) :

    Scary

    Now, before you giggle – imagine you are in a dark dungeon environment. You feel so alone, you move from one burning torch to the other, trying to find a way out. Suddenly the torches around you go out, and you see two pin pricks of red light in the distance. They start moving towards you, speeding up, getting bigger and bigger, and then suddenly the torches splurt back to life and OMG IT’S A BOX WITH A SCARY FACE ON!

    Hardly Amnesia alas, but still will be interesting I feel. To confirm my suspension that I had created a monster more scary than the Weeping Angels I had the following conversation with my partner :

    Me : (Shows image) does this look scary or silly to you?
    Me : imagine it dark, glowing eyes
    Her : more scary than silly i think

    I truly have created a monster! The game play idea itself is going to be a pretty simple one. You destroys these, errm, boxes by shattering them apart. They drop certain magical and alchemical elements which you can then craft into making your own scary boxes, or improving yourself. As you explore the location, you find out clues about who you are, why you are here and where you need to go to escape. I’m toying around with the idea of some other cool things, but want to keep the design fairly open for now, as I’m sure 7 days will translate into about 2 about a bit with my current rl work load alas.

    So this is my current thinking 🙂 Let me know what you think 🙂

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    Slime Dungeon : Infographic to show progress


    2011 - 11.06

    Posted in Random Thoughts, SlimeDungeon | 1 Comment »

    I’ve been tweeting screenshots all this weekend about the development of Slime Dungeon. I thought it would be cool to combine several of the images to document the games creation along its rather short life cycle :

    Quite pointless, but I think it is quite cool to see the development process all in one place like that 🙂

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    Slime Dungeon : A game made in a weekend


    2011 - 11.06

    Posted in Game, Random Thoughts, SlimeDungeon | 2 Comments »

    It has been a while since I have released a game – everything seems to be complex prototypes at the moment. So I decided to give myself a challenge. Similar to the
    19 hour challenge     that spawned SpaceOreMiner but slightly more concentrated – complete an entire game in a weekend.

    On Thursday night I came up with a simple prototype idea for a cell based game. Clearing as much of my weekend as I could, I set to work coding a game based upon this prototype idea. The goal was simple : I wanted a playable game, with sounds and music, as well as non-place holder artwork and a menu screen.

    One of the things I had to avoid a lot during this process was feature creep. It was so tempting to fall into the ‘lets add everything and make it awesome’. But I knew if I realistically wanted to complete a game within the weekend, I had to keep everything as simple as possible. But, to be honest, for around 12 hours work, I think I have something that fulfills all my major goals within my allotted time frame.

    There is plenty I will add and change to Slime Dungeon in the coming weeks ( it says version 1.0 but probably a good idea to take 0.99 off that value 😉 ). One of the most important of these being an option screen. The music is great and all, but gets annoying after a while 😉 Secondly the AI REALLY needs beefing up – currently it just randomly picks squares and tries to group it’s slimes together. There are some minor ( non-game play altering ) bugs also that need squashing.

    Thanks go out to Inko, who provided the amazing slime model and animations ( also an upgrade that is needed, he has provided three animations in total with it but time-constraints have prevented me from implementing them this weekend). I’d also like to mention freesound.org for the fantastic slime sounds and also the incredible offering of No Soap Radio which provided both the music pieces to the game. If you are an indie developer, I’d really recommend checking them out!

    So without my usual large amount of blog text, GreenSlimeGames is proud to present :

    Slime Dungeon

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    Papertesting the prototype card game


    2011 - 10.30

    Posted in Game, Random Thoughts | No Comments »

    As regular readers are aware – I am a very strong believer in play testing a game before the game actually gets to a serious code level ( papertesting heh ). The original card prototype ( see here for youtube video ) was very much a proof of concept – to see how quickly it took to work out the physical game challenges ( capturing, placement on board, blank ai loops etc; ). Now that is in place – it is time to test the gameplay mechanics themselves. And I’ve found the best way to do this was with lots of squares of cut a paper, very many brightly coloured paper clips, a supply of beer and some willing volunteers to help.

    After a few games, it became very apparent that playing on a four by four grid always favored the player who moved second. Changing the game to a five by five grid removes this advantage to a degree. It also means that the game can’t be a draw, as there are an odd number of cells to be played upon. This, I feel, would have never come to light without this papertesting until the game had reached a certain stage of complexity of code. Knowing the grid plays better as five by five, means that I can code the game with that in mind, and I’m not going to have to change anything major down the line.

    Grouping cards into levels, based upon the total sum of their attributes also helped to balance the game. It was very apparent that cards of level 1 ( who added up to 8 ) and level 3 ( who added up to 10 ) were very clearly inferior. However, by altering the cards, removing some attributes and giving it a big boost in one direction, meant that in certain situations the level 1 cards were useful under different circumstances.

    Another major factor that came into play was playing blind, compared to playing open. E.g. the difference between seeing the other players cards, and your own cards. When your opponents cards were visible, it gave the game a very different feeling to when playing blind. When playing blind, the only fair way of playing it wasn’t with random decks, but with both players using the same level cards. Both ways of playing were fun, but had very different feelings to it. So I’ve decided to add this as a selectable option in the final version of the game – two different game modes. First one I will develop will be the open game ( as I preferred that as it allowed some form of strategic planning and removed any luck element ), the second one will be the blind mode.

    For card trading, we tried a couple of methods. The first method was allowing the winning player to select one of their opponents original cards and getting it. The second was allowing both players to take whatever cards were they had captured in the game. Both had very interesting feels. The first capturing method seemed more logical, and allowed the players to strengthen their decks quite quickly. It seems to be the perfect way of playing the game vs an AI in a single player mode. The second method was brutal. A badly lost game means that your deck is very quickly reduced – but thankfully due to plenty of paper and a pair of scissors, it was possible to replenish your deck with level 1 cards again. It also lead itself to a very different play style, people grabbing sides and corners and building up strong defensive positions to avoid loosing their cards. Again, the difference between this two methods were quite enjoyable. Which suggest to me another gamemode 🙂 Beating an opponent by a large amount, and going home with most of their cards was a pretty good feeling, albeit slightly sadistic at times.

    So now that I have a lot of the mechanics actually sorted, it is time to pick a theme for the game 🙂

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