Monday, October 29, 2012

Game : At The Corner of the Earth



Download (GMC Topic)
Playthrough
Timelapse

Why do I still make games?

Absolute failure made in 72 hours.  You might play it but you might as well just look at the screenshots and read the storyline because it's extremely broken.

And, following my usual habits, I have no intention of fixing it.

Overview below, but first I want to say a few things:
  •  Not to be arrogant but I never really realized how good I am at last-minute coding.  Almost 3/4ths of the game was programmed in the last 2-3 hours.  At one point I was exporting a sprite, then importing, coding, and loading it into the game one sprite per minute.
  • THIS IS BY FAR the most buggy game I have ever made, mostly on account of the point above.  I think I disappointed a ton of people because they seemed to be really interested in the screenshots and the game doesn't hold up at all.
  • Photoshop crashes are by far the worst.
  • Also, I hope people in general are smarter than me because I tried to make a story-based game with "no text" as the handicap.  It clearly didn't work well.
Video version of walkthrough coming soon.

WALKTHROUGH

Note: Greenland, whiteland, and yellowland are not the actual names for the places but rather their descriptions for the sake of.. descripting.

Talk to the cartographer at the bottom right of greenland. Press space and he will give you his pencil/paper and you will assist him on his map-drawing quests.

Go to the rock on the right and hit space to be magically teleported (??) to whiteland. Press space to jump and navigate your way up to the top of the level. Press space to pick up the caution sign on the way and use A/S to navigate to it in your inventory, then press Z to whack bears with it. Find the map in the upper right and go up to it until the screen craps out and open your pencil/paper with A/S and Z. You'll see that the character has drawn it on the page.

(If you want, go to the river and fish with your fishing rod. You'll need it later).

Navigate your way back down (or be cool, kill yourself, and bug-exploit your way to the bottom). Press space and revisit the cartographer, who will pay you for your sufferings. Use the money to go up to the innkeeper at the top of greenland, and pay to sleep in the "inn" (yes, that's a single pillow, shut up).

Go to yellowland and fight off the bears with your caution sign. You'll notice that the innkeeper is dead and now you get free rides to and from greenland/yellowland! Make your way to the lower right, down the rocks, and look at the drawings the children made/buy the TNT from the kid. The first drawing is a map of the yellowland, which you add to your drawing. The second drawing is that of the child's mother, the innkeeper, who just died. I hope you're happy.

Use the TNT to blow up the cave and the fence where the bears are. Try to not get brutally destroyed by the bears. You don't have to dodge the TNT because it magically doesn't kill you. Just talk to the farmer and trade in your fish for money, then go back to whiteland for more fish, then go back to farmer for more money, and eventually you'll have enough to pay the guard to step aside and visit the memorial. Alternatively, just walk around the guard. Bugs FTW.

After seeing all three memorial posters, go back to whiteland. On the way you'll notice the cartographer is gone and the globe is cracked. Going to whiteland will activate the credits scene and the end of the game.

STORYLINE

I'm usually against outright explaining my storylines but this one is so poorly executed that I'll make an exception.

The game is the aftermath of an underground nuclear test gone completely wrong, blowing up the entire core of the Earth, leaving two groups of islands floating in the sky. All of the characters have incurred a personal loss of some kind: the innkeeper loses her life, the children lose their mother, and the farmer loses his crops. The cartographer loses his perception of the world, indicated by his disappearance and the shattered globe at the end of the game. The guard of the memorial dedicated to the post-apocalyptic event is the only person who hasn't lost anything. At the end of the game, the credits scene shows your character enjoying the only pastime discernable from his position in the game: ice-fishing. And the follow-up question is, what have you lost? Eventually, just like everyone else, you will lose everything. You will lose your fish.

The disaster in question isn't just on the global scope (nuclear suicide) but a personal one as well.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

H Game Engine : HGameSFML

Download | GitHub

Rewritten using SFML instead of SDL.  Runs much faster.

Making a game with it today and tomorrow to test it out.  Not quite Game-Maker-prototype speeds yet but I can make a platformer without too much heartache now.

Docs coming eventually but feel free to use it if you can figure it out on your own.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

A weekly dose of Internet

Wow, you know what college is killing me.

I have no time to anything ever anymore, and that includes blog posts, so here's a big list of things I think are interesting.

Good Music: Diablo Swing Orchestra - Honey Trap Aftermath (the entire Pandora's Pinata album, really)
Good Webcomic: Subnormality #200 - Anomalies
Good Documentary: Indie Game - The Movie
Good Sign of the Robo-Apocalypse: Evolving Robots Learn to Lie to Each Other
Good Game Jam: Ludum Dare's October Challenge 2012
..: Fuck This Jam
Good Person: Charles M. Schulz, cartoonist for Peanuts, who dedicated his life to his work for so very long before succumbing to health complications.  God bless.
Good Book: The Oatmeal - How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, currently #8 on Amazon's Top Sellers list.  I haven't actually read it, I just want to do some advertising for The Oatmeal.  He'd be person-of-the-week if he weren't up against Schulz.

Good night.

Edit: Oh, forgot to mention I'm a writer now for the Game Maker Blog which is interesting because I don't even have time to post on my own blog, let alone another one, but it'll happen. 


Friday, September 28, 2012

Biggest Mess Ever


Hey, see these images?  They're supposed to resemble each other.

I've got just over 15 hours to get this damn program working and write a research report about this before I have to turn it over to UPS for overnight shipping.

jaksdfl;

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Ubuntu

I'm building a shape analysis program and writing an 18-page research paper in one night.  So, before I go completely off the wall I need something to distract me.

Some of the more perceptive of you might have noticed I've switched to Linux.  Specifically, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  And it's absolutely beautiful.

A quick dry run:

Pros:
  • XKCD jokes are a ton more enjoyable when you understand them.  This is by far the biggest pro.
  • No more linker errors.  Or at least, it's less of a problem.  Everything typically installs to your /usr/ folder so it's all system-wide.  (Although arguably the same can be done on Windows, it's more hassle-free on Linux).
  • Very flexible Terminal; more (useful) arguments available and it's almost possible to control your entire computer GUI-less if you know what you're doing.  (Windows' Command Prompt falls behind just a tiny bit).
  • Installing anything is a breeze.  Either find it in the Software Center (which has a slew of great programs, both free and paid) or find the package name and install it with:
 sudo apt-get install [package-name]
  • Super resilient to viruses.  Compared to Windows, very few people spend time making viruses for Linux systems considering they make up a minuscule portion of the market.
  • Workspaces let you essentially quadruple the size of your screen, allowing you to push groups of windows around very easily between the four quadrants.  (Same goes for Macs, I believe).
  • I hear it's fantastic for networking and server maintenance but I can't personally attest to that.
Cons:
  •  Lack of Windows program support.  You'll be leaving all your favorite Windows programs behind.  There's WINE, of course, but it's fairly buggy.
  • As far as I know, there's no task manager.  Crashes for good, and the proper restart procedure is a really masochistic key combo: Alt-PrintScr + R E I S U B, in that order.  Seriously.  Why.
  • Not much point in using it if you're not a programmer.  It's clearly built around convenience to coders.  Stick with Windows if you're not having problems with static libraries or what-have-you.
  • Cross-compiling is kind of a pain.  It's also a necessity, since you're programs will likely be distributed to Windows users.
Overall I'm really glad I switched but I won't be getting rid of my Windows partition anytime soon.  If you're coding in any library-dependent languages then I highly suggest at least VM'ing it and testing it out.  Brilliant OS.

(I just wasted 20 minutes that could've gone to that research paper.  Go figure.)

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Loaf : Part One


This happens every time.

Jammed with Loaf today for four hours and ended up drawing that while everyone else was straddled down with Github errors and Borderlands 2.

Aaaahauauuuuuuu Githuuub.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

The Game-Design Normal Curve

A.K.A., a really self-centered timeline of my game-dev non-career.


My friend Exar sent me this video we made a while back with most of the games we made about 3 years into game development, and wow.  They're great.

Or no, they're not.  But they're actually playable.

I've been making games for (six? seven?) years now and here's how it's been.

Year One:
Ohmygosh gamedev!  Ohmygoshohmygosh this is so fun.  I can't draw but there's sprite libraries everywhere let me just borrow some here and there, and wow!  Dodge the ghosts!  Done!  I am so cool.

Year Two:
Game Maker is really super nice I don't know why people don't use it more, you can do anything in it ever.  But I guess I should try a little C++, I hear that's standard.  WOW nevermind this is impossible, sticking with GM.

I can draw a little now and I'm starting this great game called Blobworld which is really pretty good and I'm happy with it.

SEQUEL TIME, it doesn't matter that I never released the first one, 'Blobworld: The Ice Age' is coming soon!

Nevermind!  I'm going to work on it up to version 0.92 and then just completely stop.

(Turns out, this is typically what I always do).

Year Three:
YoYo Games is putting on this competition!  Wow!  I can totally win this, let me make this gizmo-based game called 'The Infinity Engine' and oh, wait.

It's literally impossible for anyone except me.  No, really.  I am the only person to have gotten past level 3, and there's 25 levels.

I should probably fix that.

...Nah.

(Plagued by this for the next four years, no one ever knows how to play my games).

Year Four:
Zerosoft Games is hosting a team competition, let me join.  Fuzion Creative and I spit out this rockin' Death Worm clone 'Tropically Correct', and we land second place.  We later start working on a long-term company called Fuzion Creative / Awoken Entertainment.

Everything goes straight down from here.

Year Five:
This is about the time I transfer out of a top-level private high school, even after getting a full ride there (a $20,000 scholarship).  The people were too college-oriented and lacked hobbies of any sort; I couldn't learn anything from them.  But it turns out, lo and behold, the people at the new school are exactly the same.

That was disappointing.

I kind of lose faith in game design and people in general.  Sort of slugged out Wrapple development for a really long time before Fuzion Creative picks up my slack and submits it anyways.  It nabs 'Staff Pick' on YoYo Games.

I then release 'Holiday Bombings' and 'Retroplat' later in the year, both for Zerosoft competitions.  Holiday Bombings wins 3rd and Retroplat get a runner-up award.  Retroplat turns out to be really successful; a certain Mr. Larson asks for an interview with me and Indie Game Comics features it in a webcomic.  All three sites, the interview, IG Comics, and Zerosoft, are now down, along with any proof of those occurences.  I submit it to a random side competition and it places a nice 4th.

Still not very happy with game design, or life in general.  I start realizing that there's no future in indie game design at all.

Year Six:
Total lack of attention span.  The GMC Jam starts running every few months, and I join the first four or so.  'Diagnosis' gets the closest to winning one (at 2nd place) and 'Pannenkoekenhuis' gets (12th?  I think?).  Pannenkoekenhuis later becomes my flagship game, which I remade in Flash and threw up on MochiAds, who later decided to spam it literally everywhere.  Google "pannenkoekenhuis game" and you'll see what I mean.  I'm still getting random hits on my blog from it.

The plan was this: Make a Flash game, post it on MochiAds or run it for sponsorships, use the money to start larger projects that recursively fund other projects and eventually make enough to start a full-fledged company, or at least to pay for college.

I make about two dollars with Pannenkoekenhuis.

Someone introduces me to a guy in Belgium who needs a Flash developer, and we work together on a few games which I'm not allowed to disclose because they're still being shown to potential sponsors.

'Cantilever Bridge' is born.  It's my ugly duckling.  It's a book disguised as a game, where one city decides to unite itself with another, of which it harbors heavy animosities toward.  The bridge is built, civilians kill each other over nothing and a war starts.  Your character is drafted in and you kill people along the bridge, but it's steady enough that you never realize until the very end that every single character has died, either by your hands or by circumstance, except for the Old Man.  He then decides to blow up the bridge while still on it, leaving you completely alone, in the wrong city, with no way to get back.

Only one person understood the story.  I was proud anyway.

Some people on YoYo Games start the Rapid Development Competition, in which you have 4 hours to make a game from scratch.  The people are generally nice and I actually manage to win one with 'Coma', which isn't particularly prestigious since there's about, on average, eight or nine entries.  But the competitions are cancelled, then revived, then cancelled, then revived, until somehow they end up in my hands as host.  I rebrand it as the 4 Hour Jam where it's all nice and cuddly before it dies out, once again.

Some time around here I somehow manage to not pass out for three days, and 'Fix It' is made for a GMC Jam.  raocow picks it up to review and it's all good fun, except for the fact that, once again, the game is impossible and no one but me can beat it.  But I'm proud of the concept; it's a simple room-based platformer where walls and objects exist on separate layers, which can be flipped back and forth like pages in a book.

And, by this point, I've completely dropped the idea of serious game design.  Just, why?  It's so much more fun making games that absolutely suck and watching people react to them.  One that I enjoyed making, called 'The Bleed Man', has a guy that you click on constantly to draw blood spots on him as he slowly shrinks away in pain.  (I didn't even bother to restrain the blood spots to his body; they appear across the screen in empty space just as much).  'You Broke The Big Thing!' involves a boss that doesn't attack you and a completely irrelevant story (irrelevant everything, really).  'This Town (ABEFTTOU)!' involves the ludicrous setting of two people on a tiny globe, trying to shoot each other in the back and somehow being completely unable to turn around.  They throw energy-harvesting balloons in the air to make them run faster and drop dead babies to slow down the other.  And in the informal RDC's I become known as "that guy that makes the really shitty games that are somewhat funny anyways."

Year Seven:
Now.

Sometimes I look back at my old games and think, hahahahah, hahahah, ahah, wow.  How did I have the attention span to make that.

There is no reason I should've spent time on all of that.

No reason.

Just wow.

The Game-Design Normal Curve:
  1. Learn how to make games.
  2. Make good games.
  3. Forget how to make games.
  4. Make complete shit.