A Week in Revolver Developments

This week I'm mostly going to talk about my game currently in development: Revolver. A month or so back this was going to be a game about exploring a mansion with limited ammo, dangerous, scary situations and quick deaths but it quickly turned into a dark, wave survival thing with eldritch stuff. Honestly I'm glad it went in this direction as I think it'll be much more fun to play as it is than as I had originally planned it and it allows me a better chance to expand my skills with Game Maker. Here is this weeks snippet of my development log, for Revolver:

16/03/2015:
-Pathfinding appears to be fixed. Bugs involving an incorrect amount of enemies (3 or 5+ rather than 4) occurs every so often so I have no clue what is causing it but in general the enemies can find the player even after returning to rTest from rTraits.
-Created a a pit sprite that is kinda shit but a good base for possible later use.
-Changed the oLight to create the flares light with code rather than with a sprite, allowing easier editing later. Also allowed the dynamic creating of flares by pressing "F". Only one can be placed for the moment though.
-Had game tested. Results: The cocking mechanic, while neat, is kinda annoying with using the right click. Find a suitable alternative if possible.

17/03/2015:
-Attempted to have ALL placed flares create a circle of light but failed for now. Improved the zombie and bullet sprites. Changed the bullet speed, making the game surprisingly more fun.

18/03/2015:
-Added enemy knock-back on hit, reloading now requires a lot more time as each bullet is loaded one at a time. To make this less painful sounds are played to for each bullet to assure the player and once the gun is full it is automatically cocked so the player can fire right away.
-Designed some perks/traits for later implementation.

19/03/2015:
-Had tested for the new gun-mechanics. Results: Reloading needs to be a little quicker/fun. Game is generally too dark. Improve the GUI.
-Halved the starting reload speed and edited the speed perk to make it even quicker. Game fits its faster paced nature much better now.
-Altered the spawning and chasing mechanics. More zombies spawn but they'll only chase you if you get within a certain range of them. This is vital in allowing players some breathing space before they get mowed down by enemies.

20/03/2015:
-Doubled the room size and increased the flash-light range to compensate. The game now runs in full screen (needs testing at some point for other resolutions) and uses views to look pretty damn good.

21/03/2015:
-Created a floppy disk sprite and a computer terminal sprite. The idea is that by collecting x number of floppy disks and returning to the computer terminal results in either a bonus or a round win. I'll have to decide through testing which is preferable.
-Nudging the enemies when shot, and the player collision detection with walls (but only on the left hand side of walls) are both FUCKING BROKEN FOR LITERALLY NO APPARENT REASON. It's just like that now. The floppy disks are now collectible but do fuck all because fuck this.
-Somehow I have the nudging working again. I still have no fucking clue how I fixed it but I did.

22/03/2015:
-Fixed the player collision detection. I fixed it by actually making it, which makes me question how it worked in the first place.
-Also fixed a bizarre deletion of the ammo collection code.

As you can see I got really annoyed on Saturday (21st) which looking back was kinda childish, but I make a thing of not editing past notes (apart from the occasional spelling error 'cos those bug me a lot) so that gets to stay. Also of note is the addition of an actual goal for the player. I've had a lot of thoughts about this throughout the development and while I've so far decided to make the game about surviving each wave of enemies I'm thinking that having the player explore to collect items is a much better system for 3 reasons:

1) It forces the player out of their comfort zone. As I don't want to spend forever making levels I'm probably only going to create a few and then randomly place the object that need collecting (floppy disks). Doing this, along with making the levels much larger, basically forces the player to explore parts of the levels that they may have never been to before helping keep the levels interesting.

2) It gives the player drive. With just a goal of survival I honestly don't think the game has much variety. It'll get really boring really quick. Having the player set out with limited bullets, exploring the darkness around them is much more interesting. Especially when I hide unique, super dangerous enemies in there.

3) It offers a chance for story. If all you have to do it survive the only proper chance I get for story is in between waves or as some sort of collectible thing. The former is alright but will feel disjointed and not part of the games world. The latter is fine but without a drive to explore (see #2) they probably wont go out of their way for story snippets. If they happen to find one while trying to collect an essential item however they will probably go and grab it. It's the difference between going half way across the map to get a bit of story or nipping a few feet to the left to grab it. Most players wouldn't want to do the first, unless the story is really good which I hope it will be anyway, but pretty much everyone would be fine with the latter and that's better.

In other news I've continued on with Lore writing adding another "societal value" (real crap name for these things) in the form of Exploration/Diplomacy. I figure working out where certain races can go & when, who they meet and how they all get on is a really important thing to understand early on. I've also been making a few tweaks to other things I've written but those aren't really of interest at the moment.

Lastly I've been doing some cartography. Specifically I've been drawing one of the two main continents I've created and I'll be posting them here as soon as I get access to a scanner. Either that or I'll recreate them digitally whatever comes first I guess. But that's enough for tonight I'll get back to enjoying my Sunday evening.

BONUS POINTLESS PICTURE:

Look at how black this game is. I really need to add some other forms of lighting don't I.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Magic, Religion & Some Progress For Once

So I'm finally making progress again, doing a bit of work here and there, getting better throughout the whole process and I owe it all to keep a dev log of sorts. Finally I thought about keeping actual track of what work I'm getting up to rather than vaguely guessing at the end of the week and forcing myself (although it's not that hard really) to at least try to get something done each day, even when I'm not feeling up to it.

So firstly I've finally got Revolvers path-finding somewhat working again. Mechanically it works, all I need to do now is have it follow the player as they move (which I believe is updating a variable or two) and I'll finally be able to work on the other aspects of Revolver I've been wanting too. Such as the art, an improved lighting system, more enemies and different characters with different skills. Most of the code for a lot of these is in place but to work out what to do next I need to get my game tested. Of course you can't test a game where the path-finding just doesn't work hence the delays on this game. That said I did vastly improve the gun mechanics adding a cock-back to the gun making it less rapid fire without practise. Honestly this makes the game a lot more fun and was reasonably simple to make just throwing around a "is gun cocked" boolean that changes when the player right-clicks.

I also started messing around creating another, much simpler, game. At the moment I'm just using this game to mess around with stuff in Game Maker that I'm not covering in Revolver. I've been working on mouse based movement controls and having objects orbiting other objects which, when combined is actually a lot of fun to play with.

Next I've been continually working on my timeline and have completed another era for a different race, which has actually been a lot of fun. It's very interesting to me, coming up with different ways that a civilisation might "find its feet" and become prosperous. Inventing creatures and resources that said races can use to bolster their economy, military or magical ability is really cool and I'll share a few things when I've cemented down the ideas some more.

Finally I've gone back to one of the first things I wrote and patched it up to fit with the new lore I've been creating for the past year or so since I originally created it. The work in question is called: Prof. Armitage's Lecture Scripts and is a pretty neat idea I came up with to explain magic. I'm a scientific person by nature (I analyse things a lot and enjoy learning stuff) so writing magic more as a science is a good way for me to express how magic works and I think an interesting take on magic. These "lecture scripts" are written by Armitage himself during the fifth era and are essentially notes or sum ups of lecture he presented during his time at the New Atzcania university where he taught on several different magic courses.

Overall I've decided to treat magic as more of a science, so while in early eras people believe it is a power granted by the Gods or other powerful being, in later eras it is actually studied like a science. I personally find this to be an interesting route for magic to go down as it follows a lot of real world examples of unexplainable phenomenon. It's been common in Earths past that when an unexplainable event occurs that superstition is often used to explain said event when, many years, decades or even centuries later, the event can be explained with the awesome power of SCIENCE. That said in the world I'm creating religion still plays a hugely important part when it comes to magic. Religious influence did affect the development of magic in a lot of positive ways but in later eras magic and religion are deemed very separate by many, but not all, races.

Anyway there's a little titbit about what I'm doing with magic which I hope you enjoyed, I'm off back home now for Mother's Day.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Lack of progress update

And the winner of least progress made in a week goes to...

me.

Seriously though I've been really busy this week with university, having two assignments for next week and a job interview for my placement year happening last Friday on the 6th of March; so I've got pretty much nothing done. That said I have been setting up a more interesting system for my world timeline.

The world has a total of 5 Eras with each sharing similarities technologically to 5 distinct sections of humanities past. The 1st Era has most civilisations living tribally or as nomads, the 2nd Era is most similar to ancient civilisations like Romans, Greeks, Egyptians etc., the 3rd is akin to the middle ages, the 4th Era Renaissance and the 5th Victorian. To make writing a gargantuan timeline spanning all that time for multiple different races I split each era into three parts: early, mid and late and for each of these parts I write about what I call the 8 societal aspects.

8 Societal Aspects:

Social (Population Concentration): What size communities do people live in? Do people flock to cities or are most living rurally? In early eras it's more whether people are living in villages, cities etc. but in later eras it's more to do with kingdoms and empires and how/where people live in those

Economic (Trade & Commerce): Does an economy exist? Is trade commonplace and how does it work? Basically how does a civilisations economy work

Philosophy (Religion): What do people of this race/species believe in? Is there a structured religion? I thought this was important as a lot of civilisations have had religion as an important factor in how they developed

Politics (Leadership): How are leaders elected? Does a government exist and if so what type?

Culture (Art & Music): What is art like? How is music played? This one is actually really hard to write about without actually creating said art/music, which I am planning on doing at some point but it is obviously important

Military (Weaponry & Tactics): How are people murdering each other and what with? What military tactics are in use?

Industry/Technology: What technologies are being invented? What industries have been developed? this is vital in understanding what state/time the civilisation is in

Magic: How much has magic been understood? What magic is used and how common is its use? Magic is a unique one in that it has no reference to the real world and so it allows a lot more freedom. Magic in my world is actually more scientific with a huge amount of it being understood later so in later eras magic and technology merge a lot more

Anyway I hope that was somewhat interesting and when I've finished a race I'll post their whole timeline to read. Cos' I'm nice like that I guess.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Art, Collision Detection and Introspective Thought

A quick follow up from last week I've decided to get someone I know to draw some art for me. They are doing me a huge favour and I will be sure as hell posting what's drawn when it's finished so you've got that to look forward to. What's being worked on specifically are drawings of up to five different creatures and races that I've created. If you want some examples of past work (because some of it is pretty damn fantastic) go here: www.facebook.com/majorgubbins or here: wouwouandthewormling.blogspot.co.uk/.

This week I've finally got both collision detection and a trait system to work in Revolver. Oh but the path-finding is still REALLY broken and I still have no idea why. On the collision detection front I've realised a great lesson for my future developments and maybe yours too.

"Avoid collisions where everything doesn't die because it's a lot harder to work out where something might be a few frames later than it is to just delete the hell out of it."

I think all my future games might just have everything explodes whatever happens, some sort of game where the rooms are made of detonators, all the items are detonators and the player is a detonator. The more things are destroyed the easier it seems to program. Alternatively I'll just copy and edit my already written code because why the hell wouldn't I? Joking aside I'm glad I've learnt something which seems very important in games programming and at this stage accumulating knowledge is vital & fun.

On a more personal note I've recently been taking a lot more time thinking about myself and where I stand on things like political issues, philosophies and the like. It's something that I'm actually incredibly good at and I'd really recommend it to everyone. I'm now able to plan around my weaknesses (I'm a fantastic planner) and utilise my strengths much better than before and it really shows in my work. If anyone reading this is a creative type or just wants to try boosting their productivity find an hour or so you've got spare and just think about the things you like and more importantly WHY you like them. Do the same for the things you dislike and by the end I assure you, you'll know more about yourself than before. At the very least you might find it an interesting experience. I know I did, but I'm wired up a little weird.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

-Beau


twitter.com/Bocodillo

Generic Progress Update

Firstly, I'm sorry I didn't make a post last night but I find when I get back to my accommodation from home I'm usually really tired and find writing something like this really hard. In the future I might make my weekly posts on another day, maybe.

I've been making progress with a variety of things really. I have an interview for a placement next year which, if successful, means I can work and continue to live in Sheffield, which is a really nice city to live in. I've been making some progress on Revolver with attempting to add in a trait system, which has broken the path finding. Oh and it doesn't actually work yet. So, yay. I'll get around it all in due time, I'm pretty good with this sort of thing so I'm not phased, I just hope it isn't going to take too long because I'd hate to get bored with this project as I'm learning lots of new stuff from it.

Lore writing is still going on steadily with another races timeline being began. It's actually really fun to shape how a race develops based on a mixture of chance events, location, culture and what are basically great persons; heroes and villains. I'll be posting a little section for the initial human and another races timeline next week so you can have an idea of what I'm going for.

I'm a shite artist. I can draw but it's not the sort of thing I'd want to actually present and usually it just serves to remind myself what a particular thing should look like. I'm good at making symbols, I've made a particular races representation of base 8 at some-point among a whole host of other symbols representing magical stuff and factions, but as a whole drawing people or places is something I suck at. So I'm asking any and every artist I know if they would like to take a crack at taking these places, races and other things I've created and manifesting them as actual viewable objects rather than just descriptions. I have basic ideas for how most are meant but there will be a pretty good margin of creative licence for whoever wants to help. If you do want to help just contact me by my email: BeauZStanton@gmail.com or twitter which, as usual will be posted below.

That's all I've got for today folks.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Build One World, Conquer Another

This week I've mostly been working on creating a coherent timeline for my world and tweaking what I've got with Revolver. On the Revolver front I've got a few new features like improved spawning and a working XP/Perk system; kill enough enemies and you can choose from 1 of 3 perks with the XP requirement increasing slightly each time. Eventually it's going to be 1 of 2 out of 6 total and it's going to be random which 2, but little steps for now.

What I'm working on next is what I'm calling a trait system. In between waves of mooks the player will have a break where they can pick from a selection of "traits". These traits will also be randomly generated but unlike the perks, which will only last the length of the wave and offer small buffs to keep the player going, these traits are permanent for the players current playthrough and many have both upsides and downsides. I'm going to make some of them simple but effective buffs and some should hopefully change the way the game is played. It's come a long way from my original idea and while it still has a while to go I'm learning cool new stuff and finding the whole project fun to make, which counts for something I guess.

Other than that I've been continuing on with Tom Francis' tutorials after taking a break from them and good god are those so damn informative. I'm learning so much not only about the Game Maker environment but loads of neat game dev tricks that I can use in so many different games. As stated at the top I've also been working on something I've been putting off for too long.

Making a coherent and above all interesting timeline spanning about 6000 (Earth?) years for multiple races is, for use of a better term, BALLS HARD. OK, so I'm probably over exaggerating but it is at least time consuming and requires a lot of forethought and research. I've got a bookmark folder full of governmental systems, types of religions and all the different varieties of geographic landscapes. I'm certainly learning a lot of stuff about a lot of things and honestly enjoying it, but jeez this is going to take some time. On the up side once I'm done it will be so much easier to use this setting in future projects, which has been the goal all along.

Ever wanted to see what you'd be like as a world leader? Try Civilisation V. This is one of those games that I pick up once every 6 months or so, play a long game, enjoy every minute of it and then forget about. In Civ V you get to pick one of a huge list of historical figures ranging from Gandhi to George Washington and begin building an empire. Unlike many other games a military victory is just one of many achievable and the game really balances the pros and cons to going on a murder spree. Often I find I'll pick a leader aiming for one particular victory type and circumstances change how I actually play the game. One minute I'm expanding my religion and influence and the next I'm gearing up for a war my ally got himself into (fucking Napoleon).

Gameplay is turn based and the game takes place on a hex grid. You start with a warrior unit and a settler and from their your empire rises. Build buildings in your cities to gain resources produce units to conquer your foes or spread religion. Explore far away lands and build alliances, honestly I can't do this game justice because explaining how deep this game goes would take too long. If you like strategies and diplomacy grab Civ V the next time it is on a Steam sale and trust me you'll have a good time.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

My Second Game, Kinda.

As stated last week I started work on a game I'm currently calling Revolver. Starting with the idea of tension and only having six bullets I've expanded it into a little wave survival game which, while still in progress, is quickly expanding into a fun little game. At the moment a perk system is being built which is going to be the crux around which the game is being built. Picking the right perks at the right times is going to be how a good player survives. Hopefully. The game is going to be intentionally too hard to begin with but as the player continues on and gets these perks, among other bonuses maybe, the player is going to be on a more even footing with the eldritch abominations that they are going to deal with.

I'm actually making this because I want to try to make a new game which builds upon what I already know but forces me to learn new skills which a should be translatable to other development environments. So far I've been working on A* pathfinding and I'm soon going to be making a proper lighting system rather than what I've currently done. At the moment I'm essentially holding up a piece of black card in front of the players view and cutting out the part where the flash-light is.

As you can see it looks a bit barren, and the enemies look downright stupid but it's a start and in testing I have managed to terrify my friends a little so it's a good start too.

But all this aside why should you give a crap? Well, the way things are going this game will be out before I'm done with this semester of uni (probably much earlier honestly but I hate forcing arbitrary deadline upon myself) and I'll be posting it all over the place, uploading it to as many sites as will let me and making this into an official first game. The actual first was, to me at least, a test of whether the process of making games is actually enjoyable. It is, and I really recommend you give it a try if you haven't before.


Once again I'm not going to recommend anything this week. While I have been playing a couple of new games I'd rather get into the meat of them before writing anything about them. Same goes for the TV shows I've been watching. So you've got that to look forward to I guess?

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo