Postmortem: Flight

Flight was created in June this year, in other words very recently. This wasn't as much as a game but rather a visual experiment.

If you have seen my previous postmortems, you will realise that my graphic skills are not good. The whole purpose of this project was to create something visually pleasing. To keep it simple, I believe I achieved this and expanded my knowledge in creating graphics in a short amount of time. This will assist me in future on rapid development projects.

The game itself was a very simple run-and-jump game. Due to it's limited complexity, the game "fun factor" was very short lived. I could have done more to improve this. However this was not the aim of the project.

Flight can be downloaded here.

Update on Youtube channel

Earlier this month, I announced that I would launch a lets play Youtube channel. Unfortunately there has been a change of the plans and I have scrapped the project. There were a few reasons for this; the main ones were that I was not motivated that much and that I did not have the time.

I did play and record a few games, such as Isra's Wings. I also did learn a lot about video editing, it is a useful skill to have.

Forever incomplete: Crappy RPG

In December 2011, I started this project with a friend. The game never had a name, but I kept referring to it as "crappy RPG." This is because the whole point of making this game was to make something, even if it was crap.

"Crappy RPG" was the first time I tried to use 3D in a game. In the beginning, this was more like a 3D engine rather than a game. Fun fact, the engine re-written numerous times, at least four from memory. In the end, it was actually reasonably good.

Whilst making the engine, my partner was designing more game related content, which was mainly the story. However, the game never got past the engine stage before it was scrapped. The reason being was due to a dispute between me and my partner, which was unrelated to "crappy RPG."

It is ironic that I have this game has been labeled as "forever incomplete," even after the dispute I intended to complete the project.

GMC Jam #6 winner and future Youtube channel

Its taken me over a month, but I finally played the winner entry from the most recent GMC Jam, being Isra's Wings by Joobs64. It was a very nice game. It's unbelievable what was achieved in the 72 hours in which this game was made.

I am also happy to announce that I will be setting up an personal youtube channel, in which I will be doing lets plays. I just finished recording and editing Isra's Wings, which will be the first lets play uploaded to the channel. I intend for this to be more of a hobby than anything else. However with that said I want it to have some structure, having a schedule for example.

Current plans are for the first video to be uploaded sometime in July.

Game Maker Studio

Yesterday, Game Maker Studio was finally released. I was originally not going to get it, but I decided otherwise.

I managed to spend to a couple hours last night using it (many assignments due soon and exams are not far off). In that short time, I spent looking at the IDE and I am impressed. There are many improvements to the Game Maker experience. The .exe files are complied rather than interpreted. Documentation has had a much needed overhaul. Extra data structures are always a boost.

I cannot wait until I have some extra time to make a game with it.

In other news, I have a twitter account, you can follow me now! Woo! @redoctober23

Fractal terrain generation

Back in March 2012, I received an assignment from my game design class. The assignment told me to design a game world map for any type of game. People who know me in real life would know that I'm not very artistic. So I took a lazy approach to this assignment; I generated it.

World generation is something that has always interested me; I blame Minecraft. I have spent countless nights reading about different ways of generating terrain. This assignment was the first time I ever used this knowledge. I decided to use the diamond-square algorithm (this is explained very well here), for the generation of the map. In short, the algorithm takes a flat map and moves the middle points up or down by a random amount.

It needs to said that the algorithm generates a height map. This height map was used to make an image. For my assignment, I used negative numbers as water and positive number for land. Here was one of the test results for the algorithm:

Of course the final generation was edited in photoshop; removing unnecessary green points and other minor changes.

Postmortem: Mystery Men

Mystery Men was made in January 2012 for the Game Maker Community Jam #5. It was made in 72 hours.

While this was my third GMC Jam entry, it was actually the first to be based around the theme. The theme was facade, which in a nutshell, means "an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality."

Mystery Men itself is a slightly altered version of the party game mafia, where you are tasked to identify and lynch mafia members. The main component of the game is the conversation system between the in-game characters. They are able to talk about a range of topics, from the jam itself to who they think are the mafia. This serves are the player's tool in determining who is apart of the mafia.

The game was mostly well received. Many people liked how the theme was used and how the conversation system turned out. A review by GMC user 11clock said, "...some of the comments that the people say are hilarious, and it's fun trying to figure out who's Mafia." On the other hand, disliked the limited graphics and non-existent sounds. In any case, youtube user raocow did make a video on Mystery Men:

Mystery Men tied 18th place out of 64 games and can be downloaded here.

GMC Jam #6

Just informing everyone that the GMC Jam #6 started today and that I won't be entering it this time around.

This jam's theme is tranquility, it is not a terrible theme, but it doesn't inspire me to create a game about it. On the other hand, this jam introduced a constraint on submitted games. This jam's constraint was to "include one or more achievements to unlock within your game, separate from the main goal or objective."

I find this constraint to be hilarious, you can imagine games with pointless side quests or random achievements for the weirdest of things. I will be keeping an eye on this jam just to see what other ways this constraint can be used.

Aside from the theme, I am also stressed with aspects of my life. This is the main reason why I do not want to do this jam and why I have not updated this blog in a fortnight.

Information about the GMC Jam #6 can be found here.

Postmortem: Spencer Street

Spencer Street was made in October 2011 for the Game Maker Community Jam #4. It was made in 72 hours. I consider this game to be the first real lesson in game creation.

This game was inspired by one of entries from the previous jam, which was created by CoolGamrSms. This game came 2nd in the jam and featured high score arcade based game play. I designed Spencer Street to feature a similar game play.

The objective of the game is to kill commuters by making them run onto the train tracks (then hit by a train) anyway you can. Some of the methods are completely random, flooded drains, smelly people and turd are just a few examples. Your score is dependent on how many people your able to kill.

The game played well. It was fun, but no great. The graphics were alright. The idea did turned some people off from playing it. While others weren't able to read the instructions. This leads to a major lesson that came from this game; assume that everyone is an idiot. The bottom line is that the game was very 'meh', might be seen to be good to some people, but certainly not great.

Spencer Street came last (likely tied with another 20 games) out of 59 games and can be downloaded here.

Forever incomplete: Geometry 2

Geometry 2 was to be the natural successor to Geometry. I started development in January 2012, but within a month I scrapped the project.

I wanted Geometry 2 to take the good parts of the original and expand upon them. One major feature I wanted to include was a visual representation of the area that each player controlled. This is shown above, however the game never got past this point because it was scrapped. The reason being that the visual effect was just too much for some people.

The project was ultimately a failure, but on the other hand it is a good example of controlled exploration of game design and development. I did learn a lot from this project, it was the first time that I created an interactive mini map, a pie graph and other features. Even in light of this failure, I still would like to create a complete game that builds on Geometry but it will take a different name.

Zero hour games

For me, last night was the end of daylight savings. It also happens to be one of my favourite nights of the year, simply because you get another hour of sleep. However it also lets you do something in zero hours, because you can spend a hour doing something between 2am and 3am before the clocks are turned back a hour.

Naturally, I made a small but fun puzzle game in zero hours. The itself gave you a string which was encrypted with an key. The purpose of the game was to guess the key, so that the string could be recreated.

The encryption was done using XOR logic. The interesting thing about the XOR function is that:

orginalMessage XOR key = encryptedMessage
encryptedMessage XOR key = orginalMessage

This could make for an interesting puzzle that could be used in many games. Unfortunately, XOR logic is not really common knowledge.

Project Euler

A part of being a programmer involves designing and solving mathematical and/or logical problems. Project Euler can be a fun way of refining those skills. The website describes itself as...

"...a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

The problems themselves are tricky, but a high school student with the mathematical and programming skills should be able to solve many of the earlier problems. Lets take problem 1 for example..

"If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000."

In many cases we can use simply a brute force attack to solve problems like above. However in later problems code needs to be designed to be efficient or else it might take days to compute. The answer in c++ of the above problem would be...

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
  int result = 0;
  for (int i = 3; i < 1000; i++)
    if (i % 3 == 0 || i % 5 == 0)
      result += i;
  cout << "The result is: " << result;
  cin.get();
  return 0;
}

Postmortem: Geometry

Geometry was made in July 2011 for the Game Maker Community Jam #3. It was made in 72 hours. It's worth noting that this game was my first game, which was released publicly.

The whole point of Geometry was to recreate a domination game in it's simplest form. The game play involved large shapes (known as nodes), which created smaller shapes (units) that could be used to capture more nodes. Victory was achieved when you controlled all the nodes and no enemy units remained.

That was what I wanted to achieve, did I do it? Yes. The game did score well and received many favourable reviews. One which I enjoyed reading came from ThatSnail, it read; "The graphics are **** but the strategy involved is so deep it's ridiculous. Whether you intended to or not, you managed to incorporate a lot of tactics like flanking, decoys, attacking on multiple fronts, intercepting enemy lines, guerilla warfare, etc..." It sums the game up well: Good game play, but poor graphics.

Geometry tied 11th place out of 59 games and can be downloaded here.

Hello and welcome!

I'm Paul, but I'm mostly known by my screen name "RedOctober." I'm a gamer who also likes to create games. This blog is to analyse and showcase my projects, as well as my opinions on a range of topics.