Slowly, but surely.

Progress!

I'm starting to get a bit nervous about potentially needing art asserts in the future. I feel comfortable handling all the coding/logic/scripting/etc, but when it comes to creating art assets? pfffft. newp.

Over the past few days I've been able to implement the following:

• Mouse wheel lets you zoom in and out! yay.
• Ability to switch camera modes. 
• push the "End" key to toggle between modes. 
• Mode1 (default): Fixed camera, chases you around. 
• This mode is intended for use with click to move (default)
• Mode 2 : full camera control by holding right-click and dragging
• This mode is intended for use with WASD movement (Not implemented yet)
• Added a player health bar
• Very ugly placeholder. -- but works
• Added an "Action bar"
• Ability icons (temp, thank you http://opengameart.org)
• Ability tooltips
• tooltips are dynamic, they update automatically based on damage/target/range numbers.
• Clickable ability usage
• Eventually abilities will be able to be dragged from slot to slot. 
• Vital to the ability advancement system in the future. 
• Enemies will auto-acquire targets when they are damaged. 
• Added enemy spawning. 
• Made 2 variations of the fireball
• Variant 1 homes in on target
• Variant 2 is a "dumb fire" spell and moves in a straight line no matter what.
• Created an enemy ability control system that defines what abilities enemies use and when. 
• Allows for customization of spell order, preference, decision making, etc. 
• Made a flag for abilities to "require viable target"
• This prevents you from using the fireball spell without a potential target. Before you could cast it, nothing would come out, and you'd still suffer the cooldown. Now, it requires a viable target or won't cast/animate at all. 

As usual, you can check it out below the break.

Creating Abilities, Testing them out, and adding some feedback.

Well, here we are again.

Lately, I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time in Unity as I'd like. I know, it's mostly my fault... well... Borderlands 2's fault I suppose (have you checked out the Tiny Tina DLC? I loved it!). 

I've still be able to find some time to work on how the ability system is going to play out. 

Last time I gave you a look at the targeting system that I'd built for use by abilities, this time I've put together two simple abilities and added some really basic animations to them. This is mostly just to figure out how all of them pieces work together and to get things to actually work. This is all, of course, very very placeholder prototype style stuff. I am NOT an artist, or an animator... so this is what you get. :P 

With that out of the way, let's look at what we've got here. 

• You can use the buttons at the bottom to increase/decrease the number of targets these abilities can hit. (make the numbers big, it's way more gratifying).
• Character is HUGE -- I exaggerated the size of the character so I could see how things move.
• He should kind of breathe a bit during idle. It's subtle, but it's there. 
• He carries around a sword now, that can be easily swapped to whatever other weapon we want. 
• He runs, sort of... Due to how huge he is, he can get stuck going ON TOP of the enemies in the scene. 
• the 1 key will allow you to do a melee ranged cleave with the sword. 
• The damage should happen right in the middle of the swing.
• the 2 key shoots a fireball
• The fireball should launch when he extends his hands, and do a little "burst" when he launches it, then the same "burst" when it hits. 

Working on this has actually given me some great emergent issues to work out. 

• The character needs a "dead range" where he decides that he's in melee range and will stop running towards a selected target or point. 
• (when you mouse up, if you do so on an enemy, he will target/chase the enemy and get all wonky cause he can't get as close as he wants. Versus releasing mouse on the ground where he just defines a point to run towards.)
• This can also cause for some "quick spinning" of your character, which isn't exactly bad... but compounds the next point. 
• The camera is a bitch. It can cause pretty significant confusion as to which way you are facing and where your spells/abilities are going to go. 
• I'm debating adding a "ring" around the feet of the character that helps to display which way you are facing. Similar to a selection reticule on the ground with an arrow or something signifying forward. I think this option will work very well, especially in a game with 5+ people and a buttload of monsters in the scene, but I feel like it's a bit ugly. Maybe if I find an artist that's something I can get help figuring out. 

Anyways.. I feel like it's coming along well. I'm still learning *BOATLOADS* by the day. I'm finding some of the most difficult challenges to be less about unity and the software, but more about keeping myself in check. Every time I learn something new, or really begin to click with some aspect of Unity, I have to fight myself from going back to previous parts and completely reworking them. I've already reworked this character, and the npcs at least 4 times now. In that same vein, every time I learn/click with something I have to stop myself from trying to add in 400 new features/mechanics that just seem to make sense with my new knowledge! 

I suppose there are much worse problems to have than "I've figured out a better way" and "oh, this gives me loads of new ideas!" 

Check it out below the break :

Targeting System

Boy... Building a targeting system wasn't as cut and dry as I thought it would be.

This is going to be a background system that abilities use to define viable targets for attacking.

• It allows for selecting of both players and/or enemies (so I can re-purpose it for players, enemies, pvp, whatever)
• Allows for any number of targets to be selected (test scene only has 460... I can't imagine ever needing more)
• Has "Frontal" capabilities. (not sure if there's a real term here..)
• Allows you to define the cone of the frontal selection (up to a full 360)
• this allows you go from a full 360 degree area attack, down to a focused cone attack, or even a beam type attack.
• Can specify minimum and maximum ranges. Allows for rings to be selected.
• Able to specify the number of targets returned, from 0 to 460. 
• Lets you randomize your target selection 
• if you have a very large range, with a wide cone (or no cone) the system will pick targets within that range at random until it reaches your required number of targets. 
• if random is NOT selected, it will always prefer closer targets over far ones. 

Overall, I'm pretty thrilled with how well it turned out. This can easily fit itself from anything to a single target melee, to a long range AOE or even a room-wide boss ability that picks random spots to attack or random people to target. 

Check it out here, play with the options, use the T button to perform the targeting function and highlight viable targets.

(I know it can kind of be a pain to move around in this room due to all the boxes, and that the fact that the options box on the left does NOT block clicks, so your character runs to the corner while messing with the options... but it's a test... so live with it. :D)

Quick Update

OK, let's do a quick update on tonights work. It doesn't seem like much, but progress is progress.

• Added a ranged enemy
• He should chase you until you're in range, then shoot an (ugly) fireball at you. 
• He's blue. 
• Ability is broken up into pieces, projectile can be easily swapped to anything. 
• Enemies have a "call for help" allowing them to act more pack-like. 
• Call for help is set to 5 "units" (pretty small)
• Changed the map around to have "pulls" or "packs" or whatever you want to call them. 
• This was mostly for testing "call for help" functionality and to make it seem like more than 1 room.
• Changed the 2 button to 100% heal / 3 sec cooldown.
• Again, this is for testing only. 

It's only been two weeks!? Lies...

EDIT: you need this plugin to play. I guess the app doesn't auto direct you to the plugin : http://unity3d.com/webplayer 

My god... It feels like it's been *WAY* longer than two weeks since my last update on this project. I feel like it's been months.

Anyways, I've put a bunch more time into it. Got a lot of systems that I'm concepting out to eventually find their way into this project.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far. Being as I'm only really focusing on the game systems and how things operate at this point, I feel like I've made a lot of progress. It's also unbelievable how much I've learned about unity. It's honestly shocking to me that it's only been two weeks so far...

Back on point! I've packed this full of fire and monsters. I did this "monster and fire overload" to just load up the scene like crazy and see if it messed with my performance. Once I packed the scene full and ran around, the ridiculousness of it made me chuckle to myself, and I decided it was worth updating on the blog. So you get to see it too.

This time, I'll put the game above the "update notes" so you don't have to scroll too far unless you want to read the update notes (which are kinda boring and more for my personal notes, but hey click "read more" if you want!)

Collision / Movement / Camera tests

So relieved!

I'm not sure if you've ever tried to make a game. There are tons of tools, and lots of quality solo-made games coming out every day. If you haven't though, let me tell you a secret. It's all the little bits and pieces that are the biggest killers.

We can talk all day about big sweeping mechanics, and crazy radical changes, but it's the little shit that you don't even notice that are often of huge importance. When was the last time you played super mario? I'm talking the old school mario. Now, tell me about the camera system in that game, I bet that never even crossed your mind before. Why? Because it was implemented so well that you didn't even notice it. Or how responsive were the controls? Things like this slide under the radar most of the time, and that's good. But when one of those (seemingly) basic systems breaks, or fails (think about the camera stopping in mario, but your character just runs off the side) it completely destroys the game.

That's what makes these core systems so important, that they have to be invisible.

Anyways, enough rambling about core systems, I built this over my weekend. I realize this doesn't seem like much, yet. But getting these core systems down in a tool i just started using yesterday has been a big task. I lost sleep over it! 

This is the very first baby steps towards an eventual handheld mobile game. I won't spill too many details here, but I figured it would be worth sharing.

If you have anything to say about it, or any thoughts, or if something breaks, let me know. Leave a comment or email me or whatever.

A Realm Reborn - The Limit Break

        This weekend, I spent a lot of time playing the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn beta test. All in all, I've really been enjoying the game. In addition to playing, I've got a boatload of notes to talk about in the upcoming days/weeks, and hopefully will be able to swing together some more updates in the upcoming weeks. For now though, I wanted to talk about a feature that really got me excited. The Limit Breaks.

        I was lucky enough to get to level 20 and the ability to jump into dungeons. This also means that I was able to get to use the limit break system. Anyone who's familiar with the final fantasy name has an idea about what the limit break system is, but for those of you who don't it's a system that builds up energy as you participate in combat, and eventually gives you access to a large and powerful ability, essentially releasing that stored energy. This has seen many different interpretations over the FF series, but is often seen as a fan favorite.

        With FFXIV being an MMO game, they've moved the limit break system to a group activity, which has some pretty exciting potential. Here are some quick details on the Limit Break system.

• About the new Limit Break System
• The new party battle system. When the gauge shared by the party fills, any of the party members can invoke it. Afterwards, the gauge becomes empty.
• The gauge is filled by hitting enemies with standard attacks, but will accumulate faster with "Fine Play," well-timed healing or blocks, which is judged by the system.
• The more you accumulate in your gauge, the Limit Breaks have several phases. If you remember back to the Limit Breaks of Final Fantasy VII.
• The same Limit Breaks have different effects depending on the player's job.
• You will be able to use a Limit Break to some extent even if your character level is low. A high level Limit Break can not be invoked if your character's level isn't high. The feature will be linked to their growth.

And a quick trailer courtesy of youtube if you want to SEE it :

        When first hearing about this system, I was really excited after having played FFXI and experiencing the Skillchain system. (Skillchain increased in power as people participated in sequential order. "player1 go now! -> player2 next!" etc.) While the skillchain definitely had it's faults, it allowed for a group to feel very cohesive and powerful. A group that time and execute a skill chain was given a huge boost in power and thus became a more effective group. I still remember the feeling of seeing a perfect skill chain carve out 75% of an extremely tough monster's health with a single hit, and feeling pride that it couldn't have happened without me. Was it required for the average player to use? Not really. Was it in your best interests to use? You betcha.

        So, naturally with FFXIV:ARR, this system is going to be improved on and made more awesome! Only not really. >< There are problems with the system as it sits now. Of course, this is BETA still, and being only level 20 I can't comment on the "high level limit break" point listed above, but based on what I've experienced of the system so far, I am quite let down.

1. My main concern with this is that the usage of a limit by any one player consumes the whole meter. Thus stripping away the whole "group" aspect of the system when it's used. Each role has a different potential break (healers do a big heal, damage does big damage, etc) which gives the system some flexibility in usage, but the problem is that everyone puts into this pool and only 1 person gets to take out. I believe the intent here was that it would be a tool of versatility, used by adventurers to cater to whatever situation they are currently facing. "Oh crap, heals are falling behind, limit break!" or similar reactiveness. It sounds great on paper, but it also limits that feeling of elation from skillchaining to a single player. Any time you put in something big, flashy, and powerful like this into a game, players are naturally going want to get to use it. And who can blame them?! "Here's this big awesome flashy ability! But only so-and-so should touch it." In one of the dungeons I participated in, We assigned the healer to limit break whenever they felt we needed it. Which, as a DPS, wasn't exciting at all. In other, everyone just started spamming the button when the gauge almost filled, and whoever got it off did their thing. In another, we never used it at all because nobody wanted to step on anyone else's toes. In all three scenarios, the system failed. 


2. Second is less of a problem, as much as something that I just think could be done better. The whole "it fills faster with Fine Play" aspect. Rewarding "fine play" is a good thing. This also has the potential to make the usage of the limit breaks less predictable, unlike a cooldown. You aren't guaranteed that it's going to be available at the same time every encounter. This is somewhat of a double edged sword, I worry that groups may count on this to get through certain phases of an encounter, or to deal with certain mechanics. While there's nothing directly wrong with this, it runs the risk of becoming a requirement instead of a bonus. While I think the core concept here (play better, get bonuses) is spot on, I want to know how it works. As a player, I want to see my enhanced contribution, games have become very proficient at giving negative feedback to players, but this is a perfect opportunity for positive feedback! We often shroud player success and reward in so much mystery, yet rub player failure and punishment in their faces, why not try to let the player know that they did something great, and are getting some reward for it? Heck, you could even combine this with the first point and let the biggest contributing player pull the trigger, though that definitely doesn't solve the first problem at all, it just blames the problem on the players. (don't do that)


3. Third is the usage and implementation of the ability. Let's picture you're a new player, and in your first dungeon. You've got this glowing bar in the upper left of the corner flashing at you, and not the foggiest on what to do with it. This ability requires you to take an ability out of your spell book and place it on your action bar, not too terrible, but the ability is only useful in groups and dungeons. So if you're not group you are just adding to interface clutter (something I hate). This is one of my personal favorite things that wow solved by giving you a contextual button on your screen that pops up. The limit system feels like the perfect place for the same type of resolution. How enticing is that button when it pops up? 

        Now, it's very possible that these may change moving forward. Even the bullet points above talk about higher level versions of limit breaks, it's quite possible that higher level breaks have different rules or functions at this time, I can't say for sure. But as they sit, I was a bit let down. 

        So what do you think? Any of you get a chance to try out the beta? Or maybe the Limit Break system? If not, that's fine, what do you think about it based on just the descriptions above? I'd love to know. 

I'll probably be doing some more FFXIV posts in the near future, as I've really been enjoying the game a ton in beta.

Bioshock Infinite

This could get in trouble wish some of my friends, but let's take some time to talk about Bioshock Infinite.

If you're a gamer, you've undoubtedly at least HEARD of this game. It's one of the year's most highly rated and highly talked about games. And for good reason, there's a lot to talk about here. There really aren't a whole ton of games out there that command as much attention as the "-shock" series has built. The series as a whole has built a large and loving following over the years.

The game opens up extremely strong, the first hour or so is basically an introduction into world of Columbia. This introduction is incredible. The world was breathtaking and so full of life. You're flooded with all of the interesting characteristics of this magical floating 1912 city. You enjoy time during a festival where everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, but things just don't seem right for you. There are quite a few odd things happening around you and way too much to be considered coincidence. I felt like the first couple hours with bioshock really set the game up to be incredible.

                Unfortunately for me, that feeling didn't last. After learning about the world, it's beauties as well as it's horrors, the shit hit's the fan. This is, of course, expected from a first person shooter. I remember where you get your first taste of the graphic violence of the game. Now, as a gamer, I'm no stranger to graphic e-violence. The scene early on where you deal with the racism of the society, and end up dealing with the situation through extreme violence is a powerful moment. The horrible violence in stark contrast to the sheer beauty of the world hits pretty hard. That first moment of the unspeakable violence here is a shock, and I think did exactly what violence in a game should do, it shocked you. You go from saying "This place is beautiful, but it's got some pretty dark and messed up under tones" into a "hoooooly shit" moment. While I feel this part was impactful and effective, the problem is that the entire rest of the game hangs on this high level of extreme violence, it loses its impact and the effect and remains the standard for the rest of the game. Essentially turning the violence away from our initial, shocking, interaction with violence into a desensitized, excessive, and childish game of spraying as much blood everywhere as you can. I think this is where violence usually fails in video games, it's extremely powerful when proving a point, giving character depth, building the story, and a thousand other uses, but when it's just constantly over the top as it is from this moment on, it loses all of its power and becomes childish.

The characters in the game are completely the opposite. They aren't obvious, in your face, and shoving the world down your throat at all. In fact, the Lutece siblings are the polar opposite of this. They speak in what seems like riddles, and continue to make you question what is really going on. From a story/character perspective, I feel like the Luteces are definitely the high point in the game for me. They were interesting, made me ask questions, really kept me moving forward through the game, and did so with a whimsical nature that only intrigued me further. The same can be said for Songbird. His first show on screen I said "oh, that's a boss for sure." But the game develops the character, exposes you to his internal struggle, his motivations, and you begin to pit the creature. In the end he even turns to your side for the final battle, only to die off in one of the better death scenes I can remember from a game. The people who designed, animated, and told the story for these characters should be applauded, as I feel these characters are responsible for the greatest achievements this game made.

Of course, we have to talk about Elizabeth. I have to admit, she really bothered me in this game. The buildup to her rescue felt good, and finally getting her on your team felt good as well. But that's where she kind of lost it for me. The game presented itself as an escort mission of sorts, to get her out. But it turned away from that pretty quickly. While I think Elizabeth was masterfully animated, written for, and performed, her interactions with the gameplay itself became really obnoxious early on. First and foremost, she's basically non-existent to the enemies in the game. She can't take any damage, and they don't even see her despite the fact that she's standing right in front of them. She runs around the battlefield picking up items and money for you, yet it's as if you're the only who can see her. It completely breaks my immersion into the game. Here's this precious girl, who I've done so much to protect, and even though everyone is out to kill me for it, nobody ever thinks to just grab her away. While the world not interacting with her is frustrating, what's worse is that she doesn't seem to have her eyes open the whole game. She'll eventually make some comments about how she doesn't like the killing, but only after you've used your skyhook to rip the faces off hundreds of enemies, none of which seemed to cause even a flinch from her. While I appreciate her desires to help in combat, I don't appreciate how generally useless she is. The rifts had a ton of potential, but they only used then for the occasional skyhook, gun, or Health packs. Not to mention it's completely uncool to have her offering a health pack or salt, then the second I'm out of combat that health pack mysteriously disappeared.

OK, on to the important stuff. Everything up to this point, I'm willing to tolerate from a video game. The story and the characters while at times annoying, oblivious, quirky, or just nonsensical, are all parts of the game and the messed up world that I'm tolerant of. After all the whole game seems to be about trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Where this game really made me feel let down is where we got into the mechanics and gameplay going on here.

Let's start with the skyhook. If you kept up even slightly with the hype and the buildup of this game, you knew about the skyhook. A fancy hook strapped to your arm that lets you ride on rails and fly around the world like an agile monkey in a forest. Except that it doesn't. The skyhook was grossly underutilized in the game. There were times where you got to jump up and grapple overhangs, or slide around for a few staged fights, but for the vast majority of the game I found myself using it as nothing more than a meat grinder. While I'm all for items having multiple uses, I wanted a lot more skyhook. I wanted to spend more time zipping around Columbia and dealing justice from the heavens. The times where you did get to use it felt so intense and powerful that I found myself wanting a lot more. Of course, much like violence, this could have easily turned into a situation where the whole game was just riding on skyhooks, which would have made the whole experience become dull, but I felt like I hardly EVER got to use the damn thing. And when I did, it was often to a fixed point to try and find some stowed away clothing crate somewhere; versus having more combat-based skyhook adventures.

Speaking of clothing, I was pretty bummed out here as well. The first hat I obtained in the game got me really excited. I liked the idea of getting some character customization out of the game. Giving me a system where I can change things up for different battles and circumstances. Unfortunately, with clothing being so rare coupled with randomly generated effects, I ended up finding an outfit and never changing it throughout the whole game. I feel like this system had a lot of potential, but when an equipping system ends up being used only 2 or 3 times early in the game, it makes the whole system seem really minor and destroys any attempt for growth from it. Sometimes I wonder if a small and simple crafting system could have been helpful. In turn, allowing me to really push my character into the direction that works with my playstyle.

On a random side note of Bioshock systems, what the hell is going on with the food here? Some give health, some gives salts, some take health for salts, etc. Yet nearly all of it is basically pointless. If you see an apple, you're going to eat it, along with everything else in the vicinity. The penalties were negligible at best, and the system feels like it's something they started to plan out, and just never bothered to finish. Given that your character has two primary resources, having restoration choices that force you to prioritize one over the other could develop into a system with some value, but that never happened here. This honestly feels forgotten about by the dev team. Not to mention that the presence of food feels somewhat pointless thanks to the presence of the shield which auto regenerates. Scrounging for health and focusing on survival wasn't even really a concern for me.

OK, back on track here. Let's look at the shield in Bioshock. The "halo-shield" has become quite the staple in FPS games in recent times. It self-regenerates when "out of combat" for a few seconds, and gives the player something of a "protective bubble" in the game. This isn't, exactly, a bad thing on its own, we've seen loads of games with this system do well, but where it gets a bit wonky is how this forces the game designers to change the game to accommodate for it. Thanks to the presence of the shield, the developers are forced to make their enemies capable of very high damage to break through it, or they need to try and set you up with ambush situations to surprise you and break through the shield. Not to mention that the breaking of the shield is way too graphically intrusive. Your whole screen goes yellow and you can't see anything for a couple of seconds. The presence of the self-regenerating shield forces the level designers into basically having stupid AI and play cheap tricks. They are forced to overwhelm the player to allow for the shield to be brought down, you're ambushed from all sides and without some system telling me where I'm being hit from I have no idea where it's coming from half the time. In the situation of enemies doing massive damage, it simply makes them feel cheap and unfair. While this isn't always a bad thing in games, the amount of damage taken should mean something. If you get hit by something that does lethal damage, you should have been able to avoid it through skill. I shouldn't walk into a room and get jumped on for my whole shield plus half of my health. This whole system essentially made it so getting hit doesn't matter half the time, and when it does it matters so much that it's grossly unfair. I remember the first automaton cannon I fought (before I had the shield) being really exciting. I had to plan out a way to deal with him with him without getting creamed, I tried changing up my positioning, attacking in bursts, paying attention to audio cues to try and catch him while reloading. It was a great experience, it felt dangerous yet manageable. After having the shield, they turned into a game of "pop out, do some damage, chill until my shield regenerates. Repeat"

This ties in to the enemy design which felt pretty lacking in bioshock infinite. Many of the enemies in the game just felt really stupid or grossly overpowered. In a world that's so intriguing and interesting, having essentially two enemy types was really disappointing. You're either being swarmed by a lot of small guys who do little more than charge at you while shooting, or your stuck with a heavy hitter who wrecks you if you get too close. The enemy behavior essentially turned me into a one-trick pony while playing through. Once you found something that worked you were never really forced outside of that comfort zone to experiment with other vigor/gun combinations. I can think of 2 maybe 3 situations in the whole game that asked more of me than to simply unload as much ammo as possible. Maybe drop a vigor here or there. These situations were the closest thing that bioshock had to boss fights and were welcome additions to the repetition of the gameplay and enemies encountered through most of the game. I really wish there had been more bosses or enemy variability.

Which leads me to the weapon system. Guns, lots of guns. I have to say, and this could fully be my fault and my fault alone, but I felt extremely limited by the ability to only equip two guns at a time. Often times I found myself completely skipping weapons because I didn't want to risk losing a weapon that I'd found to be my go-to. While this provides me with some level of choice in my weapon loadout, it also prevents me from trying out new things and really experimenting with my armory. There are guns in bioshock that I've only fired once or twice just to see how they behave. There were situations where I picked up a new gun from a safe, assumed it was very powerful due to finding it in a safe behind a lock, only to be hugely disappointed the second I got to test it in combat due to how weak it was. I feel like the vast gun variability would have worked out much better if ammo had been the limiting factor in my weapon usage instead of my ability to only hold two guns. Running out of ammo in my favorite forcing me to search for alternate ways to complete the task at hand is a great way to push people to experiment with weapons. But, due to the placement of vending machines, I never ran out of ammo. This part feels like a wasted opportunity to me, there are so many guns in bioshock, and I really wanted to play around with more of them I just never had a reason to. The  upgrades did so little for me, making them feel almost useless. While any gamer knows that stat improvements like "increased damage" are the right choice, they are seldom the most fun or interesting choices. Guns, although, or only half of the equation here, this is bioshock, so we've got to talk about vigors.

I loved the vigors in concept. In stark contrast to the weapons, vigors also had some interesting upgrades. Not all of them, but there were a few good ones in there here and there. While the whole super powers and mana bar thing is nothing new in games, bioshock didn't really force me to play with them as much as I'd have liked. It's very similar to the gun concept I talked about above. There's no real need or reason to deviate from the formula that you've grown comfortable with. You'd get a new one here and there, but they felt really formulaic as you'd acquire them, and you'd essentially be confronted with some challenge in the next few minutes that is ideally suited to your newly acquired power. After said challenge, you switch back to your comfort vigor and simply keep on keepin' on. This could have been mitigated by using per-vigor charges, essentially the same way that guns use ammo above. I feel like the presence of all of these weapons and all of these vigors begs for me to play around with different combinations, it wants me to try new things and be continually exploring my arsenal and powers in tandem with my exploration of Columbia and the story, but the game never actually asked me to do so. The trapping system was an interesting touch, but without enemies that do more than just charge straight at me, trapping didn't feel like it was ever really worth the effort. Had the game had some level of a stealth component to it, I think the trapping could have been a major boon for the vigors, but as it sits I never felt the need to play with or really use traps or vigors during the game. Which is a real shame.

 When all is said and done, I feel like bioshock is a huge game of missed opportunities. After playing through a few times I feel like the game made no real attempts to push me out of my comfort zone. The death system was far too forgiving, allowing me to zerg many situations, the weapons and vigors never pushed me into the area of ability experimentation. The shield allowed me to play recklessly and aggressively, while the enemies were predictable and formulaic. I really wanted to love this game, it's beautiful and the world had infinite potential (pun intended). Luckily, the masterfully crafted characters and story do a lot to keep the game going. 

Wow Hunters

*This is very stream-of-consciousness. It's scatterbrained and mostly just me rambling. If you're reading this, please keep in mind I didn't take the time to pretty this one up, I hope to later. But I just had to get this written down while I was thinking about it.*

In a recent discussion with some friends, I was confronted with the question of what I play in wow, and what I didn't like about my class. I thought to myself “oh, this easy”. I answered that I play a hunter, and that I feel like I have way too many abilities on my bars. There’s just too much stuff there, it’s overwhelming. Then they followed up with “I think that’s fair, what would you cut?” and I stumbled.

It’s weird, ability bloat or issues with class-kits are easy problems to “feel”. I think everyone who has a high end character in wow feels, sometimes, like parts of their class are excessive or too specialized. The irony here, is that while I knew WHAT I felt about it, I hadn't really made the effort to dive in and try and identify what was making feel like my class was bloated.

So, I decided to do so. It’s one of those things that you know by feel, but without some analysis it’s just a gut thing. And when trying to really explain something to someone, saying “that’s just how I feel, I don’t have examples” just looks bad.

Anyways, in the process of going through all of the hunter abilities, what I feel their purposes are, and how useful I think they are, I came to some conclusions and drew some connections with the hunter design that I hadn’t really explored in the past. Having played a hunter for years, I’m a bit annoyed that it took some prompting to make me do this. I guess I never really dove into class design due to focusing my thoughts elsewhere. Either way, here are my thoughts on being a hunter, ability bloat, hunter systems, and what I feel like would make being a hunter more enjoyable for me.

The first thing with hunters, is that I feel we’re still plagued by some remnants of old design. By this I mean that we still have abilities around or systems running that just don’t really apply to modern wow. Look at some of the abilities we have for our pets.

Pet System Abilities:

Feed Pet: This ability made a ton of sense back when we had to worry about pet happiness, and our pets abandoning us. It allowed us to give food to our pet and keep them happy. The happiness system is now long gone. But we kept this ability, it was retooled to be a 50% heal for our pet, only usable out of combat, and it still requires the consumption of an item. This is one of those abilities where I love the fantasy of it, but the current functionality isn't really there. I logged into my hunter and realized that I don’t even have the thing on my bars, talking with my fellow guild members, neither do they. This could, essentially, be pruned. Better yet, it could be rolled into the mend pet ability. Mend pet is a nice hot that heals your pet for 2.5% a second, and is usable in combat. It seems to me it would be super easy to make it heal 5% a tick out of combat.

Beast Lore: This is another ability that is antiquated. There was a time where your pet was super important for a hunter. I mean, it’s still important for a hunter’s effectiveness, but in today’s wow all pets have the same stats. You tame a pet now-a-days not for higher damage but for which buff/debuff it gives, or a specific ability the pet has. While information like damage/health/diet/armor were all super useful in the past, they are pretty much pointless in today’s wow. This ability essentially gives a hunter two important pieces of information: Special Ability and if it’s Tamable. Both of which could simply be added directly to the hunter tooltip when selecting a beast.

Aspects:

OK, there’s two buttons we can get rid of, next I want to talk about the hunters aspects system. Again, this was a neat system at one time. It worked similar to paladin auras or warrior stances. The hunter would take on different aspects that did different things. One of which used to make us more mobile, while another would give us more mana. It forced us into adapting our aspect to the situation. It was pretty slick back then. Today, we have three aspects. Hawk gives us a passive damage boost, while cheetah makes us move faster, but with a penalty if we’re hit. Any hunter spends 95% of their time in Hawk in today’s wow. When talented it even gives you a damage reduction! So let’s talk about cheetah/pack.

I feel like cheetah served a great purpose in the past. In my experience this was a wonderful ability for rapid wipe recovery. Thinking about the old days of Vaelstraz where you had 1hr or he despawned, shaving a few seconds off your wipe recovery was mandatory. If you wanted to get another attempt in, you needed to save every second. In today’s wow, this ability is pretty much just a troll. Raids now return you to the instance much closer to where you wiped, so your runs back are minimized. Many raids allow you to mount while inside, so cheetah is useless there. Currently there really aren't any limited timed bosses anymore, so getting back 2 seconds quicker doesn't make or break your group. As a hunter, I honestly wouldn't miss this ability in the slightest.

So let’s say we cut aspect of the pack out, that leaves us with cheetah and hawk left. Cheetah is exactly the same as pack, only for just the hunter. I feel like this is MUCH more practical, as one of the hunter’s most powerful tools is the ability to kite. So let’s keep cheetah, but this leaves our aspect system with only two abilities. Which is far from exciting. I really like the aspect system personally. It makes me feel like I’m being active and reacting to my surroundings. Either way remember the aspect system, we’ll come back to it later.

Active Abilities:

There are a few buttons in here that I honestly feel like are just in the way. First and foremost is hunter’s mark. There was a time where this was the only method of “mob marking”. Getting through Garr without this ability and 4 or more hunters was not an easy task at the time. But with today’s raid markers, I feel like the “marking” aspect of this ability doesn't really apply anymore. But, lucky for us, this also gives a debuff that gives us a damage bonus. Which is awesome, and useful for sure! But the hunter’s mark is currently automatically applied when we use our core damage abilities. With the fact that it’s auto-applied, and that marking is a thing of the past, just take the button away. We don’t need to have it actively on our bars anymore.

Next ability to go, is eagle eye. This has some neat functionality in pvp and for reconnaissance work, but the fact that it breaks camouflage is just painful. You’re essentially just standing there doing nothing while it’s active. In high end pvp, there’s really not enough time to use this to spy on the other team. Now, this is one of the abilities that I love the fantasy of. The ability to see far off places is so fun in theory. But in actual game play, I think I’ve used this ability only for messing around and handful of times. I don’t think I've ever seen another hunter use it.

Let’s also prune, or at least change scare beast. This is a fantasy spell, it seems really cool in theory. The hunter has power over beasts! He can scare them away in fear! Well, so can other classes. Except they can scare anything. Hunters are already pretty notorious for their control, so I wonder if changing this to a non-beast specific fear would force us to lose some other control elsewhere, but I feel like the only time this really becomes super useful is when fighting other hunters (or the occasional warlock), or if an encounter is specifically designed for this ability. It’s simply too limited to be of major usefulness.

Widow Venom. I hate this spell. Looking at all of the other mortal strike effects, this is by far the weakest one. It has the advantage of being ranged, which does count for something, but let’s look at the other mortal wounds effects. Mortal strike, rising crane kick(ww), wound poison, warlock pet, devilsaur pet. This is the only one that doesn't have a damage component to it, or isn't completely passive. In the case of the warrior and monk, they are also part of the CORE rotation, which essentially makes the debuffs application pretty passive as well. Now, anyone who pvps a lot, or even in pve at times will tell you how powerful this debuff can be. So I wouldn't kill the debuff entirely, instead I think this is where we could go back to the aspect system. To me, this feels like it should be part of serpent sting. Give me a third aspect that makes my serpent sting do less damage, but also apply this debuff to the target. It mimics the rogue usage fairly closely at this point, but by forcing us to have a slight dps loss in the process, I feel like it’s more in-line with the rest of the mortal wounds debuffs. It also gives hunters a bit more of a reason to, at times, drop out of aspect of the hawk.

Traps! 

Traps are core to the hunter. We have invisible deployables that, if used with some thought, can be extremely powerful; doubly so with the addition of the trap launcher. The trap system gives hunters some unique gameplay that I don’t think many other classes are fully aware of. But not all traps are created equal. Personally, I feel like snake trap could be done away with, or at least changed to be more exciting. Again, this is a fantasy spell, the idea and the visual for snake trap is great. But the fact that they are easily wiped out in 1 or 2 aoes (even when glyphed) gives them limited pvp potential. They are controlled by ai which can, at times exhibit odd behavior. They don’t do any meaningful damage, and I can only think of one real use for them in modern raiding. I almost feel like these could be combined with the ice trap, make them no-longer targetable, stationary, and have them spit their venoms at anything that comes in range for 30 seconds. This would essentially do the same thing as ice trap, give a great visual, bring the hunter down to 3 traps (only one of each school, right now there’s 2 ice, 1 fire, 1 nature) and it would still serve the purpose of both traps. Of course, I think we’d need to have  a shadow or arcane trap to fill the gap, which doesn't really eliminate this ability, but tweaks it a bit instead.

Spec Specific:

I generally feel most of these are pretty spot on. Except for cobra shot, that is. Cobra shot is a total replacement for steady shot. I’m not sure why to be honest, it seems to me like it would be just as effective to simply make steady shot refresh serpent sting for survival/beast mastery. It’s nice that when specced into survival/BM that steady shot is completely removed from our spellbooks, preventing someone from using the wrong focus generator while in those specs, but I don’t really feel like having two separate abilities holds a whole lot of value. It could be rolled into the mastery, or simple have steady shot taken out and just make everyone use cobra shot.

Black Arrow is another ability I’d like to see purged. As a survival hunter myself, it fits nicely into my rotation, and prevents me from being focus positive, but it shares a cooldown with explosive trap. Now, I’m ok with it sharing the cooldown, what I don’t like is that it takes away value from the trap system for me. I think that having the trap proc explosive shot, and removing black arrow makes my gameplay more interesting. Albeit it’s a bit more complex as the trap requires placement, but I honestly have more fun using the traps than I do applying a dot on cooldown. Of course, this solves movement issues, and losing explosive traps positioning. But the lock and load proc could easily be moved elsewhere, turning explosive trap into a dps spell. 

February, bloody February

This was an interesting month.

My goals were far from achieved, but as with all worthy failures, I think I learned a ton more than I would have had I succeeded (and done the smart things. :P) 

As a designer, I always have all sorts of off-the-wall ideas of crazy insane things that I've never seen and just wonder if they will work. While I think this creative curiosity is healthy for anyone who wants to be a game designer, it's dangerous for someone who wants to WORK as a game designer. Ideas are cheap, and worthless. That may sound harsh to many, but I guarantee to you that any game designer, working or otherwise, has hundreds of ideas just floating around. I guarantee that any professional game has an army of people behind it with a backlog longer than you can imagine. Ideas are great, but implementation is what separates the dreamers from the doers. With this in mind I made a decision fairly early on that I was going to make a platformer game. 

The purpose of this was to force myself into an environment of focusing on implementation and prevent myself from getting too experimental  I think it was a wise decision, but i think my handling of it crashed and burned. If you've ever done any looking at game maker, you've seen that there are hundreds of "engines" out there for all sorts of game types, and platformers is the most common. People have, essentially, mastered the systems underneath platforming games. This is a good thing, it allows for people interested in play, mechanics, and design to get involved without spending too much time digging around in things like coding collision or figuring out how to work with gravity. 

It's also something that I, very stupidly, decided not to take advantage of. I'm not sure if I was thinking "oh, it'll be easy" or if I was just getting a kick out of the coding aspect, but I decided that I was going to code my own engine. I don't regret this, as I learned a ton about coding and how the Game Maker Language works. But, I definitely feel like it was a bad idea from the perspective of operating on a limited time frame and my desire to try and focus on the design aspects. I ended up spending more evenings trying to refine player collision versus spending my time trying to figure out how to make interesting situations/obstacles for the player to deal with. I basically spent the month as a coder with designer on the back burner. 

I did learn some very valuable lessons as a designer though. First, and most obvious in retrospect, is to avoid duplicating work. Doubly so if it's something you don't fully understand or aren't highly experienced at. Had I taken one of those platformer engines and focused on just building the player epxerience within that engine, I think I would have come out with a much more desireable product in the end.

Anyways, on to more designery topics. Easing into complexity was a big thing I struggled with in this month's project. I think there's a certain appeal to the fantasy of "everything is normal and BOOM SHIT GOES NUTS!" but in practice that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. I started this project throwing in all sorts of obstacles and abilities right off the bat. Partly because I wanted to test them out, and partly because when most of use think of games, we think of them as completed pictures versus a lot of tiny pieces. It's important to make it clear to your player what they are supposed to be doing. When I dropped my player into a room with guns shooting, enemies jumping at them, and pitfalls of death, it became instantly clear that this was too much too fast.

After changing to a more smooth introduction, the game felt a lot better. Let's look at my first room. (I know, my collision blocks are an eyesore)

Starting the player in a position where you have one tiny block standing in your way, it's easy to come to the conclusion of "i should hop over that". And you just tought your player something valuable. Next I gave a jump two blocks high, "OK, I can jump that high. check".

 The next jump worked out pretty well. You can make the jump from two different positions. I wanted a few buddies try this jump out and saw a lot of interesting responses. Most people tried the jump from Point A first. Where it got interesting is when people failed. Some tried to jump against the 3-high wall a few times, few decided to try from point B (which is easy), but most immediately rushed back to point A to try again. They become, almost instantly, fixated on this one minor goal, that they completely ignored that there was a much easier way right there. They failed at least 3 times before looking for point B. The ones who stuck it out would eventually get it though. I expected them to stop once they got it and pause for a second or say something, but none did. This makes me question the concept that we need to shower our players in rewards to get them to do anything.

 I had a few ask me if it was possible to make it. I found this really interesting.  Specifically when the people asked me if jump A was possible. I think being a video game, when presented with a jump like that, most people naturally assume that a game would not give them an impossible task. I noticed the people going for jump A were a bit more active gamers while the people who went for B were the more casual camp. I suppose games have trained group A that they should seek out the greater perceived challenge even with a lack of any form of reward? I'm not sure, but i found it interesting.

From there, the level forces you to back track to get the disc to open the blue door, then to do this again. What I liked here is that the A group, upon seeing it a second time, seemed to lose all determination to get the jump. They've done it once, so they knew it was possible, and that they could do it, but it wasn't until the second time through it that they realized there's an easier jump there, and they kind of had a "damnit, whatever" moment and went for jump B.

Anyways, I've talked too much about a single jump. :P

The second room I introduced hazards  Originally I just had a "ramp" (I never got the character running up a ramp to work, which is already coded in tons of platformer engines... grrrr) where green balls of slime drop from the blue circle and roll downhill. Simple enough, just jump over the green things. But I found that some people didn't immediately realize that they were hazards  I was a bit surprised here honestly, assumed knowledge would lead me to believe that stuff rolling at you would be bad. But it (apparently) wasn't readable. So I added a second "slime dropper" thing a bit earlier that just dropped slime from the ceiling. People immediately recognized this one, nobody got hit by the falling slime. This could be a question of graphic fidelity, if they were spikes would people have let the rolling slimes hit them?

With this set up, I was able to more clearly communicate the slimes as bad. Then giving the player a bit of a corner to jump out of stalled the player long enough for them to see slimes rolling down the ramp as well. After adding this nobody had any question as to what was going on.

BAH! This is no good, I fear that going through this thing room by room is going to make this blog post way too long. While I would like to talk about the next room introducing projectiles and teaching a player how to use duck, but I fear this is getting lengthy already, and that I need to wrap this up.

Conclusion
Overall, this is a huge failure as a game. But it was a huge learning opportunity for me as a designer. I've learned a lot of things that I will never repeat. And obtained some interesting perspective on level design and player behavior. I think that I may revisit this one after the year concludes, as I really enjoy the idea of a platformer and trying to make that interesting. I've got some concepts for an aesthetic and some further room puzzles and stuff that I'd love to try out. But when operating on such tight time tables, I fear I just went *WAY* out of scope here.

January...

January was actually pretty good to me.

I started a bit late, so I felt a lot of pressure working on this one. As I mentioned previously, I hadn't actually found out about the 1GAM community at all until about half way into febuary, I actually started this under the inspiration of someone else where I work.

Anyways, let's talk about the game I made for January.

Concept: 
Anyways, the idea for the January game was a really simple strategy game. The core idea was that your offense and your defense are linked in the form of your units. I wanted attacking to feel risky, where by attacking, you are leaving your bases vulnerable  Once defeating an enemy base, of course, it's now a player-owned base. Next I wanted to make upkeep and maintenance of your forces important. I decided on letting the player build a network within their bases, allowing them to move resources around rapidly versus waiting for bases to churn out soldier naturally. This also allowed for a base that was locked in by friendlies to still serve a purpose and still be part of the game.

Aesthetics: 
Originally, I wanted to do a cellular theme, where you were controlling an army of cells/bacteria/viruses,etc. I played around with art assets i could find online (remember, I am NOT an artist), but I couldn't really find anything that felt right. I decided to make it pixel art characters. I wanted to build out a campaign where you start with tribal characters and your bases were huts, then the next level of the campaign you were moving into the bronze age with rudimentary weapons, then into the iron age, and so on. All the way up to the future. The core game itself wouldn't have changed, but each "time" had a small upgrade that it would add as the game went on. Eventually you'd be able to upgraded bases, soldiers, use player activated abilities, etc.

But that ended up being a bit too ambitious for a 30 day project and my development skills.

Implementation: 
For some reason, I envisioned the game as something that would work on phones. So I, very intentionally, kept the control scheme as simple as possible. In a lot of ways, this actually helped me out. It served to keep a lot of feature creep in check, and kept me trying to think of ways to do things that would fit. It basically kept my ideas reeled in an my focus pure. For the sake of being in development, I attached the functionality to "transfer" soldiers to the right click, so in it's current state, it couldn't work on a touch device, but that was done to allow me to separate out all the functions and see things happen in isolation, I never got around to move it to Lclick.


The map was never intended to be the map. It's extremely basic, there are a series of neutral bases with the player having one base in the corner and the AI having it's own base in the opposite corner. I basically just needed a test bed to see how things worked. Which ended up being the one and only map I had. Since I realistically had no idea about the time investment needed to make even an insanely simple game, coupled with the fact that I'd never done anything in gamemaker before, and the fact that I was just flying by the seat of my pants the whole time, there wasn't time for more maps.

Most of the functions weren't too awful to implement  although with even the little that I've learned up to this point, I can tell you that the code, scripts, animations, etc are all horrible. There's a chasm between code that functions and good code that's elegant, functional, and efficient. Mine BARELY functions. As I mentioned, I initially wanted to stay out of code, but I quickly found that to be impossible. So any coding that I did end up doing was pretty begrudgingly done, as I move further into this whole 1GAM thing, I'm getting more comfortable with code and hate it less... but I still don't like it.

Transferring was probably the most exciting part. It took me a couple days to figure out how the heck to make it work, but once I did get it to work making your soldiers to zoom around felt pretty good. It's one of those things where on paper it seemed like a boring mechanic, and in implementation it's not amazing or anything, but I though it felt pretty good. Moving around the map and having your soldiers zoom around feels pretty cool. Getting that short burst of super speed, and seeing your soldier zip around the map definitely made the mechanic feel like it was actually somewhat important. The management of the player network of bases is probably the thing that I feel like worked out the best. Of course, it ended up making the game extremely easy, but that's OK.

I'm not sure that having one-way transfers was really a good idea. It was actually harder to implement unidirectional movement than it was to enable bidirectional, at least with the way I put it all together. There's also no way to undo a road. I did this intentionally as I didn't want network management to be haphazard, but it ended up limiting the players ability to be reactive to a situation  I'm still not sure if that's good or bad, do I want players to pay for their mistakes that gravely?

Conclusion:
Overall, I'm actually pretty pleased with January's game. It's insanely simple, and I don't think it's fair to call it anything more than a prototype, but I think there's a lot of potential here. One of my goals of the 1GAM thing, is to build 12 prototypes and then next year see if any warrant coming back to and further developing/polishing. It's way too early to say, but I definitely can see how this prototype could be further expanded in a million ways. In addition to the fact that this is the first thing I've ever made in this software, and that I went into this with no friggin idea what i was doing, I have to say I'm alright with it.

Honestly, I'm just happy that I was able to make something. Anything. Anything at all.  :P

If you want to check it out, you can here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/khttvmqdkafmkal/takeover.exe 

I realize that it's an exe file, and that scares a lot of people. That's ok, if you're not willing to click an unknown exe, I can't blame you. But if you REALLY want to play it, and REALLY don't want to mess with .exe's, give me a hundred bucks, and I'll buy the HTML5 export module. kthx. :D

There's a lot more I could talk about, rudimentary AI (and how it can stomp your face in if you don't put in decision making cooldown), the upgrades I wanted to include, working with game maker, how difficult it is to get feedback from friends, etc. But I feel like this post is already getting too lengthy, and I'm sure those more general topics will be revisited over the course of this year.

Next time, I'll talk about the February game, and what a huge failure it's been and how boring it is!!! Stay tuned.

I almost forgot about this thing!

Well, here I am again.

I had almost forgotten about this thing! hah.

I guess updates first. It's been quite some times since I've written anything here. The most pressing update, and the reason I remembered I even had this blog, is that I'm participating in something called 1GAM. Over at http://www.onegameamonth.com/ It's a pretty interesting little site that challenges people to make 1 game a month for a whole year.

I actually decided to do this long before I found out about the site, and the community. I made it through my whole January project before discovering this community.

Anyways, to go along with my whole "year of game dev" I decided that I should be documenting a lot of what's going on this year. It's pretty important for me to be able to identify my struggles, pitfalls, successes, and all of that stuff. Which, of course, led me to the idea of starting a blog when I suddenly remembered that I already had one!

SO! Let's talk about some general observations.

First, how this started up. I found the gamemaker software free on steam and decided "what the hell". The original idea here was to try and keep my barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. I wanted to try and avoid code if at all possible, and to be able to focus purely on the design and mechanical aspects of the game.

That didn't work.

At all.

I've come to accept that I need to know some coding if I'm going to work in the digital realm. There's really no escaping that. It's good, and it's bad, but it's the truth. One one hand learning how code works, and programming logic, and all of that is of major value. As computers and internet make our world smaller, knowing how to function within software is increasingly valuable.

I've already learned *SO* much, it's really kind of surprising. To be quite honest, I have no clue how translatable the game maker language (GML) is to another, more advanced, language but I figure any experience can't really hurt me. I've always been able to decipher code and reverse-engineer it to figure out what's going on, but never before have I really had to think long and hard about generating code.

I find that most of the logic and math is actually fairly easy for me, it's finding the functions and formatting that is a huge pain in the ass. Of course, I'm typing this from a position of "I've only attempting extremely simple development" so I could (and likely will) end up eating those words in time.

While coding can be troublesome, where I'm struggling the most is with Art.

I am not an artist. I have very little skill with art, or patience with it. I realize that art is absolutely a learned skill. Having gone to art and design school and being forced to "do art" a lot, I know that the more you do it, the better you get at it. But I don't enjoy it.

I love mechanics, systems, how things work together, I love to sit down and figure out how things work. I'm often highly inspired by art and art itself can cause me to flood with ideas on how I can factor that into systems or what neat things I could do with it. But generating art is... simply not my bag. baby.

Anyways, I'm going to be trying to update this more often now that I legitimately have something to talk about. I'll write in a bit on my January game and do a post-mortem of sorts, then later I'll do some writing on the February game and what a disaster it's been so far! :D