Making games has been a long term goal of mine for a few years now, probably since I outgrew astronaut as a life goal. This year I really started making games in earnest. While I had made about 4 games prior to this year, I didn’t really have the drive or the understanding to do it. A bunch of things came together this year though, the most important of which was the funding of Lucky Frame by Channel 4 and Creative Scotland. That allowed me to stop doing my day job of making websites and dedicate myself to making games full time. What a year it has been too.
The most recent thing is that Pugs Luv Beats was nominated for an IGF award. I had entered the year with the goal of having a single game that would be worth submitting to the IGF at all, I had zero expectations of anything more than that. To be clear, I did not have any game that was even worth submitting last year.
It turns out that over the course of this year, I have made 10 things that qualified as video games. I also made a card game, which may have helped a little bit in my understanding of games, but I am not really sure. This is a super far stretch from 2010 where made 4 games, only 2 of which were arguably playable. And an even further stretch from the other 27 years of my life where I made 1 video game.
This is the third Glorious Trainwreck that I had done. Glorious trainwrecks is where you make a game in 2 hours, so it is a slightly crazier jam then the Ludum Dare, but good for testing out ideas. For this one I decided to learn flixel. Also I had not even tested out the tool chain, so I had to get that all working within the 2 hours. This game kinda sucks. But Flixel turned out to be totally awesome, and I ended up using it on a few more projects throughout the year.
I actually ended up cloning big part of flixels engine into the iphone engine that I am using, because it is so enjoyable to work with. This may also be because it is the first real game engine that I have worked with, so I didn’t know anything else. I suspect it is because flixel is really great.
Direct link to SWF - arrows to move, space to jump
During the month of March I started working on Lucky Frame all day, and made a few prototypes that were not released. Sound Track is probably the most complete of these.
I had been playing a bunch of trainyard at the time, and wanted to make a game that accentuated the rhythmic aspects of that game. Yann made about 10 levels for it, and we user tested it a few times before realizing that it was far to complicated for people to control. I think that we didn’t fully understand user testing at that point, nor did we understand our market, so we may have been more harsh on this prototype than we should have been.
However, it was good that we scrapped it, because the toy at the core wasn’t that fun to actually play with. It felt more like a chore to build songs by drawing roads.
This one doesn’t have a link because I was not diligent about saving working builds back in this time period. Also it is for iPhone, and I neglected to port to PC.
My second Ludum Dare entry, this one is a literal take on the genre “tower defense”.
Boy, does it have some problems. I made the controls far too losey goosey, you have to hit buttons at the exact right times to place pieces. There is a strange cool down period on the placement that has nothing to do with the actual game play, and feels really divorced from it. There is no difficulty curve, and it starts out pretty darn hard, so you don’t really get a chance to practice your skills before being bombarded by enemies.
All that said, the core toy is pretty fun to play with. Basically it is a human controlled Diffusion Limited Aggregation system, so you can make super cool looking structures super quick.
Sean, the artist at Lucky Frame keeps bugging me about this one, so it will probably have a sequel at some point. One of the things that I want to draw from is [Rampart](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_(arcade_game), which was pointed out to me by Tony as a pretty similar concept.
This one started out as a text adventure slot machine, which I did in 20 minutes as a joke. When I saw how sucked into it Yann got, I decided to add graphics to it. Still was basically a joke.
I ended up putting it in the IGF Pirate kart, so a bunch of people have played it in the context of other strange games, so that is good that there is a context for this type of thing. The Pirate Kart ended getting a bunch of news coverage, which is strange and cool. I think I am going to do more of those if I have the time.
I still think that slot machines are a great model for thinking about simple game play. Mining in minecraft is basically a big slot machine. Every time you break through a block, it is like pulling the handle.
Did this one with Alex and Yann in 6 hours for a dundee game jam. I didn’t do too much of the gameplay code because I was handling the bridging between the pitch tracker and the game engine. Unfortunately because of the crazy setup we used, it is pretty hard to setup. I think that it would be possible to rebuild it, but I am not sure why you would.
I also did the character art for this one. It is “OK”.
Working with Alex was awesome, it was great to have another programmer on a project. A++++ Would work that way again.
A game for Ludum Dare, made with Lucky Frame. This one is half vvvvvv, and half super crate box, but not as successful as either of those by a long shot. I burned half of the compo time trying to get the collision code correct, and ended up not tweaking the gameplay enough. I should probably revisit this one now that the collision code is solid.
Also, Super Crate Box for iOS has convinced me that platformers can work on the iphone. I may revisit this one, if for no other reason that platformers are a well accepted genre, and one of the things that people like to cut their teeth on when learning level design.
OSX Download link and instructions
After the stress banging my head against collision detection for MvM, I decided to take it easy and do something super simple. I ended up making a clone of crossfire for iPhone. This one didn’t require much work, but turned out pretty great. There are still some rough edges, but I don’t know how much I want to fix them. We should probably make this free.
One thing to learn from this one, it is that games where you play against another player are much easier to make engaging then games that you play by yourself.
This game is an object lesson in not getting bogged down in systems. After spending a week or so writing a parser for BulletML, I decided to make something with it. BulletML is a programming language for programming bullets, and is used in some of my favorite shmups. It turns out that using the same systems as your heros is not the best way to make the same things as your heros.
I would like to actually make a shmup at some point in my life, but I need to actually spend some time trying to understand them first. This thing I banged out in a few hours, and it made me realize that shmups are far more complex then they seem. I am probably not going to attempt one for quite some time.
This one is the final outcome of an idea that I had been thinking about making for over a year. Unsurprisingly, it is not very good, as many over worked ideas turn out to be.
The initial plan was to make a game called rocket gun, where you control a gun with rockets attached to it, and have to control your movement either by shooting or firing your rockets. I made a prototype for that, and it turned out to be impossible to control. I didn’t even get as far as making levels for it.
I revisited the idea, but took out the shooting, and just made a game where you are an oblong object controlled by rockets. Turns out that this is still super hard to control.
If I revisit the idea, I think I may continue to lower the complexity of the control system, because that seems to be the real issue here.
Not going to say much about this here other then the gameplay is an ongoing revision, partially because we really care about this one, and partially because the gameplay isn’t the best it could be yet. It is interesting to change gameplay on games that are already “finished”, but I think it will be an important lesson.
However, as a toy, it is super fun to play with and make music with. I think that fulfills where we wanted to go with it. Any further things that happened with this game are amazing. I am so excited and humbled that it got into IGF.
I am just in the process of finishing a really big project, and as such, I have a bunch of little projects that I have been pushing off, or not finishing in the interest of completing the big project. Now that it is coming to a close, I am starting to think about which of these little projects I can take on in my brief vacation and make into something nice.
The aforementioned big project, and a number of small projects have been built on top of this toolkit, that I built ontop of another toolkit. I really wanted a version of love2d that I could run on iphone. I just like writing in languages that don’t require header files and make it really really easy to mess around with your object instances.
So I put a bunch of lua bindings on top of openframeworks, and some of the openframeworks addons that seemed useful, and have built a number of games with it. It actually started with this ludum dare game soundman stepper and I have used it on two more ludum dare entries. It is getting to the point where I can throw together 3-4 hour games with it that are almost app store quality.
The issue is that I know it like the back of my hand, and it would be a really long road to go to make it useful for other people. In fact, I don’t even know where to start or what the major problems are. I also don’t know if anyone cares. There are plenty of frameworks out there that do really similar things, and I don’t particularly feel any great need to compete with them. I guess I am going to put this one off until someone asks me for it.
Man this one is a goddamn millstone. It started as a clone of scratch for iphone about 2 years ago. I got it pretty far and then dropped it until this october. I rebuilt it using blud, and got it pretty far into a nice graphical code editor. There are a few missing opcodes (arn’t there always), but it is pretty nice.
Then I started in on a drawing app (ya know, because scratch has one), and then I realized how scary big this project is, and then dropped it.
I suspect that if this one doesn’t get picked up again, and soon, it might be another year before I get back into it. I would really like to release something with it though, because I think it is pretty cool.
Or little iphone tracker. I havn’t written any music (seriously) for over a year. I have just been too busy with other stuff. Part of me wants to blame my tools though. My last composition tool that I really loved was LGPT, but keeping around a platform that ran it became too much of a pain. Before that, my favorite was LSJD, and before that buzz. All the interface spawn of octamed to a certain extent.
I have been pining for something that has that model for iphone, but havn’t been able to figure out how to deal with translating the smoothness of the chording buttons + dpad that they all used so well. I have a brain bolt last week that might be the right thing, and started bashing it out. I would really like to dig into this and figure out if it is the right interface decision, but I don’t want to add yet another project to the pile of incompletes.
Did that.
I spent the past few days taking in as much of the neon festival as I could. The neon festival is an annual digital arts festival that takes place in dundee. I am not sure why it is called a digital arts festival, as a bunch of the highlights for me were decidedly analog, but I am going to chalk that up to a combination of a lack of understanding of the specifics of electronics, and a push to fund anything that seems remotely computer related. I am excited to see how the festival develops for next year, it had some rough edges that could have been smoothed out, but on the whole, it was a super vibrant display of the interesting venues and people that dundee had to offer, and I was glad to meet a ton of people involved in it.
The first thing that I saw was the pecha kucha. I found that the majority of the presentations were really hurried sales pitches, but a few of them stood out.
Gary Penn of Denki’s presentation was quite quick and confusing, and it gave me a bit to think about as a game designer. What I gathered from the core of his presentation is that Orbital for iPhone is a better game than gimme friction baby. The comparison felt a bit off, comparing something that is both a highly abstract and minimalist game, to another game which had a budget, and eschewed minimalism using the flavor of the month glowy vector graphics. For players, yes, I would agree that orbital is a better game. For game developers, I would say that gimme friction baby is a far more important game to study, and that the games we should be looking for are more like that one. While I was initially frustrated by this presentation, it has absolutely left me with a few things to think about in the realm of game design.
Rohan Gunatillake’s buddify app presentation was nice and measured, didn’t feel rushed, and ended on an uplifting note, and I am not just saying that because I am friends with him. He managed to bring quite a bit of personal history into his presentation, and only mentioned the app in the minority of the slides, which was nice.
Andy Milligan’s presentation I wanted to call out for seeming to overlook a really important prior art. Andy Milligan was suggesting an alternate conference format that would center around the dining table, as a method of democratization of the conference format. I was struck by the fact that this would possibly increase the likelihood for the loudest voices in the room to continue that trend, and I think that well curated speakers can work just as well for creating an interesting discourse around a topic. One thing that it did make me think of is the micro funding system based around communal dinners that has popped up recently. Called Sunday Soup, it is a dinner that charges every one at the dinner a cover, the proceeds of which are then awarded to one of the artists that has presented that evening. I think that it may be more of a phenomena in places that don’t have the arts funding that the UK has, but I still think that it is an interesting concept.
While I have organized more than one rip off pecha kucha in the past, I have never been to an official one, and going to this one fulfilled my expectations of the format.
I took the next night off from the presentations, and came out to the skull etching workshop performance. I was happy to see a nice turnout for what was essentially an academic noise show. The conductor and workshop leader kept it moving along, and for a group of people that had not only built all the synths that afternoon, but had learned how to play them, and the performance as well, it was really great. Full disclosure, my partner was part of the group, so take that into consideration. Even so, it was great to see a bunch of people, some of whom had never touched a soldering iron, put together a synth was really awesome. I made me wish that more modern and electronic art techniques could be picked up so fast. I guess that is why there is so much synth noise music and animated gif art, and relatively few art games though.
The presentations the next day had two great standouts. Alex Tobin’s presentation on his homemade 3d animated music videos was short and sweet. It was great to see something that was within the reach of the audience members being presented. The fact that I really loved his aesthetic didn’t hurt either.
N55’s presentation was mind boggling. They are a couple of amazing engineers that take on crazy projects and succeed. It was Buckminster Fuller, by the way of hippy utopianism, looped back though modernism, and then with some aggressive anti copyright stuff as well. I spoke to them later at the art exhibit about there engineering, and they claimed that it was all relatively easy. I want to try out some of it to see just how easy it is. The other thing that I am wondering about is how low the prices on their stuff can get. A house that costs the same as a car and lasts for 500 years is amazing no matter the details.
The finale day had a few highlights as well. Rachel Maclean’s videos being shown over lunch was really great, as well as the performance in the basement. This was by NOMA (John Cromar) who doesn’t seem to have much of a web presence unfortunately. It was one of the droniest, easy listening’ist power electronics shows I have ever heard. Super great, to the point, and with a bunch of peaks and valleys in the music. Plus it was in the dusty basement of a youth center.
The planetarium show, with both a presentation by the hilarious visitors guide, and a ambient electronic show in the observatory top was super great. The visuals of old nasa footage, as well as the fact that we were listening in the same room as a 1.5 meter telescope helped out the atmosphere a bunch. I would go to more shows there. From there we went up to the Dundee law and saw a performance detailing all the of things that we were not allowed to do in Dundee public spaces, during which the performers proceeded to do them dressed up in florescent costumes. Solid.
Interested to see if Dundee can sustain the kind of energy that it did for this week.