The Dos and Don'ts of Enemy Design

Gabe's Game - Waju

Solo development allows for uncompromised creativity. However, that can result in unchallenged creativity as well. This week I went through a journey of love, loss, and redemption while creating art for an enemy character in my game. Ideally, this will serve as a cautionary tale for developers doodling damage-dealing degenerates!

Finding a Name for an Impossible to Name Game

William

I've been talking about my current project on this blog for 2 months now, and so far the best I've been able to call it is Game X.  This isn't an attempt to be 90's XsTrEmE or anything, it's just what I consider to be a completely empty placeholder name like Jane Doe or Hayden Christensen.

So, in these past weeks I've been trying to think of what I could possibly name my game.  If I were writing a book, I might want to wait until I've written the entire manuscript before giving a stab at an official title.  But, alas, I'm making a game which I'm writing a blog for to somewhat market it, so giving a title that readers and fans can latch onto to look for news on it in the future will be paramount moving forward.

But, how on Earth do I give a title to a game like this?

Communicate Through Color

Gabe's Game

Colors are a language that most people (sorry color blind folks) use daily to communicate. Our biology has evolved to respond to greens and blues as comforting because water and foliage sustain life. Red is stressful and attention grabbing, the color of blood and fire. Our brains has been molded to respond subconsciously to every hue and value in site. Primitive colors offer easy wide reaching emotions, just as primitive language like a scream or laughter communicate generalize ideas. Becoming eloquent in verbal communication allows one to more clearly express a wide range of nuanced concepts. Becoming eloquent in color theory offers the same freedom.

Value

Color values allow our eyes to organize and estimate visuals.

example 1

example 2

Thoughts on Story in Open Worlds

William

I'm making an open world game that's more open world than most open world games.  Some open worlds let the player travel large distances at their leisure.  Some open world games let you travel an infinitely expanding world.  Some open world games let you travel across a few infinitely expanding worlds.

My game lets you travel across infinite infinitely expanding worlds, encouraging you to dump each one without looking back as you proceed into the next one.

Making a game that's open world is a mess.  A lot of conventional game design flies out of the window when you can't force the player down a certain physical pathway or even multiple pathways- there are no physical pathways!

This is fine if your game is a playground, but if you're trying to make an open world experience with a worthwhile story to boot then you have to get pretty creative and layer the way that the player experiences story.

The Trouble With Blog Posts - A Blog Post

Gabe's Game

Marketing for indie games has to start on day one. Most of us don't have a marketing budget or know how to target and effectively reaching an audience. So we are left to play the long game: without consistent updates, indie games are forgotten. 

William and I both know how to make games. However, blogging, or more aptly marketing, feels like swinging at a piñata. Sometimes we put our backs into it, sometimes we swing gently searching for our target, but we are always swinging blind. 

Populating Multiverses with Minimalist Art

William

My current project is an ambitious one that requires that the player traverse hundreds or even thousands of different environments.  While one major part of keeping this interesting is with fun and varied gameplay mechanics, an equally important aspect is creating interesting atmospheres.

But if I'm going to create hundreds and hundreds of atmospheres with only myself for a team, I can't making crazy-detailed work, right?  I have to find a happy place where the quality is engaging but allows for much in terms of quantity.  That's how I ended up stumbling on this minimalist, but eclectic, art style that will perpetuate my game.

I Love My Game Enough To Trash It

Gabe's Game

When conceptualizing a game, my imagination generates an ideal. When the project kicks off polish is paramount and planned detail is intricate. Then reality sets in. I think it's easy for indie devs to become intimidated by the enormous amount of work ahead of them. When that pressure sinks in, things get rushed.

Two weeks ago I made a post about animations for my game. All of the animations in that post along with their implementation took less than 8 hours total. In other words, it was very rushed. Since art is the field I'm most confident in, I spent the week working on bugs and then sped through the animations the day before posting. The result was half-baked work. So, I took a deep breath and started fresh.

 Old 

New

It really took very little time to drastically improve this jump animation. My whole game is about jumping, so the visual feedback for the jump is among the most important animations I'll do. Slowing down and doing it right was absolutely worth it. 

Metamorphosis: How Player Upgrades Develop an Experience

William

I'm working on a game that randomly generate pseudo-infinite landscapes that you are expected to leave behind as soon as you're capable of doing so, never to see them again.  Through certain inherent patterns in hopping between worlds and overcoming certain challenges, the player can begin to uncover secrets, a greater continuity, and, most importantly, player upgrades and items.

Silky smooth character animations

Gabe's Game

DISCLAIMER: These gifs are recorded at 15 frames per second - My game runs at 60 frames per second. The animations depicted are not representative of the final, or even current, product. 

I've been watching boxes jump around for too long. I have a character design ready to go, so let's get this thing animated and in game! 

My characters build actually presented some unique problems. The body is almost entirely legs, a deliberate design choice. Putting focus on the part of their body that is used as a weapon. 

Dumping a Project for a Hotter, Younger One

William

It's been a while since my last post.  I'll cut to the chase: for a bunch of reasons I'll briefly go over in a moment, I've switched from working on my previous project, Bone Boy in Blob World, to a previously halted project that I feel has a more promising future.

It rests, but is not gone forever

So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to the game that I have been working on for the past few weeks:

Absolutely No One Knows How to Make Games

Gabe

Over the last decade, I've watched countless GDC lectures and interviews. I've read loads of development blogs and dissected other developers methodologies. The primary lesson I've learned through all of this can be summed up in a single phrase: Absolutely no one knows how to make games.

Adventures in Self Rediscovery

William

Creating things all the time means that you have all the time's worth of creations.  It's hard to keep up, especially if you're a disorganized slob like me.  It's hard to remember what you created back in 7th grade, not to mention the specifics of what little you can remember.

Might as well have been a completely different person

Over the last week, however, my parents gave me some spindles of CDs I had burned while making stuff on the family computers.  See, back when I was in middle school and high school flash storage was still really new.  Uploading files to the internet was also extremely clunky, with most people abusing Rapidshare or Megaupload for whatever they had to upload- but were then still limited to a maximum of a couple hundred megabytes.

In a true act of inefficiency, however, I used CD-Rs to transfer projects, resources, and countless pieces of garbage between computers.  Dozens of them.  Spindles full.  So I figured it was time to take a trip down memory lane.

Specifically Interesting Enemies

Gabes Game

There have been countless platformers made. In many of those, there are a wide variety of enemies. So if you couldn't count the number of platformers made, you really can't count the number of side scrolling enemies in existence. So while you're not counting, how do you find originality? 

You don't. You find what makes your specific game fun, then you push the player to experience that. I've found that the coolest moments in my game, are when I'm doing sweet air combos. Jumping from one enemy to another, or sending one enemy flying into his buddy. Essentially, the game is most fun when the player isn't touching the ground.

One-Man Team: Focus vs. Split Development

Week 9

William's Game 

Last week I found myself working hardcore on two different things: enemy AI and a home-built developer console I could use to manipulate the game during runtime (something that there's not much native support for in Game Maker, unfortunately).

So I had to ask myself: which do I write about?  Still unfinished AI or an unfinished developer console?

The answer was neither because my car broke down and I spent the whole week fixing that and visiting family who came in from out of state; but I digress.  My point is: I need to take a serious look at what I've been doing development-wise to be missing crucial but simple milestones.

What Steam Direct Means For Indies

As many of you no doubt know, Steam is undergoing some pretty drastic changes very soon. Greenlight is nixed and replaced with a per game fee, no voting process. Unpopular games are going to be buried away, with the intent being to have fewer shit games visible to the average user. Users can sign up to be explorers, giving them special privileges in exchange for trudging through shit games to find the diamonds in the rough. All games are going to show public sales records and other statistics. Curators are going to have more power over games popularity.

So, what does all that mean for independent developers? Was Greenlight trash or misunderstood? Is direct better, worse or just different? As two solo developers, with Greenlit games on Steam, we are going to discuss how we think these changes impact the indie community.

How to Camera System

Week 7

Gabe's Game

Its easy to forget how important camera systems are. In good games, you don't even notice them. If you're thinking about the camera system while playing, it's probably because it's annoying or disorienting. A good camera does two things: The first is to clearly show information in the world pertaining to gameplay. The second is to move as seldom and as smoothly as possible because brains get pretty confused when presented with the illusion of movement.

As a disclaimer, I have worked as a designer on multiple shipped titles. Not a programmer. I've never actually done the legwork on a camera system, but how hard could it be?

I started with a horizontal camera movement set up similar to Mario. 

Making a Full Game By Yourself With a Full Time Job

Week 6

William's Game 

This marks the sixth week I've been working on my game, currently under the working title "Bone Boy in Blob World."  At this point in any full-time development schedule, I would have most of the main game mechanics fleshed out and maybe even some fairly developed early game levels.

However, this isn't a full-time development schedule.  Unlike with many of my previous projects, I've been developing Bone Boy in-between a full-time day job.  Not just any full-time job- a full-time job that I also spend at least two and a half hours on commuting every work day.  This, combined with extreme ADD, means I have to be really conscious of how I'm budgeting my time in order to be an efficient developer.

So, have I been succeeding so far?

Realistic Project Scoping

Week 5

Gabe's Game

Indies have less time, less money, and fewer people than AAA studios. So scoping your game to be within your abilities is imperative to success.

Which of the above images is more pleasing to look at? I used the same objects for both, in the same room, so they are equal, right? Obviously not, the images only have a few resources but A clearly takes better advantage of them. First of all, A combines the resources, allowing them to compliment each other. Secondly, it focuses the viewers eye in on the resources, keeping your gaze from wandering into less interesting portions of the scene. For B, you may or may not know what's missing, but what any person can do, is identify where information is lacking. Making games is similar.

Creating an Intelligence to Outsmart

Week 4 

William's Game 

For the past couple weeks, I've been working on making the enemies for my game work.  For a stealth game, an enemy's AI could end up carrying a lot of the gameplay's weight.  Being stealth is, after all, all about outsmarting and outmaneuvering a reactive foe.

And... this.

So, between my extremely time consuming job and the commute that comes with it, I've been working on designing my enemy AI.

Early Art: Finding Efficient Style

Week 3

Gabe's Game

On an indie team, being efficient with your time is important. As a solo developer, it's imperative. Traditionally, when adventuring into the early artist process for video games, you'll have piles of concept art, mood sketches, character concepts, often even prop art concepts. You'll find an art team deliberating over details in a way an individual just can't. So how am I possibly going to make an attractive game solo? By being strategically artistic.

Coding a Foundation for Comfort

Week 2 

William's Game 

This week, I began tackling the programming for my game.  Hammering out a prototype, as Gabe had started doing a week ahead of me.

A little known fact about programming is that it's actually really easy as long as you can follow logic, understand order of operations, can work within a structured environment, and (most importantly) can use Google to see how other people approach it.  To the surprise of those who have never programmed before, code is just a lot of mostly interchangeable instructions written in a very specific language.

I'm actually mostly self-taught as a professional programmer.  I've programmed since I was 11 years old and it wasn't until I turned 19 that I started my first programming class.  Now, having completed quite a few programming classes, there's really only one thing that I learned from them that I hadn't already taught myself: a clean coding environment is what separates professionals from amateurs.

Games and Growing Pains

Week 2

 

Gabe's Game

Much like the process of reproduction, in game design there are a few fundamental pieces that you put together to get things started. From there, the thing grows on its own. You're mostly left to deal with growing pains, college loans and, if you're lucky, a top-selling spot on Steam!

Like raising a kid, from the fundamental pieces you put together, a game grows into its own personality. Also like raising a kid, forcing a game to be something it's not, makes it turn out shitty. 

Over the years, this has been among the hardest design concepts for me to grasp. I often will get so excited about a story concept or gameplay mechanic that I blind myself to the bigger picture. I love donuts and I love lobster. Putting them in a blender together is less than desirable. So, how does all of this apply to my project?

When I first thought of the concept of a wall jump attack, it was within the context of a Super Meat Boy meets Shadow of the Colossus sort of thing. I was imagining that you would wall jump up huge enemies to get to their weak points. I needed to start smaller though, so I came up with the idea of jumping off rockets quickly after prototyping basic movement with moving platforms.

Drawing a Game From Nothing: Concept Art

Week 1 

William's Game 

When making a game, there's highs and lows.  For people who like a challenge, that might be bug fixing.  For people who like world-building, that may be in crafting Easter eggs or cutscenes.  For people who like money, it's when the game ships.

But for people who just like to create, it's in the design process; and nothing says design process quite like concept art.

Pictured: pure, unadulterated creativity

Prototyping

Week 1 

Gabes Game 

Really pure ideas are hard to come by. Ideas that don't feel forced or gimmicky, but like an intuitive way to experience gaming. For example, I love how in Mario, you fight Goombas and Hammer Bros using the same skills you have developed for platforming: movement is combat. By the time you've really sunk your teeth into the game, your fingers are pumped full of muscle memory because, aside from the occasional flower, you have been doing nothing but running and jumping the whole time.

I'd like to make a game that explores methods of movement as combat. A game where, instead of getting hulking armor, you're developing a skill. Rep after rep you perfect your muscle memory, culminating in epic battles that really feel epic because you've become an actual badass. Don't like mastery in games? Well, you quitters can go back to your "outside" and "relationships".

My first idea was to make a platformer where holding down an action key enabled you to defy gravity and move faster for a short period of time, as well as damage enemies.