Procedurally generated levels

After discarding a few prototypes, I settled on an action roguelike game with procedurally generated levels. The foundation for the tech has been easier than I feared.

I arranged blue squares that represent rooms. The actual rooms, consisting of many brown cells and optional side entrances in blue (depending on the existence of an adjacent room), are authored and randomly chosen. Pieced together like a puzzle. Orientation of the entire level and each room is random. There are special rooms for hallways and in the future, corners.

It only takes a handful of rooms and arrangements to reach millions of uniquely generated worlds.

(mirrored as part of the randomization)

(mirrored as part of the randomization)

There is no limit to the size of a level.

Things will get even more interesting, when I sprinkle in spawn locations for treasures, enemies, and traps.

*Snap*

*Snap* Long story short, I have a spiral-fracture on my distal humerus, just above the elbow, almost severing the radial nerve. The two pieces of bone were disjoint. In other words, my dominant arm will be in a brace for six weeks, forearm hanging in a sling from my neck. Two weeks down, four more to go. The pain has subsided before my frustration.

Thankfully, Zombie Tactics basically is finished and being auctioned off to a sponsor. You could say this incident occurred at a "convenient" time.

I am unable to draw to produce art assets in the meantime. Using the mouse is a tad awkward with my left hand. At least I can still type 85wpm using an additional keyboard, flipped upside down and positioned like a guitar on my lap.

I'm attempting to be 90% finished with code and design on my next unannounced game by mid January, allowing me to perform an art pass once I get my arm back. I was planning to pursue a similar development process anyways. I still love working on tiny projects.

From my perspective, I get to begin 2014 with my arm back, and a much greater appreciation of being self-employed. I have learned to be more thankful for my health, skills, and opportunity to do what I love.

Zombies in beta

At last my turn based tactical game has reached beta status...! Surely but steadily, piece by piece. This definitely is my largest project as an indie. Now I can sit back and basically play-test each of the five endings and survival mode. Private testing will come sooner or later.

I made an effort to introduce features and content gradually in story mode, so the player is not overwhelmed and turned away in confusion. There are 66 items and 36 human abilities, against the 8 zombie types. It was great practice to get in there and rapidly draw everything one after the other.

This is a Flash browser game that will be sponsored for the web. Originally it was for tablets, but that fell through for several reasons.

Backgrounds continue to be my overall weakness, though I'm pleased with how they turned out. I sketched everything, did an ink and color pass, and then hue shifted each scene to change the mood. They all get cached as bitmaps anyways, so there is no cost to filters and details. I threw away the old subway station background because it looked so lackluster.

On a design level, everything came together nicely. It will take some additional tweaking to get the difficulty of the game to feel right.

Conveniently, I have new ideas to pursue while this project wraps up in a part-time QA phase. I would like to try simulation / micro tycoon games, like create your own brewery, winery, or even shooting range with individual target pieces plopped down on some top-down grid.

I'm also inspired by bits and pieces of American history, like the Battle of Gettysburg which took place nearby. Also Bunker Hill seems interesting for a time-based survival defense game, because historically the onslaught of British forces eventually captured the location. It is much easier to use an existing story anyways.

Ludum Dare 27 Results

The Village of Lost Time has been ranked 18th place overall in Ludum Dare 27!

Is also ranked 13th place for graphics. The art was heavily inspired by Toy Defenders, and it was partially inspired by Kingdom Rush. I admire the simplicity of shapes and colors in games like these. Scribblenauts is another one I have been reviewing from an artistic point of view; I love it.

That grind

I made several changes to help reduce the amount of downtime in the game. The allies no longer return to the subway station, which acted like a main menu to exchange items and train in skills. Those interface features still exist; the merchant and skills trainer emerge after a battle immediately to trigger the interface options. It feels more natural and less disruptive.

Battle

Downtime, placeholder characters for merchant, equipment, skills trainer.

As a way of balancing the game, selected allies can scavenge for equipment and money while others stay behind. It is a risk versus reward mechanism.

This month I have to bring everything together and do a full balance and bug fix pass. Meanwhile I want to squeeze in some dialog and at least four other backgrounds. This has been a huge undertaking, but I am confident it will all come together.

The Village of Lost Time

On the weekend I participated in compo Ludum Dare 27! The 48 hour solo game jam held three times a year. It looks like the number of total entries almost hit a new record of 2213. The theme was "10 seconds" winning by a landslide in the final voting round. My suggestion "You must leave it behind" got a lot of buzz and ended up in third place.

My entry is called "The Village of Lost Time". It embraces the 10 second theme by rewinding time prior to your daughter's demise. As you control a villager, the game records the movement and replays it for each sequential session. Eventually you have this massive army built up. The goal is to fend off the spirits that take your daughter, destroying totems to harvest appropriate magic.

The Good

• I gained a lot of experience. This was the absolute first game I made where it was entirely playable using crude placeholder art. Rectangles and circles everywhere, but it worked. I spent the first day programming everything, and the second on art, audio, and dialog. Now I can repeat this process with confidence.
• I slept eight hours both nights (the jam begins at 9PM) and I did not consume more caffeine than I normally would. I stuck to my typical daily routine.

The Bad

• Sound effects. I used as3sfxr for most of them, with limited time to record my own, such as chopsticks and knives hitting my desk. The spirit sound is me blowing over a plastic bottle all warped up in Audacity.
• There is no music. Only after the jam did I come across this amaaaazing program that can generate a unique song using specified structure and arrangement. Yes, this is allowed, and even recommended.

The Ugly

(technical ramblings)

The original 48 hour version suffers from a technical bug that causes incorrect movement of the previously recorded villagers but only as the game progresses. Basically, each frame I was recording the keyboard controls, so the currently controlled villager and recorded ones would compute velocity and position using the same function.

The time step is a fixed number so frame rate should not matter. Floating point errors are expected in numerical integration, but it is all feeding off the exact same data each session. Eventually recordings get bugged and seem to worsen each sequential session, as if bad data is bleeding into the mix.

I fixed it by only storing the positions each frame, calculating velocity only for the current villager. This guarantees it to work accurately.

Equipment

Recently I took a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Currently in the atrium is a special "mouse exhibit" that had on display over a hundred items in a dark room, ranging from toys to tools. Supposedly its purpose is to overwhelm the viewer by everyday objects, due to the large number of pieces, each demanding equal attention. The viewer, like a mouse, scans around a cluttered room. There is no focal point of the art.

At least that was my impression of it all.

In a way, I used it as inspiration to create these 61 items for my game. There are eight items per category with the exception of special rare equipment, tentatively sorted in ascending order of power. Each human can equip one on the left panel, plus one on the right.

I need a few junk items too, so I suppose the total will be bumped up to a nice and even 64, power of two.