The Rampant Coyote posted an excellent article on game size, which has prompted me to write a quick article on some things I have noticed with my recent gaming.

Games – Too Big, Too Hard?

For years I have been working full time, and going to college full time, while trying to spend time with my wife and four kids and working on games in my spare time, which left very little time for actually playing a game. During that period of time I almost completed Final Fantasy 3 on the DS making it to the final boss, and alas the world was left in peril due to my untimely death. So now that I am working one full time job putting my hard earned degree to work, I have had time to actually play games, like an hour every night!!!

The first game I pulled from the backlog of unfinished games was Chrono Trigger for the DS. I enjoyed almost every minute of this game, with exception to a lot of the add on quests that came with the DS version, but they were optional so I did what I wanted to do until I got bored with them. Then I got back onto the original side quests and beat all but a handful without having to reference a walkthrough. Each one was creative, and most came with good story bonuses. Then after many hours I took on the Black Omen and pretty much ran straight through from there to the final battle with Lavos.

It took me three nights to beat the final battle, putting the DS on suspend (love that feature) but slowly learned the what needed to be done and took it with patience. The battle felt epic, it was far from impossible, but seemed like it at times, and really challenged my nerves. After it was all over I was given an incredible game ending, and I might eventually play through this game again on the beaten mode.

After that I grabbed Suikoden for the DS, because I remembered the story line in that game to be quite good so far. I played on it for about a week or two, but the constant random battles just wore me out, Suikoden went back on the shelf, and now I am playing another game entirely.

For me Suikoden became more work than fun, and since it is wildly an amusing waste of time, I don’t find it necessary to explore the game further. But Chono Trigger had very little filler content, and I could explore without constantly being punished for doing so. And Chono Trigger is by far the harder of the two games, but it’s balance and intrigue kept me going, and I hardly noticed that it took me about four weeks of hour long play sessions to finish, I just couldn’t put it down.

So, that has been my recent experience, I like to jot this stuff down as I still do a bit of game development to break up the web development tedium.

Before I start in, believe me, I like the movies but wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan, or put this movie in my top 10. But it is a vampire movie (which I enjoy, Bram Stokers #1), and has earned itself a massive and dedicated following. While I liked the movies and absolutely loved the soundtrack I just couldn’t get into the spirit of Twilight, until I watched the second movie. Now I am not certain, don’t quote me on this. But I am about 3% sure I saw him. I believe he was part of the vulturie (or however you spell that), I believe they did their best to edit him out, and I beleive they divulged deep secrets into the reality of vampires existing among us today.

Everyone believed him dead, but I now know he un-lives as a vampire, and I will forever be part of …

Oh yeah, I’m a fan!

My wife was at the release party last night, she won that bottle and a few other things. She hasn’t woken up yet to see that I’ve fixed this for her, but I’m sure I’ll be the first to know when she does. Anyway, it’s fun to do an off the wall post every now and then, but I must hurry and get back to my anticipation.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Twilight or Earnest. I enjoy parodies of even my favorite movies and singers. This is in no way meant to be offensive, it is just for fun that I do this.

Today I was going to announce a game I have been scheming on for a long time, but when I googled the name this time I found a development studio founded in 2009 that has that name for their company. So for now I am code naming the game “Goat Cheese” and will divulge a few of the details.

Goat Cheese concept art.

• Goat Cheese is a party based RPG focusing on the story of one town
• Up to 4 in your adventuring party
• Almost every NPC is a recruitable character on condition
• Lots of dialog based on your chosen party adding to replayablity
• Optional boss fights with the right party
• Every ending is a game ending, just go home and roll credits
• Humor based story line with multiple outcomes
• Start the game over with your saved character
• Desired Target Platforms: Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad

The design has multiple authors and I am teaming up with a friend to make this game happen. The timeline is a year in our spare time, give or take a few months. Just to show you how serious this game is I included some early concept art. So in the mean time check back from time to time for updates and if you have an iPhone go check out my current game, Choppacide EU.

For a couple years now I have been working on programming an RPG. I started out with one idea which I ran with for a year before realizing I would never complete it with my current schedule. So I tried to simplify everything and start anew, but that RPG quickly got large and out of hand as well. I then jumped onto an iPhone project and finally finished a game, then finished a side scrolling RPG for a competition, then came back and made another RPG combat engine prototype which I am holding onto for a rainy day.

So now I have several partial RPG’s, including one half started 3d game (need more cash first) and no more college waiting on a degree so I can job hunt. So after running aground financially on 3D I decided to review my old design docs and decide on a way to mix them up and finish an RPG. I am still finalizing the design doc and prototyping a bit and getting pretty close to having something that looks fairly impressive. I am also toying with the idea of teaming up with an artist and a sound and music person. I was always hesitant to drag someone onboard before due to my inexperience, but I have learned a great deal over the last two years and feel much more confident in what I can do. And with college no longer a time factor I have been able to accomplish in a week what took me a month and a half in the first competition.

At long last Choppacide Enemy Unearthed is available on the App Store. It is a fast paced helecopter fighting game in which you protect your cattle from being a spiteful last act of a defeated foe. I had a lot of fun making, so go grab it so you can have a lot of fun playing it.

Choppacide on iTunes.

This was my expected date to start offering support for my new iPhone application, but it remains in review and will hopefully be available by next weekend. When I first started with the iPhone developer program most people bragged on their applications being passed in 1 to 3 days. Now I am reading a lot of reviews that indicate their review times taking around a month to get reviewed. I just hope to see this passed before I graduate college next month.

Choppacide EU

Choppacide EU was the side project I started to let off a little steam from two years of programming on an RPG. It is a quick fun game that is loosely based on my java4k entry in 2004. Choppacide EU was a fun project to work, and allowed me a chance to objective-c and cocoa, not to mention an incredible open source game engine called cocos2d-iphone. Chipmunk is used for the physics and is quite capable. It took me a couple of days to get a prototype working in TGB, then quite a few weekends learning iPhone development and tweaking physics.

I will have more on this game once it gets released.

The gaming industry has changed a lot since I was a kid. I started out on an Atari 2600 playing Donkey Kong Jr, Jungle Hunt, and Joust. The games were simple, and quite honestly fun, and that form of quick game play is making a re-emergance right now on the iPhone and other mobile gaming outlets. The popularity of arcade style gaming in one sector makes me wonder if new arcade style games on the desktop might be a worthwhile outlet. Maybe some other genre is being underserved, it has been a few years since a Kings Quest game was released?

A few weeks ago I picked up both an iPod and an Objective-C cocoa book, well, I actually got the iPod touch for my birthday from my wonderful wife. I am currently working on a smaller game project aimed at the iPod and iPhone and I am about as far as I can go without official enrollment, and I am typing this while waiting for Apple to process my enrollment and get me started.

Things are going quite quickly, it took me a while to get the hang of the syntax but it is pretty simple. It also took a bit to get used to the stricter C as opposed to the C used in C++. But I have been very impressed with the language and how quickly I can get something done in it. I most likely won’t bother trying to tie in a scripting language because Objective-C is as dynamic as I need it to be.

Finally, I have to take a moment to brag on the impressive framework that is Cocos2D. It is still being worked on and I have been able to submit some code to it, which might get rejected but I was happy with it. Cocos took a bit to get the hang of, but once I got into it I began using it as well as manipulating it to suit my needs. And with chipmunk physics easily integrated my game is almost fully playable. Now I just need to get it off the iPhone simulator and into my iPod.

I have been working on what is basically the same RPG for almost two years now which can get a little frustrating and disheartening at times. When I started this project I knew nothing of my engine and was trying to decide between two games to develop. I decided on the RPG since I had no experience with AI, and felt turnbased AI on a grid would be easier to learn and tweak than real time AI in free space. Oddly enough they both play out to many of the same principals, with optimization being equally important for the two.

So I will now be throwing in the other project for development along side this one, most likely meaning that The Soldred Kingdom will go another year into development, while I at long last release a game this year. I would have never made this transition on my own, but I have a glint of hope that might mean some help on both projects. Not only will it help in completing them faster, but having someone like-minded to discuss things with will improve my sanity immensely.

I am about 6 hours into development on the second game and have had it playable since about 4 hours in. It is a sidescrolling action game idea that I have been wanting to do for almost two years and it is possible that a few months of work will render a polished game. I will have more to come with screenshots and an official announcement as soon as I get some art in place of my polygon mockups.

I have read many forum requests for a way to turn 3D models into sprite sheets. If your 3d program can spit out animations as images then this program might be able to help. I use Cheetah3D, and if you do likewise then you are sitting pretty because I have a javascript file you can stick in the Macro Scripts directory for spitting out the frames into separated folders for 8 directions. You will simply have to adjust the camera settings, FPS, and maybe a few others to suit your models. stripanimation.js.

When you are prompted, find or make an empty directory and it will create (or you might have to create) 8 folders named se, s, sw, w, nw, n, ne, and e. It will insert 8 frames into each one of these directories. If you have another 3d program you might want to set something like this up.

The program that puts it all together is a java application (it’s what I’m decent at). You need to do a few steps for this to work quickly if you are using the 8 folders as mentioned above. First, decide how you want the strip layed out with the columns and rows text boxes. Next, open a Texture/Template from the menu. What this file does is it gives the size all the images will be scaled to. If the images are already the size you want just open one of them here. Finally, in the file menu press “Open 8 Strips”. When the file dialog opens select the folder that contains the 8 direction folders and press open. You will see your images strip quickly followed by a save dialog, just name that direction with a “.png” extension and do this 7 more times as it prompts you.

If you either want to do individual strips or just make one big sprite sheet then use the “Open Mask/Strip Directory” option in the menu rather than the 8 folders option. Please bear in mind this is a development tool, quickly put together to accomplish a necessary task. I am also including the source code with it. I put a BSD licence at the top of the two files I wrote.

uglyiso.jar

This is a Netbeans project file, the gui code was generated.

uglyiso.zip

I would prefer to answer technical questions about this on the forum, so please post those comments there. Thanks.

A lot can change in a year, I thought I would have a game released in a year and it is nearly at the two year mark. But, as things change you just have to change with it and endure. Right now I have two really big todo’s on my list.

1. Finish my Bachelors Degree in Software engineering at age 30. (You can tell I was an over acheiver in my younger years.:)

2. Release a game, maybe? (I’ve got 4 kids, a full time job, and full time college, just gi’me a sec OK!)

I really thought I would have more time to work on the game this year because I am mostly taking development classes. I have hobby developed for over 10 years now so Databasing, Java, and C++ have been pretty easy so far. What is going to kill me later on in the year are the marketing and business classes I opted to take as my electives. I seriously doubt I will be skimming the reading in those courses.

On my quest to perfect this stats engine I keep pondering the question as to whether a cRPG should mimick a PnP RPG, or mimick the big number stats like Diablo and Final Fantasy. I actually designed several instances of the engine based on a hybrid of both. I actually planned on making a simple PnP system based on what I did with the computer, but now I am thinking it would work better to do the reverse. I always get balanced gameplay to a point, but there is always that infamous gotcha that makes you realize you missed something. I went for 6 months not realizing several problems because I hadn’t tested several combat techniques properly.

So tonight I am breaking out the dice and I am going to hash out a PnP game based on my existing stats engine, improve the rules, then import it back into the game. Luckily with the rules already loosely based on PnP, implementing dice rolls is not a big change. The question largely remains as stated, should I loose the dice coming back into the engine or keep the dice. The longer I play RPG’s the more I like the dice.