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.

At long last, some more screen shots! As I wrote earlier I have started a side project and am currently working toward an iPhone game. After much debate and a lot of test coding and graphics I decided that the Soldred Kingdom is a better fit on the PC. I believe I will do an iPhone RPG sometime in the distant future, but for now I am going to finish Soldred and see where this new action on the iPhone goes. So, I kicked things back off this week on Soldred and with a rejuvenated step got some things accomplished.

The biggest gaping hole in this RPG is artwork at the moment, so that is what I have been concentrating on. The tiles were drab, the levels were drab and was just getting frustrating. But I finally took a look at some older games such as Popolo Croise and realised a few places I was skimping and didn’t even notice. Grass tile transitions are pretty dull it you don’t take the time and mix them up a bit, and one transition tile per type and direction simply does not cut it. Variety is the key ingredient.

I also spent some time on trees and other objects. I like shadows for the trees, but forested areas seemed to suffer from having one shadow on top of the next, so I decided that it might be better to leave things as they were in the dense areas and use tree shadows only for trees in the clearing. So to flavor up the forest floor I decided that adding underbrush might have a good visual effect by giving the appearance of dense and impassable.

There is also some UI artwork done, but that is for a later blog. The goal of the stats system is to make a complex game as simple as possible. Basically I am shooting for low numbers with only a handful of stats and several skills to complement. That’s all for now, short and sweet.

For some time now I have been watching the community at Garage Games slowly get bled back behind the pages of what seems to be a lot of commercial back scratching. I am constantly reading articles about raising the prices and fan hype cheering them on saying indies can afford it. This immediately says to me that existing users feel threatened by the competition. Just look at the casual games market, it is overpopulated and finding a good title now takes quite a bit of digging.

Now a bit more of my history, interests and lessons learned. I have always hailed the era of DOS-Win9x and SNES as the greatest era in gaming history. That era on those platforms rendered more games that stole away many worthwhile hours of my life. Now the handheld platforms are picking up where they left off and once again I playing games that I feel are worth my time. I had originally pictured Aeges Road a DS game until I priced it. While the graphics aren’t’ by todays standards great, I still find them appealing and acceptable, some times even better than some of today’s graphics. IGN my think Chrono Trigger for the DS should have been 3D, but I beg to differ that point. When I started my project I was of the mind that 800×600 would be just fine for an indie, but after reading some reviews for Eschalon Book I, my confidence faded quickly as I realized I was going to have trouble getting the right details in a 128×128 animated sprite.

Then came along the iPhone. At first I never payed it any attention due to its NDA knowing full well tutorials and instruction were going to be expensive to get to. But low and behold they dropped the NDA as well as the up front charge and simply charge 30% on every sale, very cool! At that point I knew the iPhone needed to be my target platform as I was still struggling with the graphics after nearly two years of working on them. Unfortunately, the development tools I use decided to tag on an expensive up front cost to dive into iPhone development. For about a month now I have been trying to justify paying the price for iPhone development, but the bottom line is, the cash isn’t there and this indie can’t afford it.

I really became discontent and this post at Rampant Games didn’t exactly help me find complacency.So I spent a while looking into alternatives. I am at the end of my Unity demo, and was able to do some cool stuff just playing with it, but Unity is too expensive to get to the iPhone as well. It wasn’t until last Thursday that I began reading forum posts at iDevGames looking for a good way to start from scratch when I stumbled upon this post. There are currently three open source iPhone engine projects, two of which I am looking to use.

SIO2 is a very cool 3D engine for the iPhone that uses blender for level editing! I already know blender, and C is not a far cry from C++, in fact, it is sometimes easier to figure out what is going on quickly when it is C rather than C++. I have been frustrated with isometric tools and have been debating going 3D with The Soldred Kingdom back when it was still Aeges Road. I have always had a vision in my mind of how I wanted it, and even had a jogl prototype and java3d level editor partially working at one point. With blender being the level editor, I can see this being fairly easy to implement.

Cocos2D is just neat, and it gave me an excuse to do something I have wanted to do since I bought a mac, learn Objective-C. I bought the Aaron Hillegass book as suggested on iDev and I love it. I will go as far as to say I think I like Objective-C better than I like Java, and I really like programming in Java. Once I get done with the book I think I am going to update my Guru account and put this as an available skill, sadly I turned a Cocoa contract down last year due to inexperience. But back to Cocos2D. Cocos2D was and is still a python game engine, thus making it cross platform compatible which would gain for me Linux, a target quickly lost with my old tools. Cocos2D was ported to Objective-C for the purpose of iPhone development. Most of the tools associated with Cocos2D, including the level editor, are in python. I played with it a bit, and I was impressed with how small everything is.

Both projects have a lot of tools built in including physics(!!), and they are open source to boot. The iPhone has a smaller resolution making graphics much easier for me to work with, and oddly enough comforming to many of my original visions for the games. After I get all of my tools and SDK’s downloaded (which will take a while) I will be starting with Cosos2D to get my smaller project (which will be shown off soon hopefully) off the ground. I was able to make it functional with 2 fully playable levels in TGB in 12 hours, so I am shooting for 36 hours given my unfamiliarity with the tools, engine and language (granted I had never used more than basic physics in TGB before either). Finally, what is really cool is that I can show all the code on my blog I want as I hope to design some stuff that the two communities might find useful.

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.

I am probably the worlds worst. When I see something I like in a game, it always causes me to rethink the design on my own game. I also find myself questioning things when I read through the comments on a blog. I have been trying desperately to nail down the final aspects of the stats and skills section of the design doc so I’m not floating on my ideas, but with no luck yet. I kinda like the AD&D, but at the same time kinda frustrated with them in a CRPG. Fallout has a good system, but it still lacks a few things I would like to add. I would love to add classes back into my game, but the nature of the gameplay just doesn’t justify it at this point.

The oddest thing I keep doing lately is trying to justify my decisions based on what I see in jRPG’s, and to a degree it is within reason, but I think things would get wierd fast. For instance, the stats in Chrono Trigger stay low for a while and damage and HP is both balanced and challenging. Something I see as an improvement over Final Fantasy where the HP and damage rolls are just too high for comfortable stat management.

Gurps is probably the closest thing to what I would invission my rule system as. There is one stat in particlular in the game that can’t be allowed to exceed a certain point or the game will offer no challenge what so ever. While I don’t like low stat caps, I ponder the reasoning in capping some stats and leaving others free, maybe even making that skill cost more skill points to increase. I actually have most of these stats and skills working for the most part in the game already, they just lack level management and proper creation right now.

So with the same base stats I have had from the beginning, I am hoping to just change up the skills section and make them manageable with game balance. I keep telling myself there’s no rush, I still have dozens of denizens to animate and many levels yet to build, but the constant flip floping and re-tweaking is about to drive me crazy.

I am currently playing Star Ocean on the PSP and really enjoying it. I had a brush with it back in the PS1 days, but never had more than a few hours to invest at the time. Now, I am probably getting near the halfway point and the game just doesn’t let go of your interest. The story is fairly basic, but there are certain levels of complexity and enough wonder of things that it feels very deep.

One thing I have noticed about this game is that tutorials are very much optional. You talk to people who offer advice, and you take it or leave. I am the kind of player who would rather learn by hurling myself against a brick wall than being stuck in a never ending tutorial on how its played. I really don’t think I have done everything possible in Civilization 2 yet, so every now and then I pick up where I left off in the manual and conquer the world again with my new found discoveries. This is in contrast to games like FF8, which is a great game, but the replay value is almost 0 when you dread the miserably long tutorial at the beginning.

With the freedom to take things on when I feel like it, I find that games are much more enjoyable in the long run. In Star Ocean I am just now starting to get into the little skill distractions such as weapon customizations and cooking. While each one is basically a recipe in a slot machine, the clever dialog really makes it enjoyable once or twice to loose. Enix seemed to be a king in this area, as Dragon Quest 4 would present you with some fun alternatives at certain points in the game. In a long RPG it is nice to get a break every now and then to tinker with things.

What great news! The freedom to play the music you buy on the entertainment devices you desire to play them on. If Apples sales on iTunes doesn’t take a large dip this might persuade other vendors to start fazing out their DRM sofware. I know piracy is hurting the industry, but is DRM helping more than it’s hurting? I won’t buy DRM enabled games for the PC because the last two I bought three years ago wouldn’t work, so I returned them both and swore never again.

You can go here and read it at Apple.

Every story, be it a movie game or book, that is worth taking in will diverge through a series of situations leading up to the end result. A good writer can probably outline an entire book simply in situations and then connect the dots with drama lines, action sequences, an array of emotions, or some history. Take for example Star Wars where Luke first fights Vader. A situation arose which lead up to a vengeance action sequence and then on to one of the most memorable movie situations I can think of. The action scene before really built up the suspense and drama and lead beautifully into Luke’s frightening reality.

Now back and take another look at this. What if Vader simply entered the room, put Luke into a choke hold and let him have it with the “who’s your daddy” line. It would have OK, it would have been a little more difficult on the escape, and it wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have been as quotable. The struggle built the drama, Luke was loosing and you could feel, and when you were finally on the edge of your seat the perfect situation had been generated.

Now lets swing over to one of my favorite series that every now and then gets on my nerves. I love X-Files. Great show, I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself so I easily bond with the looming plot lines and back story. So as a fan I think I can fairly criticize this one a bit. In the latest movie toward the end there was a moment where Mulder was pushed off the road and crashed. So here he was, someone attempted to kill him, he survived, and rather than calling for some back knowing that this probably wasn’t over, he conveniently never realized his cell phone missing and went after the truth with my mind screaming from the moment he got out of the car to get his cell phone. By the time the bad situation come about I really didn’t care that he just might get killed. For me, that ended the movie, I watched the rest of it, but I couldn’t get that out of my mind.

Now lets plug this into game development. When generating situations for your heroes it is important to remember that the events leading up to the situation are just as important as the situation. If the situation completely dependent upon someone doing something that is going to have the human player throwing the controller at the screen, it is best to do it through an NPC or a temporary party member. Unless you are a truly remarkable story teller, using the main character to do something stupid for anything other than a light hearted humorous moment is likely to make the gamer feel that their role in the story has been eroded.

Well, boxman is now retired and I am working with a pretty nice model right now. It took some time, but I am pleased to reveal the first character ready to take on the baddies in The Soldred Kingdom, Snow. Snow was a pretty simple concept at inception, basically a somewhat cheerful looking but fairly high maintenance girl with a lot of color. My wife actually helped me with the colors (don’t tell anyone, but she admitted to enjoying it) and afterward started helping me design one of the villains in the game. I have to admit, I am starting to enjoy the art side of this as much as the programming and scripting.