New Horizons

Lots has apparently changed since the last post, oh about 6 months ago.

First of all, I'm no longer a part of 0 A.D. it's been a particularly short run on that project.
I did do some changes in the code, really small ones, someone even told me I breathed new life into the project.

But then some friends of mine from college called me up, and asked me to help them do some server coding for a project they have been working on over at Dream Farmer.
I felt like it was something I could really do, based on my previous history with them and the what I was suppose to do.
So currently I'm working on a Facebook app with them, should be cool, should be released soon.

Again, I find myself really surprised at what I'm using to create these apps:
PHP knowledge I gained from an instruction video I watched during my college project, and Data Base knowledge I gained in a minor course at the university.
It just goes to show you how sometimes the small stuff also count, and become important.

On other things, I'm still studying some gaming stuff, but in a less intensive manner, meaning less courses than last year.
Did not attend Global Game Jam this year, since I haven't fulfilled my conclusions from last year.

I also want to add a new feature here, "Cool Game I Saw", I'll try and post it with every post.
So here it is:
Shank, a side-scrolling 2D platformer, very much like Metal Slug, but with a really cool visual style and really cool moves.
Check out the gameplay demo here.

Keep following, reading...

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Now playing: John Petrucci - Damage Control
via FoxyTunes

It's Online Project Time!

Again, it's been too long since I've written anything down here.
and a lot has happened since I've last written.

The big project I've been working for the last months has in fact imploded, I won't go into details since I don't want to take any sides in the matter.
I'll just say it's a damn shame that it didn't see the light of day, it could have been a very interesting game to play.
But, what can you do? you can't win them all, and you can't make everybody get along.
It was an ambitious project indeed, and we just couldn't make it work, no matter how hard we tried.

Aside from that I finished my Breakout game, it came out pretty good, it still has some bugs and things missing, but I don't think I'm gonna continue hammering it out.
To tell you all the truth, it's a pretty limited game, and I don't see how I can make it a whole lot better, so I'll just leave it for the time being.

The big news is that I joined another online project, I hope this one takes.
The name of the project is 0 A.D., it's an historically accurate RTS, that recently turned open-source.
a Friend of mine sent me a link and I thought, "what the hell?".
It seems like this project is running for quite some time (a few good years), and I know what it takes to run a project like this for that long.
It seems well managed, a good example of that is that I got the head version of the game complied it and it just ran, no problems, which is always a good sign.
Anyway, I'm currently "employed" as the GUI programmer of the game, since that's my field of expertise at the moment, but I hope to get some gameplay coding experience as well, sometime in the future.

That's it for now...

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Now playing: Miles Davis - So What
via FoxyTunes

Knights of Honor Review

It seems I'm making up for lost time, here's the second post for today.

In a recent surge of nostalgia I got the itch to play Knights of Honor (KoH), I played this game when it was released, about 2 years ago, and I really enjoyed it.
Then time passed and other games came along and I kinda forgot about this game, but now I'm back.

KoH is a real time strategy game, which simulates you being a king of a European country in the middle ages.
This is not a C&C or Warcraft kind of strategy game, it focuses more on the ruling, diplomacy, population control and war strategy part of ruling a country.
The goal of the game is to become the most powerful county in Europe and the most powerful ruler.

As always this is an opinion review and not a specific details review so here are the categories.

The Good:
Unit control - In this game you control 9 units at most, as you progress through the game, these units come and go for some particular reasons.
This is a great design choice, since it limits the player with the amount of control he/she has on the game, and it raises the level of difficulty of the game.
But it also lets the player choose their game style, if your goal is to conquer every country you'll invest in marshals, on the other hand you can win the game with trade alone (merchants), etc.
So this way you're both challenged and intrigued at the same time.

Recourse Collection - Finally a strategy game where you don't have to micro-manage all the resources.
In this game you control provinces, each province has some areas it controls, and on these areas a farm or church or mine can be built, and these structures give you the majority of resources in the game.
The good thing here is that you don't control the construction of these structures, I believe it's auto-generated by the computer, you can only affect the already existing structures in a minor way, by building structures in your province.
The only resource you control entirely is trade goods, which includes money.
Now some people will say it's a bad thing, but as you play the game you understand the meaning of the sentence "Heavy is the head that wears the crown".
You will quickly understand that you do not have the time to micro-manage every little detail in your kingdom, especially when you conquer a lot of provinces and you have to control them all simultaneously, with limited personnel.

Spies - one of my favorite features in the game.
Spies are done in a very clever way in this game, since each country can only control 9 units, you have to constantly hire and fire these units, here is where the spy comes in.
You hire a spy and wait for him to be hired by the country your sent him to in a certain position, each position has its advantages, for instance if the spy is hired as a spy in another country, you can actually assassinate the king, which is really cool.

Sound - a really nice feature in the game is the soundtrack, it is pretty loopy, but you get into the game's ambiance.


The Bad:
Graphics - for a game that was made in 2007, you'd expect a bit more finish to the graphics.
It's basically a 2D game, with 3D models used for sprites.
Although this does not affect the gameplay, it could have been nice to get a bit more animations even in the 2D world.

Computer Power - since I played mostly against the computer, I can honestly say, the computer tends to take advantage of its position.
As you start the game, the computer randomizes the diplomatic relations between the countries.
Sometimes you can start the game when you are at war with all the countries around you, and the computer starts sending troops instantly, before you even had the chance to breathe, let alone buy some decent units.
This could have easily been solved with some imaginative coding.

The Stupid:
Lead the Fight - in this game you have the option to get into a certain fight and control the forces by yourself, warcraft-style.
This feature is stupid, I've must have used it once or twice.
Since the game has so much to offer aside from this, I couldn't even muster the power to lead a fight, and when I finally tried it my results were a lot worse than the computer's.
It seems like the studio put a lot of effort into that portion of the game, and it seems as though they shouldn't have.
It's like a friend that brings you a gift and you say "oh, you shouldn't have", but in this case you actually mean it.
I imagine that the studio did not want to alienate the RTS core gamers, but I think those gamers are not the target audience for this game.

In conclusion, I give this game a 9 out of 10.
I really enjoyed trying to conquer every country in Europe, and I suggest you do the same.

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Now playing: Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons
via FoxyTunes

Status Update

It's been a month+ since I've posted anything in here... my new years resolution is slipping away :)

Anyway, not much to update...
Lots of work was put in to my Breakout project, this is another project that I'm doing as a part of my studies.
The whole thing is written in Java, using the LWJGL implementation of OpenGL.
It's a project that's done as a part of a course in OpenGL, its goal is to help me learn OpenGL.
The project started as a 2D implementation of the game, and now I'm building a 3D version on top of that.
The project itself is reaching the end soon, as the school year is coming to a close.
It really opened up OpenGL for me, and it gave me some desire to learn XNA.

About the big project, it's currently on the verge of imploding, so I won't update the status of that project right now.

Aside from that, I've finally put up a financial goal for the studying abroad thing.
It's a pretty large sum, but I hope to gather the cash for that in an acceptable period of time.

Have a good week

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Now playing: Dream Theater - Lines In The Sand
via FoxyTunes

More Crunch and more Presentation

Wow, so the last post was about a month and a half ago, there goes my new years resolution :)

Anyway, a lot has happened since that last post.
Well, not a lot, but quite a bit.
I'm posting this after the most hectic work week I've had in a long time, probably the first since my university days.

After the last post we started working on our beta delivery, about a month of work, give or take.
This time around, after the shocker in the alpha stage, we decided to focus on one task and one task alone, and that was to actually show some gameplay.
We actually divided it into nice and small portions, so we could digest it properly.

One setback was the art, we got some pretty gruesome comments on the graphics, and we had to redo it.
So, first couple of weeks we redid what we actually already done in the alpha stage.

My portion consisted of creating a skirmish manager on the server side, and creating a simple AI on the server for simulation of our task.
The manager seemed pretty easy, at first, but as a I progressed it became harder and harder, lots of code, for a pretty simple thing.
Plus, PHP is a pretty crappy language when it comes to keeping a state.
Everything is getting erased all the time, from load to load during one session, and you have to constantly find those pitfalls, and save them.
The manager was done about two weeks ago, that's when I started on the AI thingy.
I wrote a bunch of code, and about a week before the delivery, I started testing it.
Suffice to say, it ran into an endless loop, corners had to be cut and features had to be removed.
On Saturday last week, I finally had it finished and working.

On Monday this week, we had a beta delivery deadline for the school project (sounds kinda kindergarteny, but I had no other name for it).
We worked ourselves to the bone, starting from Saturday last week until the deadline.
I can honestly say, I'm running on fumes.

Integration began Saturday last week, not exactly last minute but pretty damn close, again, apparently I haven't learned anything from the points I've noted to myself the last time.
This time I gave the client developer the messages I was going to use, before hand, hoping it will shorten the integration process.
Suffice to say, it didn't help much, this time the messages did not go through all that well from the server side.
Lots of work was put into the integration, (Sunday ended at 5:00AM), lots of feature cuts were done, but we had something to show, gameplay-wise, at the end of said Sunday.

Come Monday, we showed the "end product" to our tutors and they actually thought it was pretty good, they gave us some notes, and let us go home to catch up on our sleep.

The next deadline was really close but, it was today, the presentation.
As a part of the college's open day event, all projects of the program were displayed for the crowd to see and get an impression of the program.
There were also a talk about investors coming to find some new ventures, but I think it was mostly bullshit.

Anyway, on Monday we constructed a plan of what else we need to do to make it look better for the presentation.
My workload was quite a passive one, supervision of the client development, and fixing server bugs on the way.
If the weekend was hard, the weekdays were even harder: a full work day(9-6), then coming back home and heading out to work on the project.
Every day ended at 2:00AM/3:00AM and I woke up at 6:30AM the next day to go to work, It was a really rough week.

But all and all it was worth it, when today came we had a good looking version of the game to show in the project presentation.
I arrived late to the scene, everything was all set up, each project had its own table, and people were walking around and asking questions.
Our game did not get the most "traffic", but we did manage to interest some kids, which is always a good sign.
We got a lot of good feedback, plus, watching people play the game, we got an idea of what we should focus on in the coming months before the end of the school year.
Plus, it was really cool explaining random people about the concept of the game, and what it will be and its potential, people seemed genuinely interested, which is a good sign as well.

Uplifted I finished today with a big gasp for air, but at least this week is over.
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Now playing: David Gilmour - I Can't Breathe Anymore
via FoxyTunes

Crunch Time for Us

Well, we've handed in our alpha of the game.
It was a miserable defeat, our standard for the alpha was not even close to the teachers' standard.
But we promised ourselves, that this won't deter us from completing the game, or a good portion of it.

The alpha was due Monday (of this week).
All through the weekend before the alpha, I worked my ass of and the backend code, it was finally finished Saturday night.
I checked it in to my nifty little SVN, and uploaded the code to the actual site, where the game runs.
Then I went out for a drink and went to sleep a happy camper, not aware of what's going to happen the next day.

Sunday came along, some of the classes were canceled so, we had a good head start on the integration of the client and server, at that afternoon.
We started connecting stuff together, messages from the server were getting in and everything looked pretty good.

At about midnight, we uploaded the offline-working client to see how it works online.
It had some bugs to say the least, some stuff we haven't considered, etc.
Fix the bugs, re-upload, more bugs, rinse and repeat.
At about 1AM we actually made some really big changes to the code, it wasn't a really good idea, but things seemed to work after that.
At about 2:00AM we decided to try and access it from all 3 of our computers, simultaneously.
It didn't work, well, some of the computers works, others didn't, a pretty shitty situation considering this is an online multiplayer game.
We bashed at this problem until 3:30AM with no solution, we then wisely decided to leave it and come back to it in the morning, the hand in was at 11:00AM...

On the morning of the alpha hand in, we checked the game in the computer lab...
Same thing, some work some don't, eventually we just gave up, we decided to show the game from a computer that the game worked on and that's it.
As I said before the it wasn't pretty...
We were not very pleased with the outcome, it was pretty depressing to see all that dedication go to waste, but we will soldier on...

As for me, a few lessons were learned:

1. Don't leave the integration and deployment for the last day
2. I have to learn how to deploy a site
3. Put the goals of the project in relevance to the time given
4. If the project's milestones are not reached at their time, remove some features, don't continue as if nothing happened
5. Showing the core gameplay is very very important
   

anyway,

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Now playing: Silje Nergaard - Beachcomber
via FoxyTunes keeping on...

Actual Work Being Done

I'm glad to say that, the development on my game project for this studying year has commenced.
We (the team) have divided the work into parts, currently we have the following positions filled:

• Project Director
• Designers
  
• Art Director
• Server Programmer
• Client Programmer

Of course since this is a no-budget project, most of us are wearing multiple hats.
And let me tell you, it's not easy balancing those hats on top of your head.

a Little bit of History
We were 3 guys at the beginning...
We all started out as designers, trying to put the main game concepts in place, that took a couple of months worth of sessions.
Then we built up a work plan, already divided up into the relevant parts, and we started working at those parts.

Since we're all new to online-development, we started out by learning our subjects and consulting with our teachers on the best approaches to the game.
As we were studying (me and the client programmer), the 3rd guy was busy recruiting and directing the whole thing.
Later, our art department came to be with a 4th guy joining in the fun.
As he began getting art assets out, we actually started to see the real game, and all of a sudden we were in it.
We cut our studies short and we dived in, everybody had their niche and we began to really work (that was about two weeks ago :) ).

My Two Cents
My main position is the Server Programmer, so when I say coding was done, I don't mean I was programming any cool 3D graphics.
No, it was a pretty basic user access module, that I've written.

But I have to say that, even though it's just a boring little module, I was excited when I was writing it.
The reason being, it's our project, the same project that started as a thought, that we talked about in cars driving home from college, the same project we tinkered with weeks at a time.
And now, it was getting its first lines of code, that will eventually make it a reality.
The game we wanted, the game that will be!

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Now playing: Chorus of Tribes - Inception
via FoxyTunes

AAA Dreams

Recently I've been thinking of ideas for new games.
Just something I tend to do recently, probably all the inspiration and mind opening, I get from studying the subject.

The problem I'm facing, is that I can't stop thinking in AAA titles concepts.

What do I mean?
Every game I come up with has to be a AAA title, or it'll never work. It has to have the graphics, the sound and the environments in order to sell/succeed.
And that's a problem, mainly since in my little country, there're no resources for these kind of games.
But let's leave that aside, let's say I moved and I get the money for this AAA title.

The main problem in my opinion, is the fact that I can't come up with a novel concept or even a good one.

What does this have to do with the title?
This has everything to do with it, since in my opinion a good concept works with any graphics be it 2D or 3D, cheap or rich.
If the concept is fresh and good, then you don't have to distract people with shiny graphics, since the game itself is fun.

What are the conclusions?
Well, first of all, finding a new idea, innovating, is difficult and is not done very often.
What most designers do is iterate an old idea, and make it look new.
That's nice, but also requires a new mechanism inside the new game, that makes the new iteration better than its predecessor.

So I think I'll settle on thinking of a new mechanism on an old game concept for now, as an exercise, see where it leads.

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Now playing: Chris Botti - Back Into My Heart
via FoxyTunes