Minimalistic Progress Update

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Minimalistic Tower Defense is coming along rather well, and I should have a rough version out by the end of the month. At least I hope so, because I was promised a cake if I make it. Let us all pray that the cake is not a lie. But enough digging up of old, overused memes – let me tell you what you can expect instead:

There are different types of towers and enemies now, and depending on its type, towers can cause damage over time (burning, poison, etc.). I haven’t yet implemented more elaborate status effects like stunning and slowing enemies, but it’s planned and with the system I have in place, it should be relatively easy to build in and will probably find its way into the next public version after that.

The editor is still a little rough around the edges, but gets the job done if you know how to handle it. For example, it’s very nitpicky about the shape of the path, and doesn’t give any useful error messages when something isn’t right, staying mute and refusing to continue until you fix whatever you’ve done. It’s kind of an asshole, really.

I’ve added a bunch of menus to get around, and stuffed in some more particles. That sounds fancy, but actually it’s just some fading pixels floating around. Doesn’t blow minds, but it fits the graphical style of the game and my theme of using just a single texture for everything. By the way, this texture doesn’t use an image anymore, but is instead created programmatically at run time. Even less static content, woooohh!

Speaking of content, I’ve also added sound. It’s very basic, and sounds kind of like from an Atari 2600 or C64 game, which wasn’t planned, but fits into the concept very well. Lucky coincidence. I used the awesome bfxr to create those sounds; if you ever need to quickly create some sound effects yourself, give it a try. It has a bunch of presets, or you can use an army of sliders to customize everything to your liking.

Multiplayer is something I thought about, but I don’t think I will implement it. I’ve only recently looked into how that works, and it’s not trivial – also, XNA apparently only contains stuff for Windows Live / Xbox Live MP, which I don’t want to on the PC because it’s a pain for the players. This means I’d have to either research what networking libraries are out there and how to use them or write such a thing entirely from scratch. In both cases, I’d probably have to restructure the project quite a bit to include it. I just don’t think the gain justifies the amount of work and time I’d have to invest. Should the game become surprisingly popular by accident (which is very unlikely, I guess), and should there then be popular demand for a multiplayer mode, I might be persuaded to create a multiplayer patch, but for now I’ll just leave it out.

Multiplayer is something I want to do for my next game, though. Or the one after that – I have two things in mind and I haven’t quite decided which one to do first. All I know is, I will try out the FlatRedBall engine for it, and maybe combine it with the Farseer physics engine, just to try out if and how much it simplifies the workflow. I’ll either do one of those “hurl a person into hurtful terrain and see how much damage you can inflict” games (is that a genre name yet?), which would heavily rely on physics, or maybe a top down tank game in the vein of the classic Super Tank on the NES:

Here, physics would play a less central role (although I’d still use them for weapons, destruction, tank mass, other stuff I haven’t thought of yet), but I really want the game to have a multiplayer mode – both co-op and a versus mode. After learning a lot about the logic of a game during the creation of Minimalistic Tower Defense, I want both games to look and sound a bit nicer and more modern, putting a bit more effort in the visuals and sound. This also means that it’ll probably take longer, since I’m not exactly a trained artist and creating an acceptable tank sprite will probably take me ten or more times as long as someone who has any kind of talent. With any luck, this will be cancelled out by the time I (hopefully) save by using an existing engine. The hardest challenge will probably still be to create AI behaviour for the computer controlled tanks in single player and co-op. I mean, I could make the movement more or less random, as it apparently was in the original game back then (just look at the video – those guys aren’t the brightest tools in the shed), but I think that’s kind of outdated and might end up being not challenging enough. On the other hand, if everyone goes straight for the target, it might be too pressing and you end up far more on the defensive side than I want. Fixed patrol routes might be too predictable.
Sorry, just thinking out loud here. I’ll deal with that when I’m actually there – for now, I should concentrate on polishing up my existing game instead of imaginary ones.

Ninety Minutes Without Diablo III

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Everything was ready. My significant other and I prepared ourselves with lots of pizza, snacks and beer – even a bottle of cheap champagne was there. We were excited, and tried to kill time until it was finally midnight, which is the time when, as rumor had it, Diablo III would finally be playable. I had to get up early for work the next day, but this is goddamned Diablo we’re talking about – how could I resist getting just a tiny bit of play before bedtime? I had already played the beta, and while I didn’t like some of the decisions they made with the game, I found it an overall fun experience and I was anxious to try another class. I was still unsure whether I should roll demon hunter or wizard; I would be playing alongside a barbarian, so either one would be a good complement. Well, as it turned out, I still haven’t made that decision because I couldn’t get past the first boss: The Lord Of Annoyance, also known as Error 37.

I was so naïve.
I was aware that the game would have this always-on nonsense, and I was also expecting the servers to struggle. But this wasn’t a full-scale MMO, and we’re talking about Blizzard – with their monster which is World of Warcraft, they are basically made of servers. I thought, there would be fifteen or thirty minutes of struggling to log in at most, and maybe a little lag here and there. I thought if any company would have the capacity and experience to deal with such a huge launch, it would be Blizzard. Also, they had this big ass beta thing going on – surely that must have prepared them and their equipment for the coming storm?
I was so naïve.

Ninety minutes later, I was still trying to log into the game. One time I was full of hope: after entering my password, I got a bunch of license agreements which I had to accept (after carefully reading every word, of course). But as soon as I did, I was back at the log in screen. My better half did slightly better: at one point, she could log in, but was then stuck in the character creation screen for ten minutes or so before being able to play – for five minutes, after which she was kicked out of the game because of a disconnect. She got lucky again later though, and was still playing when I finally gave up and went to bed, wondering if there are people with pirated versions out there who don’t have any issues thanks to their crack and laugh at us legitimate customers.

And the sad thing is, I will keep trying. I sure as hell wouldn’t put up with this crap if it wasn’t freaking Diablo, but here I am feeding them my money like the good consumer they want me to be. I wonder what wonders await me when I try again this evening: Will it let me log in? Maybe it will, but won’t let me play with someone who’s hooked up to the same router? Maybe it’ll let me play a few hours, and then tear my character to shreds because of a disconnect? Do I have to worry about being able to play the game at all in a couple of years, when the servers get shut down?
Nah, I’m sure everything will be fine from now on.

I’m so naïve.

Minimalistic Deadlines

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Turns out that writing a decent, usable map editor for Minimalistic TD, while refusing to use existing UI solutions, is almost as hard as writing the damn game itself – if not even more. But it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I am making progress, and as soon as the game is a little bit less broken I’ll put a download here. ETA two weeks or so, depending on how much time I’ll have to work on it.

The trouble is, I was actually planning to use it for creating the “campaign” missions myself, so I have to sort this thing out. My intention was to learn something by doing everything from scratch, and I do… but when such seemingly simple tasks take up such an unproportional amount of time, I wonder if it’s really worth it. But that’s also a lesson in project management, I guess – or rather, it’s two:

1) Things will get frustrating. Deal with it.

2) Something, somewhere, is going to go horribly wrong. Anticipate it, plan for it, and then try to anticipate the more unlikely problems. Then add some buffer time for the things you don’t anticipate.

Granted, I’m not under a lot of pressure. It’s a personal project that’s not meant to earn money or do anything else important. But I can’t shake the thought of an imaginary manager yelling at me for not meeting imaginary deadlines. “WTF is this shit?”, manager P. Card asks condescendingly. “Get your shit together! How hard can it be?”

Maybe deadlines would be a good thing. I think that they might make me organize better and work on this more (and more efficiently). It’s also advice that other devs give newbies, so there must be something to it. But what makes a deadline so powerful? So scary that you work crunch time because of it? Usually, it’s because of the inevitability the name implies, and the consequences should you fail to meet it (you know, the torture dungeon, limb amputation, the usual). Now, that’s the part I don’t get: how do you do this to yourself? If it’s not a project with publicity, not something you need to make money out of, just your first, personal project – how do you impose deadlines on yourself? I mean, sure, you can set them. But if you miss them, nothing happens, robbing them of all their evilness. You pass the deadline, and you think “well shit, that was not supposed to happen, was it? Seems there’s not much I can do, though, since I lack the power to reverse time, so I’ll just put up a new deadline and move on”. At least that’s my experience. My own deadlines and schedules for non-important projects usually turn to shit because nobody is enforcing them. I don’t need to meet them. So, if things get stressful, or I’m overly stuffed with pasta and can’t move, I just let them pass by if I can’t meet them with a reasonable amount of work. That’s why this game is taking so long. Real life keeps happening and I have a hard time motivating myself to race after the lost time.

But what is this stuff that keeps happening, you ask? Well, among some other stuff, there is stuff, some more stuff, and also I’m changing jobs. Very soon I’ll be with a new employer, earn a bit more, have a bit more vacation time – all in all very exciting stuff. I’ll probably write a more detailed post about this soon. If I’m not caught up in Diablo 3 by then.

Mass Effect 3 And Its Neverending Ending Story

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This has been floating around as a draft for some time – I wrote it almost immediately after finishing the game. Then some real life happened again, and some gaming happened, and I kind of forgot about posting this thing. Now I come back here and see that I formulated a monster of almost two thousand words, all about a single game. What do you mean, I’m obsessed with Mass Effect? I most certainly am not!

Anyways, I finished Mass Effect 3 a couple of weeks ago, and as I promised I’ll add my two cents to the discussion about the ending, even though I’m – as always – a little late to the party. Naturally, this post will contain massive spoilers, so if you haven’t finished the game, you might want to stop reading now. You’ve been warned.

If you don’t have much time, here’s the summary: while it’s not perfect, it’s not as bad as people are saying and I think a lot of people who complain are just jumping the bandwagon. If you want to read the entire wall of text, feel free to continue.

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Productivity = null

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I don’t have much to update, because real life happened and got in the way of productivity. And then Saints Row The Third happened and now Mass Effect 3 is happening – how am I supposed to get anything done? I’m not even counting lengthy or even endless games like SPAZ or Dwarf Fortress here. And don’t even get me started about all the games I’d like to buy and/or are not yet released, like FTL or Max Payne 3. There just aren’t enough hours in the day nor enough money in the pocket. Apart from gaming, I fiddled around with menus and map editor stuff for Minimalistic TD (behind the scenes stuff mostly) and finally put up some proper source control, but that’s about it. I have now put up a schedule for myself to force me into being more organized and spending more time developing. I’m curious to see whether I’ll manage to stick to it or if my productivity is forever lost in a vast ocean of electronic entertainment and procrastination.

I guess at this point I can’t tell you much about Saints Row that you haven’t heard anywhere else, other than that I thoroughly enjoyed it and that I’m looking forward to the pile of craziness that will be Saints Row 4. I don’t think the brutes work out so well as a gameplay element as I found them more annoying than challenging, but as a whole this is a really fun game. And despite all the wackiness there are moments that feel really important and awesome, thanks to a fitting choice of background music and the abandoning of realism wherever it would get in the way of fun or story.

I won’t say much about Mass Effect 3, because it has just been released and I don’t want to spoil the experience for anyone. I’m not finished yet, but so far my general opinion is that the atmosphere is really well done and there are genuinely funny as well as genuinely touching, dramatic and sad moments, none of which feels forced. A lot is told just by the enviroment, the level design and NPC conversations. You really get the feeling that yes, the galaxy is at war, times are rough and a lot of people will give their lives before this is over. Also, you kick huge, robotic ass. What’s not to like?

The ending, apparently.
I haven’t seen it myself, but I noticed that there’s a lot of whining and discussion and everyone’s making a fuss about it. I’ll add my two cents when I’ve finished the game. It’s really hard to avoid spoilers when you can’t even visit sites like Rock Paper Shotgun or Penny Arcade without ending-related posts jumping in your face, but so far I’ve been successful – wish me luck.

The coop multiplayer pleasantly surprised me as well: it doesn’t feel tacked on, it’s fun and with a little imagination and suspension of disbelief by the player it even kinda-sorta makes sense inside the main story. Very kinda-sorta, but at least not quite as detached as with other games.

That’s all I have to say right now. Stay tuned for more news, as I hope to make more progress again in the coming weeks and months.

Behold The Beauty Of Minimalistic Tower Defense

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Work has been going slowly lately, but I’d still like to share the first screenshots of Minimalistic Tower Defense with you. So brace yourself, put on your sunglasses to avoid retinal damage and behold the world première of the game people will talk about for centuries:

The screenshot that started it all.

Hey, I told you in the title that it’s not fancy.

In case some explanation is needed, the sand-ish coloured tiles are the path. The “S” and “E” letters mark the start and end of the path respectively, but I’ll probably change that to something else – it looks silly. The dark green means “towers can be placed here”, the little light green square is a shot fired by the slightly bigger light green square (which is a tower), and Red squares are enemies and follow the path from start to end (or at least they should, they have a nasty habit of breaking out sometimes and I’ve yet to find out why).

There’s even a menu for buying and upgrading! Menu design might not be my strength.This whole thing is basically me stumbling around with events, mouse coordinate checks and more stuff and in the end accidentally getting something to show up. Didn’t expect that.

DirectX 12 required.

They look slightly better in motion.

I’ve also made some pretty bitching (read: lame) explosions, though I think I need to tune them up a bit. While they do look better in the game than in a screenshot, they are still a bit dull and short. I consciously avoided using a special exploding sprite, though – I want this game to use only one square texture in different colours and some text. If I can think of something to replace it, I’ll get rid of the text as well. Much too fancy.

Argh, my eyes!

"I'd say it's the inner values that count, but that would make you even uglier."

At this point, I have a bunch of stuff already in: spawning enemy waves, building and upgrading towers, player data such as money, points, health etc., randomly generated maps and pathfinding, but there’s still quite a bit to be done. Most annoyingly, the map editor is only half-finished as of yet, and it looks pretty shitty. Also, there is no win condition – the game just keeps going after the last enemy wave is finished, with no other option than to close the game with ALT+F4. Tends to break the flow of the game a bit.

I hope I’ll find some time soon to fix these things and get the game to a halfway playable state. Once I have the map editor done, it should be a breeze to create maps for a campaign. Then, the part I fear the most begins: balancing. I really don’t have a clue how to do that, except for a long, tedious trial and error approach. After this is all done, I’ll see if I can get this running on XBox 360 and Windows Phone 7, just for the heck of it.

In the next step, I’d like to add different tower, damage and enemy types, status effects and all of the usual tower defense stuff, but for now I’d just like to get it running with just basic towers and enemies. For updates on my progress, just keep an eye on this blog. Also, fell free to check out the game’s page or discuss it on the forums!

As soon as they're upgraded, they get cocky... *sigh*

Legal Woes And Nerding Out

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You’re probably wondering what I’m up to, so I’m just going to give you a quick rundown:

I have a game not entirely unlike Tetris sitting around on my hard drive that’s about half-way finished, but then I suddenly got scared about copyright/patent/other legal issues, then read about The Tetris Company (yes, this does actually exist), who are apparently throwing around lawsuits as if it were confetti at a party at everything that’s even remotely similar to the original Tetris, so I panicked and decided to not work on this any further so I don’t get sued into oblivion. Of course, at that time I did not consider a couple of things, like the fact that I’m not taking money, using different graphics and, most importantly, that I’m an idiot and next to nobody will even see it at all. So I’m probably safe, and thus I’ll probably pick that up again, finish it and put it up, legal issues be damned.

But that will have to wait until I have finished Minimalistic TD, the project I have replaced it with. Like the name suggests, it’s a Tower Defense game with minimalistic (read: simple enough to create even for me) graphics. With the recent explosion of cube- or voxel-based 3D games, I thought I’d take it a level further and make a 2D game consisting entirely of coloured squares, sharing the same square texture that gets a tint depending on what it’s supposed to be. I’m being extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeme! Expect screenshots and a download soon(ish).

Other than that, I’ve been getting busy with Blender once again. Of course, after a few weeks of pause, I had forgotten ninety percent of the required shortcuts, but once I got back to speed, I was able to create this:

Totally not worried about any other copyright issues.As you can see, it’s not finished yet, but it’s a little hint at the secret project I’m also not having enough time for. Feel free to guess what it is ;)

Last but not least, the obligatory gaming news.
First off, I was able to finish Batman – Arkham City, and the only reason I didn’t immediately start a New Game Plus is that there is so much else to play on my shelf and so little time to do so. When I first started the game, it felt kind of average, but after a bit of time it really grabbed me and I was having so much fun that it should be illegal. Oh, and don’t worry if you’re planning to buy it used – the Catwoman episodes are missing, but you don’t really miss that much in my opinion. The goddamn Batman himself offers more than enough bang for your buck.

I have Saints Row The Third lying around, still unused, but I keep hearing good things about it. I’ll get around to it eventually, but at the moment I’m trying hard to finally finish Mass Effect 2 in preparation of the sequel’s release. I still don’t like some things that they changed from the first Mass Effect, like the hugely simplified levelling, the tedious planet-scanning minigame or the ham-fisted attempt at including ammunition via thermal clips which I still don’t buy the explanation for. After all, there were weapons and weapon upgrades in the first game (i.e. two years before Mass Effect 2) with cooling so efficient that they could fire almost indefinitely, so the “forced to deliberately shoot slower to manage waste heat, or pause as their weapons vented.” explanation is all but cancelled out. Not to mention how thermal clips are implemented in such an absurd way that you can always shoot only an exact number of rounds with one clip, instead of only using them to “emergency cool” the weapon when the shit hits the fan or something, while the weapon can still cool down on its own like it did in Mass Effect 1 if all is calm. Add to that an increased rate of fire so heat builds up faster and that would be an explanation that, in my opinion, would have fit better and still resulted in similar gameplay.

Phew, sorry for nerding out here. I promise I’ll never make fun of Trekkies arguing about fictional technology again.

I see it as a testament to the quality of the game’s universe if I care that much about such small things. Anyway, I’m not saying ME2 is a bad game. It’s not perfect, no game is, but it’s still pretty damn good and it’s nice to meet people from the prequel or see results of your earlier decisions. All in all, I love the game and I love the universe they’ve created even more, and I can’t wait to finish it and then dive into the third one when it’s released.

Rockin’ Roccat Gear

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I promised a review of my new Roccat gaming equipment, so here we go. I’m going to talk about the Roccat Kave 5.1 headset, the Kone[+] mouse and the Isku keyboard.

Disclaimer: After writing, I realised the text below sounds pretty much like advertising – I promise that I do not get any money from Roccat, I just genuinely like their products. I won’t mind if they offer me some, though ;)

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Query ExPlus 2.0.3.1 Released

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Stop the press! There is a new release of the most downloaded SQL tool of the world (citation needed).
This version can be downloaded over at SourceForge and includes several minor bugfixes and updates, such as:
• Null values can now be displayed (thanks to emonk72)
• No more overlapping of the row number into other fields – either the cells are widened so they contain the whole number or the number is clipped at the egde of the cell. The behaviour can be changed in the options and the latter one was also submitted by the very awesome emonk72.
• User Andreas Kleffel made me aware of a very stupid error I made and even provided the fix. Long story short, importing an Xml Serverlist is now possible and actually imports instead of exporting again.

Over the next weeks I’ll try to make time to look through the older entries in the various tracker categories and do what I can.

I wanted to talk about the SOPA blackout yesterday, but I figured that I can’t say much that hasn’t been said a million times all over the internet already. I find it strange that the USA, who allegedly value freedom of speech and of the press so much even think about such a law without projectile-vomitting all the way over to Europe. What’s even worse is that it would affect the whole internet, or more specifically the whole world – since when can any one country make laws that govern other countries?
I blacked out as well yesterday, even though I knew nobody would notice anyway. It just felt wrong not to participate in this protest.

Happy New Syntax!

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First of all, happy new year everyone! I hope you survived Christmas and the new year parties and are off to a great start into 2012. I guess you can’t have a blog and not post your resolutions, so here goes:

  • Finish writing a game. Even if it’s just a crappy Tetris clone.
  • Get an app into the WP7 marketplace and not have too horrible reviews.
  • Catch up on my list of yet-to-play games. It’s getting embarassing in size.
  • Read a couple of books. I’m eager to finally read the rest of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books and to start with A Game Of Thrones.
  • Finally get syntax highlighting in Query ExPlus working and push out a new version.

Trust me when I say that I am just as surprised as you are, if not more, but it is true: I have finished a new version of Query ExPlus, including the goddamn Batman syntax highlighting. Download it from there or see a glorious screenshot here:

It lives!

A little sample of syntax highlighting in action.

The colours can be customized in the settings window, where you can also turn the whole thing of in case it gives you any trouble (it shouldn’t, but you never know). Another new feature can be found in the menu, where there are now items to save your serverlist to an Xml file or import from one. This way, it can be backed up, imported after an update, etc.
I’m thinking about haveing a setting to enable saving passwords, but I’m not sure. It would be easy to do, but I have security concerns. Should something bad come out of this (e.g. the wrong person somehow gets access to the computer and the password saved there), I don’t want to be blamed for the “hilarity” that ensues. On the other hand, shouldn’t it be enough to give the user a warning when activating the setting and just trust in their responsibility? I’m not sure yet.

In other news, maybe you noticed that the site has a new icon – it’s actually a 3D spoon that I created in blender, but at that size it just looks like a dark square. I’ll do something about that sooner or later.

While I have officially declared 2012 the get-your-head-out-of-your-ass-and-get-shit-done-year for me personally, during the holiday season I didn’t do much except for eating and gaming (and letting my wallet be abused by Steam sales), so here is a quick rundown of what I think of some of the games:

  • Serious Sam 3 – BFE: Awesome. Basically very similar to the older Serious Sam games, only with a serious graphics update. In other words, exactly what I wanted.
  • SpaceChem: I’ve had this for a while from one of the bazillion indie bundles that came out in the last couple of months, but have only now started playing it. Holy shit, have I been missing out! If you have even a tiny bit of love for puzzle games, buy this right now. Finally a game that makes you think and even has different solutions, giving you a reason to revisit older levels, trying to do better.
  • Bastion: Same as above, had this for a while but just played it. It is great, and in many ways a better game than a lot of “AAA” titles. You can’t talk about Bastion without mentioning the narrator: he really adds a lot to the game in a way that I can’t quit explain. He gives your advenure more depth, or at least that’s the way it feels. There have been few games with that level of atmosphere.
  • Serious Sam Double D: Meh. Saw a trailer, thought it looked fun and bought it, but it just didn’t click with me. The price tag is rather small so I’m not mad about wasted money, but I don’t recommend buying. It feels kind of like a flash game, and an average one at best.
  • Battlefield 3: Been playing this for a while now and it’s still fun. I don’t give a flying shit about the singleplayer, but the multiplayer is one of the best experiences you can find in online FPS gaming (except for some of the assholes you end up playing with, but that’s hardly the game’s fault).
  • Skyrim: I don’t think I have to say much about this. A++, would buy again.
  • Anomaly – Warzone Earth: A fun reverse approach to the tower defence genre, where you play the part of the attackers, plan your route, buy units etc. Definitely worth a try.

Oh, and I have also received new hardware! I now have a new mouse, keyboard and Headset, all from Roccat. I’ll add a new post with a review soon, but the short story is: all of them are rather cool! :)