VectorStorm Blog

After some discussion over on the forums, I’ve finally implemented the new road placement system for version 1.1.  Roads now pass through “Road Nodes”, which serve as anchors for splines.  Each “road node” can have up to four roads attached to it.  This means that in 1.1, you’ll be able to have nicely curved roads and branching roads, and it’s easy to specify exactly the path that roads should travel, instead of always being approximately straight lines between destinations.

There’s still a little work to be done in the interface (the road node graphics need to change their scale based upon the current zoom level, so they’re always visible but not obtrusive, adventurers need to actually use the nodes, etc).. but placement is working in my development branch, and I’m pretty happy with the behaviour.

For the curious, in this screenshot, there are six road nodes.  Though I could have done it with just five.  And those green dots are monsters (we’re zoomed too far out to see more detail than just dots)

For those who’ve been bitten by the “Preference value too high!” crash, I’ve finally found the cause of that, and have uploaded a fixed version of MMORPG Tycoon;  it’s 1.0.16, available from the link in the sidebar.

You may need to delete your old Data/Preferences/MMORPG.prefs file, if you still have trouble with the new version.

Well, it’s been well over a week, time to talk about how things went with Robot Finds Ice Cream.

In general, I’m pleased with the game, but less pleased with the production quality that came out of it.  I justify it by pointing out that it was implemented in just a week, and that explanation seems to satisfy everyone except me.

More beneath the fold.

Continue reading “Robot Finds Ice Cream Post-Mortem”

Riddle me this, Batman.  My original thinking was that I’d up the maximum number of entities in a region to 300 (was previously 100), but would count the number of monsters against that.  So you could have region servers that supported lots and lots of players, but only by lowering the number of monsters.  It was a clever plan, I thought.  Until I saw this, just a few minutes ago.

It’s a randomly generated starting area the game just gave me.  Each region has 200 monsters in it, leaving the same 100 adventurer maximum as was present in version 1.0.  As you can see, the monsters are very, very sparse in the large northwest region, but very dense in the tiny northeast region, just because the game is spreading 200 monsters more or less evenly inside each region, regardless of the region’s size.

Is that reasonable behaviour?  I’m not convinced.

The more I play with this, the more I’m thinking that I don’t actually want to have nearly so many design options that affect the whole world;  that really, what people want to do is affect a single region, or a single group of regions.  So you could have a region with a town, and allocate very few monsters to it so that the region server has space for a lot of players, and then have outlying regions which have lots of monsters, as fewer players will be visiting them.  And while I’m at it, maybe you should be able to create monster types individually for each region, instead of having one “master list” that’s used for the whole world.

But that’s going down the path toward micromanagement, and I really didn’t want to go there, initially.  But maybe that’s the natural directon for this type of game to move into.

So I see that Geometry Wars 2 has been released on XBox Live Arcade.  I kind of have to acknowledge it as it’s one of the few other glowy vector graphic games out there right now.  And wow, they’ve really nailed the glowy vector thing in a big way.

Granted, in this revision they’re a bit less vector than they’ve appeared to be in the past;  lots of things have been added which are obviously textures and there are plenty of curved lines (which usually aren’t present in old-school vector graphic games), but the overall look is still very nice.

So in reaction to Geometry Wars 2’s beautiful glows, I’ve been revisiting the glow shader used by VectorStorm games.  Here’s a shot of the current map screen in the in-development MMORPG Tycoon 1.1, using my updated glow shader.  For those who’ve played MMORPG Tycoon, you’ll notice a few interface niceties already;  textual level ranges have vanished at this sort of zoom level and in fact, similarly-zoned regions are being drawn as just one larger region, when we’re zoomed this far out.  Also, there’s a cute little compass rose in the northwest corner of the map.  But really, this is showing off the new, brighter, softer, and much more accurate VectorStorm glow shader. I’m pretty pleased with it.

And it doesn’t even cost much more GPU time.  In fact, the optimisations I made to the code probably actually make it cheaper, on most video cards.  (Although I’ll confess that I haven’t actually profiled it)

With bare minutes to spare, I’ve finished Robot Finds Ice Cream!  Go grab it from the sidebar.

I’m vaguely pleased with how it came out, though I do wish I’d had more time to spend with it.  You’ll notice that it feels a little more rushed than the previous GiaW games;  that shows up mostly in the inconsistant art style, its lack of a main menu, and the rather small number of levels (I’d have been happier if there were about fifteen of them).  But hey, what do you want for something that’s free and both designed and implemented in under a week?

And now I’m going to post this, before the clock turns over to midnight.  Hope you all enjoy! 

So it’s time to talk a little about the Game in a Week that I’m ostensibly working on.

This particular GiaW is interesting, in that of all the GiaWs I have done, I got the final game idea for this one the earliest in the week (Tuesday morning), but left the first implementation the latest.  This was primarily due to work and other real-life factors distracting me.  Also, I was introduced to several neat TV shows this week, all of which have conspired to pull me away from the computer.  Also also, I’ve been a little distracted by MMORPG Tycoon bugfixes and development.  Now I know how Petri feels, trying to do his monthly games while still getting work done on Crayon Physics Deluxe!

Anyhow, this is also the GiaW where I’ve used the most words from the initial quote, in setting the game theme.  The initial quote (from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, although I’m sure that the same sentence appears in the less deprecatingly-titled Philosopher’s Stone), I’ll remind, was this:

It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.

I’ve pulled words from this passage to form my game’s theme, and the game’s theme is this:  “It is very hard to move around, because it remembers a lot.”

So.  In this game, the player takes on the role of a young boy.  This boy has a robot pet/friend/nanny, and is going shopping with that robot.  Unfortunately, the robot is being a little difficult today;  owing to a minor design flaw in its object-avoidance programming, the robot absolutely refuses to cross its own path, for fear of colliding with itself in the past.

Also unfortunately, the robot has the money.  And so the boy must get the robot to each of the vending machines in each level by pulling on the robot’s leash or shoving the robot, but with the robot never agreeing to cross its own path.

This game is strongly grid-based, and there is no time limit;  each level is a maneuverability puzzle which players must solve to reach the next level.  And it’ll be trivially easy for anyone to create new levels for the game.  And I’m hoping to set it up so that the computer can automatically generate new levels itself.  Though that might be a bit of a push, by the end of the day tomorrow.  We’ll see!

Anyhow, I don’t have a title for the game yet;  possible options I’ve entertained are “Robot Pal”, “Robot Goes Shopping”, and my current favourite, “Robot Finds Ice-Cream”.  So for right now, I’m just calling it “Robot”.

New in 1.0.15:

• Autosave support.  The game automatically saves every two minutes.  Just because not doing that was tempting fate far too much. 
• Fixed a silly display bug which caused subscribers who were online at the time of the last save to not be counted in the “Total Subscribers” count.
• Fixed a bug which caused adventurers not to have their XP return all the way to zero after gaining a level, if the player had turned up the “XP Per Level” design value past 10.

And yes, I’m still working on the “Game in a Week”;  sorry for the lack of updates!  I’ll post an update in a few minutes with where that’s going. 

Also, holy cow:  http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-08/st_wte

I’ve gotten very little coding done in the past week;  mostly feeling a little worn out and uninspired.  So I’m going to kick myself into gear by starting another Game in a Week, as a break from development on MMORPG Tycoon.  Not to fret, though;  I’ll be back on MMORPG Tycoon after this is done. 

It’s past midnight at the moment, and I really need my sleep, so I’m going to keep this short.  The book for this Game in a Week is a hardback edition of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, by J.K. Rowling (as though I had to tell you that).  This is a US printing of the book, published by Scholastic Press, and the text is copyrighted 1997.  There probably aren’t many copies of the US-titled version of the book here in Australia, but somehow I wound up with one of them, so it’s the one that I’m using.

As always, my topic selection method is to open a book randomly, and take the first sentence which is completely on the leftmost page.  From this sentence, I must choose one or more words to take as the theme for the game I’m to design and implement within the next seven days.  In this case, I’ve opened to page 132, and the first sentence entirely on that page is:

“It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.”

In my mind, that passage kind of conjures images of a cross between Concentration and the Three Card Monte.  But I’m not nearly cruel enough to inflict such a horror on any of you fine people.  At least, not unless it gets to be Sunday and I haven’t come up with anything better. 

My initial thoughts are that good words for starting with would be “remember”, and “move around”.  And if I twist it a little, maybe I could turn “lot” into “lots”, and do something with small stones.  Or the game could take place in an empty lot.  Or there could just be a lot of things to remember or move around.  So many possibilities!

Anyhow, I’ll post more thoughts tomorrow, when I’ve had proper sleep.

So I’ve been a bit busy the last few days.  I’ve once again shrunk subscribers and monsters (or expanded the world, depending on your point of view), and I’ve increased the maximum number of entities allowed in a region.  The new maximum is 300 per region;  I find that 200 monsters and 100 players per region feels about right.. but this will be wired up to options in the “Design” area, so others can tune things differently.

Subscribers are now drawn using the vector sprites I created for “Ill-Timed Petition Damsel”, and the monsters are drawn using the Muncher sprite from “The Muncher’s Labyrinth”.  I know, I’m totally ripping off my own work.  It’s probably just temporary;  I wanted to see how things looked, animated.

So now if you really zoom in on the map screen, munchers actually chase meat (and petition damsels), instead of just having little geometric symbols slide along the ground.  I think it’s a big improvement.

I’ve also fixed a number of extra AI bugs on both the subscriber and the monster side.  Getting monsters and subscribers to actually approach each other to attack is surprisingly non-trivial.  But it’s pretty much working now.

Devs are also now in the world, though they aren’t really doing anything yet;  they’re just little arrows (like the player’s arrow cursor, only they don’t rotate and they’re fainter) that move around in the world.  Eventually, these will scurry around fulfilling the player’s build orders and assisting players in distress.  But that’s not been implemented yet.  Soon!

In other news, I’m pretty sure that next week I’ll be taking a break from development on MMORPG Tycoon, and doing another Game in a Week.  Need to clear my head a bit with a change of pace.  More on that as we get closer.