VectorStorm Blog

My mouse is kept on the right, and is plugged into the USB port on the left side of my laptop.

My gamepad is kept on the left, and is plugged into the USB port on the right side of my laptop.

Once again, I’m amazed at what my mind gets up to when I really ought to be focused on coding.

Also, I now have a functioning grappling hook, which is sticking to “clouds” and letting the player swing around like mad. If I was really desperate, I could generate a “target” cloud to land on, put in a ground, some basic level progression, and call it a day. But I feel like there’s more that should be done.

Well, I didn’t see this one coming! I had my brilliant idea which was both cunning and simple to implement, and after work yesterday I quickly banged it out in just a half hour and..

It wasn’t fun.

I called the idea “Cloud Racer”, and it revolved around the fictional, highly competitive sport of hotted-up racing clouds (although ‘racing’ really had no place in the game concept). In effect, you’re centered on a particular cloud racer, which is zooming across the sky, raining all the way. As the cloud is raining, it is shrinking. As in Vector Physics, you are able to draw solid and rope objects, and your goal is to catch nearby clouds as you travel past them, to try to capture their moisture and add it to that of your own cloud, and thereby be able to rain and race for longer.

In effect, it’s basically a version of Crayon Physics where instead of trying to get a ball to a star, you’re trying to catch objects that are being algorithmically generated by the game. Simple to code, but as it turns out, it isn’t actually any fun to play. The simple joy that you get from the wide open “draw whatever you want” physics playground games is simply lost when you try to focus it down into tighter goals.

Of course, a game prototype being ‘non-fun’ has never stopped me before, but upon retrospect, it was also a time-limited game (which I previously stated that I didn’t want this game to be), and also a “look, I have physics!” game (which I also previously stated that I didn’t want this game to be). So I find myself without a viable game idea on the Saturday afternoon. What to do now?

Well, honestly? The new Sam and Max episode, Night of the Raving Dead, is sitting on my hard disk right now, looking awful lonely. But I’m going to be good and not play it until I have something out the door. So without that, I’m off into experimental gameplay land, searching for something fun for the player to do. Right now, I’m starting with generic movement mechanics. First order of business: a grappling hook. Yes, it has nothing to do with clouds, but at this point I’ll be perfectly happy to put something out which has only a passing connection to the chosen theme. And maybe if/when I find something that’s fun to do, I’ll be able to bend it back toward being relevant to clouds.

So I got home after work tonight, and realised that I was out of fresh milk. So I decided to wander down to the corner shops to buy milk, and as I walked, I thought about cloud-based game designs.

And during that walk, I think I finally broke through, and came up with a real game mechanic. It’s reasonably simple and easy to code, and I’m hoping to have a gameplay prototype worked out by tomorrow night. The screenshot here is just a quick rendering test, experimenting with cloud rendering.

Of course, in the actual game, clouds will be a bit more rounded off than these rectangles; this was just a test of the basic concept. And yes, it’s rendering using ordinary VectorStorm rendering. It’s rendering normally instead of additively, and with the bloom shader turned off. And with an overlay for the sky, and for each cloud, to make the nice gradients.

Hopefully I’ll have a much more representative screenshot to show off tomorrow!

So here it is, Wednesday evening, and I don’t have a solid gameplay idea yet. To be fair, with Muncher’s Labyrinth I didn’t get the final gameplay idea until Saturday morning. But I’d still be a lot happier if I had a good idea to get started on right now.

When I’m working on a very wide-open game design like this, my general approach is always very visual; I try to get a mental image of what the game looks like on screen. Once I have that mental image, I try to invent gameplay mechanics that fit within that mental image. Sometimes it’s easy, like with Muncher’s, and sometimes it’s really hard, like with Petition Damsel.

With that said, I do have two vague images in my head, running with the ‘Cloud’ word, but I don’t quite have gameplay to fit with those images.

The first image is of a person who lives on a cloud. This person lives in a little house, built on the top of the cloud, and there’s a small smokestack that puffs out smaller clouds; the whole thing would be viewed from the side. I think that this mental image is heavily inspired by the illustrations from The Little Prince. This is, for me, the stronger of the two mental images.

The other mental image I have is a top-down view of someone flying in the sky, dodging between or flying through clouds, with a simulated ground in the background, potentially getting the effect of flying ‘up’ and ‘down’ by scaling that background. I’m not sure exactly what the player would be trying to do here, though. Perhaps the player would constantly be losing altitude, but gathering clouds would buoy him up, allowing him to last longer. For me, this is a pretty weak mental image, but it does at least suggest some vague gameplay mechanics.

So I’m not entirely happy with either of the concepts I’ve been working with so far.. I’d love to do something freeform and open like the Cloud game, but I feel that you’d really want a full 3D environment to really deliver on that sort of promise, and VectorStorm isn’t that..

Anyhow, with any luck, I’ll have a solid gameplay idea worked out by tomorrow, and will be able to start implementing. Crossing my fingers.

Oh well. The WaveFront (.obj) file format looked ideal yesterday; simple, straight-forward, ASCII-based.. but it doesn’t support object hierarchies, which pretty much limits its utility for me. It means that if I wanted to create a character with multiple joints, I can’t build them all together and make a single export; I’d have to build each piece separately, centered on the world origin, and then manually piece them back together again in code.

It’s too bad.. other than that, WaveFront supported everything I wanted, including both polygon and vector definitions, basic materials, etc.

I still like the dinner party idea, but I’m now thinking that it’s a little too ambitious to realise this week; there’s too much engine work that would be required to put it together well (primarily to do with writing an importer to actually get data into the game). I’ll come back to it later on. Perhaps as ‘Game in a Week #4′, or something.

So I’m now back to thinking about the other possible game topics, clouds especially. I have this vague notion about slamming clouds together to make them rain.. but don’t really know whether you’d do this using a “pool”-style interface, or by flying a plane around and shooting them with little bullets to push them around, or whether there’s some other method to use.. and I don’t have a very strong idea about why you’d want the clouds to rain, exactly. Perhaps the goal of each level is to make all the clouds give up all their water. Could call the game “Drought Relief” or somesuch.

But I’m not really convinced by that idea; I’m going to have to keep mulling it over, and hope to come up with something brilliant in the next day or two.