VectorStorm Blog

I had to add a little extra note..  one of my favourite entries in the TIGSource Retro Demake competition is this demake of Sly Cooper into an LCD “Game & Watch”-style game:  Thieving Raccoon.

I love how Shoo has captured the core gameplay of Sly Cooper, and rendered it down into such a minimal form.  If you liked Sly Cooper, you owe it to yourself to go have a look and a smile.  No download required, it’s Flash! 

Well, it’s happened again, TIGSource is hosting another interesting competition.  Folks here will remember that I started MMORPG Tycoon as an entry for their last competition, the “Procedural Generation” competition.

This new competition is “Bootleg Demakes”;  basically selecting a game and creating a bootleg version of it for older hardware.  Full details and rules are here.  I’ve had a few fun ideas for it, but I don’t think I’ll actually be entering this one;  there’s too much stuff to do on MMORPG Tycoon, and I already took one break from MMORPG Tycoon, to make “Robot Finds Ice Cream”.  I don’t think I could justify taking another big break.  But there’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in this contest.

My vector-loving heart is absolutely in love with VipeÜt (a demake of WipeOut, to the Vectrex console).  I especially love that it’s simulating the bright spots where the vector hardware’s display gun accelerates.  Someday I’ll add that sort of fine touch to VectorStorm.

Anyhow, back on the topic of MMORPG Tycoon, there’s been a lot of progress recently, but there’s still a long way to go before I reach 1.1!  I’ve got a thread with progress reports running over on the forums.  Check it out, if you’re interested in how stuff is moving along.

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.