VectorStorm Blog

Just a quick note that I’ve locked down the design for Game in a Week 6;  right now, my plan is to use the whole quote as its title:  “Lord, save us from that horrible land!”  Although as that’s sort of long (says the guy who named the ‘Nicholas Spratt’ game), I may use it as the subtitle.  I’ll probably make that decision tomorrow.

Anyhow, it may turn out to be a little like game 4, the ‘Nicholas Spratt’ game in that it’s a game concept which could easily be expanded out into a larger game if the whim ever took me.   But it should be fun to play in its own right.  Or at least, I’m looking forward to playing it myself.  Goal for today is to have a fully playable prototype by the end of the day.

I’m a little concerned about the control method for the game.  Ideally, I think it ought to be played with the mouse, but I don’t think I have time to implement mouse picking on my warpy/stretchy playfield today;  I might have to use a controller/arrow keys for the initial release, and have a patch when I get mouse control in.

I should also mention that due to a planning failure on my part, I ended up having the deadline for the game planned for a day when I have very little spare time to actually work on it;  I’m still going to try to have it done by the self-set deadline, but depending on how things go today, the game might end up slipping by a day.  We’ll see.

So I’ve been making more progress on the Game in a Week.  No game screenshots to show yet, but here’s a neat piece of tech that I’m using, which will be finding its way into MMORPG Tycoon 2.0.  What you’re looking at again is a slow zoom-in on a very, very small terrain in wireframe view.

Notice that when fully zoomed out, the terrain appears as a flat map directly beneath the camera, but as you zoom in mountains begin to appear, and then the terrain begins to take on the gentle curve of a globe, and the camera begins to automatically pitch upward to give you a ground level view of the scene (and let you see the sky, beyond the horizon).  Topologically, the terrain it’s actually a torus that just happens to sort of resemble a sphere.  Had to cheat and do it that way, in order to allow the map to unwrap into a flat rectangle without distorting.  And you don’t want to know how much time I wasted making this math work.  But it’s sort of neat, and I’m looking forward to releasing the game.

Two more days to go!

So after a day of consideration, I’m putting forward my current musings on a design for GiaW #6 (currently work-in-progress-titled “Lord”).

As a reminder, the theme quote this time is:  “Lord, save us from that horrible land!”, a lyric taken from the novel Dune.

First, some constraints that I need to keep in mind during this game.  As I’ve recently added 3D support to VectorStorm, it’d be really good to use them in this game.  However, there are a few issues:

1. I have no 3D collision library in place, and I probably don’t have development time during the week to learn and integrate one.  If I go 3D, the game will need to have either simplistic or no collision requirements.
2. I still have no bitmapped/truetype font rendering support.  This would probably take me about a day to implement, so could realistically be done if needed for this game (but I’d need to start on it soon — only six days in total remain, including today!)
3. VectorStorm’s shader backend is very simplistic;  it currently is either “on” or “off”, and it always performs a full-screen bloom pass.  If I wanted to do something that was non-glowy-vector, I’d either need to turn off the bloom entirely, or devote some time to revamping it so that I can apply the bloom to a single layer, instead of to the whole rendered scene.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about game designs.

Meerkat pointed out in the last article that the quote theme is a dead ringer for the game Lemmings.  Which means that I don’t want to do it that way;  not interested in doing remakes, here!  :)

My most expansive idea was to cast the player as the deity of a poor farming village, consisting of about five families.  The parents till the earth, the kids do small chores around the house.. and they all pray to be freed of the tireless and difficult work for various reasons;  some so that they can go to school, some so that they can go shopping, some so they can go to the casino, etc.  Give the player some divine powers to help or hinder (or indeed, to smite), and then give the player no score at the end (“It is not for you to judge My wisdom.”)  I still really like this idea;  it’s kind of a less-Lovecraft variant of I Fell In Love With the Majesty of Colors, and everything I did here would be directly applicable to MMORPG Tycoon 2.0.  But I worry that there’s too much work to be done;  that I wouldn’t have time to complete it.

In a more bizarre bent, I tried speaking the theme phrase with the emphasis on the word “land”, and ended up with this little pitch:  The water level has fallen, and the poor fish are flopping about helpless on the exposed beach!  As Poseidon, lord of the seas, you must use your mighty trident (with seaweed cabling attached) to spear the floundering fish and drag them back to safety!

This game would be played from a side-on 2D view, and would be basically an Artillery-style game, except that a direct hit on a fish would leave you with a grappling cable connected to the fish, and would allow you to drag the fish back toward the water.  Everything here would be implemented using Box2D, including fish flopping about on the shore.  I really like the core concept here; the “Oh no, the fish are dying — quick, save them by spearing them with your trident!” thing.  But I’m not wild about the actual gameplay.

But I do like that I’d finally have made a game which used Box2D, after all the time I spent integrating it into my game engine.

The thing I keep coming back to when I consider the theme statement, though, is the word “that”.  “Lord, save us from that horrible land!”  Kind of implies that the person doing the pleading isn’t actually on the land that’s horrible, but is either afraid of the horrible land, or wants to avoid going to the horrible land.

Of course, when you put together “Lord” (in a religious sense) and “horrible land”, it’s difficult not to think of Hell.  But I don’t think I want to go there.

So as is often the case, after a day of brainstorming, I haven’t picked the final theme yet.  But I have a number of interesting directions to go.  My goal for today is to get bitmapped font rendering into VectorStorm, as I suspect I’ll be wanting that.  I’ll update tonight/tomorrow with progress.

I have a confession to make.

I never liked Dune.

Now, I’m not talking about the father of the modern RTS genre, nor am I talking about the frequently-incomprehensible David Lynch film, nor even the John Harrison miniseries (although I never particularly liked any of those, either).  No, I’m talking about Frank Herbert’s Dune, the original novel.  I’m not going to go into the precise reasons why, here, but I thought it was important to mention that I’m not really a Dune fan, even if I will joyously misquote the “Fear is the mind-killer” mantra given even half a chance.

However, when it came time to select a topic for a new Game in a Week, Dune was the first book that leapt from my bookshelf, and it’s offered up a doozy of a quote.  Dune is Copyright 1965 by Frank Herbert, and my particular copy is a paperback edition, and was printed by Clays Ltd.  No printing date is specified on the book.

For those who haven’t seen me do this before, the topic selection process for Game in a Week games is simple;  I select a book at (more or less) random, open to a random page, and take the first complete sentence at the top of the left page.  I am then free to interpret the sentence (or portions thereof) in any way I wish, to construct the theme for the game.

In this case, the page was number 138.  And the first sentence on that page is:

Lord, save us from that horrible land!

(It’s actually a lyric taken from the middle of a song, apparently referring to the harsh desert of Arrakis.. although as mentioned above, I’m not really a fan of Dune, so I didn’t check very closely to make sure that my interpretation of the quote was correct)

As always, I’ll make a few initial thoughts about how this sentence can be applied to a game.. though I think there are some pretty obvious ones.  We could take the whole sentence as the topic;  the player is God, and is tasked with protecting his minions from some sort of dangerous terrain.

Alternately, we could do any sort of rescue game if we just took “Save us”, or any sort of God game by just taking “Lord”, or an evil deathtrap game by taking just “horrible land”.  But right now, I’m really taken with the idea of using the whole quote, and maybe even using it as the name of the game.  I’m not quite sure what’s so horrible about the land that we need to protect people from it, but.. I’m sure something will occur to me.

And it will give me a chance to continue working with the terrain rendering which I’ve been playing with for the past little while, so that ought to be a good thing too.

But that’s all the gameplay consideration that I’m allowing myself tonight.  Proper design work on Game in a Week number six starts tomorrow morning, and the playable game is due by the end of January 3rd.  I’ll be posting updates here, as events unfold.

Wish me luck!