Life of a Game Designer

It’s been a bunch of months since I blathered on about game dev. I’m still crazy excited about the iPad but haven’t finished anything for it.

I have about 10 prototype games in the making, and lots of other ideas spread out in my top secret Idea Notebooks and nerdy voice recordings I make to myself while on the commute back and forth to work.  I haven’t been able to decide which to make though!

SpinCycle was a lot of fun to make, and barely took any time- which is fantastic.  Simple ideas like that are hard to come by though, and my free time is extremely limited these days, mostly nonexistent when working 2 jobs and dealing with a ridiculous commute. So I get plenty of time to design but not much time to code.

First I need to finish up BigFish, which is a Facebook 3D fishing game I am creating with a business partner. I gave it a whirl on the iPad and it looks fantastic, so I will most likely port it to iPad once it’s done on Facebook.

Of all the games I’ve made for iPhone so far, CastleGuard2 has had the biggest success and following, indeed I still get emails and sales on it almost every day. So I am pretty sure an update for that game would be a good business decision too.

Arcana: Spell Duel is my personal favorite game, but did very poorly in terms of sales and feedback, and took the longest to build. I did come away from that project with a fantastic dynamic spell effect system though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

DangerLands is an enormous project, and I have a good crew still on tap to work on it, but it’s been hard for me to get back into it. Still, of all the projects I want to spend time on, RPGs seem to call me home the most.  There are a couple technical hurdles that are stopping me from getting back full force into DangerLands though, and if I am going to jump in I need to work out a theoretical solution first.

The first issue is server networking. I love working with Shiva very much, but it doesn’t yet have a scriptable server. This means I have to use a specialized client to act as a server, and optimize it. Ideally I would have a fault-tolerant client/server, so that instances are hosted by players. The big issue with this is making it work nicely when the controlling player leaves the game. Pocket Legends seems to do this very well, and I should study/observe it more to understand what’s going on.  It’s important to incorporate into the architecture early on, but hard to do it in a neat and clean way.  I had begun to do something like this with DangerLands, but that kind of tech takes a while to get right.

The real hairy ones are the networked objects. Scene geometry and even character data can be hosted on the other clients, straight from the server.  Yes, that can be a trouble area, but should be minimal on a relatively closed platform. Networked objects which need to think and maintain persistent state across clients are a different animal. It feels like I need to create some kind of centralized monster controller, so that monster states and current information/brain activity can be maintained on all clients. When the hosting server sends out information about a monster instruction (Bandersnatch is attacking Dave), all the other clients should tuck that away into their own inactive monster controllers. Then, if the hosting server should disconnect, the next client in line can start up their monster server and pick up where the departed hosting server left off. It sounds simple, but I know it will be complex.

The other hurdle is with multiplayer code. I had a foolish notion that I would run lots of players on maps, but it’s just not feasible. It seems much more practical to divide up into instanced areas like Pocket Legends does (and many others), and have some central ares for casual hanging out.  I would love to architect the entire game with only a single headless pass-through server, and spread out the server load to all the other clients.

So, step 1 for the continuance of DangerLands would be to get just type of flow working. I also aim to GREATLY simplify the character framework, and reduce the stats/skills to minimize the data being thrown around.

This kind of framework would let me work on some of the other game ideas I have in the future. We will stick with click-to-move/tap-to-move so I don’t have to finish up my dead-reckoning code either

Anyway, just a few random thoughts on what I want to do next.

My newest game SpinCycle is live as a free game on the iTunes app store.

I made a mistake of not including support for OS 3.1, and I will be rectifying that when I can. Otherwise it’s a WHOLE LOT of fun and is the simplest game I’ve ever made. It took a couple weekends to make. I’m particularly proud of this one because it is so simple and so fun, and the gameplay mechanic is one I came up with myself. I wanted to come up with something quick and simple to try out iAds and an Ad Supported game.  When I got it figured out, I released the xcode project to the Shiva community so fellow Shiva developers can also take advantage of iAds/adWhirl to monetize their apps.

Feedback is great so far, though no one can come close to my high scores

I will be getting to an update soon I hope, to clear up the help screen(s), simplify gameplay even more, and add a whole lot more POW! to the gameplay experience. Also will be putting out an Ad-free 0.99 version. Then I’ll market it a bit, I won’t spread the word much until I get those issues fixed.

Special shout out to Dede Sundberg, who came up with the awesome title.

This version is Ad Supported. Here are some screenies.

Grab it, let me know what you think!

This iPhone app is the secondary focus of this article: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/balloon-fun/id359009848?mt=8

A Fun Game

My good friend Montgomery Farrar Tidwell, who goes by the nickname ‘Cucumber’ is also a fellow Indie game developer. We both have been creating iPhone games for the last year or so. Him using Unity 3D / Objective C and me using the Shiva Game Engine.  We chat almost every day in the legacy MyDreamRPG IRC (irc.dreamgamesinc.com:16667), or http://www.mydreamrpg.com/irc for the last several years.

This year, Cucumber released a kid’s game called Balloon Fun. My 2 year old daughter Olivia loved it from the moment I showed it to her. The game is simple for her to use ‘all by herself’ as she likes to say, and she plays it for hours when she can get my iPhone away from me.

Here she is last Christmas:

I admit it, I would jump in front of a truck for this little girl. She’s a princess through and through and lights my heart up every day without fail.

Tragedy

Yesterday I drove up to work like most days, which is 2 hours away with traffic. I was there for only a few hours when I noticed my phone vibrating, and saw that I had several missed calls and a couple voicemails also. The dang iPhone vibrate button is on the blink so I missed them all, but managed to grab the latest call. It was my 14 yr old son Ramsay, who sounded panicky. “Dad, Shauna needs you to come home right now, we called 911 and Olivia is on the way to the hospital.”  Those kind of calls are always good for an immediate adrenaline rush, and of course I need to know more right NOW!! So I asked to speak to my wife, but she was in panic mode and couldn’t talk. I found out later she was holding my little girl in her arms, who was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth, so couldn’t talk anyway.  This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten a panic call to come home now (happens with the little ones), but never involved an ambulance.  So I left work somewhat angrily, another 2 hours in the car before me. I was thinking my wife was over-reacting.. but she wasn’t.

Morning

On the ride home I called home to talk to my son and get the details of what was going on.  My wife had taken all three kids out to breakfast (Ages 14, 2, 1) in the morning, and Olivia is usually a laughing, talking, dancing, singing whirlwind of a girl, but on that morning she was very very quiet. She didn’t eat her favorite breakfast foods at the Phoenix, and she even fell asleep on my wife’s lap. She said she didn’t feel good. On the way home my wife stopped to pick up some Children’s Tylenol because Olivia felt a little warm. While she was in the grocery store, Ramsay called me at work because Olivia wanted to talk to me. She told me she was scared and she didn’t feel good. I told her Mommy will take good care of her, and we hung up. An hour later she was in an ambulance being rushed to the Trauma ward at St. Luke’s Hospital.

When they got home from the grocery store, Olivia got out of the car but just stood still. She walked up to the top of the stairs and just stood there, staring ahead. Then she moved inside and was staring into space, not saying anything to anyone. Shauna put her in a bath and gave her some Tylenol, figuring she felt really sick. She is a bath maniac, but  today she just splashed around a little and then didn’t move around much. My wife has had some experience with seizures, and instinct told her this was going to get bad quickly. She had my son call 911 and an ambulance was on its way. Minutes after the bath my little girl collapsed and began to convulse. The paramedics came and took her to the Trauma ward, but not before she had 3-4 seizures, one of them over 6 minutes long. She was unresponsive with an extremely high fever.

Ride Home

I found this out at the beginning of the ride home and began to accelerate.  The ride takes on average 2 hours, I have done it safely in about 1 hour without traffic.  This ride was much faster than usual, I was praying nonstop, and even yelling at God to not take my daughter from me. I can’t describe my love for this little girl, it’s surpassing.

During the rest of the ride there were no more details or updates forthcoming.. I went straight to the ER.

This is what I saw there:

Waiting

She remained unresponsive for many hours in the Trauma unit, a couple times seeming like she was going to wake up but she didn’t. She sat by her side, holding her hand, talking to her, singing to her, praying.  She woke up and looked around once for a few seconds, then passed out again. We waited more, monitoring her vital signs and the beeping machines. This was an extremely nervewracking time. We didn’t know if she was hurt badly from her seizures, and if brain functions would be normal. We just wanted our little baby girl back.

After many hours, my wife and I decided to try to wake her up. I had my iPhone with me and I loaded up one of her favorite songs “Lonely Goatherd” from the Sound of Music soundtrack. She wasn’t responding at all, we began to get a little desperate but persisted. Then Olivia woke up and looked around. She kept on looking like she was going to pass out again, her eyes were rolling around and body moving strangely, but we managed to sit her up. Shauna reached over for a piece of chocolate chip cookie and I rubbed some on her lips so she could taste it and maybe be interested in it. She licked her lips a little and then smacked her mouth. She was acting very strangely now, almost like an infant.  We kept her awake while she nibbled on chocolate chip cookie, and we tried to get her to communicate. She was unresponsive to that, and didn’t seem to recognize us or smile. I tried showing her several pictures on the iPhone of family members she loves and she didn’t seem to recognize any, but she grabbed the phone and put it in her mouth to lick a piece of chocolate off it. My heart sank… this was something our 10 month old baby boy does. I felt that perhaps she had been damaged by the fever and seizures.

Then I got an idea.

I pulled out the iPhone again and cranked up Balloon Fun. It begins with a voice which says “Shake to Play”. When she heard the voice, she snapped her attention onto the phone and grabbed it from me, and began to tap balloons. The first one was clumsy but she then began tapping the correctly colored balloons in rapid succession. This was as sure a sign as any that her brain was functioning OK! My wife and I laughed with tears in our eyes and watched her play. After a minute or so, she fidgeted and tried to grab the IV out of her arm. “It hurts mama” She said. My wife and I broke down then, to hear our little angel speak again. She was going to be OK.

10 minutes after waking up

In the next several minutes she regained her natural state and was chatting, eating popsicles, chocolate milk, and cookies. We were happy to give them to her, and praised God for the gift of our daughter Olivia.

This story is the story of one heck of a dramatic day, and of the iPhone app Balloon Fun that allowed my little girl to re-orient herself from a comatose state. Who would’ve thought?

Thank you Cucumber my good friend. I know it hasn’t sold too many copies yet, but this one little user is your biggest fan.

I was just reminded from a friendly email that I haven’t posted here in awhile  I’ve been really busy wrapping up the year and continuing development on DangerLands, some other games, and, as always, working full time for  Gamesville.  I handle video ads and do quite a bit of Flash game development for the day job, and it’s a lot of fun!

To sum up: Been Busy Coding!

DangerLands development has been going strong (with the natural exception of the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas slowdowns) and I’ve gutted the network code to move away from the click-to-move control style into a joypad/keyboard style movement by popular request. It sucks up a ton more network traffic, yes, but is very much worthwhile interms of movement precision and world immersion. It took a few weeks to do this one thing, and it still needs tuning, but it works!  In the process, I developed some really cool server architectures which enable us to fire up a DangerLands zone server on any network-enabled device.  This should let us run instances, let people build their own zones, and reduce our infrastructure costs dramatically.

I’ve been posting on some other places too lately (not blog persay) but lots of little updates about DangerLands over on the DangerLands site and on TouchArcade, where there is a lengthy thread about the game.  There is also a private messageboard we use for DangerLands dev with over 300 posts, but it’s private and lots of top secret confidential take-the-world-by-storm type stuff.

The DangerLands team has between 2 and 4 people on it, depending on what’s going on.  We’re all art-timers, and I am still doing all the development/coding.  I’m not doing world design, which is a good thing.  That’s being handled primarily by Winin, and he’s been posting some blogs about his experiences over on Multiplaying.net.

We recently announced that we are expanding the cross-platform nature of the game to include Facebook. It will probably end up being the primary platform for DangerLands in a casual gameplay sense if my hunch is correct.

So, this is really gearing up to be an awesome 2010!  And… I’ll try to post more

I gotta take a sec to post about my son: Chase David Young, born 9/11/09.

He was born at 5:07PM EST. He’s been really quiet and he’s just a little cutie. I’ve been spending tons of time with the family, and my two-yr old daughter too, so that she isn’t so jealous

It’s very exciting to have another boy around!

A full test group submitted many bugs which needed addressing, and my son and several testers helped me test several online duels to iron out some other miscellaneous bugs and needed features.  I submitted the first build of Arcana: Spell Duel to the App. It was a lot of spare time work this summer but it was definitely worth it.

In the next two weeks I’ll be working on a promo vid and figuring out what to do next. I’m glad to have this done, as I’m expecting a new baby any day now!

In the spirit of giving, and of fostering perhaps a community RPG project like what we used to have at www.mydreamrpg.com, I have released the source code of CastleGuard2, my iPhone RPG created with Shiva. It doesn’t contain any of the protected artwork which is licensed to me, but it does maintain referential integrity. I’m releasing the project for a few reasons:

1. As I said, to see if a community RPG code project can be sparked up
2. To help some Shiva coders maybe learn a few things they need to know to make iPhone RPG/Action games
3. As I continue to develop it, I will take advantage of improvements other suggest: I like to learn from folks!

You can find the thread/files here. There is a Personal Learning Edition (free) of Shiva which you can use to figure out if it’s the right tool for you to use to make games with.  It uses StonScript, a LUA-like language for coding. I personally think it’s an exceptional product and I look forward to using it as long as I can, or until I need more!

The game previously known as Recombiner has been going by the working title Arcana: Spell Duel.  There’s a cuople threads about it over on TouchArcade where I post frequent dev updates.  I’ve had some vacationing and a lot in life going on but I found some time to get some playtesting in and some new features added. I’ve finished adding in the replacement player, using my existing customization system and player. I added in new skin color options and all the clothing options for a really wide range of appearances. Though the players ingame aren’t using the custom settings yet

I’ve also added in a battle scene system and am building some new environments.  I am using one large outdoor map right now with several predefined locations for battles for now.

Anyway, the purpose of this album is to show off the new interface (work in progress) and the customization options quickly.
I’m shooting for end of August for submitting to the store. Online battles are working, just a big list left to do and balancing, etc.
Enjoy!

[View with PicLens]

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I’ll add some details later