End of June Progress Report: I'm taking a break

This'll be a short post.

I'm taking a break from game development for the month, even though it's killing me to do so. My day job has been really stressful and consequently I haven't had a lot of time to do game development in my free time. This has really sucked, but there's been no way around it and I keep beating myself up about not doing more, but that really doesn't help with my stress levels (and I would like to note here that I feel I am typically quite good at dealing with stress).

I'm feeling burnt out and work isn't going to be less stressful for another month at least, so I'm giving myself permission to not work on game development. In fact, I'm going to force myself not to work on it with the assumption that this break is just for the month of July and that this will help me be more energized to do the work in August.

No small part of me worries that not being able to handle this all at the same time means that I could never make it in the games industry. However, I've been reminding myself that if I were in the games industry, I (probably) wouldn't be working literally all day for six days of the week.

I don't know. Guess this is just another part of my grand experiment. Feeling kind of down this month.

On a positive note, I finished my first playthrough of Analogue: A Hate Story tonight and it was great! Also, I'll have some more things to post about the MSU-1 soon, so hopefully people will look forward to that; especially the people who have been posting in the comments of part 2 of that article series!

End of March Progress Report

Oh wow! March just flew by didn't it? Well, time to put our best foot forward and work hard this April. It's going to be a month full of hard work and-

Oh... geez, April's already half over...
Well, uh, I guess I've been making good progress on my "Power Game" prototype that I've been documenting all year. Yeah, let's take a look at the progress I've made on that!

Uh... well, shit.

Real Talk

So, what happened?

The answer is a lot of things happened. Work at my day job started to get really hectic towards the end of February and that's still going strong, so I've had a lot less energy by the time I get home each night. Then there's been some tough times for friends of mine, so I wanted to be available to them, further diminishing time I had for working on the adventure portion of my game. When I did work on my game, I managed to make it really tedious to put text into the game and since my plan had been to write out the story, that made me loathe to work on the game. 

Perhaps the biggest problem though, is taking a step back and looking at my project's scope. I've designed an art heavy game and I have no means of making the art. I mean, I've been making do with my horrible approximations of art, but it really doesn't do much for morale. I see what other people are doing in less time and I feel like their smaller, simpler (graphically) games are doing more for them because they're actually learning things and making finished projects.

I haven't been completely delinquent in my game development though. I've created a few small projects experimenting with different parts of Unity, and while that's been fun it hasn't created anything very impressive or fruitful.

So What Now?

Well, I've identified my problems, and I've taken some time this past week or two to recuperate. I'll probably take most of next week easy as well, but my goal for April is to have a small finished game. There are three things I think will propel me towards hitting this goal:

1. Greatly reduced scope. Despite my best attempts to check myself before I wreck myself, I keep trying to make games that are beyond the amount of time I have available. So part of what I'm doing with these small projects I've been making is busting myself down to the smallest possible scope I can let myself have. It sucks, but it has to be done.
2. Ludum Dare 29 is happening on the 25th of the month. I'm going to participate and make a small game in 48 hours. The last time I did this, I actually came out of it with something, so hopefully a small scope and a hard deadline will kick me out of this slump.
3. There was a job opening at XSEED Games for a Localization Editor. From the job description, it sounded like a dream job for me. I thought I met all the qualifications rather well and then some, but they told me that my background was too technical for that position and that I didn't have any sort of English degree or professional writing background. They're absolutely right, of course! I've taken five years of creative writing classes throughout high school and college, I've completed nine first drafts of novels in the last ten years and written several short stories, but none of it has ever been published! Tons of people have done this as well, so I'm really not special in that regard. If I want to get that sort of dream job in the future, I need to get published. I need to have work I can point to and say "I don't have a degree in English, but this is what I've done and here's how people have responded to it." Basically, I'm disappointed but determined to not miss out on such a chance in the future.

So for now, I'm going to try to relax and be in a good place for Ludum Dare on the 25th, keep up on my small projects in Unity, and come May 1st I'll reassess where I am and figure out what I can do to make a game in eight months. I'm down, but I'm not out yet.

January in Reflection

I wanted to take a moment and reflect on what I learned from January's RPG.

Things That Worked

Random dungeons worked well. They aren't always perfect, but they're fairly flexible and reliable for reproducing the same layout given a seed number. The only downside is that without a large varieties of rooms with a combination of edge types, the dungeons look a bit samey since the same rooms are repeated over and over. Overall though, this was a great success I feel. I'll definitely be looking into using this in the future.

Using default assets was amazing. Not having to worry about making my own art or finding someone else to make art for me was wonderful if not a bit limiting. I'm not an artist even on my best day, so having the RTP at my disposal was a blessing.

RPG Maker VX Ace was fantastic to work with. Despite having messed around with the program for years in my childhood, I had avoided using RPG Maker to make "serious" games. I felt like there was a stigma attached to it and that I would be better off writing my own game engine in XNA or C++ or whatever. However, the engine has turned out to be more than flexible enough for my needs this past month and that was a pleasant surprise. Perhaps even more surprising though was...

Ruby, and specifically RGSS3, the scripting framework that ties RPG Maker VX Ace together. Before January I had no experience with Ruby at all (though I did have some experience with Python) so it was nice to find that Ruby was easy to use. I'm not really clear on a lot of minuta still and my coding style with it is still a bit too Java/C++ judging by the samples I've seen around the web, but I'm getting there.

Cutting content I didn't have time for. More on this below.

Things That Didn't Work

Doing all the balancing on the last day. I was so focused on getting the dungeons generating well that I ignored any semblance of balancing equipment and monster stats against the player. The result was a frantic five hours as February slowly approached. I think I did an okay job in the end, but the difficulty curve is still a bit too steep especially at the beginning of the game. I did my best to compensate for this by letting you easily run past enemies and growing in power very quickly but it's something that should be improved upon later. Ultimately, I think I can improve upon this by planning out my month better.

Bugs. I say that these are prototypes in part because I anticipated not spending as much time on these as I would if I was going to call it a full game (or even think about charging money for it). There's quite a few bugs I noticed while doing a final pass for January. Chests would spawn when they shouldn't, they would spawn on top of each other and a few enemies spawned in walls pretty consistently. But to the best of my knowledge, there aren't any show-stopping bugs. The few story sequences all play out just fine in my testing and the game plays fine. If anything, the game is broken in the player's favor.

Infinite dungeon mode. This was the thing that I really wanted to get in for January. I envisioned the game's real value in being able to get a high score in this mode and then challenge a friend to try to one up you using your password. In my head, the password would seed the RNG so that everything spawned the same way on both playthroughs. Unfortunately, this mode only partly works. It was thrown together at the very last minute, maybe two hours before my self-imposed deadline. There are a couple problems with it, but the two biggest problems are that the monster spawns are always slightly different even given the same password, and the adaptive difficulty is a bit too hard. Unfortunately these were both things that were notice right before midnight so... they got pushed out of the way and I just had to release with them.

Worst of all in Infinite dungeon mode, it doesn't work! Trying it out in the initial release just generated a screenshot of the dungeon generation! Argh! This has since been fixed and anyone who downloads it from the previous blog post after 2/2/13 will get the fixed version. But still: argh!

Cut Content

I wanted to just quickly list a bunch of stuff that I had cut for time constraints:

10 floors instead of just 8

More random floors

More bosses

More room variety

Optional ally partners

Optional rivals

More floors in infinite mode (currently it cycles through three sizes)

More monsters

Better balancing

Generated puzzles (like the room rotation and gate sections)

Different kinds of generation methods on different floors

Looking Ahead

I'm feeling good about February. Aside from some games coming out that are going to eat a lot of my free time, I've got a better handle on my workflow and I have more experience with the tools now. I've even figured out a way around balancing issues for this month (spoiler: no battles). There'll be some new challenges and I'm taking my time this month and will be using today and tomorrow to plan everything out so I don't have to cut as much. Tuesday will see the start of a new game though, and the theme for this month will be "Romance."

2013 Is The Year of The RPG

A week or so ago, RPG Maker VX Ace debuted on Steam. I had spent a lot of time in my youth messing around with RPG Maker 95, 98 and XP. I remembered those days fondly for a moment, and then passed it by. I simply didn't have $70 to spend on it. Steam's Winter Sale started yesterday, and the program was 20% off. Even at this much more reasonable price, I couldn't afford it. That's when my roommate gifted me a copy of it over Steam.

I've been thinking about what I could do with this that would be meaningful and also forward my own development efforts. If you check the date of the previous post before this, you might be under the impression that I haven't been doing any game development lately. This is partly true. November is eaten by National Novel Writing Month every year, and after that 30 day thing, I was just too burnt out from all the rush. I have spent some time working on games though, just not enough to warrant any sort of blog post. There was some fiddling with the platforming engine, some XNA experiments, a lot of article reading, and finally I decided to make a simple JRPG in Unity which got as far as me working out the stat systems and displaying a map before November hit. I've got lots of ideas, but the startup cost for trying them out is always too much because I'm working in XNA or Unity where I have to either start from scratch or spend time understanding other people's frameworks before I can try out the thing I wanted to play with. This is no longer an issue.

With the aquisition of RPG Maker VX Ace, a tool I'm familiar with, I can create basic JRPGs very quickly. The biggest new feature to this version of the program is the scripting editor and it looks very flexible and easy to understand. So I'm going to jump in head first and start doing things: I've decided that 2013 will be the year of the RPG for me. My new years resolution is to make one JRPG prototype per month and I'll release it here on my blog at the start of each new month.

My plan is to focus on one core idea each month, and build the rest of the game around that idea. So for example, I want to dive into the scripting system, so maybe I'll do random dungeon generation for January. Everything else will be incidental, so I'll be skipping over steps I'd take in a more polished game like creating custom art assets. Or really any sort of resource. I'm a programmer and aspiring game designer, not an artist. It simply isn't feasable for me to do the art for my prototypes and RPG Maker accommodates that.

Early on in the month, I'll post what my theme is for the month and what my progress is like. I'll try to post about challenges and the process of getting an idea working and fun. Ideally, this will result in me gaining some experience as a game maker and some cool things will come out of it. I hope you'll be here with me whether I have soaring success, or miserable failure.

Progress Update?

Oh man, Guild Wars 2 is so much fun. I'm spending pretty much all my free time playing it.

What's that? Adventures of Balzac? Programming?

They're crying over how little work has been done.

So I said I would be fixing bugs and then releasing the first level as a demo yesterday come hell or high water. It didn't happen. Between doing a ton of programming for my actual day job (web development) and Guild Wars 2's recent release, nothing has gotten done on my game. This is very frustrating for me since I'd love to get a job in the games industry, but feel like I need a portfolio to show first. Now it's September, 4 months since I started programming my game, and 1 month since I got anything meaningful done on it.

I'm feeling kind of lost on this project because...well, I'm not sure why. Maybe it was the fact that the game is pretty bland and generic in terms of gameplay and I'm not entirely sure what to change about it. Maybe it's that after spending every available free minute during July working on the game, I just burned out on it a bit. I'm not sure what's causing me to feel this way about the project, but I've got to take steps to deal with it and get back on track to shaping the game up to a point where I can feel good about posting it somewhere.

What I've decided to do about this is two fold:

1. I will no longer hold myself to the previous "I need to have visual progress every Saturday" standard that I was keeping up during May, June and July. Progress will come on it's own time and I'll just have to deal with it. I suspect that there will be more progress when things are slower at work though, and less when, like now, we're scrambling to make sure all our ducks are in a row so that we can release our product.
2. I'm going to sit down and be mapping out possible ideas to integrate into the engine. As it stands I have the jumping and shooting aspect more or less down pat. But there are other things to think about including level gimmicks and code structure (which still needs to be fixed up after the rush at the end of July). So I'll be carefully planning out where those go from here.

Hopefully these two strategies will lead to me getting more work done and feeling better about it in the future. If anyone has any ideas on how to deal with this kind of lethargic, wandering feeling regarding a game project or if you have a neat idea for a platforming mechanic that you'd like to see in a game, feel free to drop a comment below and tell me about it.

Goals for the Mega Man clone

I think I've mentioned this in replies to r/GameDev's Screenshot Saturday posts, but since this blog is my record of the development process, I may as well put down my intentions here. I mentioned in the first post of this blog that I wanted to write a game that I would enjoy playing and that's why I'm focusing on the NES Mega Man games. I really enjoy these games and I think that they're simple to program compared to other types of games I like playing (grand and sweeping RPGs, Civilization, Dynasty Warriors, etc).

That said, I don't want to just copy the Mega Man games straight up, but I feel that I don't have the experience to create my own original game right off the bat. Like how some artists start their careers with fan art of their favorite franchises or how some writers get their start in fan fiction, I need to start by imitating things I enjoy until I can feel confident in my abilities to make video games. Lots of forums and websites tell new comers to the craft to start really small. They recommend games like Pong or maybe Space Invaders or maybe 1942; but usually Pong. Making a game as simple as Pong can be great to practice your ability to make a game compelling, but I can't let myself go that small for reasons of maintaining my interest in the project as well as feeling like I could learn more by being more ambitious.

With that introduction out of the way, here's the major milestones I want to hit with this engine:

1. Replicate Cutman's level from Mega Man 1, release it (for free of course) online and gather feedback.
   Cutman's level is pretty simple all things considered. There's a good number of things for me to have to account for (boss fight, multiple enemies, some vertical as well as horizontal sections, etc) but not enough to overwhelm me (one level means no real weapon switching/upgrades, no level select or title screen really needed, a ton of enemies won't appear, no need to come up with and polish my own original level design, etc). All the functions of the game are pretty straight forward and easily checked. I could make improvements at this stage, but I probably won't make many (one improvement I will make is not implementing the infamous "Pause Trick" that lets you murder bosses easily). Once I have released this and gotten some feedback on what I did wrong or poorly, I can move on to the next stage.
2. Create a short game in the Mega Man tradition that doesn't copy weapon, enemy or level designs.
   This allows me to polish up things from the previous milestone and then improve on them and implement more functionality. I view this as a halfway point between starting from scratch and releasing my first "real" game. If I can get here, I'll have 4-5 levels with some sort of game mechanic that is hopefully fun and probably not very original. This step will be very much focusing on presentation and what it takes to release an actual game. Reaching this milestone will be a big deal for me because it will mean that I have what it takes to make a "real" game. I will have proved to myself that I have a shot at being successful at this. I'll release it for free online and more or less beg people to play it and give me feedback.
3. Create an honest to goodness video game and release it commercially.
   This milestone is currently a long way off, but it's part of what will keep me going. This is my carrot at the end of the stick. It doesn't matter if it's a success or not, it just matters that I make it here. It'd be great if it was a success for me (I'm defining success here as I can afford to take my wife out to dinner with the profits), but that's not the primary reason I'd be happy. If I can release a game commercially, then I've proven to myself that I have the basic skills to live as a game developer. This is the point where I would feel confident enough to apply to developer jobs at game studios. That far off dream is what gives me the energy to come home after work each day and program for another three to five hours.

I plan on documenting the entire process of reaching for these goals here, on this blog. As I go along I expect that I'll be writing posts about me learning things pertaining to design of a game overall, level design, making sprites (I'm a very poor artist) and debugging. As I release each milestone, I'll be posting about feedback I get and how I intend to incorporate those suggestions/criticisms into the engine. I'll also be taking breaks from programming sometimes to post here about past games I've made (successfully finished ones and maybe a post about the ones that were not so successful), if only to document my past failings and maybe learn something from them. I'll probably start that sometime in the next few weeks depending on how busy I get.