Game Design 0.3

*Note: I'll just start organizing all of these posts like this.

So this week we had to make Portal 2 levels. Since we were working on it in our GDW groups, we split up the requirements. I was in charge of making sure that the level had turrets that would be pushed into goo, two different types of gel and a T flip flop (more about this later). Sadly, I had booked a dentist appointment for the day of the presentation (I thought we would be presenting in our tutorial, not in class) and will get no marks for this. Still, that's ok. It's one assignment and, well, I would have lost marks for my group had I spoken in front of the class.

Public speaking is not my forte; nor has it ever been my forte. To give you an idea of just how poorly and awkwardly I express my ideas before a crowd, I shall give you an example. On my report card for grade 6 or 7 or 8 I clearly remember getting a 62% in Drama/Public Speaking, a 56% in Gym and 85-95% in pretty much everything else. But I guess that's why I chose game dev. I thought I would sit in a tiny, enclosed space devoid of windows where I would work all day and not need to interact with other humans except for the ones which I manage to not be awkward around (my friends).

Unfortunately, as every member of Squabble studios pointed out to my friend who said MIGS would not be worth going to due to the exorbitant costs, "You need to know people to get anywhere in the industry". I have also heard this said by many other, more experienced people. If this is the case though, it saddens me, for that means that a man is not judged by the skill with which he manages memory and produces magic from lines of code, but by his ability to socialize with other humans; a skill which is based mainly on talent and does not help in communicating with computers at all. If that is true, then perhaps I should give up trying to become a better programmer and artist, then buy a house somewhere in the country and bake pies all day. I will not give up just yet though, and hope that someone will hire me based on the things that I can do well.

Even though I will not get a mark for the Portal level I made, I still had to make it, which took some time. The thing that caused me the most problems was the "T flip flop". At first I though, wtf is a T flip flop? I searched it on Wikipedia, which showed me diagrams of electrical circuits that were way beyond my knowledge. So I asked my mother (she has a degree in Electrical Engineering. So does my father, but he was harder to get a hold of that day) because I thought that she might know. In fact, she did know.

My T flip flop gate in Portal

A T flip flop consists of one input, one output, and a clock of some sort. Imagine it like a black box with      a button attached to it at one end, and a light bulb, door, insert object here, attached to the other. When the button is pressed, the clock ticks. As the clock ticks, the light bulb, door, or insert object changes state (so if the light is off, it will turn on; if the door is closed it will open) and does so over and over. So each time the clock ticks the light turns off, then back on again then off again. The clock stops when the button is no longer pressed. Everything stops moving and changing when you step off the button. This means is the light was on when you stepped off the button, it will stay on. If it was off, it will stay off. That is a T flip flop gate.

Here is the very helpful picture of it on Wikipedia

Engines 0.2: I Hate Distractions

Ok, so we have our GDW teams all set and our game idea worked out. We have everything we need to get started on making a game. We have so little time and all I want to do is sit there for hours every day working on it. But I can't. I have classes and assignments which don't pertain to GDW and this saddens me a little. It breaks my focus and makes me much less efficient. It also takes time to complete assignments. Precious time I could be putting into working on the game.

Lectures aren't a bad thing. You can learn so much just by listening. I just find that I am much less productive during the school year than during the summer. There were few people in the lab in the summer, giving me a nice, dark, quiet place to work. And there was no reason to leave, so I could stay as long as need be. Walking from class to class, then having to get settled all over again, searching for somewhere ideal to work, and taking time to do assignments slows down our game production.

Another problem is the way my brain works. I keep a list of the things I need to do in a .txt file in my head. Unfortunately, I have to constantly keep it open so that I can see it. This takes away RAM from my daily tasks. The longer the list, the less RAM there is for me to put to use actually doing the work (my mind does not do very well with multi-threading so I have to pretty much just do one task at a time). If I have to focus my attention on 5 different assignments, keep track of when they are all due and what I should be working on, while still remembering to complete ......the Game Engines homework questions, I lose my train of thought (just like I did back there, while writing this sentence).

It would be so nice to methodically take each task and use my entire CPU power to complete it, then delete it from my mental list and move on to the next task. Unfortunately, this is a luxury we do not have. The closest we can get to this is spending all Saturdays and Sundays in front of a computer, working undisturbed.

Our games could be so much better if we just sat and worked on them all day every day. Sadly, we still have much to learn so we have to send most of our time learning how to better make games instead of actually making them.

Game Engines, Summed up by Memebase

Why I Think My Game Idea Sucks

One of my friends posted this http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_221/6582-Why-Your-Game-Idea-Sucks and I instantly thought "YES! Thank you! Someone actually said this!" Now, I'm not hating on everyone's game ideas, I just think people get too attached to their idea and refuse to start making it until they know it will turn out to be exactly what they want it to be. This causes them to wait, and wait and wait, for the AAA producer and the programming team that made their favorite childhood games to come along and make their game. But this has almost no chance of happening in the real world, and their brilliant game idea never gets made. This is why I've given up on thinking about the best, most innovative, meaningful game I'd want to make. It's just never going to get made.

As our first year Creative Writing professor said "You have to kill your babies". By this,she meant that no matter how great your idea is, it may not be good or plausible in the real world. Think of it this way; even if you are the lead designer at your own studio, your team may not be skilled enough to bring your dream to life. And unless you are a mufti-millionaire you will not be able to afford the best and brightest in the industry.

That's why "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself". Actually, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself, and while you do that, realize that there are some things you can and cannot do. The best way to make your brilliant game idea into a game is to start making it yourself. Don't wait for the planets to align and floods and plagues to take out the people who are in the job-positions of your dreams. Just get programming and make your game. Then you know for sure that it will get done (if you work till it's done and don't quit). You can even get a small team together to help you if you have the funds. But know that it will not be easy. Know that it may not turn out exactly how you'd dreamed, and learn to accept this.

People see things like "Indie Game, The Movie" and think "oh jeez that sounds hard, but they made it big so I can too". I don't think it works that way though. Take a moment and think about all of the people around you who would like to try to make their own studios and games. Now think of the indie developers in the industry that have made it big. There don't seem to be very many compared to the people that must try to make games. They think "Oh, it's easy and fun. I can totally make millions". There are so many things that could go wrong and so many obstacles one must face to make a good, successful game that gets published and widely distributed. The odds seem incredibly low.

That's why I don't particularly care what games I make for GDW, because all I want to do is make a game. That's why I'm here. It doesn't matter if it's a first person horror game or a maze game or a space shooter. It doesn't matter. Art assets need to be made, levels need to be designed, and most of all, the engine must be programmed and scripted. That's what I'm here for; and I know our game won't turn out perfect.

Engines 0.1

This is my first thought about TwoLoc. 

 

I'll bet Dan and Saad are smirking about it in the Grad Lab. But seriously, I feel like the errors in TwoLoc are much different than anything I'm used to encountering. I'm used to errors in my own logic, bad syntax, and vectors being out of range. Now I run into linker errors, and weird include errors that I have little to no idea how to deal with. 

I have to admit, when we first received the engine I didn't want to touch it. I thought if I would so much as write a comment, everything would explode in my face. TwoLoc is a three-headed beast; one is Ogre, one Havok, and the third is a much larger head, with monstrous arms and legs, that seemed to have absorbed the  other two (please don't take this offensively, I just see it as something that I have to gut so that I may rearrange its innards). Now I've never slayed a three-headed beast, so I didn't really know where to start. Actually, I was completely lost and thought it would take me till the end of the semester just to get one easy question.

Luckily, Harry always finds a way to make me feel like I can do stuff that I never thought I could do. And that's what he did.  He gave me a sword to slay the beast (he convinced me I could do it if I tried), so I started stabbing at it. I stabbed away, and now I almost have a question to show. The Ogre tutorials help a lot too. They tell you where to sab to cause the most damage. 

I feel like at least now I'm not terrified of TwoLoc anymore. And that's a good thing, because there are a lot of questions plus a game to make. 

Bad Design (and Horrible Menus)

I'd like to start by saying sorry for this rant. It's no way to start a blog and I don't even know if it counts towards marks for Game Design or if it's too early for that. It is about design though. About how I hate the new design trends and how they make my life horrible and impossible.

Ok, maybe it's not that bad. But if it takes me more than 10 minutes to figure out how to find my program files then I will get quite frustrated. Unfortunately that's the direction that design seems to be favouring these days. I make myself sound old by remembering the good 'ol days of Windos 95, 98 and XP. Those were much simpler times. Everything you wanted was right there, labelled and organized...in a list....that you could read. Everything had a place in memory and a path that was clearly traced to it. Now, I may be biased because I grew up with these operating systems and know them well, but everything was so linear and straight. You had to dig through folders sometimes, but the search option was always there.

Nowadays everything is pictures and colours. Everyone tries to make things flashier, shinier, "more intuitive" and easier to use but to me it just seems more and more jumbled and bloated and uselessly complicated. Take, for instance, Microsoft Word 2010. The bar at the top is huge, which means I can see less of what I'm typing. Everything on the top bar is pictures! Pictures! I don't read hieroglyphs. I read words. Words make sense to me. A box with squigley lines could be anything. And figuring out what the pictures mean takes far, far longer than reading. And you might say "well I know what the pictures mean so it's easy for me". Yes, you've memorized pictures. Good job. You've also wasted a lot of time and if you don't use Word for a while you'd have to re-learn all of the pictures again. UGH!

The worst menus though, are organized in a table, which makes it so much harder to find something. Is it organized alphabetically horizontally or vertically? Who knows? Maybe it's just randomized and different each time. Because every busy person loves playing that game when you have to match pictures.

Then they made that abomination called Windows 8. As if the Mac OS wasn't hard enough to navigate. I once spent half an hour trying to scan something in the school computer lab because the Mac just saved my files in a random place that I couldn't find. I had no idea what picture to click on for "default file location". That's a pretty abstract concept. I challenge you to draw a picture that describes that to someone.

But I guess this course is teaching us design for games, not operating systems. Games are different. You start a game expecting it to be flashy. You expect to have to explore its intricacies and not know everything right away. No one gets on their computer and thinks "Well, I'm bored. Time to explore the workings of my operating system and find where my word processor ran off to. And maybe I'll sit here and admire the shiny buttons for 10 minutes".

That being said, games should also have interfaces where it's easy to find what you are looking for. No one wants to sit there for hours trying to find how to switch the weapons in their inventory or buy an upgrade for their character. At the same time though, it does look nice if things are flashy as I'm in no rush to put down my game, and besides, it's nice to explore a little sometimes.

One notable problem I've had with games is that I could not figure out the controls. I would press every button on the keyboard and not find what does what (*cough* Limbo *cough*). All games should at least have some sort of place in their menu where they state their controls if they do not teach you how to do things. Also, if the HUD is not very clear, or the inventory is hard to find, their locations and purposes should be stated somewhere or taught interactively.

Interactive tutorial levels are pretty awesome, or at least I think so. I'm glad they take my hand and walk me through everything before they throw me in with all of the pros that have been playing the game non-stop for eons. As long as it's kept short (or optional) for the people who know what they're doing, it helps greatly.

I guess I don't always realize how important design is. It can mean the difference between someone buying your software or not - and the difference between someone buying your game and recommending it to someone or smashing it to pieces in frustration.