I hope you brought a toothbrush ...
Intro
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I feel I must introduce myself and the point of this ongoing project, so please indulge me in a little text heavy post for my first installment.
This journal will follow my progress in designing, writing and selling a game via shareware. It is hoped that it may encourage others who are similarly handicapped with apathy, insecurity and a near fanatical inability to finish what they start.
I will be sharing everything, from design through to selling the game via shareware. I will make public the sales figures (if any), profit (if any), and all expenses incurred to give a realistic picture of the whole process. I shall include links to all my research and examples, and I'm sure the more competent among you will be begged to help where possible ('specially if you can create sprites/tiles/graphics of any type).
This journal is in real time - the game does not exist yet, nor has it made it past the design stage.
"Gamemaker to the left of him,
Darkbasic to the right of him,
into the valley of Blitz goes Squiffy."
A Squiffology Of A Gamemaker, Part 1
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I Don't Do Games
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As a reasonably experienced programmer in the non-gaming world (or Muggle world), I've always wanted to "do games" but could never be bothered enough to actually start. I have many scribble pads full of ideas but none made it to code. The reasons? Choose any or all of: too much hard work to get the graphics done, won't be fast enough, will take too long, you need assembler to really get the job done,
Holy Grail
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What I needed was all the hard work done for me, so I asked around. I was briefly introduced to the Gollop brothers through a collegue of mine, just before Mythos Games went down the swanney. I then spoke to some friends of mine who, like me, had had some early games experience in the heady days of Vic20's and BBC Micros writing BASIC (and a little 6502) "half-games". Result? No chance, forget about it, too hard.
The Darkness
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I have no idea how I came across DarkBasic. It must have been a Google search or something; heaven only knows what I was looking for for that to pop up. I read it, re-read it, checked my heart rate, read it again, and saw the end of the tunnel with a neat outer-glow effect. I downloaded the demo, went to buy the whole thing, and found that I couldn't get an electronic copy of it, only a CD. For whatever reason possessed me, I couldn't be bothered to order it and wait for the CD, so I started to look for similar products.
The Lightness
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I found BlitzBasic and Gamemaker. I bought both online, downloaded them, and started to muck around. Gamemaker got me excited, as I very quickly put together some ideas and could try them out. Gamemaker then got me very frustrated - I knew how to code what I wanted to do (and to be fair Gamemaker does let you code if you want to) but I found it a little uninstinctive, and to be honest I got almost no satisfaction from using it. I'm a programmer, dammit! It took me a number of months to actually unpack my BlitzBasic & BlitzPlus downloads, and between then and now I have actually been able to purchase and download DarkBasic Pro.
You Are The Choices You Make
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It's hard to explain why, but I get a nicer feeling with BlitzBasic, even though I'm sure the differences with DB are subjective. I will probably give it a proper go at some point, and I will probably write a complete game with Gamemaker in the future, but for now I have done something unique for me - I have made a decision! BlitzBasic it is. BlitzBasic it shall be. Anyway, it'll be nice to tell the grandparents that I too have experienced a Blitz....
Next, please!
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There's the background, the next issue (due Sunday night) will explain my choice of game style.
Squiffy.
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A Squiffology Of A Gamemaker, Part 2
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In this the second installment of my game journal, I discuss the type of game I shall be creating. And it's a day early...
To Kill A Mocking Sprite
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I nearly wet myself the first time I played Quake. The fun I had nailgunning a "person" in accounts on our office Quake server that I set up is hard to convey in a courier font. The cries of "good shot" - or something like that - from a dismembered loser were like a 100 piece orchestra playing music for angels. I was, like many others, to become a digital serial killer and proud of it. I could imagine no other type of game that I would produce - it would be a networked slaughterfest.
I May Be Indecisive
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I read in an article I unfortunately cannot find again, that most successful shareware games are puzzles or cutesy games played by women aged 30-40 while at work, and that they must have a complete game cycle capable of being run inside 15 minutes. This allows them to jump in and out as the boss leaves and returns.
List Off My Face
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So, now I had a game style forming in my head. It was time to list the project objectives:
1. Main Objective
To design, write and sell a game through shareware. Success of shareware model being the prime goal.
2. Game Style
Cutely drawn, colourful puzzle game, windowed for easy hiding, pausable, simple, single player and challenge-a-friend 2-person multiplayer. Controls must be as simple as possible using just the mouse.
3. Game Language
Blitz3D chosen over BlitzPlus purely because I think that more cutesy effects could be achieved. This is rather tenuous, as I have not used either in anger.
One Girls Puzzle Is Anothers Tedium
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So, what sort of puzzles? Wordgames are the obvious choice, followed closely by "turn the bricks over to match the doobries". Both done to death. I used to enjoy The Incredible Machine. It was simple, fun, and there were usually a number of different ways to solve the problem. The game design was good in that it defined a number of rules based around gravity, motors and the like, and how they all interacted with each other, then it left you to play with these to solve the levels. I wanted something like this.
"Water, water everywhere..."
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Coorrae posted an article headed "Super Water Simulator 2D" with a snippet of code that I thought was wonderful. That's it, I thought, the timing element of the puzzle will be something filling up with water, and you, the player, having to do something before whatever it was that was filling up filled up (!?). Ideas are baths, barrels, swimming pools, rooms. Possibilities were numerous, and the water model in the example was the simple rule I was looking for. Water flows wherever it can. It could be that you have to keep the water below a certain level for a certain time. It could be you have to plug the leaks for the water to reach a certain level.
That's Settled Then
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I just need to decide what will fill up with/drain out of water, and what the player(s) have to do to encourage or stop it. Please feel free to post ideas.
Please Sir...
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...more to follow as soon as I have the game plan laid out, but I will post by Wednesday night at the latest.
Squiffs.
A Squiffology Of A Gamemaker, Part 3
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The first hiccup!
That's Rubbish!
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Ok, this part 3 is not the original one. That's going to become part 4 as the body of it must change. Reason? I had a crisis of confidence in my game design.
Was A Good Idea, Though
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The water particle flowing thinggy doobrey whatsit gave me lots of ideas, but I became set on using it in the game itself. The problem was that all the games I could think of did not benefit from such a routine, and I was writing the game around it, not fitting a good routine into a good game design.
So What CAN I Do?
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I came up with a name for my games company - Bottlefed Productions. For those who don't know (and why should you?), my wife to be, Tessa, has just given birth to twins. The association should be obvious...
Also, I started to wonder if there would be any elements of this game that would be common to all games that I would produce in the future. I think there are. Here's my thoughts:
1. Splash Screen
When you first fire up the game, I wanted the production company name to appear with a little animation. Long enough to say "it's my game", but short enough to avoid becoming an irritation. Mine is going to be a fade-in minimalist outline drawing of a baby's bottle, a brief animation of the teat flexing as if being sucked by an invisible baby accompanied by a Maggie Simpson style sucking noise, followed by a brief baby giggle. The whole thing should last a max of 4 seconds.
2. Loading Screen
During any extended loading periods over x seconds, something to focus on rather than the hourglass cursor. Mine will be a game specific background with a superimposed baby's bottle filling up with milk as the progress bar.
3. Main Menu
The options may change and the background graphics too, but the way the menu is displayed could be consistent. My idea is to have the words Main Menu shoot in from the left off screen and come to a sudden stop in the centre-top and wobble a bit. There will then be an explosion in the middle of the screen which, when it clears, will reveal the menu options (New Game, etc.). This whole process will be over in about a second or so, as again it mustn't get too annoying in terms of delay.
4. Set Up For Computer
This includes graphics mode (640/480, windowed/full screen, DirectX/OpenGL, detail level etc.), sound on/off, whatever else. No idea how to present this menu yet, although I think all the sub-menus (especially the functional ones such as this) should probably be gimmick free.
In Conclusion For This Episode
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Don't persevere with an idea if it proves to be no good. Not at this stage anyway. We are still designing the game, so changes here are not only essential, they're the cheapest place to make them. If you start to make serious design changes when coding purely because you don't like the idea anymore and not because you have an insoluble problem, that is going to be expensive. Also, when you hit a brick wall with one aspect, look at something else that you can do to break the impasse.
Squiffs.
For a printable copy of this article, please click HERE.