Tag: games

Caaargh Game Development Blog #1

I’m making a game called Caaargh, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about the development as I go along. This is the first blog post to get that ball rolling.

Caaargh is inspired by one of my favourite games from my childhood, Micro Machines Turbo Tournament. In particular the experience of playing a four-player race, where the winner drives right up against the leading edge of the screen and gets very limited visibility of the track ahead.

In Micro Machines, the difficulty this limited camera view caused the leader created a beautiful balance mechanic that made multiplayer games so tense and exciting, especially when combined with the crazy tracks with plenty of places to crash if you forgot about an upcoming corner.

If you’re not familiar with Micro Machines, it’s worth watching a recording of a four player race see how this works.

After playing a lot of Micro Machines, you eventually race the tracks by memory. You remember what turn is coming up after the spilled cereal or the red cue ball, and you begin to steer before you even see it so that you can take the corner at full speed.

It is this second implication of the limited camera view that I wanted to play with as the core mechanic for Caaargh.

In Caaargh, the tracks become a series of memory puzzles. A bit like that kids toy game Simon, with the primary colours. But instead of remembering a series of colours, you have to remember a series of corners. And instead of pressing you buttons you have to steer the car.

Playing this way is also a bit like racing a rally car without a co-driver.

I’ve been working on this game on and off for a few months now and I think I’ve tested enough of the concepts to want to push this through to be a real game. So as I do I’ll try and write something on this blog at least every couple of weeks.

The latest news (for those people who’ve seen a bit of this story on Twitter already) is that I’ve decided to target mobile for the initial game release.

In the long-run I’m really interested in making this a co-operative local multiplayer game for PC and console as I think there are some interesting dynamics that will come from the mechanics that I have planned in a co-op setting. But I can also see a much quicker route to completing a nice single player version of the game that would be well suited to mobile. So that’s what I’m working on now.

This week I’ve been getting placeholder screens in places to manage the player flow from title screen, to level select, to level results screen etc. These are not visually interesting to share at this stage, but I feel good seeing the prototype turning into something that feels more like a real product.

That’s it for today.

Also, you should sign-up for my newsletter about my game design projects here.

Concept Game – Simple Evolutionary Model

I’ve spent enough time on this now to submit it, even if it’s still a bit rough around the edges. I’ve included a bit of a write up below. This demo will run best in Chrome or Opera. Click to play.

I’ve built a simple ‘game’ called Digital Husbandry. It’s more of a time killer as it doesn’t have any serious game mechanics, but there is a visual reward to keep the user engaged.

It’s based on the idea of simulating progressive evolution through selective breeding. Much as generations of farmers have done with livestock. The player brings together critters on the screen based on visual qualities that appeal to them, and produces offspring that drive the overall appearance of the group closer to those qualities selected by the player. The ‘critters’ die when they reach the ‘deadzone’ at the bottom of the screen, freeing up space for new critters in the population. So choosing which critters to sacrifice is as important as choosing which ones to breed.

The critters are recursively drawn from a simplified ‘genetic’ code. This allows the game to have millions of possible variations of critters, and the longer you play, the more varied the critters will appear.

I ‘composed’ some music in http://www.beepbox.co (which is a hugely fun distraction from fixing bugs in code). The music gets more layered and complex in line with the number of critters in the population. The audio tracks aren’t perfectly synced, but I’m happy enough with the effect for now.

NOTE: I ran into problems publishing the sketch with audio and I’ve run out of time to do any more work on this, so I’ve had to submit this version without sound.

A quick review of the Coursera Creative Programming Course, and using Processing for this kind work:

  • It was nice to write some code that isn’t about capturing web form data or sanitizing user input!
  • The format of the course, and the challenge I set myself were a good way to revise some of the classic programming concepts I don’t actually have to use much these days
  • I was jumping between Java and JavaScript quite a bit – which is a good study exercise, especially when porting code from one to the other. My basic Java knowledge is rustier than I thought, but I got there in the end.
  • Processing isn’t quite right (yet) to take a project like this and polish it into a publishable product (which is partly why I haven’t worried too much about the finer details of this ‘game’)
  • Processing is excellent for teaching creative programming
  • It was a shame to loose the sound, I had a slightly mental retro game tune going by the end. This was the base tune, which built in complexity with each additional critter.
  • I wouldn’t want to put this project through a code review! But it does the job for this assignment.

 

Critters Sketch in Processing

If your browser is up to scratch, here’s a little JavaScript based sketch from a current personal project…


This is some early code for a simple game I’m working on for the Coursera Creative Programming course (it’s my first time building a game rather than regular software).

These shapes are generated from a limited range of numbers, which can later be turned into a simple genetic code to define these critters.

I’ve hosted this on OpenProcessing.org, so you can get to the source-code etc.

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/103410