<3 Farbs

Apologies for the mic – it was supposed to sound space-radio-transmissiony, but got a little garbled in the process. What do people think – do you want more of these, or would you rather I went back to regular ol’ blogging?

<3 Farbs

There’s a lot in development at the moment, including:

• Asteroid field surrounding start location (pictured) – I like sneaking out through its protective barrier at the start of each play, but the hundredth time it got a little repetitive. I had to speed the command module up a little to compensate. I’d love to see more formations like this across the map, and expect to spend lots of time figuring out how to generate them.
• Ingame email – currently functional but ugly
• Paying for oxygen – right now it’s free, which means you can go a long way without touching the economy. I want to try this out and see how it goes.
• Proper death sequence – I’m still using the Nemesis/Narcissus/Eris sequence, however the ships you fly in Jameson are normal civilian craft so they shouldn’t explode quite so spectacularly.
• Placeholder Quest Zones – spaces in the map that you need to visit to finish the game
• Emergency Beacons… are how you find the quest zones
• Bugs – are few but annoying.
• In-game Instructions – are necessary because…

…I’m about to submit the CF series for the Freeplay Awards. It’s funny how much gets done a day or two before a deadline

<3 Farbs

My attempt to finish Captain Jameson’s bounty system wandered further off track when I realized that ol’ Captain Clippy would also need to store and retrieve messages. What’s more, lengthy text fields really don’t belong on the main game screen anymore. I need to put this in the terminal window. I ditched Clippy and started building a simple mail system for the game. It’s functional at the moment, but it needs things like message notifications and new-message counts before it’ll be of any use. This led me to work on arguably the most critical part of the system – the notification beep.

I can’t just use a single beep or it’ll get lost among the general interface noise. No, I need to play a 3-4 note sting. It’s surprising how expressive these can be. Depending on which scale you use you can create something despondent, triumphant, alarming, or discordant. The difference between your first and last notes can suggest that something has finished, or that something is still in motion. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll have to leave music theory study ’till I’ve finished the game.

I ended up picking out a 0-5-7-12-7 pattern, since the first four notes neatly congratulate the player (“You completed a goal!”), and the last implies unfinished action (“Go read your email!”). I was about to blutack a microphone to my PC speaker (Yes, this is how I make Captain Forever’s beeps) when I realized why the tune held such appeal. I was pretty sure it was from Gradius. In fact, it reminded me of the tune played whenever you drop a credit into the machine. “Congratulations on your purchase! Your game is about to start!”. You can hear it in the youtube clip here. Luckily they turned out to be slightly different, so my version should be okay. Heck, after the thousandth time I hear it I might drop the second and third notes anyway.

<3 Farbs

Yesterday I continued my quest to compound complexity, this time creating Captain Jameson’s bounty mechanic. Currently it just gives you credits for defeating designated ships, but over the next few days I plan to add LAW stations, bounty maps, and possibly even police vehicles. First however I need to add some player feedback, and for that I must resurrect Captain Clippy. What I need is a way to notify the player when they receive a bounty. I considered using the COM line at the bottom left of the screen, but chances are they’ll miss it. No, I need to put this message front and center.

Captain Clippy is a player feedback system I added to Captain Forever some time after launch. I realized that many new players weren’t reading the flight manual, HLP hud lines, or pause screen command reference, and that the only way to teach them to play was to spam instructions across the middle of the screen. I needed them to last for a minimum time (regardless of player clicking), and for fun I added a variable delay to simulate human response/typing time and the ability to refer to the player by name. Now it seems this system, named after the world’s least loved paperclip, would be perfect for passing messages from non-player characters. I’ll port it over today.

Meanwhile, Indie Kombat maintains pace. With two and a half weeks remaining I’ve built a surprisingly difficult mashup of Fishie Fishie and SYNSO: Squid Harder, and Rob has built… a slot machine? Or something? I’m really not sure.

<3 Farbs

Captain Jameson received asteroid fields today, and I wasn’t immediately sure what they should look like. I started with the bright chalky colours shown in the middle of the picture here, but they just look right. Next I tried asteroids that look like, well, Asteroids, but surprisingly they didn’t fit either. I eventually settled with the style shown in the bottom right. It seemed weird drawing part of a CF game without a bright glowy border, but I think it fits quite well and suggests (correctly) that the asteroids are a background element.

Tomorrow I’ll make the asteroids spawn in interesting patterns. Right now they’re just sprayed randomly across the map.

<3 Farbs

Thanks everyone for your comments on the last post. You folks posted a lot of useful stuff up there. Ben’s suggestions were particularly inspiring, but what really lodged itself in my brain was Vaconcovat’s comment about scrap hauling. The scrapper stations are relatively simple game systems, but because they interact with several other game systems they invoke complex and interesting player behaviour. In a few minutes of Captain Jameson I might do the following:

1. Decide to explore further along bearing 90 from 0,0 (go right)
2. Log in to the nearest nav station, and notice that I would need to cross a large gap between oxy stations
3. Visit a recently reactivated factory that manufactures Charlie class Mk II Boosters (which should provide enough thrust to get me across the oxy gap)
4. Realize I have insufficient credit
5. Reconnect with the nav station, and this time bring up a list of ships in the area
6. Identify, track down, and destroy a couple of hostile ships
7. Rebuild my ship using the newly earned modules, configuring it for fast movement because my oxy is running low
8. Crawl back to the second nearest oxy station, because it’s closer to the scrapper station I’m ultimately aiming to visit. I begin to doubt my decision as oxy hits 2%, but I make it there in time.
9. Visit scrap station and get a quote for my wares. The quote is very low because some of the modules were damaged in the fight.
10. Sell the undamaged modules and rebuild my ship out of damaged parts
11. Take the damaged modules to a nearby repair station, and spend the credits earned in step 10 repairing them
12. Return to the scrap station and sell of newly repaired parts
13. Refill oxy
14. Return to the factory and purchase a shiny new Mk II thruster
15. Bolt the thruster to the back of my ship and zoom off into the unknown

It’s not a great story. There are no characters, there is hardly any plot, and it says bugger all about the human condition – but it’s a start. You’ll also notice a huge hole in point 1 – why go East? In fact, why go anywhere? This was the question that got me caught up in this stuff, but I think it was a mistake to try to answer it while also addressing generative narrative issues. I’m going to try treating them as separate problems for now and see where that leads me.

I’ll add asteroid fields on Monday.

<3 Farbs

(image source)

My brain’s in a knot. Any way I push or pull it draws the knot tighter, leaving me ever less capable of unravelling. Here’s how it happened:

Captain Jameson, in its current form, is fun. It’s fun to explore the galaxy, hopping from station to station and nav point to nav point, picking a path between laser beams and oblivion. Unfortunately, this exploration doesn’t serve any purpose. I usually invent my own goal by setting off in an arbitrary direction, but for most players that isn’t enough. People need a reason to journey into the black. Initially I thought the problem trivial, and I set out to build a quest system. I figured it’d take a few hours. All I’d need to do is create a station visible from a long way off and tell the player to go there. I haven’t done it yet.

The reason I haven’t built this system is that I’m not sure I should. I want Jameson to have procedurally generated quests, so that each time I start a new world I have new things to discover. Unfortunately every generated quest I’ve ever seen in a game they have been utterly, utterly dull.

“Hi! My name is charactername. I need your help! Please deliver itemname from placename and I will reward you with lootname. Thanks!”

No thanks. This led me to think about generated narrative content, about which there are many articles suggesting it should be possible, and very few examples of it working in any way. Most of the articles focussed on the Hero’s Journey, otherwise referred to as the Monomyth. Here’s an overview:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” – Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The idea is that most myths follow this template, with other elements (such as supernatural guides, vision quests, death and rebirth) often contributing to the tale. Working from this formula it seems trivial to automate the process of building a good narrative, but despite all the talk nobody seems to have managed it. Thinking more, I’m not even sure I’d want to do this. After all, this formula is tailored to non-interactive storytelling. I’m sure there’s a lot I could learn from it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to just dump it into a game and assume it’ll work. No, I think I need to understand how and why it works, then consider how that effects the design of interactive systems.

Now all I need to do is learn narrative design, discover some incredible way to make it procedural and interactive, and code it. People have been trying this for years without success, so my expectations are extremely low. Still, I have a giddy feeling about it so I won’t give up just yet.

<3; Farbs

I keep accidentally typing indiedrome

Yesterday I launched IndieKombat, a site dedicated to one-on-one game development contests. The first bout was announced like so:

Enraged by Fearon‘s recent Twitter attacks, superstar game developer and current INDIEDOME champion Farbs issued the following challenge:

“Die, fcker!”

We asked Farbs’ public relations manager for further clarification.

“Farbs statement clearly embodies the issuance of challenge, whereby both parties (Fearon and McFarbs) are bound to Indie Kombat. Both parties may spend up to one (1) hour per working day between the date of issue and the date four weeks thereafter developing a single video game, built from pre-existing video game components. In this particular case both parties may draw upon source material from the Fishie Fishie and SYNSO series. Once both games achieve public release the contest enters a voting phase, lasting no longer than one (1) week. Interested parties are invited to submit votes for the most deserving game. The winner is to be the developer of whichever game receives the most votes. The loser is to carry the forfeit of the name Fearon.”

Farbs’ Fishie Vs SYNSO is now hotly anticipated, with Fearon’s SYNSO vs Fishie drawing early criticism for its cumbersome title.

IndieKombat also includes a small hot-or-not style minigame, whereby you can help determine which indie dev is the indiest and even measure your own indiehood. Much <3 goes to the TIGDb project for making this possible.

Captain Jameson development resumes now. Today I’m planning quest structures.

<3 Farbs