Caught the game developer choice awards last night, thank you facebook for reminding me. Journey took home some many awards, top props to the team and all of the other phenomenal nominee's. Last year was pretty fantastic for games and 2013 is somehow shaping up to be even better with the recent release of Bioshock Infinite (its soooo good).
And while I would really like to be playing that right now, I am pretty excited to be working on Pathogen at the moment because I just added a new game mode, Capture Zone. These zones, painted onto the gameboard in the map editor, will help to generate some fierce competition in the early moments of the game. Here is the way they work, after 10 rounds the zones become claimed. Any cells within the boundaries of the zone are instantly promoted to a t4 solid cell of that player. If there happens to be an empty space it becomes a grey t4 cell piece. Should a player take over the whole zone before the 10 turns are up, that zone will be claimed early.
I got the code in yesterday for dynamically distinguishing zones from one another, which means there can be any number of zones painted on the game board. Better yet player will be able to create their own control zone maps because its so easy to make them.
Today I want to get it working, which hopefully wont be too difficult.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Wednesday Already?
Whoa, the week is going fast.
Marguerite called the other night and said that the meeting she had went well! Which is super awesome, we potentially have some options on the table now which is refreshing. Shes is going to be hanging around the expo hall and SF area until tomorrow trying to see if there is anyone else interested.
Got a basic tutorial all wrapped up, was not nearly as hard as i thought it would be. Once Matt has a simple Ai I want to throw it in front of people to see what needs to change. Until that point I think I'm going to keep hammering away at the first round of campaign missions, get a general order resolved.
Marguerite called the other night and said that the meeting she had went well! Which is super awesome, we potentially have some options on the table now which is refreshing. Shes is going to be hanging around the expo hall and SF area until tomorrow trying to see if there is anyone else interested.
Got a basic tutorial all wrapped up, was not nearly as hard as i thought it would be. Once Matt has a simple Ai I want to throw it in front of people to see what needs to change. Until that point I think I'm going to keep hammering away at the first round of campaign missions, get a general order resolved.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Framework
This week is about laying the ground work for the next two months. As I said in my last post, Matt has been working on the AI.
I'm setting up the campaign structure for the single player at the moment. How many levels are there? (roughly) how does unlocking the next one work? How are the animations going to be handled? Layout of the single player levels, etc.
I'm going to be nailing down the tutorial as well, which consists of four missions that each focus on introducing a new cell to the player. tweaked the map editor to have a dev save again so that i can save out the mapdata and copy it into the campaign levels, making those levels super easy to build. At the moment we are thinking around 25 levels. Throughout the single player game experience we will be introducing new game modes that will also become available to local play.
Thank you to all of our testers who have been reporting bugs, i'm going to deal with those at some point in time. I really need to update the web build to be the same version as the iPad build so that i am not getting confused about if the bug still exists or not.
I'm setting up the campaign structure for the single player at the moment. How many levels are there? (roughly) how does unlocking the next one work? How are the animations going to be handled? Layout of the single player levels, etc.
I'm going to be nailing down the tutorial as well, which consists of four missions that each focus on introducing a new cell to the player. tweaked the map editor to have a dev save again so that i can save out the mapdata and copy it into the campaign levels, making those levels super easy to build. At the moment we are thinking around 25 levels. Throughout the single player game experience we will be introducing new game modes that will also become available to local play.
Thank you to all of our testers who have been reporting bugs, i'm going to deal with those at some point in time. I really need to update the web build to be the same version as the iPad build so that i am not getting confused about if the bug still exists or not.
Friday, March 22, 2013
AI
Matt is about to take those first small steps into creating an AI for Pathogen. We know that its going to be a pretty big challenge, but you've got to start somewhere. A month or two ago Matt sat down with the AI professor at Champlain and got some good notes on how to go about it.
The key is to have the AI play through multiple scenario's and pick the "best choice" as their move. In order to do so, Matt will be building a function that will do a virtual player turn. The AI will assign a point value to each cell on the board and add those together for a total. After completing multiple turns the AI will compare the results and choose its turn.
I have been working on a variety of mock-up's for what other features that I have yet to implement. Planning for the future like that helps in the long run, functionality wise as well as a list of assets. We are headed back to JDK this afternoon, its been a while since they have seen the game so it should be pretty interesting to see their reaction.
The key is to have the AI play through multiple scenario's and pick the "best choice" as their move. In order to do so, Matt will be building a function that will do a virtual player turn. The AI will assign a point value to each cell on the board and add those together for a total. After completing multiple turns the AI will compare the results and choose its turn.
I have been working on a variety of mock-up's for what other features that I have yet to implement. Planning for the future like that helps in the long run, functionality wise as well as a list of assets. We are headed back to JDK this afternoon, its been a while since they have seen the game so it should be pretty interesting to see their reaction.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Help has arrived
Matt is finally available to help me! And he jumped in to tackle sliding for the iPad. Its a usability thing, but goes a long way for iPad users because it is what they have grown to expect. So we will begin to integrate that functionality across the board. PC players will be able to use the scroll wheel and some of the arrow buttons (mostly the left & right ones).
Mike also gave some of this time yesterday and he is working on simplifying the save system in the editor as well as adding in the functionality for players to play their newly created map straight from the editor. As of this moment, they have to quit out of the editor and go through the game setup in order to do so.
I got a viewable ladder into the online game, so players can see where they stand in relation to all of the other players as well as their win/loss rates. Going to try to tackle public/private games as well. Right now everything is public, which means you cannot play only with your friends.
For those playing the online build you may have noticed that the background floating elements have been removed. Somehow we ran into additional efficiency problems with them... A large map was completely unplayable with them activated. So for the moment I killed the function, hopefully I will be able to find a way to put those back in without a problem.
Mike also gave some of this time yesterday and he is working on simplifying the save system in the editor as well as adding in the functionality for players to play their newly created map straight from the editor. As of this moment, they have to quit out of the editor and go through the game setup in order to do so.
I got a viewable ladder into the online game, so players can see where they stand in relation to all of the other players as well as their win/loss rates. Going to try to tackle public/private games as well. Right now everything is public, which means you cannot play only with your friends.
For those playing the online build you may have noticed that the background floating elements have been removed. Somehow we ran into additional efficiency problems with them... A large map was completely unplayable with them activated. So for the moment I killed the function, hopefully I will be able to find a way to put those back in without a problem.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Beta is Live!
A slew of minor changes got pushed into this update thanks to the work of our great testing base that came out on a Sunday afternoon and gave us two hours of their time. We had quite a range of players as well, from those who had no idea what they were doing to veteran testers. Even better the overwhelming response was very positive.
We have a bunch of pictures up on Facebook from the event and shot some video as well that Marguerite will be taking out with her for the whole GDC tour. Lots to do this week, mostly on the video editing side of things. A gameplay video has to come together, capturing footage is what I'm going to be doing this morning.
Started to have a discussion about the virus the other day as well, at the moment the one in game is placeholder but I think its going to be a little tough figuring out what exactly it should be/associated animations.
Fixes that came with yesterdays big content push include the following:
1. Undo button fix! You can no longer try to undo while undo is running!
2. Virus cool down has been increased by 2 on matches where there is > 2 people playing. I felt that as players reached the "end game" it became a seriously frustrating battle because viruses were being utilized everywhere and no one could gain any traction. By increasing the recharge rate to 8, the window of opportunity the virus presents is longer allowing for strategies to better employed.
3. Replay... So if you watched the replay and then tried to quit back out, the game would actually continue to keep playing itself out which caused some serious lag issues. Pretty easy fix thankfully. Still to come is keeping a snapshot of the end game and keeping all that information displayed even if you watch the replay. Currently the end game stats screen actually shows you the end state at the moment you quit viewing the replay, not for the actual end game.
4. Selector Tiles: Had a lot of people have to ask me if their selector tile was available or not. By just having the count-down bar visible, people naturally assumed that it was not available, when in reality it was and was actually working its way to netting the player a 2nd playing piece. What happens now is that countdown indicator appears directly next to the usable playing piece to avoid confusion.
5. Tie! You can now actually tie in a game now! For the longest time I thought i would have to do this long round-about way to figure out if a tie happened. Sat down and did it yesterday in 2 lines... Sometimes it just works out like that.
We have a bunch of pictures up on Facebook from the event and shot some video as well that Marguerite will be taking out with her for the whole GDC tour. Lots to do this week, mostly on the video editing side of things. A gameplay video has to come together, capturing footage is what I'm going to be doing this morning.
Started to have a discussion about the virus the other day as well, at the moment the one in game is placeholder but I think its going to be a little tough figuring out what exactly it should be/associated animations.
Fixes that came with yesterdays big content push include the following:
1. Undo button fix! You can no longer try to undo while undo is running!
2. Virus cool down has been increased by 2 on matches where there is > 2 people playing. I felt that as players reached the "end game" it became a seriously frustrating battle because viruses were being utilized everywhere and no one could gain any traction. By increasing the recharge rate to 8, the window of opportunity the virus presents is longer allowing for strategies to better employed.
3. Replay... So if you watched the replay and then tried to quit back out, the game would actually continue to keep playing itself out which caused some serious lag issues. Pretty easy fix thankfully. Still to come is keeping a snapshot of the end game and keeping all that information displayed even if you watch the replay. Currently the end game stats screen actually shows you the end state at the moment you quit viewing the replay, not for the actual end game.
4. Selector Tiles: Had a lot of people have to ask me if their selector tile was available or not. By just having the count-down bar visible, people naturally assumed that it was not available, when in reality it was and was actually working its way to netting the player a 2nd playing piece. What happens now is that countdown indicator appears directly next to the usable playing piece to avoid confusion.
5. Tie! You can now actually tie in a game now! For the longest time I thought i would have to do this long round-about way to figure out if a tie happened. Sat down and did it yesterday in 2 lines... Sometimes it just works out like that.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Almost at v1.03
Almost there... Going to try to get a build out by Friday, but we will see what happens. Online for the most part is cooperating. The biggest challenge is there are just so many menu screens and sections that need to be able to scroll and show additional information.
As of yesterday a new mode went in! TimedVS, has all players confined to a 20 sec time limit for their turns. More advanced options like setting that interval is planned of the future, its also missing the major indicator of when the timer hit 5,4,3,2,1 which should help player realize their turn is about to be skipped.
Oh, so we had a bit of a wrinkle getting the web build running well. As you played the game would get progressively slower and slower and slower, which made no sense. How could an iPad (very much so underpowered compared to a desktop) actually run the game better?
Well, the reason is because when i build Pathogen out for tablet devices I direct it to use the devices GPU instead of the CPU. The GPU, which coverts all vector images into bitmap is capable of greater computational power when it comes to displaying images on a screen.
The thing about putting the game up on the web is that i cannot direct the users computer to access the GPU, which means that the CPU is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of displaying images (which it always does poorly). This meant that no matter how good your CPU is Pathogen would "lag", we had a report of the i7 not even being able to handle it.
So how did I fix it? Well the issue was caused entirely by the background elements. Each of those pieces has their own stack of effects (blur, glow, etc) and are all transparent. Which means that for each object the CPU had to do several draw passes per frame to render it to the screen. The background consistently has about 30 objects in it, which meant the CPU was getting pretty taxed with just dealing with those fancy background effects.
The key was to render all background objects in a single pass instead of the 50+ it was doing. For the web build now all objects are added to a single bitmap object and that singular image is redrawn every frame with each objects updated location due to their wandering AI. Pretty cool huh?
As of yesterday a new mode went in! TimedVS, has all players confined to a 20 sec time limit for their turns. More advanced options like setting that interval is planned of the future, its also missing the major indicator of when the timer hit 5,4,3,2,1 which should help player realize their turn is about to be skipped.
Oh, so we had a bit of a wrinkle getting the web build running well. As you played the game would get progressively slower and slower and slower, which made no sense. How could an iPad (very much so underpowered compared to a desktop) actually run the game better?
Well, the reason is because when i build Pathogen out for tablet devices I direct it to use the devices GPU instead of the CPU. The GPU, which coverts all vector images into bitmap is capable of greater computational power when it comes to displaying images on a screen.
The thing about putting the game up on the web is that i cannot direct the users computer to access the GPU, which means that the CPU is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of displaying images (which it always does poorly). This meant that no matter how good your CPU is Pathogen would "lag", we had a report of the i7 not even being able to handle it.
So how did I fix it? Well the issue was caused entirely by the background elements. Each of those pieces has their own stack of effects (blur, glow, etc) and are all transparent. Which means that for each object the CPU had to do several draw passes per frame to render it to the screen. The background consistently has about 30 objects in it, which meant the CPU was getting pretty taxed with just dealing with those fancy background effects.
The key was to render all background objects in a single pass instead of the 50+ it was doing. For the web build now all objects are added to a single bitmap object and that singular image is redrawn every frame with each objects updated location due to their wandering AI. Pretty cool huh?
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Lots happening all of a sudden
Took the game into Champlain the other day to sit down with Greg Bemis & was fortunate enough to catch Amanda Crispel in her office. Neither had seen the game since it was Overflow so showing them the new changes was pretty exciting.
We are potentially doing a large scale testing just for Pathogen this upcoming Sunday, just need to verify.
Need to get the website up and functional, almost there. Need to pull one more good screenshot from the game. Might do a score screen. + the copy needs to selected and put on there as well.
We are also potentially showing the game off at JDK this upcoming Friday, and they haven't seen it either since the art overhaul.
Working on a timed game mode at the moment, 30 seconds for a turn. If you don't make a move, it skips your turn. In addition, after a few weeks of mulling over it I am upping the recharge time of the virus from 6 turn to 8 turn when there is more than 2 players. This could go as high as 10 turns, but ill be conservative and stick with 8 for now.
Online is coming along, colors? are screwed up I think and because i changed the menu system I am having trouble loading games from save space so I'll tackle that next. But it should be coming soon to the web and iPad near you, if your in our testing pool :)
We are potentially doing a large scale testing just for Pathogen this upcoming Sunday, just need to verify.
Need to get the website up and functional, almost there. Need to pull one more good screenshot from the game. Might do a score screen. + the copy needs to selected and put on there as well.
We are also potentially showing the game off at JDK this upcoming Friday, and they haven't seen it either since the art overhaul.
Working on a timed game mode at the moment, 30 seconds for a turn. If you don't make a move, it skips your turn. In addition, after a few weeks of mulling over it I am upping the recharge time of the virus from 6 turn to 8 turn when there is more than 2 players. This could go as high as 10 turns, but ill be conservative and stick with 8 for now.
Online is coming along, colors? are screwed up I think and because i changed the menu system I am having trouble loading games from save space so I'll tackle that next. But it should be coming soon to the web and iPad near you, if your in our testing pool :)
Monday, March 11, 2013
Testable Web Build!
We had a tester show serious interest in the game, however they didn't have an iPad. The game is built in flash, so a web build is basically created every time i build a iOS build, why not use that?
We had done so with Overflow, but with Pathogen we want the game being stolen in the dead of night kinda thing yet we still want it available for testers. So today we created a sign in system! Pretty simple really, we just leveraged our database we had already created and added a new field. Simple as 3.14. Which is pretty great, all a tester needs now is an internet connection and and email!
They send us an email, we enter them into the system, make up a password and send it back to them along with the pathogen web build link! Brilliant! Why didn't we think of this before?
We had done so with Overflow, but with Pathogen we want the game being stolen in the dead of night kinda thing yet we still want it available for testers. So today we created a sign in system! Pretty simple really, we just leveraged our database we had already created and added a new field. Simple as 3.14. Which is pretty great, all a tester needs now is an internet connection and and email!
They send us an email, we enter them into the system, make up a password and send it back to them along with the pathogen web build link! Brilliant! Why didn't we think of this before?
Friday, March 8, 2013
And Presto!
Switched over the beta framework I had for online play to the new art style (took far less time than anticipated) and have actually gotten the new gameplay into the online, which is major accomplishment since the animation system changes everything. Its a bit more organized as well, originally for the online game I had actually segmented all of the code, so that the local play would be stable. Which meant that there were near identical versions of the player class, called online player, an onlineTile class, an onlinePostGameReport class etc.
Well, now that I know what i'm doing with online and know exactly how it is different from those original classes, i can scrape the duplicates! Which, is a great thing. Now if i make an aesthetic shift to the local game it will carry over into the online game and I don't have to remember to duplicate code.
Well, now that I know what i'm doing with online and know exactly how it is different from those original classes, i can scrape the duplicates! Which, is a great thing. Now if i make an aesthetic shift to the local game it will carry over into the online game and I don't have to remember to duplicate code.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Im a Web Developer?
Yesterday we had a good sit down where we plotted out the future of Pathogen, what needs to happen in what order and who is going to be doing them. Matt is going to be scheduled full time to work with me, which is pretty awesome! And it looks like the first thing we are going to do is take another look at the online component and try to get it back up to scratch.
Before that happens though, we really need to get a good website up that showcases Pathogen. So I pretended to be a webdev for a day and get that started. We are going for a full unique page, not something that is confined within our classic site layout. I handed the reins over to Matt, who actually knows what he's doing, so that should hopefully be up pretty quickly here.
Before that happens though, we really need to get a good website up that showcases Pathogen. So I pretended to be a webdev for a day and get that started. We are going for a full unique page, not something that is confined within our classic site layout. I handed the reins over to Matt, who actually knows what he's doing, so that should hopefully be up pretty quickly here.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Mass Digi
wow...
What a weekend. Mike, Marguerite, and got up super early met at the studio to grab last minute things and hit the road at about 7:00 AM. Three hours later we were at the Microsoft NERD (yes its really called that) Center in Cambridge Boston with about 200 other people waiting for the event to start.
The event, now in its second year, was setup as a mix between mentor meetings and various industry seminars. Over the course of Friday we met with four different mentors, ranging from an independent developer, to a representative from adobe to an industry veteran.
From my view, our first two presentations went ok, not great by any means. We were having difficulty breaking into a good "conversation" about the game. We tried opening straight off from the slides, but they didn't do a good enough job in getting people into the mindset of what the game was. At around noon that day we had a lengthy break between sessions and came up with "Pathogen is Words with Friends for people who want to take over the world... at least on a cellular level"
And what this kinda lame sentence did was two fold.
1. It broke the ice, got a small laugh and eased them into the conversation at hand.
2. It functioned as a High Concept, this film industry term is used to give the general idea as quickly as possible by giving the audience two or more facets to mash together, ie: the film speed is essentially Die Hard on a Bus.
After we came up with that, everything fell into place. Our last two mentor meets went exceedingly well and we came away feeling pretty good about the game.
Saturday!
Of the forty teams that entered, a full 20 of them had entered the independent category (we didn't find out these stats until much later). We met with three judges during the morning, and again it was a pretty varied group of industry individuals, from a CEO of a social gaming company, to a serious gaming developer.
Armed with our little opening phrase we ended up doing pretty well i think. Every time we stepped away from the judging table we saw that we had successfully captured their attention, and thanks to having the game on the iPad had them actually get hands on with the demo.
And then, it was out of our hands. A few anxious hours later and the finalists were announced. We were 1 of 4 independent finalists, which meant that we were then going to present again in front of the who assembled audience (200+) people as well as in front of the other judges who had yet to even see the game.
The presentation went over smoothly, I had built the presentation directly into the game and launched the SWF through a web browser. It worked like butter thankfully, despite many other groups having some serious problems being able to show videos of their gameplay. Go Flash!
And then, right after us the big guns came out... The team that created Girls Like Robots, a matching tile game published by Adult Swim took the stage. I felt like that was it... Just how the college teams were a step above the high school teams, and we (the independents) were a step above them quality wise, these guys were another step above us. Their art and music was another tier above anything we presented. They are the professionals in the independent space.
And then the judges came back... And that team was an honorable mention. Wow.
Well, we won two prizes. Best Online game and 2nd place finisher in the independent category. The weekend was a huge experience for us, we met a lot of great people from the industry and gained some invaluable knowledge in how to pitch a game.
What a weekend. Mike, Marguerite, and got up super early met at the studio to grab last minute things and hit the road at about 7:00 AM. Three hours later we were at the Microsoft NERD (yes its really called that) Center in Cambridge Boston with about 200 other people waiting for the event to start.
The event, now in its second year, was setup as a mix between mentor meetings and various industry seminars. Over the course of Friday we met with four different mentors, ranging from an independent developer, to a representative from adobe to an industry veteran.
From my view, our first two presentations went ok, not great by any means. We were having difficulty breaking into a good "conversation" about the game. We tried opening straight off from the slides, but they didn't do a good enough job in getting people into the mindset of what the game was. At around noon that day we had a lengthy break between sessions and came up with "Pathogen is Words with Friends for people who want to take over the world... at least on a cellular level"
And what this kinda lame sentence did was two fold.
1. It broke the ice, got a small laugh and eased them into the conversation at hand.
2. It functioned as a High Concept, this film industry term is used to give the general idea as quickly as possible by giving the audience two or more facets to mash together, ie: the film speed is essentially Die Hard on a Bus.
After we came up with that, everything fell into place. Our last two mentor meets went exceedingly well and we came away feeling pretty good about the game.
Saturday!
Of the forty teams that entered, a full 20 of them had entered the independent category (we didn't find out these stats until much later). We met with three judges during the morning, and again it was a pretty varied group of industry individuals, from a CEO of a social gaming company, to a serious gaming developer.
Armed with our little opening phrase we ended up doing pretty well i think. Every time we stepped away from the judging table we saw that we had successfully captured their attention, and thanks to having the game on the iPad had them actually get hands on with the demo.
And then, it was out of our hands. A few anxious hours later and the finalists were announced. We were 1 of 4 independent finalists, which meant that we were then going to present again in front of the who assembled audience (200+) people as well as in front of the other judges who had yet to even see the game.
The presentation went over smoothly, I had built the presentation directly into the game and launched the SWF through a web browser. It worked like butter thankfully, despite many other groups having some serious problems being able to show videos of their gameplay. Go Flash!
And then, right after us the big guns came out... The team that created Girls Like Robots, a matching tile game published by Adult Swim took the stage. I felt like that was it... Just how the college teams were a step above the high school teams, and we (the independents) were a step above them quality wise, these guys were another step above us. Their art and music was another tier above anything we presented. They are the professionals in the independent space.
And then the judges came back... And that team was an honorable mention. Wow.
Well, we won two prizes. Best Online game and 2nd place finisher in the independent category. The weekend was a huge experience for us, we met a lot of great people from the industry and gained some invaluable knowledge in how to pitch a game.
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