Realities

Much of yesterday was taken up by me just trying to understand touchevent.TOUCH_Begin & touchevent.TOUCH_End functions in AS3. Thanks to my little black box test program, I have a pretty good understanding of how dragging and zooming is supposed to work in flash.

Unfortunately that test has proven that my code is probably not very efficient, which kinda makes sense. Every single tile is continually getting pushed data like whose turn it is, what the selected tile they are holding, etc. So it comes down to a painful decision. Either rewrite a good chunk of my base code :( or leave it.

Looking at everything and thinking about the future reveals that the flash version of Overflow is essentially all throwaway. It will be replaced and until that point it just needs to work and look good doing it. The hot fix for the moment is that the iPad maps are just zoomed out so that all tiles are visible, though they are a bit small.

So onward!

Time to get four players into the game!

Hitting that Wall

Uggg. Getting a smooth scroll/zoom in flash is turning out to be more painful than first imagined…

I came into with high expectations, flash has built in multitouch gestures for pinch as well as swipe. However both of these actions are not smooth. You make a swipe action, and once you finish then it moves the canvas, not in real time. I’ve tried a variety of different methods and ultimately nothing has produced the same effect that all tablet users are used too.

So today its back to the drawning board, im going to open a new project and have only a single square to test this with. Trying to build it into the existing framework of Overflow has been tricky and who knows if anything else is somehow prevent the smooth motion of these actions.

Also Critiques! Headed to campus to go get some other outside perspective on things.

Got some other stuff done yesterday though, here are the updates for Overflow:

-          Added 6 additional maps, 2 per each additional map size

-          The game now will end the game if one player seizes more than 50% of the playable map with level 3 tiles

 

What’s next? – Overflow Part 3

On our white board right now we have a good sized list of next steps as well as a wish list of wouldn’t that be awesome. It all comes down to what we can accomplish in Flash, which is what I’m fluent in, and what would require a switch in engines.

Yesterday I added the ability to create maps of various sizes in the map editor which allowed Mike and I to send the last part of the day just having fun crafting new maps. There are now four available sizes, small, which was the old standard, medium (22 x 24), large (32 x 28), and Marathon (40 x 35)! Which is pretty ridiculous.

So today is all about getting those maps playable through the menu and making the same editor updates available on the iPad, need to add some movement control stuff for that to happen. Everyday ill continue to make these little modular updates, seeing how far we can push the design and polish it up before our next big deadline. As of this moment we have a little more than a month before submission to the Boston Indie showcase ends, so it’s all a matter of how much we can pack in. As I’ve said from the beginning, we want user feedback of any kind. Please let us know what you think, what you dislike, or what you would like to see added in the future, on either our Twitter, Facebook or via email @ zach@birnamwoodgames.com

Concepts Part 2

Everyone is saying it’s a bit like Go, or even that dot game, the one where players draw connecting lines between points and try to create squares. Which is interesting, because while creating the idea neither of those came up as inspiration.

I’ve played Go with Taylor and my biggest problem with it is that the game is so slow.  The Dot game comparison is closer, because when comparing them, players both have chances to create chain reactions that would drastically change the field of play.

What I wanted to create was a basically a digital board game. From the very beginning I had this image of two players across from one another in a coffee shop, playing on an iPad. In pursuit of this vision I did a few things with the layout.

1. As few as text as possible, most of it is represented through iconography. The quit button is an X, the rules are a ?, each of the maps include a small diagram of what they are beneath them.


2. The unlocking tiles have the color slowly fill in addition to having a numerical value, so just by glancing at it the player can see if it is filled or not.


3. Player’s pieces are on opposite sides of the board. If they are indeed playing across from one another, players don’t want to reach across the game board, obstructing the field of play in order to select their tiles.

The beautiful thing about the game is its simplicity. The primary game loop, is less than 600 lines of code. Each tile keeps track of its current state, its owner, and knows whose turn it is and what they have selected. It all comes down to incrementing tile states. If its player 1’s turn and they have a level 1 tile selected and they click on an empty space, it becomes theirs; the tile is flipped and turned the correct color.

For each tile there is only a finite number of states. The cool thing about the game is dynamic nature of changing those states and causing cascade events.

By Tuesday I had it working all working and realized that we could actually put it out for distribution. The game might not be feature complete, but players would at least get a taste of the gameplay and would hopefully give us feedback on what they like/don’t like or what they want to see added next.

So I pitched to everyone a deadline of Friday. I wanted to try what the Super Meat Boy guys did with the original SMB, a free flash game that was available on the internet that gained followers. And that is what we are going to do. Already, since the Friday deadline a whole new mechanic of differing terrain has been added! And soon to be uploaded will be a much better tutorial!

Thoughts on Overflow Part 1

So what happened last week was pretty spectacular and out of the blue; never thought that the production of Overflow would take off like it did. So many things just clicked and because of that we were able to meet our Friday deadline. So I'm going to try to slow down a little bit and look back at how all of this happened.

Turning back the clock, the days have been pretty standard for me. For a few months now I had been prototyping different ideas, some lasting a few day and others upwards of about a week. As a result my desk is covered with old printer paper with hand drawn maps, pieces of code, random words, and idea after idea for games.

I have always been a strategy fan; ever since my family refused to play board games with me anymore I dove into video games. Starcraft is one of my all time favorites; Supreme Commander was brilliant, backed Planetary Annihilation. And because of that I have always wanted to create a strategy game.

Overflow began as a very abstract thought, a water turn based strategy game. Water would pour down from higher terrain onto lower sections, taking them over in a cascading fashion. But what would create the water? Springs? Would they be water towers that overflow? Just kind of a lot of awkward questions that ultimately led me to abandon the idea.

But last week I started playing around in illustrator and ended up creating this:

This file is the game doc for Overflow. I began with some really simple, aesthetic colors and tried to differentiate, yet keep them in similar shades. When I created the first color spectrum the water idea just came back and I knew I could use it in an abstract form.

Immediately I grabbed some graph paper and started cutting out little pieces, colors for one side, numbers for the other to make it easy to differentiate them, and then Mike and I sat on the floor and played it out.

How much can we pack in?

So today is the day! Some time around 1 or 2 we will be uploading to Apple. So now its just a matter of seeing how much I can pack in. Yesterday I got side tracked by having to debug another application for JDK, but overall here is what was completed:

1. Ownership bug has been stomped! You can now stack level 2's on one another!

2. Cascading chain reactions! Now you can see exactly how one move impact the game board.

3. A map editor was created and was what I used to create the three additional map types.

The map editor took the majority of the as I have never made on before. It saves a player map out to an XML file which i can then read back in. I tried really hard to figure out how to get player created maps in, but it just didn't end up working out. In flash I cannot get the selected map URL link when a player clicks open.

Go check out these updates HERE!

So today i need to go back and start commenting code, hard code the map types in for iOS development, and Matt suggested a great temporary way to get people playing their own maps.

 

Punch List

So yesterday ended up being very productive. The tile game has been christened and named Overflow. Play it HERE, if you haven’t already.

1. A Proper menu was created


2. A pie chart at the end of the game was added to show how much a player has won by.


3. Switching between players has been made a bit more obvious.


4. You cannot get locked in an infinite loop of instruction screens.


5. A reset button/functionality was added.


6. The game was successfully deployed to iOS and runs exceedingly well on the iPad.


7. Basic tile flipping animation was integrated near the end of the day.

So overall, got a lot done. Even got some testing feedback last night which was even better. So now the bigger decisions need to be made, what functionality needs to come next?

Well, I believe I’m going to first make the overflow mechanic give more visual feedback. Right now when a stack spills over, the tiles flip instantly. What I always wanted to do was show the cascade, this set flips, which causes this set to flip, so on and so forth.

The next big question riding on the heels of this one is what after? And at this moment there are two choices, 1. Add more players (support for up to 4) or 2. Add additional maps, shapes, terrain features that would shuffle up the players experience every time.

If you have any crazy additions you would like to suggest please let me know, either on Facebook, Twitter, or at zach@birnamwoodgames.com.