Mandible Games

So, I made this game. And – let's be fair – it sort of sucked.

I could go on at great length about how this is Box2D's fault, and thanks to issues integrating Box2D with Lua. There's some truth to that. There's still bugs in there causing the physics to behave a bit wonkily. I spent a lot more time working on infrastructure and bindings than I'd meant to, and even today it doesn't work properly on Linux (and probably won't, to be honest, it's not a good enough game for me to spend the time on it.)

But that's not why the game isn't fun.

The original view I had of the game was that you'd be running along towards the next checkpoint, trying desperately to get there in time, and at the last minute you'd fling yourself towards the goal, die in midair, and get to watch your corpse crunching its way down the mountain until you happened to fall into the rejuvenator and oh god time to keep running go go go get to the next checkpoint.

But there's a bunch of problems here. First off, it requires you to make a crucial decision – your exact death position and velocity – before you can even see what you're trying to aim for. Second, physics tends to be extremely chaotic, so either the game needs to be built to funnel the player inevitably down into the right location or the player's death is near-certain, regardless of skill. And, of course, if you funnel the player down to the right location, then you're making skill irrelevant anyway. A game with no skill component tends to not be a good game, and as much as I rail against them for being low-skill, even Bejeweled and Peggle involve more skill than my original vision of The Ultimate Race did.

Even that isn't the crucial problem.

The reason the game isn't fun – and this took me a while to hunt down – is that a game of this sort is only fun if you're almost losing. If you get to the goal quickly, it's easy, and you'll never bother with an early death and it's boring. If you're nowhere near the goal, you lose no matter what and it's simultaneously boring and frustrating. The player has to be right on that knife edge of losing for that fun moment I had in mind to actually occur.

And that's just ridiculously hard to orchestrate.

If I were going to do this again, I'd be trying one of two different approaches. One is to make the difficulty self-balancing in a sense. I hate auto-adjusting difficulty, so in reality what this would mean is that reaching a goal very quickly would unlock a "harder path" that the player could choose to go on, so the player could make the game as hard as they could handle and thereby keep it fun.

Another thing I would try would be to remove the time limit entirely, and even remove the voluntary-death button. I'd add some kind of a laser defense grid around the checkpoint. You die because you leap headlong into a laser and get fried, and that is when the whole "fall down the cliff praying" thing would kick in. I'd play up the "race" thing more heavily – you'd ideally be racing against a bunch of computer opponents that don't get shot by lasers ("sorry man, we're out of the reflective armor. good luck!") and so you'd be encouraged to leap headlong into danger without really spending a lot of time preparing.

And finally, the player needs at least some influence over the corpse behavior once he's dead. Even if that's limited to twitching in one direction or another. Something.

I feel like, in some sense, this game is a milestone for me. It's the first time I came up with an idea that just flat-out didn't work – the rest of my unsuccessful games have been unsuccessful because I didn't have an idea. So, I mean, I had an idea, and it sucked. That's progress.

I think that's progress.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX
(No Linux version currently available, there's a bug I can't find right now)

This was made for the annual SomethingAwful GameDev Challenge V. The theme for this year was "You Can't ____" – something that you would normally be able to do, but something that you are now unable to do.

Make a game out of it!

As such, The Ultimate Race is subtitled "You Can't Avoid Having Constant, Instantly-Fatal Heart Attacks".

This is my first game with a physics engine involved, and some parts of it went . . . rockily. I ended up spending far more time fighting my tools and far less time actually making the game than I'd expected. Still, here's a game. Go play it!

Well that didn't work.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX
Linux (32-bit only)

The theme of this month was Casual Addiction. I came up with the bare bones of an idea, without any real belief that it would make a fun game, and decided to implement it and see what made it fun.

Four days in, with virtually nothing to show for it, I realized this entire thing felt very familiar. Almost like I'd done this before! And, shockingly, it worked just as well this time. I am amazed! Are you amazed? We are all amazed.

What I've realized, albeit a bit too late for this project, is that I absolutely need a clear vision of what I'm working towards. If I don't know what I'm trying to code, I can't code it. Now, it's fine if this ends up morphing as I code, it's fine if what I end up with bears only tangential relation to what I originally intended to make. But I need that anchor point to work for, and I didn't have it. That is something I'm going to be watching for in the future.

I'll describe what I was working for, though. Maybe someone else can make it entertaining!

I was planning on working Casual Addiction very deeply into the game idea. You were going to be a drug dealer, and part of the game would involve getting your customers hooked and then getting lots of money from them. But that was a double-edged sword. The more customers you had, the more the cops started noticing you. Unfortunately for you, just shutting down one of your dealerships wouldn't really solve the problem – now your customers would be looking for a new dealership to buy from, and in the process of searching, attract even more police attention.

Similarly, your less-alert drug runners had a chance of being noticed by police (this is Bad). You could assign guards to them . . . but that would, in the process, reduce their Alertness even further, as they'd start relying on the help.

So basically, whatever you did with an intent to make your life easier would result in you being locked into that long-term, with a huge amount of pain to un-do it. I was hoping to balance things such that the "way to win" was basically stay low and under the radar and not try to make it big, while being a Big Drug Dealer would result in a cataclysmic meltdown unless you realized what was going on and bugged out early.

The problem is that I didn't have any mechanics for any of this. I was thinking of having Police and Runners walking around the world, but I was never happy with my mental image of how it would work. I was thinking of abstracting Police into some basic values, but I never came up with actual mechanics. I didn't have a game, I had a pile of unconnected ideas.

And, as a result, I don't have a game.

I've seen this exact same problem play out over and over, which is why it's kind of embarrassing to realize I've been doing it myself. It's the classic class-project or group-project issue. One person says "hey roleplaying games are awesome, let's make an RPG" but nobody has a clear view of what they're actually trying to make. They know it's got main characters, and a game world, but there's simply no coherent vision. If nothing else, I'd say that coherent vision is the most important thing to get, and fast. With Nieuwe Aarde I was forming the vision even as I was doing the first development, but less than an hour in I knew I'd have islands and you'd build buildings on those islands and there would be a monster attack once in a while. That's the core of Nieuwe Aarde, and once I had that implemented I was fine to spend a day tweaking and polishing.

So, if you're trying to make a game: write down your plans first. If you don't know roughly how game balance is going to work before you've written your game, you're certainly not going to be able to figure it out midway through.

The only thing that went right this month was that I recognized a recurring pattern. With luck, I'll be able to stop making that mistake in the future.

This game had a lot of firsts. It was my most visually ambitious game yet. It was my first use of actual perspective. And it was my first serious attempt at making art without resorting to 2d sprites – the only sprites in the game are the black structure at the beginning, the minigame icons, and one simple sprite used for the explosion graphics.

What Worked

Honestly, all of the above worked.

The game does look good – I think the explosions particularly turned out well. I spent a good chunk of time on "small things" like screenshakes and a gradually changing background. Things that nobody really mentions, but that help the game tremendously. So, full marks for art.

The game design itself also worked as well as I was hoping. The game design didn't really change from the first day to the end – I knew where I was going with it, and I went there, and everything was good. I didn't have concrete plans for the bosses from the very beginning, but they came together in an hour or two each once I sat down to work on them.

What Didn't Work

I made some decisions early on about the monster graphics that ended up constraining my design a bit more than I'd really intended. Namely, I just assumed I'd be sticking with right angles for everything, and, later, when I found myself wanting more complex layouts, I couldn't do it easily. I'm not sure this would have been easily solvable, however. I could have changed it moderately simply, but it would have been Difficult to do the actual graphics design without that constraint, as my character design was limited to text input.

Originally I had plans for how to produce more organic-behaving monsters – still built out of right angles, but with the individual parts given a little more freedom relative to each other. I ended up not implementing this due to a lack of time. I was also running into issues with render speed, which that would have made even worse. I'm not sure what the actual render speed bottleneck was, though I suspect it's heavily based around my continued use of immediate mode OpenGL. Solving this will require me to finish my Lua OpenGL layer first.

Speaking of graphics, I decided to use framebuffer objects to do the bloom effect. It turns out that framebuffer objects are problematical, as many graphics cards don't support them, and I actually reduced my userbase rather unfortunately with them. The "standard solution" appears to be rendering to the screen, then copying that to textures. Unfortunately that is difficult with my current render framework. I'll have to come up with a solution for this in the future, as I'd now like to avoid FBOs.

More graphics issues: I did the complex texture effects entirely with shaders. It turns out that shaders don't antialias well, and I was having horrible aliasing issues. Turning up the back render resolution fixed that issue. An effective 64x antialiasing looked goddamn gorgeous. It also ran like crap on every system I could get my hands on, besides my main computer, so I turned it back to 4x and crossed my fingers that it was an acceptable tradeoff. I'm not convinced it was a great tradeoff. The only alternatives were to completely redesign rendering in terms of multiple textures or to try simulating anti-aliasing inside the shader itself – the latter didn't go well, and the former would have taken a lot of time. I'm not sure what else I could have done better here, but I'll keep it in mind as a stumbling block.

I spent about six hours trying to get perspective working properly, but I kind of expected that.

I also ran into some problems writing the monster AI – I had hacks upon hacks upon hacks, and that, as well, became a significant bottleneck. I've since written some chunks of code to provide a more powerful and general AI layer, which should prevent that from happening in the future.

Despite all the work done on making the Linux version work well, I had one giant critical error that – as near as I can tell – broke it on all NVidia cards. Whoops! Guess I shouldn't have relied on friends and VMWare. That's fixed now though, and the incoming Linux error reports flatly stopped after fixing that bug. This was kind of expected, though, new platforms are always a little flaky until you do a serious test.

The Bottom Line

I know I just spent like 3/4 of this post talking about fuckups, but the fact is that I think the game was pretty successful. I got everything done I wanted to, and the game worked out as well as I'd wanted. I don't have anything major to say about the game design itself.

I'm trying a few new public-relations things, despite it feeling a little bit scummy. I went and posted a bunch of stories on Reddit and got a huge pile of comments and readers, so I feel like that worked out well. I was kind of hazy about whether this moved into "spammer" territory or not, but considering the generally positive feedback, I figure people aren't objecting to the content. Oddly, I simultaneously feel like I'm getting fewer non-Reddit comments on this game than I'd expected, though maybe I've been spoiled by the feedback on Robert Recurring and Nieuwe Aarde. (So if I'd posted RR or NA heavily on Reddit, how much feedback would I have gotten?)

The hits I'm getting for "mandible" are finally overcoming the hits I'm getting for "hard disk double boiling".

In summary: k0r worked out great. I learned a lot from it, and I learned a lot about what I fucked up badly. Time to move on to the next project!

I decided to spend a little more time on graphics this time around. Here's the result.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.5 or higher)
Linux (read notes below)

A few major things to be aware of.

First, this game makes more extensive use of your video card than any I've written before. As such, if you've got old hardware or bad video drivers, you may have trouble running it. Sorry! It should tell you if anything goes wrong. I did fix a bug causing it to crash if you had no audio output, so that might make a few of you happy.

Second, I now support OSX 10.5. At least, I think I do. Let me know if there's problems.

Third, I now support Linux. At least, I think I do. There will be problems. I know for a fact that it does not natively run on any 64-bit Linux distribution. I've heard there's a way to fix this, but I don't know what it is yet (besides "make a 64-bit build" which won't be happening for a while.) The sound layer also seems to be a bit flaky – there is sound, but you might not get any. I may be rewriting the sound layer in the near future. I'm also hoping to add .deb and .rpm packages in the future.

It's been tested successfully on Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 8.04, Kubuntu 10.04, Fedora 12, and Debian 5.0.4. Success, in this context, means "it either ran properly, or complained about a lack of video card capabilities." It's been tested unsuccessfully on Ubuntu 64 10.04. It's also crashed on a friend's system running Debian 6.0 test. Why? Couldn't really say! I'd absolutely love any data points or debugging assistance you can provide.

Obviously, I haven't said much about the game. That's because you should be playing the game and not listening to me ramble about it.

So. Nieuwe Aarde, that game I made for Ludum Dare in 48 hours.

This is going to be one of the toughest postmortems I've written.

What Worked

Well, first of all, it's fun. I'm getting a lot of commentary saying that they enjoyed figuring it out and that they think it's an enjoyable game overall. That's cool. I seem to have done a good job with the base game mechanics and the interface, I'm having very few people tell me that they simply couldn't figure it out.

The art, while not spectacular, is servicable and nonconfusing. The game feel is consistent. The tooltips work absolutely great for explaining the concepts.

I also appear to have nailed the difficulty. I've had a few complaints that it's way too easy, and a few complaints that it's way too hard, but the bulk seems to fall into the categories of "it's tough, but I beat it" and "it's tough, and I didn't beat it, but I think I could have if I'd put more time into it."

For doing it within 48 hours, it turned out great. Compare it to my earlier games – I spent a third as much time on this one, and I think it turned out better. My tools are maturing like you wouldn't believe and I'm just getting faster and more skilled at this whole thing.

So, in summary, I made a good game.

What Didn't Work

The problem is that I didn't make the game I wanted to.

The original goal was Desktop Dungeons meets Seafarers of Catan. Desktop Dungeons is a clever small-scale dungeon crawler which is designed so that almost every single move is critically important. Sure, you can get a nice lead, but that lead can be whittled down rapidly by bad luck. Doing "as well as you can" is critical, every step of the way, and each time you click it had better be the right click.

Nieuwe Aarde doesn't succeed in that. You'll spend a large part of the game clicking "Work" over and over, for example. Clicking a few too many times? Totally okay! Building the wrong thing entirely? You can probably recover! There's very little that has to be timed exactly, and the game design itself isn't conducive to the sort of miniature puzzle where you're trying to scrape out the last little possible iota of advantage.

I still think it may be possible, but if I want to do it, I'm going to have to start from basics again.

The Bottom Line

I made a fun game, but I made the wrong game. I'm not really sure whether I want to call this a success or not.

On the other hand, I made a fun game. If this is failure, I wouldn't mind failing more often.

The planet is dying.

Monsters raise themselves out of the ocean monthly. The skies themselves blacken.

You, and your civilization, have but one choice: amass enough magical power to leap across the starless void, to another, safer planet. But you're racing against time – every day the attacks get stronger.

The planet is dying, and it's taking you with it.

Ludum Dare competition page and voting

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.6 or higher)

Nieuwe Aarde was made for Ludum Dare 17, a 48-hour game development competition. Yeah, that's right, my normal week-long development process was compressed into two days.

Ouch.

The theme for this event was Islands, and so Islands is what I did! Nieuwe Aarde was inspired by Desktop Dungeons and Seafarers of Catan, and I feel like I've made a reasonably coherent little single-player strategy game with a whole pile of tooltips.

Postmortem up in a few days. Time to start on the next project!

Thought I'd give you a quick peek of my next short project, as well as an idea of what this stuff looks like early on.

I bet you want to know what those buttons do, don't you? Well they don't do anything whatsoever. You push them, they highlight, and then nothing happens.

But this is what 3.5 hours of development gets me. Tomorrow I'll hook the buttons up to work, and then see if the game design works. Might work. Might not. We'll see!

I should probably get this done before I finish another game.

What Went Right and What Went Wrong

This was a very focused game. I started working on gameplay and I pretty much ended working on gameplay. There's no graphics, no sound, and the game does suffer from it a bit. The gizmos started to look too similar – many of them are based on the same texture, only differently textured and shaped, and that really isn't enough. They should look more different and they should stand out better than they do, the wall texture is just too distracting.

The gameplay I think I pretty much nailed. Or, rather, I nailed it as much as I could within a week. I'm actually still coming up with ways to mathematically describe the levels, and I think I could make even more interesting game layouts. I managed to abuse Lua in some exciting ways that I hadn't done before, and it turned out really really well – I'm finally getting my dev environment set up so I can do extremely complex stuff easily, and that is just damn cool.

The Bottom Line

I continue to be excited about this game, and this is one of the few that I've felt possibly worthy of being fleshed out into something bigger. That said, I've got like two other games queued up before I'll have a chance to come back to it, possibly more. So we'll see! We'll see.

It's on the Short List.

It's that time of month again! The time for games.

Robert Recurring is a side-scrolling puzzle game that is arguably about time travel. No, I did not remake Braid. It is about a different time travel gimmick than Braid.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.6 or higher)

I know what you're saying. "Oh, this game looks terrible! He must have given up again." No, on the contrary – I ended up spending the entire week working on really fascinating game mechanics, and I've got half a dozen ideas that I didn't have time to get to. Lots of design ideas = no graphics. You don't get graphics.

Graphics aren't for you.

Let me know what you think.