As of Friday night, we’re in peer review for XBLIM.  I slept for 14 hours, woke up, and slept for another 6.  I’m starting to feel like my old self again, which is good, because I was starting to go a little crazy, and my brain was turning to mush.

The end result was a solid and fun game that runs like a dream with 4 players.  We’re 50% through the community peer review process, and will likely have the game up on the market by the end of this week.

We also got our first trailer up, with a “start to finish” video coming soon.  I took videos of the many different versions of the game.  From when I just started my work on the engine, to the very awkward alpha version, to the beautiful and complete finished product.

Check out the new trailer :D

I still feel like our dragon looks like Mushu from Mulan.  lolol

I think I’ve slept a total of like maybe 5 hours in the last 3 days because of how busy things have been with getting our game completely finalized with no bugs or performance issues.  Bottom line, Heroes of Hat is getting submitted for approval to the XBLIM tonight.  Then comes finals, graduation, and a 2 week vacation because I’m super burned out at the moment.  As much as I love Heroes of Hat (I think it’s a REALLY fun game, and I accomplished my high goals I started out with), I’m ready to start on some new personal projects.  And to start writing blog posts again.  I have several really good ones in mind.

We’re getting posters made, and we’ve already got the first pass of our trailer done.  One of our art leads, Tom Clark (http://tclarkgamejournal.blogspot.com/), made this.  I cannot wait to have it hanging on my wall.  I believe that we’ll be printing many extras if anyone is interested in buying some :)

Check out these platforms from the latest build of our game!

…I have to be up in 4 hours.

The Entertainment Arts and Engineering program ranked 3rd in the nation after MIT for video game design by the Princeton Review.  Our class and professors were interviewed about the new ranking, and I make several appearances.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=19427890&title=us-video-game-design-program-ranks-3rd-in-nation

Additionally, like 1/4th of our school’s front page is about video games right now.  Pretty awesome.

Obviously, the more attention the program gets, the more support it will get from the school.  And the more support it gets, the more likely they are to try and retain the school’s ranking and the excellence of the program.  Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen the program only get better.  Bob, Roger, and everyone else have done a great job with it.

For those not in the know, we use the OgreMax plugin as a scene exporter from Maya.  I’ve mentioned it several times in the past, and I brag on it a lot.  Mostly because it’s a tool I would have written myself, but someone had already done it, and done it really well.  And although not perfect for XNA (it was made for Ogre3D), it has given us a lot of flexibility when designing levels.

Recently, though, we found out we’d have to pay $250 for a commercial license, although it’s a freeware product.  After emailing them, they’ve allowed us to use OgreMax for free.  This all being said, though, we plan on repaying them back as soon as we get $250 from selling the game, although they never asked us to.  We couldn’t have made it through this project without it.

The greatest part about OgreMax is the ability to export XML files that can be easily parsed from Maya scenes.  You can store data like level specifications, the type of object the mesh represents in the game, parameters to those objects at initialization, the physics group of the object, and the rotation, scale, and translation data of each mesh in a scene.

http://www.ogremax.com/

Courtesy of our artists, James Bowman and Damean Lyon.  DEUCES.

This entry is kind of all over the place, but I get around to what I’ve been working on specifically (level creation and implementation) toward the bottom.  I have to make up for many weeks of silence first.  I’ve been really busy.  I talk a lot about design too.  Blah.  There’s pictures!

A few things that have happened in the last few weeks…

We had a demo with Electronic Arts, Microsoft Game Studios, Smart Bomb Interactive, and some other indie developers.  The general consensus was that we had a great game.  And a design lead from Microsoft, I can’t remember the direct quote, said the game was “so impressive”. There were, however, level design issues, and I was aware of this…just listen to me ramble some more.  I’m getting to it.

Probably the person who caught my attention the most, though, was a designer named Alan Tew.  For the last few months, I had been suggesting this idea that the game needed progression.  I had thrown the idea of “starting with no hats” in the ring several times before, and progressively getting different hats.  We teach the players how to run, how to jump, how to climb vines, and then progressively move them through different challenges.  Basically, making sure they know how to use their Archer Hat before they get their Dragon Hat or their Jester Hat.  After playing my game for about 15 minutes, Alan knew exactly what needed to be done.  He said that we needed to teach the players, and not throw them into using all the hats in one level.  This guy understood what makes a game good.  We wound up talking for quite a while after the demo.  It was his suggestion that solidified what we needed to do and kind of paved the way for our new game plan.

A few other things we got was that we needed to lock our z-axis.  Alright so, I made this 3D physics and collisions engine and pipeline.  That’s not exactly what I wanted to hear, but I guess I could understand where they were coming from.  Basically, with the amount of time we have left, it was almost necessary to eliminate the Z-axis so we wouldn’t be having to write sophisticated AI for combat.  Fair enough.  I’ll add my own little twist.

And then the next suggestion, from almost all of the pros, was to eliminate combat and switch over to more puzzle platforming.  This was another thing that I had been talking about.  Switching to more Megaman-like enemies, where they’re more parts of puzzles, hazards, and scripted obstacles that complicate your advancements through the level or a puzzle.  No super sophisticated combat.  ONLY HAMMER JOES.

All in all, this is exactly what I wanted to hear, and much of what I had been saying.  It took a room full of actual pros to convince our team that this was the direction we needed to go.

SO WE FORGED A NEW PLAN FOR LEVELS

1) The Z-axis is now locked between 1 and -1 meters.  Every shot you take at an enemy will hit.  Every platform you jump for, takes up the entire Z-axis.   I’m still worried that this is a little too awkward.  If the need be, I can lock it entirely with the change of 2 lines of code.

2) The game is now more puzzle platforming, where enemies are parts of the puzzle, complicated obstacles, and hazards.

3) You will now progressively receive different hats.  Learn as you go, bros.

• For the first level, you start with no hats. You learn to run, jump, and climb vines.
• Half way through the first level, you receive the Archer Hat, and then have to learn to ride arrows and bounce yourself on leaf platforms.
• The next level is an all archer level, where you have to fight enemies, bounce from platform to platform, and make your way to the end of the level using the archer hat.
• The third level, you use your archer hat half way through, and then come upon the Jester Hat.  
• We continue in this fashion up until the Dragon Hat.
• We then have levels where you combine all 3 hats.
• And then a final platforming boss.

So what’s this looking like?  We haven’t shown pictures in a while. We will be releasing our final market trailer here in the next month or so as the textures for everything gets completed.  Here are the levels we put in this week.  We have one other coming from Nick Rasband by Tuesday.  We’re moving at a fast pace with levels and trying to put in as much content as possible.

Our new HUD.  The goblin’s facial expression changes as different events occur.

Bouncing from platform to platform.  These are placeholder platforms.  They will be leafs in the next day or two.

An enemy cube (place holder) throws a bomb at our hero, as he gets ready to arrow the shit out of his enemy.

The first level in Maya.

The second level in Maya.  The last part has some new trigger/moving platform puzzles that I’ve been programming.

Every once in a while, my mind latches on to a topic and doesn’t really let it go.  Recently, it’s been different forms of collision detection.  Having gone through and implemented several different kinds for Heroes of Hat, the problem that stumps me the most is actual physics where entities are able to push each other because you start having to deal with contact resolution, which is seemingly a real pain.  I actually wound up buying a simplified version of the source code demonstrating speculative contacts from one of the guys who worked on Little Big Planet (source @ http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-contacts-an-continuous-collision-engine-approach-part-1/).  I haven’t gotten to look at it in too much detail yet because I’m busy with gameplay in Heroes of Hat.  I do learn best by looking at source code.

While this is all cool and good, a lot of my focus for this current game is figuring out ways to make sure certain things don’t happen so that I don’t have to deal with them.  The features we support right now are more than enough to make a fun game.  Just today, I put in the “Jester Hat” which drops and slings bombs that you can detonate and send yourself flying in a direction relative to the center of the explosion.  Looking at other games helped me realize the different ways you can avoid physics and make fun games.  Pioneering different mechanics that fake physics is the beauty.

So let’s look at Super Meat Boy.  Notice that there is no pushing or pulling of entities.  Literally, it’s just a piece of meat jumping around, getting hit, and then dying.  There’s no multiple collisions either.

So there’s this cool looking game called Muffin Knight for iOS.  Notice the lack of pushing and pulling.  VERY simple physics (it’s probably all AABB bounding boxes).  They went purely for some fun mechanics and a beautiful art style, and then made a game out of it.  It’s a REALLY simple game to make.

Here’s an example from a game being developed by someone at my school called Catball Eats It All.  Again, we don’t have the pushing and the pulling and real physics.

So what am I getting at?  You can get away with really simple physics and collisions and still have a fun game.  Especially on platforms like iOS where gimmicky little games with simple mechanics do really well.

What I’m fascinated with particularly is the idea of coming up with these really simple games to make that are still fun, new, and different.  You could push these games out really quick and probably get decent sales doing it.  You can also focus more on things like art (which I would love to do) and polish.  The thing you’ll notice most about iOS games is that they are very polished and have a very nice look to them.

Currently, I’m planning to make iOS and Android games this summer.  I’m really looking forward to designing a game based purely around the principles of simplicity in design, art, and polish.  While I’m interested in the complex physics and collisions, I also see beauty in this idea as well.

I’ve been working on creating a new model for our game in my spare time that’s true to the original concept art that I made a few months back when pitching the game.  I haven’t finalized the design since I need to show the artists and get their feedback, as well as the entire team’s.  Plus, he’s got nubs for hands.  I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with them.  Anyway, here’s a quick look.