Work continues at a decent pace on my next game BDatRF. Features are steadily being added, with further test rooms for them added if there isn’t space in the current layout.

But that had got me thinking that I should have a proper crack at roughing out a layout for the map. Partly because one of the up-coming tasks is making the in-game map, and having an idea of what sort of scale I’m working with would be very helpful before I start.

I’d drawn a very rough outline sketch, with some vague numbers of how many rooms each area should contain, but that doesn’t really give enough detail to work from.

The problem is I have never really found a decent tool for what I want to do. Namely, place a number of rooms in a layout, and quickly sketch their contents. If I decide a room’s not right, or in the wrong place, I want to re-sketch it, or shift it about.

Did I mention the game is flip-screen, not scrolling? So this kind of whole-room replacement will be very easy to achieve in-game, as the rooms are just connected by a list of which room to load next when you reach the edge of the screen. (This also makes it really easy to mess with peoples’ navigation as I can warp you around the place, or have rooms link to themselves in a number of ways. But I’m not sure I’ll use that ability for this game.)

After weighing up a bunch of options, such as flowchart and sketch software, a solution came to me – sticky notes!

Armed with a pad of notes I sat down and “sketched” out the map today. I knew I wanted somewhere between sixty and one hundred rooms, so I plopped down seventy notes in roughly the right layout.

As Roy Walker would say, it’s good, but it’s not right. It feels too tall (you were just about to say the same thing, right).

So I shuffle a few notes around and have a slightly shorter, slightly wider, map. This feels better.

Then I set about scribbling in some room details based on other sketches and ideas I’d already had. But as you can see there’s still a lot of empty space in there! Some things have already changed since the initial sketch, particularly on the left of the map the entire function of that area has switch from one thing to another.

Anyway, I thought I’d share these with you (but not in too much detail, I wouldn’t want to give the game away quite yet!) And I thought it would be interesting to have a record to check the final version against.

I remember reading on a couple of other blogs recently a discussion about “what does the label of indie developer mean to you?”

There were numerous replies along the lines of creative control, studio size, target platform etc. Anyway, today I was reading this interview with John Pickford (one half of the Pickford Bros. in case you didn’t know) and one quote in particular really stood out and hit home.

So I will pretty much nick John’s words here and say that this is what “being indie” means to me.

Creating something that is inextricable from ourselves. We aren’t running a huge staff or other big overheads. We aren’t going to go bust and our IP will never be for sale. We might not get rich either, but at least we’ll be making games that we believe in and the game you see is the game we set out to make.

If you haven’t already, you really should give their game Magnetic Billiards a look. It’s very nice, and you can try it out for free.

Run From the Sun is now available for you to play for free!

The sun is exploding! Launch your spaceship from planet to planet and keep ahead of it for as long as you can.

A side scrolling “race the screen” game with just one control – launching your spaceship. Time your launches carefully to land you on another planet, and hop from planet to planet to stay alive for as long as you can. Fancy flying, such as using another planet’s gravity to slingshot you to a safe landing or narrowly avoiding meteors, will earn you big bonus points.

Features

• 9 space ships to unlock and pilot.
• 22 in-game awards with a mix of short and long-term goals.
• Seemless in-game tutorial teaches you everything “on the fly”.
• Dodge meteors and hit stars for bonus points.
• Will you spot a ufo?

Fairly productive morning today. I had previously been thinking about making electricity by using animated sprites. This morning I came to my senses and realised that was a) stupid b) destined to look like crap anyway.

So instead I came up with what I think is a fairly passable electricity arc effect that’s generated by code.

The next step is to make it be created in the right place when the level is loaded in, but that’s pretty straightforward. You can see a few of the electrical generators dotted around in that screenshot, so it’s just a matter of finding that start and end points off two of those. A doddle.

There’s other progress since last week’s shot in there as well. A couple of deadly robots. A floating platform (every platform game has got to have those, right?). Some HUD (there’s more than that, but most of it clears off when it isn’t needed). And some collectibles.

If you can tell me what the collectibles are meant to be then I’ll be a happy man, as I’m not sure they are very recognisable.

I’m not one for the big pre-release hype buildup, but I thought I would throw this trailer out there. If you like cartoony, space-themed, one button, screen chasing games with zombies in them, this game will tick four out of five of your boxes.

Coming soon to an internet near you.

This one is perhaps more self-explanatory than Family Rez.

But just in case my horrible chicken-scratch writing is letting me down, I’ll explain it a little. Lighthouses is a twin-stick save ‘em up that tasks you with guiding ships safely through the rocky waters around your lighthouse.

Keep your light beams focussed on ships to allow them to see, and steer around any rocks in their path. Without a light they’ll just keep heading in a straight line. (Yes, I know that this isn’t how lighthouses actually work. But I don’t care.) Essentially it becomes a plate spinning exercise as you have more ships to take care of than lights to use.

Hazards come in the form of rocks, the smashed up remains of ships you failed to protect, adverse weather conditions, and even sea monsters. There was also a thought that you could send out an air-sea rescue power up to rescue drowning sailors, but would need to hold a light on the wreck to guide them.

Thinking about it now, this would also work pretty well with Kinect. Maybe I should have formed a Kinect-based studio.

I was just wondering if you’d explain this to me. Preferably in a way that isn’t just horrible buzz-phrases about expanding the market, monetization, and the like.

How have you managed to find a voice over that’s more annoying than the DJ that everybody turned off almost immediately in Burnout 3? “Boo-yah”? A clip of Spandau Ballet’s “Gold”? “You have really expensive tastes.”?

Why’s everything suddenly tiny? That’s not dramatic or exciting, it’s shit. It’s crash done using the Sim City engine.

At least you used to know when and how to do camera cuts and closeups so that a player could still make the game work and understand where the traffic was coming from, but also see exciting booms and crunches and cars shattering. You know, the cool bits from Burnout’s Crash mode.

I’m guessing this view and locked distance is so you can get a much lower age rating; since it’s now no more visually exciting than slapping two HotWheels cars together and making a “bang” noise.

And the Kinect controls. I hope you’re getting a big payout for that. Having to jump to make my car explode? Is it helping make the game more exciting? Or immersive? Or fun? The most exciting thing that happens in that video is in the top right at a point where the player’s car is down in the bottom left somewhere.

I hate being negative about games before they come out. I don’t like being Denny Downer. But every now and again I see something that just makes me cry for what I wanted it to be.

Since I know people love pre-pre-alpha shots of games, I thought I’d share this with you.

Did this guy look like the sort of person who would save the world? Maybe. I hope so, anyway.

The level is not much to look at yet, but it’s serving an important purpose. The idea is to create one or two test levels that have common jump sizes, and then tweak the player’s movement and jumping variables in those. Running around and around, trying to jump up a one tile step, then up a two tile step, then up three tiles. Should your character even be able to jump up three tiles? If he shouldn’t then this will tell you if he can.

Eventually you’ll have something that feels good, and you’ll also know exactly how wide and tall to gaps and walls if you want to create barriers for the player.

Best of all, you won’t have a load of levels half arted up that have the wrong measurements in them to fix.

I’m not done with the greyboxing here yet. There are a couple of “feels nice” platformer movement tweaks to code in, and I’m not entirely happy with the distance the little fella can jump – a four tile gap feels for too wide for a little baldy headed scientist.

But his vertical jumping feels right, and the flick screen boundaries are also good. So I’m happy. You can’t rush these things.

Or “How Homefront Annoys Me by Confusing Me”

I’ve just recently started playing Kaos Studios’ Homefront, and to be honest I’m having a bit of a hard time of it.

Not the harrowing scenes of innocent people being shot, or my character having to lie on top of a mass grave to avoid detection, but the terrible job it does of guiding me.

First off, it frequently tells me to do things it doesn’t want me to do. This is a problem that Call of Duty World at War had in spades, so I’m not terribly surprised that Homefront accidentally copies the bathwater while trying to duplicate the baby.

Team mates will often shout things like “quick, get over there it’s urgent” while exciting music plays and the game does its best to make me think time is a pressing factor. The problem is that the level and combat designers seem to not have been told that run-and-gun sections will be needed. Playing on normal difficulty requires a fair amount of cowering behind cover and slowly edging forwards in most situations. Which is a play style that doesn’t gel with the pace the game is trying to achieve in these sections.

You’ll also be told things like “wait up, we don’t want them to see us”. What this actually means is “we are going to stand still and wait for you to walk forward and hit a trigger point, so whatever you do, don’t wait up or the seas will run dry long before we move on”.

Secondly, it’ll often leave you hanging and wondering if you’ve done something wrong (or not done something you should have) while you wait for AI buddies to perform some animations. Maybe moving on to the next area requires a fridge to be pushed out of the way – your character can’t do this (weak arms, I guess) so you have to find ways of entertaining yourself while your chum moves in to place and does his thing.

This happens altogether too frequently – you spend a lot of time looking at the asses of your AI people, and waiting. I could make a crude joke there, but I’m not going to.

In fact it happens so often that at one point the AI got stuck (two guys were trying to move through the same narrow tunnel at once, and locked their collision against each other – also stopping me from getting past) and I stood for a few minutes to see what scripted event they were supposed to be waiting for. Eventually I got suspicious and reloaded from the last checkpoint, and lo and behold, they weren’t meant to hang around there.

Thirdly, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been hit by instant-kill enemy attacks that I couldn’t see coming. It’s very annoying to be running about shooting people and for a helicopter to suddenly rocket you to death. Or to be locking your helicopter-killing robot tank on to the helicopter, and have it pinpoint you and blow you up. or to be walking through a perfectly normal building and suddenly thewall next to you explodes and kills you. Or to enter a new area and have a rocket-wielding guy target you immediately.

Finally, AI buddies will often put themselves in places where I will get killed if I follow them. I see two of my fellow soldiers behind a piece of cover, standing up and firing at the enemy. I run over and crouch between them. I get killed within seconds by the nasty men focusing their attacks on me.

This isn’t rocket science, I should be able to copy what my chums are doing and have the same chance of dying as they do (unless there’s a particularly good, obvious, reason for their lack of damage, such as them being encased in a five metre tall exo-suit of armour). In fact, watching and copying my buddies should be a good way of leading the player through the level. But while I have doubts about my survivability in their location, I will always hang back and let them take the lead.

(In one level of Homefront I actually let them run so far ahead – partly while I hunted out the random hidden collectibles, and partly because I was afraid of dying if I followed them through an enemy camp – that I never saw them for a good ten minutes. They finished off entire combat encounters, shouting stuff to me about what was going on and enemy positions I should be aware of.)

So overall, not a terrible game (I’m still having more fun with it than I did with the Duke Nukem demo), but one that is awful at telling you where you should be, where you shouldn’t be, and what’s happening next.

I get really angry when the new floor in my tower is not the dream job of any residents. I have a Tiny Temper.

I, along with lots of the rest of the world, have been “playing” Tiny Tower recently. I used dick quotes, because I never really feel like I’m playing much, and it doesn’t really feel like a game. I would describe it as more of a semi-interactive screensaver. Something to spend ten seconds on, a few times a day.

I suppose the gameplay is in trying to min/max the output of your towering-inferno-to-be, but I don’t find that particularly compelling beyond looking a few times a day and ordering in new stock to every floor.

Likewise I don’t find the personalisation enticing, because I can’t actually choose what’s on every floor, or what a floor looks like beyond palette swaps.

Early on I thought the free to play side of it was a little broken. After racing through the tutorial and placing a number of floors, I hit a huge calm period of waiting to build up cash. “They’ve put in the pay barrier too soon,” I thought, “I haven’t had time to become attached to my skyscraper yet, so I don’t care if it thrives.”

Shortly after this the game hit a rhythm where I’m never more than half a day’s farming away from having a new floor’s worth of cash – my tower quickly reached a point where it was generating money hand over fist, and frequent visitors meant that I was able to upgrade to the best elevator within days. “They’ve put the pay barrier in too late,” I now though with apparently very little self-awareness, “I don’t actually have to pay to play this at all.” (You’ll notice I don’t use dick quotes when I speak.)

Then I read that there is a 2.6% conversion rate on a player base of well over a million. And I realised I know much less than I thought I did about what drives free to play players.

It’s a shame there isn’t a way of getting more data out of this. What were people buying the Towerbux (the currency Nimblebit sells) for? To speed up building and buying goods? To convert for raw cash to spend on floors? So that they could go through all colour options until their tower was a uniform hue?