Thursday, July 4, 2013

OUYA, that's why I'm doing this.

I love how easy it is to make pun titles using this console name.  :D  Ok, now that that is out of my system, on to actual info.

Cirrell Battle, from OUYA Nation over at G+ asked the OUYA group this question this week:

"What do you plan to do with your new OUYA console?"

The following after the break point is straight from my reply on the group, and sums up my thoughts on the current OUYA games market.

TLDR: The market has more then it's share of problems, mostly from ported or cheap cash grabs, and from developers who don't remember to think like a consumer or keep marketing things like they did for android / iphone.  In short, don't market your game by annoying the people who haven't paid you cash.

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Developing and releasing a game for it. Hopefully more then one, but I'm a one man army so for now even one good game is a great goal.

I wish I could say I'd be playing games on it, but there really isn't much in the market that catches my attention without breaking my wallet just yet. To be fair, I have only given the market and OUYA about 20 hours of play so far, total, and most of that was spent having a little too much fun with The Amazing Frog.

From what I've seen, as a poor gamer on a shoestring budget, I'm not all that convinced to buy games yet. There are a number of reasons why:

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Oh look silence, let's break it with an OUYA!

I don't have much to say, but I wanted to post something so you all know I'm still around.

It looks like the last blog post was way back in January. That gives me a lot to catch you up on. With the timescale, I feel most of the events will be water under the bridge, so to speak. So I'll just hit the highlights.

I got an OUYA!

I know you all expect me to have lots of game reviews and such for it, but in truth, I've been so busy developing my own game for it that I haven't really played much.

Yes, I'm developing a new Smiley Gems. A very upgraded version, running in Unity 3D, which in turn means running on OUYA, PC, and probably Android as well. A new blog will be coming that is about the project, as I'd like to keep all the news about it in one source.

I'm currently coding the game engine to adapt to all the devices, so it's taking a bit longer then usual to actually write all the gameplay elements. In particular, the controls and gameplay elements currently scale and adapt to all three devices. Mouse on PC(with controller support overwrite), controller only for consoles, and tilt on Android devices. It's all a bit rusty and lacking in polish, but I do have it working.

As for OUYA itself:

I feel any list of recommendations for OUYA games I give is going to be a very slanted view of what's on the market. But yes, OUYA is a thing. It's only $99, the controllers are expensive but with some quick use of the internet you can get PS3 or X-box wireless working on it too.

It's not perfect, a lot of things still need some work or could be improved. But it's very developer friendly and open, and really impressive considering the company behind it didn't even exist as more then a dream a year ago.

Our new standard for things we try on OUYA is how they compare to playing "The Amazing Frog?". We might have been a bit biased when we played that one due to it being 2 AM, but it managed to entertain us for at least a few hours, and is still fun to play later on. I do recommend getting that game, it's free, and features free-form no goal ragdoll gameplay with frogs, explosions, and two player support. It's definitely experimental and open minded.

I told you OUYA was a thing.

Perhaps the biggest flaw, and feature, is that OUYA is currently suffering an identity crisis of sorts. My impressions from the store have been that the console has a lot of potential, but like a new Nintendo DS, no one really knows what to do with it just yet. Hopefully once the free market and more developers hop on board, it will become more clear what OUYA's eco system has to offer in terms of gameplay style and audience.

I was sure there were some other things to talk about, but as it turns out, none of it seems that important. So I guess this post will mostly just be OUYA first impressions and a small teaser that I'm cooking up something new in regards to Smiley Gems.

Monday, January 14, 2013

La-Mulana PC Remake - First Impressions

Not a review, more like a comment, but I felt it to be blog worthy.  Besides, I might never actually finish this game till a few months or years later given my current progress, so any review I do wouldn't do it justice.  So I'll ramble instead.

Bought La Mulana, the paid PC remake of the old freeware game.

Still got mixed feelings about it.  I don't regret buying it, nor the time spent playing it. Not in the slightest.  Up to 13 hours so far and have barely scratched the surface, revealing a much deeper game than I expected.  This game is rather long for a Metroid-like game, especially a platformer.

In fact, it's one of my new favorite platform/exploration games of all time.  Scratch that, one of my favorite games of all time, period.

But man, sometimes, I just want to throw something at the designer.

I constantly waver between throwing massive nostalgia tear soaked thank you notes for all the hard work this near perfect gem of a 2d platformer has taken to produce. Or the biggest, heaviest, most painful to die if hit by spike studded object I can find.

But I do want to throw a Something. Just not sure which yet.

Maybe a spike studded object covered with nostalgia tear soaked notes would send the message?

The new graphical overhaul in the PC remake of the game and the refined puzzle design makes it all the more sweeter to play, while the difficulty of the old freeware game has been kept intact despite having a Wii Ware release.  And the length, in a world of Metroid clones that last 8 to 10 hours, La Mulana's puzzles and just plain massive maze like map is very refreshing.  The content is also quite varied, no two puzzles are quite the same, and often they are unique riddles that need to be carefully thought about and then acted on in experimentation to solve.

This is a good game.  Of that there is no doubt.  

But it is certainly not for everyone.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Light headaches, code progress, and combat control theory.

Running through compiler errors while having a headache from a sickness isn't a recommended activity for entertainment. It's a bit demoralizing, to say the least. I may need to take a break till this sickness runs off.

In good news, I now have a script that lets objects be "aware" of how many of a given type of object are around them.

Still working on getting the distances between them returned as well. Ideally the script would enable the object to request how many of X object are within distance Y, and get an array returned containing either distances or the object references.

Why do I need this?  Good question.  It does seem like a silly script taken out of context.

Our main character needs to know how if he is fighting one enemy or a group. Combat changes a bit depending on which situation he is in, so like a real fighter, he's got to be dynamically aware how close the nearest enemies are and change his moves accordingly.

In turn, the proposed system lets the controls be super easy (just one attack button) while the combat itself can vary from "doing combo attacks on the big thug enemy" to "swinging all around to defend from all sides". It should be pretty fun once it all works.

But mainly, having him aware of how many enemies are near helps solve the problem a lot of games with a combo attack system have.


Yes, game design rambling oncoming:

Anyone who's played them knows one of the most annoying things ever is to have your main character "lock on" to one enemy, only to be smashed to bits by the three other surrounding enemies.

Realistic, sure, after all, you were the one that mashed the attack button telling the main character to start the combo attack. However, that doesn't make it any more fun to be a victim of this when you panic in the heat of battle.

Most games call it "skill" and leave such a trap in on purpose to punish the player for making mistakes. For a combat focused game, that would be an acceptable additional complexity.  There's nothing wrong with it actually, assuming your game is mainly about fighting or has a complex fighting system in it.

For games that don't have such a system, they usually solve the "combo gets you killed" in a few ways:

-Having the other enemies mostly just stand there while the combo is going on. This works, but makes the enemies look kind of stupid since they go from charging into battle to just standing around screaming while their friend is brutally murdered in front of them. Assassin's Creed players know this all too well, it happens so much in that game it's often immersion breaking(They've been trying to fix this in the sequels, with varying success).

-Splitting the attack commands into a "Light attack" and "Heavy attack" option. This creates two buttons in the controls, which works for complex action games, but for this game I want to keep controls simple so anyone can play. In a game where fighting is only going to be a third of what the player is doing, it doesn't make too much sense to make it so complicated.

-Give the player a control for "dodge" that interrupts the combo, even when it's been pressed into motion. This is fun, I like games that do this, but once again, we're adding a third button that only exists for the sake of combat. Combat in turn is only a part of the platforming game experience, and so unless we can come up with a lot of platforming uses for the button, it's just adding more complexity to the controls.

My game actually sort of uses the third solution without adding a third button, the Jump button will cancel a combo by jumping out of it. This actually serves a purpose in platforming, you can jump higher by kicking off enemies or combo attack-able elements in this way. Of course, this alone isn't enough to fix the initial problem of getting attacked by many enemies at once.


And so my final solution is to avoid ever creating the "combo mobbed" situation in the first place, by making the main character himself only be able to combo attack if there isn't other enemies nearby that might interrupt him.  It sounds simple on paper, but in reality there are a lot of little scripts that need to talk to each other to make it work and feel right.  In the end, it should just feel like the main character is "behaving smart" and helping the player out.  Since the game is primarily focused on collecting and platforming, having the combat be a bit light should work just fine.

Not sure how soon I can get the system up and running with all this illness going around.  But I think it looks really good on paper, and I really want to try it out in practice.