NaGaDeMo - Make a Game in One Month! START!

Had my first playtests last night. Working on a blog post to describe my project and what I've learned so far.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Had my first playtests last night. Working on a blog post to describe my project and what I've learned so far.

It's a card game, right? Are you making a physical game or going to make it a video game?

SixteenBlue wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Had my first playtests last night. Working on a blog post to describe my project and what I've learned so far.

It's a card game, right? Are you making a physical game or going to make it a video game?

A video game if I can swing it. But the nice thing about it being a physical card game is that I can prototype and playtest really, really quickly.

Cyrax : rather than forcing you to constantly update the first post with my various ramblings - leave in the link to my first entry and I'll add my own updates into that instead. Will probably save you a bit of work

Ok, so... walking animations for the main character all look more or less acceptable for now. Left/Right need a couple of more frames, looks a bit odd at the moment, but up and down work suprisingly well in context. I've set up the scale properly in each of the maps now as well, so the sprite is the right size to match each environment (really easy to do in AGS, you just tell it what size % the sprite should be at the very top and very bottom of the current walkable area and it automatically sizes everything inbetween).

If I have the time, I'll probably go back and completely redraw the main character from scratch in a slightly less rough form but for now this is acceptable.

Also, started working on painting up the first room properly...

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/scene1_forweb.jpg)

Got an extra free day tommorrow thanks to a bank holiday so the plan of action is

1. Before I get much further I need to figure out how to set up a non-sierra interface...never been a fan of that design - FAR too many icons to rotate through. Need a nice simple "left click interact / right click examine" interface.
2. Start work on the first proper obstacle/puzzle and figure out how the inventory/items stuff works in AGS
2. Do a bit more work painting the backdrops for the first couple of rooms

Forward, to retreat! Wait..what

That's incredible.

You are the king, stevenmack! How are you finding AGS, pretty easy to work with?

Less progress today - I planned on switching out the interface from the classic sierra interface to the "disk" system, similar to the one used in Monkey Island 3 (hold down mouse button then pick from interaction options), but I can only assume I screwed something up as I just couldn't get it to work correctly in the ridiculously high resolution of 800x600 (it's the future, I tells ya).

Also it would have meant rebuilding everything I'd done from scratch again - not a HUGE deal since right now that's mostly just navigation between the rooms but I decided it was one extra hassle I didn't need so to keep things simple I ended up rolling back to the Sierra layout

...which ALSO needs to be updated to get to work in this resolution, so right now I'm sorting out the layout and adding some temporary icons that don't make me want to claw my eyes out.

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/tempmenu.jpg)
just placeholder icons at the moments obviously - will draw my own once I'm happy with the layout n' stuff

Or, I'll do it NOW!

Looking real nice, keep it up!

You kids with your "graphics" and your "pictures". My updates are going to be pretty boring as I all I have to put on screen is code and... the text that makes up my display. (But seriously, looks great!)

This is about as graphically exciting as my game gets right now:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QULEal.jpg)

Citizen86 wrote:

You are the king, stevenmack! How are you finding AGS, pretty easy to work with?

Haven't really looked at the scripting side of things yet, but just slapping down rooms, hotspots, objects etc is a breeze.

Actually had an idea about the interface. Working on the buttons now to see how it looks...also gives me an idea of the direction to take things thematically...

Bam!

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/iconprogress.jpg)

I'm happy with that for the time being I think.

Now I just need to do the inventory and all the other menu screens to match 0_o

Inventory Get

Michael wrote:

You kids with your "graphics" and your "pictures". My updates are going to be pretty boring as I all I have to put on screen is code and... the text that makes up my display. (But seriously, looks great!)

I'll be slightly better off once I get into polishing... but not too much. (I'm also going for roguelike-inspired, but in 3d). That said, most of what I have is tech-demo kinds of things and 8 pages of design text (No, I'm not kidding), I've not had a whole lot of time to actually code this week. With any luck I'll have something, even if it's just wandering cubes, to show by the end of the week.

Got about two hours of work done last night, but no graphical output to show off yet. I did playback my Chronolapse movie thus far, and that was pretty neat. I have it set up for 10 second captures. It's a lot of me switching back and forth between Pandora and code, but still fun to watch. 3.9 hours in so far. (I'm clocking in and out to see how long I actually spend on the game. Helps me (somewhat) focused, too.)

Out of interest, Is there any way of going back to update your register entry on the http://nagademo.com/ site?

I kind of wish I could go back and put in something a bit less vague.

I'm tempted to just put up my concept just to get some discussion going around it. The current doc has a bit of great wall of text of China about it, but I'm sure I can trim it down to the essentials, and keeping the specifics I've come up with out of it is probably better for discussion(I put it up somewhere else and it didn't get any traction).

How do you guys feel about espionage and counter-espionage, no violence, paranoia, investigations, etc?

Scratched wrote:

How do you guys feel about espionage and counter-espionage, no violence, paranoia, investigations, etc?

Feel pretty good about that.

Gravey wrote:
Scratched wrote:

How do you guys feel about espionage and counter-espionage, no violence, paranoia, investigations, etc?

Feel pretty good about that.

Agreed, I love games that can break out of the norm

Scratched wrote:

How do you guys feel about espionage and counter-espionage, no violence, paranoia, investigations, etc?

Everyone has a great idea. Without context, I can't give you an honest opinion.

And stinking E3. I half forgot it was this week, so most of my free time will be spent checking up on news and media. I didn't get too many things done on Sunday, but the few things were fairly important. I figured out the collision problem I had, which was an option hidden in the mask setting for sprites. Now sprites properly drop, collide/stop at the edges, and stay put when the first row hits the boundary box for the section. My next goal is to get the randomizer, the default DnD one is terribly limited, to work like a normal Match 3 game. Right now, the randomizer options are to either create at a specific point, or at the current location. Neither is optimal, but I suppose if I get serious I'll have to rework most of this as code down the line, anyway.

Almost no content, but I wanted to get something up.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.ph...

cyrax wrote:

Everyone has a great idea.

Yes, definitely, I subscribe to the 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration school of thought. It takes a lot more than just saying 'wouldn't it be great' to have that greatness happen.

Quick update before work - changed the inventory screen to match the menu and added a test item

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/inventory_screen.jpg)

just the various menus to sort now and that's all the interface stuff reasonably complete

starting on the first main puzzle

I can't figure how to work Chronolapse. All my videos come out a second or two long. Obviously, some of my record settings are off, but they're not described too well imo.

cyrax wrote:

I can't figure how to work Chronolapse. All my videos come out a second or two long. Obviously, some of my record settings are off, but they're not described too well imo.

What are you recording it at? I don't have it handy but there should be a setting for how often it captures. And the video creator does too... Maybe not enough images?

Here's my settings.

http://imgur.com/a/UDBRm#2

Seriously, stevenmack is an inspiration.

This month is actually the worst month of the year so far for me to do something like this but I'll keep it in mind in the future.

ta very much

Making good progress on the first proper 'puzzle' - got all the major pieces in play, just need to work on triggering what happens when everything is in the right place and also adding some clues around so that it's solvable without random trial and error. Which probably makes it sound more complicated than it is, but whatever

After that's all working I'll maybe post what I've got so far.

cyrax wrote:

Here's my settings.

http://imgur.com/a/UDBRm#2

No idea what's wrong with that... Sorry I can't offer much help. Maybe check their site?

So E3 brought work on my game to a stop, but I also ran into a problem.

I had been making a trick-taking card game with an assassination theme. In a nutshell, players picked targets, bid on the number of that target they could kill (tricks they could win) given their hand, and then were awarded points based primarily on the stealthiness of their executions. It makes for a fun, quick little card game.

But when I started writing about it, explaining the rules and what they represented, I found myself repulsed by the game's theme. It made me uncomfortable to make a game where players bid on human lives and then competed to kill people. I just couldn't keep working on it.

So now I have a fairly solid mechanical foundation, but I'm having trouble making progress without a theme to build from. I tried a few different variations (monster hunting instead of assassination, for example), but I couldn't quite make it work.

I'm not sure what to do from here. Maybe grow some dreads, kick my shoes off, and reek of patchouli.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

But when I started writing about it, explaining the rules and what they represented, I found myself repulsed by the game's theme. It made me uncomfortable to make a game where players bid on human lives and then competed to kill people. I just couldn't keep working on it.

I had a crude proof of concept game where you were a mayor of a small town during the end of the world. I created data for 100 citizens batching them into families of 10 people each... It got kind of disturbing when I started adding in motorcycle gang invasion events and starvation when those 10 person families included kids as well. It just didn't sit right so I removed kids completely and eventually stopped working on it.

Take a look at the Mafia game. My line of thinking is that when you're involving people in your design, try to involve them as much as possible.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

But when I started writing about it, explaining the rules and what they represented, I found myself repulsed by the game's theme. It made me uncomfortable to make a game where players bid on human lives and then competed to kill people. I just couldn't keep working on it.

Would you be interested in making the game political? Drone strikes on kill list targets, with points awarded for having as little collateral damage as possible (and having no civilian deaths would be impossible). Then the repulsion would be meaningful.

I was playing September 12 yesterday, looking for inspiration, when I thought "You know, this game would be a lot easier if I just 'made' everyone terrorists." That reminded me the Pakistani "militants" euphemism. So I tried to brainstorm a card game where you have to assassinate targets and "deal with" the collateral deaths by discarding their cards into a "civilians" pile (any civilian card) or a "militants" pile (actual soldiers, and male civilians over 18), so that when you get a random "media exposure" card, your revealed civilians discard pile won't be so big to result in a huge points hit. Anyway, that's as far as I got in the shower this morning.

My other idea is a card-matching game based on ThereIFixedIt.com.