The Wolf's Den

Top Secret Project In The Works

2010-07-21T13:58:00.001-05:00

Me friend back in the Philippines wants to create a Facebook game! I was very excited to hear about this. He gave me his pitch, and now I have to do my research, there are maybe two of games out there similar to what he wants to make, so this might actually work.

Right now we are tossing around ideas of the concept, theme, and overall game play, looks like a lot of game design and prototyping to be done in the coming months. I suppose once we have the game locked down we will have to convert it a digital form and work on from their.

I actually have several games already written up (its always good to write down your ideas), I will have to adjust them to fix the style that we need for our game.

Hit Boxes

2010-07-13T14:15:00.000-05:00

After completing my project, I now see how creative games are, they are mostly all hit boxes and collision detections! Which is why I feel that mastering this concept is even more important.

Fighting games use this concept a lot, and in this link it explains how it is used. If red box touches blue box then it is a hit, and damage is dealt.

I'm still working with 2D game, but I can see how it can work in 3D as well, instead of comparing boxes, you will compare cubes! If any of the points enter the area of another cube, then you can flag for collision!

Project One - Pickin' Sticks - Complete

2010-07-13T08:41:00.008-05:00

Took a good week but I finished my first game! Pickin' Sticks! The game handles well, I might remove the diagonal walking, but over all all the criteria is there. You can download the link here.

Music is very easy to add, begin able to call that function from anywhere is great!

Mix_PlayMusic(music, -1);

Color Key was a huge issue for me, my character spite was white while my background was an odd shade of pink. I simply changed all the colors on the file to magenta (255,0,255); it was a bit weird for the background, I would input the right settings but it kept coming out with an odd shade of magenta, I finally opened my character sprite copied the color, then copy-pasted the background into that file then the pink finally became magenta, I then renamed the file and saved it.

It would be much easier if I had Photoshop, with the magic wand and selecting all of a certain color, that would make converting any color to magenta easy. Sadly I lost my Photoshop CD years ago during the move... I might reconsider getting it again.

Another time consuming task was the int to string conversion. The word "Score: " was a string, but the counter is obviously a number, I was able to create the code for it, but it seems rather bulky... I used to program more in Java, so I was babied with the auto string concatenations so I did not have to deal with this. In the end I used this code:

std::string strOne = "Score: ", strTwo = "";

nScore++;

itoa(nScore, strTemp, 10);
strTwo = strOne + strTemp;

message = TTF_RenderText_Solid( font, strTwo.c_str(), textColor );

What was annoying was I had to declare the strings in the main loop and pass them as parameters into the walking function (where it checks for collision), there is obviously room for improvement here. I know there is a limit to the number of parameters to pass, and wasting two like this is horrible. I'll have to test a better way to do this.

EVO 2010

2010-07-12T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Olympics of Fighting Games: EVO 2010

It was an amazing event, wish I had more time to prepare and just go to see it live, however the live stream was great as well, other than it crashing when it got overloaded!

I was very impressed with Super Street Fighter 4 (SSF4), they had a total of 1,600 player enter and they duked it out for an entire day! No surprise to see the top 32 with some of the best players in the world, as well as a nice character variety. The matches were amazing, plus the event did a great job, there was one main screen, but two different systems connected to it, as one match was being played out, the other one had players do their button check (which takes up time). Matches came one after the other! Huge upset when Justin Wong got eliminated, but I was routing for the under-dogs anyways, Vangief just because my main is Zangief, and Gamer Bee who played, what people consider the second worst character in the game, Adon!

Grats to "The Beast" Daigo for being the EVO 2010 SSF4 Champion! As much as I wanted the other two to reach the finals, Daigo is just a monster; he is just the best there is!

My brother and I were very fond of fighting games, we grew up together playing it, ever iterative and almost every fight game we have played. I do miss my brother, I'm here in the States, while he is still back in the Philippines, he is coming here to the State soon once he graduates from college, and I'm hoping to get into the groove again when he comes here!

We are a huge and massive fan of Marvel versus Capcom 2 (MvC2) franchise, and I'm sure he will be excited with MvC3 which they showed some game play during EVO, I was ecstatic, if SSF4 looked like a moving painting, MvC3 is like a moving comic. The art directing is great, but I'm not too happy about some of the supers/hypers that some of the Capcom characters have, hopefully it will be better!

In another note, the MvC2 tournament was very exciting to watch as well, I was really hoping that Clockwork would win with his Striker-Sentinel-Doom combo, it was very amazing to watch all the insane combo-lock-down you can do with that team.

Overall what makes me love games like these are the community. I'm glad that a lot of games have translated to online play, as it opens up to a huge variety of players as well as being part of a large community. I have been a long member of SRK and its great to see the community grow and discuss, I could however live without all the flaming that goes on, but there are still a majority of helpful players.

Project One - Pickin' Sticks

2010-07-12T11:57:00.000-05:00

So the first game that I’m currently working on is Pickin’ Stick. It’s a very simple game concept where you move a character and pick up an object, once you collect it, another will appear on the map! Its like Snake, except you don't grow longer.

The tutorials have taught me a lot but its time to piece all the parts together! I broke the game components down and attempted to solve them individually, here is how I did it:

+Character movement

+Character sprite animation

+Background

+Stick sprite

+Collision Detection

+Randomly Generate Stick
-Music

-Score Board
-Color Key

So far any of the plus I have completed and all the minus I’m still working on. Currently I have a few bugs to work out like the Color Key, I just went ahead and did the other parts but I will come back to it later.

The Collision Detection took a while to do as I realize my Sprite was an odd size 32x48, and as she walked I guess it overlapped my 32x32 stick which caused a collision and got my character stuck... I thought it had to do with my passing of the parameters from function to function, but after a simple change in the size its working! It was still a good experience though, because I relearn the pointer passing shenanigans again. Also I ran into this issue because I was testing the Collision Detection WITHOUT the stick moving just yet, just wanted to make sure that the function was working right before I added onto it!

Surprisingly I'm stuck with the text on my screen, for some reason it is not loading my font, which is in the same folder. I tired a separate test and it works for that! I must be missing something... I'll figure this out soon, then its off to Music and Color Key!

I got my sprite from this website link

Double Duty Configuration

2010-07-09T13:49:00.007-05:00

So I’ve been reading around about IDEs, and it looks like DevC++ is not the best one to be testing in. I have tried Microsoft Visual C++, but its very slow… and I can not use past a month… Unless I pay, so I decided to go with what many have suggested Code Block.

So far its going pretty well, I moved my project over and everything ran, and I decided to clean out the rest of my IDEs… Bad Idea, haha, prior to me removing the other two IDEs, Code block as using the setup from DevC++ so I had to reconfigure my setup.

I’d like the share my configurations with other that are a budding programmer like me, so they can overcome this annoy obstacle.

Firstly Download Code Block here and install it!

Download SDL from their website here and extract it, its easier to extract it than to copy-paste the items out. (Check from a more updated version if it exists)

You should have something that looks like this!

Open the bin and, you will want to move the SDL.dll file into the compiler's bin folder. If you just did a straight up install it should find it in: C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\MinGW\

Then you do the same for the items in the lib and Include, note that the Include you will want to move the SDL folder.

So basically:
C:\SDL-1.2.14\bin\ -> C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\MinGW\bin\
C:\SDL-1.2.14\lib\ -> C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\MinGW\lib\
C:\SDL-1.2.14\include\SDL\ -> C:\Program Files\CodeBlocks\MinGW\include\SDL\

This should give you the basics, but you will want to download these as well:

SDL Image – Look for SDL_image-devel-1.2.10-VC.zip

SDL Text – Look for SDL_mixer-devel-1.2.11-VC.zip

SDL Music – Look for SDL_ttf-devel-2.0.10-VC.zip

Click the corresponding file to what system you’re programming in and make sure to get the most updated version. For each of the files you will want to do the same thing. Move all the .h to the Include folder, .lib to the lib, and .dll to the bin folders.

After that open up Code Block; and go to settings->Compiler and debugger…

In the linker settings you will want to enter these lines:

-lmingw32

-lSDLmain

-lSDL

-lSDL_image

-lSDL_ttf

-lSDL_mixer

This is very daunting, but I hope this can help others attempting to start out!

NOTE: I'll have to add more pictures, because I forgot to link the includes and lib which of course are VERY important. When I have time I will add them!

Reference:

http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson03/index.php

http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=Using_SDL_with_Code::Blocks

Game Review - Long Shot

2010-07-09T10:38:00.001-05:00

So I was able to play my friends new game Long Shot; a horse racing game that has a similar heart pumping – mad cheering excitement as an actual horse race. The goal of the game is to obtain the most amount of money at the end of the race. You can get money by playing the cards in your hand; having a horse you own get top three, or betting on a horse that gets top three.

The movement of the horse is simple, you roll a horse dice (1d10), and a movement dice (1d6). Each face of the horse dice corresponds to a horse, and the movement dice has four 1s, a 3, and a 0. Generally a horse will move one space; there are also cards that can affect the position of the horses. After a horse moves, you may complete a single action; playing a card, buying a horse, or betting on a horse. The buying of horses goes up really fast at the start of the game, leaving a player with really only two difficult options, playing a card for effects or betting on a horse. I consider it difficult because each have their benefits, a bulk of money can be won by betting on a horse, but if you over bet and none of your horses you bet on win you will lose big as well. The cards on the other hand can earn you money, but very little, other effects like moving the horses can be good, but its very limited, you could spend all your cards to move your horse to win, but their will not be enough time to collect money and bet on it as well. NOTE: There is a darker brown part of the track, after a horse passes that section no more bets can be played on it.

Overall the game is quite random, but not in a bad way, there is always an option to bet on the winning horse, even if it’s not a horse you own, with the odds you can win a larger amount than the horse owner! There are several strategies you can employ because of the randomness; you could try to own several horses and have them win, or simply bet on horses that are winning, or even a combination!

Overall I had a great time with that game and I would like to play it again. The only compliant I would say it that its a very long game, however you don't really feel it.

Pictures from BGG

Back on the Ball

2010-07-09T09:07:00.008-05:00

It's been a while since my last post, but I think it’s about time! I've been starting to program again, and boy was it a pain to start. Attempting to configure them all; IDE, compliers, and linkers caused such an issue. I guess I should have not started with SDK, it is such a beast! I decided to start with SDL, much better to deal and configure.

I was looking for many sites to learn as my current book as not adequate… It was just too old… Some of the first few sites that I found on youtube was moosader, and then it linked to lazyFoo where I got most of my basics down in one day.

Great path way if anyone wants to get started with it, from here on I plan to blog about my progress and some other game design ideas or concepts as well.

TCG Color Wheel

2008-10-23T11:40:00.001-05:00

One huge aspects of a TCG is the deck construction. There are literally thousands of cards to pick from and fitting the right cards is important in winning consistently. TCG have, what is called, a color wheel, named from the most popular TCG, Magic: The Gathering. A color wheel in a TCG is basically made up from the factions, sides, or teams in the game; each being its own color. A good TCG will have a color wheel where you can mix the different colors, for example games like Magic: The Gathering; mixing White and Blue, Pokemon; mixing Fire and Grass, and VS: System; mixing Fantastic Four and X-men, you do lose a mono-color consistency which can make it difficult for your deck to function and play for balance issues, generally speaking of course. I believe a good TCG needs a very mixable color wheel to have many combinations, although balancing becomes a huge issue; testing out all these combinations is difficult and some combinations may be over looked and become broken.

On the other hand, World of Warcraft the TCG took it another way; creating class-stamped cards really shrunk the card pool, not to mention another faction stamp on top of that, bringing the card pool down again. You can only play a single color on the color wheel for this game. It removed a lot of card combinations, not to mention the seal deck is so horrible, but I discuss that issue another time. The game seems vanilla to me, although I do admit it’s much easier to balance the game. I won the first Regional and got top 8 in the Nationals, but I felt the game was good, but not great. I brought this topic up because I still observe the game; the new set had an interesting concept, with dual-class cards, these cards be used by two or more classes. It’s still not as free-form as the other games, but giving deck builders a larger pool to pick from the expansion. So far all the cards previewed none have impressed me, yes the pool of cards seem larger, but when you look at it, it’s basically the same as if it were only for that class’s card.

I hope Upperdeck creates more demon heroes, or heroes like them for WOWTCG, because that opened a whole new alley for deck construction, I was very happy researching cards and creating decks for these heroes, because each demon broken the class-stamped cards and faction-stamped allies, it created a unique color. Overall I believe card games are more enjoyable when player can experiment and create a game play style that can suit them, rather than picking a pre-molded style that you need to fit yourself into.

Portals - Still Alive

2008-10-23T10:02:00.013-05:00

Portals hands-down is an awesome game, its a very unique FPS, in fact there is not shooting at all, its a puzzle solving game. The game concept alone makes it a winner, the game play is very simple, get from point A to point B, alive. And you have many to get there, since you have a hand-held portal device! You can shoot out two different portals on a smooth surface, when both are active they become each others entrance and exits. So simple. It even goes further with its humor and cute sounding killer robots. It is definitely a MUST play game.

Just yesterday, October 22, 2008, they released the expansion; I can’t wait to play this game again, it was very short, hope this fills the void. Click on the link if you have never heard of this game, it links to a video demo.

Board Game Downtime

2008-10-23T09:48:00.006-05:00

I’m a big fan of board games, so I’d like to discuss the progression of the concept of “turn.” The two most famous of board games are Chess and Go; because both use a simple turn-based system, where one player takes his action then the other. The turn is defined by the action that a player takes; most of the traditional board games take after this concept.

One of the flaws of turn-based games is when the player is idle while not on her/his turn; it is especially long when there are several players. That idle time is downtime. Recently the newer board games have taken a different angle in how turns are taken. Games like The Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Agricola. As players have more uptime while it is not on their turns. In Catan, the active player rolls the dice, and resource is produced based on the corresponding tile, any player that is adjacent to that tile gets a resource. In Puerto Rico and Agicola the active player selects a card/action, and all players in an orderly fashion have to perform that action. With this the amount of downtime is reduced, because players may act or perform while it’s not their active turn.

In order for board games to be fun, you want the players to be involved, or else you might as well pick up a single player video game, so you need to reduce the amount to downtime for each player. Turn-based games tend to deal with this issue, but there are work-around, such as, collective planning or bargaining or resources; game such as Last Night of Earth: The Zombie Game or Shadows Over Camelot use the traditional turn-based system, but players are constantly discuss about their strategies during each players turn.

Star Wars: KOTOR MMORPG

2008-10-22T12:41:00.012-05:00

Bioware and Lucas Arts just reveled Knight of the Old Republic (KOTOR) the MMORPG yesterday. This game will be very story driven and the classes will strongly follow the classes in the KOTOR game series.

They said that your actions will affect the story somehow, if not the game as a whole at least your avatars own. They want each side and each class to play a different storyline; they want the experience to be 100% unique. In that sense, I assume they want it to be different from WoW, where you end up questing in neutral areas or have mirror quests.

The game is still unwraps, they are still planning for a console version and the release date is unknown. I would like to play this game when it comes out; I’m a fan of the KOTOR series, and a large fan of the Star War world.

Sandbox Games

2008-10-22T12:19:00.005-05:00

Also known as open-ended games, this genre of games are similar to Role-Playing Games (RPG) except unlike traditional RPGs there story line is not as linear. The story line does progress in open-ended game but can be in a different order and there are multiple side-quests/missions. The play style is very different are well, traditional RPGs tend to give characters a specific role or class, while in open-ended game you can create the style of play you want.

These games are my favorite type of games, as your imagination plays part of the game, playing any type/combination of roles is awesome, but having the right background story in your head makes your avatar that much better. Being able to play a bad guy is always a plus, well at least for me; it’s great that these games can cater to that.

I would have to say the Elder Scroll Series has been the best open-ended game I have ever played, created by Bethesda Softworks. I spent a lot of time with Elder Scroll II: Daggerfall; but I spent even more time with Elder Scroll III: Morrowind. The world is just designed well and its very large, the graphics were so-so but that didn’t really matter, creating your own spells to owning your our castle, I enjoy that game so much. Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion, unfortunately I did not have the same amount of time to play it, but I will get around to playing it, just because I love the series so much.

The newly released Fable II is in the same boat, being able to customize your looks as well as your play style. I still need more time to truly see how much I will enjoy it. I do fear that I might have to choose between Fable II and Fallout III. Fallout III is even made by the makers of the Elder Scroll Series, so I can already tell I will love it. And I do like Post Apocalyptic worlds; it seems to give such a fresh feel as compared to futuristic or medieval theme. Plus the V.A.T.S. is just so awesome, the slow motion and cinematic camera angles make it visually stunning.

Whenever I play a game like this, one thought always crosses my mind… How do I break this game? How do I become so powerful without cheating? For open-ended games, there is always a way. And it makes the game that much more fun.

Zombie Panic!

2008-10-22T10:10:00.007-05:00

A First Person Shooter (FPS) that was created from the source engine, at the moment this game is free to download from Steam. The setting was well done, just like any other zombie movie; it takes place in a remote small town, or as Sarah Palin calls them, the Real America. The night would seem like any other night, except that zombies are running amuck!

Zombie Panic! is a very interesting game. Players start out as survivors, composed mainly of Policemen, except for a single player that will be the master zombie and maybe a few more normal zombies if the player pool is large. The master zombie known as Whitey, has more hp (50), walks faster than the normal zombie, and has an infection attack. Most of the game missions are to survive for X amount of time, gather items and escape, or purge the zombies. But overall the system is always the same, if you die as a survivor you will respawn as a zombie to kill and turn on your ex-teammates!

Survivors start out with a melee weapon; from sledge hammers to golf clubs to keyboards, there is a large variety. There are handguns, shotguns, rifles, and a magnum. Most guns have a good kick that can pin down a zombie from getting to you, handguns having the least kick and rifles having the most. The magnum on the other hand can one-shot a zombie with a headshot. A unique feature to the game is the bullet weight; carrying spare ammo takes a toll on your character making him walk slower based on the weight of the ammunition he is toting around. There are several buttons on your keyboard to manage your spare ammo, such as cycling through the types and dropping them. This is great because it prevents people from hoarding ammo and adds a balancing factor to the zombies as they can chase you down more easily despite their natural slow walking speed. If worse comes to worst, you can always press the “panic” button. This allows you to drop all your spare ammo and guns and gain running speed and melee attack speed bonus. Zombies on the other hand, gain melee attack, regeneration, and a limited sprint to help them catch those pesky survivors. Whitey has a special attack that infects a survivor; it has a 10% per hit that slowly turns the survivor into a zombie. When this happens the player could easily be quiet, turn and kill their fellow survivors, or scream “I’m infected!” and take one for the team as their teammates shoot you dead.kill you dead.

Zombie Panic! is based on a source engine so most objects are moveable. Which brings me to another great and unique feature -- the barricade. As the name implies, the barricade enables you to move objects to block doorways or hallways. This is a very important, as survivors need to find ammo and quickly gather up and barricade a room for safety. Zombies on the other hand group up, and pile in and push the barricade away; it is an epic fight, sadly, mostly won by the zombies. Smart zombies will try to waste ammo by strafing in and out before the big push, as it can easily heal back the damage.

The game environment is nice and dark, which fits great into the game. There are several bugs that are annoying but hopefully it will get fixed soon. Several of the gathered items and escape maps need to be redone because it is difficult to locate them. Unlike most games, this game creates a sense of fear, since whengoing one-on-one with a zombie the odds are hardly in your favor.This compels survivors to stay together for survival, and the same goes for the zombies. I have played many pick-up games (PuG) FPS, but no other game ever combined playstyles or strategies together like this, working together, watching each others back -- its amazing. Overall it is an awesome game.

Fable II

2008-10-22T09:26:00.005-05:00

I just got Fable II yesterday on the release date, it pretty good so far, simple controls, and good start on the story line. I wonder how many times I will play it through? I am definitely going to play as an evil hero first, then a good hero next. Magic seems to be very limited I expected a large selection of magic, hope it scales well so you can one shot in the late game.

Overall environment looks great, and the dog is a good addition to the game as well. This game will do well; I personally like open-ended games such as these, it going to be hard when Fallout III comes out, yet another game of the same nature. I will write a better review once I have played through the game more.

Guitar Heroes and Rock Band

2008-10-21T08:53:00.002-05:00

My job sure is keeping me busy. I’d like to take time and discuss about Guitar Heroes and Rock Band. In essence they are the same game, although they are targeted for different market. Guitar Heroes caters to the more hardcore rockers, with the selection of music and its theme. From the battle of the bands stages to the devil and death characters, you can tell that it was a game made by rockers for rockers; it does seem less appealing for the average casual player. Guitar Heroes III also took a new approach at its multi-player and added a battle mode, so you can battle it out with a friend to see who the better guitarist is, as this game is about a player’s skill level. As for Rock Band, its target market focuses on the general public, with its very neutral and sleek look. The focus as was co-op, as compared to a more battle oriented theme, where it rewards you for playing as a band and playing well together even at different skill levels. Overall it felt like Rock Band has the masses favor, as it more for casual players, because your skill level is not what the game is about, but I feel Guitar Heroes may take the lead in World Tour (IV) over Rock Band because of its music creating feature and similar features for enjoyable co-op.

In terms of game play, Rock Band is also much easier as compared to Guitar Heroes, the four different levels of difficulty don’t match up, and Guitar Heroes seems to usual be one level difficulty higher. Both games are great, but I would say that Rock Bands had its success over Guitar Heroes because of its larger target market and its neutral look.

A New Start

2008-05-20T23:29:00.006-05:00

I am an avid gamer, whether it be video, card, tabletop, or board games. I enjoy playing all very much, but in this blog I want to discuss about game-play, mechanics, strategies, and other components that make a game. One of my goals in life is to create a great board game or a card game, I show great expertise when it comes to turn-based game mainly in card games, as I have won several trading card games (TCG) tournaments. I have won several VS: System Pro Circuit Qualifiers (PCQ) and a World of Warcraft Regional. I have earnt invitations to the Pro Circuit (PC) and World of Warcraft World Championship. With this background I believe I have a good grasp of turn-based games.

I enjoy dissecting games to understand the concepts, mechanic, and game balance. As well as other components which makes a game successful, such as the games' target market, advertisement, and learning curve. I also research on the reviews and feedbacks for different players and also what strategies players like to use. I am open to constructive criticism, so any comments and/or suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Also if you find any typos or grammatically error please let me know.