I’ll keep this one short.

I’ve been doing some contract programming work for the last few months and this looks set to continue into early next year. The bad news is that Substream development is as good as paused during this time.

I’ve been pretty busy lately with this and other things. I tried to write some blog posts bringing the timeline up from my last post to the present but they didn’t get finished. To summarise: looking for contract work earlier in the year would have saved me a lot of stress. I have blown the original budget for Substream. I wish I’d approached a few things differently but I don’t regret aiming for the quality I’m aiming for. This work means I can continue to do that. Before I start on Substream again I want to make a rough long term schedule to see what I should be aiming to do. However I’ll be keeping the details to myself – I think giving my milestones and goals publicly (e.g. on this blog) hasn’t helped anyone. Stepping away from the project has been great for me, I’ve identified a few things that should be approached differently; in the way I code and in the game’s design.

I can’t promise another post here in the next couple of months, but Substream is definitely not geting canned or anything so please stay tuned!

I’m cheating slightly this time with my first two picks; these games actually are pay-what-you-want with an option to pay nothing. So while you’re free to check them out I do encourage purchasing them if you enjoy them, I certainly have.

Proun

A racing game with abstract art and a jazz soundtrack – This is my kind of game. Rather than racing along a 2D road surface, Proun has you wrapping around a pipe which snakes through it’s understated geometry. Solid controls, radiosity lighting and depth of field effects make this game look and feel as smooth as smooth jazz.

Fotonica

Fotonica plays something like a cross between Canabalt and Mirror’s Edge, and looks like neither. Controlled with one button you sprint along a wireframe course leaping from one surface to another. Release your button to jump, or hold it to run or dive out of the air. Sounds simple but the speed, effects and animations make this intense.

Rock Paper Scissors

Now I’m sure you’ve played rock paper scissors before, but (probably because I’m a programmer) it’s the AI in this version that grabbed my interest. The Veteran AI is simply based on all the play history the system has gathered since it’s been online. And if you want you can watch how the computer is deciding what to do next. Trying to outsmart it seems to be the safest way to lose.

For June I had a plan: to attempt to make a complete level in a month. That’s a new set of animated environments and all the enemies it contains, synced to eight minutes of music. I’m at the stage now where knowledge of how long the average level takes to build would be really useful for future scheduling (and motivation).

Did I succeed? Yes and No. ;o)

At the start of June I took a build of Substream on my laptop to the monthly Sheffield Indies meet up evening, where some local game developers get together to drink and chat about the making of games. I got some interesting feedback from this, as well as some more thoughts and bugs from online testers at around the same time. Addressing all of this took a week. Fixing one set of issues brings others to the foreground so I wanted to address some of the common problems and ideas sooner rather than later. Several people wanted better visual and audio feedback about when you or an enemy has been hit which will I hope will make the game feel fairer.

In the next two weeks of June I built half of the level. This means I was fairly accurate in my prediction, in this case at least. That’s reassuring.

But I then I got bored!… One problem with working on a game that’s synced to music is that I need to listen to that music over and over again. I need to listen to each small section carefully to get inspiration, understand the patterns, and then check that everything is syncing correctly. So I don’t think I’ll be assigning “month X for level Y” in the future. I need to swap and change to stay sane.

I probably have enough material for a new trailer now, but I’m not putting that together immediately as I’d like to have a preview build I can send out at the same time. A preorder with beta access is still the plan after that.

I just finished Hexen II. I hadn’t played it before, I literally bought this game just because I loved Quake 1. But I have completed Quake many times and it holds no surprises for me now. Hexen II was developed with the Quake 1 engine, it has similar feel and style but is more RPG based. I thought I’d give it a go.

There was one particular puzzle I’d like to describe for anyone interested in game design…

• There are nine buttons on the floor in a 3×3 square, and you have to press three of them in the right order to proceed.
• There are three possible solutions, which are on a small unmarked plate on a random wall half an hour back in the game.
• Each time you attempt to enter a solution, the ‘correct’ solution is selected randomly from these three possibilities.
• This means it’s possible to try all three solutions in turn and not succeed.
• If you press the buttons in the wrong order, you are teleported back through the level and have to walk for a minute to reach the buttons to retry.
• Also when you are teleported back, the helpful message “Nothing happened…” appears on the screen.
• After you press each button in, you have to stand nearby and wait for about two seconds for the button to rise before stepping onto the next one in the sequence, or this too counts as a failed attempt with the same message.

The only reason I know all of these conditions is because I read two different walkthroughs – neither of the authors of these FAQs were aware of the complete set of rules and mentioned that they were still confused and their descriptions may not be accurate. By figuring out some of these rules and with sheer determination, they had fumbled past this puzzle in order to continue.

Hexen II

This was the worst puzzle in the game but there were a few that came close. In one level I needed to find a spade, and although there was one was in plain sight in the middle of the level, I couldn’t pick it up – the real one was hidden in a closet. I was also often frustrated by other flaws, such as doorways in the corners of rooms which were completely unlit, making the black doorway indistinguishable from the surrounding black walls. And I discovered that if I stood behind the final boss, he couldn’t see me so just stood there while I shot him in the back.

What did the critics make of Hexen II? The first three reviews I find on Google are MobyGames giving 82%, Gamespot giving 73% and CVG 94%. Fact is, in 1997 flaws like this were acceptable.

Some people say “games aren’t as good as they used to be”. I disagree!… Compare with Portal 2. OK, it’s not an RPG but it’s a first person shooter that tells a story, with lots of puzzles and some combat. And keep in mind that it also had similar review scores. But drop the puzzle I’ve described above into Portal 2 and you’d halve those scores, because design like that is not acceptable today.

I can be nostalgic about old games, but not especially so. I’m not too bothered about riding the cutting edge either. My favourite games are scattered liberally all over the last twenty years. My favourite Mario game is Super Mario Bros 3, but this is largely because I first experienced when it was released. I feel that it’s the best Mario game for it’s time, but that doesn’t make it the best of all time. If someone was new to gaming I’d be more likely to point them to Super Mario Galaxy, and I think they’d find this to be a more enjoyable game.

Graphics, sounds, story telling, control, menus, feedback, and presentation have all improved. People are better at designing games now. Putting light sources over doorways so the player can see them is just one little trick designers have learnt. But it goes further than that – they put the doorways in considered positions, or create architecture that leads the eye towards points of interest, so the player naturally finds their way through a level. They put play testers in front of puzzles and watch how they react, not just to check that they understand what they should be doing, but to see whether the solving the puzzle has made the player feel clever or educated them about the game’s universe.

Portal 2

If you look at some sub-par modern games and compare them with those retro games you cherish then things might look bleak today. There are modern design directions I dislike; achievements for doing otherwise illogical tasks, meaningless patronising reward credits, and I’m sick of customising avatars before I start every other game. But I think the average games of the times are better than the average games of past years. New games are designed with the experience of previous iterations. Each generation refines every aspect of game design. The best is yet to come.

A lot of indie games use pixel art. I think these are the reasons most commonly cited by observers of the scene:

1) A sense of Nostalgia or a general nod to old games.
2) It’s Simplicity for those with low budgets of money or time.

I think these are sometimes true, but I think there are bigger reasons. I think nostalgia is sometimes an inspiration but rarely a reason or driving force. And often it has no bearing at all; many young indies became interested in games after the SNES era.

Here’s what I think are the top reasons:

1) High Definition screens.

Yep I’m really claiming that low-resolution pixel art is popular because of the availibility of high-resolution displays.

There are other simple ways to make game art. More classic paint-like tools, vector based tools, scanned drawings. People wouldn’t make pixel art games today if it didn’t look nice. And it does! Infact it looks a lot nicer now than it did in it’s day.

Mario wasn't a pretty baby.

This is Super Mario Bros on an average 80s television. It’s pretty disgusting, and I doubt every gamer of the time figured out that the image was made up of squares. The edges of Mario are highly blurred. The font is high contrast and easier to discern, but in general pixels bled together and pixel art was harder to appreciate.

With modern monitors, not only are individual pixels sharper, but developers are using mutiple screen pixels per artwork pixel, for super sharp definition. With hard edges and a limited colour palette which doesn’t bleed into other colours, pixel art now has a clearer style which is easier to appreciate.

Infact HD is so sharp that developers are breaking down the pixels to apply styles in or around them, as in Appy 1000mg or Arkedo PIXEL!.

Arkedo PIXEL!

Appy 1000mg

2) Art Tools.

The vast majority of 2D art tools use pixels as the smallest element. Zoom in on Windows Paint and you have a brilliant pixel art tool, available on every computer. Had Paint and Photoshop used hexagons as their smallest unit, I reckon we’d see a lot more hexagon based art styles.

Pentagon Based Pattern

These tools do exist but they’re not as popular or accessible. The interface may not be suited to everyone. But even if these tools were everywhere, there’s one more imporant benefit squares have over other shapes:

3) Directional Movement.

You can simply move a pixel based image vertically, horizontally or diagonally by one pixel and it still fits in a grid. This art style has an inherent compatibility with D-pads and arrow keys!

So, modern pixel art looks really nice, it’s easy to create and it just works. Personally I haven’t got bored of seeing it in games yet. But I have to say, I’d like to see some more tools for indies to create artwork with styles other than squares. In terms of movement, other shapes are only a problem while the entire game is based on the same grid; take that away and images can still broken down to simpler forms. I’d love to make some tools like this one day but I feel time is against me right now. If anyone knows of any examples please post in the comments!