Tom Endo from the Escapist wrote this post before. I thought that it, and it’s linked forum thread, was very interesting. It has given me deep thought about gaming and game design, and will perhaps influence my future creations.

I do agree fully that I am spending less time per game then I had in the past, though this could be just as much to do with the current availablity of games to me then anything to do modern game design, because:

• Since I am working I have more disposable income to spend on myself then I did when I was in my preteens.
• A vast variety of old games is available to me through budget re-releases, Wii Shop and emulation.
• New games are drastically cut in price after only a few months on the market, I expect very few games on the market cost more then 50% of their original price after a year.

However I don’t necessarily agree with the suggestion that gamers are finishing less games then they used to; excepting the C64 era (which was too bloody hard, no thanks to 1942, Robocop and the Last V-8) my ratio of games bought to games beaten has probably remained roughly about 40-60% from 1990 right up until today. But the reasons why I don’t complete a game have changed completely.

In the Golden age of gaming, the typical game was generally pretty short (If you were only just good enough to beat it, you could probably do so in under 2 hours) with a sparse, passive narrative. It was easy to jump into if you hadn’t played it for awhile or even if you had never played the game before. You had to start from the very start of the game every time you inserted the cartridge and turned the console on, and you had three lives and perhaps a very limited number of continues to get you through the game; once you lost all of those, it was back to the start again. If you wanted to replay a section of the game you enjoyed, it wouldn’t take long for you to get there if you had reached there previously. The difficulty of the game was high, and the end screen was reserved only for those who had practiced enough to gain the skill to get through the entire game. In essence, Players were rewarded for becoming skillful enough to beat the game.

In the Modern era of gaming, the typical game is much longer, with only speedrunners approaching two hour completion times (the rest of us would normally take 8 hours plus). The narrative is stronger and generally force fed to us. Getting back into it after a break is difficult, as we may have forgotten the complex controls, how to operate the GUI or where the story had left off. If you want to replay part of the game you enjoyed before, you either have to manage your save game files (which can be tedious) or slog through the game from scratch again. You only have one life, but the game can be beaten by practically everyone as you are usually only sent back a couple of rooms, at most you’ll have to do the level you’re on from scratch.  In essence, Players were rewarded for just spending time playing the game.

The disadvantages of the Golden age of gaming is that it is frustrating to lose all of your progress for dying on a tricky jump, it’s repetitive to have to play from the start again, and there’s only two hours worth of content to see. The disadvantages of the Modern era of gaming is that the games have far less challenge, the difficulty of entry and re-entry is higher, and without good save game management it’s difficult to replay the parts that you enjoyed the most (Imagine if TV Season boxed sets forced you to watch the episodes in order!).

Is it possible to forge a balance between the two? Absolutely.

Some people on the forum are claiming that episodic, or at least much shorter games is the answer; I respectfully disagree and believe that a full length game can provide the best of both worlds, and keep the player hooked for far longer then the 8 hours it takes to defeat the final boss for the first time. The example I’ll use is Goldeneye 007.

Goldeneye had a lot of levels, greatly expanding on and going beyond the film. After beating them you could replay them again in any order at any time; if you just wanted to enjoy the complete Moonraker mission in the fifteen minutes before dinner, you could do so. At least on the harder difficulties, the levels were just long enough to be a rewarding challenge, but not too long that you would get frustrated and bored when you repeatedly failed. There were cutscenes and mission briefing documents if you really wanted to get into the story of the game, but these could easily be skipped and even ignored completely without affecting the enjoyment of the game. Goldeneye actually had a lot more features that made the game much more enjoyable over a longer period of time but I think I’ve made my point.

Like Tom Endo, I also want to see the day when games will hook me from start to finish, but also when those same games will keep dragging me back for more. Perhaps the days of games with long, unbroken narratives are limited.

Two screengrabs from Stephen showing his new Tokoroa level in action. It’s a rather vast level divided up into four quadrants, and it very closely fits the mould of the original game. It also has some quite nice graphical touches (such as saw-blades instead of the cliche spikes you see in too many platform games).

Stephen has also been doing quite a bit of work on art assets and additional levels recently, Josh and Matt are polishing their individual levels and I have been adding new features to the codebase while trying to squash old bugs. Stephen also informs me that he is talking to a sound engineer about getting new sound effects to replace the Atari 2600-esque ones that are in the game currently(!).

A bit of news came in a few days ago, the competition deadline has been extended by a week to December the 13th. While this means we won’t get a chance to play the competition entries for another week (Personally I’m most looking forward to the remakes of Bruce Lee and the other one of Raid Over Moscow) this will give us a chance to polish, refine and add more content to our entry.

Even though the deadline has been extended, we have been aiming to produce a final beta version by the end of this weekend. After having meeting with the guys I’ll do a blog post on Sunday evening (Sunday morning for almost everyone who lives West of Asia) that will contain a download link.The download will have a playtesters form for anyone who would like to contribute to the game. Note that this won’t be the complete game, we’re likely to be adding new levels, enemies, weapons, vehicles and secrets right up until the day we upload the competition version. Even then, we’re probably likely to do a non-competition version later (possibly with Mac compatibility and multiplayer)

The Shark and Stingray, the two underwater villains featured in the New Zealand story remake, were added into the game on Sunday. Stephen worked on the artwork while I coded them in; the behavior code isn’t fully there (they don’t do anything but swim left and right) but they’re still a nice touch to have in the game.

Other then that, Stephen, Josh and I have been tweaking and fine tuning our levels. Stephen has also been churning out some great backdrop artwork, while I have been tackling a few bugs here and there.

Over the next week I’m going to focus on adding the boss and arena levels to the game (two each) as well as doing some graphical refinements, such as adding an animated intro screen, and maybe even working on the final credit cutscene. I’m aiming to have the game at a final beta stage by either next Sunday or the Sunday after it; leaving at least a week for beta testing. We may not get the planned 16 levels done by the time of the competition but we’re certainly not ruling out a more complete post-competition release.

Less then a month to go! Time’s a getting short and there’s still a big backlog of things to do, but the game is looking better now then it ever has before. Stay tuned.

Coming out soon after Red Alert 3, Andrew Layden has finally released his version of Raid Over Moscow at Retro Remakes. It can be downloaded here.

The original Raid Over Moscow was one of my favourite games as a kid, I even once made a playset out of Lego very vaguely resembling the Kremlin level, complete with the patrolling tank! The game was hugely controversial in the 1980’s, particularly in Finland for it’s Anti-Soviet message (This may have subconciously influenced me to this day!). As discussed on the blog previously I failed to remake it myself, so I’m glad to see someone else has finally released theirs.

All of the segments from the original are intact and play almost exactly as they did before:

• The world screen where you can watch the Soviets nuke the US and Canada (if you can be bothered waiting five minutes)
• The Hangar screen where you have to fly your Stealth fighter out of a Satellite without hitting the walls!
• The attack run, where you have to navigate Russian streets without being hit by Tank fire or missiles.
• Attacking the silos, where you have to blow up the Soviet headquarters without being shot down by Fighter planes or hit by ground fire.
• Invading the Kremlin, where, on foot, you have to blow up half of it (along with Snipers and Tanks) with a Rocket launcher!
• The Reactor Room, where you have to throw a bouncing explosive disk at a robot to make Moscow explode!

The game plays pretty well, and is almost instantly accessible to any Raid Over Moscow fan. On my second try I ended up being blown up inside the nuclear reactor which was actually as far as I had ever managed to get in the original. Though one thing gameplay wise I was disappointed in was the lack of 3D elements in the attack run; The original featured bridges you could fly over or under, but since there is nothing like that in this version there is very little reason to increase altitude.

I find controls a bit awkward, there is no way to change the defaults and the action button is Right Control, which is an uncomfortable place for my left hand to be while my right is on the Cursor Keys. I would find the game a lot more comfortable to play if you could use Left Control instead. Presentation is clearly not the remake’s strong point, there are some nice pseudo-3D objects and backdrops but most of the game looks like a mid 90’s Klik n Play title done with MS Paint. Still, it isn’t eye straining, and it’s good to see that the author did all of the artwork himself instead of relying on sprite libraries. There isn’t any music in the game, but that can be forgiven because the original game didn’t have music either (I always thought Moscow would have been a great song to feature in a remake).

Overall it’s a fairly good diversion, especially for a ROM fan, but I think there are fairly obvious areas for improvement. Soon we may see another ROM remake, in development for the Retro Remakes 2008 competition, and I’m very interested in seeing how the two compare. I don’t think I’ll ever resurrect my remake project, but, considering this one was developed on and off over six years (!) we’ll see.

Matthew Gatland is an indie gamer and fellow AGW attendee. A few years ago he released a commercial puzzle title, which, unfortunately, wasn’t a success. I was interested in finding out why and I thought that an interview with him would make a great blog post, as well as having invaluable advice for game developers looking to make their first commercial title. So here it is.

When did you start making games, and why?

I’ve been trying to make games for as long as I can remember. Before I learned programming, I wrote rules for board games and table-top games. When I was ten years old, I learned some QBasic commands from my brother and started making computer games instead.

What were the games and systems that got you interested in gaming?

I spent a lot of time with the Sega Master System and Sega Megadrive. My favourite Megadrive game was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Where other platform games made movement difficult and slow, Sonic made it fast and fun. I still think Sonic 2 is the best platform game I’ve ever played.

On the PC, I remember connecting to a local BBS and playing the multi-player door game LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon). LORD inspired my earliest game projects. I also played DOS games: Captain Comic, The Incredible Machine, Civilization, Doom and Command and Conquer.

The board game HeroQuest also had a big effect on me. HeroQuest worked like a table top RPG, with a dungeon master controlling the monsters while players exploring a grid-based dungeon. After playing HeroQuest, I couldn’t stand other board games where the playing pieces only moved along a fixed path.

What tools do you use for game development, and how did you learn the skills and knowledge to use them?

I have used Blitzmax (from New Zealand!) most recently. I learned Java at university but haven’t used it much for game development. Before university, I picked up some QBasic and Visual Basic and learned more by making games.

I got a lot of design ideas from playing and modding commercial games. One of my high school games copied the scripting system from Red Alert, the path navigation from Unreal Tournament and the awareness levels from Thief. (I got to see this game in action recently. I think it looks like it has a bit of promise if development ever started again - Erik)

Tell me about your commerical game, Trail Bay

When I was young, I thought making games commercially would be really cool. But then I found a whole lot of articles by games industry people that basically said that real games cost millions of dollars and that only well-established designers get to design them. I kept making games for fun but no longer wanted to work in a games company.

Later on, while I was a uni student, I learned about the ‘casual game’ phenomenon. It turned out that a whole lot of independent developers were making games for people who didn’t play mainstream games. Small teams and even individuals were making games and actually making money from it - some of them actually did it full time.

I thought that was really cool, and wanted to know if I could do it too. Trail Bay was my attempt to make a casual game that people would buy.

Trail Bay steals its gameplay from a free Flash game called Roadblocks. I decided to clone Roadblocks because I noticed that every time I showed it to someone, even people who didn’t normally play games, they sat down at the computer and and I couldn’t get them off. Roadblocks had terrible graphics, so I wanted to make a game that looked great but had the same addictive gameplay.

Why, in your opinion, do you think it didn’t sell?

The gameplay wasn’t quite right for the casual audience. Compared to a match-3 or a time management game, the puzzles were hard and didn’t give constant rewards.

But I think the main reason is that I didn’t put enough into the game. There weren’t enough levels and some of the graphics were rushed. When I discovered the ‘casual games’ market, so did everyone else. By the time I finished Trail Bay, there was a lot more competition and the standards were much higher.

Come to think of it, I also didn’t do enough marketing. I didn’t really do any marketing. That must have contributed a lot to the lack of sales, and the fact that I didn’t think of that as soon as you asked the question probably shows that I’m not the kind of person who should be selling things as a business.

If you were to make another commercial game, what would you do differently?

Next time, I would only make a game that I was really passionate about. Making a game always takes a long time and always gets harder as it progresses, so I need to care about it to see it through. I don’t know if that is the best way to get lots of sales, but it is the best way to make sure that the game gets finished.

I won’t make another game for profit until I am prepared to give the business side more attention. I would need to invest time in marketing - some developers say that marketing is a bigger job than making the game. There are other issues too. For example, Trail Bay had text embedded into image files, which creates problems for translation. I didn’t think about foreign language versions until it was too late.

Are you working on any projects right now, or planning to?

I haven’t worked hard on a game since Trail Bay. I have ideas, and I’ve investigated things. For example, I’ve always wanted to make a first person shooter, so I spent a few days reading the source code of the open source FPS Sauerbraten. But I haven’t started coding anything yet.

I started making a simple platform game a while ago, and realised that I’d never coded proper collisions before. I’ve been making games my whole life, but I’ve always managed to avoid having real collisions! Now I’m thinking that I should make lots of simple prototype games in lots of different genres, to hopefully become a more well rounded game designer.

What are your favourite free or independent games?

Cave Story - it has great gameplay and incredibly strong characters considering how few pixels and words are used to create them.

I’m also a big fan of Dejobaan Games’ Inago Rage and The Wonderful End of the World. They both have a distinctive style and personality. You can instantly tell when a game is from Dejobaan Games. For an indie company, that’s a really good thing.

Finally, do you have any advice for people who want to make their own games?

Yes: Just start. I only knew about three QBasic commands and that was enough to start making a text game. Once you start, you can learn the rest as you go.

For your first few games, don’t plan. This stops you getting stuck on ideas that are too complex for you. If you have a book full of game ideas, put it away until later.

But the most important thing is to start. In fact, I need to take my own advice on that.

The website for Matthew’s game, Trail Bay, is http://www.looseleafgames.com/. I recommend having a look at it, the game is actually quite addictive and charming. I look forward to seeing the game Matthew produces in the future.

New this week are a few bug fixes, a configuration menu (for volume control, fullscreen, controls etc). I have also been experimenting with “Arena” levels (pictured) which is intended to be a sort of bonus stage, it effectively works as a shoot-em-up where you have to just keep shooting things to stay alive. Actually, there hasn’t been as much done on the game this week as there was last week. Things have been distracting me from working on the game (such as working till 1:30am one night!). So, yeah, not really a whole lot to report this time.

I realise that I need to manage my time developing the game much better. Instead of just working on it whenever I feel like it, I should consistently work on the game at the same time for every day for at least an hour. There’s barely over a month left to go so I better get cracking.

Other week, another update:

I have been working hardcore on the engine all week. Notable additions include enemies riding balloons, enemies spawning from portals, enemies with weapons (like sheep with backpack lasers and hedgehogs that fire spikes!), a far larger range of Kiwi animations (Stephen drew all the animations about a week ago, I have only just got around to adding them to the game).

And yet, theres -still- crap loads more on the engine to be done. I can imagine myself programming the engine every day until the competition deadline; I had been planning to contribute a few levels to the game but now I honestly don’t think I have time.

Fortunately Stephen, Josh and Matt have been doing some good looking levels that are unique in their own way and have great potential. They also compliment each other well. Stephen’s levels are wide open areas that closely resemble real NZ landmarks, featuring tricky jumps and ballooning action. Josh’s levels are a visual mish-mash of 8/16-bit platformer styles (taking cues from Wonderboy and Sonic) with vast tunnels (including submerged ones). Matt’s levels are fiendish with enemy ambushes and spike lined mazes, featuring outdoor areas and tight corridors, very much in the spirit of the original game. Cam has started working on his own levels but it is still too early to see how they will turn out.

The game is really starting to take shape. It is still very rough though, a lot of hard work is still needed, but if we can stay at this pace we should beat the deadline.

Only five weeks to go. Stay tuned!

Unfortunately me and the guys weren’t able to have a game development get-together this Saturday, regardless some new stuff was added:

• Stephen added Snoopy-esque flying goggles (only when operating a vehicle) as well as drawing an animated caged Kiwi (Bottom right of the image - the really subtle tears are a nice touch).
• Bitmap font functionality added.
• Triple parallax (Could be quad layer if you consider the foreground as part of it) replacing the single layed parrallax. I’m hoping to get a pseudo-3D effect similar to that of the early Sonic games.
• Basic NZ Map screens added
• Unlike the original game, the vehicles now have momentum. Dodgem style collisions with enemy vehicles should be fun
• Configuration of enemies and levels has been seperated out from the code base into a config file.

For the past week I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on the engine rather then any new content - my goal is to get the game engine fundamentally complete by the end of Labour weekend. It might be difficult squeezing development time in between Auckland Congress Hall (Salvation Army) 125th anniversary celebrations and Armageddon, but I will make sure I set aside some time each and every day to focus on making the game.

Less a month and a half of the competition to go and still mountains of work to be done. It’s scary, but I’m confident we’ll pull it off somehow.

This is Stephen’s draft skytower level. Here the Kiwi is firing arrows at snails and pukekos while ascending to the top to face the (not yet in the game!) final boss.

We had a very productive day today. Some of the AGW members came around to my place to collaborate on the game together - I’ve never really done that for a game before, and it was great. Occasionally I’ve met with one other person to work on a game with but never an entire group. Stephen did a few level graphics and helped the other guys make levels, Josh did some graphics and a Wonderboy-esque level (with platform clouds), Matthew made a really big level based on the moraki boulders (the mini-map literally takes up the entire screen, I definitely need to work on scaling it), Chris sketched out a ED-209 esque boss (piloted by an evil sheep no less) and I worked on the codebase. Kai (who wasn’t at the meeting) also submitted an awesome sheep enemy.

While development of the game had been slow in previous weeks, it got a real kick in the pants today. Now that levels and more enemies are starting to come in, we need to sort out final lists of both and also decide who is doing what. I would like to have another game development get-together next Sunday but we will see what the other guys are upto. Stay tuned.

It’s about time I finally laid this one to rest.

Traffic Department 2192 (Remake)

In-game screenshot. The buildings are 3D, the draw distance is longer, and some of the textures have been converted to hi-res.

The original Traffic Department 2192 was one of my favourite games back in the early 1990s. After the invasion of the Desert planet Seche

by the Vulture cult army, the former Traffic Control division becomes a guerilla fighting force for the people. While the gameplay was merely average, what made the game truely special to me was its expansive and interesting Science Fiction storyline. Each of the 60 levels in the game was bookended by a decent length dialogue sequence that was more entertaining then levels themselves were.

I have attempted and failed to remake the game no less then three times! The first time was back in the early 00’s using The Games Factory, replacing the freeroaming gameplay with something closer to Spy Hunter but staying true to the original story. That was doomed to fail, it’s difficult enough making something in TGF that has the scope of Super Mario Bros, let alone a game that featured more dialogue then the average novel. In 2006 (and again in 2007) I had another go at remaking the game, this time in Blitz Basic 3D.

Development

An example dialogue sequence. The main enhancement over the original is the background watermarking of the current scene.

When I first attempted to remake the game in Blitz Basic 3D, I had actually managed to hack the graphics and level data from the original game, allowing me to transfer it to my project verbatim without needing to take an excessive amount of screengrabs. I succeeded in getting a 3D version of one of the cities from the game running (as reported here) but didn’t get any further. I hadn’t even attempted to bring the dialogue sequences across. I guess, because I was working on the project alone, there was no one following the project, and because a massive amount of work had to be done before the game became good, I just left it to collect dust.

That was until about half a year later when I was contacted by “Commander Stab”, a fellow TD2192 fan who also had ambitions to remake the game. He had a strong desire to actually have every line in the game recorded by a voice actor. So we got to work on the project, my domain was working on the programming and gameplay side of things, his was to work on bringing the story across and collect auditions and lines from voice actors. Things went pretty well for awhile, but ultimately the project collapsed again.

What went wrong

Illustrations like this helped tell the epic story.

Commander Stab eventually became extremely busy with his real life (University, moving etc) and we fell out of contact. He had worked incredibly hard on the project seeking out voice actors and writing a program converting the original dialogue files into a format we could use in the remake, but since he stopped contributing to the game I lost motivation and stopped working on the game entirely soon after.

The Moral of the Story

Actually there’s two this time. The first is that working on a game with a friend who is equally enthusiastic about it is a massive motivation boost. The second is that, a large game project requires comittment.

Afterwards

I dabbled in several different game projects before getting started on Derelict. Traffic Department 2192 is still a game I care about a lot, so maybe, just maybe, a TD2192 remake will actually see the light of day.