How to become a programming god!

What up internet?

Today I want to talk to you about a difficulty curve: not the one that you experience when playing games – but the slope that I'm climbing learning how to make the bloody things!

If you've played our games so far then you may have noticed a thing: every released game is a little bigger and more complex than the last… and they've all got something new about them that the others do not.  This is deliberate!

What I'm trying to say is that this is one of those rare occasions in my life where I'm actually following a plan! In each project I'm setting myself a new challenge or two, with the idea being that I’ll expand my knowledge of games programming a little each time and also add a few new tricks to my toolbox.

So what I thought I’d do with this post is lay out where I think I am with it all and also what I’m thinking of tackling in the future… and why!

The story so far…

Here’s what I’ve conquered so far (on top of learning how to deal with general Flash BS):

• Basic game AI & logic
• Cut scenes / movie clips
• Sprites / animation
• Sound controls
• Faking 3d & depth

There’s a bunch of other stuff you need to know to get to this point, but I’m already an experienced programmer so most of it wasn’t new to me… I won’t bother boring you with the details!

So that’s where I am, here’s where I’m headed..

Next steps on the path to enlightenment:

As well as official collaborative project with the other guys I’m also going to keep cracking on with personal learning projects.  From where I am I have a rough roadmap that I want to follow.  Each of these games will teach me a new thing that I want to learn and hopefully let me grow a little as a game developer.  Here’s the list of projects I’ve got in mind – and what I think I’ll get out of it:

•      A bullethell game  – Dealing with a player avatar on screen
•      Top down racer – direct twitch input
•      A platformer – It kinda covers all the skills I’ll have under my belt at that
•        An adventure game – Mungy wants to remake dizzy...
•      A multiplayer game – duh multiplayer
•       A Roguelike – It’s a great way of providing a lot of content efficiently
•     New platform / something in 3D - dunno

If I get this far then it’ll probably time to move on from Flash…

Along with these I also want to dick around with the following features in my games:

•        Doing an android game
•           Integrated leader boards, achievements & player stats
•           Facebook game
•        Getting on a game portal like newgrounds / kongregate etc.
•           Making a game that works with a game pad

So I’m probably going to mash up these two lists and see what comes out J

Anyway that’s the plan, let’s see how it all works out…

What Up G?

Hey there internet.

We’ve been quiet for the last few weeks but do not fear! We’ve been busy!

We currently have two games in production and they’re both going great guns: ‘

Bedlam’ is the game that came out of our game jam a few weeks back. It’s a simple puzzle/reaction game based on a mental hospital (!)

We came up with the core game engine and idea at the jam itself, since then Rich has been hard at work on the art and animations. We’re now at a point where we can put it all together and see what’s what. After that Adam with the sound and a bit of general polishing and then that’s it. So it’ll still be a little while before it’s available to play but we’re getting there!

The other game in the works currently has no name… we haven’t found one snappy enough yet. Also boo-urns, I’m not going to give any details out now as it’d spoil the surprise. What I do want to say is that it’s already pretty far down the line (it’s actually closer to completion than Bedlam) and I’m getting really excited about it. We’ve added some nice mechanics and it feels really fun to play… I’m so proud!

 It’s also nice that we’re starting to develop games built from original ideas and not based example code or tired old table top games. It feels like we’ve stopped crawling and we’re starting to make our first baby steps :-)

Anyway both these games will be up in the not too distant, so keep half an eye out!

This month I have been mostly eating… 

I thought it might be nice if I start talking about what I'm playing. Here goes!

Well it’s all been about zombies! I’ve been playing through a couple of hours of The Walking Dead of an evening followed up by a Left 4 Dead 2 campaign. The combination’s awesome! – Some atmospheric scene setting and then all out gun blazing action. If only there was a way to stick the two together….

NEW GAME WOOP! WOOP!

I’ve finally found a bit of time to get my shit together and finish a game!

ladies & gentlemen…

This one’s the biggest we’ve attempted so far. If you’ve played any of our earlier games then hopefully you’ll notice a step up in quality.

This was the first time we played around with things such as animations, AI, cut scenes etc.  so we’ve added a few new strings to our bow. It may not be very big or ambitious but we’re moving in the right direction… We’ve still got our training wheels on at the moment :-)

Anyway: enjoy! And check back again soon for more gaming goodness!

Lies lies lies!

Well internet, yet again I have to write a grovelling post apologising for being late!

I promised a game for you before Christmas and also we were going to hold a game jam and make yet another game and it’s now 2013 and neither of those things has happened… which technically makes me twice the liar. So what happened?

The short answer: Christmas

The long version…

Firstly there’s the Connect 4 game I’ve been working on since October: I did genuinely have it completely finished about a month ago.  Then, just before launch, I decided to get my missus to play test it...  She beat the AI 8-0 without breaking a sweat :-|

Watching that happen made me realise something:  in the single player game, difficulty is everything! 

The AI I had written was pretty simplistic and didn’t offer much of a challenge.  As a result of that she found it boring as hell despite the fact that she was winning.

So therefore, all the time I’d poured in to animations, sound & music, etc. was wasted, I mean: who gives a shit if a boring game is presented well – it’s still boring…

Since then I’ve completely gutted the AI and rebuilt it from scratch, I made it lot cleverer (in the rematch my wife couldn’t beat it once)… then realised that I’d hit the same problem from the other end (i.e. I have to let you guys win sometimes!) So now I’m concentrating on making it more dynamic.  In the end I’m hoping it’ll be dynamic so that it changes and gets harder to beat as the matches progress.

I’m not going to make any promises for release as I keep breaking them – but I’m just doing this final balancing now so let’s settle on ‘soon’

Game Jam:

Well we did indeed hold the jam and it was awesome. We spent a day locked up at Rich & Ads house working on a new project from scratch.  As well as consuming large quantities of beer and pizza we put together a rough design, art assets, a sound track and a from-scratch game engine in a single session!

So where’s the game?  Well we didn’t get enough done before ran out of time.  After much discussion we decided that we’d be better waiting until it’s coherent and playable rather than just releasing something half baked.  

The objective of the jam was always more about being a good learning experience anyway, so as far as I’m concerned I think it was a huge success!

I’ll leave you with proof of the above in the form of some pictures of the crew hard at work :-)

Happy New Year!

Adam getting his mac on:

Mungy being all artistic n' shit

Yay! Christmas!

Well internet, we've got a new game almost finished and ready for you perusal. Keep an eye on the website over the next few days! I'm not going to tell you anything about it now, you'll have to come back and see for yourself ;-)

Instead I want to give out a general update on some exciting new developments. So BONG! Here is the news!

We have a new team member: 

Take a bow Adam Tustian! Adam is Richard’s bro and also a kick ass composer / sound engineer. Like most of the rest of us he has no prior games experience but he’s been messing around writing tunes in Reason & Cubase for years. Expect kick ass beats in all our games from now on!

It also means that team Caper is now complete, between the 4 of us I believe that we’ve got all the skills required to make a game covered.

Game Jam: 

 I’m really excited about this – next Saturday we’re going to hold a game jam! For those who don’t know: a game jam is where you hole up somewhere and try to make an entire game from start to finish in one bash. We’re going to start from nothing and go through the whole process of coming up with an idea, and then designing, building and launching the game in a single day. The plan is that we start at midday and don’t stop until the finished game hit’s the website.

I think it’ll be a great experience for us, and we’ll learn a lot about working together as a team. Also it means you guys get another game to play, Merry Christmas!

New concept art:

Here's something Richard knocked up this week.  No idea if we'll use these guys for anything but it showcases a new art style that Rich has been working on... looks rather nice I think! 

That’s all for now folks, remember to keep half an eye on the website and enjoy your mince pies :-)

Hello Internet!

It's been a while since my last post so BONG! here is the news!

First off a game update!

As mentioned last time I've been cracking on with Minesweeper.  I've gotten an alpha build up and running so I thought I'd whack it on the website for people to play with.  At the moment it's all my work but a lot of the text / images / etc you can see are just placeholders.  Rich and Mike are beavering away at coming up with some proper assets for the game. Anyway enjoy: 

http://www.caper-republic.net/d-day-minesweeper/DDayMinesSweeper.html

Also, we still want to put a twist or several on it - at the moment it's pretty much vanilla minesweeper - so I'm looking forward to creating a whole new version of it later on with some new mechanics and game modes.

In the meantime though, I want to give Rich the time he needs to operate so I'm going to move on to the next chapter in my book... Connect 4.

Great...

Well I can't think of anything interesting to do with Connect 4 so I expect I'll just read the chapter and knock out something completely vanilla.  The upside is that it won't take me any time at all and I can do it solo, obviously on the other hand it'll probably be bland as hell but oh well - it's all good experience:-)

If you have any ideas why not shout them into the comments box below :-)

Other general news

(In no particular order...)

Work sucks! 

my main job has been taking all my attention for the last couple of months :-( But I'm back to pretty much normal hours now until Christmas so I'm planning on getting a bunch of games cranked out by then.

eLearning is boring!

I've given up on the lynda.com flash course I was working through. It's pretty good and I would recommend it... but sitting watching hours and hours of videos has very nearly destroyed my will to live.  As therapy I've been actually doing rather than reading about it... So there you are: making games is officially better than reading about making games when it comes to making games.

Games are good!

With work and all the time I've been putting in to making games I haven't really played any for a while.  So I've been going through my steam library and playing all the games I bought in sales and didn't get around to.  So far I've played Bastion, Metro 2033 and I'm having fun with Borderlands (yes the first one...).  Rich has also blagged me a key for The War Z - Good man!

That's all folks!

See you in a couple of weeks with either a new game or an updated minesweeper :-)

Baby Steps

Well we're a couple of weeks in, here's an update:

My Bro's helping out:

He's a producer for a big UK game studio, so we'll be able to pick his brains for sagely wisdom and advice. I doubt he'll get too involved in the nuts & bolts of our work but it'll be great to have him around to bounce ideas off etc.

He's also younger than me by several years... so that puts him on tea duty!

Training's going OK:

Rich and I have been cracking on with learning Illustrator and Flash respectively. 

On my side I've ditched the boring training videos.  I feel I know enough of the basics now to actually start making some games!

I'm working my way through a book on flash game design, it teaches you by showing how to make a bunch of classic games, (pairs, bejewelled, minesweeper, etc). My plan is to go through each chapter and then, when I've got the gist of the game, start fucking about and try to make it a bit different.

With that it mind let me introduce our first ever game: Card Bastard!

You can play it at: http://www.caper-republic.net/card-bastard/CardBastard.html

As you'll find out, despite the awesome name, it's a pretty boilerplate rip off of the card game pairs.but it lives! and we made it! we're off the mark :-)

Also a disclaimer! We're going to publish a bunch of games over the next few weeks of a similar ilk... but these are just training exercises for us - they're not part of our overall plan.  We know the first 'proper' game we're going to make and we're already quietly working away on it.  So by all means go play these games, but don't judge us on them yet!

The website is starting to take shape:

If you clicked on the link above you'll have already noticed :-) I've added a simple colour scheme and some info about our blog / twitter / etc. There's still not much content on it, but it's a great jumping off point for all things caper - and that's where our games are, so go play!

http://www.caper-republic.net


This is by no means final (we'll tart it right up at a later date when we have the time) - but at least it looks a bit better than a white page with a couple of sentences of Times New Roman text....

Next step:

Well the next chapter in my book is on minesweeper... so expect a caper version of minesweeper in a couple of weeks!

We've already started brainstorming the design and have hit on a few ideas that should add a twist to the old formula.

Also I want to get everyone else involved, the last game I just got my head down and made in a couple of evenings.  I grabbed a few art assets that Richard has developed for other projects and also raided our band's mp3 collection for sounds, but neither the visuals or the sounds were designed for the game, I just picked whatever fitted.

Next time we'll do things the proper way round: starting off with a plan and then designing assets specifically for it.  Hopefully it'll make the end result more polished.

Well that's the plan anyway...