For August the theme for the Dublin One Game a Month group was “Give Up”, a topic near and dear to my... slightly malfunctioning head.
I had written a little bit in the past about my then recent discovery and self-diagnosis of Social Anxiety Disorder [in brief: Social Anxiety can be considered the irrational fear of public embarrassment/being judged in a negative way way. Everyone experiences this to one degree or another, which is perfectly normal. It is when it becomes persistent, affecting day-to-day life over a long period that it gets classed as a Disorder; anxiety over anticipation of social interactions becomes debilitating]. I've since had that diagnosis confirmed, been prescribed medication to help, albeit the smallest of doses, and come to realise just how much I've allowed it to take such a firm grip of my life. It has affected my capacity to work (directly and via a knock-on impact on self-confidence in my abilities), I've allowed friendships to evaporate and it generally has made me stall in many regards. Oh, woe is me, etc. etc.
This is something I obviously want to change, although irrational fears are not always so obliging. I figure one of the best ways to start is to rob it of one of its most potent weapons, the reluctance to even acknowledge its existence to others. So when the theme of “Give Up” came around, I saw this as a chance to create a game featuring Social Anxiety, at least in part. I wanted to have a character that can become so overcome by anxiety that they have to quit that game and run away, thereby achieving a “hollow victory”; they feel the relief of avoiding their fears but ashamed of having run from them (thematically at least) and therefore causing the other players to fail at their group task. A slightly superficial representation, but enough to get the point across and give the player a taste of the experience.
So along the lines of “write what you know”, I decided to make a game called “Game Jam”; a cooperative tabletop game where the players have to collectively complete their game projects before the end of the day. But some of the players could be playing for their own personal goals that could prevent the group from winning, with different character types having different types of goals, one of which being the Socially Anxious player type.
This wasn't just a #1GAM game, I was also doing it as part of a game design workshop I was taking part in. So that and the fact that this was a somewhat personal project, I kinda went all out on this one. A lot of coloured paper and printing and gluing to mounting board and cutting, so much cutting, hundreds of tiny pieces worth of cutting (and one finger). If nothing else, it looks pretty.
It'd been half played in the workshop without characters and goals, and it felt a bit stale (to be expected) and half played, at the #1GAM meetup at dubLUDO, with everything more or less in place. There the players seemed to like it, pausing only to go play some Johann Sebastian Joust, which ended up taking so much time - because it was so much damn fun! - so we never got back to the game. What was noticed was they the players were rapidly approaching a point of stalemate where it would have been harder to make progress. So changes I'd probably make would be to accelerate advancement in the later half of the game, which would also simulate the mad rush near the end of an actual game jam to get your game finished.
But there probably won't be much more work done on it; August and workshops are over, so it's on to other things. What I'll likely do is make a few tweaks at some point and bring it along to the next Dublin game jam event and see if anyone is interested in having a go.
Here's the rule sheet I had typed up for the game.
You are attending a 24(?)hr game jam event
Your goal as a group is for everyone to complete their game project before the end of the day (one turn for each hour of the event)
At the beginning of the game each player blindly selects:
A skill point counter for each of the 4 skills, Design, Code, Art & Audio.
A Charisma counter
A game board
A character sheet
A Goal card
At the beginning of each turn players choose to 'work' one of their four skills, taking a number of skill tokens for that skill equal to their skill points plus any modifiers.
They then all select turn counters from the bag; these will indicate the play order for that turn.
On their turn, a player can choose to apply their skill tokens to their game board or trade them to another player who has not yet taken their turn.
If a players Charisma score is at least 2 greater than the Charisma score of another player, then they can force that other player to trade, otherwise the other player has the option to refuse to trade.
If players trade, then both players will have used their turn (returning their turn counters to the bag).
After trading the players apply the received tokens directly to their game
When applying a token to a game, if a highlighted marker is filled, then the player will take a chance card and follow its directions.
If a chance card makes the player miss their next turn, then their current turn ends (cannot take additional chance cards)
Each skill bar on a game card has two Polish markers. These can only be filled by obtaining Feedback from another player. This requires the player to trade with another player, receiving the appropriate skill tokens and then changing them for Star tokens.
Some players will have received Personal Goal cards, this allows them to win the game for themselves, instead of the group. A player can 'win' a personal victory by fulfilling the indicated requirements on their Character card.
I made it as part of One Game a Month Dublin, a group that loosely follows the format of One Game a Month (aka #1gam), where you have... wait for it... one month to make a game. I decided to do this has it's been ages since I've actually finished a game.
For the Dublin group there is an optional theme and then you get together at the end of the month to play each others games. There were a number of interesting games made this go around, including a dungeon explorer, pirate space invaders, an intesting boss fight mini game [win32, OSX], a stock trading card game and others.
For my own game I decided to ignore the theme of "Rogue" and instead have a go at adding gravity to my game engine and make a platformer.
That went in easily enough, although I had initially just added in the acceleration due to gravity and not the velocity it acted on (I've defined gravity as a separate 'force speed' that then modifies the overall object speed, basically using what I had already put in place for handling slopes). This meant that at lower frame rates you couldn't jump as high, which i noticed when trying to play on my phone. Oops! Easily fixed.
I wanted to have the camera be a bit smoother, as it gets very jerky with all that jumping (although the jumping in the actual game is a bit smoother than portrayed in the videos), and I got some good suggestions from other members of the group on some simple code to make the camera lag behind the player.
Code: camera.X -= (camera.X - player.X) / N;
//(the higher N the higher the slower it gets to the player)
I then went about creating background parallaxing, a new set of tiles, some basic character animations and added in some simple colour blocks and a block spawner. The aim of the game is simple enough; combine four similarly coloured blocks to create a bigger block. Then combine four of those bigger blocks to make an ever bigger block. The goal would be to get a large (level 3) block for each of the six colours, but each block has a limited lifetime (according to it's size) and there are also bombs to add in a bit of friction.
With a bit of extra work put into my object collision detection (it wasn't really up to handling multiple objects at once) and getting it to work on my Nexus 7 pretty smoothly I was more of less done for the month.
I actually like the game! I found that taking one minute to test a bug fix turned into ten minutes playing. So after the month was over I decided to keep on going and turn it into a finished game. This means I have to polish it up a bit; adding in the goal (which was missing), cleaning up the collision detection a bit (including stopping blocks from hanging in the air) and adding some character and animations to the blocks.
A bit of Polish and Tint
Following the universal law that all inanimate objects should have googly eyes, I created some simple animations for the blocks. To make things easier on myself I decided to make them greyscale and tint them at runtime. Trouble is if I do this the easy way with blanket tint using a colorTransform then it tints the eyes too, which I don't want. So I need to tint only selected pixels. Of course the obvious answer that immediately sprang to mind was to do exactly what Metaplace did (again!); alter the tintable pixels of a png so that (red-1) == green == blue (where red==green==blue is greyscale), then at runtime check each pixel and if it matches those conditions then multiply by the tint colour. So I wrote a quick Paint.NET plugin to reduce red channel of selected pixels by one and then tested it in Flash. But I found that some pixels that should have been tinted weren't.
After much testing I discovered that the BitmapData of the png when it ends up in Flash is not the same as the data in the original file. Specifically for pixels that had some transparency the data could be off by one in one or all of the red, green and blue channels, which would screw up the very precise conditions of r-1==g==b. I spent a couple of days trying to get the exact data into flash by various means (ensuring no compression on Embed, using a loader, loading as a ByteArray, saving in different graphics program like gimp or even creating in php to ensure some png flag is set, pouring over the binary data with a hex editor etc.) to no avail. Something just happens to the data and I never found out what (I have a nagging feeling this is one of those areas where gaps in my self-taught knowledge are tripping me up, and someone could just say "Duh! Of course that happens, you didn't set your foo to your bar. Every n00b knows that!"). So I decided to see how Metaplace actually handled that by decompiling the client. Turns out I was being too restrictive with my r-1==g==b. From the looks of it maybe they ran into the same issue too; they had an allowable offset of 3 (although they went in the other direction). So changing my pngs to have an offset of 2 instead of 1 in the red channel and using the following appears to account for all cases...
Code: if(green == blue && red < green && red > green - 4)
This would appear to allow the red to be off by one in either direction, while the original offset of two leaves the green and blue intact - or at least equal to each other - when embedded.
Of course the real power of this type of system is that it allows you to use three tinting colours, one for each colour channel, on a single image, which is overkill for this project but may end up being useful later down the line.
The game still needs a fair bit of work but I'll likely keep it very simple; simple goal, single map. I'll then put it up on FLG and finish the android version. If it performs modestly well I might expand upon it. And I just might get to call myself a Game Developer again... maybe.
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