Making One of those Weeks episode 14, part 2

More of Modern Melee Combat has been posted to the repository. The game is playable, but not fully tested. Still, unless I discover a major bug in the next few days, the game will be released this Friday. Being burned in the past when I didn't have an alternative ready, I am going to continue working on my Making of One of those Weeks chapter in this and in tomorrows posts. So, lets get on with the chapter.

As this episode takes place in a forest, we obviously need a way to create a forest. There are at least three ways that this can be done. My three methods are build the forest by hand, import an existing forest, or randomly generate a forest.

Building a forest by hand is time consuming, but not overly difficult. My 3D sequences are actually two dimensional maps extruded into the third dimension. As such, the forest is a simple tile map with three different tiles used to represent different shapes of trees, one tile to represent ground, one tile to represent sand, one tile for the river, one tile for Charles, and one tile for the cave. My Coffee Quest Construction Set was used to quickly build the tile map. That being said, even if the map was truly three dimensional, the task would not have been that much more difficult. The 3D map editor would probably allow tree objects to be placed anywhere. Some ground would have had to be created, but then the placing of trees would work out pretty much the same way as it did for the tile based construction set.

Importing an existing forest is certainly possible. You would have to find a map of the forest that you wanted to use for the game. You would also need to be able to either convert the map into a file format that your game could use or write your game to be able to handle the format that the map data is in. For a game like this, the time saved using an existing map is probably more than offset by the time converting the map. That being said, if your game was set in a real world location and you had legal access to map data, this could be a real time saving way of getting level data for the game.

The final method that I was thinking about was a randomly generated forest. I have done maze generators in the past (see the Ultimate Retro Project Maze and Dungeon Romp games) so I know that this is not that difficult of a task. A random map may add a small amount of replay ability to the game, but it does remove the consistency of the episode. Hand crafting a map gives the designer a bit more control over the flow of the map than any generated map does, but randomness is an option that as a game designer you may want to consider.

Making One of those Weeks 14, part 1

While Modern Melee Combat is now starting to come together into a playable game, there are no guarantees that the game will be finished by Thursday evening. Still, I am now at the point where the code that I have developed can start to be posted to the ultimateretroproject.dev.java.net repository. I don't want to dump a huge chunk of code all at once, so am going to be releasing the code to the repository in a series of logical chunks. I took so long getting to this point because I had a bunch of different parts of the game partially done. I don't like releasing non-functioning code and don't like bothering with branches unless there is a pressing need to do so. While at the moment it looks like there is a really high chance of meeting the Thursday deadline, I am not going to take chances so over the next few days will be writing the next chapter of Making of One of those Weeks Chapter 14. The rough draft will appear in this blog, so the few of you who care about this eBook will get to read it early. This assumes that the people who care about books on game development would read a blog about game development, but my guess is that covers a number of the eBook's readers.

Episode 14 revolves around navigating through a forest. The auto-map feature was not ready at this time, so the player has to deal with mapping themselves. To aid with self-made maps, there is a coordinate displayed on the top of the display. For those of you who do not want to make a map, below is a copy of the map with a path to the ending location in red.


There are actually two separate goals in this episode. The required goal is to reach a point where you can cross the river. The optional goal is to find the cave. The path in the map above only shows the route to the river crossing. The cave is the grey square. It is not too hard to find on your own. Going to the cave adds to the final score for the episode. This cave is very important in future episodes of the game, though is only acknowledged in this episode.

Flex SDK now Open Source

Yesterday Adobe released their Flex SDK under an open source license. The license they chose was the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which is a fairly common license but is not GPL compatible. The license is more corporate-freindly than GPL, which is probably the reason for this choice. As the Flex SDK has been free since Flex 2 was released, this may not seem like that big of deal. What it does do is confirm that the Flex SDK will always remain free.

For those of you who are not familiar with what Flex is, it is a pure code-oriented way of creating Flash content. Flex projects consist of MXML files which is an XML-based layout language. Putting together a flex application is done in a similar way to creating a web page. That being said, flex supports ActionScript 3, so you can also use the SDK to compile ActionScript files. All of this code can be created in a text editor, though Adobe has a commercial tool called FlexBuilder that gives you a graphical way of putting together Flex applications.

Now that I own a copy of Flash CS3, I really don't need to use the SDK to create ActionScript 3 programs anymore, but I do still plan on keeping my code in separate files so that when I do Open Source my projects, people will be able to use the free Flex SDK to build and modify my code. Having the SDK free gives me added security as I know that if Microsoft does somehow manage to kill Adobe, Flash could still survive without them.

The Flash 9 player is still closed source. As the output of the Flex SDK is a file that requires the Flash player, some people may argue that open sourcing the Flex SDK is nothing more than a gesture. While I personally would like the Flash player to be released as open source as well, I know from my Java experiences that having multiple vendors creating versions of a platform leads to incompatibility problems so I personally don't mind that there is only one official source for the Flash player. That being said, there are open source alternatives to the Flash player, with the biggest one being Gnash which is aiming to be compatible with Flash 7, though I suspect they will eventually support Flash 9.

Game page look results

Regular visitors to the Blazing Games site will know that I had a poll about the new look of game pages. A couple of weeks ago I posted an updated version of the 13 Spikes game that had a tabbed format breaking different parts of the old game page into separate pages. There is an overview page, an instructions page, a game page, a downloads page, and an articles page. I was thinking about slowly transitioning all the game pages to the new format. Still, being the way I am, I figured that I would ask the site visitors for their opinions. I got very little feedback, so figuring that people don't like emailing me they might respond better to a very convenient poll. I was right.

There were a lot of votes, with most of the votes being the neutral "either" choice. In fact, only three votes were for something other than either. Two of those votes were for the new format. Certainly, the voting results explain why no one emailed me. I suppose this means the change isn't as drastic as I thought it was.

In the future, all the game posts will be using the new format. It will take quite a while for this transition to be completed, though I don't think the transition will be that noticeable as all the more popular projects will transition fairly quickly. I should have started the transition tonight with One of those Weeks tonight, but was already really late posting the site so didn't have the necessary time.

Order Pending???

This morning a rental truck appeared in my driveway. "Strange, " I thought to myself while sipping my coffee, "I'm not moving and don't know anybody who is so what is going on?" The driver of the truck then walked to the door and knocked. Answering the door, I discovered that there was a delivery person at the door with my package from Adobe. It appears that there was trouble with his vehicle so he had to use an alternative vehicle while it was repaired. After installing and playing around with the various applications, I decided to check to see if they finally updated my order status on the Adobe site. It was still marked as order pending! My order is here so I am now able to learn CS3 and now own a copy of Photoshop!

I must say that Adobe does a much better job of packaging their software than Macromedia use to. The box is kind of small, but it only contains an overview book (that covers the key features of all the different applications that come in the box) and a DVD case that contains the three DVDs that make up the package. The first DVD is the application disk, the second is a content disk, and the third disk is a video workshop disk. It takes quite a while to install everything, I would guess it took about 45 minutes. No interaction is needed so you can do other things while it runs. Adobe has adopted Macromedia's authorization procedure, meaning that once installed, I had to go online to authenticate my copy and register. If you don't authorize the copy within 30 days, it stops working. Thankfully I never had any problems authorizing my copy.

My overall first impressions of the actual software is good, though the 1GB minimum that they state is probably on the low side if you like to run more than one of the components at the same time. On the other hand, if you tend to only work with one program at a time, 512MB would probably be more than adequate.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will give my impressions of the different programs that make up the package.

Still Waiting

I didn't get much done this weekend as Saturday ended up being used for a variety of chores and Sunday ended up being a Earth day family gathering of sorts. Of course, the local garbage dump apparently caught on fire, though that was not confirmed. Some people insisted that it was not the dump, but my Dad (as well as many other people) said it was. I would side with my Dad simply because he really does have a good sense of direction. Needless to say, I didn't get as much work done on One of those Weeks as I hoped. Still, the game should have no problem making Friday's release as the beta is functioning and unless a critical flaw appears before Thursday, I should have no problem getting the final touches done.

Of course, this leads to the Adobe shipping my copy of CS3 to me. Sadly, when I checked the purchase page a few minutes ago it was still marking the order status as pending. However, when I phoned my credit card company to check the status of my credit card, I noticed that the order had been billed to my credit card. As Adobe said that they were not billing credit cards until the order has shipped, I have to assume that the order has gone out but the status has not been updated on the computer. I should know for sure if the package arrives within the next couple of days. If the package hasn't arrived by Friday, then I may start getting really annoyed.

Feedback

The site poll on the new look of the game pages has actually provided quite a few responses. This could be because people don't like emailing strangers, but in this particular case I think it may have been something else. I don't want to skew the results of the poll so I will not speak of the current results, though will do so this Friday.

The more interesting response I got today was an email from Adobe. I am apparently an important customer, but they could find no tracking information for my order. What does this mean? I can think of three interpretations. The first is that they are trying to tell me that they simply have not shipped the order yet. Second, they are saying that my order should have been shipped, but they can't find the shipping information and have no clue as to why it is still marked as pending. Third, they are saying that they are support people in a different country and can only tell me things that have been entered into their system so I am S#$@ out of luck.

As it clearly isn't going to arrive this weekend, so I am going to be focusing on finishing the rest of Day four of One of those Weeks using Flash 8.

Adobe Hates Me

As visitors to BlazingGames.com have already found out, I am not quite ready to post Modern Melee Combat. What I did not tell the visitors to the site, even if I finish it in time to release it next week, it will not be next week's game. My current plans for next week is to post the next episode of One of those Weeks if I get it finished in time. What I was hoping to have happen is that I would get CS3 by the end of this week and then be able to have the next episode be the first episode that uses ActionScript3. Considering that the last time I checked, Adobe hasn't even mailed my copy of CS3 (which I pre-ordered on the day it was announced). The suite I ordered has been out for 4 days now, so I really don't understand why this would be the case but once I finish all the games I have planned for Flash, which will probably take a couple of years, I will seriously consider switching to a company that actually cares about it's customers. Perhaps if I am really lucky, there will be open standards that are actually implemented in a majority of the browsers by then. In the past, VRML looked like a potential contender, but it never really took off. A real contender needs to be something that will work in the majority of browsers.

So what is going to happen with One of those Weeks? I have decided that if I don't have a copy of Flash CS3 by the end of Friday (after all, it is possible that my copy of CS3 was shipped but the order status was not updated) then I will create the final three episodes of Day 4 in Flash 8. I will not do any other non-paying Flash work until I get Flash CS3. Day 4 will also be the last day of One of those Weeks that I will work on outside of the 20 hours a week allocated to the Blazing Games site. Day 5 through 7 will be voted on, meaning that the series may be released more frequently than once a month but could be less frequent if voters decide they prefer something else.

Year Zero

I have been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails CD, which was released today. I find it interesting that I had no problem getting the CD on the day it was released, yet the extremely expensive software that I pre-ordered the day it was announced and has been out for two days already has not even been shipped yet. This has got me more angry than it probably should have, but why is it that so many companies in the computer industry seem to take customers for granted. If I was offering pre-orders for a product, I would go out of my way to make sure that my customers who were loyal enough to go to the effort of ordering a copy of the product before it was released got the product they ordered the day it was released (or at least a copy of it shipped to them on the release day).

One of the nice things that Nine Inch Nails did was to release the album online so that their fans could listen to it weeks before it came out. I actually did listen to it online, and while it would have been easy to steal the digital stream, I never because like the majority of people out there, I am honest. After listening to it once, and restraining myself from listening to it multiple times in an attempt to not spoil the higher quality CD version. It is just too bad that there wasn't a DRM free high quality version available on online music stores as I would have preferred to download it as I don't like having to running to a store to get stuff.

What the lack of a shipping copy of CS3 means is that the next episode of One of those Weeks will be created using Flash 8 instead of Flash CS3 like I want. It is probably not that big of a deal, but there are differences between ActionScript2 and ActionScript3, so it would be nice to finally only have to use ActionScript3. I just hope that Adobe gets their act together because the one thing I dread is having to switch to Silverlight even if it is suppose to be a cross-platform cross-browser Flash killer. Microsoft just doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to cross-platform compatibility. Though I must say that the name is much better than WPF/E.

CS3

I am now waiting for notice that my pre-ordered copy of Adobe's Creative Suite 3 Web Premium to ship now that it has been released. I am hoping that it arrives before the weekend so I can get the next episode of One of those Weeks finished. I am going to strictly work on ActionScript 3 from now on, though may make an exception for OotW if I don't have CS3 by the end of the week.

CS3 is a very expensive program which is why I an glad that I am eligible for the upgrade. The best part of the new suite, at least from my perspective, is going to be Flash CS3. This will allow the development of Flash Player 9 content without all the hassle of using the free Flex SDK. People using the FlexBuilder have a much easier time of building Flash 9 programs, but with my small budget, I held off on getting it, and may decide to forgo getting it if Flash CS3 meets my programming needs adequately.

My thoughts is to use .fla files only as a container for artwork and animations, while having all the code in external text files. Ideally, I would want it compilable with the free Flex 2 SDK so the open source release can be modified without needing expensive tools, but we will see how feasible this is once I have CS3.

20 hours

As many of Blazing Games visitors (who are also probably the only people who are reading this blog) already know, I am essentially working on Blazing Games in my spare time. The amount of time I am going to put aside for Blazing Games is roughly 20 hours a week. Half of that time will be dedicated to the game that won the last vote. The remaining time will be making sure that I have some content to post for my weekly update, and actual work on the site. When I finally work out details of my upcoming sponsorship system, more hours will be put into the site, but that will actually be work that is indirectly paid for.

My work day is whatever consulting contract(s) that I happen to have at the time. While I would prefer contracts through Blazing Games, a lot of the more recent work that I have is not through Blazing Games. My official rate is CAD$25 per hour, which is probably under-priced. This is negotiable and based on the specifics of what I am going to be working on. If I am going to be required to travel or put in more than 40 hours a week, the rate goes up. If I am working on games or open source software the rate goes down. Somebody who wanted to get me to work on an open source game could probably hire me for as little as CAD$8.00 an hour and I would probably "forget" to bill them for some of my work.

That being said, I am sure that anybody who is still reading this is probably wondering what I do when I don't have any contracts. I have my own personal project that I am working on which I am considering releasing as shareware if it is ever finished. Of course, in reality, when it is done I will probably decide it has no market value and simply start releasing it on Blazing Games as a series of episodes. This is assuming that the side project ever gets off the ground. What seems to happen is that I just start on a project then something else comes along (contract work, family disaster, rising oceans flooding me, war, alien invasion) so the project gets "temporarily" put on hold and permanently vanishes.

In other words, if you somehow consider Blazing Games to be a competitor and don't want to see a real product emerge, hire me. Not only will you be getting a great programmer, but will be preventing me from being that big of a competitor.

Changing the Game

The Friday update to Blazing Games has been posted early, though the "official" announcement will not be made until late this evening. For the few of you who actually subscribe to my blog, you can look at the changes by going to Thirteen Spikes. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am doing something different with game pages, or at least will be if the Blazing Games visitors don't hate the change. I will explain my rational for the change in the remainder of this entry. Feel free to post a comment or email me.

I am making the change due to the basic fact that the game pages were getting awfully cluttered. By breaking the game page into five logical sections and having tabs leading to each section makes it easier to actually find what you want.

The overview section of the page is the landing point. Here there will be a summary of the game so people can quickly decide if the game is what they are looking for. This page will also have revision history for the game and a road map for future releases.

The Instruction section holds the actual instructions for the game. I am going to try and be more thorough with the instructions. I suspect that despite the extra effort I will be putting into the instructions, these pages will be the least viewed pages for the game.

The Play tab will actually hold the game. In cases where there is more than one episode of a game, this page will act like a list of episodes (with icons for each episode) so that people can select the particular episode that they wish to play. Games will now start appearing within the same browser tab instead of opening a pop up window. With multi-episode games, I will make pop up windows a separate launch option.

The article tab will be for articles that have been written for the game. For instance, Thirteen Spikes has a strategy guide that was released today, which is what appears in the article tab. As is the case with multiple episodes, if there are multiple articles then the page will be a list of the articles with summaries so people can find the article they are interested in reading.

Finally, the download tab. As you can see, any tab that is not being used is greyed out. When the tab is not greyed out, it will be used for downloads. These are mainly Open Source Release zip files, but could also be level sets. If in the future I start releasing Apollo (not the official Adobe name, but as the official name is not yet announced, I am using the code name) versions of my Flash games, they will be located here.

That covers the new format I am thinking about using for the game pages, but it is conceivable that my visitors will not like the new changes as much as I do.

Directories

I spent the day adding the directory links to all the game pages on the site. I was catching up on my podcast listening while doing all the cutting and pasting. I foolishly did the directory links as hard-coded links, but when you consider that all the pages are permanent pages anyway this is not that big of an issue. Though a better way would be to generate the directory algorithmically, though as the actual path doesn't always match the directory of the content, this probably wouldn't be as easy as if I had planned for a directory from the start.

While "organic" programming has become trendy lately, due to the frequent release schedule I force upon myself, Blazing Games and all the games created for it have always had an organic nature to them. By organic, I mean that you start your program (or site, as the case may be) with small initial goals. You then grow the program by adding new features and functionality to it. As iterations pass, you end up with a much larger entity than you ever imagined you would have. Sometimes you are able to trim chunks of the project (refactoring the code), though sometimes you end up with knots due to the way the thing grew (interfaces that have to be maintained even though they don't quite fit in with the rest of the growth).

Blazing Games has grown to huge proportions, and hopefully it will continue to grow over the upcoming years.

Wii Store

One of the interesting things about the Nintendo Wii is the online store. Actually, all three of the new consoles have online stores, though as I don't have a PS3 or an XBox 360 I can not comment on them. While it is nice that you can instantly buy a low-cost game right from the console, there are still a lot to not like. Here are my top five complaints about the Wii store:

1. Where are the RPGs? So far I have only been able to find one non-action based RPG in the store. I know the NES and the SNES had a lot of turn based RPGs released for them so why is the only turn based RPG in the store a Turbo Graphics 16 game. It wouldn't be too bad if Double Dungeon was a great game but it is 22 simple hunt the boss games combined into one. I'll review it in a future blog entry.

2. The games in the Wii store are all older games, so why do they cost so much? $5 for a NES game? $10 for a Nintendo 64 game? I think the price is quite high considering what you are getting. Had the price been half as high, I would probably be buying three to four times as many games as I am going to buy at the current prices so Nintendo is probably losing a lot of money with such high prices. Lets hope that in the future they cut the price!

3. Speaking of cost, the points system sucks. I don't know why this is such a big trend with big companies. Actually I do. By forcing users to buy their own points (non refundable, of course) they are guaranteeing that they will get a set amount of money from you. Likewise, you are probably not going to be using the points all at once, so they get to hold on to your extra money and earn interest off of it.

4. The games are stored in the small amount of flash memory that the Wii comes with and can not be transferred. If I could put the games on an SD card and then use that card to play the games, that would be great. Sadly, this is currently not allowed. Granted, you can re-download any game that you bought so if you are running out of space, then you can always delete games and then if you ever want to play a deleted game again, re-download it.

5. finally, the in-game manuals that come with the games are very poor. Mind you, this could be because the manuals that came with the games were poor, but why not provide pdf versions of the manuals that the buyers could download?

Of course, these are just my thoughts and I highly doubt that Nintendo will ever see this list.

Trial Balloon Slasher movie

While I am still adding directory information to all of the game pages on the Blazing Games site, the big thing I was doing today is preparing for Friday's release. If you look at your calendar, you will know that it is Friday the 13th this Friday. As such, I am planning something special for that day. While the release will be a walk through of a certain action game, and as such probably not overly interesting to a large chunk of my regular visitors, what will be interesting will be what I am going to be doing to the game pages.

In politics, there is something known as trial balloons. These are when a politician (or PR firm) hints at something in order to see what the public reaction will be. This Friday's release will be similar. If the reaction to what I do is positive, then I will slowly (over the course of a few years) update all the game pages to support the new presentation format. If everybody hates it, the game pages will stick with the existing format until I can come up with something else.

While spreading the change over a long span of time might seem to go against web design principles, the site has grown rather huge so making the change all at once is no longer practical. The way things will work, it shouldn't have a huge impact on perception, and as all new and updated games all will use the new look, most visitors won't even notice that some pages use a outdated format.

Where did I put that compass?

There is an easter egg hunt going on while I write this. That should be no surprise as today is easter, though I am not entirely sure why they are called "egg" hunts, as modern times have replaced coloured eggs with chocolate and candy that occasionally happen to have an egg shape. The hunt for candy has started me thinking about the direction that Blazing Games, this blog, and myself are heading in so I figured that since this is sort of a new blog I should probably set fourth a proper road map for this creature I am creating. There are a bunch of goals I have for this blog, and it is going to be a different beast from the old version of this blog that was self-hosted on spelchan.com.

I am going to put a bigger effort into updating the blog. The goal is to post at least three times a week, though ideally a daily post would be better. The number of posts this suggests immediately should tell readers that instead of just being announcements about open source release and voting results, there is going to be much more to this blog. So, what is going to be put in here?

This is a game development blog, so all the posts will at least loosely deal with game development in general. This is a huge area for finding topics, so that alone I should have no problem finding subjects to write about. I will try to vary my posts, so while some posts will be about programming and algorithms, most entries will not be. One thing I am thinking about doing is writing my eBooks in my blog. In other words, readers of this blog will get sneak previews of articles and chapters that will later appear on the Blazing Games site.

Finally, I am not going to hold my opinion back. Even controversial topics will have my opinions expressed. For instance, I believe that "The Fragile" was a far better album than "The Downward Spiral". Well, that isn't really that controversial but it does make the point I am getting at. If I really wanted to annoy people I could have said "Jar Jar Binks is the best character in Star Wars" but then I would have been lying and that is something that I certainly am not going to do in this blog. If you want to read a blog that is purposely controversial, then take a look at dvorak.org/blog.

Egg on my Site

I posted a new "game" on Blazing Games today, which is what I do every Thursday evening as being in the west coast it is Friday in most of the world by the time my post is released. You will notice that I have the word "game" in quotes because this week's release wasn't really a game. With all the overhauling of the site that I have been doing I simply didn't have time to create a new game for Easter. I still have a huge amount of minor changes to make to the site yet, but all the major changes have been complete. I was just going to take my existing Evil Eggs game and release it as open source. Then I thought it might be nice to write a short article about making Evil Eggs. The only really significant thing about the game, though, is the egg generator, and that is not overly complicated. Then I remembered that when I was originally creating the game I had wrote a simple testing program for testing my random eggs. I then thought that with a bit of tweaking, it would be perfect for the release today.

As people who have visited Blazing Games and played with the egg generator have already figured out, the random eggs in Evil Eggs were fairly simple to generate. All that is happening is that an egg color, a pattern color, and a pattern are selected at random. Of course, the original reason I wrote the egg test was due to strange problems I was having with Flash. As much as I like Flash, there are still occasionally quirks that one must discover and often find ways to work around the quirk.

The problem I had with Evil Eggs was that the patterns were not working. As any Flash developer reading this already has figured out, the egg is made up of a group of layers. The bottom layer is the basic egg movie which holds a color for the egg. Over that is another basic egg movie of a different color that has a mask applied to it. The mask causes only part of this egg to be shown, resulting in the egg. There is also a light layer to add a bit of a glint to the egg.

The problem is that masks, at least when compiled for Flash Player 7, are not always accurately rendered. In particular, any mask that has a hollow portion within the mask area will not render properly. This quirk resulted in some of my masks not rendering properly resulting in rather strange looking eggs. The solution to this problem is to simply make sure that there is a open path that will lead to the gap within the mask. For instance, my checkerboard pattern actually has notches cut out of the corners, and my O shape has a hairline crack in it.

So, if any Flash developer is having problems with using masks, remember that flash expects masks to be solid shapes.

Transitioning my blog

While BlazingGames.com has had a feed for a while, I decided to play around with a personal blog so set up a blog on my free godaddy page at spelchan.com. This was more for experimentation and my own journal than anything. I was unaware of the problem with subscribing to my old blog, as I foolishly did not try to subscribe to it. I got an email today from someone who does read my blog but was not able to subscribe to it. After looking into the issue, it appears that GoDaddy's pre-pended advertising is messing up the rss feed so I have decided to move my blog to somewhere where people would be able to subscribe to it. I want the blog to be separate from Blazing Games (I control the advertising on that site so setting up blogging software there would be doable and would in theory solve the problem) as this is my personal opinion, and does not reflect the opinions of Blazing Games Inc., I want the blog outside of Blazing Games. Google has been good to me, so I figured I would look at their free offering. So I am now transitioning my blog to blogger.