Torchlight II

The best way of improving your skills at something is to actually do it. The old saying that practice makes perfect is mostly true. I am one of those people who don't believe that perfection is possible as there is always room for improvement. The second best way of learning is by learning through others. That is at least the excuse that I use when playing games. Just playing a game is not enough, though. To learn from a game you need to think about why you are enjoying the game. Think about why the elements work. Often even the annoying things serve a purpose. I have found that it is easier to learn from a bad game than a good game as the mistakes that make the game un-enjoyable tend to stand out far more than things that make a game good.

My sister got me Torchlight II as an early birthday present (yes, she told me I could install and play it before my birthday this Sunday) so I decided to take a look at why this game is getting such good reviews. I am only a few hours into the game but have enjoyed the game so far. The biggest lesson to be learned is that small cute dogs can be extremely vicious.

The game supposedly randomly generates the maps to increase the replay-ability.  The levels I have played so far are pretty good but I have noticed that a lever puzzle was repeated making my second attempt at getting the treasure exceedingly easy as I knew exactly what steps were needed to solve the puzzle. What I suspect is going on is that the random dungeon uses a mix of random dungeon generation and canned chunks of dungeon.

This is actually a good approach to take, as it gives the replay-ability of randomly generated dungeons while also giving the much more streamlined and thought out designs that human created maps have. For me, and probably a large number of Torchlight players, this random generation of maps is lost on me as I have such a backlog of games that it is unlikely I will be replaying the game multiple times.

One advantage of hand-crafting the maps, at least in theory, is that it gives the designer more control of the game difficulty. Torchlight II appears to have solved this problem by using the player's current level when generating the quest map. So far every map I have come across has had the levels exactly mach my current level. I am not sure if this is actually the case or my exploration has just coincidently matched the level suggestions. I am hoping the later as one advantage that canned levels have is that it is possible to grind if the game gets too difficult. If all the levels are based on the level I am when I reach the quest then if the game is getting too hard, I am going to have problems.

MiniLD#37 Postmortem

As anybody who read the previous blog post already knows, I entered the Mini-Ludum Dare #37 challenge. This had the not-a-game and real-time themes. My entry was Musatic, which was a rhythm game but with the twist that you create your own song and dance in real time. As the initial phase of creation was in real-time and the focus was on the creation of music/dance instead of the actual game, I feel that both themes were at least loosely met. Now that the challenge is finished and I have had time to reflect on it, this post will be my mini-postmortem.

What went Right

Choosing music for my theme seemed like a really risky thing when you consider how little I know about the subject. Still, I believe that the best way of learning something is by doing it so writing a game that revolves around music would at the minimum give me some working experience. My goal behind this project was to create something that someone who knows nothing about music could use to create a short song. The first step was to create notes. As Audacity has a pluck generator, a range of notes were created. I decided that the easiest way of handling music would be to have all the notes that make up the song the same length. This made editing and replaying the music much easier as I would only need a grid that indicated what notes to be played at what interval.

This lead to my first day of work being focused on the creation of the music editor. My original thought was this would be a cheat mode, but I wanted to have the editor functioning for testing. When it took far longer than I originally anticipated to get the editor to a functional state, I had thought that focusing on the editor was going to be a what went wrong entry, but as I started playing with the editor, I realized that it was kind of fun so upgraded the editor to a main-menu item.

What went Wrong

Yet again, I made the mistake of not having a library ready. As creating a game engine, even one for such a simple game, is time consuming, it would be wise to go into a game jam with an existing game engine. I've noticed that a number of participants use game creating tools such as Game Maker, but I would prefer to have my own engine. Something that handles all the basics of a game so that the 48 hours (less with sleep) can be focused on the game not on the plumbing of the game. Some people may point out that I am using the Starling framework, which could be considered a library. This really is not the case as Starling is more for giving Flash a 3D acceleration boost rather than adding new capabilities.

Speaking of Starling, using an unfamiliar framework would be my second mistake. While I had been playing around with Starling before starting on this project, I had not actually finished a project using it. As a result, there are a lot of things that I did not know about the framework so did not know what issues there were. I actually did run into an issue with the way I implemented the editor. I am not sure what exactly the problem was, but suspect that I simply had too many objects with listeners attached to them. Had I been more familiar with the framework, the approach I took towards creating the editor screen would have been different and the performance of the editor would probably have been much greater.

Going forward

I actually really enjoyed this project and learned a lot. It is a project that most certainly be expanded upon so is probably something that will be revisited if only to enhance the music editor so quick and dirty music scores can be created for future game jam projects. If I do decide to update the full game, I suspect that it would take the form of an AIR application so that it would be easy to save and play levels.