Well, my birthday has come and gone. While this is suppose to be a game development blog, it is also my personal blog so readers will have to put up with some personal junk today (or you can simply skip this entry which is what I am guessing everybody is doing this very moment). I suppose from a strictly technical point of view I was only a day older yesterday, not a year older. I don't really care about birthdays because they are a reminder of how poor I am doing in the game known as life. At my age I should be married and either have kids or be thinking about having them. Instead of trying to find a wife, I spend whatever spare time I can find developing games for Blazing Games Inc. with hopes of getting the company off the ground so that it can start paying me. Right now the company is technically profitable, but if I was to take the salary that I should be getting the company would be in the red. Living off of money earned from various consulting jobs might sound glamourous, but really is isn't. The only really nice thing about consulting work is that between jobs I can focus on my own company and hope that my plans for getting the company profitable enough to pay me will actually pan out so that instead of working for other people I can take a salary and devote all of my time to Blazing Games.
I did get Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door as well as Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga for my birthday since it is obvious that I am now a fan of the Paper Mario series. Don't worry though, I am not going to have long drawn out reviews of those games in this blog though I will probably be mentioning them from time to time. I am going to play through the second paper Mario game first, even though M&L was released earlier. I'm not far enough along in the game to make any comments.
For my birthday supper I had a ten pound pizza and black forest cake. No, I didn't eat the entire pizza by myself, nor despite how much I like pizza could I. If any of my Californian friends ever visit the Okanagan, I'll have to order one for them as then they will see what a real pizza is. Sorry, but thin crusts with thin toppings don't cut it for me. Overall, I would say that my birthday was pretty good.
Showing posts with label Paper Mario. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paper Mario. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Paper Mario - Story
Let us finish off this review of the game by taking a look at the story. The game starts out with a playable cut scene. By playable I mean that you have to go through the motions of the game but are forced into specific actions. This is where you find out that Bowser has the Star Rod which makes him invulnerable. At the end of the battle you get thrown from princess Peach's castle which is on top of Bowsers castle and is floating in space. Somehow you survive the fall. You get discovered by friendly Goomba's and get taken to their "town" where you end up on a quest to find a hammer. Once found, you get Goombario as your first party member. You then need to travel to Star Summit to find out what is going on. This requires crossing a bridge guarded by the first boss, the King Goomba. Crossing the bridge leads you to the main town and from there you can go to Star Summit where the story really starts.
It appears that not only did Bowser steal the Star Rod from the seven star spirits, but he also locked up the seven star spirits in seven different locations. You, obviously, have to rescue the seven star spirits in order to gain the power to counter the star rod so that you can beat Bowser in a fair battle. This leads you to to a variety of areas including (in random order) a Volcanic Jungle Island, a Frozen Wilderness, Space, a Fortress, a Haunted House, a Desert, a Toy Box and Flower Fields.
Between the chapters you get to control Princess Peach as she tries to gather information that she feeds to Mario via Twink (a young star). Gathering this information leads to stealth sequences that can be somewhat annoying if your timing is poor. There is also a cooking sequence that is quite interesting and a quiz show that she gets to compete in. The one combat she is involved in is really just an extended cut scene where you don't really have any options at all but have to go through the motions.
Overall, for 1000 points this game is a must-have game if you enjoy role-playing games.
It appears that not only did Bowser steal the Star Rod from the seven star spirits, but he also locked up the seven star spirits in seven different locations. You, obviously, have to rescue the seven star spirits in order to gain the power to counter the star rod so that you can beat Bowser in a fair battle. This leads you to to a variety of areas including (in random order) a Volcanic Jungle Island, a Frozen Wilderness, Space, a Fortress, a Haunted House, a Desert, a Toy Box and Flower Fields.
Between the chapters you get to control Princess Peach as she tries to gather information that she feeds to Mario via Twink (a young star). Gathering this information leads to stealth sequences that can be somewhat annoying if your timing is poor. There is also a cooking sequence that is quite interesting and a quiz show that she gets to compete in. The one combat she is involved in is really just an extended cut scene where you don't really have any options at all but have to go through the motions.
Overall, for 1000 points this game is a must-have game if you enjoy role-playing games.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Paper Mario - Inventory
Inventory within the game is only usable by Mario and is very limited as there are only 10 slots. Quest items, such as keys are kept in a separate inventory so you never have to worry about items needed for the game. Items can be broken down into two basic categories. Items that heal you and items that cause damage on your opponents. Since combat items can only be used once and generally are not powerful enough to wipe out your opponents, I found the combat items fell into a use them if you find them but don't bother buying them category. Healing items are much more handy. These tend to either restore Heart Points or Flower points. A few items will heal both, but these tend to be items you make by going to Tayce T. the cook.
Cooking is a really interesting aspect of the game. You give one item to the cook and get a different item in return. This can be coded by using a simple table. After you find the cook book, the cook can use two items. This again can be done using a simple table look up. What makes cooking interesting is the simple fact that by combining a HP healing item with a FP healing item you will often end up with an item that restores both FP and HP, which is good as you then need fewer inventory slots.
The ten inventory slots, while filling up quickly, are supplemented by 32 extra slots that are available by storing items at store. What is really nice here is the fact that you can put stuff into storage at one store and reclaim it at another store. This means that you can make a large pile of Shroom Steaks (a life shroom and a mushroom) and put them in storage. There happens to be a store in Bowser's Castle so you can withdraw these steaks just before you go into the final boss battle.
Cooking is a really interesting aspect of the game. You give one item to the cook and get a different item in return. This can be coded by using a simple table. After you find the cook book, the cook can use two items. This again can be done using a simple table look up. What makes cooking interesting is the simple fact that by combining a HP healing item with a FP healing item you will often end up with an item that restores both FP and HP, which is good as you then need fewer inventory slots.
The ten inventory slots, while filling up quickly, are supplemented by 32 extra slots that are available by storing items at store. What is really nice here is the fact that you can put stuff into storage at one store and reclaim it at another store. This means that you can make a large pile of Shroom Steaks (a life shroom and a mushroom) and put them in storage. There happens to be a store in Bowser's Castle so you can withdraw these steaks just before you go into the final boss battle.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Paper Mario - Level Advancement
When you defeat an opponent that is at a higher level then you, you gain star coins. For every 100 coins you obtain, you gain a level. Whenever you gain a level, you are given the opportunity to increase one of your three properties. The game is fairly well balanced so the choice is almost always a difficult one as you could use all three. There is an upper limit on all of these properties. The upper limit is a bit lower than I would have liked, but I am one of those level up my character style of role-playing game player.
Note that opponent level information is not present in the game, so I am making an assumption about the way star coins are rewarded. I am assuming that all opponents are given a level and that experience is simply max(0, opponent_level - player_level). If I was coding this, I would have done this slightly different. I would probably make the coin counter go up to 1000 instead of 100 and have each opponent given an experience value based on the difficulty of that opponent. I would then reward experience using max(1, opponent_xp - player_level). This way, players would always gain at least 1 experience point for suffering through combat.
Party members only get leveled up when you find a special type of block in the world. These blocks will only work once and initially will only advance a character to super level. Once you reach Yoshi's Island, you will be given an object that will allow you to use those upgrade blocks to raise characters to ultra level.
Note that opponent level information is not present in the game, so I am making an assumption about the way star coins are rewarded. I am assuming that all opponents are given a level and that experience is simply max(0, opponent_level - player_level). If I was coding this, I would have done this slightly different. I would probably make the coin counter go up to 1000 instead of 100 and have each opponent given an experience value based on the difficulty of that opponent. I would then reward experience using max(1, opponent_xp - player_level). This way, players would always gain at least 1 experience point for suffering through combat.
Party members only get leveled up when you find a special type of block in the world. These blocks will only work once and initially will only advance a character to super level. Once you reach Yoshi's Island, you will be given an object that will allow you to use those upgrade blocks to raise characters to ultra level.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Paper Mario - Combat System
The combat system in Paper Mario is a menu based system. As mentioned earlier, there is a first attack feature on the main map so you or your opponent may get a free attack. Once this is out of the way, Mario and his companion each get an action. Once these actions are performed then each of the opponents get a turn. You can face up to four opponents at a time.
Mario has a basic jump attack and a hammer attack once he has acquired the first hammer. In addition to these basic attacks, more advanced jump and hammer attacks can be performed if you have the appropriate badge equipped and enough flower points. Each badge has a badge point cost so you are limited to how many different types of attacks you can have. There are also badges that are defensive in nature and some that give you other abilities. The most important badge to me is the quick swap badge that lets you swap out your companion while letting the replacement companion still get an attack. As an alternative to attacking, Mario can use an item or use a star power (once star powers have been acquired).
The companions can only attack or swap. Swapping a companion for a different one takes up the companion's turn unless the quick swap badge is equipped. Each companion has their own set of up to four attacks, based on the level of the character. The first attack is free, while the other attacks cost Mario flower points. Many of the special attacks do things such as put the opponent(s) to sleep. One of your companions can make you invisible for a turn making the opponents miss you when they attack. While this sounds great, the designers play-balanced this power by having that companion unable to act the following turn.
The monsters attack Mario pretty much exclusively, with the rare attack on your companion only having the effect of temporarily knocking out your companion for a number of turns. As the companion can not use items or heal Mario, you do occasionally end up in a situation where Mario is dazed, frozen, or asleep and the only thing you can do is hope that Mario's heart points last until he recovers or your companion wins the battle. This is a very big flaw but thankfully does not come into play too often.
There is a slight arcade element to the combat. Every attack has an arcade action (timing related for the most part) that can cause the attack to do extra damage. For the most part this is not a requirement but there are a few monsters that you will encounter for which you will do no damage unless you get the bonus damage to register. Very poor design. Damage can also be reduced by clicking on the action button just before the opponent hits you. I almost always took full damage.
Mario has a basic jump attack and a hammer attack once he has acquired the first hammer. In addition to these basic attacks, more advanced jump and hammer attacks can be performed if you have the appropriate badge equipped and enough flower points. Each badge has a badge point cost so you are limited to how many different types of attacks you can have. There are also badges that are defensive in nature and some that give you other abilities. The most important badge to me is the quick swap badge that lets you swap out your companion while letting the replacement companion still get an attack. As an alternative to attacking, Mario can use an item or use a star power (once star powers have been acquired).
The companions can only attack or swap. Swapping a companion for a different one takes up the companion's turn unless the quick swap badge is equipped. Each companion has their own set of up to four attacks, based on the level of the character. The first attack is free, while the other attacks cost Mario flower points. Many of the special attacks do things such as put the opponent(s) to sleep. One of your companions can make you invisible for a turn making the opponents miss you when they attack. While this sounds great, the designers play-balanced this power by having that companion unable to act the following turn.
The monsters attack Mario pretty much exclusively, with the rare attack on your companion only having the effect of temporarily knocking out your companion for a number of turns. As the companion can not use items or heal Mario, you do occasionally end up in a situation where Mario is dazed, frozen, or asleep and the only thing you can do is hope that Mario's heart points last until he recovers or your companion wins the battle. This is a very big flaw but thankfully does not come into play too often.
There is a slight arcade element to the combat. Every attack has an arcade action (timing related for the most part) that can cause the attack to do extra damage. For the most part this is not a requirement but there are a few monsters that you will encounter for which you will do no damage unless you get the bonus damage to register. Very poor design. Damage can also be reduced by clicking on the action button just before the opponent hits you. I almost always took full damage.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Paper Mario - The Party
The party in the game, not including Mario, is very limited. In fact, coding the party would be very easy to do as the only thing that you would have to track is a 2 bit number for each of the members indicating the level of the character. Party Members only have three levels. Their starting level, super level and ultra level. You can have up to 8 members tagging along with Mario. You gain members as you progress through the story. While the game pretends to give you a choice about taking the member or not, the end result is always that the character joins the party.
While you may have eight members in your entourage, only one member may be with Mario at a time. Swapping out the character can be done at any time, so this isn't that big of a limitation. Each character has a special ability that can be used. These abilities are used to solve the various puzzles in the game. In fact, at the end of the game you will find yourself swapping characters constantly to get through the final chapter.
Mario, as the hero, is a bit more complicated. He has three attributes (and later gains a fourth one) that grow as he advances in levels. Heart Points are your health, Flower Power are your "magic" and Badge Points control how many special abilities you can have. Levels are gained by collecting star coins which are earned by defeating opponents. If you are a higher level than an opponent, you no longer earn star coins but still have to fight the opponent anyway. I wrote a rant about this subject earlier.
While you may have eight members in your entourage, only one member may be with Mario at a time. Swapping out the character can be done at any time, so this isn't that big of a limitation. Each character has a special ability that can be used. These abilities are used to solve the various puzzles in the game. In fact, at the end of the game you will find yourself swapping characters constantly to get through the final chapter.
Mario, as the hero, is a bit more complicated. He has three attributes (and later gains a fourth one) that grow as he advances in levels. Heart Points are your health, Flower Power are your "magic" and Badge Points control how many special abilities you can have. Levels are gained by collecting star coins which are earned by defeating opponents. If you are a higher level than an opponent, you no longer earn star coins but still have to fight the opponent anyway. I wrote a rant about this subject earlier.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Paper Mario - Basic Game Play
The game is a 3D game with all the characters in the game being 2D, hence the word Paper in the title. This is a fairly simple thing to code as all you need to do is to use the artwork for the characters as an alpha-mapped texture placed on a plane. The 3D view is simply a camera that is essentially on a rail. The position of the camera would the be based on the horizontal (x) position of the character. The world is broken into small chunks, so only a small amount of the world needs to be loaded into memory at any give time.
The player's interaction with the environment is fairly limited. You basically can walk over things, use your action button on things (for reading signs) or can use your hammer on things. Monsters and NPCs do exist and can be interacted with. Bumping into a monster will take you into the combat system. There is also a first attack feature that allows you or the monster to gain a free strike simply by purposely attacking in the game screen.
Non-player character interaction is very limited and amounts to a simple static dialog message. Static may not be exactly the right way of describing it as the message does change as the game progresses based on what chapter you are on or which character you have with you. This, of course, leads to the rather lengthy topic of your party.
The player's interaction with the environment is fairly limited. You basically can walk over things, use your action button on things (for reading signs) or can use your hammer on things. Monsters and NPCs do exist and can be interacted with. Bumping into a monster will take you into the combat system. There is also a first attack feature that allows you or the monster to gain a free strike simply by purposely attacking in the game screen.
Non-player character interaction is very limited and amounts to a simple static dialog message. Static may not be exactly the right way of describing it as the message does change as the game progresses based on what chapter you are on or which character you have with you. This, of course, leads to the rather lengthy topic of your party.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Paper Mario - Review Overview
I am going to start a very in depth review of Paper Mario, which I just completed over the long weekend. This will be a bit different from other reviews you might read because I am going to go into depth about play mechanics of the game using my programmer's hat to explain how I would have coded the game if I was working on it and my designer aspect to point out game design aspects that I thought were well done and things that I would have done different.
Why am I doing this? To be perfectly honest, this is something that I do every time that I play a game. The difference is that I never write down my thoughts. While there may not be anybody interested in what I think about games that I am currently playing, writing things down allows me to focus my thoughts and will hopefully improve my own games.
For those of you who just read reviews to determine if you should get the game, read the summary I wrote when I first purchased the game to see if the game is something you want to play. Then note that I am giving this game a letter grade of A. For 1000 points (US$10) you really do get your money's worth out of the game. It took me about 40 hours to finish. While it is probably possible to finish the game faster, I would say that even if you rushed through the game, it would still take over 20 hours to finish.
My next few installments will cover the basic components that make up the game. After that I will quickly run through the game pointing out some story specific elements and finish off with a rant about why I hate bosses. I should remind anybody who is reading this that my FLOSS entries and drafts of making One of those Weeks will continue.
Why am I doing this? To be perfectly honest, this is something that I do every time that I play a game. The difference is that I never write down my thoughts. While there may not be anybody interested in what I think about games that I am currently playing, writing things down allows me to focus my thoughts and will hopefully improve my own games.
For those of you who just read reviews to determine if you should get the game, read the summary I wrote when I first purchased the game to see if the game is something you want to play. Then note that I am giving this game a letter grade of A. For 1000 points (US$10) you really do get your money's worth out of the game. It took me about 40 hours to finish. While it is probably possible to finish the game faster, I would say that even if you rushed through the game, it would still take over 20 hours to finish.
My next few installments will cover the basic components that make up the game. After that I will quickly run through the game pointing out some story specific elements and finish off with a rant about why I hate bosses. I should remind anybody who is reading this that my FLOSS entries and drafts of making One of those Weeks will continue.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Save Points
I was going to past my second FLOSS entry today but yesterday Sega actually released a RPG on the Wii virtual console. Shining Force is the second game in the shining series of games, though I have never played any games in the series. I am probably going to be playing this entry as soon as I finish Paper Mario.
Since I am talking about consoles anyway, I might as well talk about save points. A lot of players don't like them, but from a development standpoint they are a rather nice way of dealing with the problems of saving a game. Saving a game, while sounding like an easy thing to do, can be a challenge. When you have memory restrictions on how much information can be in the save file, as you do when you are creating a console game, this becomes a major factor. This is why a lot of games reset rooms once you have left the area. By not having to track the state of the monsters in the room you can then eliminate having to save that information. This means that when you are saving the game all you need to save is the player's location, the player stats, and the key game flags.
Key game flags are bits of information that reflect what the player has done in the game. For instance, if you have a treasure chest, you don't want that chest to be magically re-filled every time the player exits then re-enters an area. To solve this problem you just assign a game flag to hold the chest state. If the chest has been opened, then the flag gets set and the next time you enter that area, the chest will already be opened. Of course, this also applies to switches, traps, bosses and any other game state information.
The thing is, if you are going to have the ability to save the game, why require it be done only from key points in the game? Could you not simply use the same flags and stat storage with a slightly larger field for allowing any game location to be the location? If so (and as a programmer I know it IS so) then you could very easily allow the player to save anywhere. All that would have to be done is saving a slight bit more information that contains the monsters in the particular room that the player is in. Even though the number of monsters in a room could vary, you just need to reserve enough memory to hold the maximum number of monsters that appear in a room. There are other reasons why this might not be done which I will discuss in a future post.
Since I am talking about consoles anyway, I might as well talk about save points. A lot of players don't like them, but from a development standpoint they are a rather nice way of dealing with the problems of saving a game. Saving a game, while sounding like an easy thing to do, can be a challenge. When you have memory restrictions on how much information can be in the save file, as you do when you are creating a console game, this becomes a major factor. This is why a lot of games reset rooms once you have left the area. By not having to track the state of the monsters in the room you can then eliminate having to save that information. This means that when you are saving the game all you need to save is the player's location, the player stats, and the key game flags.
Key game flags are bits of information that reflect what the player has done in the game. For instance, if you have a treasure chest, you don't want that chest to be magically re-filled every time the player exits then re-enters an area. To solve this problem you just assign a game flag to hold the chest state. If the chest has been opened, then the flag gets set and the next time you enter that area, the chest will already be opened. Of course, this also applies to switches, traps, bosses and any other game state information.
The thing is, if you are going to have the ability to save the game, why require it be done only from key points in the game? Could you not simply use the same flags and stat storage with a slightly larger field for allowing any game location to be the location? If so (and as a programmer I know it IS so) then you could very easily allow the player to save anywhere. All that would have to be done is saving a slight bit more information that contains the monsters in the particular room that the player is in. Even though the number of monsters in a room could vary, you just need to reserve enough memory to hold the maximum number of monsters that appear in a room. There are other reasons why this might not be done which I will discuss in a future post.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Level Limits
Sorry for not posting this earlier (I forgot) but the poll results for last week's Blazing Games poll were 100% for working on Coffee Quest Revenge until the 1.0 version is ready. As the few readers of this Blog already know, I am playing Paper Mario. Now that I am back to work, I will be limiting the amount of time I play to roughly an hour a day, so it will be a while before I finish the game. That being said I did run into one element of the game that I absolutely hate and in the future will ensuring that my own games will not have this major flaw.
The game started off fairly easily so I was just following the plot not building up my character other than through normal solving of the game. Then I hit the Dry Dry Desert, where I found the game a bit too challenging for my liking. For that reason, I decided it was time to build up my character. While I explored the desert, I was fighting all the monsters in an attempt to build up my character. This worked real well and I got to the point where the monsters were no longer a burden but I wanted to build up my character a couple more levels anyway to make the future areas a bit easier. After gaining a level, then went into combat and noticed that I never got experience. There are level limits in the game! Once you have reached a certain level, you no longer gain experience (star coins) from defeating a monster. This means that unless you need money, the fighting of low-level monsters is pointless. I should point out at this time that the money is capped at 999 coins, so once you reach that, picking up extra coins does nothing!
While I have no problem with games that reduce the amount of experience from defeating easier monsters, eliminating it is just wrong. None of my RPGs do this so I am not being a hypocrite on this subject. I must admit, however, as a lot of my RPGs do not have re-spawning monsters (something that most of my future RPGs will have) the lack of new monsters acts as a way of limiting how much a character can be built up. This is a bit different as you at least will always gain experience when you defeat a monster, so none of the fighting in my games is pointless.
The game started off fairly easily so I was just following the plot not building up my character other than through normal solving of the game. Then I hit the Dry Dry Desert, where I found the game a bit too challenging for my liking. For that reason, I decided it was time to build up my character. While I explored the desert, I was fighting all the monsters in an attempt to build up my character. This worked real well and I got to the point where the monsters were no longer a burden but I wanted to build up my character a couple more levels anyway to make the future areas a bit easier. After gaining a level, then went into combat and noticed that I never got experience. There are level limits in the game! Once you have reached a certain level, you no longer gain experience (star coins) from defeating a monster. This means that unless you need money, the fighting of low-level monsters is pointless. I should point out at this time that the money is capped at 999 coins, so once you reach that, picking up extra coins does nothing!
While I have no problem with games that reduce the amount of experience from defeating easier monsters, eliminating it is just wrong. None of my RPGs do this so I am not being a hypocrite on this subject. I must admit, however, as a lot of my RPGs do not have re-spawning monsters (something that most of my future RPGs will have) the lack of new monsters acts as a way of limiting how much a character can be built up. This is a bit different as you at least will always gain experience when you defeat a monster, so none of the fighting in my games is pointless.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Paper Mario
I was going to start my series of rants - I mean posts - on Open Source software today, but last night I took a look at the Wii online store and discovered that on Monday Nintendo finally released a decent role-playing game. For only 1000 points ($10) I got myself a copy of Paper Mario. It is about bloody time that a good RPG was released on the virtual store. Lets just hope that this is the start of a trend and many more good RPGs will be released for the virtual console.
Some people may not be familiar with the Paper Mario series. It is the follow-up series of games for a game known as Mario RPG. The Mario RPG was a game that took the Mario Brothers universe into the realm of Role-playing games. Of course, the Mario universe has been expanded into a wide variety of other genre of games.
The first impression of the game is pretty good. The RPG elements consist of Hearts (HP), Flower Power (Mana), and Badge Points. Badges represent your special abilities, which you not only get to choose, but can change at anytime. When you gain enough experience to gain a level you choose which of the three things you wish to improve. Combat is menu driven, though have an arcade timing test that gives you extra damage or reduces your damage. I will try to have a full review later.
Some people may not be familiar with the Paper Mario series. It is the follow-up series of games for a game known as Mario RPG. The Mario RPG was a game that took the Mario Brothers universe into the realm of Role-playing games. Of course, the Mario universe has been expanded into a wide variety of other genre of games.
The first impression of the game is pretty good. The RPG elements consist of Hearts (HP), Flower Power (Mana), and Badge Points. Badges represent your special abilities, which you not only get to choose, but can change at anytime. When you gain enough experience to gain a level you choose which of the three things you wish to improve. Combat is menu driven, though have an arcade timing test that gives you extra damage or reduces your damage. I will try to have a full review later.
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