Wish everyone a merry Christmas. Mine has been great so far. Got to spend lots of quality time with my family and my wife's family, all of whom are wonderfully kind, generous people.
Let you all know that my wife an I are leaving tomorrow for an extended vacation in Argentina. I'll be returning in mid-January, so I may not be posting for a few weeks. If I have the opportunity, I will post a few accounts of my trip as we go along, so if you're interested, please keep an eye on the blog the next few weeks.
Update you on the status of SPUDZOOKA. It's coming along quite well, but I didn't get as far as I would have liked before the holiday/travel madness started. I'll publish a demo level when I return and am able to get a little more polish on it.
Once again, I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season. It's been a good year, and I'll talk to you in a few weeks!
Saw a really cool YouTube video over at Independent Gaming (strangely, the post seems to have been removed from the blog). The video is of a guy describing (and demonstrating) how to set up a VR display using the Nintendo Wii. Really cool stuff. Wouldn't surprise me if this makes its way into a few games in the next year or two.
There's a nice post from Leo Stableford today about the pros and cons of self-publishing. He's discussing things in context of writing, but I have a feeling many of the same issues apply to self-publishing games.
It would be easy enough to post SPUDZOOKA to a site of my own designing, set up a Google AdSense account and maybe earn a few dollars. If I did a decent job promoting the game, people might come play it.
On the other hand, if I attempt to get my game published on a well-trafficked game site like Shockwave.com, I would definitely get more players and could potentially make more money. The question is whether self-publishing would hurt my chances of being published on a site like Shockwave. Honestly I don't know. The game publishing business is certainly not as well established as print publishing, so my guess is that there are still more avenues available for indie game developers to publish and distribute their games.
I'm just starting to research the possibilities, but maybe I'm getting ahead of my self. I still have a game to finish before I can even publish it myself.
SPUDZOOKA is a potato cannon shooting game (as one reader already guessed). It's designed to be super easy to learn and (I hope) really fun to play.
I'm still in the early stages of development, but things are coming together pretty quickly.
Some features Like most casual games, SPUDZOOKA is built around a simple game mechanic. In this case it's shooting potatoes at targets. There are a million target shooting games out there, but this one will have a few features that I hope will make it stand out:
Play in 3D. Most casual target shooters are still Flash-based. SPUDZOOKA's realistic 3D environment should make it more immersive.
Customize your cannon. As you progress, you'll earn points that can be spent on new parts for your potato shooter. Barrels will affect ammunition and fire speed. Combustion chambers will affect power. Stands will affect accuracy.
Use various kinds of ammo. Potatoes come in all shapes and sizes, and they're all good for shooting.
Vent your frustrations on inanimate objects. Part of the fun of SPUDZOOKA is finding targets, which are often hidden behind obstacles such as boxes, crates, shelves, and barrels. You'll have to use your potatoes to knock them out of the way.
I've got some other features in mind, but they will take a bit longer to implement. Casual games are at their best when they're addictive, and that means you can keep coming back without playing through the same content every time. I'll save the details of my plans for another post, but my idea should keep things interesting.
I'll post a test level for everyone to play as soon as it's ready. I'm leaving the country on a long vacation right after Christmas, so I hope to have something ready by then.
As a follow-on to my last post, I thought I would point everyone to a Gamasutra article published yesterday that predicts the next big thing in gaming (now that music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are a "phenomenon").
The analysts polled in the article all seem to agree that the future of video games (the short-term future anyway) is going to revolve around "social gaming," games designed to be played with multiple people present in the room.
A couple of the analysts make a nice (if a bit obvious) comparison between such social video games and the classical board games of a generation (or two) ago. The current crop of games happens to be focused on music, but music isn't the root of the phenomenon, according to these folks. I never much cared for traditional board games, but I do agree with them -- we're just witnessing the next incarnation of group entertainment.
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On an unrelated note, here's a quick hint about the subject of my casual side project...
There's a great post over at Geek Studies today about Rock Band. The gist is that games just can't win:
If a game features violent activity that we could never (and, hopefully, would never) enact in real life, it gets criticized for encouraging real-life violence. If a game features non-violent activity that might even be considered worthwhile in real life, it gets criticized for discouraging real-life action.
In short, Rock Band has been getting some criticism (granted, it's pretty benign) for effectively discouraging people from learning to play real music.
I agree that this is a pretty ridiculous assertion, but I think the more important observation in this post is that games still seem to occupy some sort of limbo wherein we (as productive members of society) are allowed to play, but only if we feel some requisite twinge of guilt during or after all the fun.
I admit to playing Rock Band at a friend's house until 3 AM on consecutive nights. I marvel at the fact that I, the guy who flatly refuses to sing or dance in public, will excitedly take the microphone and sing songs far outside my vocal range while strutting in place (picture Mick Jagger) and dancing with the microphone stand (picture Steven Tyler--yes, my friend bought a microphone stand).
This is fun in its purest form, yet every time my friends and I (including my wife, and her sister, and my brother's wife) gather to play this game, someone will utter, once every half hour or so, "This is some nerdy shit." It's as if we all hear the little voice of society whispering, "You're wasting your time. Video games are for losers."
So what, I say! No one anywhere does anything productive on Friday night. None of us will ever be a rock star. That's not the point. The point is entertainment; the point is fellowship. And that's a lesson I learned from South Park.
I've learned a lot in the last few days about lightmapping, the process of "baking" lighting effects into the texture on a 3D object. I've heard it described as a "poor man's lighting effect." For me, that's a true statement. I can't currently afford the pro version of Unity, which includes dynamic, real-time shadows, so the next best option is to map static shadows into my scenes.
Despite being less flashy, lightmapping is considerably less expensive in terms of processing. Ultimately, I think it's a fantastic value. The effect is great, and the cost is minimal.
Lightmapping is a tough concept to get your head around. Wikipedia has a brief article on it, but it's kind of technical. Here's the gist:
Generally the best way to control lighting is in your 3D modeling application (the image to the right was rendered in my 3D app). You can build a number of objects, texture them, and light them in whatever way you choose. The trouble is that rendering images with sophisticated lighting is much too slow for a real-time game engine.
When applying textures to 3D objects for games, you have to "unwrap" the object onto a flat surface that then gets painted with a texture (a tedious process called UV mapping). The texture is then wrapped back around the object.
Most 3D modeling applications now allow objects to have multiple UV sets. In other words, the main texture can use one set of UV coordinates, and another texture can be attached to the second set.
The lightmapping process takes advantage of this second UV set by converting lighting information from the 3D application into a flat texture that can be applied to an object on top of the primary texture. The result is an object that looks like it's being lit, even when no lights are present.
Since lighting is one of the most processor-intensive tasks in real-time 3D processing, lightmapping is tremendously beneficial from a performance standpoint. The downside is that the "baked" lighting isn't dynamic and won't apply to any moving objects in the scene (well, you could do it, but it would look pretty strange).
These before and after images illustrate the point. The first one is a screenshot of a scene with no lighting and no lightmapping. The second image uses lightmapped textures, but still has no in-game lights. As you can see, the cube that should be lit by the light coming through the window (if this were the real world), is not receiving any light at all, since there are actually no lights in the scene.
Probably the best approach for me is to use some combination of lightmapping and in-game lighting. The result won't be perfect, but it will be close enough until I can spring for the pro version of Unity.
Ah, the holidays. Nothing is better for turning optimistic productivity into an overwhelming sense of "I accomplished nothing today." My blogging pace has suffered, as you might have noticed, at the arrival this funny thing we call December. It's a time when the routine balance between personal and professional inevitably tilts one way or the other -- and neither direction favors hobbies.
Nevertheless, I'm making some progress on my side project. Currently I'm working to model and texture the main environment for the game. Though this project is far less demanding on the artistic side, the work still has me looking at quite a long list of required assets. But today I found some good advice on art for indie games.
I programmed some of the basic mechanics for this project back in the summer when I first had the idea and was playing around with Unity, so once the main environment is finished, I'll be able to focus on level design and refining the gameplay. From there it's user interface and sound.
Yeah, there's still a lot to do, but this project is so compact compared to my main one that I might just have a chance of finishing. At this point I remain optimistic. More details to come -- as soon as I finish my shopping.
By day, I work in online marketing. By evening, I am a hobbyist game designer. I started this blog because there are plenty of people talking about video games but very few exploring the process of making one.
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