My 6 year old daughter is on a monster kick (not sure where she *gets* this stuff from). She’s collected dragons for years but has now stepped up to werewolves and trolls and sasquatches and such. More than anything right now she wants to travel to Scotland so we can search for Nessie, who happens to be her current favorite mythological creature.
Local Monsters support Local Produce
Anyhoo, Scotland is not really in the family budget. Nor is it really a top travel priority for us. Its actually at the very bottom of our current travel priority list, well under such exotic locations as Portland, and Vancouver and that small strawberry festival a few blocks Down the Street from our house. Despite all of her “research” on Nessie (more on that later – did you know they teach research methods in kindergarten these days?) we aren’t funding her current exploration overseas.
However, there are local myths here in the NorthWest. While perusing her summer reading list (a fairly tall stack of well-illustrated children’s books on monsters collected from our local library) we discovered the stories of Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan, a lake which happens to be fairly close to her Grandfather’s current place of residence.
Actual apparent photo of the Ogopogo
Long story short, we aren’t travelling to Scotland this year. But we are planning an expedition, an adventure really, to Lake Okanagan, on a quest to find Ogopogo himself. My 6 year old daughter, her dubious older brother, myself, and my somewhat reluctant wife.
Its old news that Evangeline Lilly plays an elf warrior in the second Hobbit (The Desolation of Smaug) movie, but photos of her started renewed discussion between side A (excited about adding some stronger female roles to the story) and side B (Tolkien traditionalists) over on RPG.net
I’m actually for adding a bit to the story, and I think there’s plenty of room to focus more on the elf characters (when you have three movies). Not sure how I feel about the romance angle to it all, though.
While Hollywood continues put out movies with women archers I’ve been putting off writing about DnDNext. Summary is that I’m looking forward to getting my copy of Ghosts of Dragonspear at Gencon in a few months. In the meantime Mike Mearls has been pontificating about dragonborns, the elemental planes and going all Moorcock in the next update. I’m not all that excited about dragonborns but the rest sounds promising. The latest playtest update came out Friday with new adventures, spell updates, and half-elf, the half-orc, and the gnome races.
Speaking of DnD here is a reminder that you only have about a day to support Jeff Dee’s latest effort recreating classic DnD art (including the cover of Isle of Dread):
In other Kickstarter news the Cthulhu Wars Kickstarter campaign is here. Play cult factions trying to awaken your own elder god in this gorgeous looking strategic board game from the designer of the original Cthulhu RPG which is already gnashing through funding levels like a malevolent entity hibernating within an underwater city in the South Pacific.
Its pricey, and due to popularity you probably already missed the first come early supporter slots, but it looks amazing.
Finally, Disney’s slew of acquisitions has opened the door for various franchise mashups and at least one is coming to screen this summer that I (and my kids) can hardly wait for:
My four your old is deep into dragons right now, with a large collection of dragon toys and several imaginary dragon friends. From my perspective (being a proud parent) she seems to come up with wonderfully interesting an imaginative stories around her dragons. Generally I think children are a wellspring of great ideas (at least, until institutions undermines their sense of creativity).
This is her Pine Dragon. A creature that lives in the giant, swaying northwest pines prominent in our neighborhood.
Pine Dragon
Habitat
Prefers evergreen forests by the sea (likes to comb beaches consuming driftwood) and a mild climate. Loves fog and rainy days and smaller islands.
Food
Will occasionally dive for seafood that’s deeper in the waters, catching shark and octopi, but brings them back to the beach to consume. Also eats other seafood (fish, hermit crabs, jellyfish) and pinecones and tree bark.
Physique
Their necks and tails are extremely long to reach seafood. They like to wrap their extremely long necks and tails around the giant, swaying pines for sleeping (the rocking of the tree soothes them and puts them to sleep). They are mostly green but can have purple and black hues. Their talons are golden, their bellies yellow. Females are more colorful.
They have no wings but are fast runners and great jumpers and can stay underwater for long stretches of time.
Wood fires their breath. They can swallow a bunch of deadfall to fire up something fierce, but even a pinecone would help. They like the hang out on beaches and nibble on freshly caught seafood. They will sometimes build fire pits like humans do and then curl up near them.
Habits
They have a weakness for popcorn and apples, and love the smell of these.
They sleep in the trees – building eagle like ness for their small young, and then wrap their long tails in the high branches, the trees swaying in the wind, soothing them and rocking them to sleep.
They will collect lost treasures or jewels, but focus on small, shiny trinkets like seaglass, colorful beads and marbles. They put these in their nests with their eggs, in the highest of treetops. Their green eggs are small (smaller than bird sized) and they start off as really tiny dragons.
They will be awake for weeks at a time, and then sleep for weeks at a time. Really old ones may sleep for ages in their trees, the bark slowly overtaking and growing over and around them. They stay warm and still in their tress during the winter / snowfall, and rest in their shade during the hottest summers.
Continuation of part 1 here, our best and worst of 2012 in RPG stuff. Enjoy and a have a happy New Year!
Computer Games
Best RPG Computer Game: The Walking Dead
Here we have IP done right. Using Telltale as a studio was a risk for the franchise in and of itself, and then they took several risks with the game (episodic releases, point and click, storytelling over-all-else) but managed to pull off a wonderful, poignant and emotional experience that shines brightly over all the other first person shooting crud that seems to dominate the market.
Worst RPG Computer Game: The Game of Thrones RPG
Fantasy is finally cool again, but Martin’s books, and the terrific HBO series, deserve better than this mediocre effort. Shoddy gameplay, unpolished presentation, and meh graphics at best.
Biggest RPG Game Disappointment: Diablo III
On the one hand, Diablo III was a decent, fun to play action-RPG, but DRM and over-design drained the joy out of it, and even with a decade of polish it’s half the game Torchlight 2 is.
Honorable Mention: Knights of Pen&Paper
An indie turn-based retro style pixel-art RPG where you control the playing characters and the dungeon master in a simulation of a traditional pen and paper RPG.
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Best Fantasy Book: Throne of the Crescent Moon (Saladin Ahmed)
Detail, humor, and one thousand and one nights inspired – the book is simply great storytelling in that classic swashbuckling sense as you follow a charismatic thief that leads a revolt in a magical and political city.
Best Sci-fi Book: Pirate Cinema (Cory Doctorow)
Still not tired of brilliant, passionate kids taking on the oppressive system in a dystopian near future. Keep these coming, Doctorow.
Best debut: vN (Madeline Ashby)
Some love and hate from critics but this is a great first novel and a wonderfully dark story about a rogue artificial woman becoming dangerous.
Biggest Sci-Fi Loss: Ray Bradbury
We lost some great storytellers (Harry Harrison) and story makers (Neil Armstrong) but the passing of Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked this Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451) is one of the year’s biggest blows. A muse for Steven Spielberg, Neil Gaiman, and Steven King, Ray’s storytelling gift has expanded minds for nearly a century now, and although he resisted the label of science fiction writer he is credited as the one most responsible for bringing sci-fi into the literary mainstream.
Stupidest Comic Book Death: Spider man #700.
In an obviously not-permanent brain mind meld switch the body of Spider Man is now housing Dr. Octopus, Peter Parker has died in Dr. Octopi’s body and fans everywhere sigh their collective sighs.
Best Sci-Fiction Becomes Reality: NASA’s Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive
What can be cooler than FTL made possible by donuts?
Most Amazing Robot Monster: DARPA’s Running Cheetah
DARPA’s Maximum Mobility Program revved up their Cheetah Robot this year. The previous iteration ran at a speed of 18 mph, but the new version clocked upwards of 28.8 mph. Finally, what we’ve always needed – robots that can outrun humans.
Movies
Biggest Movie Winner: Decent Geek Movies
Great geek movies are everywhere nowadays. Go Avengers! Go Hobbit! Go Batman!
Biggest Movie Loser: Nostalgic Franchise Reboots
Promethius (Ugh), Dark Shadows (Huh?), Men in Black III (Really?) and Total Recall (Yawn)
Best CGI Character: The Hulk
Puny God. ‘Nuff said.
Most disappointing CGI Character: The Hobbit’s Goblin King
The very definition of CGI overacting.
Best CGI actor in a CGI Scene: The Hobbit’s Golum
The Riddle Me This interchange was perhaps the best CGI scene ever produced in film (don’t see it in 48p though)
Golum is basically amazing
Movie Weapon of the Year: Bows
Let’s get Hawkeye, Katniss and Merida together in a hunting super hero party. Really. With these guys.
Finally, Monster of the Year goes to: Giant Spiders
Having discovered Tolkien while at the same time discovering my love for reading and books, and growing up in an era where the story is synonymous with gaming I’m likely the target demographic. I’m not sure where the hate is coming from since it’s pretty much what I expected from the LOTR movie franchise and I really enjoyed it (although I too have my bones to pick). Desperately needing to focus on something other than current events I put together a few thoughts on the movie from a gaming perspective.
The important scenes
I’ve read that the first scene shot for the film was the Golum and Bilbo sequence. This shows in a good way. Martin Freeman is excellent throughout (which surprised me since it was his first scene) and Golum especially is extremely well rendered (note I didn’t see the film in the new 48p format, purposely skipping that since I heard it destroys the immersion) – It seems Golum had a lot of post processing time. His facial expressions and acting are amazing and you totally forget that he’s CGI (not so with other overly CGI characters).
Golum is basically amazing
The scene is pretty true to the story and is an iconic one for gamers – it’s perhaps the quintessential rogue mini-sidequest. Separated from the rest of the party, your rogue uses guile to belay the attack of a very unusual creature, engages him in a battle of wits solving puzzles, finds a magic item, and somehow figure it how to use it to escape.
In design it’s these smaller, side-moments from the larger quest, and the combination of puzzle and action (thinking and doing), that give players a moment to immerse themselves and shine. These deserve your full attention and prep time, and often the larger action scenes we think we need to focus on can play out themselves (more on that later).
Too many Players
“Thirteen dwarves is one of the reasons I dreaded The Hobbit. It’s why I really didn’t think I would make it for such a long time.” -Peter Jackson
It’s tough to flesh out and get people to care about that many characters (which would be a good reason to draw out the movie length, but this doesn’t really seem to be what’s making it so long). As a movie goer, let’s see, you had the leader, the archer, the fat one, and the older wise dwarf that sucks you into the backstory. That’s four dwarves that I distinctly remember from scenes. Now I think there were twins… or brothers? Not sure and uhm…
How many Dwarves are there again?
Have you ever tried to run a fourteen person game? (I think had a 12 person weekly game or so once, it was a cluster). Jackson had the same problem. Having lots of dwarves helps make Gandalf and Bilbo more interesting, but there are too few moments for each player to have their own in the sun. I think most gamers keep their parties small. And each player needs to have their regular moments to shine, otherwise the player isn’t going to have fun. NPCs too, need more than just a brief line and a fancy costume to be memorable. There’s a reason why boardgames tend to top out at about 6 players, and why four player Co-op has been such a popular format.
Too much Backstory spoils the plot.
People are complaining that the film is drawn out and bloated. I think people forget that the books are also somewhat dense and rambling but OK, I get the perspective, and it was over an hour before we left hobbitsville. This is due to extremely long flashbacks, interesting from a fan perspective and good foreshadowing (although mainly of a badguy that doesn’t belong in the story at all, but I digress…) but wholly unnecessary.
Middle Earth is more than a setting, it’s the key character. Exploring it is the main reason for participating. Setting up the film with a long historical exposition into the nuances of why and what happened before actually hurts the exploration. This history should be teased out as little treasures throughout. The backstory needs to be there (and some thought put into it) but the long scenes belong in the extended disk release for fans. Meanwhile Bilbo’s perspective is and should be the perfect for adventure. It’s his first run away from home and he doesn’t know what he’s in store for and he should be piecing it all together along the way.
For those of you who don’t know I’m creating a simple-ish RPG causal arcade game for NaGaDeMon – I’ve only got until the end of the month to finish it, and it’s been interesting juggling ambitions with a very strict time constraint. In the last couple days I’ve added simple gamestate + menu options to the project and worked on adding new levels and new monster AI.
Monsters now have a couple different AI modes – they have the original meandering one or they can make a straight beeline to the player. I used Oreilly’s HTML5 Canvas as a reference for the new equation:
if (monster.AImode == 1) {
//Move in a straight line to the player
var p1 = { x: monster.x, y: monster.y };
var p2 = { x: 640, y: 225 }; //player ie center of screen
I’d still like to build more interesting modes here (circling bats and archers that wander the edge of the screen should be quickly doable) but we’ll see how we’re doing with time towards the end of the month.
Monsters now vary in speed, damage and hitpoints, and there is a level progression where the monsters grow in number and difficulty. Here’s some shaky footage of the latest build:
Not quite where I’d like to be in the 2nd to 3rd week. My todo list for last week isn’t completely scratched off and there’s quite a bit added onto it, and there’s a lot of testing I’m skimping on to get features into the game.
The whole project is still very simple. The lack of progress is really about me getting enough free time to sit down and focus on it (I’ve only had a few hours since mid-week to play). I also took some dead-ends while learning HTML 5. For instance, I spent some time looking at the built in HTML5 canvas shadow for the player shadow, only to then instead create copies of the player images, turn them black, squish them a bit in drawimage() and render them under the regular player image because it was faster to implement (I knew I could get the look I wanted in a graphics program in a few minutes, or I could spend hours tweaking shadowBlur, shadowColor, shadow.OffsetX etc, values – I chose the former).
I also spent way too much time thinking and and prototyping a menu using several different html pages and brilliant looking metro, only to realize I’m not going to have enough content (leaderboards) to warrant it, so instead I just shoved html5 buttons on the default page and use style.visibility now to hide them during play:
//Set Up Menu Screen UI Elements
function showMenu(event) {
menuEnabled = true;
txtPlayerName.style.visibility = “hidden”;
txtScore.style.visibility = “hidden”;
imgPlayer.style.visibility = “hidden”;
imgMenu.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnStart.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnHelp.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnCredits.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnOptions.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnLevel1.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnLevel2.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnLevel3.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnLevel4.style.visibility = “visible”;
btnLevel5.style.visibility = “visible”;
In my opinion there are way better ways to do this, but hey this works, and didn’t take very long.
Not pretty but functional menu buttons
Here is the updated TODO list – completed items are crossed off, new items in bold.
“Code” work:
Player character Hit points + health bar
Unique monster attributes (speed, strength, hit points)
Been busy refining my core play mechanic for this NaGaDeMon effort – updated bits include swiping that doesn’t eat up processor constantly:
//Wait till finger comes down first before doing the touchhandler thing function startTracking(event) { mousePositionX = event.x; mousePositionY = event.y; var wtf = event.x; canvas.addEventListener(“mousemove”, touchHandler, false); playPlayerAnimation = true; }
I spent some time scoping out other NagaDemon projects. There’s some exceptional projects out there. I like the way this card/hex/dice game (The Domain Game) is shaping up, and also Heaven’s Shadow, which is ambitiously listing itself on Indiegogo.
OK, I’m actually a few days late for the first week of National Game Design Month, but as you’ll see below I’ve been busy. I’ve never participated in any of the various do X in a month challenges, but couldn’t resist this year. Maybe it’s all the collaboration and effort I’m seeing friends put into Nagademon and Nanowrimo. Maybe it’s the ugly mugs of random old friends with mustaches showing up on FB promoting men’s health pushing me to do something productive in November. Maybe I couldn’t resist the siren call of something that begins with Naga and ends with Demon.
I’ve worked on short indie projects before but frankly have a history of going epic and overboard with my side projects. I hope Nagademon will provide a good design constraint, help me stay grounded and keep out the feature creep. I’m severely time constrained, and have a few big projects lining up in December, so limiting the effort to 1 month and at most a few hours a day is perfect. Let’s see how the first week turned out.
Before Nov 1
I have a game concept going into the gate. Three things:
I want to build something for Windows 8 marketplace.
I wand gameplay around a simple, swipe mechanic
Since this is Wandering Monster Studios there needs to be wandering monsters.
That’s it.
Day 1
Went to the store, got a copy of win8 and started installing it. Signed up to be an App Developer and got an email:
Thanks MS – Email sent me here in between updates.
Starting missing lots of stuff that was Win7 but not Win8 – maybe the new OS wasn’t such a good idea. at least if I fail miserably and Nagademon I’ll have my updated OS to show for it.
Going through some of the documentation MS sent my way and got excited about monogame. Figured this was cheating though (porting some of my previous games instead of building a new one) – I knew I would have to cheat eventually to make the 30 day date but decided not to do it in day 1 or 2. Maybe day 3
So far I’ve put about 1.5-2 hours and all I’ve done is some reading, install stuff and run updates. Perhaps this isn’t my forte. Realized I only had 5 hours until I had to get up again, so I left the computer installing Visual Studio 2012 for Win8, running updates, and downloading a number of javascript samples and framework thingees:
Prayed my 7 + 4 year olds would sleep through the night and called it quits for day 1.
Day 1: 2.5 hours. Nada to show for it
Day 2 – Friday Nov 2nd
Machine ran through night installing stuff without hiccups, yay!
Started going through the tutorials MS had sent me on game development. Skipped day 2 + 3 tutorials. Jumped to day 5 (windows game kit) which had the first decent source code sample. Skipped ahead again after that – downloaded the Atari SDK samples. Went for other downloads in my quest for good sample code and assets.
Took a quick look at the free previews of Gamemaker, Game Salad, Creator, etc that are advertised as helpers for Win8 development. Still cheating to some degree but picked a date (Nov 10th) where I’d start falling back to frameworks like this if I wasn’t happy with my progress – by progress I mean I want the core mechanic in place – and it needs to be “fun” already.
Finally get space cadet from win8gamekit.codeplex.com running – whoop.
This sample is actually pretty good for what I’m looking for – but the controls seem iffy on my surface device so that’s what I’ll probably look at first.
Checked out the Space Cadet authors blog to see if he has any tips or a more thorough code explanation – He does, so I start digging in. I Listen to his game loop video tutorial.
Game loop looks like:
initialize
load resources
input
react to input + feedback, via draw loop
Also listen to the animation and touch instructions videos. I’m not seeing the Prince of Persia sample from the video on codeplex anywhere – lame, I really want to do animated sprites and hoped for a good sample.
Told myself I would focus on controls – Davedev is using Mspointerup to catch his touch events. This isn’t what I want for my swipe mechanic, so my first actual code change in Space Cadet is to switch the mouse/touch event to this:
Now, instead of mouse up we can swipe to hit ships. I think swiping is much more fun than tapping – and feels more Wandering Monster-ish, and almost sword like. And now it’s easier to levelup:
Level 42 – how far did you get in space cadet?
Changing touch was easy – now I need to change the AI. Started experimenting with updateShip() but then needed close it down since the kids were getting up and I needed to get them off to school and hit the day job
Day 2: 2 hours and I have Space Cadet with a swipe.
Saturday 11/3
I was too busy –touched no game
Sunday 11/4
Ditto – today is a total wash
Monday 11/5
Downloaded paper.js because it looks like I’m not going to hit my deadline by the 10th. Remember how much I hated trig as I start to work on vector functions for AI. Skip the trig because I’m starting to feel the burn of time constrain having basically nothing to show after 5 days. Open up my standby AI book AI for Game Developers. Thumbing through it decide to start with a simple move towards the player algorithm and build more complexity later (if there’s time):
if (ship.x > middle_of_the_screen.x) {
ship.x– -ship.accel;
}
else if (ship.x < middle_of_the_screen.x) {
ship.x ++ -ship.accel;
}
if (ship.y > middle_of_the_screen.y) {
ship.y — -ship.accel;
}
else if (ship.y < middle_of_the_screen.y) {
ship.y ++ -ship.accel;
}
With Swipe and some simple AI, its starting to take shape.
Tuesday 11/6
Changed my ships to sprites that are animation capable using this article:
Discovered that the key to sprite anims are the slicing of the image. That and using a timer. Got it. //Animation Timing (for my homebrew sprite additions)
End of week 1: core mechanic in place. Game is “fun” at it’s most basic.
Week 2: game code/ game play done (i.e. Code complete)
Art from an earlier, yet as unpublished Wandering Monster Studios effort
Week 3: All art/assets done (i.e. Content complete)
Week 4: testing, playtesting, and marketing (marketing really should be 2-3 weeks, or as long as development, but I figure it can bleed into December)
Thursday – 11/8
Lots of polish – Replaced most assets and imported animations. Here’s where I cheat a bit and bring in art I have used in earlier, unpublished games I’ve worked on, as well as assets that I’ve either scrounged or purchased (like Wit entertainment’s fantasy character pack and Pow Studios effects).
With the art and all of the fiddling I’ve done with spawning, AI, and sprites I now have something that looks OK, uses a swipe mechanic, and has wandering monsters…. In other words, I hit my Fun goal (and just in time).
Will post more next weekend. Meantime here’s a screenshot and video.
Wandering Monster Studios 