Boom Bot

Blog Postings for the, up coming game, Boom Bot.

[boombotgame-blog]

It is my belief that all developers, at some point in their process of understanding the craft of making games, acquires the belief that everything they do will have problems and nothing will come easy. This has been my experience with game design, thus far.

Code that had worked flawlessly the day before is, mysteriously, rendered useless and is followed by several hours to several days of tracking down and eradicating the problem.

It's a process of two steps forward and one step back. Slowly making your way to the, ever elusive goal, of a finished game.

I had come to accept this as a fact of life. I had accepted it as gospel. This was until something curious happened. I stopped caring. Not about the game I was making but about it being perfect. I stopped thinking that every graphic was a museum piece and every line of code a bar of gold. What I reminded myself was that by always perfecting one thing before moving on to the next meant that things didn’t get done. I was so consumed with perfection that I was preventing myself from moving forward.

What helped me realize this was watching interviews of other developers and finding out that they were often learning as they went along and that they made a lot of mistakes. Despite this, they just plowed ahead and learned as they went along and, in some cases, they learned to work around the limitations of the technology that they were using and around the limitations of their skill set and experience. Understanding this allowed me to take myself off the hook. Once I took the weight of the world off my shoulders, I was able to work much faster.

There are still mistakes that need to be corrected. Glitches that need to be ironed out, but I can polish things up at the end after everything has been fleshed out.

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[boombotgame-blog]

Crime Inc.

My addiction started as all addictions do. It was a fun, innocent diversion. Something that friends introduced me to. We would get together on the weekends and while away the time, doing nothing in particular, until someone would say ' Let's go to the arcade!' Like well trained soldiers, we would march towards that magical place where a young man could lose himself for an entire day.

 A Never Never Land of flashing lights blaring sounds and garish colors all blended together with the faceless huddled masses that were crowded around each machine. Like royalty, the game masters, those that consistently placed in the top 10 of high scorers would hold court as the hustlers wannabes and fool sycophants stood close by to bask in the greatness and perhaps to glean some secret that would propel them to the same lofty heights or at the very least, take over an abandoned game that one of the masters grew tired of.

What started out as a minor diversion on weekends became an all consuming daily passion.

Sacrificing my piggy back to get to the shiny coins inside I soon realized that I just didn't have enough money. I had to feed my addiction so I did what any other junky would have done. I stole.

I stole from my siblings piggy banks. I stole from the comic book store, sold the comics and used the money to play more games. I, even, stole money from my mother's purse. I was shameless and I was good. I never got caught I never slipped up. I took just enough so that none would know, or at the very least, they would know that something was different. Something was out of place. Something was amiss but they couldn't quite put their finger on what it was. As a 10 year old, I was improving my skill at video games and my skill at thievery. Such was my sickness that I didn't stop until two years later when I got my first official job as a  paperboy.

Once I realized the hard work that went into making a dollar I stopped and never went back to my life of crime.

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[boombotgame-blog]

Light Under a Bushel

Now that I'm getting close to shipping my second game one of the things that I'm worried about is having my creation lost in the miasma of abandoned games on the various app stores.

It happened with my first game,  "Crazy Game 8", so I expect the same thing might happen to my second game if I'm not careful.

Making those, who would appreciate my creation, aware of its existence is job number one. Long gone are the days when, merely making a game and uploading it to the app store would ensure its success, one must mount a promotions campaign equivalent to that of a presidential candidate.

At this point I can say that the actual game could be as little as 30% of the work of making a commercially successful title. There are a multitude of fantastic titles in the various app stores sitting undiscovered. Untouched. Unloved. There are also several mediocre titles that are pulling in the big bucks. What is it that make fortune shine on some while giving so many others the cold shoulder?

Marketing is the key but how do you market effectively with little to no funds. I guess this will always be the problem for those in the early stages of building their first or second or, even their tenth game. Send a telegram. Write it in the sand.

Shout it from the rooftops!

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[boombotgame-blog]

Whistle while you work

For anyone that has ever created a game there is a section between unrestrained exuberance at the start of a project and the satisfying exhalation that comes  at the end of a project when you step back and survey all that you have accomplished. This "Middle Time" seems, somewhat, like the burden that Sisyphus was tasked with.  

In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a king of Ephyra. He was punished by having to roll a boulder up a hill forever for his crimes. This is a time in the project when your life seems like that of Sisyphus and all you see in front of you is work with no end in site. That time is, usually, referred to as The Grind but I've come to know it as one of the seven circles of hell. Toiling away in my workspace, the endless amount of small details that go into the quality game that I am assembling can seem to stretch on with no end. One must, truly, hate oneself to put themselves through something like this without being coerced but I can't seem to stop myself. Not only am I drawn to work on this game but I have so many ideas that want to come out that it sometimes feels like the pressure will make my head explode. All of my game ideas are fighting for my attention and jockeying for position in the pantheon of creations. They all want to come out at once but it's my job to hold them at bay like a Lion Tamer directing the actions of the lions that only cooperates because they still haven't realized that the Lion Tamer is, quite, fragile.

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[boombotgame-blog]

If you build it they will come.

When it comes to 3D graphics, my main interest has always been animation. Specifically, character animation. When I first started I quickly realized that without something to animate, besides boxes and cubes, things got boring real fast so I started to teach myself how to model in a 3D package. Some may wonder ' why not just download a model to animate? ' which is a very good question. I have a few answers. The first is that I want my characters to look a certain way and it may be hard to find the exact look that I want for the project I’m working on at the time. The other reason is cost. The better quality models will, most likely, have a fee. While paying for models is not a problem for a few items, here or there, it can get expensive if you need a lot of characters and other game elements. With that being said, the main reason I like to “roll my own” is because I’m used to it and I like the control that gives me. The thing to keep in mind is that I started doing 3D graphics at a time when a 14.4k modem was considered fast and for me to  download a model online was not in the cards. So the only acceptable solution, for me, was to build my own. I have to admit that even though I went to a good art school, my early models were a little shaky.

I knew I needed a lot of practice so I fired up my "Extended Evaluation" copy of a 3D application called “Imagine” and proceeded to model objects out of a book I got from the library on musical instruments. For anyone that has ever tried to teach themselves how to model in a 3D program without manuals you can probably relate to the pain and suffering associated with such an undertaking. Many times, through frustrated tears, I wanted to put my fist through the screen. I avoided this, however, because replacing computer screens can become expensive. After a while I, finally, started to make progress and understand how to take what I had in my imagination and put it into the computer. Finally, I had something to animate and because I built it myself, I didn’t have to pay for it or remember to give credit. All that was needed was the idea and the time.

In my last post I showed some of the sketches I did of the characters.

Using those drawings as templates for the 3D models I was able to quickly build them in 3D. For those that have done this before, this is not new or special. For the uninitiated, this may seem a little complicated.

The thing to keep in mind is that these characters will be used in a game and there may be a lot of stuff going on in the game at the same time so the characters can’t have too much detail.The fewer the pieces the better.

More to come soon.

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[boombotgame-blog]

In The Beginning…

When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite pastimes was going to the arcade and spending an entire Saturday feeding the machines quarters and improving my skills on the latest games. Weather it was defending the earth against a hoard of renegade aliens or drifting around a tight turn in an, overly powered, muscle car. I was the ruler of my little world for as long as I could make that quarter last. Needless to say that, over time, I got very good at crushing my enemies and seeing them driven before me and hearing the lamentations of their women. The end result was that I had to spend less and less money dumping quarters into those hypnotic fun boxes, to the dismay of many an arcade owner.

  One of the games that I would go back to again and again was a game called Rip Off, a game released by Cinematronics in 1980. In this game, you are piloting a tank and it is your job to protect these canisters, sitting in the center of the screen, from enemy tanks whose mission it is to carry them off to who knows where. Like a lot of games from this time, the task becomes more difficult with each successive wave until you are completely overwhelmed and die or all of the canisters were stolen. At the time this game was made, there were no real categories but this type of game would later be known as a Top-Down Shooter. This game is unique because it is the first known game to have characters that exhibit flocking behavior.

  Another game that I was, very much, into was a game called Bezerk which was released in 1980 by Stern Electronics. Berzerk had you running from killer robots with lasers through an electrified maze before the “Evil Otto”, an indestructible bouncing plasma orb, would come out and bounce you to death like a smiling inflatable sumo wrestler.

  The last game which I’m going to reference is a game called Smash TV released by Williams in 1990. In this game, you are on a game show and it is your job to destroy every robot and mutant that comes your way looking for a fight. At the same time, you collect cash and prizes, as well as, power-ups to make it to the next wave. Very much like an early arcade game but with better sound and graphics.

  Why do I bring these games up? The answer is that these three games are the inspiration for Boom Bot. My take on the Top-Down Shooter.

  In Boom Bot you control a small robot, armed with a laser and you are tasked with escorting a cargo shipment from one end of an island to the other while fighting off roving bands of killer robots tasked with destroying you and taking the cargo that you are, so valiantly, protecting. Along the way you can pick up various weapons and prizes that help you accomplish your task.

  So now that I have the inspiration for my game the first thing I do, like with any other project I make, is to do some sketches. Sometimes detailed with full color, if I have the time, but more often than not I’ll just do some simple pencil sketches of the characters and a bit of the interface so I can understand how much work is going to be needed to make this game a reality.

Because I’m working alone, I don’t have to be so detailed with my sketches since I’m the only one that needs to see them and I’m very used to looking at my chicken scratch. I like to work out as much as I can, up front, so that when I’m constructing the game I already know what’s going to go into it and I won’t waste time guessing what goes where. I understand that it’s hard to know everything that I will want in the game, at the onset, so I plan to do more sketches or refine others as I progress.

(Title Screen)

(Map Screen)

(Game Interface)

Most of the time I’ll draw in one of my sketchbooks but this time I’ve decided to draw on my iPad mini. I found that by doing that, I am able to save those sketches to the cloud and then open them up on my computer without having to scan them in. This seemed to work really well and I think that I will adopt this kind of workflow for my future projects.

(Hero Bot)

(Bonk Bot)

(Grab Bot)

(Shot Bot)

(Chomp Bot)

(Pop Bot)

(Shock Bot)

I have to say that it took me a long time to learn how to sit down and plan things out before starting a project. When I was a kid and I wanted to work on a project I would just jump in and work things out as I went along. Over time I realized that I was spending more time reworking and fixing things than I had wanted and it made the project drag on because I didn’t really have a definite plan where I could look at the big picture and know where I was in the process. It wasn’t until I went to art school that I learned, often the hard way, that good planning yielded good results. Here’s to good planning!

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[boombotgame-blog]

print ("Hello World!");

So here it is folks! My first ever indie game dev blog! I’m a 3D artist by trade and have worked as a freelancer for several years in and around NYC making all sorts of 3D visuals for TV, web, medical and corporate clients. Even though I love creating 3D graphics, video games is my first love. As a kid, I would stay after school for hours tapping away at the Commodore PET computer that was in the corner of the classroom trying to figure out how to make stuff work.

The teacher at the front of the class, periodically peering over the papers she was grading to give me a quizzical look, wondering why I haven’t gone home yet. There was no way I could leave. How could I go home? I was going to make the next Donkey Kong or Pac Man. It didn’t matter that I was only seven years old. I had work to do and nothing was going to stop me from doing it. My mother was concerned that I was getting home from school late. 6pm, to be exact,  so she bought me my first computer so I would come home earlier. My first computer was An Atari 800XL and I was in love!

Back in those days, there were a few different camps of computer nerds that you could belong to. Besides the kids that were the Atari faithful you had the kids that were, die hard, Commodore 64 fans and then you had those that were loyal to the Apple IIe, for some reason and there were a few kids who were able to get their hands on an IBM PC because their fathers had one at home for work. There were a smattering of other computer enclaves, as well. TRS 80’s, Texas Instruments, Vic 20’s and a couple of Timex Sinclairs in the mix but the kids that advocated those other computers were often looked upon with pity and shame and were a subject of derision. Armed with my copies of Antic Magazine,

I proceeded to stay up late into the evening entering in line after line of game code in basic. The joy I felt after I had finally entered in and debugged those little gems that I would play and then pull apart to try to understand exactly what it was I had just created was indescribable. In my mind, I was on my way to a career in video games. I was going to work for Atari, or Activision or maybe some other company. My path was true and my steps were sure; but I was pulled off my path and my game making skills atrophied. By the time the 90’s rolled around, I got the itch to start making games again but with a full time job and little free time, I soon realized that making games on my own was a dream that I could no longer entertain. I tried, several times, to collaborate with other artists but it soon became clear that everyone had a different idea of what committing oneself to a project actually meant so I was back to square one. Video games is what got me into computers and computer graphics to begin with but I didn’t seem to be able to get back in the saddle. I gave up. For a long time. It wasn’t until around 2010 that an architectural firm, I was freelancing at, wanted to be able to make their visualizations interactive that I started looking at different tools to help with that goal. Every other engine that they were looking at was either too primitive or too expensive. I then happened upon Unity 3D. No, I’m not advertising for them but that technology did make the prospect of making games more accessible. I didn’t have to be a master programmer. I didn’t have to make my own game engine. And most importantly, I didn’t need to rely on anyone else. All at once, I realized that my dream was not dead. It was just sleeping for a while. I could make games again without being a computer science major and I was hooked again. I made my first game Crazy Game 8, which is a good game but failed to go anywhere for many different reasons but now I’m back making game number 2 and I want to make people aware of it.  

No longer content to work in obscurity, working quietly in the corner, shunning all light and human contact until I have a finished project. I want to share much of my process and progress with others. The game that I’m making now is called “Boom Bot” and I’ll be documenting it as I go along. I’ll be sharing with you the tools and techniques I use, as well as, my state of mind. I’ll post some videos, images and tutorials and by the end of this ride I will have a finished game that I hope everyone will enjoy and share with others so I hope everyone will stick with me until the end and please understand that, inside, I’m still that seven year old boy that stays up late making games just because it’s fun.

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