Chimera Genesis

Chimera is a 2D platformer, Mega Man X-style, procedurally generated, with an emphasis on cooperative multiplayer. Up to four players join forces as a team of animals and fight through 16 different types of nature themed levels to reach a Uber Animal Monster. If they can defeat the boss they are rewarded with limbs that they can equip to help them through endless levels of increasing difficulty. Eventually allowing them to become THE STRONGEST CHIMERA!

[flyingpurplepizzaeater]

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

[molydeux]

GDC2014 “Are QA capable of feeling emotions?

Are QA capable of feeling emotions? This is a question that I only started to ask myself in the last decade or so when I was working on Fable 2. A QA tester that for the purposes of protection I shall be referring to as Colin. 

Colin was a fun chap but unfortunately also a QA tester. I remember interviewing him and asking him the very first question that I always ask everyone, including people outside of work;

“Has a game ever made you cry?”

Firstly, it’s a great ice breaker but also a insight into the understanding of where our glorious medium is heading. He replied with an interesting answer that compelled me for the rest of the day. Most people respond with the death in a FinalFantasy game. That’s a bit of a cliche, in reality I’ve probably had hundreds of games result in me turning into a crying mess but you often don’t hear about the others tear jerkers in the media such as Lemmings, A boy and his blob, WarioWare SmoothMoves and many many more. If you believed the media, only a handful of games such as FinalFantasy and Ico have made us cry. 

So, Colin’s interesting answer to my question? Pilotwings64. I won’t go into why as it’s very personal to him but it showed me that he was capable of feeling emotions. I was excited about having a QA tester that could cry even at games that were not designed to make the player cry. I almost believed it was possible to have a QA tester capable of feeling emotion. Yet, I was soon to be disappointed. 

During Fable 2 I had this idea to give the player a choice at the end of the game to sacrifice their dog for more wealth. I made sure to be there when Colin was testing this part of the game, I looked closely at his eye ducts during the process. He had previously chosen the option to save the dog but now he had to choose to sacrifice the dog for purposes of exposing new potential bugs. 

Not one single tear.

I asked him why he wasn’t crying. He then proceeded to tell me that he felt no connection to the dog other than hate because the dog was responsible for about 80% of the game’s bugs.

“But what about when you taught your dog a trick? Did you not find that doing so made the dog an extension of yourself?”

He looked confused, empty, soulless and tired. 

You see, the dog to him was just a piece of code. He was forced to play the game differently to how I wanted players to play my game.

I had to let him go. I can not begin to tell you the amount of QA testers that I have had to send away because they didn’t cry at REALLY sad moments in my games. They are good at finding bugs but terrible at finding emotion in games.

From then on I vowed to only employ normal people for a new role that I titled ‘Emotion testers’. I wrote the following ad;

Urgent: Emotion Testers needed for a day. Applicants must like games and be in touch with their emotional being. Must have experience of crying at games in the past and play games in a normal manner.

I was successful in getting applicants and had set up a room with the latest build of the game. The save file was near the end of the game and by the end there was not a wet face anywhere in the room. I asked why nobody had cried about sacrificing the dog and found out that nobody had become attached to the dog. That made sense to me so I had them all start the game from the beginning and paid them to stay a further few more days to play the entire game. 

When it came to that decision people began asking if they had to sacrifice the dog? At first I saw this as a positive result, in that perhaps they had grew their bond with the dog on such a level that they couldn’t emotionally cope with continuing their lives knowing that they had to sacrifice their beloved furry friend? No, they were just curious to know what happened if they kept the dog this time around. I told them to sacrifice the dog, no tears.

Sadly, I had to send them away as I knew that these play testers were just not capable of crying because they had not played my game properly. I stayed in the studio that night, alone, playing the entirety of Fable 2. At the end I chose to sacrifice my dog and I wept. I wept hard.

Only then, did I finally come to the conclusion that I had created something with great emotional weight. 

During build up of my new studio, I was interviewing someone and asked them this question once again;

“Has a game ever made you cry?”

They looked deep into my eyes and simply said ‘Dog. Fable2′. We nodded at each other for a couple of minutes before I asked a second question;

“WHY did it make you cry?”

He replied, ‘I don’t know. I just played it and cried at the end.’

‘Just played it, interesting’, I said. 

Just played it. That is interesting isn’t it? Do QA testers ‘Just play it.’ or do they do something else entirely? I now never expect to see tears in the eyes of my QA testers and I’m now a much happier person for it. These days if I want to ‘test’ emotion in games, I just stay behind in the studio, turn off the lights and just play the game as a normal human person.

By all means, have a QA department in your studio but don’t beat yourselves up when they don’t cry whilst testing your game. Remember that they are not playing your game, they are simply testing it. Once you truly come to accept this you come to appreciate QA and playtesters as their own kind. They are not like you or me but we CAN work together within this crazy land we call Earth by utilizing their main strengths such as the ability to notice a character in the game go through a wall and many more.

I’ll leave you with one more thought;

Imagine if when a certain Final Fantasy character constantly had her eyeballs on the outside of her face due to a bug, if a QA tester missed that bug do you think people would still be referring to that as one of the saddest moments in the history of this medium?

Thank you for listening. 

[chimeragenesis]

We’re still active!

Sorry that we haven’t been keeping this tumblr page updated.  While we love tumblr, we’ve been working at a hectic pace and it takes a little more work to make a decent tumblr post than it does to blurt out an update on Twitter.  We’ll try to get posting on here again once things quiet down a little, but until then you can find more frequent updates at https://twitter.com/ChimeraGenesis .

[chimeragenesis]

An amazing discussion of camera controllers in 2D games, (also a great example of the right way to use animated gifs in a text tutorial!):

Scroll Back

The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers By Itay Keren, creator of upcoming award-winning game Mushroom 11

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdHD50gs8MNXF1GCf08efg/pub?embedded=true

[chimeragenesis]

A video of current Chimera Genesis gameplay for IndieCade.

[chimeragenesis]

Lots of bug fixes preparing to submit a build to @IndieCade and @IndieMEGABOOTH! #indiegamedev

[chimeragenesis]

Twin-Stick Platformer

How do you make twin-stick shooting work in a platformer?  Put jump on the right trigger.  And that leaves your left finger free for...bullet time, obviously.  And add a triple air dash with active aiming to the jump button.Bleed is the fastest 2D platformer I’ve ever played.  Here it is on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/239800/

It’s $5 and 2 hours and made by one person and at least half of it is boss fights.  Looks like they’re working on another.  I can’t wait.

[chimeragenesis]

Ultimate Chicken Horse is an amazing combination of cooperative game design and competitive party platforming, with visual theming that makes the game feel very, very accessible.  Check out their Kickstarter campaign!

[chimeragenesis]

Just fixing bugs as we move everything to 3D models.

[chimeragenesis]

900

The 900th SVN commit to Chimera Genesis adds heat distortion to fire levels!

[chimeragenesis]

GDC Vault recorded GDC talks before 2014 are now all free!!! http://gdcvault.com/free  Free knowledge!

[chimeragenesis]

Commit #800!!!!:

Knockback & Damage: -Make the stats damageFromTouch and damageFromWeapons work, this makes the elephant legs reduce damage from touching enemies. -Fix players getting stunned and invulnerable from damage over time attacks. -Fix terrible SFX when players hit enemies with DoT attacks.

[chimeragenesis]

Super excited to make svn commit #800 today...version control host is down

[chimeragenesis]

We have a new build of our game out on our website!  We really need feedback on our progress, so please try it out, and let us know what you think.

www.ChimeraGenesis.com/demo.html

Some update highlights:

-3 different bosses

-8 different animals' arms and legs are earnable and usable with different attcks (arms) or mobility upgrades (legs).

-new pause menu (inventory) and stage select menu.

-a lot of new dialog.

-holes and a questionable difficulty curve to our levels.

[chimeragenesis]

svn r749: fix a bug where player one could join as rabbit, leave, player two could join as rabbit (random), and player one could return, still as rabbit, making two rabbits.

oh god, not TWO RABBITS!

[chimeragenesis]

our 3rd party version control server is down.

[chimeragenesis]

A draft of our new stage select menu.  What do you think?  Is it too busy?