Это не "УОООО, ОХУЕЕЕТЬ, ДА КАК ВОООБЩЕЕЕ, ААААА" - это именно песня.
Тебе сделали шикарное окружение, которое И красивое, И интересное в исследовании, И насыщенное в головоломках - так вот, тебе сделали шикарное окружение и ОСТАВИЛИ БЛЯДЬ В ПОКОЕ. Наконец-то. Мне кажется, это первая ступенька успеха этого проекта (и, собственно, доказательство смелости и трудолюбия Блоу: он решил ни за что не водить тебя за руку, поэтому пошел и вылизал трассу своим собственным языком так, чтоб ты куда б ни пошел - всюду было хорошо и вовремя).
Это именно вот как я помню Myst, только там я вообще дупля отбить не мог ни в чем. Щас или умнее стал, или тут все немного понятнее (хотя пока что у меня это только паззлов касается, ни одной подсказки в сторону к чему идет или кто я вообще такой), но вот это Myst в хорошем смысле - к тебе никто не лезет, тебя вообще никто не трогает, единственные туториалы - картинки кнопок в первый (и только!) раз, когда они тебе нужны. Вплоть до того, что если не успел увидеть, а она исчезла - все, найдешь сам.
Первые два геймплейных удовольствия, которые дала игра мне: головоломки вот эти с линиями и прослеживание проводов. С проводами ваще такая тяга, прямо находка на миллион, серьезно. Простейшая штука, но так же ж тащит, когда от пульта идет провод, ты на пульте решил загадку, провод засветился, а тебе не видно, куда он идет (потому что он ныряет в кусты, прыгает в бойницу башни, петляет кругами по роще). Это вот два самых базовых тут и самых приятных, мне кажется, геймплейных элемента. Исследование острова - да, классное. Остров как-то так в плоскости лежит, что он с одной стороны всегда кажется небольшим, а с другой - постоянно понимаешь, что нет, он довольно большой. И это происходит прямо вот одновременно. Как будто у тебя в голове два разных слоя восприятия, а Джонни их нашел, разобрал, и на каждый отдельную картинку положил, чтоб ты думал одновременно противоположные мысли.
А еще тут слегка стремновато, но только чуть-чуть. Мне даже кажется, что он, может быть, играет на встроенной паранойе некоторых игроков - таких, как я - даже и не собираясь потом это как-то усиливать или использовать. Тут не играет музыка, что очень приятно, но я довольно часто слышу в стороне какие-то звуки. Как будто кто-то то ли в траве шуршит, то ли костер веточками потрескивает, то ли еще чо - но ничего и никого, конечно, не вижу. Я не знаю, будет ли из этого потом БУ, но пока мне просто слегка стремновато.
Короче, я поиграл 30-40 минут в пиратку, а потом пошел и отдал Блоу свою зеленую двадцатку. Мне кажется, он ее заработал, и вот Witness я собираюсь пройти. Становится сложно в смысле паззлов, но это никогда не было преградой, а во всем остальном мне игра нравится.
Сегодня потестил Armello: очень красивая штука - и в визуальном смысле, и в смысле дизайна. Несколько кланов с четко выделенными сильными/слабыми сторонами, несколько способов достичь цели (всегда!), силовые, магические и политические силы, взаимодействующие друг с другом. В общем, шикарная РПГ-стратегия, очень динамичная и разнообразная в смысле конкретного игрового опыта (в течение туториала-пролога тебе дают поиграть за 4 разные клана, доходчиво демонстрируя специфику каждого и разницу в ходе игры, который ты получишь).
Отдельно про визуальную красоту: само поле - довольно симпатичное тридэ, классные анимации моделей и все такое. Но настоящий ЖЫР - это картинки на карточках (айтемы, спеллы, спутники и всякие штуки в игре представлены карточками). Там иллюстрации уровня MtG, как по мне (но в другом стиле), да еще и искусно анимированные! В пору найти энциклопедию всех карточек в игре и ходить смотреть эти анимации. Причем авторы игры настолько молодцы, что на любую анимацию на карточке можно навести мышкой - и увидеть автора картинки и анимаций (если это разные люди).
Для меня игра, правда, оказалась слишком требовательной в смысле времени. Я понимаю, за что я его там отдам, и мне интересно и приятно в процессе, но я понимаю, что у меня не хватит времени нормально в нее сыграть. Идеальный сценарий для меня в ней - сыграть мультиплейер с кем-то (т.е. просто как в настолку в нее сыграть).
Но тем, кто хотел бы рубануть несколько часов к ряду в очень красивую пошаговую РПГ с маневрами, хитростями и способностью изменить все парой мастерски сыгранных карт, категорически рекомендую прикупить ее до вечера пятницы за $9,44 - http://store.steampowered.com/app/290340/
Hi. My name is Alexzander Protasenya. I’ve made the “de-monstration” game for Ludum Dare #33. The theme was “You are the monster”.
The hardest thing with post-mortems for jam games and prototypes - when do you declare that “mortem” part? When the jam is over? When you’ve made everything you wanted for the game? When you just give up on making it better?
I’ve decided to go with the last one. De-monstration have recieved a considerable lot of feedback for its idea and gameplay. My guess is, that means I’ve made it just complete and fun enough. I’ve never planned turning it into a commercial game, so I thought I’d call it a day, archive it and go onto other interesting stuff I’ve got going on and brewing up.
Before we start, I’d like to send bright thank-rays to every LD participant, who have rated and commented my game. Thanks, folks, that was a lot more and better than I expected! :D
Read on for the idea overview and “went wrong/right” lists.
Idea
As I pointed out in the earlier LD-report, “You are the monster” was not among my personal top due to the fact it sparkled no ideas in me right away (unlike some others).
So I started with Wiki-search for “monster” to widen my perspective. The main takeaway for me was that “monster” is the label people stick on someone they find abnormal, hideous, scary. Like people with “abnormal” body traits or the ones with “abnormal” behavior or moral standards. Roughly put, you are labeled a “monster” if people are unable to understand you, to include you in their world view and - therefore - are afraid of you.
I’ve decided to make a little game where the player’s avatar (unpredictably named Monny, by the way) differs from everyone around greatly in how they look and what they are capable of - and they are called a monster among others for that. And then the players’ natural desire of being loved (we all have that, yep) motivates them to de-monstrate: turn to not being a monster anymore by showing folks you are essentially not evil and can do good/fun things. And the game enables players to do that.
Yet the ability to just smash everything and scare everyone was also included. Rendering your power on others or just letting the steam out - you do your own thing through the tools the game gives you. That’s what I believe interactivity to be about.
What went wrong
Time management. Unlike before, I even did some preparations prior to the jam, but overall - with that lack of sleep I got - time management leads this list. Even though everyone seems to get that in jams. At some point I want to make a decent game in 48h and feel great through all the process.
Planning. Since there was almost none. I’ve tried to line out some basic features I want in the game and what is just enough for it to be playable and fun. But then I’ve had some implementation questions I’ve decided to answer through trial and error, and ultimately it all went a bit chaotic.
Variety. De-monstration happens when the monster uses his abilities in a fitting context: when meeting cello fans, play the cello or bird-sing to it, but don’t smash it or just scream. But there were meant to be more. You’d run into a folk in the woods confronted by a wolf (use your smash on the wolf to make the folk happy). You’d encounter the folks dancing around some tribal idol (they’d cheer if you scream insanely to their dance). That kinda stuff. Never had time though.
Music. It’s a funny thing and I blame it on my little panic. The thing is I’ve made autotracker.py (chiptune music loops generator) work for me earlier that week before the LD. I’ve tested it, I’ve made sure it makes cool-enough stuff, I was all ready to generate random loops until I get something that fits the game. And then I was in such a rush I just forgot about it! That’s plain stupid.
User Interface. UIs are always the last ones to do, which puts them in the maximum risk of being not done. In what little time I had I just made the essential in-game tutorial labels, and then I’ve made the results label and fixed the results management in a fix after the deadline, but otherwise the game is UI-less. :)
Z-layering. Currently the layering is hand-adjusted inside the complex objects of the monster and folks (see #5 in the “right” list), but is taken zero care of on a scene’s scale. So you can see folks and wise idols over the monster’s face, etc. I even know how it’s done, I just didn’t do it.
What went right
Visuals. The most surprising part, which makes me blush and happy. I have almost no control over the lines and colors, so I was shooting for just some clean enough programmer art. All of a sudden I’ve impulsively decided to hand-draw assets for the game on my own in just plain black and white, and spent the most pleasant first jam’s day drawing away. And then the commenters came and said they really liked the visuals! And I was all like “what?! are you kidding me?!”. Hope they were not. :)
Gameplay. This is a game about socializing, basically: you could play nice or get nasty and have the others react to that. And there’s no “right” way to go, the only hint is in the name: “this is a game where you can de-monstrate, please mind that”. Judging from the comments, there were people going both ways and they all have enjoyed themselves in the process. Which I consider a thumbs-up for the gameplay.
Tutorial and words. People wrote about how they enjoyed the in-game tutorial, which gave me cheers. From the two letsplays I’ve seen as of writing this, though, I can see I could’ve been a bit more clear about the basic action controls: I've written “left-click-smash” there, while it’s really a “left-mouse-button-hold-smash”. Sorry, guys, cheated you there. :)
Still I consider the tutorial to be more of a win. It’s also cool to see I’m not the only one to enjoy the wordplay in the name. Now I’m going to do even more of that!
Feedback. I like how the audio-visual feedback in the game seems to be working good. Every action has a sound and a simple animation, and the affected stuff and folks react to the action in a seemingly clear fashion, which makes one understand what they’ve just did. It could possibly use even more “juice”, simple particles and some screenshake, but I really like even what I have now.
Complex objects. I really enjoy this one. Monny and all the folks are complex objects constructed from several independent parts. Which enables:
easier control (folks’ reactions are just switching their faces),
multiple actions (objects have several colliders and triggers for different purposes),
customization (lads have bowlers as hats, while lasses are made by putting bows in that same “slot”),
actions animation (only the parts involved are animated)
and a nice tiny detail - the moving eyes. :)
Several commenters seemed to also enjoy the latter: Monny looks at the mouse pointer (which gives you a clue about where he’s going to smash/grab) and folks look at what matters: their cellos, Monny or the town they run for.
Coding practice. I've had a nice real coding practice with this game. My main projects have me as a designer of all sorts of stuff, not the coder, so I like it when I can exercise in C#+Unity, come up with functional solutions to things and also try to make that code as healthy as I can. I’m already at the point, where I’d be using different managers for different tasks, and even deliberately split large classes into smaller ones if I see that as doable. I don’t want to sound narcissistic, but I really am a bit proud of that. :)
To conclude
I am still a week away from getting my final rating for the game, which was one of the main reasons I’ve entered compo-version, and not the jam-version of the Ludum Dare.
But for now - all things considered - I think "de-monstration” turned out well. I’ve not polished it enough and the variety is lacking, but the gameplay seems to be all right, and my design and technical solutions seem to give people some fun, which is awesome.
Thanks, LD33! :)
P.S. You can play de-monstration and get all of its source files here.
P.P.S. If you’d also participated, let us cross-rate-comment our games! :)
The first LD’s day is over, as I’m risking to fall asleep right at my desk. I’ll still try to quickly cover what I’ve been through today.
NB: I believe that a lot of fun in games comes from surprise. So today and tomorrow I won’t show and tell some things I’ve thought of or made - not to spoil your discovery fun later. We’re cool with that? Good.
Name and Concept
I have to confess: “You are the monster” was not the theme I was hoping for. I liked the ideas’ embrios for the other ones much more from the design point of view. But the theme was chosen and I’ve decided I’d still go with what I have - as opposed to quit over the theme and then wait for another 3 years to participate, heh.
So I’ve sifted through the wiki’s page for “Monster”, thought about the actual meaning of the world (not the games’ one, that we all know). And then I’ve remembered a one-word concept I was thinking about long ago, conveniently connected to the “monster” subject. It’s also a wordplay - and I like those a lot.
So there - I’ve had the name and the main concept. ~3 hours went into having a breakfast and then elaborating the concept a bit so that I knew what content/functionality I was gonna need.
Images
Here comes possibly the ultimately wrong - yet equally interesting - part of today. I’ve decided to draw my assets. This defies every optimization logic as I am a poor and a slow drawer, and I know it, and the starting plan was to just use circles and squares for stuff, and get the functionality to work first. Which is what smart people do in prototyping and jamming, right? I know!
But then I stumbled: I thought about implementing the real assets later and figured I don’t know exactly how to do it - so I went onto drawing stuff to figure out how it’s gonna work. Which resulted in those fellas above. Do you like them? I do.
Did this approach work? Yes it did. By the end of the day I have:
almost all the needed assets drawn (really - all the necessary ones, and that’s a lot of drawing for me);
animations already hooked up in Unity (more on that below);
better understanding of the future gameplay and visual feedback;
mixed emotions: part of me thinks I’m bloody late already, which is understandable), but there’s another one which is cool as ice; we’ll know more about that tomorrow evening. :)
Keep reading if you don’t know how to edit sprite animations in Unity - I’ll show you.
Editing sprite animations in Unity
Ways to create sprite animations are covered in their own tutorials (like the 2D Roguelike project), and work all right. While you make them right the first time and then never change them. It goes like this:
Have the gameObject for the upcoming animation ready and preferrably in the opened scene.
Select all the anim’s frames in the Project view and drag-n-drop them onto the corresponding gameObject.
This automatically creates (in the “Sprites” folder) an animation out of those frames and also an animation controller in case this gameObject does not have one yet. If controller’s already there, animation will be created and added to the respective controller.
Now you can manage animations in the controller, yada-yada, but then one of the animations seem broken or you want to add a frame to one of them - how do I do that, roguelike tutorial?!
Last time I asked it did not answer - I had to limit the animations edits, as they were all done through re-creating the animations and the wiring them to the existing states in the controller. Put short - it’s too much effort for this kinda stuff.
Yet today I’ve learnt how to do it and the Sun shed it’s golden light upon my forehead and there was happiness all over the world for a sec or two. :)
Provided you’ve created animations and controllers as shown above, do this to edit them (it’s gonna be so simple you’re gonna giggle):
Open the Animation window (not the Animator one) via Ctrl/CMD+6 or Window menu;
Select the gameObject we were talking about this whole time in your scene’s Hierarchy window - if it has a controller and at least one animation, the Animation window will show it like below.
Now you can drag around these frames of animation, copy-paste them, and even change them completely. If the Inspector window is open, you’ll notice: when you somehow change the animation, the “Sprite” field of the “Sprite Renderer” will have a red background. That’s because the animation changes the content of that very field. So you can as well select one of the keys in the animation or create-and-select a new one, and then drag some sprite into that field - it will go into the animation now!
Now you can edit your sprite animations! Ain’t it awesome?! :D
Just always remember to hit Ctrl / Cmd + S, when you’re done with the animation’s edits - and you’ll be safe and sound.
And to finish this on smth fun(ny), here are several cool little “Day 1″ updates from the people at the Ludum Dare: one, two, three, four, five, six. That last guy - I’m so with him on that. :)
Hi! This blog held only two of my old games for a long while, but I’ve decided to try writing here from time to time.
The theme for Ludum Dare #33 is to be announced in a matter of hours, and I’m uber-glad I’m in at last. SO!
Provided I’ve read the compo rules right, this:
You’re free to start with any base-code you may have.
- means I’m free to make myself some basic code (Unity, C#) to start from on tomorrow’s sunrise (LD starts at 4 a.m. Ukrainian time, FYI).
So basically what I’ve made today prior to the main 48-hour rush is nearly empty versions of:
GameControl - to hold all the game-level logic and values: take turns if the game is turn-based, control the high-level events, enemies, etc.;
InputControl - to handle all the input from the player: all the checks for keys down, mouse moves, etc.;
SoundControl - to play all the music loops and custom sounds;
UIControl_level and UIControl_menu - to handle all the UI logic in respective scenes: operations with UI elements, sequences, etc. (I’ve used this scheme on the past jam-game and it seemed cool, we’ll see how it goes here);
Player - to control and perform everything going on with the player.
Below I’ll explain why I’ve made the “Player” script so seemingly early and how do I go about linking all these scripts to each other (code shots included).
Player script
It seems too early for the Player script, right? What if tomorrow I want to make a game with no player - say, a strategy? Wouldn’t this script’s existense already limit my design freedom?
Well, first of all, the script is almost empty, there’s nothing to hold on to. Second - while it’s true there will be no player inside the game in the “strategy game” scenario - there will always be the one outside.
True, the Player script could be not performing operations to the player’s avatar in such a game. However, it could still be useful, as it also handles the processing for the player’s actions, which it seems unwise to store in other places: e.g. InputControl script could take the signal of the button pressed and launch the needed function in the Player script.
The Linkage
As you can see, chances are high all the scripts will be using each other’s parts quite often, so they need to have links to each other. At first it was common for me to have these long linkage lines at the start of EVERY interconnected script - for example, GameControl:
Don’t get me wrong, this works. But it’s pretty boring even copy-pasting those from one script to another. I’m no great programmer, but I talk to those sometimes, and about coding too. So I learnt this was pretty lame.
Here is what I do now instead.
First of all, I store all these “-control” scripts attached to one gameobject called “MANAGERS”. This way the actual linking is boiled down to just getting the component from a script’s own gameObject. Because they all share one. Smart, huh?
I like the second part even more though. :)
I’ve created a singleton script called “Hey”, which acquires all the popular links, and then stores them for everyone to use. And since it’s a singleton these “everyone” don’t even need a link to the “Hey” script in the scene!
"Hey” gets each one of the links the first time it’s asked about it, so there should be no problem with someone asking for a link while “Hey” does not have it yet.
And now to the fun part! With adding of a little something here and there you could be calling something like this from one of the scripts:
“Hey, sound control, play my cool track!”
It’s like talking directly to the machine! Ain’t it cool?! ^_^
Of course, it would be more common to write this in less lines (and to less fun).
Well, I guess that’d be all for me right now. I would call myself ready with my code base at this point, so let’s just all watch that timer count down in a blissful peace which is gonna blow up so soon...
Hi! I’m Alex Protasenya a.k.a. protascenery.
It’s closer to “a.n.r.k.a.” really - as in “also not really known as”. :)
So I was thinking about writing here about my gamedevvy, jammy, hobby-y, freelance-y stuff for a while. And I’ve decided that the about-to-start Ludum Dare #33 is an occasion just alright.
On format and place
I know Tumblr is said to be the best for the images/gifs posts, not for the text. Should not be a problem: I’m intended to post those here too, amidst the text. Besides, Mike Bithell does text-only’s sometimes and it seems to go okay, so.
On the reason
The reason I want to do this is for both you guys (hopefully) and me.
See, I design games as a freelancer which in my opinion is pretty interesting. I also do jams and my own prototypes at times. And I generally do think about games and making them, and being in artistic crafts industry at all, etc.
But I need written words to clear all of those things at least for myself, and then it is my humble hope, that what I think and write could be of at least some use or help to someone else in the world. And if it proves itself true, that day would be the all-dancing day for me, I’ll tell you that. :)
That’s all for now, and thanks to those who choose to stick around.
Here's my new arcade speed typing game, made for "Retro (no) Future" contest!
Here you're striving to last for a working day at the Retyping Facility, retyping messages word-by-word really fast. And then the word-feeding machine's glitch is to add on top of that.
Extra-challenge: can you learn all the stories that you transmit?
Play/Download here
The game offers English and French version. While EN is played with comfort (as it is present in this type of game), FR is to be played at your own risk. You are warned. :)
The game was made for the #22Jams01 game jam. An early versions of game and its content were created during the challenge (around 23 hours spent) and then fine tuning, issues fixing and polishing took around 15-20 evenings.
To get in touch just drop me an e-mail or follow me on Twitter.
