///* rza notes *///

[rezahooshangi]

Bloody Streets on Steam

[rezahooshangi]

Support the Bergsons! KickStart this beautiful story-driven pixel art roguelike about a family. http://thndr.it/1KTKgG9

[childrenofmorta]

Children of Morta is live on KickStarter now!

[childrenofmorta]

Happy holidays!

Children of Morta - ScreenshotsSaturday - DEC-20-2014

[childrenofmorta]

We have a brand new story trailer for our upcoming narrative-based roguelike, “Children of Morta”.

This trailer reveals the game back story and the challenges and ongoing journeys of the Bergson family.

Game website: ChildrenOfMorta.com

Twitter: twitter.com/ChildrenOfMorta

The Bergsons wish you happy holidays and a great new year!

[childrenofmorta]

What will be behind this door?

Children of Morta - ScreenshotsSaturday - DEC-06-2014

[childrenofmorta]

Children of Morta - ScreenshotsSaturday - NOV-15-2014

[childrenofmorta]

As you know Children of Morta is a roguelike game and its levels are totally procedural generated. So we had to find a good way to make different beautiful and challenging levels which also supported story and narrative related chunks procedurally.

We created a random level generation and spawning system named “Oracle “ to create our levels based on these needs but since the start of the project we had a fundamental question about its design and architecture.The big question is how much could we trust Oracle in creating levels?!

We can totally trust the system and let it create levels on its own but the problem is that making beautiful levels needs both design and artistic view! On the other hand limiting the system by some predefined chunks will kill the random and reduce the variation.

We are searching for a balance between these 2 paths by implementing and testing different algorithms.

At first, our algorithms were just based on the count of each object in the level and by setting different parameters about objects count the system itself grouped them in rooms and distributed them all over the level. After spending some more time and studying various games including “The Binding of Isaac”, we reached a new perspective about level generation. In “The Binding of Isaac” objects and enemies are set in some pre-designed patterns and the game will arrange these patterns in levels.

So we did something similar and implemented the concept of patterns. Now we have lots of patterns that show the system how objects and enemies should be arranged together in a room. It’s usefull in some ways but as I said before it also limits us in creating different variations and creating many different patterns for a lot of objects is a very difficult job to do.

We’ll write more about it in our next blog posts.

[rezahooshangi]

Hunter Spawning System

Today I was thinking about enemy spawning system of Bloody Streets and remembered how much I liked it so I decided to explain it here.

In Bloody Streets we needed a big crowd of zombies in the scene that move slowly toward player.This image shows our first playable prototype of the game. Those green mask-like things were our first enemy, that blue eye-like thing in the middle was our player avatar :D and those pink thick lines are walls.

Enemies moved toward player but there was a problem with their movement style. They're moving in a line so player could easily fool them and escape from another side. So our first problem was making enemies move in a way that block all the ways and don't let player escape.

For solving this problem we set a minimum distance between zombies so they were always separated from each other and occupied a larger area. This minimum distance was dynamic for each enemy and was a function of distance to player. As the result when zombies were near player they were near each other and made a dense crowd around it but zombies that were far had more distance from each other and block the passes so player couldn't escape the area. This simple solution helped a lot.

In the next steps we wanted to make a good difficulty curve for each level and our most important parameter for doing this task was the count of alive enemies in the scene but if these alive enemies were far from player or outside of camera boundaries they didn't make any challenge for player! on the other hand having a huge bunch of active enemy AIs that player can't even see was obviously a very bad idea.

For solving this problem our first idea was making many spawners in each level and when we wanted to spawn a wave of enemies spawning system picked the ones that were in camera area and spawned all of enemies through them but this solution had one more flaw.

Even if we spawned enemies around player like that, he could still find a way to escape from the crowded area and reach other side of map that was empty of enemies. So we needed a better solution.

The main problem was enemies outside camera boundary so we made a decision. when an enemy go outside of camera bound we return it to enemy pool and spawn a new one near player! so player can never escape from zombies. they are everywhere that player is! just like a nightmare. 

But it's not finished yet. Next step was spawning zombies somewhere that enables them to surround player and make the nightmare even more scary.

In the image above assume the big red rectangle as camera boundaries. Spawning system scans the map with some physic raycasts and find the areas that camera rectangle collides with streets. In the image you can see these areas as thick red lines. After that when a new wave of zombies are coming they'll be spawned on these lines and some other spawning points that are in camera rectangle.In other words enemies get spawned right in front of player's path of escaping!

That's it. and by the way we named this spawning system Hunter :)

[childrenofmorta]

Children of Morta - ScreenshotSaturday - OCT-11-2014

[childrenofmorta]

Hey,

We are the Children of Morta development team from Dead Mage and this is our first Dev Diary post. So… LET’S PARTY!

(GIF is from Kotaku post by Chris Person)

We are currently in pre-production and I think it’s good to give you some information about the game and what’s...

[rezahooshangi]

Automatic testing

Good testing is one of the biggest challenges of game development. a game includes lots of systems, components and objects that work together. with players who want to test every possible action in your game there are so many unpredictable bugs that can happen and you should check them all (or at least most of the major ones) before releasing the game!

So, ideally you should make a bunch of test scenarios for each of your game objects and systems (that usually you have a lot of them!) and then make some more scenarios that test those together. for an indie medium size project this process will take a whole day or more; and don't forget that it's a cycle after each change in your project you should repeat all of these steps again!

Even if we forget about the human error rate in this process (which is very high specially when someone have to do it over and over again every few days) , it takes a lot of time from the development team and time is the most precious resource we have.

The only way for doing this task is automating it. There are many tools for creating automatic unit tests for your codes and scripts. "Unity test tools" is one of these tools that works in unity. I recently found it and I don't know everything about it yet but it seems cool. 

this is it's link on asset store:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13802

and below is a link to a tutorial about it's basic features. The tutorial's flow is a bit slow but it's good.

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/live-training-archive/test-tools

It seem easy to use and it's package contain some good example scenes for using it.

I like to make a system using this extension that run our game automatically and play it over and over to find bugs and flaws. It seems hard and for some visual bugs almost impossible but it's still a very fun task to do :)

[rezahooshangi]

Children of Morta

We recently announced our latest game "Children of Morta" that we are working on in last few months at DeadMage.

It's a challenging rogue-like action game which will involve you in the adventures of a family of guardians living at the foot of the cursed Mount Morta.

 This is the game's debut trailer :

and here is the social media links:

Twitter : https://twitter.com/ChildrenOfMorta

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChildrenOfMorta

[rezahooshangi]

Let the players play it

It's almost 10 month since we posted Bloody Streets to Steam Green Light. At first days of posting the game it's thumbnail was in recently added games section so some players could see it and this made a small wave of votes and comments for us.

A part of votes were positive but the negative part was bigger and that started to scare us. We had believed in what we were creating for a long time and it was very hard for us to accept that most of players don't like it.

Some negative comment started to show up in our page. A part of them were just some nonsense written in Russian! but most of them commented about some common topics that I mentioned them below :

Stop the zombie crap - Some people thought making zombie game is too cliche and boring.

flash game - some were complaining that our game is a flash game. It was really confusing for me because It's not a flash game and even if it is, what's the problem? The Binding of Isaac is a flash game and everybody likes it!

Multiplayer / Co-op - having multiplayer and co-op is very common these days but it wasn't possible for us because our game was designed for being single player and making it multiplayer meant designing it again from ground up.

But the negative comments were not our worst problem; After a time newer games came to Green Light and pushed Bloody Streets out of recently added games section. this means that nobody could see us without searching our name. so number of votes per day dropped to 2-3 which is almost nothing and most of them were negative!

We thought about some other ways like finding a publisher, publish it free and ... but we were hopeless. after seeing these feedbacks we lost all of our faith in Bloody Streets and thought may be it doesn't worth it to spend any more time, even on publishing it!

So we left Bloody Streets unpublished and moved to our new game. but recently with the help of a friend we hopelessly uploaded the game on Desura and Groupees Bundle and the results were very intresting.

after publishing it on Desura everyday a lot of people come to our Steam profile and give us positive votes and comments. there is no complaining about zombie cliche or lack of multiplayer mode! most of our votes are positive now.

So what was the problem? Why those problems are not so important anymore?

We think maybe the main problem isn't the game itself but it's the way that we showed it to players! We didn't have any P.R. experience and we didn't know how to make a good trailer and these are the only things that players see when they look at your steam page.

I'm not saying that Bloody Streets doesn't have any problem but it's not as bad as it seemed in our first Green Light days. We did our best to make it perfect. It still has many problems but it's a good game and I hope good things happen to it.

Maybe we publish a detailed article with charts and statics about Bloody Streets later. But for now we learned 2 main things from all this that we won't forget in our next games :

Good P.R. can help making your game look better but if you don't do it right or don't do it at all it can ruin all of your hard work.

You won't know your game's problems until you let the players play it.

[headlesswizard-blog]

Bloody Streets on Desura!

Bloody Streets is now available on Desura!

[rezahooshangi]

Survive as an indie

It's been almost 4 years since we started our journey to be professional game developers. At first we wanted to make games because we loved it; it was our dream to make games that everyone plays and enjoys, just like the games that we loved and played.We enjoyed creating something new.it was like magic for me !

We believed that if we do our job perfect and make something that is fun for us, so everybody else will enjoy it too and soon the rivers of money will run through our pockets !

After a while we started to understand that making money isn't as easy as we thought! It took almost 2 hard working years until we learned enough to make a good game. so we took many risks and made Bloody Streets. it's not a perfect game but we loved it and did our best to make it. we hoped that by making this game we will make lots of money. but unfortunately that wasn't completely true!

we learned lots of things during the development of Bloody Streets but after finishing it we had no money to continue! soon we started to understand that money is more important than what we thought and there are thousands of other teams out there that are struggling to make enough money to continue their path !

So we still don't have much experience but I like to share some tips that I think helps every new indie game developer to survive :

We all have dreams about games that we love to make and it's really great to take some big risks, make them and end up with a huge reward! but every risk has two sides and we should always be aware of both of them!

Actually money is very important. even if you don't want to be rich and just want to continue and make games, you will need it! think about how your game is going to make money in the first steps of design.

Knowing the market behavior is a very difficult and important job.a game's success in market depends on lots of factors and some of them are not completely predictable! so you should always keep your eye on the market and get feedbacks.

Publishing and distributing of a game needs lots of links and communications with lots of people (publishers, editors, digital distributors, customers ...) so you can't finish development of your game and then find a good publisher to publish it! you should always be connected to everyone and everything in the industry and if you can't do it or you just want to focus on developing the game , find someone who knows how to do it !

Good luck and keep rocking ! \m/

[rezahooshangi]

VideoPlayer class is missing !

I downloaded latest version of MonoGame for VisualStudio 2012 and created a new Windows OpenGL project. Then I downloaded Farseer physics 3.5 because previous versions didn't support MonoGame .Moved all of my Bloody Streets codes to the new project and everything was good until one problem showed up !

VideoPlayer class hasn't implemented yet in OpenGL version of MonoGame (Windows and Linux) so we have to deal with it in some other way because we have some cut-seens in the game.

I searched the web for any solutions and found some branches of MonoGame on GitHub that support VideoPlayer class.like this one.

Honestly I never worked with git repositories before and have no idea how they work so lets learn something new ! \m/