Pointless: A Game About Stuff

Welcome to the Tumblr of the most epic game that ever epicced. Be enthralled with the orgasm-enducing artwork, the dev posts from our resident Programmer who weaves words as well as lines of PHP code, and just get lost in the overwelming need to paint your entire face with a half-jar of extra crunchy low-fat non-dairy double-calorie peanut butter.

[thepointlessgame]

I just wanted to wish you luck with the game and to tell you that this is basically everything I want in a game sobs. Can't wait to play it when you're done! :D

D'aww! That's very sweet of you to say! We're still working on it, even if we don't do status updates very much on the tumblr. It's going to be really good and hopefully won't take too much more time to complete a releasable version!

[thepointlessgame]

HELLO THERE.

It's amazing what a few months will do, am I right? I was doing the sprite for the Landlord character, and I found that my painting style has changed in a sort of durastic way.

Don't get me wrong, I think it looks really cool. But it also looks really weird against the rest of the Pointless characters. I may have to to redo some of them. But redos will have to wait!

Once the game hits late Alpha, I'll start redrawing the rest of the Sprites.

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: A little bit out of it...

This week has been a busy week here at HQ. Things have been progressing on both WTSNV and Pointless, and slowly we're getting there. This week has been about bug-fighting - I switched the way our system renders a scene on the back-end, and all hell has broken loose. So, it's been happy fun big-fighting times!

So, What's this change mean?

On the front end? Absolutely nothing. On the back end? Chaos and confusion. The way it was built before, when the rendering engine would come across a tag, it would simply run a function and inject the results back into the output variable. While this worked 95% of the time, there were still a few weird places where it wouldn't for whatever reason. You wouldn't notice these quirks casually, but very rarely these would lead to some strange behavior of the engine, such as alphabetically sorting all the tags(Yes, this was a real bug. Sometimes the engine would get tripped up in processing and just get 'stuck'.).

The new system completely reformat the output, building it from scratch. It leads to a cleaner code, and more easy to read output - however everything needed to be switched to the new format. I wrote a script, and long story short not everything got updated as it should. So, it's been manually updating all the locations and conversations since.

So, next topic... Currency?

The in game currency for pointless is called Zends, and funds all of your in-game purchases. Zends can be earned through mini-games, or in some special cases from events(Like your mom sending you money). Most of your Zend generation will be from part-time mini-games, Like McBurgerQueen.

Each mini-game will have a certain goal, and base points off of your ability to achieve that goal(duh..). A good example, as stated above, is McBurgerQueen.

McBurgerQueen is a McJob inspired mini-game where you serve as a minimum-wage dissatisfied employee who must throw food into your gluttonous customers mouths to earn zends. At the end of the day, your score and the number of zends you get is calculated off of the percent of hits that you got.

Zends are also the primary way you will be able to travel from the Bus Station.

Wait, Bus Station?

Yes, Pointless has a bus station. From this place you can order tickets to travel to any number of self-contained themed locations. I can't exactly say what they're going to be, but each location offers it's own rewards for completion, on top of the story.

Well, that's about it for this week. I'm going to go get some rest - Stay classy, People!

Is there any topics you'd like us to discuss in future posts?

[thepointlessgame]

Character Customization

Zoey here! There was an ask for this, and I thought I'd pop in and blargg my two cents all over the walls  :D  In Pointless, there is a good amount of customization - the character base (the skin) is created as genderless, and any of the clothing can be applied. As an example, you could have a character identify as male, and wear stereotypical feminine clothing.

The base itself is customizable, in various skin tones, as well as some fantastical blue, green, etc. There is also a "tattoo" option, where you can give it zebra stripes, or spots.

You can also change the eyes, mouth, hair/hat, shirt, pants, foreground and background items.

So there is a lot of customization for the characters available  :)  Now, if I'm getting this totally wrong, and you wanted to know about the coding and mechanics behind how to do it, you'd have to ask my partner  ^.^

EDIT: Character customization is a pointless-only feature (for now). There is no avatar system set-up for the Night Vale game.

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Let there be sound!

So, what does this mean for the Nightvale Game?

Everything is still going smoothly. I've got all the support in that the engine needs, it's from here on in just implementing the actual story and art, and then bug-testing. It doesn't sound like much, but believe me, there's still a lot to be done.

Any idea on a timeline?

I unfortunately can't say. It should be released on the first of October. We've got to schedule about a week of serious bug-testing and fixes before release, but that's all dependent on how fast everything gets done. What I can say is that we're going to do everything in my power to hit that release date.

So, what about pointless?

Pointless's development is still proceeding as planned in tandem with the Nightvale game, as for the moment the issues that need solving affect them both. I'm going to try and give each project equal time, but as the deadline gets closer for Nightvale that game will honestly take up the bulk of our time. I want to be clear on this: That does not mean that pointless has taken a back burner in any way. There are several things going on in pointless that are not implemented in the Nightvale game, which means that I can simply disable some of these trouble spots from the engine on release.

As well, the scale of the projects is incomparable. While Nightvale will be streamlined set of stories, Pointless is built on the purpose of being a large and open world for you to explore. The base town isn't fully completed yet and we're already sitting at well over 200 scripted locations, not including dialogue, events and stores. That's not even touching some of the other towns and locations that you can go, that are going to be included immediately on release.

So, Sound support?

Yes, we have sound support in game. While this is mostly used for conversations and scenes, We've been playing with different ways that this could be used for either background music or streaming audio. While we're still not that far yet, it's a possibility that we're exploring. All sound can also be disabled from the options menu.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions either message us or send a ask!

Have a topic you would like us to discuss?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Bite Sized Inspiration

It's simply this: If you want to be something, go be it. You want to do something, go do it.

What?

Yeah, I know, cliche right? I'm serious though, if there's something you really want to do or be, the only way you're ever going to get there is to go out and start doing it. Now, that dosen't mean to charge off blindly and start ripping people's skulls open thinking your a brain surgeon. If it's something you want to do, you need to have the drive and determination to learn about it on your own.

I knew at a young age I wanted to be a game developer. When I was twelve, I inherited a selection of manuals and a C compiler from my uncle, and I took off. Within three weeks, I had developed my first game. It was a linear adventure, in the style of the choose your own adventure books. It was also riddled with bugs, and very much a "guess the verb" game. In the end though, it was playable.

I have dedicated countless evenings, weekends, months and years learning how to do what I do. I haven't had any formal training, so I do make mistakes from time to time. I tend to leave things like the <DOCTYPE> tag out until I'm done getting the page working. I use the style tag instead of CSS unless I have to use CSS. There are <div> tags EVERYWHERE. It's the little quirks you learn when you teach yourself. In the end though, the product still looks good, so I don't worry about refinement until after the project is done.

Another great example is zoey. From a young age, she loved television and writing. As a young girl she would write episodes for some of her favorite shows, including in one instance making a entire new season for one. She has a passion for writing I have seen in few other people, and her scripts are top notch. It seems that some of that may be paying off finally, and we're waiting to hear back if she's gotten accepted for her most recent fellowship application.

The point is, that if you really want to do something, and I mean really want to do something, you're the only one holding yourself back.

Anyways, it's late and sleep deprivation is starting to get to me. Hugs and Kisses,

~Nymall

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Classy OOP

Nymall here with another post from the development trenches. It's saturday, so it's time to pull a random subject out of our hat-o-topics to discuss. Remember, if you have any questions or specific topics you'd be interested in us talking about, send us a message and we'll see about spotlighting it.

This week we'll be talking about some of the additional features of the game engine and some different future plans. Read on!

Engine Madness

One of the many exciting things about the game engine we've developed is that it can be used as a base for serving several different structures of game. At the current stage of development, it's being used for developing two different games, Pointless and another that shall remain nameless at this time. So, what's the upshot benefit of this?

Log-in information will persist between games - what this means is that the system will basically use one log-in to rule them all. This can be controlled from the in-game options menu, but if enabled(it is by default) to register with another one of our games all you have to do is log in with your username and password. It's that simple!

If disabled, however, registration will work as normal. In the end it's a optional, but highly encouraged feature.

Another interesting feature that this universal engine will enable is "synargies" between games. One of the first planned synergies is a cross mini-game between this and a in-dev game of mine called zombie towns. The mini-game will be completely accessible from in game and, if enabled in zombie towns, will generate additional resources as well as the bonuses gained in pointless for playing the daily mini-game.

Minigame - McBurgerQueen

How could a McJob ever be interesting fodder for a minigame, you ask? Well, it becomes interesting when instead of being a time-trial or timing game, we instead make it a physics game.

Wait, what? That's right, physics.

The entire goal of the McBurgerQueen minigame/job is to throw the food into the customers mouths. The general theory being that either the customer is too lazy to get the food themselves and have outrageously large mouths or you've just become so disgruntled you don't really care anymore.

So, how does the game work?

You'll start each day at the job with 100 coins(this is tennative, as the game is still being balanced), and you'll be able to choose between different types of ammunition that cost more points, but at the same time offer more of a reward if scored. Once the ammunition is picked, then it's just a matter of hitting the targets mouth with the food.

Insane? Yeah, a little bit. It's fun though.

Dev News

Other then the aforementioned updates, nothing particularly of note has happened this week in development. Zoey got a new computer, and I've been restructuring the rendering part of the engine to run a bit faster and use less resources. Hopefully by the end of next week we can get all this business sorted out and get back to finishing the last few things with the forums. The laundry list is surely getting shorter...

As always, if there's anything you want us to discuss, either message us or leave a reply. What topics would you like to be discussed in future posts?

[thepointlessgame]

Zoey here!

I absconded the Programmer's computer to get some work done. It really sucks that we have to switch out, it's really slowing down progress, but hopefully that will be dealt with soon. Soooon.

In the meantime, I've updated the GUI, adding in things as they were needed (such as a logout button, whoops). It looks much cleaner now, yes?  :D  I've also created GUI for new features (such as the Petology Codex, shh) and some other things that I cannot disclose to you at this time.

If you want to follow us, go for it, or if you just want to stalk a tag, I'll make sure we use the tag pointlesssquidly for all of our future posts!

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: A little bit of Mr. E

Welcome to a Sunday edition of developer time! Some news on some recent complications, some different planned event stuff, and more! Read on!

State of the Project

This week has been another week of setback, as the day before yesterday the database to our development environment got corrupted after a unexpected power outage. While most of the code that I've been working on was safe, the last week has resulted in quite a bit of modification of the structure of the database, which had to be reverted back to a old backup thanks to a few complications with a number of recent back end updates.

Most of my work has been assessing the damage, but it's nothing major, just annoying data entry.

This week's Ramble - Nightmares?

As I have stated before, one of our most excited features is the simply dazzling amount of hidden content the game willl contain, and I wanted to semi-spoil one piece... I'll tell you about it, but not how to get to it.

The nightmare realm is a place that I've designed, that follows a horror-esque theme. Most of the encounters you will have will be distorted versions of places and characters you already know, but warped and twisted. It's up to you to evade these creatures and survive. Die early, and your character will still get a sweet consolation prize, but make it to the end and you'll get a special reward.

The rewards will change and the length of the area will change as well as more areas are added on, introducing new characters and new pitfalls, but new prizes as well.

The link to this adventure will only be available randomly once or twice a day, for about a half hour. It will be available for everybody at the same time though, so watch those message boards!

In closing...

I think that's enough for now... We'll probably have a new computer for zoey tomorrow, so expect some creative updates from her soon too! See you next week!

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Bit Switching Swingers

State of the Project Address

Well, it's been a tumultuous month here. Between computer problems for both of us, financial woes and a grumpy server, things got kinda down. Still, there has been a lot of progress for July, with many parts of the mail and forum system coming together, the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be getting nearer. The Dev list for our alpha invite release is still quite a laundry list, but things are being crossed off one by one.

However, the biggest blow so far has been the loss of my partner's computer last week, on which were many completed pieces of content and plot documents. We have managed to save everything we can from the hulk, but the blow has set back the development timeline somewhat, as she has not been able to do many of the pieces of art we're waiting on. However, things are looking up and we should have a new workstation for her on the first of next month.

Onto the Mechanics!

Today I thought I'd go a bit more in depth into some of the inner workings of the game's mechanics. I'll surround this in a block quote for those of you who aren't interested, but it should be a interesting discussion anyway.

I thought today I'd talk about one of the things that I find most interesting about the way we've set up the engine, and that's something called Bit Switching.

In pointless, most of what you do is tracked through a series of flags, with most conversations having between one and three flags associated to them. These flags are simple, being represented in a "on " and a "off" state, or "true" and "false" if you prefer. There are many ways that these could be represented, and I found that the simplest way was to simply store them as a single unsigned integer.

Q1: Unsigned Integer? What? A1: A unsigned integer is, quite simply, storage for a number between the values of 0 and 4,294,967,295. It can't hold a negative number, but for this application all I care about is how many bits it can hold, which is 32. Q2: Ok, I sorta get what a unsigned integer is. What is Bit Switching? A2:When I bit switch, I'm simply taking the integer above and converting it to binary. For example 4,294,967,295 would be represented as:

11111111111111111111111111111111

For completeness, this is 0:

00000000000000000000000000000000

Now, lets say the game is running, and you end a conversation. If I were to track that(For this example lets use the first flag), it would look like this:

10000000000000000000000000000000 ^The flag that's tracked.

So, I can imagine now you're saying "Hah! How will you track multiple options? What if I pick number 3?!". To which I respond, it's simple. If there's more then two options, we concern ourselves with more then two flags. Lets say there's four options - This is the bits we would be concerned with:

1 00 00000000000000000000000000000    ^These Right here...

So, our selection of 3 would look like 01. For selection 4, it would be represented as 11. Here's the completed field:

10100000000000000000000000000000

Or

5

Q3:So, Mr. Programmer, how would you do this? It can't be done! A3: Actually, it can, and in PHP it's really simple.

For this example, let's say I wanted to track if you selected option 3 from the previous example. First, I would have to determine which flag I wanted to test for. This is quite simple, and I'm not going to go too in depth to how we keep track of flags to be tested, but let me assure you - it's trivial.

Well, now I know which section I'm looking for. A little bit of math lets me know the bounds I'm looking for, which in this case I'm testing if 4 is set in the field. The easiest way to do this is:

if($test & 4){       //whatever you want it to do }

So, what is this? This is called Bitwise Comparison, and is simply testing if the number 4(represented 001) is active in the last variable. Since, in this example, the Variable is set to 5, the test passes. Here's a example of the math in action:

  101(5) &001(4) -------   001-True(if it was 000, it would be false)

If you want to learn more about Bitwise Calculations, Jim Plush has a great tutorial over at litfuel.net. --Here--

That's enough rambling for now - I'll be back at the end of the week with another chaotic, mechanics filled post. Leave us a messsage if there's anything in particular you'd like us to cover or leave a replay!

What would you like to hear about?

[thepointlessgame]

As you can see, the sprites for the characters look sort of really epic now.

The programmer is asleep, and my own computer is six ways dead (stupid stupid computer, making development drag!) so I've obsconded his computer to work on the cast of teachers. Yeh, that's right, this image is a teacher, Ms. Tsuki Chou, in her casual clothing. She teaches the Zoology class, that is, the care + feeding + raising of your pets.

I just really loved the way she turned out, and that I haven't shown off many female characters yet - so there you go.

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: A Small Apology

The Problem

Well, this part is actually quite simple. Her computer is dead. I've been working with her over the last few months to keep it going, but the main problem is that it's finally kicked the bucket. I'm looking at different avenues of getting something working for her, but it's all a bit in the air right now.

The Last Week in Development

The forum build is continuing on schedule, and I've been going back and adding extra features to the rendering section of our engine. Most of the main parts of the forums are in place, and it is now both read-only publicly and read-write signed in view-able. With that, I thought I'd talk a little bit about how the game actually creates rooms for those geeks like me out there.

Science?

Pointless uses at it's heart a tag based system I've been developing called AMDL(Adventure Module Definition Language). This language allows me to control any element of the game through a simple tag-based interface. It allows me to store not only character triggers, but stat checks, inventory assignments, and such while keeping the individual definitions simple enough to still read. Here's a small example of a simple room:

[roomimg=/sample/room.png] [door r=x100y100 l=x150y200] [obj src=/item/clock.png r=x50y150 t=1]

To describe this room, I've used three elements. Firstly, the [roomimg] tag points to the actual background image of the room. Next we have the [door] tag, which defines the coordinates of the top-right and bottom-left points of the link, which is then image mapped on the image of the room. Lastly, we have the [obj] tag, which I use to define the standard placement of clickable objects. When clicked, it sends back to check the flags for "trigger" 1. There's some other handling that goes into each of these tags, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

Another example is the script for a confrontation with Ellian. Here's an example:

[roomimg=/sample/hall.png] [char=/char/ellian.png l=r t=y n=Ellian] [dia="Ooof! Watch it!"] [resp=Well, Sooorry Princess! h=1] [flag=7 p=1]

Just as before, we start with defining the room via the [roomimg] tag. Once the room is defined, we then define the character to be shown via the [char] tag, that it's on the right side of the screen, that there's a conversation, and the name of the character to be displayed. Finally, we put up a link to the next part of the conversation and close off by setting a flag to mark this conversation as done.

The intention of this language is to make the development-to-live time of most of the story content as short as possible, so that there's little as possible overhead with each new update. If there's any interest into specifics of AMDL i'll go into more of the advanced features in depth another time.

So, now I leave it up to you, the reader: What questions would you like us to answer about pointless?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Forumage?

Well, the first parts of the forum are in, and we're just into the implementing of the actual forum. We're going to be using some of the same pieces of engine that the mail system rides on, so it will be extremely easy to access one feature and then the other. With that in mind, I wanted to discuss some of the things I promised last week, starting with stats.

Stats

Stats in pointless will follow a simplified RPG system, where a stat can range between two extremes, such as "Smart" and "Derpy". The position on the scale of each of these stats will determine some of the responses of the characters you meet, and your choices in dialog and quests will interact with these values.

Each of these stats will also affect minor trivial outcomes in the game, such as taking tests and multipliers for certain mini-games.

The Love You Long Time Meter

The Love You Long Time Meter(lyltm) is the scale in the game that determines the affections that each character feels towards your character. This will run a scale much like the stats above, where one extreme is "Hate" and the other is "Love". Each character has their own likes and dislikes, and it's up to you to learn what each specific person admires.

While you can only directly influence the Love/Hate meter through conversation, your stats also play a important part in this interaction as well, meaning that if the character likes "smart" people, but you make a inconsiderate action(something they hate) it will be somewhat mitigated by your characters intelligence(and vice versa).

On that note: You do not need to get every person to love you in the game. While it's an admirable goal, some of the better interactions may require a certain amount of dislike from some characters.

Ractions

As stated above, characters will react differently to different combinations of stats, and figuring out the proper balance is half the fun of the game. There will be a tonne of hidden content throughout the game, and discovering some of this will make your journey through the world of pointless that much easier.

Remember that not every person may appreciate what you do, and some may take a disliking to things that you do for other people. If you find yourself suffering from the good-nature crowd, you may want to leave off of the "meanie-mcpunchingbag" quest for a while and see if there's something you can find to balance out your Karmatic scale.

Other then some Limited-time events, most of all quests will not have a time requirement, so if you need to step away from a quest for a while you can.

Secrets

Possibly the most exciting thing about pointless is the sheer variety of secrets that abound in the game. The game is still only in early alpha, and some of our playtesters have been finding funny little things we put in. As time goes buy, these unannounced secrets will only grow, with things like randomized dream sequences and plans we have for a entire horror-esque "Mirror Reality" where EVERYONE is out to get you.

The bottom line? We're trying to make it so that theres always something for you to find and do. And if you do find something, please be a good sport about it. :p

So, as always, if you have any questions, drop us a message or an ask. I'll leave you with this though - Of all we've discussed, what are you most excited for?

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Backendedness is Complete!

Reinventing the Wheel?

As work on this project has gone on, we have been looking at some of the ways other developers and communities have tackled the way of handling forums, and it's become fairly obvious that a lot of trust is placed on third-party platforms, such as vBulliten. Why is this so?

Development Cost: It's not just the money cost, but the time cost. Developing a entirely new forum on your own usually takes time, especially to add in group options, profiles, security, etc.

Security: Usually these forums are well updated by either the company that produced them, or the open-source group that collaborates on them.

Features: Most of these forums have enough of a wide variety of features that it covers most if not all the use-cases the end user could want.

"Alright," You say, "That's all well and good... So why aren't you guys using a pre-made forum option?". In a word, control. We don't need sections where people can post private image albums, and in forum messaging, and all of the soap opera that comes with having a separate forum. It's easy just to make the forum itself publicly readable, and integrate it's handling into the game.

It also allows us to add extra interesting features to the forum, such as randomly generated character names, dice rollers, animations, the list goes on. This also eases some of the administrative tasks on our end a bit, and makes the entire engine much more easy to work with.

The forum system will be completely integrated into the mail system, allowing players the option to send PMs straight from the topic or user profile. There are also some planned features, like a in-game topic update notification system and the like, but they're probably not something that's going to be available on release.

If everything goes well with this, I should have both a update on this and some stuff about our stat system sometime next week. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!

Edit: You may have noticed a momentary hiccup if you've tried to log in in the last hour. A update wasn't properly pushed on my end, sorry. It's fixed though! 

[thepointlessgame]

Thought I'd post this lovely image of the park from some of Zoey's most recent work. I'm really excited to get the park all up - it's really beautiful!

[thepointlessgame]

Developer Time: Postage!

Well, another day, another development. Most of the last couple of weeks we have been working on back-end stuff, so not really anything spectacular to report. I've been writing a number of error reporting functions and spreading them throughout so that if something goes wrong we can get a good idea where and how bad the damage is, and my partner has been working on finishing story and game art.

There's going to be a lot of neat stuff flowing into the development tank over the next few weeks, and we're getting close to being able to announce some kind of release date. There's a whole horde of new art, locations, and a good chunk of the starting stories are being prepped to ship over to our alpha team. What does this mean, though?

It means that everything's still on schedule, and performing as expected.

We've got a laundry list of things that still need to be implemented and tested before we can release into beta, but the good news is that the list is getting shorter by the day. Every chance we get to work on this we come a bit closer to having that list complete, and open to you.

So, why can't we just release it now?

1) Some base mechanics aren't fully implemented. We still need to make some critical decisions on balance, and decide on what would be the best for both the game and fair to the player.

2) There are several plot-related stories being developed. We have a good deal of it worked out, but the writing part is not complete yet.

3) There are several interface wrinkles we need to polish out still. We'd rather let some things cook the extra week or two in Dev to make sure it works strait out of the gate.

This also brings up the question of how to make it come out faster. There's really two answers to that one:

Short Answer: You can't.

Long Answer: At the moment we're not receiving any income from this project, which means that we've got to put more resources towards other avenues of work that can. This really limits the amount of time we have available to work on this each day. If there was a way to get this off the ground faster, it would have to cover the living expense problem first. At this point, there's enough of a game for a brief tech demo, but we don't really think enough to warrant donations and release. It's a catch-22: To get support, we need to show progress. To be able to put in the time to show progress, we need support.

We're still throwing around ideas though, so I guess we'll have to see what happens on that front.

[thepointlessgame]

Slowly but surely, the art is getting better. Although, things will look a little odd for a while, whilst we upload some bits and you get sketchy-cool dorm rooms, followed by vector hallways. Sorry bout that.