Tuesday 26 July 2011

What I did with my Weekend (a one-man Game Jam retrospective)

Having missed yet another game jam (TIGJam UK 5, this time) by being at a LARP event, and suddenly finding myself with an unexpectedly free weekend, I decided to have a gamejam of my own (because that's just how cool I am). I'd been mulling over some ideas for a Dwarf Fortress-meets-The Sims-meets-Day of the Triffids game - a sort of Survival Strategy - since watching the 2009 remake of Triffids, so I sat myself down on Friday night and started coding - and here's what I learned from the experience:


Writing Design Notes

It's kind of obvious that writing a design is useful, but the hard part (I've always found) is knowing what to write down. When I have a code architecture in mind, it's tricky to try and work out which bits are obvious and which bits I'll forget and wish I'd written down. Equally, it's often as quick for me to write the code framework, and then use the code as the documentation; which is fine for me, because I've more practice of reading and writing code than reading and writing English, but other people less so.

Over the course of the weekend, I was making the whole thing up as I went; there was no grand design in mind, I just wrote down a list of features and tackled them one at a time. That level of focus (and the particular focus on How Do I Do This Quickly over How Do I Mix All These Into One Unified Symphony Of Code) meant those individual notes flowed more organically into a fleshed-out design, even if that design was just a tree of This Feature needs ==> This Features needs ==> This Feature; and probably This Feature, too. It was also more obvious which design decisions needed to be recorded for future reference when the code was less structured and self-describing.

Coder's Block

Realisation of the weekend: The more you know about something, the harder it is to code it. I know all about AI & Pathfinding - it was the topic of my degree - but somehow the language in which I understand those academic topics is very different from the language in which I express code. Equally, when I'm writing game code (I've hit this block a few times before) my mind jumps ahead, because I already know the (implementation) answer to the questions I've not quite reached yet; but that means that rather than smoothly grow my code base, I'm stuck trying to work out how to plug together the code I've written, and the code I know I'm going to have to write in the near future.

So I stopped thinking ahead. The emphasis on "just get it working, it doesn't have to be pretty" finally pushed me through the block, as I stopped thinking in terms of a grander design and just focused on the bit of code right in front of me. Of course, just getting it to work means that the pathfinding code I have now is nothing like as efficient as it could be, but it works, and it'll be easier now to go back and polish it up, now that I've tied it in to the rest of the code.

Take better care of yourself

Staying up too late on Friday night (by which I mean 8am Saturday) threw my whole sleep cycle off; I wasn't properly focused on Saturday/Sunday & would estimate I hit a 50% velocity for the whole weekend, when I should really have managed 70-80%. What I got right was my eating habits, for once; plenty of caffeine shots to keep me alert, glucose drinks and "energy" snacks (mmm pistachios) to replenish my blood sugar (continuous mental activity can really drop your blood sugar levels) and only eat "heavy" foods with complex carbs at main meals (I'll confess I cheated and ordered in pizzas, but hey, time saved cooking, right?) because the effort of digestion makes you sluggish.

Prep your materials in advance

Ye gods, the time I lost searching for isometric sprites. I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, so all the art I used is downloaded from very generous people on the 'net; but there's a lot of dross out there, and to make things worse, many of the sites that do publish free sprites are horrific to navigate and search. I was really lucky to find OpenGameArt, from where I got most of the artwork that I used in the game, but ultimately the time I spent searching for and prepping sprites (especially given my lack of skill or experience) was time I couldn't spend building features. So next time, I'm working out a shopping list of the artwork I'm likely to need and getting it together before I start.

Play games before you write games

The first thing I did was to sit down with a notebook and write out a few key phrases and ideas about the game. The second thing I did was to think of all the games that those reminded me of and see if I could have a quick playthough of each; which meant that the first hour or so of Friday evening was spent playing X-COM & The Sims, re-learning the interfaces and "vocab" of an isometric UI. I guess this point (for me) is more about user experience and interface; I don't have anything new to bring to the table in those fields, so I'd rather point to previous games and say "They got it right, so I followed their example." and focus on gameplay, which is what I'm trying to improve.


Of course, having talked about all this I should mention what I actually achieved over the weekend, which is admittedly not a great deal. The game idea I had was quite grand for two-day sprint, so the result is more of a simple tech demo than a playable game, but I've uploaded it for now and will see about turning into something actually fun at the next jam; or maybe at the next CB2 Indies meet (there's one tomorrow, actually, will see about heading along).

Go here to get the current download; when you run it up, you'll see the example map with a single survivor. There is code in place for ambling/hunting/killing zombies (hence the red health bar about the survivor's head) but I need to wire up a button or something to spawn one on the map. A task for tomorrow, I guess.

Anyhow, middle-click somewhere on the map to refocus the camera on that spot, and the scroll wheel moves the camera up and down levels - note the basement under the house.
Left click the survivor to select them, then right-click to tell them to move; sorry about the lack of animations...
With the survivor selected, click the wall button in the top-left to select the Build Wall tool; then right-click on two locations on the map (two clicks, not click & drag) (also, two locations in a straight line) to tell the survivor to start building a new wall. It is a slow action, so don't worry if they seem to move to the site of the new wall and stare blankly at it for a few seconds - they're working, honest!

I'm fairly pleased to have got all that working in a single weekend; it's not exactly fun, but it's broken the back of building a simple Tower Defense vs Zombies game, and from there is just a matter of adding ever more awesome.

Monday 25 July 2011

Epilogue install

Prereqs

The game is built on v4 of the .NET Framework (Client Profile) & the XNA Framework - that makes it Windows-only, I'm afraid (XP SP3 or later).

Download & Install

You can download the game from here. There's no installer, so just run the Expilogue.exe file in situ.