Active Sketch 07 - Quilt

Not only has my new job at Linden Lab been inspiring me to post more often, I've also been doing a lot more prototyping! :)

I used the platformer engine from my Ludum Dare game Ninjural Selection to make this infinite "quilt" of platformer levels. When you go off the edge of the screen, a new level is randomly generated and placed alongside for you to fall into.

Active Sketch 07 - Quilt

The levels are generated by randomly drawing and erasing horizontal and vertical lines of tiles, and then placing random emoticons for you to collect and avoid. But imagine what it would be like with fully featured platformer levels with roaming enemies and cool stuff to play with. Imagine that each level was created by another player - in fact, in this prototype you can already edit the platforms by holding shift and drawing with the mouse. Imagine that there were other players roaming around the quilt with you in real time, collecting coins with you or racing to find special items.

I think that could be pretty cool.

Active Sketch 06 - Runway

Almost two years ago I posted my last Active Sketch. The thing was, I had made another one around the same time that I never got around to putting online! So I decided it was time to finish it up and share it with you all.

It's a test of a one-button runner control scheme. I added new artwork, and random blocks to avoid.

Press and hold to run, let go to jump, and press again while in the air to fall faster.

Active Sketch 06 - Runway

Maybe not the next Canabalt, but I think it has a nice feel. :p The real challenge will be designing an environment that is fun with this control scheme - right now it's a bit too hard to avoid the blocks. I'd guess that it might actually be more fun if you were running on rooftops...

Active Sketch 05 - Planets

It's been more than a year since the last one. Time for a new Active Sketch.

I made this to test out an idea my coworker suggested for indirect control through gravity wells.

In this little physics prototype, you can click to add planets and drag them around, and your little face person will zoom around, orbiting them according to Newton's laws of gravity.

Can you imagine playing with this on a touch screen?

Active Sketch 05 - Planets

Nothing fancy. Just a little experiment. Turns out that gravity among all these planets is a chaotic system, where it's almost impossible to predict where the orbiting face will go next. That might make this a little too confusing for a game, though who knows - maybe if you slow it down and draw motion trails showing the future paths of all the objects, it might be pretty interesting.

Still, I think springs might make a better physics-based mechanic than gravity, at least for a real-time action game.

So this Active Sketch was pretty quick to make - maybe an hour to get the basic mechanic working, and another hour to polish it up for release. This is encouraging, because it means I might be able to make more of these, even in the limited time I have now that I have a job as a game programmer.

I don't want to make any promises, but with any luck hopefully you'll be seeing a lot more of these little prototypes from me in the near future. I'm looking forward to it. :)

Active Sketch 04 - Pillars

Update:
Critiqued and analyzed on the Critical-Gaming Network blog! :D

Finally, an actually fun prototype!

It's a test of some movement controls for a one-button flying game. Tap to flap your wings, hold to dive.

I've been working with the artist brontosaurus off and on for several months now to create a game, and this latest attempt seems like our most promising project yet. It started with a bit of concept art, a simple landscape of pillars - Pixel Skylines 01. Then I tried to imagine what sort of game, what sort of characters and actions might be fun in such a landscape. Obviously, the typical platformer approach would not make sense. But maybe if you could fly...

So I made this prototype, and yes, flying is fun. See for yourself.

Active Sketch 04 - Pillars

It helps that there's a flock of tiny fliers to keep you company. They give you something to do - something to attack or run away from.

In response to some prompting from brontosaurus, I've also released some experimental versions that allow you to turn in midair, either automatically or by double-tapping. And I've gotten some useful feedback about each of these.

But I think I'll stick with the simple original. This is the one that has gotten the most unanimously positive response, and I have found it to be much more accessible to non-gamers in my own informal playtests.

And I like the feel. It's like a soaring eagle.

So the next question is, how do we elaborate this into a full game? Maybe even something for the upcoming GAMMA IV one-button game competition?

This is where our organic process should be able to take off. In the past, brontosaurus and I made the mistake of trying to start creating cool things before we had a solid foundation of fun actions to build on. But now we have our fun actions.

I can see even this simple prototype turning into a game just by adding a score multiplier system and a time limit. But I would hate to waste its potential on something as trivial as that. I want to create a bigger game, with vast landscapes to explore and creatures to interact with - some dangerous, some friendly, some food.

I think the way to go, then, is to continue building a playground for this one-button flying creature, this eagle. I remember reading that this is how Super Mario 64 was built - first with a playground that made full use of Mario's abilities and acrobatics, and only then expanded into a world of castles and mountains and bosses and missions and such.

Well, we shall see where this takes us.

a cloud dragon...

Active Sketch 03 - Words

Update:
Reviewed by Gregory Weir, the author of Silent Conversation! :D

A new prototype.

It's an attempt to turn a text into an interesting environment for a game, along the lines of some of my earlier thoughts. I was never really satisfied by Silent Conversation's take on the whole "text as environment" thing, and I've been trying to extract some meaningful gameplay out of the words themselves.

So this is where I'm at so far.

Active Sketch 03 - Words

The goal is to match similar words. Use the arrow keys to move around. You can pick up a word by pressing x or c.

On the right is your score, and on the left is your score multiplier and the current word you are holding. If you match two words exactly, your multiplier goes up. If you pick up two words that have no letters in common, your multiplier is halved. Otherwise, you get points for each letter the two words have in common, multiplied by your score multiplier. I stole the multiplier system from Music Catch.

There is no time limit, and words reappear after they go off the screen, so you can get as many points as you have patience for. It's not a game. It's just a test.

The story is something I wrote over a year ago, a retelling of Where the Wild Things Are with the themes of Ishmael, in the style of a Haida myth. It still has a sappy Western ending, though.

The lines that end in "they say" are the canonical elements of the story - actually two stories, Where the Wild Things Are, and Genesis. That's based on a Haida mythtelling convention, more or less. The symbolism and structural harmony and such is woefully inadequate compared to the stories of the master mythtellers, but hey, it's my first try.

Anyway, the story doesn't matter. It's just filler text to test out the matching mechanics. :p

Try it out and let me know what you think.

they will eat you up...

Active Sketch 02 - Ledges

Another sketch.

This time, a prototype. I made it to test out the movement controls for a climbing game.


In our effort to make a cool intriguing game, the artist brontosaurus and I have been coming up with concept art and procedural sketches that we could combine into something interesting. But we've realized that our approach is in need of a slight course correction.

Procedural trees and space invaders may be cool to look at, but that's not the same as a game that's fun to play. If you create a bunch of cool things, you don't automatically end up with an interesting interaction when you put them all together. But if you start by creating cool actions, things to do, then you're more likely to end up with something that's fun to play.

Daniel Cook put it this way, when asked for advice:

Typically what I'd suggest is working on a core mechanic and seeing if you can 'find the fun'. I see you focusing more on artwork...which is pretty, but doesn't find the fun.

Given this suggestion, I realized it might be more appropriate to spend less time creating procedural art and more time prototyping gameplay.

This doesn't mean that I shouldn't spend any time creating procedural art. It just means that before I come up with things, I need to come up with the actions first. If I have the gameplay down, the stuff you do, then I'll know what sort of things would go well with those actions, what would make them more fun or meaningful or interesting.

So this is our new doctrine: design the verbs first, then the nouns. Not the other way around.

Thus, this climbing prototype.

Active Sketch 02 - Ledges

It's simple. Use the arrow keys to move the climber around. You can press up to jump, or down to drop from a ledge. The interesting bit is that you can hang on ledges. Maybe not quite as interesting as jumping off walls, but hey, it's an experiment. :p

I used the Flixel engine to make it. Flixel is awesome. It's perfect for little games like this, especially if you like pixel-y graphics. I wholeheartedly recommend it. I'll write a blog post about it sometime.

However, brontosaurus and I probably won't be taking this climbing concept any further. We had thought it might be a good idea to start with a simple action like climbing, and build up from there. And we started creating some concept art for such a game, which you can see here.

But after trying out some movement controls in this prototype we decided that the gameplay wasn't strong enough to carry an entire game. And that's the whole point of a prototype - to tell you whether the game is worth making or not.

So we're back to the drawing board.

And with some inspiration from Shaun Tan and The Little Prince, hopefully we'll come up with something even better. I'll let you know how it goes. :)

Active Sketch 01 - Invaders

An update! :D

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going indie.

And for my first project, I'm working with the artist brontosaurus to make a game showcasing his unique blend of pixel art and intriguing world design. In order to make the most effective use of his talents, we are trying to make developing a game as much as possible like doodling random pictures.

This means that we're creating little sketches in code, implementing one concept at a time in order to mix and match them into, hopefully, a cool game. We talk about our ideas, brontosaurus creates some concept art, and then I take the art and try to turn it into something procedural.

We're calling these procedural things Active Sketches, and I've just released my first one.

Active Sketch 01 - Invaders

This is just a tool to generate a bunch of random space invaders, based on the invader fractal. It's amazing what the human brain will do with bilateral symmetry. :p

It's fun though. You can find some nice pixelated images quickly with this thing. Need help creating sprites for your new graphing calculator game? Just set the dimensions to 8x8 and click Generate until you find some that you like.

Next up - fractal invaders, colored invaders, procedural trees...







Ahh, trees.