Ludum Dare #23

For Ludum Dare #23, I went in with one purpose: To make a game. Specifically, to write an engine for a game as I prefer engine design over game design. I had no desire to win the competition, just the desire to work on a game from start to finish. Since I’ve been busy doing other things for Convict Interactive and tutoring virtually full-time at UoW, I haven’t had the time to just sit down and work on a game from start to finish. Sure, I’ve done some work on Triangle Man, but that is barely anything and is a different experience. You can say “yeah, I worked on that game” for a game that you only partially work on, but for a game that you work on from start to finish you’re able to say “I helped build that game to what it is today from its infancy”. Personally, I prefer that feeling much more.

The idea behind the game was that you are a mouse who must leave your small home in order to search for your father who has gone missing. We did plan on putting in multiple endings (a lot of which are where you die due to various things) but we only managed to get the base level in place. The game has got a few design flaws which we neglected as we more or less just wanted to get it working first.

The game itself was simple, probably a little too simple. As such, the game is nothing more than a simple 2D platformer. Whilst some would say that the gameplay of a 2D platformer is solid, I still feel that the game definitely need more. We did intend on putting more into it but unfortunately we just didn’t get the time to do it. It also doesn’t help that I wasn’t able to start the project roughly 3 hours after it started since I had to work at the University.

The way I approached this competition is not the way I would normally approach a game making challenge. Normally I would sit down with the other members of the group and we would throw ideas around until we found one that fit. However for Ludum Dare I kind of decided to take the approach of just building the engine for the game idea. Whilst I do enjoy building enjoys, I must admit that I was a little out of my comfort zone for skipping the ideas creation process, more so because it helps me get a much better idea of the game I’m helping build. For future competitions I plan to take full participation in the game design process.

Getting the idea over the phone was also a horrible idea. It was far too difficult for me to fully understand the idea Luke had in his mind which meant that the code I was writing could have been completely wrong. In a way, the code was wrong. The physics I had written were far too simple for the idea Luke had and I felt they were far too complicated for me to do on my own if I also wanted to add in some gameplay elements. We were fortunate that the next idea we went with was able to utilize the physics I had already written by that stage so we didn’t really lose out on any time. I believe that for the next competition we can resolve this issue by ensuring we are able to discuss the idea in person.

Whilst I firmly believe that the physics I wrote were already beginning to rival the physics written by Jordan for Triangle Man, I still would not use these physics in a development environment. The physics was written so that each movable entity would calculate its own collisions and resolve them which could result in some resolutions that are not appropriate. Instead I would much rather prefer to have a manager to check the resolutions and deal with them accordingly. But I am still experimenting with this; I hadn’t tried to write a full 2D physics engine before this competition.

One of the biggest issues I had with the game was that Luke was unable to do the artwork he thought he would. Unfortunately one of his other jobs required his attention and it took up much more time than either of us anticipated. As a result, Luke was only able to spend roughly 4-5 hours working on this game with me. As such, I noticed when I realized that Luke wasn’t going to be able to spend a whole heap of time on the game that I began to lose the drive for it as I could tell that it just wouldn’t progress to the idea we had in mind.

If I were to give any advice on participating in a Game Making Challenge based off my entry for Ludum Dare #23, it would have to be this:

  • Don’t start working on the game until everyone is comfortable with the idea
  • Don’t start working on the game until everyone has a clear understanding of what the game is about
  • Try to utilize code/assets that you own or are free to use in order to help give you an advantage, but you should only use it if everyone is comfortable with it
  • If you are going to rely on someone else to help you complete the game, ensure that they will be able to put in the effort before the competition starts
  • If you get partway through a game and figure out that it’s not going to work the way you had intended then feel free to throw it out and start on another idea
  • Work with an engine you’re comfortable with
  • Ensure you get an appropriate amount of rest – in my experience, nothing kills productivity more than a tired person

You can also download a copy of the game from here.

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Triangle Man


Triangle Man is an exciting 2D punishment platformer that challenges the player to use their wits in order to solve a vast variety of levels designed to test your problem solving and multi-tasking skills. The game is being developed for PC and will be released during April of 2012 on various PC Digital Distribution networks.

Triangle Man has been developed in C# with the XNA Framework using an in-house engine. Our engine is small and has been developed specifically for Triangle Man. The engine offers some basic 2D physics, collision detection and a 2D particle system. The game has also been incorporated with an easy to use Level Editor which allows the developers to pause a game and edit the level in real time.

The main issue that we’ve had with the game is finding individuals who are able to help us produce the artwork that is required for the game. We are fortunate that the two we have found are able to help us out with this predicament and do as much work as possible since they both have other commitments which take priority. With their help we will hopefully be able to complete the game by our April deadline, but unfortunately since it took us several months in the first place we’ve had to cut some potential content from the game just to keep it from taking an extra 3 months to complete.

Whilst the team have enjoyed working on Triangle Man, we are very anxious to get it complete soon so that we can release it and find out what everyone else thinks of our first major title.

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Global Game Jam 2012 – First 12 hours

So it is currently 4am in the morning which means that the Global Game Jam for Wollongong has been running for a full 12 hours. We announced the theme 11 hours ago and everyone is working hard getting an early version of their game up and running. We have 9 teams that have formed and it’s great to see people who have never met collaborating together to create something awesome. After all, that’s what Global Game Jam is all about!
So far, one team has managed to get a fully functioning prototype of the basic elements of their game, another team has come up with an idea and decided to rebuild the work they’ve done so far in another engine, and several groups have decided to call it a night and try to get some sleep so that they can really hit their game hard tomorrow. We’ve even got one team member who has spent more time walking around checking out other teams than they have working on their own game.
The atmosphere I’ve experience here so far has been fantastic. Everyone is getting along nicely and teams are sharing their ideas amongst each other. It’s great to see that no one is worried about people stealing their ideas and keeping them to themselves. It’s amazing how committed some of them are as well, we currently have 9 out of our 28 jammers still working hard. I just hope that the lack of sleep doesn’t come back to haunt them later when they’re all in crunch time during those last 12 hours. I’m also hoping we don’t experience any technical difficulties like we have so far.
Unfortunately, our wired network decided that it wanted to stop leasing out IP addresses about 1 hour into the competition due to a faulty config file on the DHCP server, something which I don’t have access to as it’s completely controlled by UoW. We were lucky that the head of ITS was able to come down and sort it out, but it still took a few hours to solve which meant that no-one could access our file repository. It’s a good thing that everyone seemed to already have the software they wanted installed on their computers before the competition and that they had their own planned method of version control.
My fist graveyard shift is scheduled to end in about 2 hours time, but if I’m anything like I am now, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. I’d much rather keep watching everyone and seeing the awesome games they’re creating.

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I’m Back!

So you may have noticed that I haven’t really posted much over the last year. Well that is all about to change as I’m making it my new years resolution to update this site again. I may not post a new update every week, but I will always aim to make at least one new post per month.
One of the reasons I plan on updating my page again is that I know some people who have found it useful, one in particular who is now a good friend of mine. So as such, I have a renewed motivation to post interesting and hopefully useful information up here.
I look forward to updating you all again very soon!

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Planetarians Update

Over a year ago I posted that Planetarians would hopefully be released soon. Due to a complete stuff-up of the company set-up and the fact that it was only set up by yours truly a little over a month ago, the version of Planetarians that we had can no longer be released.
Planetarians was originally written using C# and the XNA3.1 framework. The App Hub (which was the XNA Creators Club) now requires a game to be written using the XNA4 framework, so the original version of Planetarians was not longer valid until it underwent an upgrade to XNA4. The upgrade was successful in terms of the number of errors produced by the compiler, but unfortunately it was a complete failure otherwise. Because of how much the GraphicsDevice functionality has changed between XNA3.1 and XNA4, various anomalies began to pop up that were never experienced before such as the planet only being drawn in a single viewport instead of all viewports. The special effects produced similar results as well as far worse results.
Due to these ‘undocumented features’, we decided to do a re-write of all drawing and special effects code. However due to one members wishes, we will also be re-writing a chunk of the update loops in order to make them more efficient and much more manageable which essentially means were will be re-writing approximately 90% of the game. I say that we are re-writing approximately 90% of the code as some of the code we have produced for Project Aurora can quite easily be adapted to suit Planetarians needs. For example, the GamerTag Manager that I wrote for Aurora can be moved to Planetarians without any modifications and it will also make a lot of the Live services much easier to handle.
Fortunately there is one upside to the new version of Planetarians. We will be able to simply improve the assets we were using and then produce more to add to the overall depth of the game. This is something that we would have like to do originally, but due to the time constraints we had set in place last year, this was simply not feasible.
We hope that the new version of Planetarians will be ready for sale on XBLIG sometime in June, which is only 2 months away. This may seem like a lot of work to do in such a short time span, but luckily we’ve got a larger team and all of the logic is already there, it’s just a matter of fixing any issues and improving the overall feel of the game.

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Convict Interactive

Convict Interactive is now officially a company.
I know that about a year ago I said that Convict Interactive was going to be officially set up soon, but unfortunately that never happened due to the designated member not knowing where to start even though he assured us that it would only be a few more weeks. This happened for quite a while and didn’t cause an issue as we weren’t quite ready to release our first title. But after about 9 months of seeing little-to-no progress, I decided that enough was enough and took over the job to start up the company. After a few meetings with our accountants, the company has officially been set up and registered. A process that took less than two months (a little longer than it has to take to set up a company, but I wanted to make sure it was set up the way that would suit us best).
So now all that is left for us to do is begin selling our games! Our first game, Planetarians, is currently undergoing some final testing, but we hope to have in on the XBLIG market in early April. We are also working on two other titles, one of which we are hoping to be released around June, the other around August.

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Jurassic Bar

As you may recall, I posted a while back that I was again entering the 48-Hour Game Making Competition up in Brisbane. Well it’s over and unfortunately we were unable to win with our game this year. The 3 key words we were given this year were ‘dinosaur’, ‘revenge’ and ‘bar’.
With those 3 keywords in mind we came up with the idea of Jurassic Bar, a single or multi-player game where dinosaurs must gain revenge for their fallen brethren who have been eaten by cavemen. The scenario is set within a prehistoric bar. There are 4 playable dinosaur types, each with their own unique attack methods. As one of these dinosaurs, the player must fight all 3 types of cavemen that enter the bar and knock out as many as possible in a game of survival. The game will continue to run, getting more & more difficult until the player is overrun and beaten by the cavemen.
Our game was built using XNA Game Studio 3.1 and is currently in the process of being upgraded to XNA Game Studio 4.0 so that it can be released on XBLIG. Hopefully Jurassic Bar as well as some other games will be released near the end of March.

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High Hopes

Last year I entered a competition with some friends from my University called the ’48-Hour Game Making Challenge’. In this competition, we are given 3 words which we must incorporate into a game and build within 48-hours. The 3 words given to us for 2009 were: ‘Storm’, ‘Giant’ & ‘Love’, and there were 20 teams competing in total. The game that is the most innovative & polished wins the grand prize. The words were announced at 4pm and after approximately 6 hours of building and throwing random ideas around, the group finally settled on a small game where two players simply jump up a series of randomly generated clouds in a race to try and save their boyfriend from the evil giant that had kidnapped him to eat for dinner. The fact that the two players are fighting over the one man adds an element of competitiveness as they throw shoes or slap each other in an effort to try and stop the other player from reaching the top of the clouds and dodging that random utensils that the giant throws down in an effort to stop the two lovers.

Because the game idea was fairly simple, we were able to spend a lot of time polishing off some of the fun features of the game, as well as learning new information about the XNA framework and how we could better ourselves when using it in the future. We built this entire game from scratch, whilst also allowing ourselves to get approximately 6 hours sleep each night which we feel helped give us an edge over the other competing teams as were were much more alert than the teams that only had a few hours sleep, if any at all.

I am very proud to say that we won this competition and we hope to do so again in the 2010 competition starting on October 1st. This year we plan on being even better prepared in an effort to defend our title. You can find some gameplay footage of High Hopes below.

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MaxTrayne

During 2009, I studied CSCI321 which is the major group project for those doing a Bachelor of Computer Science at UoW. I was in a group with 4 other students/friends under the supervision of Luke McAven. The project we chose was a railroad construction kit based off of the Thomas the Tank Engine Trackmaster System, with our chosen name MaxTrayne. During the early stages of the project, problems arose with the current project leader and so a new one was sought to replace him. I was that replacement, but there was a lot that needed to be done and allocated in what was by then a rapidly reducing timeframe.

MaxTrayne offers users the ability to place pieces of a track together on their computer so that they can see how all the pieces they have fit together to create a single track. It also gives users the ability to determine how many pieces they would require in order to build their desired track, as well as the ability to print out the track to make it easier when it comes to build time. The program also allows users to watch Thomas travel around their track in full 3D, as well as change Thomas’ path through various switches that may or may not have been placed.

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Dream Build Play Challenge

Every year, Microsoft hold a game making challenge with a grand prize of $40,000. The aim of the challenge is to make a game that is fun, innovative and polished using XNA Game Studio. When I started Convict Interactive, one of the items on our agenda was this challenge. Since we were already planning to use XNA to develop our first title, we thought we  would enter the competition. Whilst most entrants have been working on their entry for a year, we only had about 2 months to develop our game.

So we decided to enter Planetarians into the challenge. Near the end of April, they finally announced the top 20 submissions and announcing the final winners early May. Unfortunately we did not even make it into the top 20 submissions. Whilst this did not surprise us as Planetarians required some more polishing, we were still disappointed. However, a congratulations is in order to all the teams that won the challenge, particularly the team that created Lumi, who won the grand prize.

We do plan on entering the competition next year, and hope to have your support. You can view the trailers below.

Official Trailer:

Gameplay Trailer:

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