Mighty Vision

definitions

2012-01-25T06:46:00.000-08:00

(This is a response to a discussion on twitter last night between @doougle, @raphkoster, @ElectronDance, @edclef, @v21 and others. Tried to reply on twitter but it expanded to like 8 tweets so I'm posting it here instead. Sorry if that makes it EVEN LONGER AND RAMBLIER.)

Definitions are a powerful tool. In mathematics, we can precisely define classes of object (numbers, algebraic structures, topological spaces, etc.) and then learn things about them by logically manipulating the definition. Writing down a formal definition is the only way we can actually get at a class of non-physical objects and do stuff with it. This the thing I've seen students struggle the most with in learning maths - they will start out trying to prove a result without considering the definitions of the objects it mentions, and they get nowhere at all because they have nothing to work with but a vague intuition and some examples.

Definitions need to be exclusive to be useful. The smaller the class of objects you're talking about, the more truths will hold in general for all objects in the class. If you talk about finite two-player perfect-information zero-sum games, you can make some pretty strong statements, which are very useful if you're working in that context.

It's important to bear in mind that theorems are completely meaningless if not all their conditions are satisfied - if you try to apply them where your assumptions don't hold, bad things can happen.

And it's important to bear in mind that a definition does not say anything about how things should be. It's not a prescription. It doesn't say that what lies outside is not worthy of consideration.

@doougle: @ElectronDance @raphkoster Raph, these discussions have POLITICAL consequences. Like what games get recognized at IGF, etc.

So there's a tension here. For POLITICAL purposes, definitions should be as inclusive as possible. Everyone should just make cool stuff and not care whether it fits some restriction, and festivals like IGF should be broad and accepting of all of this. But for useful technical discussions, we need to be clear and precise about what we're talking about by using exclusive definitions. When people confuse the two there's a problem.

I kind of wish "game" wasn't the general term for interactive software art. Maybe we kind of need a new term for rule-driven consequentially-interactive maybe-competitive games, because they're an interesting class of object and it's worth discussing them, and it would be nice if we could reason about them without having to make exceptions for Proteus every time.

New Year cleansing

2012-01-10T06:08:00.000-08:00

It's now 2012.
Here are some smaller games I made in 2010. Some of them are from an album concept I was working on, but at this point I think it's better just to release them and make something new than to try to complete the album.

download link: IDIOLECT (dropbox) (windows only)
edit: Avast is giving a virus warning on this for some people, seems to be a false alarm.

* Fire Up The Lemma Engines
* You And Your Motion
* Cubic Computing Carcass (doesn't have an end-state)
* The Bristling Beard of Science (puzzle game, doesn't really fit with the rest here)

I've included an exe (Idiolect) with some of the other album tracks which are fragmentary and very unfinished but that you might like to look at anyway:
* Black Pyramid Script
* This Is The Dystopian Future
* Cryptoforest
* A Simple Instruction (no interaction in this one, but mesmerising)

I've also bundled in a few of my other games from the same period that are already released, that fit with these stylistically and round it out to a nice collection:
* Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J
* the sense of connectedness
* Babeltron 2010
* Hyperabuse Monolith

not a bundle

2011-12-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

Oh, and maybe I'm a bit late posting this here, but Vertex Dispenser is 50% off over Christmas, until Jan 2. Here are some other cool games that are discounted too (thanks Dejobaan for the mention!):

Glitch Tank

2011-12-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

Released a game for iPad: Glitch Tank (app store)

It's a competitive two-player game, made with the same constraints and aesthetic as Exuberant Struggle (160*100 resolution, 8 colours, 2 players, arrow-keys only as input^*, minimalist real-time strategy, high randomness).

It's somewhat inspired by RoboRally, but takes things in a different direction. You have a hand of four random actions which are replaced when you play them, and have to try to use them to destroy the other player. Basically I made up a list of all the things I could think of that tanks do and made them be actions in the game: drive around, lay minefields, fire lasers, jump, reproduce. The twist comes from that last one: you end up with multiple tanks, and the same commands are given to all of them.

^* Since I've put it on iPad the control restriction doesn't apply anymore, but it influenced the design.

Something that came up when playtesting this was that sometimes people would spam actions as fast as they could instead of trying to pick what was best to do. This didn't turn out to be a good strategy - you're more likely to kill yourself than your opponent - but it tended to dominate the game if someone did it; their opponent couldn't effectively do much more than wait for them to kill themselves. So I added an "overheating" effect, where your tank will lock up for several seconds if you press actions too quickly. It feels like a bit of a hack since it wasn't a viable strategy, but since players were doing it anyway and not enjoying it something had to be done. (I may need to adjust the parameters for when this happens - let me know if you're finding games dominated by button-mashing.)

At some point I'll release a PC version, but probably not on its own - it just doesn't work as well on PC, because there's an extra layer of indirection in the controls. Will probably do a telephone build as well, although the screen does seems too small for it to be very natural with two players; I'll have to get hold of one to test.

Two-player Lessons

2011-10-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts from designing two-player games:

1) Damage and score are equivalent. This isn't quite true: score can be unbounded if there's another condition for the game ending, but a target score is equivalent to a target amount of damage; competing to be the first to deal 100 damage is identical to competing to be the first to score 100 points. There are some perceptual differences: numbers going up feel different to numbers going down, and being able to recover damage done to yourself feels quite different to being able to reduce your opponent's score. The abstractness of score is generally more appropriate for more abstract games.
In multiplayer (in the sense of "more than two players") this symmetry is broken, and score/damage lead to quite different dynamics.

2) Everything is zero-sum. In multiplayer games it's common for different objects to have different values for each player, and this can add a lot of depth. In a two-player game, everything has the same value for both players; anything that helps one player is just as much hurting the other. If there's something only one of us can get, it's value to me is "what good it does for me to have it" + "what good it does for me for you not to have it". The value to me of you not having it is exactly how good it would be from your perspective for you to have it, so this equation is symmetric in the players - for example, something worth 3 points to me and 5 to you makes a difference of 3+5=8 points between our scores, no matter which of us gets it.
So lots of mechanics common in multiplayer games just don't work very well in two-player. If something is more effective for one player because of synergies with other powers, it's equally desirable for their opponent to prevent them getting. If an auction determines who gets something, each player should be willing to pay the exact same amount. If an action benefits an opponent as well as yourself, that is a strict disadvantage.
As a side-effect, when balancing a game sometimes the value of an object turns out to be double what you might expect - for example, in Exuberant Struggle sometimes a "new life" powerup appears; collecting this is actually a swing of *two* lives, because it gives you one and prevents your opponent getting one. (If you're in a situation where you can't possibly get the powerup, there is a third option - destroy it so that your opponent can't get it; a swing of one life, equivalent to killing them!) In ADAM ATOMIC's Terratri, capturing an opponent's territory is worth twice as much as capturing unoccupied territory but has the same cost - this gives rise to a degenerate "snaking" tactic of continually exchanging territory (Vertex Dispenser would suffer from the same problem if capturing enemy vertices were not sufficiently more slow and risky than capturing neutral ones).

3) In order to break this symmetry and get each player doing something different (without which the game is not very interesting) it's necessary to obscure the choices somehow so that it's hard to select the best option^*. Some level of obscurity also helps to soften the essential viciousness of a pure zero-sum game - e.g. in games like Magic, Race for the Galaxy, Dominion (2-player), both players have a constructive feeling of "building up", even though with each action one player's raw chance of victory decreases.

Obscurity can be achieved through:
- Computational complexity (as in Chess, etc.). There may be an optimal choice, but it's very hard to work out what it is. If there's a tight time limit on making decisions then the difficulty of finding the best move doesn't have to be so high, and if there is unlimited time available and the complexity is too high this can lead to "analysis paralysis" as a player tries to compute their ideal move.
- Randomness or hidden information, so that it's impossible to determine the best choice using the information currently available. This isn't a completely satisfactory method because there will still be a statistically optimal choice based on what you do know (often this optimal choice is to randomly select between several alternatives with specified weights on each).
- Difficulty of execution, so that even if you know the best move it is still challenging to perform it.
- Secrecy of rules: simply not giving players access to what they need to know to make the best choice. This option is interesting to me, because it's only really possible with videogames, but it's not entirely satisfactory - it's more elegant for a game to offer difficult choices even when the rules are fully understood. It's also not very reliable; a sufficiently motivated player can always reverse engineer the rules.

^* While obscurity is of special importance to two-player games, it is a key element of games in general, and in this they are distinct to puzzles - you want a puzzle to be eventually solved, even if the solution may be very difficult, but it's better for a game never to be completely solved.

Vertex Dispenser updated

2011-09-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

I've updated Vertex Dispenser. Main changes:
- added mouse control for selecting abilities: scroll wheel to select colour, left/right button to activate ability. (also middle mouse to delete vertices; if you're using this instead of the alphabet keys you'll probably want to set movement to WASD instead of arrow keys.)
- slightly improved how it handles lag. (still some work to be done here.)
- fixed crashing on startup on some Macs with MacOS 10.5.
- small balance tweaks: Damage All does +2 damage to objects, Roaming Mine does +1 damage on a direct hit, vertices captured by Local Capture are invincible for a short duration.

A lot of people complaining about the large number of keys used for abilities. This really surprised me, because nobody mentioned it as a problem in playtesting, and because the keys are laid out in a really clear logical manner. I added an option ("Horizontal") to display the abilities across the bottom of the screen instead of to the right, so their positions map directly to the key positions - I find this a less convenient position for seeing when they're charged, but the option is there if anyone wants it. And now I've added an option to activate abilities with the mouse. It took quite a bit of experimentation to find a system for this that felt vaguely okay, and this is the result.. moving the mouse to select abilities didn't feel anywhere near as good (even with visual and audio feedback) as using the scroll wheel. It seems a bit inelegant to use the mouse just for buttons and scrolling, and not for the main thing that a mouse actually does (continuous movement), but I guess that's what you get when the game is discrete. The option is now there if you want it.

I doubt that this will make much difference to anyone. The game has been pretty unsuccessful, and small fixes like this aren't going to change that - I'd have to make it a completely different game, something I'd like less, something much closer to what's gone before. (Preferably a puzzle-platformer, that's how you make a successful indie game, right?)

BIGJam

2011-09-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

Went to the Berlin Indie Game Jam last weekend, a meetup of game developers. Made four games, three of which aren't awful.

5 hour jam, theme "album cover of your choice": Resistance Revolution
3 hour jam, theme Free/Cat: Feline Feeling
2 hour jam, theme Mysterious/Enemy: Mysterious Sniper
3 hour jam, theme Delicious/Suicide: Delicious Cake (don't bother with this one)

Resistance Revolution is my favourite of these, it was based on this Muse cover:

A quite satisfactory weekend. Met lots of cool people.

Vertex Dispenser

2011-06-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

TLDR version: released a game, get it on steam.

This game has haunted me since 2005.
My first attempt at it pretty much failed. Back then it was a fairly standard RTS with a few weird new ideas mixed in. I didn't much know what I was doing, and the code got into quite a mess.

A couple of years later, I came back to it. I'd started a few other games (but not finished them), and knew better new how to go about things. I cut out the unnecessary parts of the design, trimmed it down to the core idea that was interesting, and ended up with something fantastic. And then I made it, played it quite a bit, tweaked it, relea--

No, wait. I didn't release it, it wasn't quite ready. This was early 2007.
It was a couple of weeks away from being done, but I needed to focus more on my studies, so I left it for a bit. It's been a couple of weeks away from completion ever since.

Back then, it was multiplayer-only. This wasn't ideal; although the game isn't inaccessible, it does have some skill to it, and it's easier to learn if you can take things at your own pace. (Not everyone agrees with this - some people like to learn an RTS by going straight into the multiplayer and losing until they win. This isn't for everyone. You're welcome to use this approach here, but it's maybe a bit harder when the game isn't a repeat of something you've played before.)

So I added a single player mode. It wasn't very good, so I threw it away and added another one. It's a series of levels with different goals, a "campaign", a fairly standard structure for a single-player mode of an RTS game.
Of course, this meant I needed to make AI for it, so I did. It will beat you.

One time, when I hadn't worked on the game for several months, I came back to it with a lot of new ideas for abilities. So I added them.
Some of them didn't work out very well, so I took them away.
It grew.
And then it was done. Well, almost. A couple of weeks away. I tested it with a bunch of different people, kept finding new things to fix and improve. Submitted it to the IGF - it didn't get in, but I met some amazing people who encouraged me that it was worth keeping working on it.
I got stuck, didn't work on it for a while. Friends would ask me if I'd finished it yet - no I haven't. I thought it was basically done - yes it is. But not quite.

This year, I had reason to switch to working part-time, and move to a different country.
Instantly, the game jumped back out at me.
"You're part-time, you can choose your hours, if you just spend a couple of weeks working on me full-time, I'll actually be finished."
Yeah right.
It was mostly correct - what I needed to do was work full-time on it for a little while. But those weeks were actually months,; making games is hard, and the final polishing stage is the hardest. Now I've completely lost track of whatever else I was supposed to be doing. But the game is done and it's fantastic and I'm so excited to finally get it out so others can play it. I hope you like it.

TIGSource review
tinysubversions
RockPaperShotgun Indie Forecast preview
DIYgamer interview

Steam store page

Vic Davis - fiddly little decisions

2011-05-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

Vic Davis (a.k.a. Cryptic Comet) is responsible for a couple of quite nice games: Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum. He has a new game on the way sometime - Six Gun Saga - but apparently it's taking longer than expected to finish (I know the feeling).

These games have a very distinctive common style. Each takes an very iconic setting - post-apocalyptic wasteland, Hell, the wild west - and makes it feel quite fresh. They borrow mechanics heavily from board games, with explicit simulations of cards, dice, etc., but take advantage of the computer's capacity to handle an amount of complexity and hidden information that would be unreasonable in an actual board game. But what I want to discuss here is something a bit more obscure: they take actions that seem like a mere formality and turn them into strategic decisions by attaching a resource cost.

In Armageddon Empires, you train and recruit various army units - mutant dinosaur riders, deranged cultists, giant robot tanks - and send them out to fight for you. But before you can send them out, you have to assign them to a group! You only have a limited number of action points per turn; creating groups and moving units between them uses these up, as well as the usual stuff like ordering groups around on the battlefield and building stuff. It's sometimes frustrating - I've trained up this Lovecraftian horror but I can't send it out to devour my enemies yet because I don't have a group to assign them to; I can create a new group for it but then I don't have the actions left to send it out. But it's not unrealistic - managing an army in real life has a lot of administrative overhead, and this simulates that somewhat - and once you get used to taking it into account, it becomes a small but meaningful strategic consideration. I have some actions spare this turn - do I move my scouting party to explore a different hex, or do I create a new group ready for the units I'll be building in a few turns time?

In Solium Infernum, the resource system involves drawing randomly generated resource cards, containing elements like "ichor" and "darkness", which you then use to spend on armies/relics/etc.. The cards generally contain more than one unit of these resources, and may even contain different types, so sometimes you're forced to overpay - e.g. if you want to buy something that costs 3 hellfire, and you only have cards with 2 hellfire each, you're going to actually have to pay 4 for it. They don't give change in Hell. It makes for a really deep and interesting system, because the 'actual cost' of anything can vary from turn to turn depending on how your resources are divided up.
Overpaying isn't always a problem - most items in the game are purchased through a blind auction system, so often it's desirable to pay more than the minimum bid anyway in order to overbid your competitors.
Where this system gets fiddly - and some would say unnecessarily so - is the constraint that you can only pay with up to six resource cards. This can be frustrating: numerically I have enough resources to pay for an upgrade, but they're spread across too many cards so I can't use them. It adds an extra axis of complexity to the resources - sometimes you'd like them in smaller chunks so that you're not overpaying, but other times you want them in larger chunks so you can actually use them to pay for the bigger items. You can spend an action to combine resource cards together, but actions are very precious in this game - initially you only get 2 actions a turn, but you can increase this to a maximum of 6 at great expense. So you're forced to make choices between preparing to buy something big or taking something small - basically it sort of means expensive items cost disproportionately more because they cost an extra action as well. There's a risk to this too - if you're preparing to buy an item at auction which then someone else purchases first, you might end up with resources combined in an undesirable way. And either way, there's at least one turn where you have this big combined resource card in your vaults, where there's a risk of another player stealing it..

You can also cast magic spells on your opponents, which costs resources. At the start of the game, you are asked to rank all other players in order of who you consider the greatest threat, and it will cost less to cast spells on opponents lower on this list. You can change this ordering at a later point, but that costs resources as well, so you have to weigh whether you expect to save enough resources from the cheaper spells for it to be worth the cost of changing it.

I've seen a lot of complaints about all these mechanics I've mentioned, and fairly so - they are somewhat fiddly. But they end up generating interesting decisions, which is kind of the point of strategy games, right? This seems to be a key element of Vic's design style: to take away something that players might expect to get for free, and make them pay for it instead.
(Another example of this kind of thing I can think of: in Red Alert, you didn't get a minimap display until you'd constructed a Radar building, and then you'd lose it again if your opponent destroyed that building or cut off power to it. Brilliant.)

bullshot

2011-04-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

The term "bullshot" is sometimes used discussing videogames (apparently originating from a Penny Arcade strip); it refers to images released from an upcoming game that do not accurately represent the graphics of the game. And people say this like it's a bad thing, like they're somehow being cheated by seeing something that looks good. I want to debunk this as a meaningless complaint. Yes, it's not giving an accurate representation of what the game LOOKS LIKE, but how is that even relevant? We don't play games for what they look like; if that was all we wanted we would look at pictures or movies. We play games for the experience of playing them, for what goes on inside our heads as we play them, and a "bullshot" can be a more accurate representation of that than a direct screenshot.

Take ADOM for example.

If you've never played a roguelike game, this looks like a chaotic mess. But I see a quaint little village with a shop selling packaged meals, a few trees scattered around, and a small lake. Through playing the game, I've learnt what the symbols mean, new structures have been built inside my brain to interpret them. I still see the ascii characters, but they now mean something to me. ADOM has an intricate, detailed world, and just showing someone a screenshot doesn't communicate that, it wouldn't be a good way to sell the game to someone. If you had to come up with an image that expresses what the game is like, you wouldn't use a screenshot. You'd use a bullshot. And for many players, that might help them to grasp the game - there's a steep learning curve as you master the interface and learn what the symbols mean, and having this image of the world already in your head might help you get through this until you understand the game enough to form your own image.

This is the same with any game. When you first play an FPS, you see detailed pictures of monsters, wall textures, vegetation.. but after you've been playing for a couple of hours, you've internalised the meaning of what's going on screen. You don't see a high-polygon model of a red spiky demon thing, you see "IMP, shoots fireballs, choice: get out of the way or shoot it quick". Your brain has reduced the enemy to a symbol; you're no longer paying attention to what it looks like, because you know what it means.

So if the graphics of a game don't matter anymore once you're playing it, their purpose is purely for the first impression. This first impression is something the videogame industry pumps millions of dollars into crafting, and it's clearly something that sells games, but after the initial hit it doesn't do anything for the player (in fact, so-called "good graphics" often impair play by cluttering the display and making the symbolic meaning of game objects on-screen harder to discern). A bullshot just moves this first impression outside of the game; it gives a more vivid image of what the game objects represent than the in-game graphics can convey, and thus eases the process of building mental symbols for them.

playtest system

2011-03-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

I've been using the following system for playtesting Vertex Dispenser. Recently I was a tester for Jason Rohrer's new game INSIDE A STAR FILLED SKY, and he was using a similar system to great effect. I thought I'd write it up because it's extremely useful; I would have benefited from implementing it sooner than I did (and I should probably use it for more of my games), so maybe this will help someone.

Basically, when someone plays my game all their input is recorded and logged to a file. Then they send me the logs, which I can play back and watch what they did in the game. I see (essentially) exactly what they saw, as though I was watching behind them as they played.

This is so ridiculously useful. Actually watching someone play is a million times better than sending them a game and getting written feedback. With written feedback there's an additional overhead from them having to explain where they had a problem, and if they've missed or misunderstood something important then they might not even know they have a problem, or might associate the problem with something completely different. If you can see them you know exactly what went wrong. Watching someone play in person is good, but it's easy to mess it up by telling them something to help them out. When someone downloads your game and plays it, they won't have you there to give hints, so recording remote playtests gives a much more accurate (and scary) depiction of what will happen when your game is released. It also enlarges your pool of possible testers, because they don't have to be geographically proximate and can do it in their own time.

(Written feedback is still useful, because you might determine from it ways that someone's mental model of the game is wrong that weren't clear from watching them play, or you might ask them why they were doing something that you didn't understand in the game. Also, suggestions from testers can be really useful; often you have to filter out stuff that conflicts with your own vision of the game, but sometimes another person will be able to come up with really excellent ideas that you couldn't think of because of your preconceptions.)

For this system to work, you need to make sure the game is completely deterministic from input. This means that updates to the game state shouldn't depend on the frame rate, and you have to be really careful with floating point numbers - they can give different results across different platforms, so it's best to stick with fixed point arithmetic if you can.. this is the hard bit. (Pseudo)random numbers are okay as long as you store the seed used with the log file. The input might be at the level of keystrokes and mouse movements, or at some higher level of game actions (i.e. "order unit X to move to position Y" for an RTS).

What else is great about this method is that once you've implemented it, several other things become trivial:
- It's useful in your own testing. If you think you glimpsed something out of place in one frame, you can just replay the log file frame by frame to check for sure.
- Replays are cool to have anyway. In an action or puzzle game, some players might like to share "look what I did", and in a strategy game some might like to look back over their games to see how they lost and can improve.
- Replays can be handy for tutorials. In Vertex Dispenser I have a couple of levels where I play a recording of myself solving a puzzle or using an ability, because playtests indicated that just using words wasn't explaining them adequately. These only took a few minutes to hack in because I already had this replay functionality to use.
- Networked multiplayer can be easier to implement (though still far from trivial). All you need to do is pass player input around the network, and advance the game simultaneously with the same input on each copy, and everyone will stay in sync (although you might want to check hashes of the game state regularly just to be sure). For some types of game it's more important to have a low response time locally than to have other players exactly in sync, so you want to do some kind of prediction instead of waiting for remote input, but a modification of this system can still work - I rewind when remote actions are received and then recompute up to the present time taking them into account.

Something Jason did but I didn't was to add to the file as they play, before input is acted upon, so that if there's a crash then the log will crash the game at the same point. I made the mistake of just saving the file at the end of each level, which means if there's a crash then a few minutes of recording are lost. Next time I'll know better.

GDC

2011-03-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

GDC was awesome.

It's ridiculously huge. 19000 attendees, what? If there are that many people making games, how are there not a hell of a lot more games?
(Answer: most of these people aren't making their own games, they're working on other people's games, or hiring people to work on other people's games, or funding other people to make games, or distributing other people's games.. the mainstream industry is an alien place.)

So I felt a bit lost at first, until I met up with some folk I know from the internet and UK indie meetups. It helped to be involved with something as well, I think if I hadn't been speaking at EGW I'd have felt more lost and overwhelmed. (Speaking was surprisingly not overwhelming, despite being to an order of magnitude more people than I'd ever spoken in front of before. It helped that I wasn't on my own, but maybe it's easier to talk about games than mathematics too.)

I happened to have gotten a full pass for free, so I went to talks and stuff, but it would have been well worth going just to meet up with people, even to just stay at the hostel and meet people there outside of GDC! I'm used to gamemaking just being my own weird hobby that nobody else does, so being surrounded by others who do the same was an amazing experience. Some of the talks were really good, but it wouldn't have been worth me actually paying full price for them.

Michael Todd's talk about depression really spoke to where I am right now with my mathematics. I've been in a downward spiral where lack of progress leads to lack of motivation and then lack of motivation leads to lack of progress. He suggested some strategies for dealing with this (in the context of game development, but applicable outside of it): focus on highly rewarding projects, stop being a perfectionist, work on shorter projects, measure work hours, design to suit your abilities.

Brian Moriarty gave an entertaining, well-researched, thought-provoking, but mostly wrong talk defending Roger Ebert's (dull, poorly-researched, completely wrong) claim that games cannot be art.
He pointed out that to determine whether games are art we need to agree on a definition of "art". Clearly games are are art under some definitions. But after this good start he failed to define his term "sublime art"! One of the common features of his examples of "sublime art" seemed to be historic significance, but this was presumably not the intention.
He made the point that videogames are not exceptional among games; they should only be considered to be art if board games are also. This seems obvious to me, but I've come across those who think otherwise so it's worth saying. He used this to support his argument that games aren't art because some philosopher didn't include them in his enumeration of art forms, which seemed a bit weak to me.
He also claimed that nobody considered mathematics to be an art form; I do, and I know many others who do also (mostly mathematicians).
He said we can't expect big studios to produce great art, because they need to make a profit, but then made the unusual claim that the same applies to independent game developers; he is perhaps unaware of how many people are making games while financially supporting themselves (or not) by other means (or with other games). But this is irrelevant to Ebert's claim, which was that games cannot ever be art, not that nobody is motivated to make artistic games.

Other talks I enjoyed were Steph Thirion's on designing by accident and experiment, and Brenda Braithwaite's on designing games about tragedy.

Overall, an incredible week. Hopefully I'll be able to go again - this happened to be on my way back from a friend's wedding in NZ (after not having been home for two years), so there was essentially no travel cost, and then I had a speaker's pass as well. Might not work out so perfectly next time.

Experimental Gameplay

2011-02-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12401
I'm presenting The Sense of Connectedness.
No idea how this has happened, but it's exciting.

Starcraft 2 fail

2011-02-23T15:49:00.000-08:00

I've been home for a little bit, so I've had the chance to play Starcraft 2 a little on my brother's computer. (I know, I'm a little late to the party - but being a bit of an itinerant at the moment I don't have a powerful desktop computer so I'm always behind on new releases; also I don't care.)

It's.. not as great as I was expecting. In several ways it's actually stepped backwards from the original. Certainly it looks pretty, the narrative is competent (one doesn't expect too much from videogame stories), and it has all the base-building and fighting and blowing things up one would expect. But the graphics are worse, units have less character, and it's missing some useful features one would expect these days, e.g. zoom. (Yes, there's a minimap, but minimaps were never an essential feature of the genre - they were a hack to get around the tech not being able to handle zooming out, and now it can.) They also left out 2/3 of the campaign (the Zerg and Protoss sections), which isn't such a big deal since they made the Terran section huge, but would have helped with learning to play the omitted races for multiplayer.

And yes, I did say the graphics are worse. This does not contradict it looking pretty. In the metric of being pleasing to look at in screenshots and videos the graphics are objectively better. But this isn't the primary purpose of graphics in a game! Compared to the original, the graphics do a worse job of communicating quickly and clearly what's going on. Colours and outlines have less contrast (in the original, unit colours were a lot more saturated than the background, which helped make them stand out), and unit types are less well distinguished. I once caused myself some trouble by mistaking a group of SCVs for a group of Reapers; they're both blocky robot things with glowy backs, but perform completely different roles in the game.

Not the end of the world, but kind of sad. And, I think, interesting to see how the goal of making detailed realistic graphics conflicts with the goal of making a game playable.

New goal: write non-negative posts about other games sometimes.

Exuberant Struggle

2011-02-22T18:10:00.000-08:00

Made this for a TIGSource competition with the theme "Versus".

Exuberant Struggle (windows)

Currently it only supports exactly two players, both on the same keyboard (WASD vs. arrows). I had a vague intention to add AI and networking sometime, but they both seem unnecessary now.

It's a sort of action/strategy game. Resources pop up in the middle of the screen, players control ships moving along the edges, line up with resources to pull them towards you and collect them. Then you can spend resources to make units and fire weapons (which are chosen from random options given you).

edit: updated (21/03/2011), new win condition and stuff, see tigsource thread if you want the details. updated (26/03/2011), minor balance tweaks, hopefully not going to tweak it any furuther.

procrastination

2011-01-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

I made a few white vertices..

I expect this means nothing if you haven't played the game. Vertices (the little coloured balls) give resources in the different colours, white being the best. I am powerful.

I also recorded a video of a full game. 2 vs. 2, the other players are AI.

Clearly I am procrastinating something. I don't even have the excuse of disease anymore. Still, the game is just about finished.

new video

2010-12-22T12:28:00.000-08:00

In bed sick and coughing (thanks to sleeping in an airport full of coughing people), no motivation to accomplish anything productive, so I made a new video for Vertex Dispenser.

Masquerade

2010-12-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, agj came up with the idea of getting a few people to each make a game, and then each release another person's game in a ring of deception. And so it happened that four games were made, inspired by the theme "Masquerade", and released:
Ascension
Doppelganger
Face Time
The Sense of Connectedness

We chose not to explicitly lie by claiming to have made the games ourselves, and instead to just post them with a vague note like "here's a new game". The main purpose was just to have some fun and make some games, not to trick people.

I had very much expected that someone would spot the deception, but in retrospect it makes sense that nobody did - none of us are particularly well-known, so it wasn't likely someone would spot "that game is in X's style", and it's not at all uncommon for people to try out new styles and programming languages. Also, some of the people who are most familiar with our personal styles were already in on the plan.

(Feel free to try the games and attempt to match them to their authors before reading further, but from 16th Dec onwards some of the games will display their author.)

It's been quite a weird experience, and I'm struggling to write down my mixed feelings in any kind of coherent order.

My game The Sense of Connectedness got quite a bit of positive attention from around the internet - it's probably been my most successful game so far. But since it hasn't been under my own name, I've felt a sense of disconnectedness from it - it's still my game, I've just felt it a bit less. But instead, I feel a sense of identification with all four games, and I've taken personally the response to each of them - it's as though the feeling of ownership I'd usually have for my own game has gotten smeared around the ring. I feel the least connection to Ascension, perhaps because it's furthest from me around the cycle.

I've felt guilty that my game's gotten so much more of a positive response than the others have (and also a bit proud for the same reason, and then guilty again for feeling proud).
I've wondered if I should have done more to promote agj's Doppelganger, and if it's partially my fault that it's had the least response of any of the four games - should I have written more about it? Was Kongregate the wrong site for it? (Do people just not like me very much?)
Noyb's been feeling guilty as well - at seeing praise for my game directed towards him, and at seeing negative comments towards his game directed at Jonathan..
I think it makes sense that guilt is a common theme, because we've conspired to commit a deception, and even though we meant it in fun, it's still somehow transgressive (and the fact that we didn't explicitly lie doesn't really make a difference; we've still intentionally deceived people).

The following I'm not enjoying writing, but I'm going to anyway because I think it's worth exploring all the feelings that have come out of this experiment:
I resent the praise for my game having been directed at Noyb. Not in a big way, but it's there.
Partially this is explainable - I'd love to be able to make a living making games, and while marketing isn't something I value much, it does kind of matter. I fear that I've missed an opportunity to get my name in front of a bunch of people, to advertise myself and thus improve my chances of success as an "indie developer".
But largely it doesn't make any sense at all, it's just a crazy subconscious jealousy that he's getting the 'reward' for my work.
These aren't feelings I'm comfortable with having.
But they're just stupid irrational feelings, and in my intellect I don't mind at all. And it's actually helped me to think about what I consider most important, and to realise that ultimately I care way more that I've affected people with my art than whether they have any idea who I am.

I've dwelt too much on the negative here; there's been a lot of good as well. The feeling of community with my co-conspirators has been great, and reading people's comments on my game has been really nice - thanks everyone! And the most important thing is that we made some games that we wouldn't have otherwise. So while it hasn't been entirely a positive experience, it was definitely worth doing - I did consider backing out a few days before we released the games, and I'm glad I didn't.

The others have written up their thoughts after the experiment as well:
Noyb
jonathan
agj

Doppelganger

2010-12-01T06:16:00.000-08:00

New flash game:

kongregate link

It's more sort of a weird interactive art/toy than a 'game'. Uses webcam.

edit: I didn't make this, it's actually the work of agj, see Masquerade.

Vertex Dispenser levels

2010-11-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

Vertex Dispenser uses 3d models for its levels - the vertices and polygons of the models are the nodes of territory that you fight over. Quite a variety of levels are possible, but game balance and feel push towards particular kinds of level - moving around on the surface feels best if it's fairly smooth and homogeneous, the colouring rules constrain the degree of vertices, non-triangular faces are very weak, combat works best if the perimeter of a player's territory is in good proportion to the amount of territory (so a player who's winning is vulnerable to attack on more possible fronts). Also, it plays best with around 150-250 vertices - much less and there's no room to build up, much more and the game drags on after one player's already clearly won. And in some vague way, since players impose a lot of structure on the level through their actions in the game, it just kind of feels better for there to be less inherent structure as well.

All this means that the two levels i've found to work best are a plane grid, and a fairly regular sphere (from blender's "icosphere" primitive). Higher-genus surfaces don't work well at all - the torus is acceptable (though not great), and past that you just can't get enough smoothness without having too many vertices.

For some of the campaign levels I've used more intricate models, which work okay for levels with specific goals rather than a full battle to eliminate opposing players. Playtesters have had some difficulty with these though, and even a little with the sphere, so I've made the initial levels use a flat plane, and gradually worked up to other shapes. But then a few weeks back I was showing the game to a few people at the London Indies meetup, and a couple of guys who'd seen it before expressed disappointment at these 2d levels: the unusual shapes of levels are what they'd thought looked cool about it, so in making it more playable I make it less attractive!

I've been working on the final campaign level - originally I had a boss fight against Smestorp, but it turns out that fighting a big enemy with lots of hit points isn't fun in this game so I've had to invent something new - and as well as the above constraints, the design I have for the level requires that a particular subgraph appears, plus a visual effect I want to use looks best if the level is convex. I'd kind of wanted to make a "special" looking level for the ending, but so far I haven't found anything other than a sphere that will work.

what I've been up to

2010-10-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

* I'm now a part-time student. This is partially because I'm moving to a different country from where I'm studying and it'll make things less complicated, and partially to give myself more time to spend making cool stuff. (So I should finally be able to finish Vertex Dispenser!)

* I submitted Vertex Dispenser to the IGF again. I don't feel like I've done a year's worth of work on it since last year, but I have dealt with the main issues that hurt it last time around (i.e. difficulty, lack of a proper tutorial), so I think my chances are better at least. Also, the judging system has been improved, and I think the new system is more favourable to niche games (because they're selected by a jury, rather than by assigning arbitrary numeric scores and taking the average), so who knows? I definitely got something out of entering last year anyway, even though it didn't place.

* Had a couple of my games featured in an exhibition last month: the start show. Pretty cool!

* I've been working on an album of smaller games, each a few minutes long, full of psychedelic sound and colour. I'm taking a "games as rock music" simile and trying to push it as far as it'll go - with hidden tracks, remixes, b-sides, etc.

* Computer has decided to break down again, I guess this was inevitable. So I've bought a shiny new one and am waiting for it to show up.

* Playing a lot of Dominion and Shadows over Camelot.

list of games

2010-10-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

the purpose of this post is to list all of my released games.
I try to keep it arranged in approximate order of interest.

nourishment

Vertex Dispenser
strategy/action/puzzle
available on Steam
"spectacularly clever" - Jim Rossignol

Glitch Tank
fast-paced glitchy action-strategy game for iPad
available on AppStore

freedom

Idiolect
unfinished album
includes some of the games below: TSoC, KPSJ, HM, B2010

Exuberant Struggle
action/strategy
Versus game for TIGSource

The Sense of Connectedness
abstract/puzzle
for Masquerade

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J
abstract
bricolage game for The Games Collective

Hyperabuse Monolith
abstract
S.C.U.M. game for The Games Collective

Babeltron 2010
abstract
S.C.U.M. game for The Games Collective

Death Lights Dancing
lovecraftian rowing game
for tigsource commonplace book competition

Smestorpod Infestation
shmup
based on connecting up networks to power things
no sound, cool mechanics

Glutton Quest
shmup
my first game with 3d graphics, kind of interesting but a bit glitchy

Chango: Chaos Penguin
turn based strategy retro mashup
Chaos/Pango mashup for Retro Remakes

Elements.
7 day roguelike
nethack modification
just trying out a mechanic.

Doppelganger
webcam game thing
(not mine)

hey, completeness. except my old BASIC games, which don't seem to run anymore. and maybe some java crap, but nothing important and java can piss off.

Chango: Chaos Penguin

2010-09-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Started this for a Retro Remakes competition in 2008, just dug it up again and had a go at finishing it off in the last couple of days. Basically it's a mashup of Chaos: Battle of the Wizards with some other old games, mainly Pango.

I'm still fixing bugs and making lots of changes hoping to make it vaguely balanced. ~~Currently it's two-player only, I'll have a go at enlarging that range sometime.~~

download

Edit (28/09): Updated. Still to do: fix more bugs, AI.

Dominion, segueing into Prestige

2010-09-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

I've realised some other reasons my first couple of plays of Dominion were not very good.
- The first game was 2-player, and my opponent had put out all 12 of each type of victory card (in 2-player games you're only supposed to use 8 of each); this served to make the game drag on for much longer after I'd already lost.
- The second game was 5-player, and the game actually only supports 2 to 4 players. The official rules for playing with 5 players say "play two games of 2 and 3 players". They then go on to specify how many cards to put out if you insist on playing with 5, but strongly recommend against it, particularly if any of the players are not experienced (as I was not). We didn't actually even play according to these rules, but rather by some ad-hoc house-ruled 5-player variant.
I was not aware that we weren't playing by the "proper rules" at the time, and it certainly helps to explain why my experience was not so good.

I'm not opposed to house-rules in general, but I feel like people often prematurely make up house-rules before they understand how a game works.
I've noticed this quite a bit recently in the BoardGameGeek discussions about the latest RFTG expansion (The Brink of War). This expansion adds a new resource called "prestige" to the game, which can be gained as a one-off bonus for putting certain marked cards into play, or generated repeatedly by using certain card powers, and gives a small bonus each turn to whoever has the most of it. A lot of threads have started up discussing how prestige is overpowered, unbalanced, broken, and suggesting various changes to "fix" it.
Amusingly, one common suggestion is to make the Prestige Lead bonus give cards instead of points every turn. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the game; cards are worth a lot more than points, particularly near the start of the game (when there's most variance in terms of somebody getting the prestige lead easily because of the luck of initial draws). So this proposed "weakening" of prestige actually makes it stronger! But these people are playing with this variant and not minding; feeling like they've fixed the problem and prestige isn't overpowered anymore. And maybe they have fixed the problem - because the problem was in their heads the whole time: if everyone believes that prestige is all-powerful, they will focus their efforts on gaining it; but since prestige only pays off for the leader, those who have spent resources on gaining prestige and have failed to become the leader end up behind; a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it's an interesting example of an unstable equilibrium. As long as all players pursue Prestige strategies, the Prestige Leader will tend to win, reinforcing the view that Prestige-based strategies are the strongest. But as soon as someone tries a different approach (like using strategies that were already strong before this expansion) this illusion will be broken. I'd think that in a game that takes up to half an hour there'd be little cost in trying something different - if it doesn't work out, never mind, you haven't spent much time on it (this is one of the reasons I strongly favour short games - you can fit so much more learning in) - but it seems that some people will try the same approach over and over again, no matter what they draw.

It's something to think about when designing games. You can't guarantee that someone's initial experience will be good, and no matter what you do people might just make up house-rules that overturn your efforts (this is much less of a problem with videogames). You can't guarantee that people will figure out the best strategies and not get stuck on local maxima (even in the third expansion, apparently). But it's worth doing your best to avoid these types of problem anyway.

Vertex Dispenser: explosions

2010-08-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Rob Fearon wrote recently about how to make explosions more awesome.

I was inspired to make my explosions more awesome.

It seems that the trick to making cool explosions is layering multiple different types of particles. I used to just have one type of particle for each explosion, and now I mostly have three or four. Lines bursting out from the centre, expanding rings, fireworks..

This doesn't actually get the game any closer to being finished.

Vertex Dispenser: progress!

2010-08-17T04:41:00.000-07:00

I've started doing some bits and pieces on Vertex Dispenser again, after having done nothing on it for several months. I'm going to finish it, dammit! I've actually fixed some of the problems in the network code, which is awesome (but it still crashes sometimes, more to do there) and I've done some work on the campaign - mostly trying to get the difficulty right, but in the process I've also made some of the level designs a bit weirder and scattered more shiny particle effects around:

I think it's an improvement. Possibly I have just gone mad.

Dominion

2010-08-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

I've played Dominion quite a few times in the last couple of days, and have been pleased to find that it's actually a good game. I had played it twice previously, and formed a quite low opinion of it despite wanting to like it because of the cool deck-building mechanic.

Most of the reason for my false impression is because I had gotten quite the wrong idea about the "Attack cards". Each time you play, you select ten card types to have available to be bought, giving variety between games. For my first game, the guy teaching me chose not to include any attack cards (actions that cause a negative effect for other players) because I hadn't played before. From this I got the idea that attack cards were like takeovers in Race for the Galaxy - an minor additional aspect giving some negative interaction between players, but with there still being a complete game without them. In my second game, the only attack card in play was the Bureaucrat (place a Silver card on top of your deck from the supply, and each other player places a scoring card on top of their deck from their hand). Scoring cards are dead weight during the game, only providing points at the end, so being forced to draw one twice slows you down very slightly. There was also the Moat (protects from attack cards if in your hand). My opponents bought lots of Bureaucrats and Moats, and there was a lot of attacking and blocking going on that didn't seem to make any difference as I won the game by quite a margin because I bought scoring cards instead. Thus I gained the impression that attack cards had no significant effect even when you did choose to play with them.

Without attack cards (and a couple of other cards like the Council Room, which lets other players draw a card while you draw four), the only interactions between players in the game are: 1) the cards of each type can run out (not very significant) and 2) the game ends when three types of cards run out OR when the 6-point scoring cards run out (very significant, but not very deep). So the strategic options basically come down to "build a powerful card combo that will get you lots of points once it gets going" or "try to end the game quickly with more points before someone's combo gets going". There is complexity in figuring out how best to do these with the cards available and the cards you draw each turn, but it doesn't depend on what the other players have, just on when they score points or end the game.

However, it turns out that with more attack cards there is quite a bit of depth in terms of how you build your deck to protect against them, and conversely in whether opponents decks are sufficiently vulnerable to them to be worthwhile. The Thief, for example, examines the top two cards of each opponent's deck and destroys any treasure cards found, stealing one of them. If an opponent has Thieves, you can protect yourself by not having many treasure cards for them to hit, instead relying on actions like the Market to provide buying power. (And conversely, if someone has used the Chapel to thin their deck and increase their chances of drawing treasure, then the Thief also becomes a more reliable choice for you.) Discovering this corrects another false impression I'd received from my second game - when choosing which cards to have, someone had said something to the effect of "you can't have attack cards without the Moat", which is ridiculously naïve - there is plenty of subterfuge you can do to defend without a blunt wall to hide behind. (In fact, I disagree entirely with choosing the cards available, and believe the correct way to select them is randomly.)

The UI still seems very very poor after playing RFTG, but this is starting to become invisible now that I know most of the cards (though I have yet to master the bizarre "alphabetical ordering" system used in the box layout). And the problem of someone having already won quite a while before the game actually finishes seems to be diminishing, from playing with a group of people of similar skill level above some minimum threshold. Overall I am satisfied.

Lectures on Structural Graph Theory (1)

2010-07-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

I've been attending a series of lectures by Paul Seymour and Maria Chudnovsky in Oxford - there were three last week and another three will be next week. I've been finding them really good. They're very dense with information, and I've been actually paying attention for the full talk every time, which is rare.

28/06 - Paul Seymour

He started by defining the chromatic number (smallest number of colours needed to colour vertices of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices have the same colour) and clique number (size of the largest complete subgraph) of a graph; clearly the chromatic number as at least the clique number. Consider the class of graphs that have these two values equal - say that such a graph is "good".

Several theorems can be recast as saying certain classes of graphs are good:
- (Konig) If G is a bipartite graph, then the edge-chromatic number of G is equal to the maximum degree; this is equivalent to "line graphs of bipartite graphs are good".
- (Konig) If G is a bipartite graph, then the size of a minimum set of edges covering all the vertices is equal to the size of a maximum independent set; this is equivalent to "complements of bipartite graphs are good".
- (Konig) If G is a bipartite graph, then the size of a maximal matching is equal to the size of a minimal set of vertices meeting all edges; equivalent to "complements of line graphs of bipartite graphs are good".
- (Dilworth) If P is a partially ordered set, then the minimum number of chains with union P equals the size of a maximal antichain in P; equivalent to "complements of comparability graphs of bipartite graphs are good." (The comparability graph has vertices in the set and an edge a-b if a and b are comparable in P.)

A graph is chordal if every induced cycle is a triangle; chordal graphs are good.

For all of these examples of good graphs, the complement is also good. This is not always true; for example, take the disjoint union of a triangle and a pentagon.
All these examples are closed under taking induced subgraphs, and this turns out to be the key idea; define a graph to be "perfect" if every induced subgraph is good.

The Berge conjectures:
- Weak Perfect Graph Conjecture: the complement of a perfect graph is perfect.
- Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture: a graph is perfect iff it has no odd hole or antihole.

Lovasz proved the WPGC. Seymour gave a proof due to Gasparyan, proving a stronger statement: G is perfect iff for all induced subgraphs H, a(H)w(H)>=|V(H)|. (Sorry about the crap notation; a here is independence number, and w is clique number.)
I'm going to attempt to reproduce the proof, but it may not be very easy to follow in this form, so feel free to skip the section between the stars. It's a very nice proof though, I really enjoyed it.
*****************************************
It's easy to show that any good graph has a(G)w(G)>=|V(G)|. Chromatic number equals clique number, so any colouring partitions the vertex set into w(G) sets of size at most a(G).

Suppose we have a minimal imperfect graph G; G is not perfect but every proper induced subgraph is. We will show that a(G)w(G)<|V(G)|. Take a maximal independent set A0. For each v in A0, G\v is perfect (and therefore good), so we partition V(G)\{v} into w(G) independent sets. This gives a list of a(G)w(G)+1 independent sets (w(G) for each v in A0, plus A0 itself). Call these A0,...,An; where n = a(G)w(G)+1. Each vertex u belongs to a(G) of these sets.Consider G-Ai for any i. Ai is independent, so G-Ai can't have a colouring with w(G)-1 colours, or else adding A as the w(G)th colour would give an w(G)-colouring of G - therefore the chromatic number of G-Ai is w(G). But G-Ai is perfect (assuming Ai is non-empty), so w(G-Ai)=w(G), and so there is a maximal clique of G disjoint from Ai.So, for each Ai, let Bi be a clique of size w(G) disjoint from Ai. Bi intersects a(G)w(G) of the Aj's, because each vertex belongs to a(G) of these sets, and no two vertices in the clique Bi can be in the same independent set Aj. Since there are a(G)w(G)+1 A-sets in total, that means Bi intersects all of them except Ai.The end of the proof used linear algebra. Let P be the matrix indexed by sets {Ai} and vertices v in V(G), with a 1 if v is in Ai, 0 otherwise. Let Q be defined similarly for the sets {Bi}. Then the statement that "Bi intersects Aj iff i!=j" is equivalent to P * Q-transpose is the matrix with a 1 in every position except 0s on the main diagonal. This matrix has rank n+1; but rank(P*Qt) <= rank(P)= |V(G)|. Therefore |V(G)| >= n+1 = a(G)w(G)+1. QED.
*****************************************

A graph G is "partitionable" if there exist integers a and w greater than one such that G has exactly aw+1 vertices, and for each vertex v, G\v can be partitioned into a cliques of size w and into w independent sets of size a. Every minimally imperfect graph is partitionable.

Example of partitionable graph: take the infinite grid; if we take a rectangular segment of this and wrap the edges we get a torus graph. Take a slightly larger rectangle of area aw+1, and tilt it slightly so that it contains aw+1 vertices, and wrap based on this; then add all diagonal edges as well. This graph is self-complementary and partitionable.

He then started to discuss the proof of the SPGC. Say that a graph is "Berge" if it has no odd hole or antihole. Clearly a perfect graph is Berge, because odd cycles and their complements are not good.

Examples of Berge graphs: bipartite graphs, line graphs of bipartite graphs, comparability graphs, chordal graphs, and complements of each of these.

Operations to construct or decompose Berge graphs:
- disjoint union
- glue together along cliques
- "substitution": for Berge graphs G and H, delete a vertex v in G, and join each neighbour of v to each vertex in H (N(v) is "complete to" H).
- "1-join": Berge graphs G and H, delete u in G and v in H, and join each neighbour of u to each neighbour of v.
- "2-join": edge e=(u,v) in G, f=(x,y) in H such that N(u) and N(v) are disjoint, and N(x) and N(y) are disjoint; delete u,v,x,y and join N(u) to N(x) and N(v) to N(y).

- "balanced skew partition".
First define skew partition: divide vertex set into four non-empty sets A1, A2, B1, B2, such that B1 is complete to B2 and A1 is anticomplete to A2.
Now, a balanced skew partition is one where any induced path from Bi->Aj->Bi has even length, and any induced antipath from Ai->Bj->Ai has even length.

Goal: prove something like "every Berge graph is one of these examples, or can be decomposed in terms of these operations"; then we'd have that every Berge graph is perfect (since these operations preserve perfection).

---

As you can see, it was pretty intense; he got through an incredible amount of material in not much over an hour.

Random stuff

2010-07-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

Just screens of a few random things I've been messing around with:

Hyperabuse Monolith

2010-06-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

A second game on the S.C.U.M. theme. This is a game about harassing people in the street. Again, the visuals are where I want them to be, but the gameplay isn't quite. It's more like a "proper game" though, has a score and everything!
(my best is 16130, but higher should certainly be possible.)

Hyperabuse Monolith

If videogames were rock music (a much better metaphor than movies), then this a fairly dull quiet track 2/3 of the way through the album (I'm not selling it very well, am I?).
I quite like that idea; an album of games.

edit (24/06/10): new version, incorporating some suggestions and fixing a bug; also, scoring is now different by an order of magnitude, so scores mentioned previously will sound absurd.

edit (26/06/10): new version, mostly the same as the previous, just improving depth-buffery problems but not fixing them completely because I'm lazy.

Warstorm

2010-06-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

Several of my friends have started playing a game called Warstorm on facebook, and I've been getting lots of messages about them giving each other hunters and mages. I decided to try the game today. My impressions have not been very positive.

It's a CCG about fantasy armies battling each other. The battles themselves seem to be completely non-interactive. Your cards are drawn in random order, and after being in your hand for a number of time steps (the 'cost' of the card) they enter play. No decisions are made during battle. So basically, the entire game is about deckbuilding. This is (like Dominion) a game designed to attract ex-Magic players who get nostalgic about deckbuilding, regardless of depth. But it's combined with the money-sink of actual CCGs (you can get new cards by investing time, but the cards that cost real money on are strictly better) and the social addiction of Farmville. A charming mix. Plus the UI is laggy and the game has more fun than the player. I don't recommend it.

(It's a pity, because the mechanic of having a card's cost be the number of turns it takes to enter play after drawing it is quite elegant.. unfortunately what it elegantly achieves is nil interaction!)

Babeltron 2010

2010-06-06T05:15:00.000-07:00

Another game. Really it's basically just an elaborate word-processor though.

Babeltron 2010

I'm not completely satisfied with the mechanics, but I think there's something there. I am quite satisfied with the visual aesthetic.

This was made as part of the Games Collective's pageant on the theme of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto. I don't think it's a very good use of the theme, maybe I'll do something else as well.

Brog Blogs about Brog Grog Jog Blog

2010-05-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

On Andy's blog, he has blogged about I, Brog. I (Brog) am now blogging on my blog about his blog about I, Brog.

Irregularity Bog Sog

There was a big frog, he was sitting in a bog, he was climbing on a log, he was gnawing on a dog, he was a NONALOG FROG.

A Nonalog Frog.

There was a big goat, he was swimming in a moat, he wore a novercoat, he nibbled on an oat, he was a NOVERCOAT GOAT.

A Novercoat Goat.

That is my song for today.

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J

2010-03-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

I made a game.

Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J
(alternate download)

Don't play it if you suffer from epilepsy (it has lots of rapidly flickering colours).
Let me know if it crashes.

The idea behind this came from the theme "bricolage", meaning "a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things". I went through a bunch of unfinished prototypes I had lying around, foetal games that will never see birth, and copied chunks of code out of each of them, pasted them into one file, and stuck some arbitrary interactions between them. There is a victory condition; it doesn't make much sense, but it is possible to reach a "you win" screen. Don't feel compelled to aim for this though, just do whatever.

Edit: The zip was slightly corrupt (3 non-essential files were broken), this has been fixed.
Edit: Updated with very slightly modified version - main difference is that it displays a title screen. Also, the "you win" screen is replaced by just having weird graphical effects then going back to title. (15/9)

Alien Oort Cloud Refinery

2010-03-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

The Brink of War, the next Race for the Galaxy expansion, is due soon. This is fairly exciting.

The first expansion came with a collection of blank cards (with the same back) so that players can make up new cards, and there have been 'card contests' for the second and third expansions where people can send in card ideas - the prize being having the card in the expansion and a mention in the rulebook.

Anyway:
The winners of the card contest for Race for the Galaxy: The Brink of War are:
* Michael Brough for inspiring Alien Oort Cloud Refinery,
* Kester Jarvis for inspiring Golden Age of Terraforming, and
* Ville Halonen and Raine Rönnholm for inspiring Universal Peace Institute.

This is even more exciting.
(The reason it says "for inspiring" is that they take the cards through their full development process to make sure they're balanced and fit the theme.)

The card I submitted was:
(ALIEN?) Rainbow World
Multicolour Windfall
Cost: 0, VP: 1
$: you may not trade goods from this world.
IV: you may consume goods from this world as any colour.
V: you may produce on this world with a "produce on windfall" power of any colour.

And the form it ended up in was:
ALIEN Oort Cloud Refinery
Multicolour Windfall
Cost: 0, VP: 1
$: you may not trade goods from this world.
ANY PHASE / GAME END: choose this world's colour.

So the only mechanical change was that they simplified and strengthened the property of "being any colour" - it does basically the same thing, but it's expressed much more cleanly and has synergy with more different powers (now it applies to cards that score for different coloured worlds, powers that let you draw cards for producing goods of a particular colour, and the new powers on e.g. Golden Age of Terraforming, which allow discarding goods of particular colours to gain discounts on other phases).
I'm really pleased not only that my card made it in, but that it was changed very little, meaning I'd already done a good job of balancing it. I'd actually started it at cost 3, and progressively reduced the cost as we played with it until it had cost 1, then cut it to 0 at the last minute before sending it off.

2 bugs

2010-03-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

I've found two Vertex Dispenser bugs in the last two days. In the actual game mechanics, not in the netcode where I already knew there's still some brokenness going on. Nothing game-breaking; probably nothing anyone but would notice, just weird corner-case interactions not working how they should. Still, it bothers me a little because I'd thought everything there was solid.

Another cold has infected me. My immune system seems not to have been performing to specification for a while. I continue to blame the hideous climate. Have spent my time fiddling around with the sound rather than fixing these bugs, and don't have much to show for it. I'm finding it quite hard to generate new sounds that fit with what I've already got but don't mush together in the same frequency range. I guess I probably should try using something a bit more advanced than sin(pitch*time)*volume.

We've been playing quite a bit of multiplayer Vertex Dispenser. The aforementioned brokenness doesn't seem to interfere with what actually happens; it just claims to be out of sync for a frame and then gets back in sync afterwards. I'd like to know why it's happening though.

Something quite entertaining to do is to place a boobytrap next to an opponent's white vertex, after attacking the vertex a few times to weaken it. Then run away, and wait for them to set it off - with any luck, it destroys their white vertex and you'll hear a grunt of rage from across the room. One time I managed to kill both my wife and her last white vertex with this trick.. playing against human beings is a lot more fun than just against AI.

Randomness

2010-03-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

From Dave Sirlin's coverage of GDC:

Day 1: See Rob Pardo's talk, paragraphs 8-9. Basically, players whined about randomness meaning that sometimes unlikely events happened, so they changed it so when you fail, the chance of success increases.

Day 2: See Sid Meier's talk, paragraphs 8-11. Basically, players whined about randomness meaning that sometimes unlikely events happened, so they changed it so when you fail, the chance of success increases.

It's really interesting that these guys independently came up against the same problem and came up with the same solution. I'm in two minds as to what I think about it. My initial reaction is: this is bad, they're dumbing things down, they should leave things done properly. Then I back this up with some solid reasons why it's harmful. But then I'm not sure.

So first, why is this harmful? Games are educational. One of the reasons humans play games is that it fulfils our desire to learn - our brains are built for learning, so we find it pleasurable. And one of the things games are able to teach is HOW PROBABILITY WORKS. Probability isn't intuitive. Sometimes you don't succeed, even when the odds are in your favour. Sometimes exceedingly improbable things do happen. (It's even worse in the infinite case - I've seen people have serious trouble with the idea that an event can have probability 0 and yet still occur, or probability 1 and not definitely occur.) So by twisting the probabilities in your game to line up with human intuition, you're preventing your game from teaching a valuable lesson - and, more importantly, you're potentially teaching a false lesson.

(Here is a slightly related and slightly unrelated article by Tom Lehmann, designer of Race for the Galaxy, just because he's cool.)

But on the other hand, it's not really the case that randomness-where-failure-increases-your-chance-of-success is "fake" randomness. It's still random, just the random events are no longer independent, which is perfectly okay, both from an abstract mathematical perspective (it's still a valid formal system of game rules) and maybe even from a real-world-intuition perspective (plenty of real 'random' events aren't independent).

The popular board game Settlers of Catan suffers from problems with streaks of bad luck - resource generation is determined by a roll of the dice, and it's common for some players to miss out, or for certain resource types not to be generated much, sometimes resulting in a slow and tedious game. A fix for this which some of my friends use is to have instead a deck of cards with numbers in the same proportion as the sum of die rolls. This has essentially the same effect as what Rob and Sid described - if a number doesn't come up, it's more likely to next time, because the deck gets depleted and there are more copies of that numbers left in it. And this I have no problem with, partially because it's fixing a problem with game balance, rather than trying to conform to the intuitions of innumerate players, but also because the mechanics are explicit - you can see the cards being drawn from the deck, you know the card you drew is no longer in there, so you know you're not dealing with independent random variables.

So I guess what it comes down to is how it's communicated in the game. I haven't played either of the games in question, so I don't know how these things are communicated. If the interface gives the impression that the events are independent, but is secretly fiddling with the odds, then this should be considered Harmful. If it's clear that they're dependent, it's fine. For example, in WoW, if you're hunting bears in a forest, some of which have paws, it makes sense if there are a finite number of bears, and then finding a pawless one means that next time you find one there's a higher chance it will have a paw - you're drawing from a deck, not rolling dice. (I'm not sure what the reasoning could be in CivRev.. maybe a public "morale" stat that, counter-intuitively, goes up when you lose battles.)

Of course, videogames can hide their rules under the surface, and it's completely legitimate to say "you don't know what the rules are; a bunch of complicated interdependent systems affect everything that happens and it's up to you to experiment and figure things out". This is teaching something too - the scientific method.

371-In-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart II: Klik Harder

2010-03-01T04:35:00.000-08:00

In 2009, 1600 people participated in the Global Game Jam and produced 370 games in 48 hours.

This weekend, 105 people participated in the 371-In-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart II: Klik Harder and produced 524 games in 48 hours. Glorious Trainwrecks is the clear victor in the QUANTITY WAR.

I had a fairly busy weekend (cocktail party, board games..) so only had time to contribute three games:

No More Lasers is an arena shmup with lots of lasers. Quite pretty, very difficult.

Mah Jong Is Longer Than Ur Dong is a pornographic mahjong game. Because last time I saw a collection of 500 pirate ROMs, about a fifth of them were porn games and about a fifth were mahjong games, and those fifths intersected severely. I have never played mahjong and I have no idea what the rules are, but I found a picture of the tiles. This game is very difficult to work out so I may post the rules later, but the main point was to give an impressionist interpretation of how I felt while attempting to play those mahjong games.

Mah Jong Is Longer Than Any Dong : Hyper Graphic Future Edition is a variation on the previous, only faster and with Minter-esque incomprehensible blurred graphics making it unplayable. Um. Skip it in favour of the previous one if you know what's good for you.

It feels really good to finish making games. The Games Collective is running an inaugural pageant on the theme of Bricolage, so I may contribute something to this as well, provided my computer comes back this week WHICH IT WILL.

Enough

2010-02-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

Have installed a compiler on my wife's computer. It's slow, but I will be able to make some progress. Have fixed one bug already. May need to install Blender as well.

Who knows, maybe working on an old and slow machine that can't run anything will encourage me to make some optimisations.

2-year old receipt?

2010-02-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

So I'm having to prove that my computer's still under warranty, it being more than two years after date of MANUFACTURE, but not date of SALE; the manufacturers don't have a record of the sale. So I'm expected to dig up a receipt from two years ago, having moved house three times since then.

I'm pretty sure I kept it (or at least intended to), but where would I have put it?

Website

2010-02-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

I still don't have my computer back; in fact the repair status is still "received, waiting to start repair".

Someone told me recently that it's never too early to have a decent website with videos and screenshots, so I've done some work on that. Needs better screenshots and a nicer looking title at the top. I'll probably try to make a better video soon too. Still, it's a big improvement over "THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER".

This is all just displacement activity though.

Igromania Article

2010-02-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

The January edition of Igromania (a Russian videogames magazine) did a feature on IGF entrants, where they picked from the list the ones they thought looked coolest. Vertex Dispenser was featured, but a misprint left it looking mysterious with just a name and a picture, and text from a different game. The text is now up on their website, at http://www.igromania.ru/articles/106147/Vertex_Dispenser.htm. Goodness knows what it says. Here's Google's attempt at a translation:

The website IGF Vertex Dispenser accompanied, perhaps, the most ambiguous in the abstract world: "Inspired by the mathematics of real-time strategy. Rapid action and puzzle-solving. Excellent use of a simple geometric 3D-graphics. However, this is perhaps a comprehensive description for this game.

Let's start with "excellent use of simple geometric 3D-graphics. At Vertex Dispenser (literally translated as "dispenser tops") game space is really divided into equilateral triangles, and can move only at their tops. The main character (in his role as advocates device, remotely resembling a vacuum cleaner) is able to emit a special laser that turns the peaks in the desired color. Color all the vertices of a triangle in a certain color, you are capturing this space, and then controlled from the center of the field leaves expressive gun.

At first glance, it strongly resembles another variation on the theme Tower Defense, with only isosceles triangles. However, the key issue here - not how fast you can grab yourself an impressive space, and how much space you decide to take. Inappropriate vertex may lead to the fact that your whole area will be in the twinkling repainted in the colors of the enemy's flag. That is "rapid shooter" is also present. As for the "puzzle-solving", then levels are responsible for them. At regular triangles author manages to break everything: the scope, volume circle, a giant cube, and then indulges in all serious and displays the articulation of shapes to choose the right strategy to capture that is not possible. Along with Fig8 and Proun this game - our clear favorite of IGF 2010. C look forward to the release.

WHAT IS IT? Tower Defense, where the production of the right strategy you will need spatial imagination and a basic course of geometry.

CHANCES TO FINAL: 10/10

Babelfish's translation is much worse, but gives the title as “the measuring hopper of apexes”, which is awesome.

Plans

2010-02-01T06:23:00.000-08:00

Why is Vertex Dispenser taking so long to get finished?
When someone asks how long I've been working on it, the simplest answer is "three years", since I first started some version of it in early 2007. But it's not like it's been three years of solid work (even solid hobby-project level work), because in that time (apart from writing a Masters thesis, moving to England, starting a PhD, spending periods of time failing to achieve anything much due to illness or depression, getting married, and having a life) I abandoned it for a while then took it up again, made a few other smaller games and started several others that I didn't finish, so it's more like two years, if that. Even so, that's much longer than I'd expected. The difficulty of completing a project seems to increase disproportionately with scale, and the saying about the last 10% being 90% of the work seems about right. Plus I just haven't planned on selling a game before - it was in a state I'd have been happy to release as freeware some time ago. I do think it's quite hard to finish full games when not working on them full-time.

But it really is quite close now. Here's my schedule of what I'll be working on once I get my computer back:

- The campaign levels are too hard, so right now they're more of a challenge than a tutorial. I have a plan for what I think needs to be done for the first part at least (need more playtest data for the second part still). When I've made these changes, I'll need to playtest again on some fresh victims, and probably will have to go through another iteration if it's still not working right. (I should have playtested on non-mathematician gamers sooner, but I just didn't realise there'd be such a difference.)

- Multiplayer has a couple of bugs still. Sometimes it detects as being out of sync when it isn't, and sometimes there's a crazy spike of lag for no apparent reason. (Also, it's a primitive system where you connect to the host by typing in their IP address, and the host has to forward a port on their router, etc. It'd be nice to improve on this but I don't know how and probably won't; current system is perfectly usable.)

- Sort out sales, distribution, etc. Figure out what to put in the demo. Then release it.

(There are some other aspects I could improve, like UI and audio, but I'm not going to because I'd rather get it finished and start on something new.)

So this isn't actually much work, when I have the time and hardware to do it. I'd like to give an estimated time it'll take, but the main bit is the playtesting iteration, which is partially out of my hands, and will take an unknown number of steps. Upper bound of two months, I'd say. Looking forward to it.

Further Grumbling

2010-01-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

It seems like a lot of what I post on here is grumbling about various things. This isn't because I'm a particularly negative person, it's more because I don't post very much, and often what inspires me to do so is being in a bad mood and having something I want to moan about.

So:
- My computer's broken.
- The courier who was supposed to pick it up today for repair didn't show up before the time I'd specified (when I had to leave to catch a train.. to go to a tutorial to which five students turned up, meaning my presence was hardly necessary, given there were three other tutors.. anyway) so I'll have to call them to arrange another time for pickup, which probably won't be until next week. So goodness knows when it'll be fixed.
- Also, I'm feeling a little down about Vertex Dispenser in general, largely because of some feedback from a few people I showed it to recently. I've spent way longer on this game than necessary, trying to make it accessible to people who aren't `maths people'. But maybe that's not possible, maybe it is just a niche game for people weird like me, and inevitably too hard for normal people to bother with.
- The time of year doesn't help. Winter in Britain always gets me a bit depressed. The snow was quite pretty, which made up for the cold, but now that's melted it's just stupid cold and rain and dark all the time when I should be at the beach in the sun.

When my computer's back in action, I'll continue working on the difficulty of the levels. There are two main problems to deal with:
1) I'm really good at my own game, so I'm completely unable to evaluate how hard a given level is. Playtest data is helping here.
2) The game itself has an inherent difficulty that can't be diminished without destroying what makes it (in my opinion) great. While I can make levels easier in fairly continuous ways by giving the player more territory, the enemy less territory, making the AI react more slowly, etc., the difficulty of the vertex-colouring 'puzzle' is fixed, and that's something players are just going to have to deal with. So I'm trying to help players deal with it, to explain things more clearly and provide explicit tutorials, but even with that it still has to be up to them to use it in the game, and that's going to be quite hard for most people. This isn't strictly a bad thing, I think it's a satisfying experience for those willing to put in the effort (which is also why I've tried to arrange things so that there's a possibility of working things out for yourself before getting to the tutorial; this is most satisfying).

I'm really feeling like this game just needs to be finished, it's been going on for far too long. It'll be worth it when I release it and some people love it.. I'm not 100% looking forward to that though, because there will inevitably be negative comments - from people who don't get it or didn't like it or think any price whatsoever is too much for an indie game (a topic of much discussion in comment threads for the reasonably priced games VVVVVV and Solium Infernum recently, and earlier Braid; no doubt others as well that I have not been following).. also there'll no doubt be some bugs left in that I'll need frantically to fix. I have other games I want to make, but I'm refusing to get into another big project before this one's finished (and tiny 3-hour toys don't satisfy me the same). But it's just not quite done yet - there are bugs to fix and I can definitely improve on the campaign difficulty - so I'll just have to keep slogging away at it once I get my computer fixed (I'll feel much better about it then too, because I'll play some Vertex Dispenser and remember that it really is worth the effort).

Water + Computer

2010-01-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

So yesterday morning my wife spills a glass of water over my computer (a laptop). Turned it off immediately, wiped away the water, left it to dry. Today it turns on fine, so presumably nothing internal is destroyed, but keyboard doesn't work. Not much use to me if I can't give it any input.

It was not the best time for this. I'd just been making some really good progress on Vertex Dispenser, and motivation for that was high. I also had a report half-written that I need to get done, which now I can't access. And Tigjam is this weekend; service is usually pretty fast here, but I don't know if I'll have it back by then or not.

Not in a very good mood now.

Edit: I picked up a USB keyboard, it's working fine with that at the moment, so I'm getting stuff done.

IGF Feedback

2010-01-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

The IGF results are out (as of a few days ago); Vertex Dispenser didn't make it. But the feedback from the judges was for the most part quite positive and also useful. Here it is:

Vertex Dispenser scored best in: Game Design
And scored worst in: Audio
---
This is a fun little strategy action puzzler. I actually agree with the designer's comment about the color puzzle¹. I enjoy the main campaign, and the active strategy required to battle, but really found the color puzzles quite enjoyable and relaxing to play.
---
This happens to have been the first game I judged, and it almost prevented me from judging anything else. It is such a refreshing, unique game experience, and addicting in the best possible way.

My only criticism is that the difficulty curve is too punishing. Playing with the AI on Easy should be an experience where I might only have to replay a level once in order to finish it. And then only in rare cases, it should mostly be a cakewalk on Easy! I find myself replaying up to ten times on some levels to beat them. It's fine to ship a game that is punishingly hard, but if you're offering an "Easy" difficulty level it really ought to be easy.

Maybe instead of just changing the difficulty on the AI there should be an option to have, for example, faster recharge on powers or something.²

But yes, you've done a brilliant job on this game and I've given it a 100 in Overall Experience because it is a solid, innovative game that I would be incredibly happy to see win the Grand Prize.
---
While I did find this game interesting to play, I did find it too difficult to advance past the first few levels to enjoy. This almost seems like a computer science teaching tutorial more than a game.³
---
A very unique and clever action-strategy-puzzle game! My only major "complaint" is that it's incredibly niche. You really need a very particular set of skills/tastes to enjoy this properly.

This also isn't helped by having virtually no tutorial for how the color stuff works. This is by far the hardest part of the game to wrap your head around, and a slow introduction would have been nice. It looks like you're aware of this issue since you give some tips in the submission notes, but the game itself really needs to provide some additional help for players.

Also
---
Zooming around on the surface of a sphere is fun.

But I found the gameplay very obtuse and kind of cold. I really wish the confrontation with the other player was clearer -- generally I rarely saw them and it felt like we were each playing separate games⁴.

Capturing specific types of nodes to aquire power boosts is interesting, but the color-to-power mapping was arbitrary and confusing⁵. I would have preferred to have icons⁶, and a more expressive UI in general.

The battlefield felt very large and empty. I never really got the hang of combat -- I felt like I probably should have been using the powerups, but combat just went by in a blur and dying didn't seem to have much of a cost, so I just muddled my way through it.
---
Amazing premise for a game and clever design. While the graphics are a bit rough⁷ the gameplay more than makes up for it.

This is one of the few IGF games I've judged that I plan to carry around with me to play for quite a bit longer.

¹ This comment was "Some people like this more than the game proper."
² I implemented this as soon as I read it.
³ I'm fairly certain that this is meant as a positive comment.
⁴ This made me smile, because it's a complaint I see made a lot about Race for the Galaxy (a card game I play quite a bit of); people throw around phrases like "multiplayer solitaire".. and it's really not true, there's a lot of player interaction, it's just subtle and parasitic rather than directly confrontational (although, a double-develop when your hand is empty does like a punch in the face), and it takes a bit of play to get to see how your actions affect the other players. But that's not the problem in Vertex Dispenser, which is very confrontational, I think he just hadn't gotten very far in. Probably I need to make it clearer that the first few levels are all fairly 'tutorial' in nature and the reason there's not much confrontation is that I'm holding back to ease you into it (not very well though, see earlier comments about difficulty - the first three levels were possibly even too easy, then the fourth was seriously tripping people up and taking multiple attempts).
⁵ He's right that the mapping of colours to powers is fairly arbitrary (not completely though - obviously I've tried to arrange them in order of power), but I'm not sure how it could be anything else without going all 'Magic: The Gathering' on it and assigning philosophies to the different colours, giving it a setting and theme, etc.
⁶ Someone else suggested this to me recently.. I found it interesting that this judge who is largely negative and not really getting it said the same thing as someone who's quite positive about the game. I think some kind of minor UI improvement is in order.
⁷ I was surprised by this comment, because I'd thought things were looking quite pretty. Sure, it doesn't have textures or shaders or whatever the latest thing is, but.. I don't know, I'm not going to worry about this anyway.

Anyway, the main things I've learnt from this were that the difficulty is too high in parts, and that the tutorial I have for colouring is completely inadequate - most people aren't used to reading statements like "when you capture a vertex, it is given the lowest colour not on any adjacent vertex", and so they don't immediately grasp what they mean and what their implications are.. I need to walk people through it more; do more showing and less telling.

So yeah, while I'm certainly disappointed that I didn't get in, I can see how my game could have been better explained and thus sold itself to some of the judges better. And I've been really encouraged by the positive comments that most of them gave, it's given me motivation to hurry up and get this game finished.

Sync Error 2

2009-12-24T17:18:00.000-08:00

I fail at network programming. Sync errors, buffer overflows, goodness knows what is going on. I may as well just declare this to be a single-player game.

I envy Vic Davis having the balls to release a game that handles multiplayer by just saving turns to a file and asking you to email them between players yourself. It doesn't do anything for you.
Maybe not the best idea though. Don't know how his sales are going, but I'm having a hard time finding anyone to play Solium Infernum with, so that's probably not a good sign. And there was really positive press about that game too. I guess indie multiplayer games are just a bad idea. Even Multiwinia did poorly apparently. Sucks.

Sync Error

2009-12-24T11:06:00.000-08:00

The network code is mostly in working order now, which is great. I've been playing some multiplayer against my wife. I just win with no effort in a one-on-one game, but if we add in some AI allies it can make it fairly balanced - she gets a Hard AI on her team and I only get an Easy one.

But it sometimes gets out of sync. And I have no idea why. Sigh.
I can detect it when it happens, so I could just send the entire game state across to get it back in sync, but I want to try to fix it so it just doesn't happen at all.

Also, Mouse Maze 2. Tomf has been at it again! Now with achievements and thinner walls.

Christmas

2009-12-22T05:53:00.000-08:00

I managed to get a couple of other PhD students at my university interested in Mouse Maze - they've been running variations on my genetic algorithm method and Andy's gotten his score up to 34,188, which is fairly impressive. My best is only 20,158. (Tomf did fix the 200 visits bug; first he just pushed the limit up to 1000, which we then proceeded to achieve, but I think he's fixed it properly now.)

Need to get around to beating Andy sometime, I think it's mostly just a matter of CPU time spent, but more important right now is Vertex Dispenser. I've been saying for a while that I only needed to spend a few days focused on it to get things like the multiplayer working properly, and now I am trying to do just that. So far I've managed to get the netcode back into the state it was a year or so ago - so it basically works, isn't jerking about wildly and constantly throwing error messages, but will probably get out of sync occasionally still. Plus there are going to be problems with sounds that get started, turn out not to have ever happened, and never end up being stopped. Still, progress!

Mouse Maze: Obsession

2009-11-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

Have become obsessed with maximising my Mouse Maze score. I've improved my search algorithm, and I've found mazes with scores up to 9960 and 642. Haven't input this to Kongregate yet, just because the maze will take so long to run - Tomf really needs to add a fast-forward button (also more graduations of colour - he really wasn't expecting anyone to get scores this high; more on that later).

Nobody's competing with me for top scores, which is a little unfortunate - that would be more fun, but it's still interesting to compete with myself and see how high it's possible to go. Apparently Tomf's code uses 1000 as the visited value for walls (just picking an arbitrary big number he thought nobody would ever reach), so if I can get the mouse to visit a tile more than 1000 times, it will power up and start walking through walls. This is my goal: break his assumptions and break the game. I'm only in the 600s at the moment, but there's some vaguely exponential behaviour which causes it to sometimes increase in fairly large steps, so I may not be too far off:

##A##
#BCD#
#####

In this configuration, if the mouse is at C and has visited A N times, then it must visit each of B and D N times before it will return to A, and in the process it will visit C 2N times.

Edit: I ran a maze that should achieve 642 visits to the same tile, but at 201 the mouse levelled up and started crossing walls. So I'd gotten the value wrong; I've broken the game already. Awesome. I feel a sense of achievement - I now have the actual maximum possible score given the current implementation. Am now hoping Tomf will fix it so I can have a higher score.

Mouse Maze

2009-11-18T14:09:00.000-08:00

Tomf made a puzzle called Mouse Maze. The basic concept is that it solves mazes with a ridiculously inefficient algorithm, and you have to find input to maximise the inefficiency. It's quite easy to make a maze that takes a few hundred steps, but after that it gets difficult.

For a long time, this very elegant maze was the second highest scoring, at 1135 moves. As it was saved to the folder of shared mazes, lots of people ran it and got the same score, but there was one single person with a higher score of 1223, with an unknown maze. Then recently someone came up with this maze, giving 1364 moves, and saved it, so it was possible for anybody to reach the top of the score table.

When Tomf told me someone had found and shared a better maze I was a little disappointed - I'd liked the mystery of the top solution being unknown. I have now fixed this; see the high score table.

Pulse Wave (GREEN)

2009-11-05T10:39:00.000-08:00

The effect of pushing away adjacent players/robots was originally on an ability named Kamikaze. The main effect was to suicide while doing lots of damage to anything nearby, but I threw in the pushing effect as well on the grounds that interesting interactions were bound to emerge from it somehow. Eventually I figured out what these emergent interactions are, and they're pretty cool, so when I cut Kamikaze, I went looking for where else this effect could be applied. Pulse Wave had been looking a little overpowered, and funnily enough, on it the pushing is actually something of a disadvantage - when you've stunned someone you want them to be next to you so you can attack them. I was pleased to be able to bring Pulse Wave down in power level and keep the interesting interactions from pushing things all in one move.

Proof

2009-11-03T13:33:00.000-08:00

Haven't had much time for working on Vertex Dispenser lately. I was near to a proof of a problem I've been working on for a while, so I've been working hard on that trying to get it out. That done, today I've just been slacking off, but I'll be back to work tomorrow. Vertex Dispenser is in a state where it really needs some dedicated time spent on it to finish it off; I've run out of little things I can do between the work I'm supposed to be doing; so probably I won't get it done until the Christmas break. I've lots of new ideas for games swirling around, but again they'd need a dedicated coding session to get them off the ground. Maybe I should get into making board/card games, so I can cut out the hard work of programming and just get straight into design.

I've entered the IGF, so we'll see what comes of that. There are three hundred entries, some of which I know to be excellent, but most of which I've never heard of. Who knows. Also got around to registering smestorp.com, as I've been meaning to for a while.

Protection (GREEN)

2009-10-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

In general, the abilities introduced in the first campaign are the ones I first put in the game, while the other ones I added later when I came back to it with new ideas after a break. Protection is the exception. Repair Swarm had its place originally, but players were being confused by it because it works in a slightly weird way - they were doing things like activating it when they were nearly dead, expecting it to repair them immediately. I realised that if they'd had Protection instead, it would have done exactly what they wanted then - Protection was the ability they were intuitively wanting to use - so I swapped them. It seems better to have the easier-to-use stuff introduced first, and the more confusing stuff later. An improvement! Hooray!

MEAD IS THE FINESTMOST OF ALL BEVERAGES

2009-10-07T02:32:00.000-07:00

Star Attack (GREEN) and Blog Explanation Procedure

2009-10-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

There's not much to say about this ability - it's been in there from early on, has changed very little, and is very easy to understand how to use - so instead I'm going to provide an explanation for these posts. People have told me for a while that I should start a blog, so finally I got around to it, but had no idea how to start writing in it. I'd put the name Mighty Vision as the blog title (being an ability in the game I'm working on), was staring at it trying to think how to start writing, then I thought "alright, it says Mighty Vision there, so I'll just write about that". So now I'm writing a series of posts about the Vertex Dispenser abilities, mostly as an exercise to get me into the swing of writing things at all. I'm trying to say something interesting about each one, whether it's how it changed during the design process or how it can be used in the game. There are currently 28 abilities in total, so that determines enough posts that by the time I'm through I'll doubtless have levelled up. And maybe I'll have gotten around to releasing the game, so the things I'm talking about will make sense to people other than myself and the few who've tested it.

Boobytrap (RED)

2009-09-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

It's good to scatter these unpredictably, because the point is that your opponents don't know where they are and die by setting them off (or else get discouraged from capturing territory when wounded; win/win). This makes Boobytrap another good candidate for automation (Alt+X), because it'll essentially just place them randomly, and has the advantage that it uses them immediately when the energy bar is full, so you'll get slightly more of them out overall.

I like to find corner cases, and try to make them interesting - this is Nethack's influence showing through. (Of course, Nethack takes it way too far; they made the interesting corner cases too powerful and broke the game, then tried to rebalance in light of them, thereby making them essential knowledge.) My original implementation of Boobytrap was a simple binary state, using the ability again on a boobytrapped vertex would have no effect. This wasn't really acceptable - not only is it less interesting than it could be, but if someone accidentally does it, their use of it would be wasted! So first I just made them stack, but it got a bit weirder after that.

Vertex Attack (RED)

2009-09-22T05:58:00.000-07:00

This one's a very situational ability, because its effectiveness depends directly on how many adjacencies there are between your vertices and enemy vertices. Usually such adjacencies are short-lived, because the faces on either side will attack each other - generally territories stabilise to solid regions of faces separated by a gap of at least one vertex, a kind of 'no-mans land' between. So often Vertex Attack will have a fairly small effect, but you can control it, try to set up situations to maximise it. It'll also depend on the level - if there are mostly open faces, there will be more adjacency because the faces aren't attacking to get rid of adjacent enemies; on some levels like the torus there is generally a lower ratio of perimeter to amount of territory, so less adjacency.

I've just run a couple of tests to measure the effectiveness on a few different levels. In a game on a sphere, all faces initially present, Vertex Attack made an average of 12 attacks each time it was used (about 24 points of damage, as each attack does 2 damage on a hit), but this ranged from 1 attack on a very poorly timed use to over 20 when large battles were going on, and over 50 when Expand Edges had recently been used. On the torus, with most faces closed, an average of 10 attacks - slightly less, because of the smaller perimeters. On a sphere with all faces initially open, an average of 20 - it's a very powerful ability in this case; one time it made 54 attacks without Expand Edges even having been used!

So it seems rather powerful for such a low level ability; situationally it's doing over 100 points of damage. But I don't believe it's overpowered; its average damage is in the mid-twenties, which is comparable to Roaming Mine or Boobytrap, and it's only doing the really high damage on specific unusual levels or in a combo with Expand Edges - and combos with white abilities can be expected to be strong, since Damage All is regularly throwing out hundreds of damage points on its own. Plus it'll sometimes do almost nothing, and you don't always know when it'll be most effective because the adjacencies might be out of sight.

Local Capture (RED)

2009-09-17T06:20:00.000-07:00

There's not really much to say about this one - it's pretty straightforward, new players seem to easily grasp what it does and how to use it, it's been in the game in pretty much the same state since the very beginning. The only change from the original is minor; it used to only capture whole faces, but now if it can't capture an entire face (because another player owns some of the vertices) it will still take all the vertices and edges that it can.

The thing that is interesting about Local Capture is that (like Close Gaps and Expand Edges) it works on the basic game mechanics rather than creating some new type of object, so it only really makes sense in the context of Vertex Dispenser. Some of the abilities could be more or less directly translated to lots of other games, things like "fire a missile that homes in on enemies" or "damage all enemies on the level". But "capture adjacent faces" is only meaningful because territory is good to acquire and hold onto for various reasons, and faces are units of territory which automatically attack.

Roaming Mine (RED)

2009-09-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

There's some quite interesting emergent behaviour that came up with Roaming Mine, that makes it potentially a very powerful ability. Its movement algorithm is as follows: sort adjacent vertices into three lists; enemy, neutral and friendly; then select a random element of the first of these lists that is non-empty, and move there. Simple enough - it'll basically move about at random, but it would rather go towards enemies (and damage them), and it might as well steer away from friendly territory - it's more likely to find an enemy elsewhere.

But what happens when there's a hole in the middle of your territory; a neutral vertex (or a few) surrounded by friendly vertices? The Roaming Mine will always prefer to move into the neutral area over your vertices, so it'll get caught, never finding its way to an enemy. So there's a risk that they'll never do anything, staying stuck in this hole forever. But the cool part is: this is actually an advantage. It allows you to focus your attacks to maximise effect. When a solitary Mine trundles off and does a small amount of damage, it might end up having no effect whatsoever, if perhaps a Repair Robot fixes things up before another attack is made in the same area. But if you save several of them up, trapping them all in a hole, and release them all at once (perhaps by capturing the neutral vertex they're stuck on), then they'll burst forth like a swarm of angry bees and do all their damage in one go. Much more effective!

I liked this strategy so much that I made the AI check if a gap in their territory had a Roaming Mine in it, and if so not fill it up, so that when I'm playing with AI allies they won't mess up my plans. Useful.

How can it be countered? A well-placed Pulse Wave could take out the whole lot in one go. Charging in and releasing them yourself before too many are saved up could help - especially if you soak up some of the damage with Protection or Fortification. And you could always try doing the same thing yourself - hoarding up your own arsenal ensuring mutual destruction.

Video again

2009-09-14T05:19:00.000-07:00

This time it's awesome.

Toggle Faces (BLUE)

2009-09-14T05:15:00.000-07:00

This one's a bit weird, it doesn't see much use most of the time. It's pretty important on some levels - where there are lots of faces toggled off at the start, it's very useful for toggling them back on (although then you have to be careful that your opponent doesn't take over the valuable real estate you've just created). But why would you ever want to turn faces back off?
I can think of a few interesting strategies based around this, but I'm not sure that they're ever worth the effort to pull off.
- Make holes for laser turrets to shoot through.
- Make a border of toggled faces along your territory so that it's slightly harder for enemies to break in; they don't have faces to back them up.
- Weaken enemy territory by charging in and making holes in the surface, so even when they capture it again it's not strong with faces.

I think it's worth leaving in there to be an unusual ability with potential applications by advanced players, even if most of the time it seems like a waste of a slot. Time will tell whether anyone figures out how to put it to good use. (Plus, as I said above, it's quite important on certain levels.)

Video

2009-09-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

I've just assembled a short video of Vertex Dispenser in action.

I've compiled a version that runs a replay, saving every frame as an image file. Then I can compile the images to a video with VirtualDub. Next task is to make a video that's actually interesting, splice together bits from various plays with some music over it.

Invisibility (BLUE)

2009-09-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

It's important to remember that while invisible, you can and will still be attacked. When a face attacks, it simply selects a random enemy vertex next to it, making no distinction between occupied and vacant vertices. This means that you can reduce the likelihood of a face attacking you by capturing some other vertices next to it; often a useful trick to know. But it also means that being invisible provides no advantage against enemy faces. Obviously you do get an advantage against enemy players, because they don't know exactly where you are, but still they can often figure it out if they're paying attention. Robots are affected, which makes quite a difference when you're dealing with Shield Robots, which need to know where you are in order to block your attacks. And of course Hunterseekers can't home in on you and Laser Turrets can't attack you if you're invisible.

In a way, I kind of think Mighty Vision is better than Invisibility, because the amount of extra information you get is more than the amount of information Invisibility hides from your opponents, especially since Mighty Vision lasts considerably longer. But Invisibility's a lot easier to use, and the advantage it gives you against Shield Robots and Laser Turrets makes it indispensible.

Teleportation (BLUE)

2009-09-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

Teleportation is the little death that avoids total obliteration. It allows you to move around the level quickly, and instantly escape from dangerous situations (often to the dismay of your opponent who was about to kill you). It's mechanically very similar to dying: both take you out of the game for a little while, during which you can move around the level to look at stuff, and then spawn at your selected location.

Originally, when you died, you couldn't do anything until you respawned at a random vertex. This was too much of a punishment - there needs to be an advantage gained by killing enemies, but being unable to do anything for a while is just frustrating. Being able to look around while dead helped a lot, because the game is still responding to input and you still feel involved, but ultimately I decided to allow selecting your respawn location. It was difficult, because I worried that the advantage from killing a player would be too little, but it turns out I was wrong; the time spent dead and the loss of colour energy are far more significant than the nuisance of not being where you want to be. And because teleporting takes much less time and doesn't stop you gaining energy, it's still way better than dying.

Mighty Vision (BLUE)

2009-09-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Mighty Vision has a few different effects, all related to letting you see information that would otherwise be hidden:
- show enemy hit points.
- draw a line over enemies, to locate them without a line of sight.
- show invisible enemies.
- uncover boobytraps.
The general effect of all this is to let you die less and kill your enemies more. You'll know better when to retreat (because you're fighting someone stronger than you) and when to press the attack (because they're about to die). It's a small but significant tactical advantage; I find it very helpful. But I've noticed that beginning players rarely use it. Perhaps it gives more information than they can use effectively. Perhaps they just don't think of it while they're busy with everything else (if this is your problem, try setting it on automatic (Alt+A) so that it'll be used whenever it's ready). Or perhaps they just don't realise the value of the information - it's easy to underestimate abilities that don't give a direct material advantage.

The original design for Mighty Vision was quite different; your avatar would be stuck still (as with Guided Bomb) while you move your view around (as with Teleport) to look at stuff. This was pretty weak, because it was rare that any advantage you could get would be worth using up your BLUE energy and spending that time vulnerable and not doing anything. Now you can use Teleport (or just die) if you want to have a peek around like that, and as a bonus you can get straight there if you see somewhere useful to be.