A few nice reviews of Glitch Tank have cropped up around the place. Here's one from Edge Online. It hasn't really sold much, but I'm not too bothered about that after the Indie Royale bundle last week! I am a little discouraged from polishing off the other two-player prototypes I have lying around though; working on something single-player for now instead.
This review from Game Side Story (a French website) finished with (via Google translate): "Finally, the only downside seems to be the variety of the game in the long run. If the first parts are greatly different from each other by the gradual mastery of the game system, they operate less and less over time. If this result is common to many strategy games, it would be here to offer some significant changes and additions on the modes and available actions. A lever easy to create diversity, particularly around the main theme, the glitch."
I figured this was a challenge I was up to, so I've added some rare stuff to provide more long-term variety. Most of the time it's the same as before, but occasionally something will glitch out randomly.
I've also added a new mode where your tanks take 6 hits to kill instead of 3. I'd recommend not playing this mode until you're used to the game - when you first play it's quite hard to do any damage at all so this will take forever, but once you get more used to the controls you can get in 3 hits extremely quickly so this option makes for a longer, more strategic game. It can still be very fast and brutal though! (Some of the new glitches tend to make the game more random as well; this counteracts that effect somewhat.)
It's also on iPhone now. There was a problem with sound not playing before, which is why I released on just iPad (plus that was all I had to test on), but now I've picked up an iPod touch and optimised my audio code a bit and it seems to be working fine.
If you have an iThing and a friend you should get this game.
app store link
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Saturday, 17 March 2012
7DRL: Zaga-33
Made a seven-day roguelike.
RGRD post
windows download
mac download
edit (17/03): minor update with a record of items you've identified.
edit (19/03): added mac version
edit (12/04): significantly updated and ithingified, see http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/zaga-33.html
RGRD post
windows download
mac download
edit (17/03): minor update with a record of items you've identified.
edit (19/03): added mac version
edit (12/04): significantly updated and ithingified, see http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/zaga-33.html
Thursday, 15 March 2012
Vertex Cortex Remix Vortex
Vertex Dispenser is currently available as part of an Indie Royale bundle. So you can pay a variable amount of money for it. Weird!
(I updated the game last week or so with some minor bug-fixes and balance tweaks. Nothing significant.)
But that's old hat. Made that game ages ago.
They asked if I had any bonus content that could be included. Nothing immediately came to mind, but with my head full of game jams I said "tell you what, I'll do a remix for it". So I came up with Vertex Vortex Cortex Remix. It reuses code and aesthetics from Vertex Dispenser, but it behaves completely differently. It's a "figure it out as you go" puzzle/experience/thing in the vein of Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J and The Sense of Connectedness.
Have a screenshot:
I've also thrown in a level that was cut from the Vertex Dispenser campaign: Boss Fight. It was going to be the final level, so it's fairly hard. Inappropriately hard, in fact - if it had stayed I'd have certainly had to drop the difficulty. I only recommend it if you've completed the campaign and really want an extra challenge.
I haven't played any of the other games in the bundle yet.
(I updated the game last week or so with some minor bug-fixes and balance tweaks. Nothing significant.)
But that's old hat. Made that game ages ago.
They asked if I had any bonus content that could be included. Nothing immediately came to mind, but with my head full of game jams I said "tell you what, I'll do a remix for it". So I came up with Vertex Vortex Cortex Remix. It reuses code and aesthetics from Vertex Dispenser, but it behaves completely differently. It's a "figure it out as you go" puzzle/experience/thing in the vein of Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J and The Sense of Connectedness.
Have a screenshot:
I've also thrown in a level that was cut from the Vertex Dispenser campaign: Boss Fight. It was going to be the final level, so it's fairly hard. Inappropriately hard, in fact - if it had stayed I'd have certainly had to drop the difficulty. I only recommend it if you've completed the campaign and really want an extra challenge.
I haven't played any of the other games in the bundle yet.
Monday, 27 February 2012
Jam and Kart
I've made thirteen games in the last eleven days.
For TIGJamUK6:
- Cube Gallery
- Number Quality
- a physical card game.
For Pirate Kart V:
- Game Title
- Game Title: Lost Levels
- i heard you like videogames
- Ludoname
- Ytilauq Rebnum
- Reverse Passage
- Grand Vampire Chase
- Reverse Passage 2: Mother's Edition
- Gardens of Time: Design Problem Solving
- Multicolour Alien Olympic (two-player)
Whew!
Obviously some of these will be less interesting than others. Game Title is probably the best place to start if you want to try one of them.
I highly recommend doing game jams. There's really nothing else like sitting down for a couple of hours and having a new game at the end of it.
Note that this isn't even that many. SophieH made 16 this weekend.
(All downloads are Windows only at this point, I'll try to do mac builds of some of them this week.)
For TIGJamUK6:
- Cube Gallery
- Number Quality
- a physical card game.
For Pirate Kart V:
- Game Title
- Game Title: Lost Levels
- i heard you like videogames
- Ludoname
- Ytilauq Rebnum
- Reverse Passage
- Grand Vampire Chase
- Reverse Passage 2: Mother's Edition
- Gardens of Time: Design Problem Solving
- Multicolour Alien Olympic (two-player)
Whew!
Obviously some of these will be less interesting than others. Game Title is probably the best place to start if you want to try one of them.
I highly recommend doing game jams. There's really nothing else like sitting down for a couple of hours and having a new game at the end of it.
Note that this isn't even that many. SophieH made 16 this weekend.
(All downloads are Windows only at this point, I'll try to do mac builds of some of them this week.)
Thursday, 9 February 2012
a dead end
Still making two-player games. There's a particular dead end I've run into repeatedly. It seems quite natural, at least to the way I think - lots of designs have ended up in the same place for completely different reasons.
(Definitions: I'm just talking about real-time competitive videogames here.)
(Disclaimer: Somewhat tired and unwell. Thoughts may be fragmented or incoherent.)
So, I'm not interested in making games where being quicker than your opponent guarantees a win. Just a matter of taste. I'm happy for speed (and chance) to play a part, but in general I prefer the outcome to be determined by decisions made by the players.
Part of the reason for this is that I play games with my wife, and usually if speed is very dominant in a game then I'll just win in a kind of boring way. My reflexes are better trained by more years of playing videogames, big deal. In a battle of wits, we're usually evenly matched (although don't ask about Chess). Having relatively even chances of winning is more interesting.
So the problem is: how to make a real-time game where quick action doesn't dominate?
A too-obvious solution is to have some kind of resource that accumulates over time and constrains how fast you can act. This leads to the dead end of which I spoke: having resource constraints on all actions. I've made at least four different games on this model, and although they had interesting decisions to make, they weren't interesting to play. Build something, wait to recharge, build something, wait to recharge. Games where you spend most of your time waiting for something to happen are boring. BORING. There's a lack of engagement. No matter how short the delay is, eventually you've made your decision and are just waiting. (Make the delay short enough and the quicker player wins and still spends most of the game waiting impatiently.)
I'm working on a very short timescale. Games that are over within five minutes. I've seen this type of thing done on a much larger time scale, games like Neptunes Pride with actions that take hours to execute. Circumvents the boredom by letting you achieve something else while waiting. But I don't like these either, they tend to advantage logging in frequently and at inappropriate times; they take over your life.
I've done games with some continuous actions with no time constraint, and some discrete actions constrained by a resource dependent on time. e.g. Exuberant Struggle. This works. I'm working with very restricted controls so it becomes quite limiting, but it's led to nice designs. The continuous actions often give false decisions - "do you want to dodge the incoming bomb? y/n" - but still give something to do and make the game more engaging. Speed is still an advantage, but I've been able to constrain how much of an advantage it is enough so that a player with slower reflexes can still win.
Glitch Tank's a curious example. It has a built-in disadvantage to haste. Spamming actions will let you build up lots of tanks and mines quickly, but friendly fire means this isn't a strict advantage. Acting quickly is an advantage, but only if you do so safely. It just barely works.
There are other ways out. I'm interested if anyone has examples that solve this. But I recommend avoiding it because it's been a dead end for me. Certainly if you throw away my constraints there isn't a problem - if you're happy for speed to be a big advantage, or if you make a turn-based game (which can end up playing faster as you master it). Or if a game is intentionally boring (?).
(Definitions: I'm just talking about real-time competitive videogames here.)
(Disclaimer: Somewhat tired and unwell. Thoughts may be fragmented or incoherent.)
So, I'm not interested in making games where being quicker than your opponent guarantees a win. Just a matter of taste. I'm happy for speed (and chance) to play a part, but in general I prefer the outcome to be determined by decisions made by the players.
Part of the reason for this is that I play games with my wife, and usually if speed is very dominant in a game then I'll just win in a kind of boring way. My reflexes are better trained by more years of playing videogames, big deal. In a battle of wits, we're usually evenly matched (although don't ask about Chess). Having relatively even chances of winning is more interesting.
So the problem is: how to make a real-time game where quick action doesn't dominate?
A too-obvious solution is to have some kind of resource that accumulates over time and constrains how fast you can act. This leads to the dead end of which I spoke: having resource constraints on all actions. I've made at least four different games on this model, and although they had interesting decisions to make, they weren't interesting to play. Build something, wait to recharge, build something, wait to recharge. Games where you spend most of your time waiting for something to happen are boring. BORING. There's a lack of engagement. No matter how short the delay is, eventually you've made your decision and are just waiting. (Make the delay short enough and the quicker player wins and still spends most of the game waiting impatiently.)
I'm working on a very short timescale. Games that are over within five minutes. I've seen this type of thing done on a much larger time scale, games like Neptunes Pride with actions that take hours to execute. Circumvents the boredom by letting you achieve something else while waiting. But I don't like these either, they tend to advantage logging in frequently and at inappropriate times; they take over your life.
I've done games with some continuous actions with no time constraint, and some discrete actions constrained by a resource dependent on time. e.g. Exuberant Struggle. This works. I'm working with very restricted controls so it becomes quite limiting, but it's led to nice designs. The continuous actions often give false decisions - "do you want to dodge the incoming bomb? y/n" - but still give something to do and make the game more engaging. Speed is still an advantage, but I've been able to constrain how much of an advantage it is enough so that a player with slower reflexes can still win.
Glitch Tank's a curious example. It has a built-in disadvantage to haste. Spamming actions will let you build up lots of tanks and mines quickly, but friendly fire means this isn't a strict advantage. Acting quickly is an advantage, but only if you do so safely. It just barely works.
There are other ways out. I'm interested if anyone has examples that solve this. But I recommend avoiding it because it's been a dead end for me. Certainly if you throw away my constraints there isn't a problem - if you're happy for speed to be a big advantage, or if you make a turn-based game (which can end up playing faster as you master it). Or if a game is intentionally boring (?).
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
definitions
(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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
New Year cleansing
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)
* 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
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)
* 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
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