Vertex Dispenser updated

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?)

procrastination

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

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.

Vertex Dispenser levels

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.

Vertex Dispenser: explosions

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!

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.

2 bugs

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.

Website

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

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

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

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).

IGF Feedback

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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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

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

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

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!

Pulse Wave (GREEN)

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

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)

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!

Star Attack (GREEN) and Blog Explanation Procedure

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)

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.