GWB Game Design Challenge

Thanks to Jeff and GWB for the Game Development contest (oh yeah, and the XBox 360)

George Clingerman — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:56:00 GMT

Now that my XBox is in my grubby little hands, I just wanted to take the time to say thanks for putting together such a fun contest. It was a lot of fun making Bob the Fish and I really enjoyed watching the progress and development arcs of all the other competitors.

So congratulations to everyone who took the time to compete. I hope we get to have another go at a contest with each other in the future, the banter and the support was just simply wonderful and the contest a whole heckuva lot of fun!

For some more photos and a bit more of the range of emotions I was going through when my XBox360 arrived, read the article here.

Thanks again Jeff!

2D Game Development with Managed DirectX Tutorial work begins today

George Clingerman — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:48:00 GMT

Similar to Scott, I felt pretty aimless after finishing off my game. I've been pouring so much work into the game contest in the evenings and the weekends that not having anything to work on felt pretty odd.

So, to take advantage of my current "work horse" mentality, I'm going to attempt to provide some Managed DirectX tutorials for those interested in developing 2D games. These tutorials will be created using Visual Basic.NET (the express version) which is a language seriously lacking in Managed DirectX tutorials so hopefully I'll be filling a previously unfilled tutorial gap (although to be honest converting from C# to VB.NET is really easy and there are plenty of C# tutorials).

I'm planning on starting to work on the first tutorial today, so hopefully I will have the first one up by tonight.

Congratulations to the GWB Game Contestants who made it to the end!

George Clingerman — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:52:00 GMT

The GWB Contest has ended and the contestants have posted their code to the server. Time to raise our glasses in the air and congratulate each other on a job well done. Just completing and having something to show people to say "I made that!" is a pretty awesome achievement. I'm really excited too because each contestant tackled a different gametype and focused on different types of technologies. Should be plenty of nice examples to improve my own coding skills and have those "oh THAT's how I should have done it" moments.

I submitted my game last night (partly because I'm a little OCD and partly because I just wanted to be able to relax tonight) and it was pretty fun coming in to work this morning and seeing some people huddled around a computer as a guy was playing my game. That was a good feeling. Then I kept getting emails during the day of little glitches and hacks they had found in the game that they could exploit. Those are exploits to MY game and that's pretty cool.

One of the weirdest feelings happened as I was play testing the other night and I threw my hands up in the air as I failed yet again in completing the "Follow the Leader" level and said, "It's like they want me to lose?" and wifey said "Who's they? You mean you?". Yep, I wanted me to lose and that was a strange feeling. No abstract "they" to blame for making the game too difficult or tricky, just me.

Making this game has been a very satisfying experience. Is it perfect? Not even close, but it is playable and in it I see the potential of what I could do if I would just focus and put the time in. Now I just need to start planning my next game...

My Game is officially submitted.

George Clingerman — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 01:52:00 GMT

Tonight was slightly stressful. I always get stressed on release days (or nights, whatever). It just seems that no matter how small the release, things always pop up. Well, even with the small things that kept appearing, I still got it submitted and I'm glad. I'm tired.

For those of you anxious to take a peak at it before Jeff makes it available. You can grab the project source here or you can just grab the game here (I think it will work, I know the source code will, just not sure about my standalone exe, especially after the way tonight went).

So there it is. No more chances to make changes. Just sitting and waiting. I'll try and work up the energy to do a project wrap-up post tomorrow. Good luck to the rest of the contestants in wrapping up the projects and getting them submitted. We made it, give yourselves a round of applause because you deserve it.

[Edit: If you do download the game or source code, leave a comment please. I'd appreciate any positive or negative feedback you might have! Thanks.]

Refactoring and A.I. improvements

George Clingerman — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 01:38:00 GMT

Tonight I spent some more time cleaning up my code and then I spent a little more time messing up the code by adding in some artificial intelligence. The Jellyfish on the Feeding Frenzy level (the Pac-Man clone) just weren't difficult enough so I made them chase Bob a bit more "intelligently". They are also very adept now at avoiding him when they are scared. The A.I. could still use some improvements, but it's a much more challenging level then it was when I started tonight.

I really want to take some time after I get my project handed in and see how other people have programmed Pac-Man clones because I say "A.I", but I'm not sure that my method of giving my jellyfish A.I really indicated any level of intelligence. A brute force intelligence maybe, but not real intelligence. So that's definitely an area I'll be investigating further once I have the time.

With the code cleanup, I'm really trying to reign that in at this point and not do too much. There is more refactoring that I could do and there are definitely places where I got a bit sloppy and stopped following my own standards. Then there are other places where I changed the way I decided to do something, but I didn't make the same change throughout the project. However, I don't want to start down this path of cleaning those things up only to find I majorly messed something up in the process so at this point I'm trying to keep my code stable and just add some commenting.

This is always my least favorite time on any project. You can't really do anything you really want to do because you'd have to send it through testing cycles again, but every time you look at the code until the day you release, you see a bunch of things you really should be doing. I'm REALLY looking forward to Friday. In fact, if I can make it through my levels successfully tomorrow after another day of refactoring (limited) and cleanup then I think I'm just going to go ahead and submit it.

When I was commenting my code tonight, I played around a little with the XML commenting feature (in VB putting 3 ' in a row) but I'm not sure that I like the way it looks. It makes my code feel a little more cluttered I think. Maybe it's just to new to me so I'll have to get used to it, but that was my initial impression.

On a non-gaming related note, I just want to give my thanks to Al Gore for inventing the internet. I mentioned the other day that my son had a Star Wars birthday party. Well for that party he got a Lego Star Wars V-Wing fighter which I told him I would help him build later that week. Well, by the time I got around to helping him, he'd lost the instructions already. Luckily, Al Gore was there for me and I was able to use teh internets to find those exact building instructions for that Lego set and could download them in PDF form to my computer for future reference (just in case Google stops backing up teh internets every night). That is just awesome. My son was happy, I was happy and teh internets are teh roxxorz!1!!11

Everybody has the same computer setup and graphics card that I have right?

George Clingerman — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:37:00 GMT

I've got the last of the game errors I was planning on addressing fixed, so now I'm just play testing and tweaking the game difficulty a bit. I also spent some time tonight cleaning up the project and removing those classes that I no longer use and I cleaned up some of my unused graphic files from the project directory.

The only remaining floating (and concerning) issue is a weird texture issue I've experienced when testing the game on another computer, but I'm not sure what to do about it. All my other textures work the same on this computer, but the Jellyfish texture positioning information is incorrect. This means that the rectangles the code grabs to use for a texture on each of the Jellyfish sprites is off so you kind of see half of two on top of what should be one jellyfish sprite. I'm going to spend a little more time looking into that tomorrow, I'm guessing it might be related to the difference in graphics cards, resolution or maybe how an image of that particular dimensions is interpreted by that graphics card. Bummer to see that so late in the game, but I should have expected it.

I'm crossing my fingers that the majority of the people that look at the project don't get a lot of (or any) texture anomalies like that but I just didn't have the resources or time to do a lot of play testing on other computers or video cards. I can only hope that my computer is the average so that most people will get the same results I did when they start playing and tinkering with my project. Come on Managed DirectX, don't fail me now!

As much fun as I've had working on this project for the last month and a half, I'm glad it's nearing the end because I'm feeling just a wee bit tired. I've got a project that is wrapping up at work as well so it's been pretty intense there during the day for the last month. Then I come home and pound away on this game project until the late hours of the night (I'm normally an in bed by 10pm guy, but for this project I've been trying to stay up till midnight (big thanks to wifey for the coffee and encouragement to continue to make that happen since I often just felt like falling asleep). June is also an extremely busy month for my family (lots of birthdays (no, I mean like LOTS), weddings, anniversaries, etc.) so I'm definitely looking forward to having my nights back for a bit.

Part of me just wants to submit my game tonight and be done, but I'm going to try and clean the code up some more over the next couple of days and make sure my comments still make sense. Plus, I guess I should take one more look at that texture problem. I guess I can push on for a few more days.

I've been following everybody's progress since the contest start (did you notice the contestant link list on the left?) and I have to say there are quite a few nice looking games coming out. I'm really looking forward to seeing how other people did things. Keep up the good work guys. We're there, just don't forget to hit submit on Friday ;)

The Story transitions have been added, the final bug fixes are being made and a big shout out to Cropper

George Clingerman — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 01:10:00 GMT

Tonight I finally added in all of the story transitions for the Story Mode. That I believe is the final "new" development piece for Bob the Fish. There are just a couple of bugs I plan on fixing and then that's all she wrote. I'll be handing it in and breathing a sigh of relief that I made it to the end.

After I added the story elements in and went through the levels (in a shortcut fashion, lowering the requirements for each...oh that reminds me I should probably set those back..), it just felt really good to see it all come together. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to develop each of the game types that I tackled and I feel like I achieved my goal of getting their gameplay figured out. The downside of doing that many gametypes was that I didn't flush each of them out as far as I could. The enemies are limited, their A.I. is limited, etc. but the basic gameplay is there and they are all a good base that if someone wanted to they could continue adding pieces and levels to that gametype for a full fledged clone of that game type.

So barring the unforeseen, I should be able to clean up those last little bugs, give my code the once over and get my game submitted early I hope (just so I stop fiddling with it and stressing over it). Here's hoping that I can make that last little push.

And just so I feel like I'm sharing something useful instead of just giving a game progress update (is anyone really interested in those?), to capture my game images I'm using this wonderful little program called Cropper. It's a free image capture utility that once I was introduced to it, I just couldn't live without it on my computer. Check it out if you've ever needed an easier method and more control of the screenshots you've needed to capture. I haven't upgraded to the latest version yet, but the 1.6.24.1 version that I've been using has been awesome.

I'm tired, I'm hot but I'm coding

George Clingerman — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Just came off a weekend filled with a new 6 year olds Star Wars themed birthday activities. And for some crazy reason, the Northwest decided it didn't feel like being a moderate climate and temperature shut up into the upper 90s. We're you're not used to that it can be a bit much. Not much time left in the contest, but I'm feeling ok with where I'm at. There's of course more I could do for each level (there's always more), but I'm being good and just focusing on final tweaks and cleaning up my code. The only major functionality left to stick in is the story transitions. Originally I was planning on doing comic strips, but I just don't have the energy left in me so I'm just going to stick with basic text.

Well, enough updating, I've got to get to it! Good luck to all the other contestants! Some of those game just look awesome, can't wait to check them out. Congrats to everyone for sticking with it (and shame on you for those that didn't' ;) )

Finishing the Final Boss Battle

George Clingerman — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:00:00 GMT

I'm not going to have time to add sound, but it looks like I might just be able to get all my loose ends wrapped up and having a fairly functional working game to submit before next Friday (the 30th). I'm just now putting the finishing touches on the final boss battle and then it's just going through each of the game types and cleaning up those little things that I told myself that I would look at later.

This whole contest has just been such an amazing experience. To be honest, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to have anything to submit. I've never actually finished a game project before, so I wasn't sure I'd be able to this time (crossing my fingers I'm not jinxing myself by saying that since I'm not technically done yet). Maybe it was just how awesome Express has been, maybe it's having an entire community of geeks to seek advice from but whatever it was, everything just sort of clicked for me this time. Those things that I normally haven't been able to figure out had solutions and with the support of my friends and family I was able to overcome those times that I got discouraged. (thanks!)

I'm pretty happy with what I've put together and my only regrets are one, that I didn't provide any tutorials or step by step, this is how I did this instructions as I went and two, that I didn't have time to find and create sounds to put into the project (I really feel that's going to hurt the "fun" level). I do have plans to revisit the game and try and do some tutorials, but I'm looking forward to other people looking my code over first to help me clean it up and point out areas I should have done something differently first. Then the tutorials will be a little more helpful I feel.

Let's hope that I can get all the "little" things cleaned up this weekend so I won't be in any danger of missing the deadline. Good luck to all the rest of you as you finish up, we're almost there!

Caverns And Leviathans: The beginning

George Clingerman — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:15:00 GMT

With today being Father's day, I of course did what every dad dreams of doing. I attempted to program a Gauntlet style game in Managed DirectX with VB.NET using Visual Studio Express. I'm sure most of you did the same.

I made some really excellent progress and it felt VERY good. The coding isn't pretty, but this is jut my first pass at it. I code similar to how you are supposed to write a college paper. First I start with notecards (a myriad of sheets of notebook papers with scribbled thoughts and ideas). Then I start putting it all in order in the IDE. Then I start flushing out more content and adding things I didn't think about or know that I needed. Then I add even more content. Then I read it over and make it all make a little more sense, correct errors and give it some flair (refactoring and an attempt at good OO practices). Then I repeat that last sentence until the due date (code cutoff, in this case the contest end). So today was basically the transfer of my notes into code.

So even though the code is extremely sloppy, the gameplay is really coming together. Here's a little screenshot showcasing the intense Caverns and Leviathans action as Bob move down through the various levels.

Above you can see Bob heroically trying to destroy the Cauldron that is spawning the evil Nagas as he battles his way through the Cavern. Good luck Bob!

Currently, the first level is loading (it's the only one I have designed so far and I'm hoping to get 4 done). The items (keys, doors, cauldrons, potion and stairs) are all loading and Bob interacts with each of these items appropriately. The cauldrons also spawn enemies and the enemies will swarm on Bob as he nears them (Naga's are shown swarming him in the screenshot). The doors remain locked and impassable unless Bob has a key and the stairs signal the completion of the first cavern.

I told myself that if I got the first level done that I would skip the next three and wrap up the final boss battle with the Leviathan. I want to do that in case I run out of time and can't add the next 3 caverns. Then at least the gametype itself would be playable. So that's the next step, battling the Leviathan. We'll see how developing a boss battle turns out, should be fun, educational and interesting.

Father's day is awesome! (thanks Wifey!)