Final Presentation

Hey there,

I recorded the final presentation of my project Refugee for you. I talk mostly about my vision of the game and then show it a little. Besides that CraftyJS and Github are discussed. The webcam ended up a little bit too much in the middle but I think it still works. I'm also sorry for the loud click sounds, I didn't realized that they were that loud and that I click that often when I don't type ;)

More crafting and music!

Seventh Version of Refugee

Hey in this new update there is a bunch of new objects in the game. Build weapons out of stone to deal a more serious amount of damage! Build picks to get those stones! And a lot more!
Also now you have a background music and sound effects!
Use the stationary saw to process your wooden logs and sticks and then carry them to the craft table to build mighty (kinda) weapons! To use one of the craft objects just press X when you're standing in front of them. Also press X in the inventory to equip your new weapons. Have fun!

The new graphic style of Refugee

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 7

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v07:

• new craftable weapons and objects
• graphic improvement
• scrollable Inventory
• added Stone Objects

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Woooho, crafting!

Sixth Version of Refugee

Here we are, now you can finally do productive stuff in Refugee. Use the stationary saw to process your wooden logs and sticks and then carry them to the craft table to build mighty (kinda) weapons! To use one of the craft objects just press X when you're standing in front of them. Also press X in the inventory to equip your new weapons. Have fun!

The new crafting system

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 6

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v06:

• new Feature: Crafting System
• new Feature: Weapon System
• minor bug fixes
• more objects
• fixed pause function

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Bigger Screens and stuff!

Fifth Version of Refugee

This time I bring you bigger graphics and a bigger screen! Also some minor improvements , mostly appearance stuff but also fixed some performance issues.

The new start menu

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 5

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v05:

• new Feature: Pause function
• new Feature: Drop descriptions
• minor bug fixes movement
• bigger graphics and screen
• improved performance
• improved start menu
• improved loading screen
• improved inventory

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

We're getting somewhere

Fourth Version of Refugee

Slowly Refugee moves away from being a prototype to being an actual game. In this version I introduced the inventory and drop system, so now all the destruction you can bring to the world will pay off. Currently there are around 7 things you can collect, try to find them all!
The next step will be either sounds or the crafting system, stay tuned.

The new start menu

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 4

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v04:

• new Feature: Drops from attacked objects
• new Feature: Inventory
• new Feature: Notifys about loot
• minor bug fixes in world creation
• improved start menu
• improved loading screen

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Destroy everything!

Third Version of Refugee

Here we go, finally you can do something in Refugee! Something very destructive! You can destroy everything! So far so good, I plan to implement the inventory and drop system next so that all this destruction will have a good use ;)

Screenshot from the latest Refugee Version

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 3

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v03:

• new Feature: Start Menu
• new Feature: Attacks
• new Feature: Trees, Bushes and Flowers are destroyable
• minor bug fixes in world creation

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Progess with Refugee

Second version of Refugee

There is progress! Yay! I just released the second version of my game Refugee.

Screenshot from the newest version of Refugee

You can play it here: Refugee - Version 2

Changelog:

You can check all changelogs in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Changelog

Changelog for v02:

• fixed Movement Issues (implemented own camera)
• added Tree objects with different sprites
• movement outside of the map is not longer possible
• improved file structure
• added wood saw object (no functionality yet)

Features:

You can check the features in the wiki: Refugee Wiki - Features
You also can see the current To-Dos with priorities there.

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Game Wiki

The game wiki for Refugee is set up!

Refugee Wiki

From now on I will edit the To-Dos, Issues and further Documentation there. But I will post on the blog if there was a major change.

MargaritaVille Review

Recently I played MargaritaVille on Facebook and her are my thoughts about it:

Screenshot from MargitaVille

I think I played the game for a few hours, mostly because I was bored and had nothing better to do at that time, but I've to admit that at the beginning it wasn't bad and motivated me to play longer. At the end I had discovered the whole first island and got the new boat which was supposed to bring me to the next island but I didn't get that to work, which was kinda frustrating and I quit. But while the quests at the beginning were kinda fun and different to each other at the end I felt like every quest was the same which got very lame. I actually read this article Who Killed Videogames - A Ghost Story the guy from Explosive Barrel Games mentioned in his interview after that and found it to be quite insightful because it was describing these kind of games. I think I have to agree with the article a lot, for me these games can be fun for a hours (like MargaritaVille) but I wouldn't never spend money on them or play them longer than that, but the article pointed out how the makers still make profit with it, which is quite impressive if you consider the thoughts and science they put in it. That really impressed me but I don't know if I would have noticed it without the article because I don't have the game designer perspective on games (yet?).

So it was a good insight in the social games industry and I don't regret spending time in it, because otherwise I would have missed the experience to understand the article.

Free writing challenge

In one of my classes we at the opportunity to ask Tom Gammarino, who wrote the fancy short story Jellyfish Dreams questions about his life as an author and his connections to video games. He left us with a challenge to write quickly about anything. Better leave you with his words:

Now you're going to freewrite for ten minutes. There is only one rule: your hand cannot stop moving for even a nanosecond. Don't worry about meaning and sense. Don't worry about misspellings or grammar. Just write, headlong and as fast as you can. Outwrite your mind. If your thoughts bottom out, you can write about how stupid this exercise is and what an idiot I am for proposing you do it. That's fine. This is an evaluation-free zone. As long as you're writing, you're doing this correctly. Oh, you must be writing English words, and no doodling. On your marks, get set, go!
I do this quite a lot, and often I find it yields really strange images and surrealistic juxtapositions that I never could have planned. Even when you're feeling blocked, you can always do this. It's probably not true, but I like to imagine that the most hardcore surfer goes out and paddles around even when there are no waves to speak of. 

Tom Gammarion about his freewriting challenge

So here is with what I came up, admitting that is was not that easy for me because my speed of writing in English is a lot slower that my process of thinking so I ended up with thinking about what I want to write which kinda misses the challenge...

Slowly you awake..you don't know were you are but it seems to be a forest, at least there are trees all around you. You notice that there is not much sound around you, well there are different sounds which are unfamiliar to you. Since born and raise in a city you collected most of your experiences with forests or nature in general from stories you overheard in taverns or at the docks.
So this is new for you. But even if it feel slightly uncomfortable to be in a place you don't know with no memory of how you got there, inside you there is the urge to discover this strange place. It took some time but after a few minutes you can't resist that urge any longer and start wandering around. Quickly you see that this might not be really classified as a forest, there are a lot of trees but they have a lot of spacing in between so you can see all the grass, flowers and bushes on the ground. In the distance you see mountains. Wandering around you can't help but enjoying this place, everything seems peaceful and calm. So different from everything you know so maybe that's what makes it this interesting.
As you get hungry you see that there are a lot of bushes with berries around, and after short hesitations you try them. They are great, much more fresher than anything you are used to from your city and so you can enjoy a nice meal here. This place seems more friendlier with a full stomach and you really begin to like it, but you feel that the night is near and it might be a good idea to search for shelter, there should be a bunch of opportunities around but you should be quick..

So buy his book and try this challenge yourself, I think it's a nice way to get thoughts from your brain to paper.

First prototype of Refugee

First prototype of Refugee

I started on developing my first own game about which I blogged here when I presented my game ideas. So now I started on this one and here is the first prototype of it.

Screenshot of the first Refugee Prototype

You can play it here: Refugee - Prototype 1

Features:

Until now there is not much in the prototype, but you are able to walk around and see the random world generation. It's kinda slow and I'm not quite sure if that is the fault of my machine or not. So if you have performance issues please tell me.

• Random World Creation
• Random Placement of bushes and flowers
• Walk around with W,A,S,D

To-Dos:

• Correcting hit boxes 
• Interaction with world : able to chop down wood
• Inventory
• Interaction with world: use stationary saw to process wood
• different ground tiles with different properties
• Crafting system
• Enemies
• Camera to follow player

Repository:

You can find all the source code to this prototype online under my github account in the repository RefugeePrototype

Falling off the wagon

Hey,

I just wanted to let you know that I'm still alive. The last weeks were busy and so I had not really time to work for this course. First I had to finish an important java project for my german university and after that I broke my laptop. Took me some time to get a new one... But now I'm back and will start to catch up, hopefully it's not too late.

Probably the only drinks I will take the next days

Here it is... My first game! *Update*

Finally. I finished my first real game! Try it now: SameGame

Screenshot from "SameGame"

It's done with the CraftyJS Framework and is based on a tutorial by starmelt which you can find here.

Comments with your highscores are always welcome!

UPDATE: Changed the light green to dark green, apparently there where some people who couldn't see the difference between light green and yellow. Nice reminder to have good tests for all your games before you publish them.

Focus on!

Today I will write about game focus and use one of my game ideas as an example. Maybe you remember this game idea, this is what I would want the focus for this game to be:

The game is an on survival based role-playing game. The player takes the role of a refugee and his experience will be based on the development of this character. It is the players decision if he want to play his character alone or use him to lead other NPCs in order to survive by building up a town. While doing so he needs to collect resources while being under steady attacks from his unfriendly environment. So the player while experience the feeling of being in danger while he struggles to keep himself and his town alive and growing. The overall tone of this game is a very dark one.

This is the focus I like to create. It doesn't tells you all about the game play or anything but what the main aspect of this game should be.

Wouldn't it be cool... My favorite!

As a last part of this mini series I like to present the idea I like the most and which I hope to realize soon. I have to admit I got greatly influenced by two (indie-) games while coming up with this idea. So I guess it's not a totally innovative one, but on the side I think those are very rare and not necessarily to create a good new game experience. Of course you can't just copy one game but by connecting good parts from two different games you can create a whole new experience for the player. At least that's what I say to myself when I think of this idea ;)

So here are the two games I was talking about:

Minicraft

Screenshot from Minicraft 

Here you play the game in your browser and also find a description about it's creation, read it! http://playminicraft.com/

Dwarf Fortress

Screenshot of Dwarf Fortress - yes that's how the vanilla game looks like

Here is the official site of the game. It's really hard to get into the game as it's not easy and has almost no help for beginners which I consider a flaw of it, but there are a lot of helpful tutorials around the forums and it's really worth it because you can do so much in it. One very good example of deep game play with lots of opportunities.

And now my idea:

The Refugee-becomes-the-survivor-in-the-wildness-and-starts-his-own-civilization-game 

(I did mention that names are not that easy right?)

Technology: 2D, isometric view
Gameplay: You control one character in a random generated world which is kinda 3D (don't know how to describe properly but you have an x, y and z axis). You would just need keys to move in the world plus one for interaction with objects, one for your inventory and one for your character screen. You would start with just a few tools but similar to minecraft you can chop wood or mine into mountain to get stone and ores to produce better tools, weapons and armor for yourself. You are not alone in the world with enemy of different strengths will roaming around and attack you if the spot you so you always have to be ready to defend yourself. Of course you always can choose to build yourself a house or any other kind of safeplace because you are able to build walls, floors, doors and all those kind of stuff with the materials you collect. You could go on like this as long as you want while improving yourself and exploring more and more of the world. Up to this point I guess it's pretty much minecraft with a different view but i want to give the player the opportunity to build up city in this game. You would do so by building some sort of special buildings which attract NPC who populate them and do different jobs in your city. An example would be to build a little house with fields nearby which would attract farmer to join you. All in all there would be different profession from guards to smiths and so on and you would need a good mix of them to keep your city running well. All the NPC are controlled by the computer so your task is not really the micro management but more the macro management.
Story: You are a refugee from an evil empire and fled to unknown lands in order to escape some kind of punishment. You can choose to try to survive on your on or as pointed out above you could try to unite other refugees and build up your own city and maybe even an empire to fight the evil empire.

By the way I found an article interviewing Notch the creator of "Minicraft" where he speaks about innovation and ideas (and some other stuff) and I think he would agree with my statements at the beginning of the article. You can read it here. So at least one of the creator of the influencing games would not sue me for realizing this ;)

Wouldn't it be cool... Where to get an idea

Where do you get ideas from? Well basically I think that you should try to make the kind of games you would like to play, if your lucky people will feel the same about it. At least that's my approach for the moment, we will see how it will work out.

In my last post I presented my first game idea by writing about three category which gives the reader a basic understanding of what the author tries to describe: the technology used, the game play and the story the game wants to tell. I haven't come up with this method on my own but again got it from Richard Rouse III and his book "Game Design Theory and Practice, Second Edition" (seriously, get the book if you're interested in this topic!).

In the arena of computer game design, the process of coming up with a game idea that will work is complicated by a number of factors fiction authors do not need to worry about. In part this is because computer game ideas can come from three distinct, unrelated areas of the form: gameplay, technology, and story. These different origins are interconnected in interesting ways, with the origin of the game’s idea limiting what one will be able to accomplish in the other two areas. So when a game designer starts thinking about the game she is hoping to make — thinking about it in terms of gameplay, technology, or story — it is important that she consider how that initial idea will impact all aspects of the final game.

 Richard Rouse,Game Design Theory and Practice, Second Edition 

So here is my next idea, which by the was created by thinking about an old school game ported to modern platforms and I had to think about this game I played a lot during school.

The Tron-Light-Bike-Drawing-Fight (Names are hard)

Technology: 2D, just drawing some lines so nothing fancy
Gameplay: Each player controls a different colored line. Each line moves with the same speed forward and the player can just control the direction with a left and right button. If you press any button your line makes a curve to that direction as long as the button is pushed, if no button is pressed the line goes straight forward. A player loses and his line stops moving when you hit the boundaries of the game or a line from another player or your own. You can see all the time the whole game area so it's not moving with you in any way. The winner is the one one survives the longest. I think this is actually and pretty simple game play but my friends and I had a lot of fun with it in the hot seat mode because of it's competitive nature. I would like to port it to smartphones so that you can play it together with your friends over bluetooth, wifi or your data connection.
Story: Nah there's no for this one, maybe something like the TRON lightbikes, they make everything cool.

Wouldn't it be cool...Some game ideas

The basic must have thing as a game designer are cool game ideas and I would like to present you some of mine here in this blog. On the on hand I can train to write my ideas down in a way other people who are not familiar with my thinking can understand them and on the other hand you can then criticize them as much as possible. These both aspects are very important, you have to work with others in a team in order to create games and so they need to understand your vision which is just achievable by telling them in a proper way. But if you tell somebody your thought you must be ready to accept comments and criticism both are very important for you because you can use them to improve your ideas. No matter how they sound to you, there is always space for improvements and sometimes you need other people to point that out for you.

I think I will present some of them in post starting with "Wouldn't it be cool.." because, well I hope it would be cool if those ideas could be become games.

Let's start with the first one: Since I played World of Warcraft a lot, I mean really quite some time, it always fascinated me who addictive this game could be. I think it was the progression you character made by getting leveling up and later getting new equipment together with friends was the secret. Because of that  I thought how you could adapt this to the new big trend in the gaming industry, the social games.

The social dungeon crawler
Technology: 2D, isometric view
Gameplay: Basically it is a dungeon run game, where you can go to different dungeons with a groups of your friends. In the dungeons the monster would drop coins, armor, weapons and so on so that you get better equipment with every dungeon run. Also you gain experience with takes you to new levels and unlocks new, more dangerous dungeons. Of course the quality of the loot depends on the level of the dungeon. Players can choose for every character a base class like warrior , ranger or mage and specialize with every level. While this all is kinda basic stuff and there are many games which have those features I like to concentrate on the social aspect of the game. In the really good dungeons you can just go with a group from 3 to 5 people so you need to gather your friends. If you have you would automatically join a voice chat when entering the dungeon the exchange and make tactics and so on because the harder dungeon would require more than just basic hit and run. Of course you also can trade your loot with your friends so it's basically a simple World of Warcraft for Facebook.
Story: It's fantasy themed, so most of the dungeons would try to tell a story about a villain or be part of a larger quest to save a kidnapped child or stuff like this.

In the next post of this series I will explain why I have choose to split it each idea into these three categories (technology, gameplay, story) of course together with the next game.

What would be my "Dream Game"?

To answer this I should make clear what I mean by the expression "Dream Game". I did not come up with it but got the idea from Richard Rouse III while reading his book "Game Design Theory and Practice, Second Edition". There he states:

"The Dream 

One could say that the goal of gameplay is to allow for different player strategies to lead to variable types of success, to reward player experimentation and exploration, and to empower players to make their own choices. All of these factors allow players to craft their own unique stories when playing your game. If in addition you want to tell a more predetermined story through your game, it is important to do everything possible to make players feel that it is their own unique story. Players should feel ownership over the actions in their game, and thereby ownership in the story that is being told."

Richard Rouse III, Game Design Theory and Practice, Second Edition 

 So what would this "Dream Game" in terms of story be for me? I think it's obvious that it is still a dream and not reality since our technology today just don't allow us to create game in which the player has every opportunity he wants to have while still creating a fascinating story. For me the game which  came close to the mentioned "Dream Game" was a soccer team management game, which is called "FIFA Manager".

FIFA Manager 12 (German Edition)

You were responsible for managing your own soccer team by handling the transfers of players, deciding how the training would look like and all these things. So basically really all regarding your team besides the actual playing the soccer game (as in the normal FIFA). Still as a player you really felt in control of the development of your team and could you use a lot of different strategies. Of course there was not that much story telling going on, but like Richard Rouse III said the player really created stories for their own by having that much influence on the success of their team which made it enjoyable for a long time.