John Zeitler

Just a little bit of an update tonight regarding the state of the Xbox Indie Games I was working on over 2009. Obviously, I lost a lot of momentum after losing the services of my artist over the summer. So, even though I had two mostly-working engines going, I had no games to produce with them. And now that I’m looking to have a lot of free time in the very near future, it turns out that the Windows machine I was using as my main development box had a power source failure (I think) and refuses to boot up. Meaning, quite simply, that all my source code is completely inaccessible. I have an old backup of the XVINE engine, but I primarily want to get something together using the action-oriented engine.

It’s not all bad news. I set up dual-boot on Mahoro a few months back so I could play my Steam games easily, but as it turns out I think I’ll be using her for development from here on out anyway. The source code for the old engines isn’t lost forever (I don’t think it is, anyway); I just need to get a hard drive enclosure to put the old machine’s drives in and retrieve it from there. And even though things are going to be a little rough soon, I’ll be paying for another year of the Creator’s Club here very shortly so that I can continue to develop and deploy to the 360. The action engine, from what I recall, was pretty adaptable, so putting together something simple and interesting is probably going to be fairly easy. The hardest part, as before, will be the art and music/sounds. We’ll see.

Catch you folks later.

In a discussion released recently regarding the Wii version of Punch-Out, Shigeru Miyamoto said:

Now, when young game designers make games and they are not fun, they add a lot of new material to try and make it fun. Even though they should make the game more fun using what they have right in front of them fully, they bring in new stuff.

In a nutshell, he’s pretty much summed up my main source of worry about the XNA projects. I could care less about how well the game sells, honestly (though it would be nice if the game does well enough to cover costs). What I’m worried about most is if the people who play it are having fun.

Right now, I’m in the engine-building phase; I’m designing, more or less, the tools that I will use to create a game. At any point during that later phase– the game design phase– I still have the ability to go back and say, “I need this,” and then go and implement it. This gives me a lot of freedom, almost too much freedom. This is because the more times I go back to the engine and tack on more stuff, the more complicated it gets; and the more complicated an engine is, the greater the chance that there will be bugs based on a flawed or incompatible implementation of the stuff tacked on.

When I was building XVINE, I had a dozen or so thoughts flitting through my head at any given time as to what tools I would need, what objects I needed to implement, and what situations I would encounter. When it came time to finally put it all together, though, I found that many of the things I thought were absolutely necessary were in fact either redundant or useless, because I could do it with simpler tools used more intelligently. Granted, there were situations where a single tool was only used once, but that’s because what it did could not be replicated by another tool combination.

In developing this engine, I’m running into that too. The entirety of this week’s coding was cleaning up the frenzied, hurried, slap-dash experimental implementations from last week’s initial “can I do this?” phase. It was a hassle, yes. But now the engine is designed in a cleaner, more effective manner. Similar objects now have common interfaces; inheritance and abstract classes are used to make sure things get done properly; and the engine has hooks for further optimization should it be needed. More to the point, with the new structuring of the engine, expandability is made that much easier– I’ve been able to easily start adding an “environmental effects” layer to each map layer in order to allow stuff like trap tiles or exits and so forth. (That’s going to be a harder part of the engine design, I think.)

What this boils down to is that once I’ve created the engine, I have to then find a way to make it fun. My original idea– a visual novel– isn’t not fun. At least, I don’t think it’s un-fun. However, a significant portion of the target audience– that is, Xbox 360 players– probably will find it to be un-fun. Yeah, this was pointed out to me before, but I resisted because I felt that the scrolling, tile-based engine setup was going to be too much work to properly implement. It’s not as hard as I thought, but it is a lot of work. The payoff is that I’ll have an engine which could be used to create a game that more people find fun– an engine which more or less works like any old NES game’s engine would, just in HD.

So what kind of game should I make? Satoru Iwata, in that same interview, made this remark on the subject:

It’s hard to know what to do when someone says to do whatever you want.

The tool that I have now is raw and unpolished, but its possibilities are limitless. However, in order to make it the best game that I could possibly make, I first have to know what kind of game I want to make, so that I can steer the engine in that direction. Now, there are some constraints. It’s a 2-D game, it’s top-down (so far), and I only have about 150MB of total space for code and resources. Really, those constraints are pretty minor. So, instead, I must fall back to the old adage: “Write what you know.”

I know old-school RPGs, and I know action RPGs along the lines of Zelda or the Mana series. I also know older action/arcade games, like The Guardian Legend and Pac Man. I really wish there were more games like those available these days. With that in mind, mimicking one of those would be pretty good for getting started, but there’s issues of complexity in each one: the original Legend of Zelda, as “simple” as it is, is far more complex than Pac Man. Heck, Pac Man itself is no slouch in the complexity department! Still, I have to take each project as it comes, and make a decision very soon on what project I want to work with first. My first project, then, using this new engine will be somewhat pedestrian– a Pac Man clone, just as a proof of concept. Once I’ve got that running and playable (it certainly isn’t going to be released) I can start work on the next project, which… I think I’ll keep quiet on for now. One step at a time.

Overall, though, I have to keep in mind the advice mentioned above. Less is usually more. Fun must come before whiz-bangery, and it’s almost certainly possible in this day and age to have a fun game in extremely tight constraints. Tetris is no less fun today than it was on an extremely high-latency monochrome LCD screen. And Final Fantasy IV told a compelling story in just one megabyte of space. I have 720p resolution, millions of colors, a powerful processor, tons of RAM, and 150 megabytes of storage. I envy the old days.

A couple of things worth discussing today, folks, all of them rather brief. The first is that I think my tweaking of my main habits is just about finished. I spent a little bit of time setting up GeekTool to close Firefox for me if the computer’s been idle for longer than ten minutes. I then went ahead and set THAT up to disable the monitoring as needed. The net effect is that if my attention wanders, I don’t have a zillion tabs open to wade through and re-distract me once I get done. Conversely, if I’m using Mahoro to look up code while I do coding on the Windows machine, then I don’t have to worry about wiggling the mouse every so often.

Let’s move on to the new project, then: the second XNA engine. Yesterday I got it set up to sort through sprites and render them in a specific order. Today I went on to create a collision-detection engine that handles layers very elegantly. I did, however, encounter a really interesting bug that I’m going to have to figure out a better solution for, involving two sprites on the same layer having the exact same position. Right now it works on a “last in gets rendered” order, but that’s not gonna work if the sprites have different sizes. On the plus side, though, my idea of setting up each ‘logical’ map layer as a physical tile layer and a ‘pawn’ layer worked splendidly, and I may have figured out a solution to moving sprites between layers as well (but that might need work too). It’s getting there, bit by bit– but given that the system was able to handle 10 layers without a hiccup (that would be along the lines of 1700 sprites at 80 by 80 pixels, filling a 720p screen) it’s doing better than I expected.

Finally, I decided to re-start my XM radio. I have to admit that the service isn’t as bad as I had believed it to be on the day they transitioned to the “XM/Sirius” setup, but there’s still some disappointments. For one thing, I still think that they should have kept the guys doing the election coverage rather than ditching them unceremoniously. For another thing, while it’s close, Area is no replacement for The System. And the audiobook station is almost completely useless now, with most of the shows being rescheduled to oblivion. However, there are some bright spots. One of the more annoying glitches in the system was fixed: now, when the radio powers on, it’s authorized for all of my stations immediately, rather than a two-minute delay (at times) to let me tune into football games. Really, that’s how I justify it: I will be getting new music and such during the week and during the summer, but I wanted to have every football game and every hockey game at my disposal once more.

That’s the plan. I haven’t done any Japanese studying today, but I’ll be doing some later tonight (before bed)… and probably in the morning I’ll do the kana drill again. I’m also going to start up the morning exercise routine as well, but we’ll see how that works out.

Catch you folks later.

Folks, I don’t know if you were aware of this, but I’ve got a pretty full schedule ahead of me. Now that I’m feeling better, I have a lot more ambition to try to resolve some of the projects that I’ve set out on, the biggest one being the XNA project. I made a post in the forums today about how the updates to the Xbox Indie Games system would improve the service (foremost among those improvements: review copies to send to game websites!), and the entire setup has me far more psyched to do this than I had been before. Plus– well, I did say I wanted to have something out in Q4 ’09/Q1 ’10, and it is the end of July. On top of that, I also started thinking about the traditional fall projects I occupy myself with: October has been the gaming-rush-thingy that I usually do, and November is (of course) NaNoWriMo, so I’ve got the next four months booked pretty damn near solidly with “work”. (This also includes the D&D campaign I’m running monthly, and any other obligations that may come up.)

So, what this basically means is that this weekend is pretty much my last set of “days off” for the foreseeable future. I’m prepared to spend it relaxing and doing as little “productive” as I possibly can. Think of it like taking a deep breath before diving into the ocean; that’s certainly my perspective, aside from the fact that I can’t actually swim, so the metaphor falls apart and LOOK NEVERMIND JUST GO WITH IT. I intend to go out exactly once this weekend, and that will probably be Saturday lunchtime to the Hokkaido buffet (considering my trip out last weekend was spoiled by the fact that I still hadn’t regained my full, monstrous appetite).

The majority of what I do over the weekend, then, will consist of varying tenses of the verb “to read”. Because dammit, I like to read.

So, Laura is at a bit of a good stopping point; I really could be writing the script (which means a lot more planning work to flesh out the different story branches), but I’ve chosen to put my mind to a few more interesting problems in XNA. Specifically, I’m trying to get a tile-based map engine set up so that I can do a more action-oriented game at some point. The emphasis here is on “trying”– my first attempt, this evening, was less than successful. Matter of fact, it was downright bad. However, I think I know what I did wrong, and future efforts should be much more fruitful.

Assuming, of course, that I ever get around to doing it. Meh, no worries, I have lots of anime to distract me, and one day I’ll get back to that engine. Laura is my real priority now, and finding an artist is the next step. This weekend or next, I’ll dig through the cards I got at Tekko to see if anyone will bite for the gig.

Ciao, folks.

Over the past couple of days, there have been some… interesting revelations regarding how well XNA Community Games have sold on the Xbox 360. To sum up the GamerBytes article in brief: ( they don’t… » )

Code work for the XNA Project Tech Demo is complete. Which is kind of a big deal. It could have been done yesterday if I had not been struck by a massive case of Lazy. Still, today is just as good, since it’s a whole nine days before I expected to have to code like crazy in order to get it up in time for Tekkoshocon. As I said on the Twitter feed, though, it’s not “done” done yet: there’s a handful of tweaks I need to make to the script in order to get it to a point where it really shows off what can be done. But, by the end of March, you folks will be able to download a demo that you can play, so you can finally find out what the hell I’ve been running off at the mouth about for three months. Just have a little more patience, please.

At the very least, I think I’ve earned the right to enjoy this convention.

Okay. I spent a bit more time working on the game last night, but today’s progress– even thus far– has been tremendous. I’ve got a preliminary loading screen, I’ve got things set up for dynamic loading (read: loading only what you need for the scene ahead of time, then unloading only that when switching scenes), I did up the character positioning setup and drawing code AND created artwork for the demo characters…

…and I got it running on Windows. It’s optimized for 720p right now (which means it’s WAY too big for average screens), so my biggest problem right now is getting the art rescaled to a standard size for the Windows version. I also have to set up an alternate control scheme, as I’m not going to demand that the people I’m giving this to have 360 controllers attached to their computers. Overall, I think I’m about 6 more hours away from a publishable alpha game (I chose not to put any music in for this alpha, beyond some sounds that will probably need to be replaced).

Those six hours are going to be next weekend, folks– I’m going to go enjoy the rest of this one, now that I can.

I’m still not feeling 100% better, but today has managed to be productive in spite of my hazy mindset. For example, I finished the script for the tech demo, figured out the preliminaries for sound and have working sounds in the demo, and fixed a VERY nasty bug that would have bit me in the ass if I didn’t catch it now. I really only have the character framework to do tomorrow, and then the hard part of getting the Windows version converted will begin. The XML assistant program I wrote was good in that it saved me a ton of typing, but on the other hand it’s not terribly helpful when it comes to assembling dialogue fragments– THAT part had to be done by hand in notepad. All in all, though, today was damn good for six hours’ worth of work.

I’m still holding off on the celebrations until I have the executable available for download. But I’m so very close.

It’s still rough on me, folks, but day by day things are getting better. I think I’ll be able to get back into a normal weekend routine next week, and get back to working on the tech demo– I only have about three weekends left before Tekkoshocon, the unofficial “due date”. The plan is that I’ll do up the tech demo, post another Youtube video and/or a Windows version (unlikely on this last one), and then hand out cards in Artist’s Alley with the link. Hopefully I can get some interest there; technically it’s just a really big commission.

More as time permits, boys and girls. Oh, and incidentally, if you have a Wii Balance Board, you might want to check out We Ski & Snowboard… I gushed about the first one, but snowboards are not the only new thing in the title: two mountains, both are bigger, and it’s just got more to do. Lovin’ it.