Ah…Memories: A ‘Promotional’ Video For A College Project

March 31st, 2012

Back in college, our final project was a game. We had to do a lot of stuff along with just making a game and this video was one of those. It is sort of a making of video. The game is called Last War of Hope and was meant to be kind of a Risk style game. We developed it under the banner of ‘Divine Knight Gaming’, hence me posting it here. We never actually finished making the game as that wasn’t really one of the requirements for passing the course. It was a lot of fun and we learned quite a bit.

I don’t really ever intend to go back and finish the game. It was barely started to begin with. However, I do like talking about if just for the shear awesomeness of the work the rest of the team put into it.

So here are some of their contributions:

Dan Morton Made some really cool looking characters fro use in the game:

Purple Knight AnimationFight AnimationNext we have a really awesome map created by Rosanne York: (click for a larger view)

World Map for Last War of Hope

There was also some great music created by David Drake:

Intro Music for Last War of Hope

Prelude to War

Finally, here is a screen shot of the game as it looked at the end of school:

Gameplay Screenshot for Last War of HopeThe full team was as follows:

Zachary Knight – Lead Designer, Programmer
Dan Morton – Artist/Animator
David Drake – Music
Rosanne York – Art
Shayne Vandersloot – Sound FX
Dorian Valente – Design, Programming

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Deadlines, Goals and Kicks In The Pants

February 14th, 2012

Something missing from our game development project so far has been a strict deadline for completion. That is one of the downfalls of many a game project. If you don’t have a strong goal or deadline that you hold yourself to, you will make every excuse to push completion out into the ether. So recently, Willis and I have made the decision to give ourselves a deadline. More of a goal really.

Coming up later this year is Indiecade. This little award show has a lot to offer a small development project like ours. We have ambitious goals and lofty expectations for the work we are doing and getting into that show will help us meet those goals. So we have decided to enter our game. One of the perks of entering the contest is that the game does not have to be complete to enter, so we are feeling confident about what we can do.

So here is the plan. Games must be submitted to the contest by May 1st if we are to be considered on time. So that is our primary target goal. What we want to have completed by then is the primary gameplay portion. This will include a rudimentary player stats and inventory system, a viewable map of the game world and most important of all, the battle system. We are not planning on having the full battle system available for play by then, but we will have something that resembles the final battle system. All of this will need to be completed by April 14th. That gives us a 2 week buffer zone for finishing up a few things.

Now, if we get more done than we have planned, that will be awesome, but that is the main focus. We want to have what is really a prototype of the game at the least and an alpha at the best. Once we get that part completed and the game submitted, we will be able to focus more on improving the game and adding more features.

Next, Indiecade takes place from October 4th to the 7th and we want to attend. By that time we want to have a functioning beta version of the game available to be played by those in attendance as well as people at home. The game will be available online as soon as we submit the game to Indiecade and all updates from then on will be available as well.

This contest is something that we have needed for a long time. This is giving the both of us, and me specifically, the kick in the pants to get the game done. It gives us a visible date and a goal to reach. We have made this decision and we are sticking to it.

So the goals and dates again for you:

  • April 14th – playable alpha build of the game
  • October 1st – playable beta of the game

Some time around the April deadline, we will be making our official game announcement. This will include all the cool info you have been so desperately wanting. During the time between those two dates, we will be implementing some payment systems so that people who play the alpha and beta versions will be able to help support us in the development stage. We will also be considering other funding sources as the need arises.

So there you have it. That is our plan and we are sticking to it. Wish us luck.

And because I like you guys, here are some more arty things to enjoy:

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Well, I Feel Stupid

December 21st, 2011

So for the last few weeks/months, I had been struggling with something core to our game design. It hasn’t really help me up on development but it had been nagging in the back of my mind the whole time. One of the core tenants of our game requires six values to be in an on or off position. With these values there are 2^6 or 64 different combinations.I had worked out 62 of those but for the life of me could not figure out the last 2.

So I ignored the nagging voice in my head to focus on it for a long time. Well, it came back strong one I made progress on the back end portion of our game. This portion used that functionality and I wanted it to be complete. So this past Sunday, I was talking with Willis about the issue. I was explaining that Braille has the same situation of six positions each in an on or off state, but I couldn’t find any charts showing all 64 Braille Characters.

I began showing him some of the sites I had looked at and this site caught his eye. This site had all possible combinations up to four digits, but I needed six. But it was mainly this chart that caught his eye.

Binary Up To Four Digits

It is a tabled view of how to figure out the combinations of binary digits. Seeing that, he made the suggestion that I do that in a spread sheet. I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of it.

So that is what I did. I created a spread sheet in Libre Office and went to work. Once I had all the combinations figured out there, I began cross referencing them to what I had already worked out. Turns out the two I had missed should have been obvious:

101010

010101

Those are the ones I missed. How I missed them, I will never know. It frustrated me to no end. So there you have it. I am kicking myself for not seeing it sooner or thinking to create the spread sheet. But that is the way the world turns.

Well here is a little treat for reading through my frustrations. A cool ghost dragon Willis made:

Ghost Dragon

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Progress!

December 6th, 2011

So I have made some significant progress with the game. I had been working on a back end utility for adding tokens and controlling their stats for use in the game. This is now working and is ready to be tied into the game. I am getting more excited about this game the more I work on it.

We are getting closer to officially announcing the game. Hopefully, we will be making that announcement in January as we are trying to have a playable alpha build by then. I feel like I have been pushing this back further and further as we have hit several set backs over the last year. I had originally wanted to have a playable alpha this past summer, but that never happened.

So this is a pretty short update, but I can’t leave you empty handed, so here are some juicy graphics for you:

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Why Is Our Logo Censored?

November 29th, 2011

You may have noticed that our logo is censored with a link pointing to American Censorship. There is an interesting story about it.

What is happening is the US government at the behest of a number of media companies such as the RIAA, MPAA and the ESA are working to pass some of the worst copyright legislation in US history. These two bills are titled “Stop Online Piracy Act” in the House and “Protect Intellectual Property Act” in the Senate. What these bills hope to accomplish is a reduction in movie, music, game and software piracy as well as reduce counterfeit goods from entering the US.

They hope to achieve these goals by giving sweeping power to the US Attorney General and copyright holders the ability to prevent ad providers, credit card processing firms and DNS providers from working with websites that are “dedicated to infringing activities”. These bills would also make it illegal to stream or upload any video or song that is covered by copyright that you do not have rights to.

Sadly, these bills will be used to censor a lot more than copyright infringement. Under these bills, sites like YouTube, Twitter, Flicker, Facebook  and any other site that allows users to upload content will be liable if anyone uploads copyrighted materials without permission. That means that if someone uploads a video to YouTube that infringes a copyright, movie studios would be able to have all of YouTubes services cut off and whole swaths of legal content will be censored as a result.

That isn’t even the worst of it. Currently under the DMCA, copyright holders can only ask for certain content to be removed. If the site owner removes said content they maintain what is called “safe harbor” protections. This prevents the site owner from being sued for copyright infringement for something a user of the site did. This is a good thing for sites like YouTube because safe harbors have allowed it to continue to operate and be a vessel of free speech for millions of people.

Under SOPA, all that goes away. Now, it doesn’t matter what the site owner does, they will have no safe harbor to protect them. If only one person uploads a copyrighted song or video, the whole site is gone even if the rest of the millions of videos are perfectly legal.

Additionally, SOPA and PROTECT-IP have no punishment for false accusations. A copyright holder can have a site removed and if it turns out to be a completely legal site, there is no punishment for the false takedown. Nothing happens to that copyright holder. That is beyond bad. There should be some kind of punishment such as a fine of $150,000 per false takedown. But no. They can get away with it.

One last thing I would like to share is that under these laws there is also no court involved. Copyright holders can just fire off letters at will to ISPs, DNS providers, Credit card companies and ad companies and those companies have to follow the law or they can be prosecuted for copyright infringement that had ZERO to do with them. This is absurd on a major level. These companies are completely neutral in all this but they run the risk of being prosecuted themselves if they don’t comply. Not with a court order, but with a letter from some random person or company. If a court were involved, these copyright holders would have to prove that the site is actually infringing before anything could happen, but the content industries don’t want to have to get a court order. They feel it is too much work.

In the end, these laws are not about stopping piracy. These laws are about unloading the burden of policing the content of copyright holders like those under the RIAA, MPAA and ESA onto third parties that have absolutely no power to control what users of the internet do. They don’t want to have to do the work themselves.

These bills need to stop now before they can be voted into law. Using the link provided at the beginning of this post and that can be found by clicking the black bar over our logo, you can contact your Senators and Congressman and tell them not to vote for this legislation. Tell them that you like our internet as it is.

You can also Contact those in Congress and support an organization that is dedicated to gamers by visiting the ECA:

Don’t Let Congress Censor the Internet

You can find more information about these bills at the following location:

The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas
Congress considers anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries

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Back End Programing

September 20th, 2011

I have been working on the actual Flash portions of the game for a while and needed a break. Since I didn’t want to stop development on the game, I am working on the PHP back end for the game.

Since the game will require information stored in a database on the server, I figured I would get started on that. To be frank, I am a lot more comfortable working with PHP at this time and it is a nice change of pace for me. I have been working as a PHP developer for a little over three years and this is second nature to me. So we will have some nice clean PHP code that will help keep the game running smoothly.

I really like working on the Flash portions o the game and it is providing me with a nice change of pace from my normal PHP work. There is a lot of stuff I did not know about Actionscript 3 and I look forward to learning more of it. But, the programming has been slower going than I had hoped as I have to look  up a lot of the information.

Hopefully, as I get the PHP back end up and running, that will spur development of the Flash front end. Knowing what information will be on the server, how I will be connecting to it and what I will be doing with it, will really speed up development. I really should have been doing more of it sooner.

Add that to my list of things I wish I had thought of sooner. So far it is:

  • Use an existing Flash Game Engine, in this case Flixel
  • Develop the back end first.

We’ll see what else crops up.

And just so you don’t leave without a treat, here are some of the latest characters Willis has made. He is doing an awesome job.

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Here Come the Bottom Feeders

September 14th, 2011

Tom Buscaglia

 

Earlier this week, Tom Buscaglia wrote up an article warning indie game developers away from bad deals with publishers. In this warning he states the following:

HERE COME THE BOTTOM FEEDERS

In this article he talks about the recent success of indie developers such as Notch, the creator of the popular Minecraft game. He states that publishers are taking notice of the indie games industry are are looking for marks. He warns us to be wary of any deal that might come our way:

But there are also a slew of bottom feeders who offer nothing but exploitation to any unwary developer looking to get his passion project in the world. I started seeing this crop up around the same time that word got out on Minecraft’s financial success. Like circling vultures with the smell of death in their nostrils, these “so called” publishing partners began to sign up Indies, launch Indie “friendly” portals and even run contests with the big award being getting the privilege to get screwed as first prize.

These publishers offer many promises and bait to lure in indie developers. I am reminded of Activision’s recent indie game contest. While the deal looked good on the surface and they promised to play nice with any developer who won, their past history with other developers led me to avoid them at all costs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Copying Mechanics is Not Theft, Nor is it Infringement

August 17th, 2011

I recently wrote this article on Gamasutra in response to a pair of articles which talked about the practice of copying game mechanics. The discussion has been interesting. So here it is for my own records.

I had never heard of Vlambeer or Gamenauts before yesterday. I had never heard of Radical Fishing or Ninja Fishing either. Yet in a single day, both companies and both games came crashing through my browser. Why?

To make a long story short, Vlambeer made a simple little flash game called Radical Fishing. They have a following of supportive and caring fans. They released this and made some money off of it.They decided they wanted to port the game to the iPhone but with improved graphics and gameplay. However they needed money now and made a couple more games browser.

While all this happened, Another game company, Gamenauts, saw a fun game that did not have an iPhone equivalent and decided to bring a game to that market that had those mechanics. This caused an uproar among fans of Vlambeer and their games.

That is the story in a nutshell. Read the rest of this entry »

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Linux+Eclipse+AXDT+Flixel

June 30th, 2011

Flixel Flash Engine

This past week, I came across the Flixel engine for Flash game development. I have been looking for something to kelp me speed up development on our game and this looked to be the most promising of the engines I had found.

However, according to the download page, they did not have a IDE based solution to getting Flixel to work in my set up of Ubuntu Linux, Eclipse Helios and AXDT. So I decided to take a stab at getting it up and running myself.

The solution turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, but I need to start from the beginning.

First I am running Ubuntu 11.04 64bit. This version of Linux only has Eclipse 3.5 Galileo in its repositories. So I had to download 3.6 myself. Now when you download Eclipse 3.6, (as of this article, Eclipse is on 3.7. I have not tested this with 3.7 so take caution if you go that route. 3.6 should still be available.) make sure you do not get the Classic version because it doesn’t have the Eclipse Marketplace. Without that, you can’t get AXDT.

Once you download and install Eclipse, follow the installation instructions on the AXDT website to install it. Very simple.

You can actually start programming flash games now. However, we aren’t done yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dialog Box and Button Tutorial

June 7th, 2011

Dialog Box Screen ShotOver the weekend I was working on a dialog box for our game. This box would add the ability to show some text that can scroll and have a button to close. Something simple that we need for just about any game.

Unfortunately, I found that Actionscript 3 does not have any built in functionality for this and had to create it myself. I found some scattered tutorials around the web to do what I wanted, but they were often not easy to find or use. Namely, most of the tutorials I found were for use with the Flash IDE, which I am not using. I am using a strict code only system. So those tutorials did not help completely. They did however point me in the right direction.

So I created a tutorial to show you what I did to solve my problems.

Just follow the link to the Dialog Box and Button Tutorial.

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