Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: kudos

Kudos 2 Character Creation screen

A first look at customising the avatar for Kudos 2. This is just me going through some of the options. Once you select your avatar and play a game with them, they get saved out as a preset that the game will sometimes preselect for you later.

Some changes to Kudos 2 (for the better)

I’m really pleased with some of the last minute improvements and additions to Kudos 2. For one, there is an NPC drawn from a portrait of everyone who worked on the game, which is kinda funny and cool. Another thing I’m pleased with is a new system when someone asks you out for the evening. If you can’t afford it, you can say so, and they aren’t *that* snubbed. But better than that, you can just lie and pretend you can’t afford it. This reduces your honesty :D (BTW A friend of mine reckons honesty should be a pre-requisite to a science job, what do you think?)

I’m also putting a system in where once you have customised and selected your avatar, it’s saved out as a random pre-set, so you might see your old creations come back as defaults (inspired by spore, clearly :D).

The biggest difference in working methods between Kudos 1, and 2, has been getting family members and friends to try the game at an earlier stage. It’s amazing how many issues other people can identify in just five minutes that you will never think of. An example is “why don’t people thank me if I pay for their evening?”.

Good point :D

Kudos 2 Feature Complete

Kudos 2 is definitely feature complete. Unless feedback from potential website partners or play testers is focused on anything specific missing, I won’t be putting any new features into the game from here on. It already has a ton of stuff in, much more so than the original, and presented 100 times better. From here onwards (and this shouldn’t be more than a few weeks now), it’s a case of playing the game, and polishing it, and playing it again etc.

The most common issues that come up in my daily playthroughs now are just balance tweaks. There’s no bugs in terms of features not working or conflicting, and there hasn’t been a crash bug for weeks, if not months. This hopefully means it should be relatively plain sailing. I’m close enough to release to actually be talking to my portal-publishing partner about the game, and will be directly contacting some portals closer to the release date.

In the big picture sense, Kudos 2 is a BIG deal for me. I’ve never spent so much time and money on a game before, and heading into a global economic downturn means potentially tough times ahead. If I can make Kudos 2 as big a success as my last big game (Democracy 2), then I’ll be trundling along ok and not nervously eyeing the bank balance. I think it’s a far better game than Democracy 2, although thankfully I always tend to be most motivated about whatever I’m currently working on (a big contrast with most people in mainstream game development).

Anyway, feature complete, today, hopefully code complete and on sale by the first week of October. *crosses fingers*.

Fiddling with variables

A lot of the vital design stuff on my games is coming ton conclusions about cause and effect that are simple enough to work inside the context of a PC game.

Take alcohol. What are the effects of alcohol? Well they are many and varied, according to scientists and doctors, low levels of some alcohol can actually be beneficial as a prevention against heart attacks. High levels will ruin your health, and we probably agree that alcohol will give you a higher level of confidence, and relax you.

But… does it make you happy? This is a complex question. In my experience, alcohol exaggerates moods, so miserable people become more miserable, and happier people get more happy. The problem is, this is a bit of a personal opinion, and not easily explained in game terms. In the simplistic fashion of a sim game, alcohol makes you happy, albeit at the cost of reducing your concentration, and having potential health effects.

So I find myself wrestling with how to set the numbers in Kudos 2. Right now, you get a confidence and relaxation boost automatically from all alcohol, but only deliberately chosen alcohol in restaurants directly makes you happy. The happiness associated with alcohol from a bar or a wine and cheese evening is factored in with the other effects. If this seems slightly woolly, and not 100% accurate, it isn’t, but that’s game design. The problem is, you could add more and mroe complexity until the game took 20 years to make and a manual like a phone directory to play it. The trick is making the effects in the game seem just real enough to suspend disbelief, whilst still keeping it as just a game, and not an exercise in statistics.

Tis a fine balance…

Kudos 2 design update

I’m now firmly at the ‘play the game until you detect an imbalance, then make a note and fix it’ stage. This can be a tad dull, because you are playing to test, not to have fun. The truly great news is that despite playing the game for hours at a time

1) It never has any performance problems of any sort ever, even in debug and

2) It never crashes.

I currently have a little list of niggles to fix for tonight and tomorrow like this:

todo : check that people get bored with an event even if you didn’t show up.
if you ignore a phone ring and go to the next day, its visually still flashing.
birthday screen friend description can be blank!
dog status text runs out of room.
I need new button graphics for graph screen
muscles should degrade slower
motorbike should give you some kudos or charisma or confidence
I maybe need some alert sound if dog fights off a burglar
might be funny to slightly stretch and squash avatars with weight.
paint ball gun needs a use button, for all year round.
dogs never eat any food.

I also have just one biggish design issue. Acting jobs last forevere, and as they have no promotions, you can get into condition for the job then ‘let yourself go’. I can’t decide right now whether to make the jobs a finite length (as in kudos 2). or have you sacked if your performance (job suitability in effect) falls below a certain level. Both ideas require horrid custom coding, but I thuink they are important to making the acting career more playable.

Today I also got some more NPC artwork, and switched payment providers abck to BMT. It’s all in a good cause (getting the best deal, and the best customer service for people buying the games).