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

Game tools and why they arent always released

Posted on August 10, 2009

Have you ever thought it weird that a lot of game developers do not release the tools they use to the modding community?

You might be tempted, in these cynical ‘game devs are bastards’ times, to suspect that this is a deliberate move by evil game devs to make modding harder, so they can sell more DLC and expansion packs. I guess that it might be true in some cases, but I think that the history of PC gaming would suggest quite clearly that a well served and popular modding community is a sales booster for a game.

I have my own theory, and its simply that professional game developers tools are crap.

I’ve always been amazed at how good the tools are that modders put together. Someone even did an editor for some aspect of Democracy that was better than any tools I had. I am notoriously crap at doing tools, and often hack things together using Excel and notepad. It’s really quite tragic.

The reasoning for why the actual developers on a game produce such poor quality tools may include the following

  • Working on tools sucks, and isn’t as much fun as the game engine or gameplay, so the least experienced coders tend  to get assigned to it, as a way of ‘paying dues’.
  • Sometimes devs are quickly hacking the tools together so they can get back to doing the important stuff on the actual game.
  • The game design is always changing, so you are quickly hacking in systems on a temporary basis, and never get time to tidy them up at the end of the project.
  • Producers and money-men dont always schedule time and budget for tools, as they don’t understand their importance, thus they are rushed.
  • An attitude persists that tools will not ship, and are not mission critical, so its ok for them to be buggy, ugly and difficult to use.

And of course this is all applicable to big budget games. With small one man companies like me, the situation is far worse. Literally every minute I spend on tools is time not on the core game. Also tools effectiveness scales with the size of the game. A tool that speeds up 400 hours of level design is worth more up-front effort than one which might save 20 hours work.

My tools do actually exist (as special hidden modes of the main game) but they are very, very basic, hacky and bad. Don’t be surprised if they aren’t released on the same day as the game :D

Big things burning

Posted on August 8, 2009

My smoke and flame textures have always sucked, and now I’ve got a lot of proper gameplay and bug fixing done, I’m having a sneaky graphics-whore day where I make better ones.

My searches for decent smoke clouds took me here:

http://www.herts.police.uk/about/buncefield_incident.htm

Ironically, a rather famous fire in the UK not long ago. Small world etc. Flipping big flames and smoke too.

I also improved my particle effects today. a simple 5 lines of code improvement that means the first 100 milliseconds of any particles life is spent fading and growing into its initial size. This prevents particle ‘popup’ when you are zoomed in, and actually looks really good. It’s something nobody will ever notice, but if I hadn’t done it, the particles would seem less organic.

Stupidly good indie games bundle

Posted on August 6, 2009

So check this out. If you haven’t already got Democracy 2, because you thought it was a bit pricey , think again:

This is through Direct2Drive, who are a reseller for some of my games. If you bought those games separately, they would cost $77.75, and they are selling them as a bundle for $17.75, which is clearly mental. I must have been mad.

Even forgetting that I have a game in there, that’s a pretty impressive deal. If you haven’t seen a game play video of Cogs, it’s worth checking out (puzzle game done with amazing polish).

The deal ends on 9th August, so if you like the look of it, snap it up now :D.

What would Jack Thompson think?

Posted on August 5, 2009

When I create particle emitters they normally have a parent object, but some, such as missiles being shot down and exploding, do not and are ‘orphaned emitters’.

These die out, but if you quit mid battle, some orphans are left. If you then start a new battle, you see the smoke clouds from the previous one for a few seconds.

So I need to clear them and fix that. So I am writing a new function called

KillAllOrphans()

What would Jack Thompson or the tabloid press think?

Polish, Interface, bug fixes

Posted on August 4, 2009

I’ve got a lot done today, it’s just hard to pin down exactly *what* has been done. Lots of small fixes went in, and some fairly obscure bugs were caught (like the ECM effect noise lingering after ships died, or the ECM effect not being skipped if its entirely offscreen).

I also carried out a bit of a tidy up and revamp of a ton of small issues on the main deployment screen, which is where you may spend about half the game time, and added a whole bunch of tutorial messages. GSB is one of those games that looks great in videos, and people trying the demo will likely want to see things blow up right away, and thus skip all those helpful messages about selecting ships and zooming the camera. The new system watches how you play, and (for example) if you haven’t used the camera zoom after 20 seconds, it will freeze the game, and pop up a quick one-time message prompting you with a hint on how to do it.

I think thats the best way to handle these things. Every FPS on earth teaches me to use WSAD to strafe, to right click to reload, or to hold down shift to sprint or crawl yada yada. Why can’t they give me a few simple tasks, and only bore me with laboriously crap and slow voice acting IF If turns out I don’t already know most of that stuff.

People learn at different speeds, and in different ways, and games should eb flexible about making sure you tell people how to play, without patronizing the hardcore.

I might be moving house soon, meaning I’m dealing with estate agent stress. I just *know* that the moving day will co-incide with release day for GSB. It’s an inevitable conspriacy to kill me through stress.