Wow...Really!?

I'm now seeing that it has been quite some time I've written. And here I was hoping that I would write at least once every other week. Who knew that it take time to actually write?

Here's the long and short of it. Seth and I were working diligently on getting those finally elements into Oh! Gnomes!. In fact, Seth had parachutes and the dynamically difficulty working pretty well. And then something tragic happened. Seth updated the Unity package to include my work regarding bushes and his weeks of work disappeared. Ok. So it's not the most tragic event in the world. But I'm sure anybody that has lost that amount of work can attest to, it certainly does take the wind out of one's sails. But we're back and running. I think we're all looking forward to polishing the final bits on Oh! Gnomes! (especially when Unity 3.5 releases).

In the mean time, Karl has been working through the cards for Ghost. They progressively get better and better with each card. I keep joking with him that he'll have to go back and revisit the first couple cards now that he found the art style. But then those cards will be better than the later cards and he'll have to revisit those cards...and he'll be trapped in an infinite loop of making it better. Seriously though, he's only got about 3 more cards to make and then he's onto modeling the players and ghosts.

While he's been doing that, I've been continuing on making the board game solid. I got it to a pretty solid working state and played it with various folk. And the more I played it, the more I realized that it wasn't quite the game that I was intending to design. It played alright, yet it was horribly chaotic (the same way Ghost Stories is chaotic). This forced the lot of us to sit down and reevaluate the player-loop. Needless to say, it received a massive restructuring. We went from an action-point system (different actions had different costs) to a phase-based system. This made the game far more accessible, requiring the player to only think about 1 action at a time. Additionally we introduced room effects making some rooms more or less desirable than others. There are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but even in its horribly broken state, it already feels significantly better. Of course, all of the restructuring code have been avoided if I would have just made a paper prototype to start with...sigh...I should know better.

Alright. I think that's it.

Heroes Who Hunt Ghosts

Artist's Log: Net date 0611.5

After being impounded for what seemed like ages, we have finally gotten our clearance from the iOS council. I admit that after spending all those weeks stuck on the ipod-3 station, watching as our applications were rejected one after another, tensions were running high. We'd certainly expected some hardships along the way, but the particulars of this setback had been especially frustrating. We are free and clear to continue our mission though, and I've been preparing for this for days now.

Our next destination is the Ghost system, only a couple of genres away from the Gnome world. I'm relieved that for the first portion of our survey, I won't be needing to wrangle with our 3d workflow, cobbled together from little more than free ware and string. No, the first part of the survey is being handled almost exclusively by the 2d workflow that, while old and outdated, at least doesn't give us many surprises.

I've already managed to produce these images of some of their greatest heroes.

These proved particularly difficult, and while I am very pleased with the results, I do wonder what they might have looked like if I had gotten them in a different setting. I made several attempts to capture some images while they were in town, but all of the abstract artwork, heraldry and symbolic carvings in the background proved too cumbersome. In the end I was forced to settle for some images in their natural habitats, but I think they turned out just fine regardless.

I look forward to tomorrow, when I return to my studies of the planet's native life forms. Spooks, ghosts, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night is what I believe they are called by the locals.

Augmented Reality is Just Plain Cool

We're continuing to go back-and-forth with Apple. Gotta love when you can play the game on our devices but nobody else can. Well...while we've been waiting, we decided to bring back augmented reality (AR) for Oh! Gnomes! For those of you that aren't familiar with AR, it is the idea of virtual images being superimposed on actual reality. With Oh! Gnomes!, the player points his Android at an image on the table and instead of the camera being constrained to a fixed orbit around the Groundling, the player can move the camera upwards-and-downwards, and inwards-and-outwards, and sidewards. It's kinda like a Wonka-vator. Anyway, we're hoping to have something here shortly for our Android enabled users.

And while we aren't adding new features to Oh! Gnomes!, we are continuing our work on Ghost. There is something strangely satisfying about rolling dice. Even if they are virtual dice. Karl is creating some beautiful cards for the ghosts and players. Once we get our final player cards, I'll post them and share the pretty.

Xcode = Devil

To all that bought the Android version of the game, thank you very much. And please, send us your feedback, we want to make the game better for you. In fact, we pushed a new build to Marketplace today because of a couple requests; and it's a lot better because of them.

To all that are waiting for the iOS release, again, we are working on it. We are working on it despite Xcode's hatred of us. We had Unity and Facebook integrated beautifully once upon a time. But because we decided we Xcode didn't hate us enough, we upgraded to Unity 3.3. Doing so broke our integration. Now we have to do it all again. So...you know, that's fun. Theoretically, we should be done by the end of the week. ...Then we can fight with App Store.

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost

First, I thought that I would share some of the ghost images...


Secondly, things are not going nearly as well as I wanted them to be going. Not because I don't want them to be but by the fact that I was one of the few individuals that recently got laid off at High Voltage Software. In a moment of absolute panic, another project was started. It was conceived by my wife (she is much better at "cute" games than I am). But from that initial spark of an idea, the design is a quick and simple game for the iPhone. Here's hoping Gnome is successful.

There are 4 degrees of difficulty, the game shows the groundling. For EASY, the groundling is wearing a diaper. For NORMAL, the groundling appears as normal. For HARD, the groundling is wearing chest plate mail. For INSANE, the groundling is shown wearing...something...I don't exactly know. If anybody has any suggestions for it, then I would love to hear your ideas.

...With any luck, the next post will be a plea for people to go purchase Gnome (And I'll even explain the game).

p.s. I did find a contract position as a technical designer at Day 1 Studios. I'll be working on FEAR3. - I'm excited.

Back from the Black

I know it has been some time since my last post. In fact, it has been far too long. Whenever I have a spare moment from the busies of life and work on my side projects I see 2 options: I can either blog about what I am doing or I can get more of what I am doing done. Unfortunately, I typically see the latter as being the more productive action.

That said, Robot is still going strong. Justin is diligently working on the script and hopes to have it completed within the next couple weeks. I am attempting to channel all of the mothers of the world and guilt Trevor into sketching the concepts for the characters. I recruited 3D artist to build those fantastic sketches and turn them into a virtual reality. ...And as for me, well...I still need to get a computer that can handle the new Chat Mapper. It doesn't completely freeze my computer. No. I just can't open the application. But of course, and I just realized this, I don't need to open the Chat Mapper to update the exporter. Just to test it.

Ghost is going along quite well. I have yet another buddy of mine, Karl, working on 2D images of the various ghosts. It was crazy. I asked him to create a set of ghosts for the game. I gave him the their various powers and toughnesses (Yes, I play Magic: The Gathering) and the next day he came back with names for all of them and several drafts of the first ghost. It's hard not to love this guy's passion.

(I really do have a lot of really creative and talented friends.)

And with all my various trips back and forth between Chicago and Minneapolis in the past few months, I have had plenty of time to think. And because I am thinking without the specific implementation of either of these 2 games, I came up with yet another game. I call it Martyr. It's based off of a thought experiment in recalled from my "Moral Theory and Practice" course in college. Nearly ten years later, one would think that I would eventually forget those lectures.

Initial iterations would be a zero-player "game" that plays as such:

Initially, a set of characters are created. Each character is defined by a personality. A personality is defined by the Five Factor Model. Each of the five factors is either POSITIVE, NEUTRAL, or NEGATIVE. For each factor, one of its dimensions is randomly selected. This dimension has the same value as its factor. This defines the character's personality. Each dimension carries with it positive and negative weights toward 8 basic emotions. The greatest 2 values in the character's emotional dyad, such as "Love" or "Morbidness". This dyad determines what action the character will perform towards another character. If the dyad is composed of 2 opposing emotions, then cognitive dissonance occurs resulting in no action.

Each character has 3 POSITIVE, NEUTRAL, or NEGATIVE "feelings" toward each character (including himself). This relationship is defined using the Triangular Theory of Love. Now whenever a character acts upon by another character, he has the possibility of influencing the target character's emotional dyad. The intensity and longevity is determined by the target character's relationship toward the acting character. For example, if Character A has an emotional dyad is "Love" and Character B has a consummate love relation toward A, then B's JOY and TRUST values increase permanently and SADNESS and DISGUST values decrease. However, if B were to have a consummate hate relation toward A, the opposite would occur. If B were to have a NEUTRAL commitment toward A, then the influence would last for 1 round. If B were to have a NEGATIVE commitment toward A, then the influence would last for 1 turn.

Each basic emotion has an opposite and resulting emotion. JOY results in more JOY. However, SURPRISE results in ANTICIPATION. This allows for "Dominate" personalities to create "Submissive" personalities, and "Curious" personalities to create "Fatalistic" personalities.

This would be the simulation. The "game" portion returns to the Trolley Problem and also why I call it Martyr. There would be X number of dying characters in play. The player would have Y amount of health (Y is less than X). The player can walk up to the various characters and few their personalities and relationships. Now the player can heal a character and return him to life. Doing so, causes the player to lose 1 point of life. Once the player has expended all of his life, he dies and the simulation occurs for a set number of rounds.

While this "game" may appear evil, we (you and me) as individuals do this sort of thing everyday of our lives. We chose to interact and influence certain people, while ignoring others. This project just brings that unpleasant reality to surface. It begs the question, or at least I hope it does: "How do you spend your life?"

Alright. Back to work on either Robot or Ghost.

Note: There is a certain emotional dyad that will heal other characters. And of course, there is also a dyad that will kill others.

Trusting Talent

While I continue my implementation of Ghost, Justin (a extremely talented writer) continues his work with Robot, using the newly released Chat Mapper. Because of its new features, I will need to make time and modify the Yack Pack exporter *.DLL. I know, I know. If I were to focus on one project at a time, I could get that project do that much quicker. But by having multiple projects in different areas of development (in this case, pre-production and production), I am allowed to trust the talented people I surround myself. Besides, other than resolving the exporter issue, I would just impatiently annoying that talent.

Ghost is going well. Using a modified maze generation algorithm, I randomly create a path through a 5x5 tiled board (board size is arbitrary until tested completely). Along the sides of these floor tiles, there are wall tiles that are properly layered to create an illusion of depth. When character-tokens move across the board, their layer position moves up and down to add to that illusion. Ghosts spawn, die, and activate their powers at appropriate phases. Shrines and gates (teleporters) trigger, and appear and disappear based upon ghost population. Bosses spawn and die. The challenge I am running into now is restarting the level once the game has concluded without forcing the players to exit the application altogether. ...At least the game is winnable.

Marwwage

For those of you who aren't married, don't expect to have a great deal of free time months before your wedding. I've got about 2 weeks before the big day and I'm grateful that my bride doesn't want to kill me. Of course, this is only one reason for my prolonged silence. The other is that Robot took a brief break. A momentary break. It will be done; that is a promise. Trevor's priorities had a slight shift recently and Robot unfortunately had to shift down a few rungs. Chat Mapper had a rather critical bug, which prevented importing the existing dialog into the engine. Thankfully, things are beginning to calm down for both Trevor and me.

However, do not think that I have been doing nothing in the mean time. I've been working on a digital board game: Ghost. Inspired on the board game "Ghost Stories," Ghost is a 4-player hotseat where players must find and kill a necromancer on a randomly-generated board while battling various ghosts.

Like I said, there are 4 players (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow). Each player has a skill that changes their play style slightly. I tried to link their skills with Bartle's Players: Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, and Killer. By using these types, I think I can more easily accommodate a greater number of players on a psychological level. I will expand on this in a future entry. There are 6 ghosts colors (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Black, White). Ghosts can have 3 powers: on-spawn, on-play, and on-death. The "on-play" power can occur during at any phase during a player's turn. Ghosts also have a toughness from 1 to 4.

A player's turn goes a such:

1. Upkeep: If there are 3 or more ghosts of the player's color (whites count as all colors), then that player takes 1 point of damage and the next phase is skipped.
   
2. Draw: A random ghost is spawned onto an explored tile. When the ghost is spawned, its "on-spawn" power triggers, which could spawn an additional ghost or steal a combat dice from the players.
3. Action: The typically player has 3 Action Points during this phase: explore a new tile (2 AP); visit an explored tile (1 AP); active a Shrine's ability, such as teleport or gain life (1 AP); and engage combat (1 AP). When a player enters combat, he engages all of the ghosts in his room. He rolls typically rolls 3 combat dice. Each die has 1 of 6 colors on each face (associated with each ghost color; whites again are wild). In order to kill a ghost, the player must get number of hits equal to the ghost's toughness. If he cannot, the player can use tokens to purchase hits. Combat is very similar to "Ghost Stories." If a ghost is killed, its "on-death" power is triggered.

For the most part, I have a prototype working in Torque Game Builder with a few things to finish up. And it is all programmer art, so it looks absolutely horrible.