Stampede at Crooked Thorax Ranch

I also wrote a mini-postmortem about the production process.

I ended up combining two of my ideas. One for the tower defense game with enemies that grow as they approach and the other for cowboys that ride on bugs.

Enjoy!

The theme for LD23 is Tiny World. After handling an unrelated work call I got cracking on ideas. I think a lot of these are pretty good!

• Platformer with impasses that require the player to shrink down to sneak past.
• Medical War game
• Tower Defense game with pixel sized monsters that creep up (unnoticed) but grow suddenly when they reach growth pads near the player.
• Manage resources on a tiny planet with too many people (2)
• a creature lives in your nose mining boogers + fighting allergens
• Position Planets in space so they don’t crash into the sun
• Grow planets in a lab setting + release them into the wild
• Insect cowboys on a bug ranch
• Your in a cell and you can only interact with things that pass by your window
• ON a small planet, every bit of acid rain or toxic waste erodes your planet a little. Stop it before the core is exposed!
• A platformer where whenever you get hit you shrink a little (everything else grows). The monsters get more detailed and it takes you longer to reach the end (but you never die, just get impossibly small)
• Some kind of puzzle or obstacle course using close up photography for graphics. Macaroni Tetris?
• City building game where you can only use pieces of molecules that fit together
• A game where you destroy particles (ants?) one or a few at a time. Try to get a large score in the hundreds or thousands (1 pt per particle). Violent screams for sfx of course.

So this year I’m doing my first Ludum Dare game competition. I’m very excited and have been trying to get my system ready to go before the theme is announced at 18:00 Pacific time. I’m running down my pre-flight checklist now.

My loadout:

Note the inspirational collages and ferret poster

(note: I’d love to put a link to every single one of these but that’ll take a long time and you can google them yourself.)

Software:

• FlashBuilder
• Text Mate
• Adobe Creative Suite
• bfxr
• Garage Band
• Amadeus Pro
• Art Rage

Libraries (probably won’t use all of these but they’re in there just in case):

• FlashPunk
• KitchenSync
• Abstract AS3
• AS3 Signals
• AS3 Utils
• AS3 Core Lib
• AS3 Data Structures
• Google Analytics
• Sterling
• zOMGamezLib (This is an old game engine that probably doesn’t even compile but I might pull some useful stuff from it. source)

You can follow me here or on Twitter @mimshwright

This may be a little off topic but since I love video games and logic, I thought I’d take a moment to share some thoughts I was having.

I just read this post from Kotaku talking about the new proprietary memory card that will be used for the PSVita, Sony’s upcoming gaming handheld. The tl;dr version: Sony’s making a new type of memory card. They will only work with one gadget. They will be expensive.

This is not the first time that a gaming company, especially Sony, has asked us to pony up for a proprietary storage medium. Sony has virtually cornered the proprietary format market: MiniDisc, MemoryStick, BetaMax, even those little cassettes that go in your answering machine. All of this, I must assume, was in the hopes of making one that lasts and becomes a standard. Well, they kinda did with BluRay even though it’s appearing at the twilight of physical media. But I digress. Microsoft’s also in the game with their custom XBox360 hard drives costing about twice the going rate. In fact, every non-standard CD-ROM or cartridge is also a proprietary format when you get down to it.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about storage being proprietary. It’s about storage being expensive. The companies create this proprietary media then sell it to us. We’ll have no choice but to buy it so they can charge whatever they want. That makes sense I guess. So to sum up their thinking…

• Make a thing customers need to use our product
• Sell it to customers for $$$
• Get rich… Right?

There’s one glaring flaw here. If I may be so bold as to illustrate my consumer-centric logic…

• If storage is $$$…
• I don’t buy storage
• I don’t have much storage
• But I need it to play games!
• I can’t play games :-(
• I don’t buy the games I can’t play
• I spend less money and have a generally un-fun experience with the gaming system

To look at the same argument conversely…

• If storage is El Cheapo!
• I buy lots of it
• I have lots of room for games
• I spend the money I saved on storage buy games without worrying about where to put them
• I have a more fun experience with the gaming system.

To try to turn this from pure gripe into something useful, I will just say this. Don’t make me your willing customers have to work hard to spend money on you. Always be aware of decisions that benefit your company by punishing your customers.

This is not just a video game rant. The online world is also fraught with similar follies. One phenomenon is discussed in this great post about the Mobile App Splash Screen Anti-Pattern by Martin Sutherland. Another example is any site that makes me create an account before I do even a simple task. Virtually every restaurant website ever made has made me endure a Greek techno slideshow and download a PDF menu just to find their hours and address.

Don’t let this happen to you, or to your clients! Always Be Closing! And let me buy more video games, dammit!

Update: Here’s my quick prototype (before skinning)

Last night, I participated in the Iron Flash competition at the LA Flash Users Group in Venice Beach. As in Iron Chef (my favourite television show), the participants are all skilled Flash users pitted against one another with the goal of creating something interesting within a strict time limit and featuring a common “ingredient”. In this case, the ingredient was a set of pictures of ‘pucks’, specifically, R. Blank’s dog Puck, Puck the faun, Puck from the Real World, and a hockey Puck. We had 3 hours to make something out of any or all of the pictures. My fellow competitors were Jon Ruppel of Hooky Interactive and Ben McMaster (also at Hooky) who both made some awesome stuff in such a short time. UPDATE: All of the entries have been posted on the LAFlash site.

It was a great experience, and not just because OMG I WON!!!

My entry was a video game featuring Puck the dog. I was considering other physics based games involving the hockey puck and the dog somehow. Then I thought of using the dog instead of the hockey puck and somehow that reminded me of the sport beloved in Canada, Curling! The scoring system is a little wonky but if I may say so, it’s not bad for 3 hours work. Here are screenshots (click to link to the game) along with the source code:

Download the source code

Check out the latest ridiculous multiplayer chaos unleashed by those crazy, crazy test tube babies at IILWY, Balloono! I developed this game, but it wouldn’t exist without the awesome assistance of EJ, Ken, Daniel, and Charles. For taking it the last mile (or five) and adding lots of great art and polish, THANKS! Great work you guys! Oh yeah, and you’re cool too, Mark.

Keep coming back, ’cause I’m sure IILWY will be adding more levels and other bonus monkey jams! And hey, if you like the game, it couldn’t hurt to vote for it on Newgrounds, right?

I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…

On Nov 7, 2006 Adobe announced the contribution of their ECMA scripting engine to the open source community under the name “Tamarin”. Tamarin is also being used as the JS scripting engine for Mozilla Firefox under the name “SpiderMonkey“. It seemed like a good idea at the time of release. But now look at the situation: we have AVM2, directly connected to Firefox AND the ECMA committee –slowing the progress of Actionscript and the Flash Player (and the internet for that matter). Needless to say, this is a disappointment. But it doesn’t end there…

Though having plenty of contributors, the realm of real-time rendering is primarily controlled by Microsoft, Nvida, ATI/AMD, Apple, and (more recently) Intel. Microsoft hasn’t really contributed to the Khronos Group because long ago they decided to pursue their own 3D graphics rendering API known as Direct3D. The evolution of OpenGL has become painfully slow while DirectX and Direct3D are becoming the (de-facto) standard. Finally, the Khronos group promised to improve the long lost API by introducing an object-oriented structure in stark contrast to its current state machine model. That was in October 2007. Last week the specification was finally unveiled and it remains largely the same. Not only is this a big let down, but it will definitely damage all future 3D software and game development releases for non-Windows platforms (including future consoles). Very unfortunate.

DISCLAIMER: Both of these developments are FAR more complex than what this post outlines -and there’s justification behind both developments. But on the whole, they both seem bad for everybody (or just me?).

Take this FLA animation.

As you can see, there is a simple animation using a guide layer and labels on the key frames.

The following SWF uses KitchenSync to control the same ball animation. As you can see, the duration and easing functions of the animation can be controlled. You can even animate backwards!

See it in action.

The source that controls this is here.

package {
	import flash.display.MovieClip;

	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.KitchenSync;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.action.*;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.action.tweentarget.*;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Bounce;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Cubic;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Linear;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Oscillate;

	/**
	*	Demos the TimelineController which controls the animation of a MovieClip's timeline.
	*/
	public class FlashIntegrationTest extends MovieClip
	{
		protected var test1:MovieClip;

		public function FlashIntegrationTest()
		{
			super();
			// initialize kitchensync.
			KitchenSync.initialize(this, "1.5");

			// add a movieclip from the library
			test1 = MovieClip(new AnimationTest1());
			addChild(test1);

			// define the start and end frame with strings or ints or FrameLabel's
			var startLabel:* = "start";
			var endLabel:* = "end";

			// set up the TimelineController tween target.
			var tweenTarget:TimelineController = new TimelineController(test1, startLabel, endLabel);
			// Animate the ball with a linear ease.
			var tween:KSTween = KSTween.newWithTweenTarget(tweenTarget, "1s", 0, Linear.ease);

			// animate the ball backwards with a bounce tween
			var tween2:KSTween = tween.cloneReversed();
			tween2.duration = "4s";
			tween2.easingFunction = Bounce.easeOut;
			tween2.addTrigger(tween);

			// animate the ball with an oscillator
			var tween3:KSTween = KSTween.newWithTweenTarget(tweenTarget, "10m", "1s", Oscillate.sine);
			tween3.easingMod1 = 0.3;
			tween3.addTrigger(tween2);

			// start the animations
			tween.start();
		}

	}
}

Pretty cool huh? We’re creating a new TimelineController and setting the boundaries of the animation then passing it to a new KSTween object. Each of the three tweens use different parameters and are triggered by the end of the one before it.

You can download the entire thing and play around with it.

One of the most interesting things that I saw today was the Independent Game Design Competition. Here were a few of my favorites from the competition finalists.

Flipside

In Flipside, you play an escaped mental patient with bipolar disorder. You start out a happy-go-lucky person in a brightly lit field
but at any time, you can let your dark side show and flip the screen into a nightmarish version of reality. You have different abilities depending on which world you’re in so you’ll need to go through both modes to beat each level. The amazing visuals for this featured a lot of DIY-looking textures such as cardboard and the character really looks like a paper doll.

Fez

At first glance, Fez is a classic 8-Bit, 2-D platformer with incredibly cute graphics. Then the camera flips around and you realize that your character is actually in a 3-D space. Well, mostly. Your character only interacts with the environment in a two dimensional way so using the depth-squashing adds a puzzle-like element to the gameplay.
Pay special attention to the faux-Engrish used in the dialog.

World of Goo

In world of Goo, you control a colony of crude oil-like creatures who are able to stretch themselves into complicated structures. The goal of the game is to engineer a structurally sound scaffolding to move your colony to a destination. The gameplay is quite a lot like Stick Remover but in reverse.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a very simple yet very expressive game. The goal is to move a ball to a target across the screen and all you have to work with is a crayon. All you do is draw something with your crayon and it becomes an object with physical properties. The genius thing is that there are as many ways to get the ball to the goal as you can think of.

There are only two ways to create a weak reference in AS3. The first is with the IEventDispatcher.addEventListener() method which allows you to create a weak link between the dispatcher and the listener. To quote the AS3 Bible:

ActionScript 3.0 introduces the concept of weak and strong memory references. Normally, an object will be garbage collected if there are no references to the object. That is, when no objects are using a variable, it gets thrown out. Weak references allow you to reference an object but the object will still be eligible for garbage collection unless another object holds a strong reference to the object. By setting the [addEventListener() method's] useWeakReference flag to true, you will create a weak link between the event broadcaster and the event listener. That way, if an dispatcher is deleted while there are still listeners attached, the weak reference will allow it to be garbage collected. This helps to prevent memory leaks.

The other way is with the objects used as keys in a Dictionary object.

ActionScript, unlike many other languages, does not have a way to explicitly remove an object from memory. Instead it waits until all references to an object are removed and then auto-deletes it. Therefore, an object will continue to stay in memory if all strong references aren’t removed.

Below is an example of how strong-references hold an object in memory. If you’d like to try this out, copy the below text into a file called StrongReferencesExample.as

package {
	import flash.display.Sprite;

	public class StrongReferencesExample extends Sprite {
		public function StrongReferencesExample() {
			// create a new object called dog. Add it to the first leash object
			// and make leash2 a copy of leash 1.
			var leash1:Object = new Dog();
			var leash2:Object = leash1;

			// tracing both leashes will show that they hold a reference to the Dog
			trace(leash1); // [object Dog]
			trace(leash2); // [object Dog]

			// deleting the dog from the first leash will not remove it from the second leash
			// even though we originally set leash2 equal to leash1
			leash1 = null;
			trace(leash1); // null
			trace(leash2); // [object Dog]

			// The object (dog) will not be free until all of the references to it (leashes) are broken.
			leash2 = null;
			trace(leash1); // null
			trace(leash2); // null
		}
	}
}
// Define a simple Dog class within the same file.
class Dog {}

Richard Lord over at Big Room Games has an interesting article on hacking AS3 to allow you to create weak-references to objects. The hack is pretty decent but lacks a few things I’d like to see like strong typing at compile-time or a more refined ‘memory manager’ type functionality. However, I tried implementing both of these and came up empty handed. If you can think of a way to make this strong-typed, I’ll give you a candy bar.

Using the WeakReference hack could be useful if you want to make sure that an object will not stay in memory if you forget to delete all references to it. However, keeping track of your objects and practicing good memory management is a much better solution and hacks like this one should be saved for special cases where tracking use of an object becomes difficult or impractical.

Thanks to Alex for the link!

• 
  Double Wire

  a Spiderman-like game where you have to guide an apparently drunken figure using two wires that attach to the ceiling.

• 
  Slug Slayer

  draw lines to direct the flow of salt. Melt as many slugs as possible. The simple AI is pretty impressive – I found myself setting up traps for the slugs.

• 
  Sand, sand, sand

  Paint a blank canvas with a palette of particle elements to create a functioning ecosystem – then destroy it with fire and zombies and build it again. This is really more of a toy than a game.

• 
  Stick Remover

  Remove one stick at a time without letting the structure collapse.

• 
  Egg Way

  Guide the egg into the skillet. Lulz!

• 
  Snow Cat

  Cats on sleds! Race your cat down the slope gaining points for landing sick maneuvers. As I look at this list, I can’t believe this one is last cause it’s still really fun.

Here are a few great Flash games that have held my interest for more than a few minutes. Most links came from Game|Life (thanks Chris).

• Winterbells – Very simple but well build game. Kind of a variant on the kick-up type games.
• Flash Element TD – A Flash game based on a mod of Warcraft III? It’s a simple but addictive strategy game.
• Four Second Firestorm – A WarioWare clone created by several different development teams. Very fun but I don’t know who still wants listen to that Eurotrash Club music.

Here’s a list of some of the new platforms, technologies, and languages I’m interested in learning about right now. I would love to receive comments on these if you’ve got anything to share or if you see something I may have missed.

Microsoft

• Windows Vista

  As an avid Mac user, it feels strange to be fawning over Microsoft products, but I remind myself that it’s not brand loyalty that makes me love Apple, it’s loyalty to User Experience. That being said, I sincerely hope that MS can get their shit together and produce some really amazing ways to use, and develop for Windows in their next release. On the other hand, I’m not holding my breath.

• Microsoft Expressions Studio

  Microsoft’s answer to the Adobe Creative Suite. These are tools designed for creating not only graphics, but elements for interactive media. The individual apps roughly mimic Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Bridge, however, to try to compare them is difficult which hopefully means that they will become a true alternative to CS3 instead of a knockoff.

  I’ll have more info on this platform after the official unveiling.

• WPF

  Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft’s new UI development system that allows designers and developers to better collaborate on crazy 3D, Web 2.0+ interfaces from space! That’s about all I know at this point.

• WPF/E

  WPF/E is a subset of WPF that can be deployed across platforms over the interweb (the E stands for Everywhere). In a nutshell, this is Microsoft’s answer to Flash Player. It’s based on JavaScript and XAML and supports animation, media, and AJAX stuff.

  WPF/E works hand in hand with Expressions Studio (specifically Blend) but can be written in any editor. I prefer FlexBuilder for the sheer irony.

  I played around with it for a while and was able to create a bunch of snowflakes but couldn’t get them to float down, but in spite of my lack of XAML skillz, this platform has a lot of potential to be good.

• XNA

  A development tool for creating XBox 360 and Windows video games with emphasis on small developers and homebrews. That’s me! MS wants to create a “YouTube” of small-fry game content.

Adobe

• Adobe Creative Suite 3

  I’m very impressed with Adobe lately. 90% of that is because they’ve done and incredible job with the Flash Platform since they acquired Macromedia – 10% because all signs indicate that the next version of Creative Suite will be a significant upgrade compared to previous ones and might even be worth the price. We’ve all played with the PhotoShop CS3 beta which is impressive and goes beyond just being a patch for Intel based Macs and Vista. The rest of it is looking good too. Illustrator is rumored to be vastly improved. The latest builds of Blaze (Flash 9 beta) are now called Flash CS3. I assume there may be InDesign CS3 as well and there are rumors that Dreamweaver and/or AfterEffects will be included somehow.

• Apollo

  Apollo is a tool from Adobe that let’s you create cross platform applications (real applications, not SWFs) built on an HTML/JS/ActionScript-like API. We could call these “Flapps”. There, I just coined a new term. You saw it here first.

• Flex & ActionScript 3.0

  Evnen though I use it every day, there’s still a lot to learn about ActionScript 3.0 and Flex. Hell, there’s still a lot to learn about ActionScript 2.0!

• Flash CS3

  Even though FlexBuilder has been out for a while, I don’t think the AS3 transition will really begin on a wider scale until Flash CS3 is launched.

• Adobe’s semi-official Flex extentions

  Lots of cool stuff in here for interfacing with APIs like YouTube and Flickr. Not to mention the countless third party packages like PaperVision. Also, what the hell is Caringorm?

Apple

• Mac OS X 10.5 – Leopard

  I’ve always wanted to take the time to learn about Cocoa development but never gotten very far. The latest version of OS X has a lot of great features for users some of which have been added to the development framework. The most significant of these, in my mind, is the Core Animation package which adds After Effects-like animation to the standard toolkit. Kinda like FuseKit for OS X. It looks like Core Animation, Core Video, Core Graphics, and Aqua are the answer to Microsoft’s WPF and Aero… or wait, I think it’s the other way around.

• iPhone

  This isn’t even announced yet but OMG WANT!!!1

Other

• Wii, WiiMote, Flash on Wii, Wii hacks for PC, &c.

  The next-generation of gaming (can we call it current-gen yet?) is putting some really incredible, wireless, network enabled hardware in the hands of the masses. Despite my earlier comments, the Wii, in particular, seems to have a lot of potential to change the way we think about gameplay. The inclusion of an Opera browser with Flash Player support has already gotten a lot of Flash developers thinking about how to leverage the technology to create new interfaces for their work. Flash games for Wii are popping up on the intarnets and some traditional flash games are even being ported to Wii or to PS3 giving us a shot at what most Flash game developers dream of. Many other projects are underway to harness the Wii’s hardware for alternative uses. WiiMote interfaces for Mac and Windows have already sprung up. The obligitory community dedicated to making the Wii run Linux has made major contributions to the hacking of the console. For legitimate developers, a more affordable development kit is available (you have to prove you’re a game development studio, believe me, I already tried).

  My hope for the future is that enough people have access to Wii’s and the PC hacks listed above that boundaries between Flash and console development continue to dwindle.

• Rails

  I know this isn’t exactly “new” but it’s still something I want to know more about. Interest in Rails as a platform has grown continuously in the past year.

• JavaScript 2.0

  Object-oriented JavaScript that looks just like ActionScript – E4X, classes, and so on. Adobe has made a major contribution to Mozilla by contributing their compI refuse to get excited about this until people stop using Internet Explorer.

• Microformats

  Design patterns for XHTML? Yes please. Although, I’m a little wary that 1. not all of these are standards based and 2. how do I convince a client to use them?

Update (more)

• Open Laszlo

  I guess this is some kind of XML based open-source RIA platform. Anyone know more?

• haXe

  Trying to unify coding across platforms by being a “web-oriented universal language”. I guess they haven’t heard of ECMA.

Update 2

• iPhone (update)

  By now you all know the iPhone – The greatest device ever conceived – The device that noone has seen and yet people would be willing to pay $1000 to have – hmm sounds familar. I think the real question on all of our minds is “will we get to develop for it?” So far the answer seems to be NO. Jobs wants to keep this thing pristine by exercising the utmost quality control, at least for the time being. I’m hoping this notion doesn’t last since this could be THE mobile platform that everyone’s been waiting for.

  Furthermore, I hope we see a spike in interest around multi-touch screens. One really successful product like this could warm up the feet of compeditors making the multi-touch interface more widespread. Then we’d all be winners.

Update 3

• The more I play with WPF/E the more I’m like WTF/Ever.
• XCode 3.0 will support Obj-C 2.0! I’ve heard that’s awesome!