After some intense last-minute work (I hate walkcycles), the game is DONE!
I submitted it to MAGS a few days ago, and now here it is for you enjoyment aswell.
Presenting
Weathered special agent Jake Brewer is called upon once more to secure the safety of his nation. But this time he only has 15 minutes before everything goes tits-up. ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO STOP THESE TERRORISTS IN TIME?
Oh man. We’re one day away from the (extended) MAGS deadline! And 15 Minutes is almost finished.
I sent the beta off to testers just before the weekend, ensuring I would have some feedback by the time I went back to work on monday. Or tuesday actually, since I had to do actual job work on monday. Work that intruded also on today, a day I had blocked off entirely to finish the animations. It set my planning back quite a bit, but the time pressure was a good catalyst and I still got pretty much everything I wanted to do today done.
That being said, I still hate doing walkcycles. I love ’em when they’re done and ingame, but creating them is just torture for some reason. The side walkcycle not so much anymore, once you’ve found the right key poses the side is easy to do. Just a couple of rotating limbs and things quickly look pretty good. No it’s especially the front and back walkcycle that annoy me. They’re a whole different story since perspective really comes into play there. And you can only get so far by distorting limbs. So that’s something I’m going to tackle tomorrow. I have the basic motion but I think I need some dedicated poses. Worst case scenario I substitute the front and back walkcycles with the sideways ones like I did in Coyote.
The rest of the work was mostly bug fixing and polishing. I’ve been doing a lot of polishing today and sunday – a little sound effect here, and extra dialog there. I’m glad I have time to spend on these little things, they really make the game feel solid. Much more solid than any previous (personal) project I have to say. I can’t wait to see what people think of it. Initial testing was very promising.
The feedback from testers was extremely valuable. They find all those little things that you overlooked or just never thought of. It was pretty remarkable too that three testers in a row picked the right solution for the final puzzle out of the 5 options! So I definitely had to change that. I toyed with the idea of scripting it so that the first try is always the wrong one, and the second one always the right one, but somehow that felt cheap to me. I know in game design it’s a big faux-pas to present a player with a critical choice without any sort of indication which one is the right one. That’s a pure guessing game. But when you think about it, that IS the situation for the main character. He is suddenly presented with a handful of options and no idea which one is the right one, so all he can do is try them all until he finds the solution. I liked that concept so I kept it the way it was.
Maybe also because making it random for every playthrough would have been a hell of a thing to code.
I’m really excited by what this game has become, and I do not regret shirking other responsibilities a bit to make it. Even if I don’t win MAGS, I’m proud of this game and proud of myself for building it in a month.
I’m happy to report 15 Minutes is now 100% playable!
Don’t ask me how it got there though.
Naively I thought I was practically done with the final puzzle. Just put in some graphics, right? Specify the correct solution and hook it into the room script and it’s all fine, yes? Yeah right. Reality proved me wrong, repeatedly, during the course of the day.
Next time I might think twice before building a puzzle which has 5 moving parts that each have 5 different states and each state has another object associated with it. That’s a technical way of saying I’ve got 5 plugs attached to 5 wires, and 5 possible sockets to stick them in. That’s a lot of variations (25 to be precise), and even more code. Seriously, you would not believe how much code it took. Probably altogether it’s about 33 % of the total game code. Maybe more. I don’t even want to look back at it. It works, so I’m not touching it.
Drawing (and mainly the exporting of) all those wires was an ordeal, but as always a typo proved to be the biggest headache. I think I spent a good hour trying to fanthom why on earth the code was not returning the correct solution when CLEARLY all plugs were in the right sockets. It turned out that somewhere deep in the vast jungle of code I had misspelled an instance of Plug2 as Plug1. I was about ready to tear my hair out when I finally found it. Good lord.
Though doing the last bits of coding leading up to the game being gameplay-complete were undeniably exciting. It was a rush I’ve seldom experienced during coding. Maybe because I’ve seldom completed a game to begin with. But let’s not talk about that.
This all-day ordeal did seriously cut into my time budget though as I was hoping to also do some animations today. But thankfully Atelier extended the MAGS deadline to next Wednesday, which came as a big relief.
After that I spent some time going through all the rooms and fixing the walkbehinds and adding hotspot descriptions and walkto’s.
My final act of the day was, symbolically, the ending. I plugged a credits screen in there and a sort of conclusive message that I’ll expand with a little video later on.
Looking at those few lines that constitute the winning condition felt really, really good.
if (AllPlugsCorrect == true) {
Wait(20);
player.Say(“We did it!”);
tracker = “win”;
CountDown.Stop();
aCredits.Play();
player.ChangeRoom(5);
}
*truncated for readability
Quite the remarkable day this has been – I actually did everything I promised I would do today! In part I think I can thank the realisation that I pretty much only have today and tomorrow to finish the game(!) as the weekend is going to be a bit chaotic (Queens Day festivities in Holland and my dad and uncle’s birthdays). Though there has been talk of extending the deadline to next week, so that would be excellent.
The gods of productivity didn’t take it easy on me neither, bombarding me with emails all afternoon. But I powered through it and got a lot done. I think it was a good idea to start with the turnaround for the barista. Drawing cute girls is always a nice motivator haha. By lunchtime all the characters were done!
In the evening I finally cracked my knuckles and started on the final puzzle. It was a beast of a thing to script, what with 25 different variations, but I was surprised to find I had managed to code the entire framework into a pretty much fully working state in one go without running the game inbetween. I expected to have a lot more trouble with it. But those issues will probably come to light during the playtesting…
With 25 abstract system states in the pocket, it was then time to create the graphics for it. Which meant drawing lots, and lots, of wires.
So what’s left for tomorrow is to script the connecting part of the final puzzle and the ending, do some hardcore animating and go through the whole game fixing walkbehinds and walkto points and such. A lot, but doable!
p.s. Let me tell you, Lux Aeterna is a great song to play while you’re doing some intense, constantly-scrolling-back-and-forth coding in the Global script.
[chamon-AH!]
[heeheeeeh!]
That was my Michael Jackson impression, in case you were wondering.
After a period of relative laid-back-ness I am feeling the heat now. With only one week left (less actually by now), there is still much to be done. I haven’t gotten ’round to the final puzzle yet (mostly because I’m not looking forward to coding all the possibilities) and I am equally if not more NOT looking forward to building walkcycles for the characters. Though I did create the turnaround for Jake today and complete all (4) backgrounds. The rest of the day was filled with miscellanious tinkerings; buttons, shadows, walkto’s, that sorta stuff. Because of the small number of rooms I tried something fancy with the character shadows that I think you’re gonna like.
Because of the time pressure I decided to cop out a bit and do the graphics in black & white now. It’s a style I use regularly in my comics, and I must say it doesn’t look half bad here either. I might still color them for a post-MAGS update though.
Tomorrow I’m gonna tackle the final puzzle then so the gameplay is complete. And draw the remaining character turnarounds. I’m hoping by writing this down in here for you to see I’ll feel bound by some moral obligation and actually do it for real this time. So check back tomorrow to see if you get to yell at me or not!
I was surprised by how little work it took to power through to the end of the game. I just have to build the final puzzle now (which is going to take some brain-wrangling for sure) and then I can start filling the game up with interactions and graphics. I hope to be done in time to do a little testing before I submit to MAGS – my target is for players to be able to complete it juuust in time, but I have no idea if that matches up with how long players actually take to get through it. I’m living on assumptions here, and as Steven Seagal once said, “assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.”
(I actually put a closing bracket and a semicolon behind that quote out of automatism, that’s how deep into coding I am right now…)
Special thanks also to Alasdair Beckett for helping me sort out some extended functionality for his Smoothscroll module. Getting it to play nice with my splitscreen system proved somewhat of an ordeal. A system which, as I discovered yesterday, is actually way more efficient if I use GUI’s instead of room objects! I was under the impression that spoken text would not appear above a GUI, but apparently I was mistaken, which is good news as it fixes a few visual oddities and interferes way less with the rest of the script.
It would have been nice to say on the 15th day of MAGS that 15 Minutes was fully playable, but unfortunately that is not the case. It’s been going slow the past week for reasons hard to identify. Although I feel good about what I got done today, which was scripting interactions for room 2 and a part of 3. There’s some pretty cool dialog in there that put a smile on my face. So that leaves only one more room to fully set up, so in theory that could very well be done this weekend. I think I should.
I got fed up with the fact that the onscreen clock counted down the game time (15 minutes) while it would make more sense to display the actual ingame time (the span between 8 AM and 8:15 AM). So I modified the Countdown module to add instead of subtract, which, aside from feeling a little strange because there are now more digits on the screen, worked flawlessly.
And to my amazement the clock now also somehow knows exactly how much time cutscenes take up, so that when I skip them it jumps ahead to the appropriate time! To me this seemed like some kind of black magic that had manifested itself upon the game without any identifiable cause… but I sure am glad it’s there because that is exactly what I was looking for.
Naming the day 4 post Splitting Headache was perhaps a little premature, since today the splitscreen actually did give me a headache from all the stunts I had to pull to get it to play nice with the rest of the code and the scrolling room. But in the end it worked!
Yesterday I didn’t get a lot done because my iPhone broke down and I spent all afternoon fixing it. On top of that I discovered in the evening a few glaring oversights in my dialog engine that required a complete rethink of it’s structure. So yeah, great day…
Today was decidely better. I solved most of the problems I uncovered yesterday, and after a long struggle I got the splitscreen feature working aswell! It’s not perfect but it’ll have to do.
The fun is that the room you are in (the frame on the left) is a scrolling room, so it will keep scrolling as you walk around while the frame on the right (an object) stays in place. 🙂
There’s this strange phenomenon that has happened to me at least a dozen times now where I type up a post on the forums describing the problem and asking for help, and almost always right before I hit the POST button I come up with either a solution or a workaround! It’s a funny thing.
I also sketched out all backgrounds today, so I can finally start building rooms now and get this thing underway proper!
Today started off a little slow but I made good progress in the evening.
I decided to really embrace the 24 tropes and make a parody/homage game out of this. This has the added benefit that I don’t have to spend time fleshing out characters since eight seasons of 24 already did that for me! Now I can get right to the meat of writing the story.
Building on the scraps of story I penned yesterday I wrote the full scenario for the game today. I’m trying to avoid what I did with Coyote where I wrote too much story and not enough good puzzles. The first half of the scenario started to feel a bit like that after I wrote it, but I managed to fill it up with more interactivity later.
To keep things simple, I limited the number of locations to 4. I have enough complicated stuff to put in as is, I don’t need more backgrounds to draw. From experience I’ve noticed the art is usually the main thing stalling development, since I get more instant satisfaction from creating and testing a piece of code (a slightly worrying development for an illustrator…). So this was probably a wise decision. And after writing the scenario it turned out one of the four locations was only really needed in a cutscene, so I don’t have to spend as much time on it as the others 🙂
So now the game needed a working title. My first hunch was to name it ’12’, possibly referring to the number of minutes you’d need to complete it. That might be a bit too short thought, so I upped it to 15 minutes.
To start things off I decided to recreate the 24 title sequence for the start of the game. I tracked down the fonts and downloaded some 24 soundtracks, then fired up After Effects. I’m pretty pleased with the result of some simple masking and a few keyframes. I could have made it resemble the source material even closer, but that was not the point of the exercise.
[vimeo 21895542 w=520 h=260]
Now it was time to tackle the biggest feature of the game – the realtime clock. Thankfully Monkey_05_06’s Countdown module could do most of the work for me (I like it when that happens). I slapped it on a GUI and man, it works like a charm. I already experimented with triggering some events at a certain point during the countdown, and so far it seems to work just dandy. The only problem I had was with sound files being triggered more than once (since I check the timecodes in the rep_ex).
I then imported my custom dialog engine and repurposed a few bits to suit this game. Seeing that ingame got me really excited!
My next challenge will be to tackle the splitscreen – another staple of the 24 show. I have a few ideas on how to do it, we’ll see tomorrow which one will work best.
Every month the AdventureGameStudio forum runs a competition where you build a game in one month following a specific theme. This month the theme is Time. I’ve never participated in MAGS since I usually don’t have time, but this theme sparked an idea in my head. An idea I’ve been throwing around for a while now, based on the tv show 24.
24, as you may or may not know, is a show that purports to portray a full day in the life of special agent Jack Bauer in REALTIME. Every episode is an hour long, with appropriate lulls written into the plot to accomodate commercial breaks. But the funny thing is that during the show Jack never seems to take the time to chow down a sandwich, or even to take a piss. I thought that was interesting, and formed some ideas on how to handle that and convert the format into an adventure game. But nothing conclusive ever came out of that, mostly because there were so many directions you could take it in. So I tucked the concept away in my ideas folder. Until yesterday.
As a freshman in game designer college, me and my classmates all wanted as little restrictions as possible during our assignments. Every constraint the teachers put on us was met with a groan. But over the years we learned that constraints actually benefit your design because they allow you to focus on a specific direction and discard anything that doesn’t match that direction. So too the constraints of MAGS (mainly the time limit, appropriately) suddenly made all those vague ideas click together, and I decided to give it a go.
A month is a decent amount of time to make a small game, but I have plenty of other, more urgent things to do aswell, so I decided on a few more constraints from the onset:
– First and foremost I will keep this game as simple as possible. I can always expand later if I have time left.
– Secondly I want to try out the idea of making everything realtime. That means keeping track of the time the player spends in the game and where he is at when the time limit expires. So that means multiple endings. Woof, okay.
– Thirdly, I wanna use this as a test case for the custom dialog engine I am writing. It’s still very much in beta, but this will be a good opportunity to use it in a real project and see what improvements can be made.
Let’s see how it goes!
