The Houghton Game Jam.

It’s been a busy few months. Considering that that’s been the case for quite a while now I don’t suppose that comes as any real surprise, but it’s definitely a contrast to this time a few years ago. With graduation looming in the very near future the typical endgame scenarios for my classes have taken on new significance. Now, it’s more than just a final grade on the line: it’s my actual (successful) exit from the university system.

In any case, most of the tasks are typical school stuff…exams, projects, homework, etc. However, having recently become a masochist (I’m told this is essential to work in the game industry!) I decided to make my life even more difficult by putting together the first-annual Houghton Game Jam. It’s scheduled for this coming Saturday, so I’ve got my hands more than full trying to juggle the preparations for this event with my two exams and two projects that are also due this week.

This also seems as good a time as any to start the slow segue I’ve had in mind for my website. Obviously I don’t post as much as I used to, though even “back in the day” I was hardly a regular updater. Part of that is just a natural apathy for chronicling my life’s events, but increasingly it’s been an audience thing. Most of the readers that come by here are friends and family that aren’t interested in games and, particularly, game development; at least, not to the degree that I am. Unfortunately, these things have become a significant part of my life in the past few years and I find myself with less and less to talk about that isn’t related to them in some way.

With that in mind, I’m finally going to remove the self-imposed restraints that kept me from posting the kinds of game development thoughts and articles that most of you will probably hate. I’ll try to make more personal updates once in a while, and they might even happen more frequently since I’ll be in a posting groove, but I won’t make any promises regarding that. Perhaps personal entries will move to a more suitable location, something I can make available to select individuals or more easily maintain without effort. We’ll see. The long and short of it is that this site, Plaristocrates, will be moving in the direction of a professional workblog type of thing.

One other thing.

I meant to mention this is my previous entry but it didn’t seem to fit very well. A couple of you noticed that the comments now have little avatar icons next to them, and that comments posted by me actually have a unique one. If you’d like to have an avatar of your very own it’s as simple as signing up over at Gravatar.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, Gravatar is a service that maintains a globally-available set of avatars for use on public and private websites. It’s free, and it only takes a minute or two to sign up. The avatars you upload are linked to the e-mail addresses you provide, so when you post on weblogs and other sites that support Gravatar all you need to do is make sure you enter that e-mail address into the comment form. Simple as that!

Feel free to give it a try.

Houghton Game Jam Postmortem: Spatial Magic

Game synopsis

Spatial Magic was conceived as less a game and more an experimental platform on which I could try out a novel control scheme. The general idea went like this: players control a wizard character, and each player is assigned another player as their partner or teammate. In order to aim their spells, players have to pay attention to the spacing between themselves and their partner as well as the angle they’re creating. In this way, the game space (the theme!) becomes a critical part of the gameplay in a slightly different way than normal. Rather than simply looking for cover or blocking your way, your location in space directly affects the way your attacks occur.

Implementation choices

I made the somewhat risky decision to use Microsoft’s XNA Framework along with C# to create my game. I had no experience at all with C# or XNA beyond the ten-minute rundown Garrett had given me a few weeks before. In the end, I decided that the opportunity to learn a new tool/language (and the overall ease of entry for XNA) would offset the penalty I’d suffer while trying to work out the typical kinks associated with this kind of thing.

I actually ended up enjoying C#, which is very close to Java, and the some of the capabilities that XNA puts within easy reach (such as gamepad support). In fact, the built-in support for Xbox 360 controllers was what attracted me to the platform in the first place – designing for a gamepad wasn’t something I’d done in the past.

Putting things together

From a coding standpoint, Spatial Magic is nothing to be impressed with. In fact, I daresay it’s one of the uglier hacks I’ve put together in my time. As you probably expect, this was due to the severe time constraints of the game jam combined with my lack of experience with XNA and C# in general. By the end of the event it was clear that there were much better ways to do what I had done, but the looming deadline made it unfeasible to re-write anything of much substance.

Things were further complicated by the fact that we lost our internet connection around midnight on Saturday. Access to the wealth of information that Google can provide would have saved me literally hours of fooling around with silly mistakes. For example, I spent almost an hour trying to figure out why none of my timing loops were updating properly. It turned out that the TotalGameTime.Milliseconds function provided by XNA didn’t give the total game time in milliseconds but the millisecond component of the total game time. To get what I wanted I need to use TotalGameTime.TotalMilliseconds which struck me as rather redundant!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Elizabeth Hartwick’s contributions to my game. As the resident art mercenary, Liz’s pixel art ended up in almost every project at the game jam! She created the wizards and tiny explosion sprites that for Spatial Magic, something that saved me lots of time.

Design Issues

For me, this is the most important part of the postmortem. I’ll start off with the standard regrets: time and my lack of familiarity with XNA cost me dearly in the tweaking and testing department; Spatial Magic’s gameplay is basically unchanged from the first rough sketches I made when the game jam started. Additionally, there were tons of extra features I wanted to have in the design, a few of which I’ll list below:

• “Ley lines” – I wanted some kind of system to reward players for putting themselves as particular points in the game space. The idea was that these could increase spell power or give them special properties and allow for map design to play a role in strategy.
• More spells – this one is probably obvious, but I wanted multiple kinds of spells for players to cast. Defensive spells, AoE spells, directional spells and enfeebling spells (freezing a player in place, for example) were all planned but never implemented.
• Better casting system – the “push a button to cast” method was a last-minute acquiesce to the 24-hour deadline. My original intention was for the players to have to work together to cast, possibly by pushing buttons in a randomly generated sequence, either simultaneously or one after the other.

In the end, I had to settle for the aiming system alone. I didn’t have much time to play around with it, but even the (very rough) version that I ended up with showed a lot of promise, I think. Moving in relation to another character was something that didn’t immediately feel natural, especially when combined with the distance’s affect on spell accuracy and power. The two player mode had an especially harsh learning curve – controlling two characters at once with the analog sticks whilst trying to aim with the analog trigger was quite a challenge, so much so that most players couldn’t aim at all initially.

However, my satisfaction with the control scheme increased when I noticed that testers (and myself particularly!) were clearly getting better at it as they played more. It could definitely benefit from some major usability improvements, but I think the system is flexible enough to accommodate those changes and represents a solid foundation on which to build.

Where do we go from here?

As it stands now, Spatial Magic isn’t very much fun to play – it’s equal parts amusing and frustrating while you struggle to understand the control scheme, and the total lack of depth means that the novelty wears off pretty quickly. However, I think the concept provides a solid foundation on which I can build I real game, given sufficient time. My intention is to re-write the core of the game to be more extensible, and then start slowly adding features and tweaking the controls. Hopefully in a few months I’ll be able to post version two as a genuinely entertaining game.

In the meantime, you can check out the Houghton Game Jam version of Spatial Magic (as well as the rest of them) here.

Stand by.

I was going to post on a couple of things today (Game Jam postmortem among them) but none of that seems particularly important just now. Check back late tomorrow.

If you were to cut me I would bleed emo.

Time spent prepping my project for recording: about two hours.
Time spent taking the actual footage: about two and a half hours.
Time spent shouting obscenities after I discovered that 80% of the RAWs were corrupted: 15 minutes.

The all-important Enterprise Expo and final Husky Game Development meetings are both on Thursday. For these, I need to have a presentation and demo reel prepared. Unfortunately, all of my god-damn footage is corrupted. For those keeping score, that means I wasted approximately my entire evening.

What’s worse, I don’t have time to re-record this stuff. I have an exam tomorrow and two other projects that are due Thursday and Monday, along with yet another presentation on Friday. There is simply no time in which to do it. Thus, I am forced to re-use the footage from our GDC demo which lacks…well, a lot. Primarily it’s using an old map build that doesn’t have any real lighting at all, and several of the shots ended up being too far away to be useful.

The plan: use this source footage as best I can and record a handful of new scenes on the old map to fill in some major gaps (using a few updated models). Then, script a new ending sequence that will basically consist of a few fly-overs of the two new maps to show that they exist at all. Maybe a bit of the RAWs that didn’t end up corrupted, I dunno. Then hope I can get all this to Ryan in time for him to sync the song he wrote for the demo.

Oh, and find time to listen to some Saves the Day or something.

Houghton Game Jam Postmortem

So…game jams. Turns out they’re a lot of fun, which is something I sorta assumed going in, but it’s nice to have confirmation. As legend tells it, the Houghton Game Jam was conceived and organized in less than three weeks using dark rituals and not a small number of virgin sacrifices (to ensure freshness). The reality is somewhat more mundane: I came back from GDC with a call to make some indie games. Honestly, when it came down to the evening before the event I was certain this postmortem was going to be filled with regrets about the rush-job nature of our game jam. For once, though, things went about as well as they could have.

What went well:

Probably the single most important factor behind the jam’s success was how motivated all of the participants were. Since nothing like this had ever really been done at MTU (and there is so little game-related activity to begin with) people were excited to make their games and eager to see the event succeed. Without that motivation, it’s likely that the terrifying blizzard Houghton experienced would have kept most people from attending.

Of course, getting people to show up was only half the battle. Providing facilities for the event was arguably the hardest part because, as it turns out, MTU’s policies are not particularly helpful (more on this later). Getting a room was no trouble at all; the computer science building had several that would work, and Husky Game Development’s association with that department made things easier. Food also worked out pretty well. We got pizza for the first meal because it was cheap and quick, and for the second we decided to buy a bunch of sandwich materials. Lunchmeat, cheese, vegetables and condiments are pretty inexpensive and we were able to feed a lot of people for very little money.

What went poorly:

The room we had was, physically speaking, great. Unfortunately, our university’s IT department made internet access a serious problem. As a little background: the computer science building is brand-new and wired so that every classroom has access to literally dozens of jacks. However, the ports are controlled by the IT department which operates almost like a separate entity – it charges all the departments for access and does so at the highest rates it thinks it can get away with. They wanted $40 per port, and were gracious enough to wave the $120 setup fee that they normally charge because we only needed them for a weekend. Of course, paying that for twenty people would have more than wiped out our meager budget.

A note to other university students trying to do something like this: do not assume that your school’s IT policies will make sense. Even though they may have spent several million dollars of your tuition and tax dollars building the network infrastructure they will probably have no problem whatsoever extorting you when and if you want to actually make use of it.

In the end we compromised: we got access to a single jack and then borrowed a 20-port switch from Peter in the local Linux Users Group. This worked until around midnight when the entire network (the part we had access to, that is) went down. There wasn’t really anything that could have been done about this beforehand, but it was a real problem nonetheless.

Our other major problem was consistency. Because we were afraid that attendance would be low we were loathe to disallow many thing, and as a result the event was not quite as focused as it could have been. I think that, in the future, the Game Jam will do something more like that of ToJam or the original Indie Game Jam by creating an engine tailored to the type of theme for the year. Putting everyone on a consistent, even footing would probably have helped the development along and made it easier to compare things when it was all over.

For the future:

Thanks to the success we had this year I’ve got no doubt that the Houghton Game Jam will happen again next year. I won’t be here to run it, of course, but the immensely capable Garrett will be taking the mantle of leadership.

One thing I really wanted to do this year, but couldn’t because of time constraints, was marry the engine creation process to some sort of coding competition. Given our connections with the CS department, there were a lot of programmers who were interested from a technical perspective but weren’t particularly talented (or interested) when it game to game design. I’m picturing something like this: a programming competition in the fall semester results in the core of a game engine that, with a few weeks more tweaking and tailoring, will be used as the basis for the spring Game Jam.

Something that came up a few times throughout the process of planning this years’ jam was sponsorship. We did, of course, get money from Husky Game Development, but being a student-run enterprise it was hardly a typical corporate sponsorship. Obviously a “real” sponsorship would give us a lot more money to work with next year, but I find myself very hesitant to do so. Personally, I don’t like the modern notion that every non-profit event (and most for-profit ones, for that matter) have to make use of corporate dollars. I would love to see the Houghton Game Jam remain independent of such influences, a true testament to what passion and talent can accomplish (rather than budgets).

That might be a little bit idealistic, but I think it’s worth shooting for.