HARRUMPH! I mean, agreed, Benza. I wasn't going to buy it, myself, I was merely planning to visit those who would shell out the Two Hundred odd dollars needed. So I don't hate them, though I do find issue with the whole never releasing games down here. Why is it still rife, we wonder. And the odd banning doesn't help things along.

At the end of the day, the reason why games are often released late or not at all in Australia is that there is a much, much smaller market here than there is in Europe or the US.  And we're so far away that shipping costs and distributor deals and the import tariffs levied by customs are so high that it pushes prices up and pulls profits way down.

Yeah, it sucks.  But I can at least kind of understand the mindset that leads to things coming out later here, especially things with bulky and expensive-to-ship peripherals like those that define Rock Band.

(I tend to import almost all my games and consoles from web stores in the US;  means I get stuff cheaper and earlier, as importing a single copy of a game for personal use typically doesn't get hit for customs fees.  Also means that I'm not tempted into the "trade your old games in" schemes)

What I don't get are the on-line distribution spots like PopCap which arbitrarily charge 50%-100% higher prices to Australians (as determined by IP-based geolocation).  This is the scandalous, purely opportunistic stuff, IMHO.

If you need more explicit help understanding your goal in each game, you can activate pretentious mode for further clarification.

I've spent several minutes trying to find words which will express just how awesome this is, and I can't do it.   

Anyone else end up jealously guarding your one last remaining shiny for the last minute, charging at people whenever the come too close?  :/

Good game.  Seems to crash a lot more than other VS programs of yours I've ran on my mac.

Hm..  I've fixed every crash that was reported to me in there, but it's the most complicated VS thing I've done thus far, so there's certainly room for crash bugs to be in there.  :/

My high score is 15 shinies remaining.  The more I play, the more I think that a winning strategy is to not break down any walls, and to aggressively shut down entrances, totally ignoring the meat.  Do remember that you can close openings even when they're on the other side of a wall, just by stomping. 

[Builds:]

Several months back, I wrote a little "Game in a Week", which had a required topic of "Munchers" (I guess I sort of cheated by changing it to "Muncher's")

It's one of my favourite of the small games I've put together, and I've been thinking for a while about giving it a little more love.  There are some thing which are obvious (needs a more reliable collision detection system, needs more sounds, needs something more legible than the minimap display, etc), but I'm really interested in what people think of its overall structure; whether the timer-based gameplay works well, or if it should have some sort of level progression or something.. 

But I'd be glad for any sort of feedback!


Builds:
Win32 Build
OS X Build  (Universal binary, requires OS X 10.4 or later)

Screenshot:

My experience is that really unique ideas are very rare.  For any idea that might occur to someone, it's almost always true that somebody else has had a substantially similar idea earlier on.  I've worked on some pretty bizarre stuff in my time, but I don't think I've ever worked on something where nobody's been able to point out a similar concept being worked on by someone else at about the same time. 

IMHO, it's in the execution of the core idea that you find the real value and uniqueness of a game.


Of course, I would say that, being a programmery sort of guy.  So I'm probably rather biased. 

You don't need to program it, it's already being made by LucasArts (PS3, XBox 360).

Variations on this idea have been around for decades.  You might be interested in Magic Carpet (and its various sequels), as just one example.

That's because you're locked into a violence-normative game paradigm!

I totally have to memorize that reply.  Would come in handy all the time.   

Tech demo crashes on launch in OS X.  Doesn't look like the Glew framework is linked in properly.

You're absolutely right.  Also, SDL and SDL_Mixer weren't there properly.  I think I've got it all sorted out now (or at least it works for me, even if I move my system-wide installation of the frameworks somewhere that they won't be found).  Can you try this new version to verify that the fix works for you?

Mac OS X Tech Demo 0.0.3 (Universal binary, requires OS X 10.4 or later) (1.8 mb)

I have a bad feeling about the future of this project... 

I always have a bad feeling about the future of my projects.  I've learned to ignore it.   

I'm not as far as I would have liked, at this stage of the competition.  I blame work and WiiWare.  And a slightly overambitious design.  But I think I should still have the game fully playable by the end of the weekend, which would leave me with a week for tuning and polish.

Would have liked to have been at that point last weekend, though.

The other way to force yourself to stop procrastinating is to set deadlines for yourself, and make sure that everyone you know knows about the deadlines.  This is how I've managed to do my "Game in a Week"s;  publishing the deadline beforehand gives you a real social incentive to actually finish up on time, even if you have to cut down the game at the last minute in order to have something you can call finished.

I was hoping that the PG Compo's deadline would work the same way for me, but I'm falling a little behind from where I'd like to be at this point.  A deadline thirty days away just doesn't seem to motivate me into action quite so much as a deadline that's less than a week away.

I listen to music.

To break through procrastination, I make a deal with myself;  I'll put on an album I like and will code as much as I can until it finishes, at which point I can stop.

In practice, once the album has finished I'm usually right in the middle of a coding task and don't want to stop midway through it, so I put on another album.  And before I know it, it's two in the morning.

So I've spent about half the day on interface improvements (button hilite behaviour works more like standard GUIs, zooming in and out is now centered on the cursor, etc), and the other half on optimisations to the simulation and graphic engine.

It's funny how trying to simulate a full world of 10,000 users at a smooth framerate can expose all the weird performance bottlenecks in your code.  It was making my MacBook Pro drop to about 20fps, just trying to cope with running AI on that many users.  Now it's doing the same work, but running solidly at 60fps again.  I should eventually do some more optimisation work on it so that it'll run that quickly on slower machines, too.. but at least it runs at full speed on my own computer now;  that's probably good enough to return to work on the simulation itself.


Now I'm worrying about something on the design side.  When I started out, I wanted to run everything at very realistic speeds.  You'd receive subscription fees once a month, and pay salaries and expenses at the same time.  If you make substantial changes to a region on the dev server, it'll take your employees a week or so to actually convert your design into a working region, before you can actually move those changes over to the live server. 

The problem is that I've written the user simulation to run in real time.  If I end up needing to run the game at a rate of a day per minute in order to have a month pass in a reasonable period of time, then users will be zipping across the screen far too quickly for the player to actually be able to see or click on them.  Maybe I need to put in a SimCity-style variable speed control.  But I already have enough trouble making the AI run within the target frame rate without trying to run 1440 times as much of it every frame.   

Going to take more thought to figure this out.

I think sometimes people assume immersion is about being able to believe that you personally are that character, so the more ambiguous the character the more chance for immersion.  But really for me it's more about being able to believe in the character and the world as a logically-consistent place that I can put myself in to.  What ruins immersion is not "hey wait, I'm not a scientist gone to the future to save humanity!" or, "hey, I don't talk like that!"  Rather, what ruins immersion is when the world doesn't react in a sensible way to my character, or if my character doesn't react in a sensible way to the world.

Okay, I'll admit that this comment is almost entirely about semantics.  Apologies in advance, but I find this sort of topic very interesting. 

Immersion is the quality which causes you to lose yourself inside a video game, movie, book, or etc.  If you've stopped being aware of the chair you're sitting on, then you're immersed in the experience.  All sorts of things can break immersion, some from inside the activity, some from the outside world.

What you're talking about here is mimesis, which I've never really heard anybody but Interactive Fiction fans talk about much.  Mimesis (in this context) is basically how consistently and predictably a video game world behaves;  once the video game world starts behaving inconsistantly, then it stops being a world with rules you can learn.  And yeah, that's one way to break immersion really fast, because once a game is breaking mimesis, you'll never be sure what the outcome of an action within the game will be.

So if the game taught you to pick up bricks, and you then discover a brick or brick-like object that you can't pick up, then that will break mimesis;  the world has stopped behaving in a predictable, internally-consistent way.  The same is true if throwing a brick at an enemy makes them yell in pain, but throwing it at a friendly character gets no response.  The same is true of how GTA IV teaches you to shoot a doorknob off a door to unlock it, but then won't let you do that to other doorknobs.  When game rules work differently in different places or at different times for no obvious reason, that's broken mimesis, and will pull people straight out of their immersion.

The neatest thing about mimesis is that it isn't about behaving like the real world;  it's about keeping the game's own rules predictable, throughout the play experience.  Not being able to shoot locks to open doors wouldn't break mimesis and pull you out of your immersion, except that GTA IV had already established that you could do it, and then inexplicably wouldn't let you do it again.

I've put up an updated tech demo build which has fixes for the sticky right mouse button that some people have had, and also fixes the hunt quest bug which caused users to hunt monsters around their home town, instead of at the hunt question's designated location.  The download links are in the top post.  I'd be really grateful if anybody who had right mouse button trouble in the last one could give it a try and verify that I really have squashed the bug.

Incidentally, the map used in this tech demo is being generated off of the name "Sample". 


I'm hoping to have a playable demo up within a few days.  Getting really close to being able to join up the far ends of the simulation logic!   

Runs fine on my craptop. Everyone of my players seemed to flock around that home icon thing? Anyway it's looking great. Keep on working!

Yeah.  The little house icon is a placeholder graphic representing a town;  users pick up quests from there, so there'll naturally be more users clustering there.

But there's a bug in the users' AI code which lets them perform their hunt quests near the town, instead of going out to the site where the hunt quest is actually supposed to occur, so that really increases the clustering around towns.

Same right-mouse-click bug at home as well. Something to do with installed frameworks? What's this running in? I've no idea what might be causing this.

Is that the Win32 or OSX build?

Right button works fine for me.  But it runs at about 3fps on my laptop and I can't see your cool bloom effects

What sort of laptop is it?  I'm guessing that it doesn't have a 3D card?

The right mouse button seemed to get stuck down. The idea is awesome though. not too dissimilar from what we're doing imo

Interesting.  I'm using SDL events to handle the left and right mouse buttons..  if a 'button up' event didn't come through, or if I mishandled one, then that could make the button behave as if it was stuck down.  Does that happen for you all the time, or did it happen only once?

I could pretty easily switch to polling the mouse button state, instead of using events.  That'd probably be better and safer.

I've uploaded a tech demo of MMORPG Tycoon.  This isn't playable, but it does all the processer intensive stuff, and you can pan around and watch the basic MMORPG simulation.  I'd be really grateful if a few people could grab these builds and give them a try;  make sure that they run correctly (no missing dlls or misconfigured frameworks, etc), and let me know how well they run for you.

These tech demos generate a random MMORPG world, automatically set up a few zones, a starting area, a respawn point, and a few towns.  And then immediately connect 450 users, who go on quests, fight monsters, and level up.  (When drawn in blue, they're questing.  Red shows that they're fighting, green that they're resting, and white that they're doing something else.. usually returning home after a quest). 

Individual users are tiny compared to the world map, and so are only visible when you're zoomed reasonably close in.  If you zoom in even further, you'll also be able to monitor their health bars.

Controls are the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and dragging with the right mouse button to pan around the map.  You'll probably have to zoom out a little to find the automatically placed towns and the users;  users tend to cluster around towns, since that's where quests come from.

Win32 Tech Demo (888kb)
OSX Tech Demo (universal binary) (467kb)
(these demos are now outdated;  get the latest ones instead, linked from the top post)

That's totally awesome.   

I can't wait to see more!

This baffles me.

Surely the concept of spherical gravity is not a new one.  I mean, at least not since some bright chap figured out that the Earth isn't actually a flat plane.  Unless they were employing that guy at the time, how can any development studio maintain a straight face when claiming to have invented this idea?

Obviously, we're talking about spherical gravity in a videogame.

Obviously.  My point was that gravity actually does go in more than one direction in the real world.  We're all familiar with this, and it's not in any way a new idea, so I don't see how someone can claim that the idea is "theirs". 

But if you insist, then circular gravity was one of the defining gameplay elements in the original Spacewar!, which was written in 1961.  And I'm sure that Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen would say that they were very pleased to see their idea being taken to an entirely new level, more than forty years later.

So forgive me if I don't take this scandal very seriously.