Rubymatt's Blog

So after a while of not being able to work on this because of assignments and stuffs, I finally have something that I can show off.  This is the first world of the Dream Build Play contest entry, Hullabaloo (working title).  From this demo, you really shouldn’t expect anything spectacular – This is an alpha, a work in progress, and there is still a lot to do.

What is it?

Hullabaloo is a take on a simple old-school concept – lead the ball through the maze.  You’ll have to collect keys along the way to pass obstacles and can gain extra lives through finding 100 gold old-fashioned coins.  The game is primarily puzzle oriented though mixes this with a slightly faster pace in some instances.  There are also various powerups and traps which may help or hinder your progress.

What’s available in the alpha?

The alpha contains the following:

• The first 10 levels of the game.  These can be played in either “Arcade” mode, in which your progress is continuous to see how far you can get, or “Single Level” which allows you to pick any of the first ten levels to play in order to try the highest score or fastest time possible.
• A bonus level at the end of the Arcade mode for those who want to find out what kind of secretty stuff the game will have.
• The basic engine that the rest of the game will be built off.
• The “Debug” level, which is a temporary test level which, in the alpha, will allow for you to test out the various items and powers available in the game.

The alpha also contains the following unfinished or unimplemented features, or problems I am aware of:

The XNA framework redist is required to run the game.  Get this here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20914

So, I haven’t blogged in a month.  Oh well.  I’m here, and I must share my opinions on this game.  Be warned, this will contain spoilers – probably a lot of them.

Fez.  A game I’ve been looking at screens for since it was first announced five years ago.  When I saw it, I immediately thought it would merely be a side-scrolling platformer but with Crush-style perspective switches.  It actually turns out to be a whole lot more than that.

The game starts with you, Fez, waking up in your nice little house, complete with developer-branded drums.  At this point you cannot rotate the world, merely platform in an old-school fashion.  You’re greeted in this world by a beautifully bright and colourful world, where all of the graphics are reminiscent of long-gone gaming eras.  When you meet up with what is presumably the elder of the village, you are taken to a pedestal of sorts, where you see a fully 3D golden cube and some unreadable text.  You receive your gift of rotation and the golden cube begins to spin out of control.  So fast in fact that the game begins to glitch and force-restarts with its own reboot screen – which is actually rather funny when it happens.

You reawaken in your room, only now you have your rotation ability from the start.  Now begins the actual gameplay.

The main aim of the game is to rebuild the cube featured in this deliberately game-breaking cutscene.  You do this by finding golden cubes shards, cube shard shards (that isn’t their actual name, but that’s what they essentially are) and anti-cubes.  The standard cube-related items are all obtained through standard puzzle-platforming means, and they’re fun to collect, but personally I thought that the anti-cubes were far more interesting.  They involve coded messages, complex puzzles and in one instance a barcode in order to obtain, and something about them (maybe the throwback to when games actually had good secrets) really made me enjoy finding them.

When you’ve collected 32 cubes total (either type seems to count) you can proceed to the “end” of the game (which is by no means the real end of the game) which is very strange and interesting and I think anybody should play the game to experience this for themselves, so I’m not going to spoil it here.

For 800MSP, I thought this was actually a really good game, and while the encoded messages and such seem hard to figure out, there are some very interesting ways in which they try to educate you as to what they mean.  It’s a game full of real exploration and discovery, and it took me about 8 hours to complete (to the point of the “regular” end of the game) which really is pretty good for an XBLA game, and I’m certainly not done with it yet.

So I’ve been working with XNA for a little while now, and I like to think that I’ve learned a lot in the months I’ve been using it.  So while I was browsing the internet, it was only encouragement when I saw that the XNA Dream Build Play contest had just started.  So I entered.  So there’s that.

This means that breakthrough updates are halted for an indefinite amount of time.  However, I do think that it is at a stage where there isn’t much more that can be done to it for a little while so that’s fine anyway I guess.  I’ll leave 0.3 up so that if anybody still wants to play it, it’s there.

I’m currently messing around with some ideas for what I could do to this new project.  I’m thinking of a platformer and have some ideas laid down and will be making  a multi-purpose level editor first so that I can use it for future projects too. I might make this an open editor and release it – I haven’t decided yet.

Well, I think that’s about all.  Wish me luck!

This update really should not have taken me this long, but here it is!  Had a lot of uni work to do (again) recently so I’ve not had the time I should’ve to work on this.  It’s been a whole month since I said I’d make the map editor that little bit better to use.  So here’s what’s new!

• As promised, the map editor now supports for multiple file names.  You can enter the name of your map when you save it now, and Load now brings up a window to select whatever map you wish to load instead of CustomMap.
• The map editor now has a “draggable” cursor.  This means no more having to click every individual block in a line and whatnot.
• The game now has some nice little particle effects on certain collisions, just to make it that bit prettier.
• A new mode – Score Attack!  The main difference between Score Attack and the default game mode is that letting your own ball past causes negative score, while getting it past the enemy causes a lot more points to you.
• An extra game style – “Brick Fog” allows you to hide the brick field so that neither player can see what’s happening to their ball in the middle of the field.  Sound unfair?  Well yeah, that’s the point!
• Various little menu refines, such as being able to press “Escape” to get from the level select menu to get back to the main menu, and being able to press R on the results screen of a game to play again with the same settings.

As ever, do let me know if there are any bugs and such, and all opinions are appreciated!

So today I came to a realisation.  I’m not commenting code enough.  I first noticed after spending two hours on the same piece of code and hardly made a single comment.  In C++ this is bad, because code can often become ugly very, very quickly.  The most fun part was looking back at a small algorithm I wrote an hour and a half ago and playing the figure-out-my-own-logic game. Woo!

So then I realised that Breakthrough is hardly commented at all.  So now I’m spending quite a bit of time mass commenting for the future because some stuff is reusable and, well, nicer.

Speaking of which, I’m still needing a number of people to thoroughly test how Breakthrough works in its current form to ensure that it’s stable at the moment before I carry on delving into some deeper ideas I have for the project, so feedback is still very much appreciated.  I’d also love to start on a number of other projects soon but there are unfortunately many, many things standing in my way at the moment (the largest problem being lack of artistic friends – why do I hang out with all the science nerds?)

On a different note, the project week is now over (thanks to the people who helped with that).  During the research I kinda did just resort to playing Minecraft myself, and I think I played waaaaay too much.  Survivals, adventures, co-op adventures, and suffocating sleeping friends with cobblestone – All good!

Last night I also received my grades on the games development assignment I mentioned in one of my past posts and I got 100%.  So that’s nice too.

Last but not least, I finally have a twitter feed and will likely be interlinking it with this blog as much as possible.  You can follow me, @ShadowRuby256 or simply click the twitter button below a post.

I really wish I was better at writing these things, but oh well.  And in case I don’t get to post on Wednesday, happy Vita release week!

After quite some time, this is finally releasable.  There are still a few little things that aren’t how I’d like them to be quite yet, but I wanted to get this out so that the major features can be commented on and such.  This version now contains the map editor and has a much nicer look and feel than 0.11.

Quick note about limitations:

• You are limited to one user map in the editor. for the time being.  This is, as I said, because I want to be able to get some feedback on the currently existing content there and I want to make sure this is all sound before I implement real loading and saving of as many files as is wanted.
• Custom maps currently are limited to 10×10.

And now the new features!

• The map editor is now included in this version if the above text didn’t give that away.
• “Patterns” mode which allows you to take your standard field of any size and apply a random pattern to it (where bricks are removed to give a different shaped field each game).
• 10 pre-made shaped maps.
• A new powerup.
• Splash screen.
• General look and feel improvements in the menu.
• More colours, and colours now affect bricks as well as players.

Full listing can be found in the version history included in the .zip.

Remember, this download does require the XNA Redistributable Framework to function, so be sure to get that first.  As always, feedback and bug reports are much appreciated.

Download

While writing this I realise that there are multiple reasons for an oops.  Firstly, oops in that I forgot I even had a blog.  Secondly, oops in that I was not able to update Breatkthrough anywhere near as quickly as my previous post stated (SORRY ALL YOU AVID BREAKTHROUGH FANS, YEP, ALL TWO OF YOU).  This update is still planned and is well under way, but I’ve been very sidetracked recently with assignments and such for uni.  This should be out very soon.

Finally, I realise that I haven’t actually used this as a “blog”.  So far, it’s just been a development diary for those few people who are actually interested in a pong-breakthroughevil- mutant-hybrid-thing.  So, oops.  This changes today!

So, recently, during the travelling to and from university, I’ve been feeling incredibly creative again.  This is both exciting and frustrating for me.  Whilst listening to mixtures of particularly emotion-invoking music, I find myself able to vividly imagine scenes from projects that I would love to start in the future but, with my current skill, am not yet able to.  A lot of these ideas stem from an old project that didn’t make it very far in my RMXP days (which was not finished due to “growing out” of RMXP).  Regardless of the idea, once I arrive back home and sit down, the creativity has been completely drained and as much as I want to, I feel unable to put the ideas down onto paper.

On an entirely different note, tonight I can experience the “Goodbye coursework” feeling for a little while as I’ve all but completed an assignment.  Whilst it is still incomplete in my eyes, submitting it in its current form should secure a high grade anyway.

While I’m on the subject, on Monday 13th February I have a “research week” thing to carry out.  This is kind of a big thing and I need some people to volunteer as test subjects.  The tests are very simple and are revolved around Minecraft (yep, it’s that nerdy).  My original plan was to see whether 30 hours of non-stop WarioWare can cause serious mental health problems but there are so many things wrong with that idea that I went with the Minecraft one.  Anyway, I really need a decent number of people to volunteer for these tests.  The tests will take place on the specified week and will most likely be arranged at varying times of the day.  If you are interested (or just friendly), please let me know sometime in the next week and you will receive much gratitude.

Well, that’s about all that’s going through my mind at the moment.   Woo for uninteresting blog posts that probably won’t get read!

- Ruby

A lot of progress has been made Breakthrough recently.  Enough has been (and is still being) added to the game that the next release will jump up to 0.2.  Huzzah!

The main feature of the new update is that any player will be able to construct and play on his or her own levels.  A number of premade levels will also be packaged with the game to show what can actually be created with the editor.  The editor is built right into the game, and will require no additional downloads.

For those who like to generate levels instead of playing on preset ones, these options will still be available with some new features.  Standard rectangular maps can now be given random “holes” where no brick is present.  These holes are reflected for both players and give randomized patterns to the brick field.

Several user interface enhancements have been made.  The menu layout has been improved and the colours of bricks now reflect that of the players instead of the default red and blue.

Along with a few other changes and features, this is roughly how update 0.2 is going to pan out.  The update will be available at some point in the coming week.

Only a small update today, but one that I think will be very much appreciated.  This is version 0.11, which adds the ability to pause by hitting the “P” key on the keyboard or the Start button on a 360 controller.

Enjoy.

Download

Whilst this is not a very original title for a first blog post, I think it is apt, considering the contents of this post, and most likely the entire blog.

First post, so let’s start things off well.  After two days of for some reason having a very strong urge to code more and more into this, I finally have a (relatively) stable and releasable version of a little game I started on Friday, under the working title “Super Mega Awesome Breakout Pong Wars”, or, as the project is titled “Breakthrough”.

The game works like standard pong, but with some changes.  Between the players is a large field of bricks which is destroyed as in Breakout.  Each player has his or her own ball (so even when all of the bricks have gone the game can continue and be kinda fun).  Bricks also drop powerups, most of which are to disadvantage the other player, rather than advantaging yourself. The game can be played with a friend locally (using either xbox gamepads or a keyboard, or both), or against what is currently a very primitive but accurate AI.

Download link can be found at the bottom of this post.  The game also requires the XNA Redistributable Framework to run (It’s only 6.7MB).

Feedback is very much appreciated.  While it is only at an “alpha” stage, the game is not without its bugs and it would be very appreciated if those who play it could report if problems occur, and how they did so.

Technical stuffies!

Current Version: 0.1

Features:

• A combination of two classic videogames.
• 2-player local multiplayer.
• Simple but difficult AI.
• Customizable games.
• Xbox 360 controller support.
• An immense audiovisual experience (not guaranteed).

Future Features:

• Additional powerups
• Enhanced AI and AI difficulty selection
• Different shaped boards
• A proper menu system and results screen, along with some nicer graphics.
• An overly epic soundtrack
• Improved collision detection.
• Adventure mode, perhaps?

 Download