Eidolon Games

A couple of days ago Jay of Rampant Games posted a link to an article about how Notch marketed Minecraft. The takeaway for me was that Notch produced a lot of content about Minecraft. The article states that he started blogging and would put up a new post every day, sometimes more than one a day. I hear things like this from time to time, and I wonder what on earth they spend all of that time talking about. So I went back to Notch’s early blog posts, and it’s just a lot of small status updates. Every day a small note on what he had done. That sounds somewhat doable. As an aside, Jay Barson of Rampant Games writes a new blog post nearly every day, but most of them are full of interesting thoughts on the industry, games in general, or any other myriad topics. I don’t know how he does it.

So how are posts like ketchup? Well you may have noticed when trying to pour ketchup that it tends to resist moving, but once you do get it moving it tends to keep moving pretty quickly. I notice that I tend to update in spurts. For a couple of weeks I’ll blog every week, then I’ll stop and silence will reign for a month or two, or three, or six, and I have a hard time getting started again. So I’ll start pouring out the updates like unto ketchup, which will hopefully lower the general inhibition against posting. Since that’s usually what gets me, anything I might say has already been said ten times and much more cleverly. I’m also going to try to cross-post these on tigsource, in the hopes that if I dump enough updates out that someone will take notice and I’ll have an easier time getting publicity.

So what have I been up to? I’m working on integrating a dialog system that I got off the asset store. But it requires that I update to the latest version of NGUI, the UI system I’m using. And the latest version of NGUI changes a lot of things, mostly for the better it looks like. Which means I have to do heavy work on most of my UI, which convinced me to purchase some UI assets so that things will look a little more nice and professional.

Screenshots later, along with updates.

We had another Utah Indie Game Night down at BYU this past Thursday. I had lots of people looking at my game, which means I got a lot of feedback, which was great. But it also meant I didn’t get to see anyone else’s game, which was unfortunate.

In watching people play I came to the conclusion, again, that the interface needs work, also it was way too hard, but I think that’s primarily since I had a lot of enemies. As I was watching, I noticed that the strategy seemed to mostly be waiting for the enemies to come to you, then doing a little bit of maneuvering to keep them within your firing arcs. I paid close attention to how I was playing it as well,, and noticed the same thing, not a lot of movement. The ships just kind of pull up next to each other, and start slugging it out.

So I spent some time watching space battles from various sci fi properties on Youtube, and I noticed that in battles between capital ships they fight the exact same way. Almost always it was the two opposing sides moving their ships into range of each other, then just sitting there shooting each other. What makes the battles interesting is that they have lots of smaller ships, like fighters, flying around through the battle like WWII planes dog fighting. But I’m really having the big ship to ship combat be the focus of the game, so I’m going to have to find a way to make it more interesting.

Something I noticed with Steam Birds is that a lot of the interesting stuff is trying to get behind the enemy, because they can’t shoot you, and it’s hard for them to shake you off their tail. Another big Steam Birds strategy is staying out of the enemy firing arcs, it really affects your entire strategy. In Flame Warrior the back of the ships tend to have very weak armor, shooting a ship in the back will make it explode pretty quickly. Of course nobody realizes that, and the ships just rotate too much for that knowledge to be any good. They move around so much that any shots at the back are just based on luck. The fast rotations also make it difficult to stay out of their firing arcs.

So I’m actually wondering if slowing the ships down would make the combat more tactical, it would probably make things more predictable, which I think is another big part of the problem. The enemy ships move a lot, and it’s hard to predict what exactly they are going to do, which makes tactical planning almost impossible. I think a part of the problem is that ships that handle with more realistic physics are something we just aren’t used to seeing. Usually in the movies the big ships move like water based battleships, and the fighters move like airplanes, so that’s kind of how people expect these ships to operate, but they don’t. At least not usually, they can behave that way, it’s a simple matter of having the ship rotate as it turns to always face the direction it’s moving. Since I added smaller thrusters all over this ship this doesn’t even violate the physics.

I feel like that robs the game of some of it’s uniqueness. But then there really isn’t any point in being different just to be different. If it doesn’t add anything to the game, then there really isn’t any reason to violate people’s intuitive sense of how the ships should be moving. I almost wondering if I should have the ships mostly move like sea-ships, but have some special maneuvers that could only be preformed by a ship in space. At the moment the game does have those, but the player kind of has to manually execute them, having the ship rotate while moving, then really turn on the thrusters to make a quick turn, etc. I’m thinking that maybe I should give the ships a button that said ‘rotate while moving then accelerate in the opposite direction’, and when they press the button the ship executes the maneuver. That might work, I’ll just have to figure out how to implement it in a way that makes sense.

Well, nothing for it I suppose but to spend a lot more time play testing and figuring out what works and is fun.

This is something I noticed and started worrying about a little bit, then a couple of playtesters mentioned it, so now it’s something I worry about a lot. The tone of the narrative and the tone of the gameplay don’t match.

On the one hand is the narrative, based in a universe where space battles are fought over petty slights such as a game getting an 8/10 instead of a 10/10 or a disagreement on which episode of an anime is the best. The humor was a bit dark, but it was still meant to be mostly light hearted, not too serious and, hopefully, funny.

On the other hand are the battles. Space ships flying around throwing lasers, missiles and bullets at each other. It’s a deep and complicated game, I’m pretty used to it, but repeated play tests demonstrate that it’s not something you just pick up and play. All of this creates a very serious tone. Which is kind of at odds with the light hearted tone of the narrative.

I thought about trying to make the combat lighter, primarily by changing the weapons, missiles left behind a multicolored smoke trail, lasers came in rainbow colors, etc. It didn’t seem to do much for me, not enough that I bothered showing it to anyone. Additionally making the weapons goofy looking wasn’t going to do anything about the heavy tactical weight the whole thing carries. I don’t know that there’s anything I can do to balance the heaviness created by the complexity of the gameplay.

Another thing is that it seems like it’s going to take a lot more writing to really convey a humorous universe like the one I’m imagining. It’s fairly different, sure everyone is familiar with the internet, but a universe where death is temporary so murder isn’t a big deal, where planets fill in for internet communities, etc. etc. It’s going to really require a good deal of world building, and right now, to be honest, I’m trying to cut out as much of that as I can. I’m trying to focus entirely on the combat, which I should have been doing anyway for the last two years. And that means I want everything else to be as simple as possible. I think of Steam Birds, which plays similar to Flame Warrior, just a lot less complicated, and in it they have a very short description for each level. They tap into our inherent understanding of World War I/II to quickly give context to the battles. Each of their mission descriptions would probably fit in a tweet. And right now that sounds pretty blasted good. Plus, the humorous approach I was trying seems to go against the natural context that people assume when they engage in the gameplay. Space battles naturally bring to mind sci-fi stories that tend to not be goofy.

And that brings me to the biggest objection to making the combat goofier is the game was primarily inspired by the Honor Harrington book series. It’s a sci-fi series all about space combat and political intrigue. It has it’s funny moments, but for the most part it’s very serious. Other inspirations included Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, really any sci-fi property that included space battles. And the thing about all of those is that on the whole they are fairly serious. They all inform the fantasy of controlling giant space battleships going to war. The thing that really drives me to make games is to try to capture the feel of something to deliver a gameplay system that allows the player to act out a fantasy that isn’t delivered in the same way elsewhere. And it’s going to be pretty difficult to feel like Commander Adama fighting an epic space battle if you’re shooting missiles that look like Nyan-Cat.

So that brings me to a decision. Do I stick with the original humorous context, trying to convey the feel of the world through brief mission introductions. Or do I abandon that and go for the more serious theme that the gameplay seems to naturally suggest. I tried looking at other games and other media that are funny to see what they do. First off, I think the only goofy space game I’m aware of is Space Zombies and Pirates, which I honestly didn’t play a lot of. It seemed to convey it’s humor primarily through text. There’s an anime called Irresponsible Captain Tylor that is all about humor and space battles, but the thing is, that all of the humor happens inside the ship. It’s not all that funny that the ships are shooting at each other, what’s funny is that Tylor is hiding under his chair or trying to surrender or whatever, and circumstances always work out to his favor, making everyone think he’s a tactical genius. I don’t exactly have the means to cut to the insides of ships and show their captain and crews bumbling about. Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy does a similar thing, they have the occasional space battle, and they are funny because the computer is tied up making tea, or something similar.  Games that do make the combat humorous depend largely on strange weapons and enemies. Like Plants vs Zombies, the zombies are goofy looking and the plants all have faces and look kind of funny. That would suggest that if I want to stick with humor I should redesign the graphics, a task which I just don’t have the resources for.

My final hope to keep the humor would be to make it a little more dark, something along the lines of the Fallout series. It was grim, but also funny at times. But even in those games the combat is really funny, it’s the little things you find along the way, the little world building moments that I am trying to throw out to get this thing to market sooner. Plus, I think it would take a really deft hand to make the dark humor work, something that I’m not really sure I have the skill for.

To tell the truth, as I’ve been writing this blog post I’m feeling like the answer is obvious, ditch the humor and go with the serious tone of the combat, not grim-dark, but definitely not goofy. The combat is where 98% of the game takes place, and fighting against the tone of the combat is going to take a lot of energy. So I think there’s only one question that remains: do I stick with the name? I’ve felt like Flame Warrior was maybe a bit generic, and the only justification I had for it was the fact that the game revolved around the petty feuds that go on in internet forums. If I’m taking a more serious approach then the name is a real stretch. On the one hand, my game is still incredibly obscure, and a name change probably isn’t going to do much damage to my name recognition, it’s not like I’ve been featured on any big gaming web sites. On the other hand, I would be throwing out what little name recognition I do have, which may honestly be my most precious resource. I know that I’ve seen a couple of high profile AAA games change their names late in development, so it’s certainly not unprecedented, but it’s still something that requires some thought.

It’s been entirely too long since I last wrote anything. I’ll summon the usual array of excuses: head down coding, blah, blah, back end changes, blah, debugging, blah. Anyway, I finally did something public facing. I entered Flame Warrior in the IGF 2015 competition, entry required a video, so I made one. I’m pretty pleased with it, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. You can find it on the newly updated Flame Warrior website: flamewarriorgame.com. This has surprisingly been very good for morale. Having the website and the video make the whole thing seem much more real. I would make promises about more updates coming soon, but like campaign promises, those are made to be broken.

I have the combat demo that I showed at Comic Con uploaded. It’s not exactly what was shown, I made it a little bit easier, and changed out the weapons on one of the ships. There’s no tutorial, but if you go through the movement tutorial you shouldn’t have much trouble figuring it out. Even if you don’t do the tutorial, I’m hoping it’s simple enough that some quick experimenting should be enough to get you going.

The demo is available here. Let me know what you think.

There continues to be a lot of talk about the plummeting prices for indie games. It’s getting to where you almost can’t give games away. Bundles, and sales, and bundles and bundles and bundles and bundles. All over the place. The artwork, premis’s and titles blur together, they all look alike. They all claim to have unique gameplay, amazing graphics (although to be honest, the last time I was really wowed by a game’s graphics was Bioshock: Infinite, and I can’t remember the last time before that), fantastic stories. And I recognize that my game is going to be in a very similar position. I guess my big hope is just that I can get someone with some sort of audience to pay attention to my game, and thus bring the attention of their audience to bear on my game.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. It seems pretty clear that the drop in barriers to making games is responsible for a good part of this glut of games. It’s awesome that all sorts of people can make games now, that opens the path for some really unique takes on what a game is or should be. But it also means that anyone and everyone can and will make games. But I read a post on a blog on the internet on this day that has changed how I view this problem.

The article in question is here (and I have to say, that it’s a very interesting blog overall) here’s a two sentence sum-up: Everyone and anyone can write, and there are so many people who want to write, and so many people who would do it for free, that it’s become very hard to make a living writing. You can only really make money doing things that no one, or not enough people, would be willing to do for free. So now the hordes of people who would be willing to make games for free, can, which means that it’s very difficult to make a living making games.

But here’s the little bit of hope that this article-inspired perspective granted to me: There should still be, and hopefully always will be, things in gaming that few people are willing or able to do for free. 16-bit-style RPGs have been democratized by engines like RPG Maker, now it’s just about as easy to make an RPG as it is to write fan-fic, and probably pays just about as well. Game Maker and other similar products have made it so easy to make puzzle platformers, that everyone who would do it for free, can do it for basically free. It seems like I’ve been seeing more low-quality 3D shooters of late, which I would bet has something to do with Unity3D’s growing popularity in recent years.

But the thing is, creating quality work is hard, and because it’s hard, there are less people willing to do it for free. Inventing new mechanics is hard; writing well-crafted stories, especially stories that allow a lot of player interaction, is hard; there are lots of things in game development that are still hard. And hopefully, that means that there is still some money to be found in those things. Of course there’s still the problem of discoverability, everyone claims unique mechanics, and impressive stories, and it’s blasted hard to sort the chaff from the wheat with nothing but a few screenshots and a short blurb to go on.

Wow, it’s been nearly a month since my last post, I’ve been busy with a vacation, and Salt Lake Comic Con, which was last week, no time for posting. So here’s all the latest stuff.

Comic Con was great, I had a lot of people looking at the game, and a lot of them were enthusiastic about the game. So it was really good to get that positive feedback. It was also good to get a little bit of media exposure, Big Shiny Robot, a nerd news site, interviewed everyone at the Indie Megabooth, including me. If you’re interested, you can see the video here, I’m the second video in the playlist. The show reconfirmed for me that making the changes to the movement control that I did, taking it from turn-based to realtime-with-pause, was absolutely the right decision. At times it was a little bit difficult to help people understand how to manage the movement, and this new system is way more intuitive than the old control method. So I shudder to think what it would have been like with the old control scheme.

I was only there showing my game on Saturday, I went Thursday and attended some panels and looked around at the vendors on display. Worked all day Friday to get the game in a showable state, then showed it on Saturday. I’m glad I only did the one day, it was nice to be able to attend the show as a guest rather than a vendor, and it would have been very straining talking to people all day for three days in a row.

The game is much improved from my last update. There are numerous little fixes made for Comic Con, and some big feature improvements. I should have the combat demo that I showed at Comic Con up soon, sometime next week. The two big improvements I worked on this week were shields and cannons. Shields have been around for a long time, but now they look good:

I’ve also added cannons, basically slugs of metal propelled by chemical explosives. As seen here:

The cannons are the third and final weapons that form the basic strategy. Missiles have a long range, but they also can’t hit anything too close. Lasers have a medium range, and deal medium damage. Cannons deal a lot of damage, but have a pretty short range. Combining ships with different weapons makes for interesting strategic decisions, at least I’ve found that to be the case. And that’s it, funny how the longer you wait between updates, the less you have to say. I will resume regular weekly updates now that the Comic Con crunch is over.

I’ve been in Washington D.C. the last several days as my wife attends a conference. I’ve had the chance to do some sightseeing while she was in sessions, and seen some interesting things. But the best thing so far was when we attended a reception at the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson building last night.

They opened up the main hall, a couple of side display wings, and the main reading room for us to look around in. The building was like a secular temple, everywhere you looked there were details, and carvings and artwork. The great scientific, artistic and philosophical minds of the past were venerated like saints with statues, paintings, and sometimes just their names in places of honor. I don’t know how crowded the building is during normal tourist hours, but I’m fairly certain that to see it with the relatively small number of people present last night was a rare privilege. The most striking part for me though was the main reading room.

The main reading room was like a cathedral to knowledge, wisdom, and artistry; it struck me as a sacred place as soon as we entered.  This, I image, was a once in a lifetime kind of experience. I sat down in one of the chairs and just observed the details and pondered on the numinous feelings I was having. I think I sat there for around forty five minutes to an hour, relatively alone, there probably wasn’t another person within ten feet or so. Again, it was like a religious experience, absolutely amazing.

I pondered on what it was about the building that made it so striking, and sacred to me. I believe it was that the building was built to honor and venerate all forms of intellectual accomplishment, and in doing so it becomes itself a great artistic accomplishment. I have a lot of respect for the artistic and intellectual minds of the past, and so being in that building felt like I held a connection to all of those great minds throughout history.

It all reminded me of an article I read years ago, I don’t recall where it was, but I think it may have been an article in The Escapist back when it was just an online magazine. The article talked about the pulp writers of the past, like H.P. Lovecraft, or Robert E. Howard. Specifically it talked about how those writers wrote about barbarians fighting wizards, or unthinkable monsters devouring hapless investigators, subjects that aren’t typically associated with great literature. And yet despite their apparently low-brow subject matter, they still used their work to express their views and feelings towards life. In reading Lovecraft you can get a feel for how he probably saw the world, an incomprehensibly large and meaningless place where humans are nothing but pathetic insects. A place where heroes, those who reach too far, or dig too deep, inevitably end up taken by madness or devoured by unthinkable monstrosities. Eventually, you gain an understanding of the author, what they valued, what they feared, and how they felt that life rewarded those who reached for the sky.

That’s important I think. I often feel that the importance in art is to form a connection between the artist and the viewer. It’s a way to reach out into the uncaring world, and to say “Here I am. I exist. I matter.”, and someone else can pick up your work and feel a connection to you, and for a moment you aren’t alone. Lovecraft’s work resonated with me, I loved the subjects of his stories: slumbering monsters, dusty tomes that induce madness in the reader, and long lost secrets that are better off remaining hidden. But at the same time his themes of existential horror, solitude in an enormous uncaring universe, and the endless futility of life resonated with me as well. That sounds fairly emo, but I wasn’t terribly happy through most of my twenties, alright? But that gets at what I found so profound about the Library of Congress, it seemed a celebration of all creators, those venerated through the ages, and those that are venerated by only a few. There was a display case with several batman comic books on display, it was awesome.

Now, to tie it back to video games. Perhaps we haven’t, as an art form, reached the artistic heights of Shakespeare, Van Gogh, or DaVinci; but I think we have reached the artistic level of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Keith Laumer. We have games that entertain and resonate on a mechanical and narrative level; but many, especially those made by small teams, also resonate on a thematic level. By playing the game you can get a feel for what the creators value and how they view life. And that, I think, is something worth celebrating, and truly validates the medium as an art form.

Sitting in the reading room last night left me with a determination to join the ranks of authors that I have read and loved. I want my games to not only entertain, but also to express, somehow, what it is that I value in life. And if my work resonates deeply with even one person out there, then I would consider it a triumph.

I’ve received some good feedback regarding the tutorial and the gameplay it presented. One bit of feedback I’ve heard repeatedly was that it’s too blasted long, I worried about throwing people in too quickly, but that’s apparently not a concern. I also asked for feedback on the tigsource forums. I only had one person play the tutorial, but they had some really good, in depth, feedback for me.

The kind individual really didn’t like the movement, and did a very good job articulating what in particular they didn’t like. Chief among the complaints was the lack of control, you tell the ship where you want to go, and it does it’s rotations and it can be difficult to anticipate when or where the ship will be rotating. I’ve played it countless hours, and wrote the dang thing, so I have a good sense of what directions it will rotate in. Earlier on in my development I really wanted to find a way to give the player really fine control over the ship’s movement, but every time I tried to figure out how to give that to the player the interface would get in my way. I couldn’t see any way to grant the user that kind of control, and keep the interface simple enough for it to be usable by anyone but me. But something the person from tigsource said made me think. They said that it was frustrating that it had to be turn based even when they were just moving around. Which led to further thinking.

It’s not uncommon for turn based strategy games where there is an open world to wander around in, to have everything move in real time, until you get into combat at which point it turns to turn based. Typically you move your units around the screen by selecting them and clicking where you want them to go, and they then move there. But that just wouldn’t work for my game, because getting around is a major part of the game. If movement worked like all the other space strategy games, where the ships move without any sense of momentum, then I would lose what really set the game apart. That’s when I happened upon the idea of realtime with pause. So you’ve got your ships, and you pause the game, and you can chart courses for each of your ships. Charting the course works similarly to how it currently does, except that you can specify your moves out to any distance.

Another complaint was that the ships can only accelerate when their main engines are pointed in the right direction, whereas we currently have technology for space ships to adjust their course without using their main thrusters. That’s something I’m also investigating, allowing the ship to make minor course corrections without having to bring the main engines to bear. That could really change the game I think, I’ll have to see what kind of effect it has.

I spent yesterday trying to pretty the game up in order to provide a screenshot to the Utah Games Guild for some promotional material for Comic Con. I acquired some particle effects from the Unity store, and spent some time trying to figure out how to get them hooked up. I think the final image is a little bit busy, but it’s going to have to do.

It took a bit of work, but as promised you can now play the in-progress first level of Flame Warrior. Just follow this link, you will need to install the Unity web plugin. I’m still working on getting a game page set up, at the moment visiting flamewarriorgame.com just redirects you to the demo. I think it’s going to take a bit of time to put together a web page that won’t make your eyes bleed. WebDesigner is a new hat that I haven’t ever really worn, but as ever, it will be an adventure.