The times, they are a'changing...

Yes, I know, I've been silent for months. And I'm sure it will shock people to find out that I've put this game on hold for a little while.

But! I have a good reason! I'm putting Welcome To The Dungeon on hold... so I can build a DIFFERENT game!

I've been doing a little research and I think I've got a decent chance of making enough money off indie games to nicely supplement my income. (And there's always the hope that a game will spontaneously take off and sell like crazy!) But I don't think Welcome To The Dungeon is the game to start with. It's something I'm building purely for fun, rather than profit, and frankly I don't think my game design skills are quite up to some of the more challenging aspects of it yet.

So this game goes on hold for a little while, and I'm on to a new project.

What project is that, you ask? Well, I haven't worked out the details yet. The spirit of the game takes inspiration from a few different sources, most notably Kobolds Ate My Baby (which is, by the way, an awesome game). It'll be a smaller adventure / puzzle-solving sort of game that follows its own quirky (and often deadly) logic and aesthetic, intended for broader distribution to more casual gamers. I'm hoping to get it onto mobile devices -- mostly Android phones & tablets -- as well as PCs. If things go well, I might use the proceeds to purchase a new Mac so I can also develop an iOS version.

I've got some more thinking and planning to do (including name selection) and once I get that stuff sorted out, I'll post up here again. What I'll probably do though is switch to a new blog that's more geared towards the company in general rather than a specific game, because I've already got tentative plans for a second new game once I get this first one sorted out...

So, if there's anyone out there still reading this blog... Any comments? Think my strategy makes sense?

One step forward...

As usual, life has been keeping me busy. I've settled on Unity3D, as it appears to offer everything I need, and it even offers the ability (if I pay extra for the Pro license) to provide add-on packs. I might take advantage of that later to provide custom downloadable content as part of a Kickstarter reward as a way of getting a bit of funding to get the game built, but we'll have to see whether that will really work.

So with restarting the graphical portion, I've been taking stock of where I am with my game. It turns out my work over the past year hasn't amounted to much -- Tom's artwork (which is awesome, of course), a bunch of concepts I mostly had sorted out about 15 years ago, and some pretty basic logic, including my own implementation of A* pathfinding. (The pathfinding is lifted pretty much directly from an AI programming book I own. So the most complicated thing I have isn't even my own idea.)

I'm taking a couple weeks away from game development to focus on a few other things, but I'm hoping that by the end of September I'll be back hard at work. And then I need to start really pushing on this, because I have some very tentative plans to share a booth at next year's PAX with Carl Hume, developer of Kingdoms of Arcania (link currently busted but hopefully back online soon). Before that, I need to find out how much the booth costs and when exactly we'd need to commit to it, so that we know what our timetable is. I doubt either of us will be making any money off PAX, but it seems like a fun excuse to go visit our tribe, and by splitting a booth we'd be able to occasionally spell each other off and take turns wandering PAX. In order for that plan to have even the pretense of making sense, I need to make sure my game's in a condition to show off by the time PAX rolls back around.

Speaking of PAX: I think anyone who reads this has already likely heard all about my trip to PAX, but I'll recap it here just in case... PAX was awesome. No, seriously, awesome. In every way. I honestly can't think of anything I didn't enjoy about PAX, even waiting in line. (There are some things I might have enjoyed more were they done differently, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy things the way they were.) Everyone there -- literally every single person I interacted with or even saw in the convention center -- was in a good mood and having a good time and being considerate towards their fellow con-goers and just generally being decent human beings. If you're a gamer, go to PAX.

Yes, I'm still alive

I realise it's been six months since my last post. In that time, the basement reno was finally completed, my daughter was born (actually a bit before the reno was done...) and I've run a half marathon. It's been busy.

Now that things are settling down again, I'm back to looking at my game, and I've come to a couple conclusions. First, and most importantly, the XNA Framework just isn't the way to go. I want to have the option of spreading this thing across multiple platforms (particularly tablets) and XNA doesn't offer that. So I'm now investigating alternatives, starting with Unity3d. If it offers what I need, I'll be back to square one as far as the graphics go. On the plus side, I was smart enough to make sure that the core game engine didn't rely on the graphics, so I'm not starting entirely from scratch. It'll still be a lot of rework but not as much as it might have been if I hadn't been as careful with my design.

The second conclusion I've drawn in reviewing my game is that the game isn't as fleshed out as I'd thought it was. I think reimplementing the graphics will give me a little time to ponder the way the game works, and the thought of implementing a touchscreen-based interface has given me the seeds of a few ideas that might help.

Two weeks from right now, I'll probably be in my hotel in Seattle getting ready to attend PAX. By the time PAX starts that Friday morning, I hope to have settled on a new game engine (I think Unity3D will work, but we'll have to see) and hopefully I'll already have the basics of the engine reimplemented and have something to play with.

More delays

The last few weeks have seen a decided lack of progress in the game, due to a bunch of conflicting priorities. Chief among those was getting some more work done in the basement; we're nearing completion of the drywall, which puts us only a few weeks away from being ready to move stuff in there and actually enjoy that space for the first time in the six years we've lived in this house. That'll be a nice change.

Another problem I've been dealing with is a severe lack of direction with the game. I've got a thousand things I could be doing, but none of them were clear winners in the "this needs to be done next" camp and all of them were big and awkward and require a fair bit of time and motivation to tackle. So the net result is that I felt like doing nothing.

I finally realised what was going on a couple days ago and have taken steps to correct it. The real problem that I've been facing is that there's no game in this game, and that's where I need to start. So I'm going to work on the basis of "what do I need to do next to make this more like a game?" And the first thing that came to mind was that, y'know, there needs to be an entrance to this dungeon... And voila, I have made a dungeon entrance!


I know it doesn't look like much, but that's because it's kind of living in isolation right now. It'll look a lot better once it's actually in place in a dungeon. I've got some work left to do on the floor (I stretched it out like crazy for the screenshot because I wanted it to be obvious what it was) and I've got some other tweaking to do, but overall I think everything's in pretty good shape. Sometime this weekend I'm hoping to finish it up enough to get it in place in the game, then start spawning creatures from it.

After that... well, there are a bunch of things I could tackle after that. I'll probably need to start by switching out my hacked-up UI library for something a little more robust, which I think I can accomplish with a single day's work, and then I can start experimenting with playing the game to see what elements I need to work on to make things actually fun.

My goal is still to get an early demo out there before the baby's born, which gives me another month (hopefully). I don't know if I can make it, but I'm sure going to try!

Starting to look like a game!

I've spent the last couple days moving stuff around, trying to get my basement cleared out enough for an electrician to do the rough wiring. Not surprisingly, that hasn't left a whole ton of time for me to work on the game. Luckily, that particular bit is out of the road and tonight I cleared out some more time to get a bunch of work done, which mostly involved trying to get the kobold model into the game. It worked, but...

Well, here's the thing. I made the kobold model smallish, because kobolds are small, right?

But they were so small you couldn't even see that they had claws on their toes. That seemed a little excessively small to me. So I grew them almost 50%. Their eyes were still so small they were eating up maybe a pixel on my screen. That was just ridiculous. So I doubled the size of the eyes, and took this screenshot.

Things still ain't right.

So now I'm looking into zooming the camera in and out... It'd be a shame to spend all that time modeling these guys only to have them be so puny on screen that you couldn't even see what a horrible modeling job I did!

On the topic of the model, you may not be able to tell from this screenshot, but the model's head has changed pretty significantly. The nostrils have widened out a bit, the head was squashed in towards the middle, and the eyes and ears were both rotated quite a bit towards the back. Overall it's starting to look a whole lot more like Tom's artwork, although I'm still not doing it justice.

Getting better

My kobold may not be perfect, but as you can see in this picture, it's getting steadily better. I'm noticing now that the head shape really doesn't match up with what Tom drew yet, and of course the kobold's body and parts are all just flat colours, without any of the fur or other interesting textural details that'll make them really pop. And the feet are still just blocks, and the pot belly still just ain't right. But aside from all that, I think I'm doing pretty darn well so far. I'll probably just make the feet look like real feet and then stop with the model for now and go back to real gameplay stuff.

Thinking of gameplay, I remembered that in my last post about mechanics, I left out an important resource: prestige! (Or notoriety, I haven't quite made up my mind about which name is better.) The idea of prestige is that it represents how well known you are and, more importantly, how respected you are. Greater respect = more powerful monsters coming to work for you, and also more powerful heroes invading your dungeon...

There are a few ways to gain prestige. The simplest, though least effective, is to make your dungeon bigger. Having a dungeon with multiple floors grants you an additional bonus, because the deeper the dungeon, the more powerful the monsters you must have (or at least that's what everyone thinks). Killing heroes grants you prestige, but having heroes escape with lots of loot can increase your prestige even faster. On the other hand, having your monsters killed (albeit temporarily) earns you a bit of a reputation for being a poor leader, decreasing your prestige.

I'm also now trying to decide if I should gear the game towards infinite play (think SimCity) or limit it in some way where there are definite victory conditions (Civ). If I go with victory conditions of some sort, achieving a sufficiently astronomical prestige rating would be a pretty obvious victory condition, representing your influence becoming so great that even your enemies are forced to concede that you're unstoppable. I'd also need some other victory conditions... I think I'd prefer to stay away from the "highest score after X turns" that's the default of Civ, because that's kinda boring to me, but I'm not sure right now what else to use. Anyone have any ideas?

Holy crap this is ugly!

I've started modeling the kobolds, because it's something I can fiddle with in my spare time and it amuses me. At some point this weekend I'll get back to coding, but for now I'm having fun with this guy.

Of course, just because I'm having fun with it doesn't mean I'm actually any, y'know, good or anything. Still, they're getting steadily better and it's still (obviously) very early in the modeling process. You can probably get an idea of where they're going, and as the process goes on there'll be a bunch of changes that'll make them look better in a hurry, so don't worry too much about how ugly this guy looks right now.

It'd be nice to get the first incarnation of this guy done so I can start having real monsters in the game instead of just green blob man... :-)