Aside from giving me flashbacks to a gawd-awful Roy “Chubby” Brown remix, it got me thinking.

You see I’ve been playing it for a while.

A FarmVille Farm in All It's Glory - Sadly Not Mine

I think for the most part it entertains the desire to explore part of my subconscious.

There’s an entertainment value of seeing what’s around the next corner or getting the item further up the tech tree, or, in Farmville’s case, seeing what new stuff you can get as you progress through the game.

Marie, my wife, is in to it far more than I am but I think it was telling that when she has reached the point where the only way to proceed was to pay Zynga money to buy items, thus effectively halting natural progression through their tech tree, then my desire to play the game came to a complete stop.

The other game issue is the grind aspect which is also designed to make you pay money, you have to plow, sow, harvest by clicking on each tile individually.

You can buy tractors, harvesters and seed sowing machines that let you do 2 x 2 tiles at a time but they have a limited amount of fuel and don’t last for the whole of a big field.

Of course you could pay Zynga real cash for more fuel

But then I guess I’m not the target audience, I can’t see me ever wanting to pay money to play the game which makes me wonder how many of the reportedly 60 million + players do.

Given that Zynga has, according to InsideSocialGames.com, reportedly 100 million unique visitors a month to it’s numerous Facebook apps, not counting its MySpace versions, and is estimated to make more than $200 million in revenue this year, although some estimates put that at over $1 billion, then there’s clearly enough people who do.

Other problems people are finding is that they’re getting lag.

I haven’t experienced too much lag when playing, but then I’ve been using a laptop that happily runs Fallout 3 with a hefty ftp transfer going on in the background (as I found out the other night ).

However, my wife’s laptop chugs like a student at a beer-drinking contest while playing it, which also puts her off the game.

Going full screen helps because Flash can use hardware acceleration in full screen.

It does make me wonder though what the game’s doing in the background to cause that much lag though, even taking into account Flash’s complete lack of multithreading, and assuming it’s constantly maintaining server state, it’s really not that big a game to cause such an issue :-/

Still, I think it’s a good game for students of game design though, as it has everything pretty much boiled down to the essentials.

• Fairly simple but effective game progression with obvious benefits.
• Shows how the effect of grind can be used to drive player progression, in this case for the Dark Side of game design to encourage the player to spend money to avoid having to do it).
• It’s a very simple to play.
• It has a series of interesting choices: do you plant one type of crop and hope to come back in 4 hours to harvest them or plant the crops that take 48 hours to grow but you won’t make as much money in the same period of time. Not harvesting your plants then results in a ruined crop and loss of money.

It’s hardly the pinnacle of game design but it probably stands out most as a way to play socially without competing with anyone, which is known to appeal to female gamers.

As a good example of the emerging mass-market social game design.

• You are encouraged to spread the game by asking your facebook friends to join as “neighbours”, and are rewarded with unlocking pre-requisites.
  Thus encouraging new players via word-of-mouth.
• Secondly, you are encouraged to send gifts to your current neighbours, and them you, in return for unlocking achievements.
  This has the effect of keeping the game in peoples mind as the message of a gift waiting for them shows up when they next log on to Facebook.

With apparently 60 million + players on Farmville, it’ll be interesting to see if their simple mechanics can keep that going or if they’ll descend into a churn and burn approach of building simple games then marketing them to drive players, then letting them die once the player base starts to leave.

Time will tell…

We were supposed to have a contract with a client to do his community website in Flex but that fell apart which was a little annoying.

So anyway, I’ve put my time and effort into finding a new job, which is easier said than done although I have a recruitment agency apparently talking to Monumental for me, and, amongst other things, reworking the design for All Out War : 4025 into a new game provisionally, and imaginatively, entitled All Out War : 4050

First though, because I’ve had the time and focus for AOW, I made some changes to the original game for the odd one or two that still play the game (and believe you me they are ODD). The changes seem to have gone down well.

A bit of history. Flash back to 2003… *cue wavy 1960s time travel effect*

The original game was created by a guy called Barry Whitely, who did a fine job of putting together a nice tick based browser based strategy game with semi-real time combat elements. He made a decent amount of money out of it, especially when we took over, and gathered a fair sized player base.

Sadly the game never got out of paid-beta, there were some design flaws not least with the unlimited points based research system which caused a lot of problems with the completely persistant nature of the game,  and the hyper-aggressive nature of some of the player base which spoilt it for everyone really. On top of that, it was my first solo active massively multiplayer project which I had to desperately redesign features and impliment them on the fly while trying to both fend off the player base and simultaniously extract useful ideas from them.

Needless to say, I worked all hours, screwed it up big time and ended up destroying the game and losing most of the players.

So we basically pay for the hosting and keep it going for old times sake, web hosting doesn’t cost much these days, even with a dedicated server, so it basically sits there playing for the one or two diehards.

One day, I plan on doing a proper post-mortem on it because even though I screwed up, I learnt a hell of a lot and I think it would be really useful for other people.

One day…

So fast forward to today…

I’ve been playing around with some Flex lately because I want to use Flex/Flash for the new version.

I think the new version of the game should follow elements of agile software development and in particular eXtreme Programming , such as releasing small improvements and often.

In the case of the new version, I plan on seperating the game from the overall accounts by using an Arena System similar to Ferion‘s where users sign up to an account in an overall portal, and then join active self-contained arenas, the results of those arenas is fed back into the portal account thus giving a semi-persistant feel to the game while retaining the closure of having an end of game scenario.
I think it should work as a good compromise for this style of game.

So development-wise, I decided to build a Flash-based version, using Flex,of the new combat system, and in order to do that I’ve broken it down into sub-projects. The first of which is to create a Flash Map Viewer for the AOW 4025 maps.

These maps are tile maps with the map data stored as an XML file and the tile graphics stored as 50×50 pixel images for each tile. The typical map size is 125×125 tiles so each map is approx. 6250 x 6250 pixels.

This was one of the problems of the original, the combat system was implimented using Internet Explorer DX Filters. Originally designed, I believe, before CSS was common, IE’s DX Filters were designed to fill the need for proper image manipulation at the browser side, such as opacity, rotation, etc.

AOW uses them mainly for rotating the vehicle graphics and for the most part they worked fine.
The problems come because a) they’re Internet Explorer only and b) the maps were generated in their entirety in the browser which worked fine in IE 6 with image caching handling most of the problems, but IE 7 seems to have a serious problem with too many images and slows down to a crawl, IE 8, which was just released, is better but not as good as 6.

So I’m using Flash instead and so far it looks promising. With a bit of help from 8-bit Rocket, I’ve managed to put together the start of a map view in about 2 days, which isn’t bad considering I have next to no experience with ActionScript.

Map Viewer Project screenshot

Although it doesn’t show much, and doesn’t look that impressive, I’m actually quite pleased with it. It loads up the XML map data, stores it in a Map Descripter object, then generates all the tile objects for the tile map, loads and caches only the graphics needed, draws only what’s needed, and reacts to resize events.

I know it’s only loading from my PC, but even so it loads pretty quickly and, according to De Monster Debugger, runs at an average of 50 FPS. Which isn’t bad I think.

Next step is to impliment scrolling and then a better interface for the maps.

Apologies if you’ve already seen this but I came across a fascinating Twitter based game for the upcoming Terminator : Salvation film the other day.

The basic premise is that the human resistance has apparently hacked into SkyNet’s Twitter channel and is coordinating they’re own movements using it.

Resistance to Twitter is Futile

The Twitternator

The game sends out different types of messages;

1. Resistance Assignments (Abbreviation: RA) will be of the following types:
   • Word Mix (Abbreviation: WM) – Word Mix is a simple jumble of letters that need to be unscrambled. Ex: “OHJN” is “JOHN”
   • Trivia (Abbreviation: TR) – Trivia questions require simple answers about Terminator Salvation. You may often be directed to the website to find the answer.
   • Partial Transmission (Abbreviation: PT) – Partial transmission is a simple letter, word or combination of both that you must fill in and then reply with the complete message. Ex: “_O_N” is “JOHN”
2. Skynet Warnings (Abbreviation: SW) are informational messages related to the war between humans and machines.
3. Terminator Salvation Updates (Abbreviation: TSU) are information about the film. The updates may also reinforce the instructions and provide tips on how to earn more points.
4. Status (Abbreviation: STAT) are direct messages that update you on your points and rank in the game

To play the game, the player must reply as quickly as possible to @Resistance2018 with the right answers to the Resitance Assignment to score points.

Cheap Internet Marketing For Game Developers

Twitter is hot right now with everyone and anyone tweeting their day away, and marketing have started to cotton on to it.

Since it’s so easy to just follow someone and then unfollow them, people are a lot more inclined to do it rather than say, join an email newsletter list.
However, people, being people, seem a lot less inclined to actually unfollow someone if they have something interesting to say.

So the end result is that if you have something interesting to say you can actually get quite a following just from twitter alone.

For example, if you had a new game coming out, it would be very simple to setup a twitter channel for that game, get people to sign up via your website and then send out interesting facts to keep people aware of your up-and-coming-game.

To go a step further, like Sony have, you could simple have a list of trivia, questions, to automatically have your website send out to the game’s Twitter channel and parse the replies for game related stuff so make a mini-game of it and keep people interested.

It wouldn’t take much to set up either, a file of questions, a couple of php files, and a cron job gets you an interested audience up to release day.

Something to think about for your next project.

I know! it’s been far far too long since I posted to my blog.

I try to post relevent items rather than making it a longer text version of Twitter like some people, but sometimes that’s hard to find the time and energy.

Anyway, a small update on what I’ve been up to….

Not much done on Space Merchants sadly.

I had some small contract work with the guys at Tag Games working on the high score backend system for the iPhone / iPod version of their new iPhone game Car Jack Streets.

The guys at Tag are always a joy to work with.

I’ve also been following the comments Paul (Farley) makes using Twitter to promote it as well, which often livens up the day.

Car Jack Streets is a great little game, the guys at Tag were responsible for the original GTA games and CJS is definately a spiritual successor for Generation Twitter.

It was only a small contract, although very welcome, and unfortunately things have dried up again on the game dev contracting front.

It’s been getting some rave reviews too. So give it a try if you liked GTA have an iPhone/iPod then I do recommend it.

Apart from that it’s still quiet on the ground though, I decided to see if Internet Marketing could help to bring in some money (yes I’ve got that desperate) but to be honest I find avoiding all the “Get Rich Quick” scams really tiring.

I’ve dug around a bit though and found some real nuggets amongst the crap. I’ve already learned a hell of a lot about SEO, PPC, and selling online in general from my foray, which has already paid for itself by improving our google ads marketing for Ferion

We are about to start on a website for a new client using Flex which if you don’t know what that is, it’s an intelligent way of making Flash movies or to put it another way, it’s Flash for programmers

I’m hoping to use this experience of making a commercial product in Flex, and apply it to remaking All Out War which is in dire need of a remake and I’ve been wanting to do it for a while.

So hopefully things will pick up, I had to turn down work yesterday!! Someone phoned up wanting a full business reporting app, and with the new website and other things on I just felt we couldn’t handle it at the moment.
Not that we can afford to turn it down and that’s the most depressing thing!

Looking forward to Cliffski’s new game Gratuitous Space Battles which looks like it’s shaping up nicely. It’s a real time space strategy game that does away with the base-building stuff and gets straight to the heart of the genre, the massive battles!
It’s looking pretty good and Cliff has been revealing bits along the way on his blog and YouTube

In other news, it was my birthday on Wednesday! I’m now 31…. not sure how that makes me feel

UPDATE: I’ve received word that Car Jack Streets is a mere 59p / $0.99 / €0.79 this weekend, so well worth the look

I decided a little while back to switch from my own home-grown XNA framework to using an existing one.
I had a look around but couldn’t find one that met my requirements, I was after a solid, modern, game engine that wasn’t tied into a specific type of game.

Most of the engines I came accross seemed to be using the old shove everything into one scene graph method, until I came across the Ox Game Engine (http://www.codeplex.com/OxGameEngine/).

It’s still work in progress, but is already very solid with a lot of the features I was looking for.

It’s a modern component based design which is optimised for XBox, integrates well with other XNA libraries such as PhysX, XNAnimation or not, if you wish, includes C# scripting and has a number of tools available.
Full feature list here (http://www.codeplex.com/OxGameEngine/).

Further more it’s open source and free to use, which is always a bonus for a struggling game developer. 

So far it’s pretty good, it does suffer from the common component design problem of not being friendly to heirachical objects, i.e. attaching a child component such as a particle system causing problems when you come to updating in respect of the parent, you have to make sure that your update value is higher than it’s parents otherwise it’ll be update first.
It’s not a major problem though, you either make sure the child update value is higher than the parents or you keep your objects shallow and make your parent object update it’s children manually.

Keeping the object tree relatively shallow is no bad thing in terms of performance though.

So far it’s seems to do exactly what it says on the tin, so hopefully this will save a lot of time working on an engine.

Couple of screenshots;

The Ox Scene Editor In Action

Balls! Using Ox with the PhysX physics library

Sounds small? Well consider that there are 8 major planets, 5 dwarf planets, 166 known moons, billions of small objects and 1 sun contained in roughly 2 light years or 125, 000 AU or 18,700,000,000,000 km/11,619,641,290,400 miles out from the sun.
I’m hoping that will give enough space and interesting locations to visit, and that’s before you start adding space stations and the like.

However, I’m planning on constraining the game area to a mere 50AU or roughly 7,480,000,000 km from the sun.
Which gives me Pluto and most of the Kuplier belt (a mass of ice particles and asteroids which is incidentally a nice design point for why you can’t go any further) but not Eris (the bugger that caused Pluto to lose it’s planet title).

The problem comes with the numbers involved, I’m planning on scaling to the metre so at the furthest extent it’s  7,480,000,000,000 m from the Sun.

Most game engines, XNA included, and graphics cards use single precision floating point numbers, aka floats, to store positions in screen space.

This is fine for most situations, however, the way floats work is that it uses 32 bits of memory and stores the number as 24 bits for the significant (the number part) and the remaining 8 bits for an exponential value.
This means that floats theoretically can store numbers up to 2^128, which gives up to 1.7014118346046923173168730371588e+38 including the sign bit (according to the Windows calculator).

However, you only have 24 bits for actual the range of numbers and one of those bits is used for the sign bit.
So even if the exponential value is 0, you only have actual numbers between -8,388,608 and 8,388,608, compared to n integer which can store every value between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,648.

There was recently a very good article on Gamasutra about the problem, which is well worth the read. 
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1965/visualizing_floats.php

Basically what happens is that you lose precision at the large end of the scale.

You can see this by viewing Pluto in the following two movies;

Single Precision Floating Point Test

Double Precision Floating Point Test

As you can see the float version jerks like mad, while the double version is nice and smooth.

The problems with doubles is that hardware doesn’t currently support them very well, so they’re slow and they take up twice as much memory.
Also the buffers used in graphics are all 32bit floats, e.g. the Z buffer, so you’ll need to convert to eventually floats for rendering.

In my prototypes, I’m currently storing the positions as doubles and have written a double version of Vector3 (called Vector3D unsurprisingly) to help.
I store the planet orbits using spherical coordinates (using doubles) and then convert to the Cartesian Vector3D when needed.
All coordinates are then converted to the floating point Vector3′s in camera space, that is I take the current position of the camera as 0,0,0 and subtract the position of each object from the actual camera position in space.
Any shake you would see occours so far away from the camera as to be unnoticable.

It needs more doing to it but so far seems to work quite nicely.
There are some obvious artifacts with lights, and a few other things, but I think this is more of a bug in my maths than any serious issue.

Well, Space Merchants (working title) simply put is a Freeform Space Opera* with a semi-random storyline, complex supply and demand trading, ship-to-ship and personal combat in a 2D game using 3D effects.

Phew, well what does that mean? Well it gives me a lot of scope and a lot of rope to hang myself!
Basically, you, the player, plays the part of a starship captain. You can then decide what to do Elite style.

What’s different to the way I usually design games is that I haven’t written it all out in a design doc first, apart from a few scribbled notes.
Usually, I’d spend quite a bit of time working on the design doc before I even put fingers to keyboard. 

This time however, I’ve decided to design and impliment the game differently.

Because it’s a freeform game, I’m planning on creating a sandbox simulation first, and then build the game features on top of that.
I think this will work because I want the player to have the feeling that the game world is going on around them.
That the player can affect that world but that the world would just as happily continue without them, and, most importantly, they feel absorbed by the game world because of it.

To this end, although the game will have story arcs, and specific things to do. Completion of these are Achievements rather than static missions leading to an end game scenario.

It’s ambitious, yes, but then it wouldn’t be one of my games if it wasn’t stupidly ambitious!

I will reveal more in future postings….

* I always love the phrase Space Opera, it’s seriously overused by journo’s and always gives me the image of a large woman wearing a viking helmet singing along inside a giant space cruiser! Maybe it’s just me

Well 2008 was a funny old year. It was the best of times… It was the worst of times…

We’ve been going as a business for the past 5 years, we ran out of initial capital a long time ago with a couple of bad investments in our browser based games, so we’ve kept going through contract work which sadly, together with the responsibility to work on the browser games, never quite gave us enough time or money to work on what we wanted. That all seemed about to change in 2007…

I’d managed to get a well paid contract working on a massively multiplayer mobile phone game called Football Pro for Sports Pro Games since May 2007, Football Pro v1 was completed at the end of 2007, and they paid me a retainer until they started on v2 in the April, along with a couple of other bits of work they needed doing. 
Version 2 started with a new client-side team, and was due for completion around August-September time of that year. 
So all in all things were looking up. 

Then things took a decided downward turn, Marie and I were married in July 2008 (that wasn’t the downward turn btw ) only to come back from honeymoon and be told that the contract would be cancelled as SPG had pretty much run out of money.

Unfortunately, that hit my company at exactly the wrong time as, among other things, the credit crunch hit, and no less than 5 contracts that I had lined up pulled out or were postponed due to lack of funding.

So I’ve ended up in the precarious position of having to find another job, at least for the time being.

I decided to aim for local game developers to see if they had any positions, so I hand-crafted some of the finest demos to best show off my ability.

Then Free Radical Design went bust laying off 140 staff.

Great, so suddenly the literally just one or two available jobs in the area suddenly have over 140 potential candidates.
So far I’ve had two “thanks but no thanks” responses and nothing at all from the others.
To be fair, I asked for feedback and one of the rejections basically said they’ve had to reevaluate their projects for this year and have put a full stop on recruiting until they know what they’re doing, so not only were the gracious enough to reply to my request for feedback, which is a rarity these days, but also it wasn’t a problem with me which makes me feel a lot better!
 

But, in the funny way of things, it has actually inspired me.

I found time to catch up on websites such as AIGameDev.com and join some new ones such as GameProducer.net

Also I had used XNA to develop some job-hunting demos because I do like C#, and I found it very nice to use.
One of these demos was an old demo favourite of mine called Space Merchants. It’s basically an AI  demo showing off a space ship using  finite state machines and steering behaviours to navigate and trade between two (or more) space stations.
I’ve written it a couple of times before in C++ but this was the first time I was happy with it.

Now that things aren’t working out on the job or contract hunting front I’m inspired to expand it into a full top down 2d using 3d space game with trading, tactical combat, RPG elements.
Whether it will be finished soon and be profitable only time will tell but I’m hoping to be blog about the experience here amongst other random wittering.

This brand new blog is one of the other items I was inspired to setup. I’ve been meaning to start the web logging malarkey for a while now. Besides giving air to your hot air, it’s generally considered as a good marketing tool especially for an Internet driven business, and hopefully will encourage some interesting people to comment.

I just hope I can keep it up-to-date, intelligent and witty enough to inspire people to regularly visit… I make no promises

So here it is;

The Beginning…