So it is that I present to you: Quitters Arcade

Now this is an honourable enterprise as the goal is to help people stop smoking but my Dad used to smoke and he claims that if you are serious about it then you don’t “Quit” you “Stop” and call me crazy but I can understand where he’s coming from. However “Stoppers Arcade” really doesn’t have a great ring to it. The site consists of 3 flash games that are allegedly based on arcade games from the 80’s. You have a side-scrolling shmup, a vertical platform game and a reflex game where you throw packets of cigarettes in the bin (which is actually my favourite).

I guess the idea is to raise awareness among youngsters that smoking sucks and it’s easier to give up than you think. At least that is what the press release says. It’s an honourable goal and it may succeed in some small way. However to quote my girlfriend: “people who have been smoking for quite a while, like me, do not really need a silly game to know we should quit” and she really is right about that. But you’re a bugger when you’re a teenager and maybe delivering the message via videogames is a good way to go about it.

OK now since this is a games design blog on to the games.

They’re not great.

“Blast n Quit” is the shooter and to be honest it fails in many ways. The instructions aren’t clear and the first time I played it I found myself floundering around the keyboard for the fire button (Left Control by the way). In addition that screen scrolls too fast, the weapon doesn’t seem powerful enough and it’s difficult to tell what to avoid. The waves don’t feel balanced and it’s just far too difficult.

“Bin Um” is the game where you toss packs of cigs in the bin. It’s actually quite a nice example of a one-button game and once I figured out the relationship between the markings on the charge bar and the distance thrown I found it relatively fun. However the difficulty doesn’t seem to ramp up very much and I felt I could keep a chain going forever. No doubt there will be some ridiculous scores posted as a result of this. Girlfriend didn’t agree however and felt it should start off slower and ramp up as you got better.

“Escape from planet smokey” is a platformer where you have to escape the rising cloud of smoke and get to the top of the screen collecting as many pickups as you can on the way. This one is simple and intuitive although I felt a little harsh as second hand smoke kills you instantly and is hard to spot and time due to the relatively small and obscure graphics.

It is however much easier and in my opinion more fun than recent game Flood The Chamber which I really did not enjoy at all. Also no I have not played VVVVVV yet either.

This includes the UI, Scoring and Online Scoreboards.

I find procrastination tends to set in at the end of my projects because of these boring bits and because I don’t have any work left to look forwards to on the other side of them. Being able to implement some awesome stuff is a great motivator for implementing the boring but essential bits.

So with this in mind I am trying my hardest to get as much of this out of the way now so that when I come back to it again in future it’s just to tweak and bugfix it which is infinitely less dull.

However this doesn’t mean I’ve not done anything on the game itself. It’s just that most of what I’ve done are small tweaks that annoyed me and were easy to fix. Things like making the game work at resolutions other than 1280×720 or fudging the camera so you can see more of the arena when you are near the walls. That kind of thing.

I’ll be back soon with an update after I get the boring bits out of the way.

Lets start with the video:

The most notable addition this week is a new enemy called a “Bumble”. Bumbles are so named because they bumble around the arena in a pseudo random fashion bumping into each other and occasionally the player. I wanted an enemy that would be unpredictable and serve to reduce the amount of empty space in the arena which would make it more difficult to just kite the “Grunt” enemies.

The wandering behaviour is based on this article although since I don’t have an infinite playing field to work with I added in some code that pushes the steering force back towards the middle of the arena the closer to the edge they get (although it’s not so strong that they don’t sometimes just bounce off the arena wall).

I’m learning some things about shoot-em-ups that I never realised before but which tie in with Deathmatch style level design.

For example – Power-ups exist not to make the player more powerful but as a way to get the player to move somewhere specific rather than just moving into the space with the least enemies. As enemies often spawn a Power-Up when they die; and this is often in the middle of other enemies, this forces the player to make a risk-reward decision. This is exactly the same as placing Power-up in a Deathmatch level where the best weapons get put in the most exposed and least defensible places.

Finally if you want to read about the more technical work that went on this week (most of my time was spent refactoring code rather than adding new features) then check out this post on the UDK forums where I talk about Actor pools, memory fragmentation and Pawns being overweight.

So to update: I decided to ditch my efforts to make a physics based puzzle game for two reasons:

1. The cap on angular velocity.
2. I wanted to make a game where you get to blow things up.

If I’m honest it was mostly the blowing things up bit that turned me.

So using what I had already built as a base I started experimenting with making enemies that I could later shoot at. There was much messing around with navigation meshes and pathfinding before I eventually decided to ditch anything remotely complex and keep everything as simple as I could.

This resulted in an “Enemy” that looked exactly like the player and whose only behaviour was to roll towards them as fast as they could. Heck entire games have been sold that only have this behaviour.

With my simple enemy type I set about coding up a simple weapon class and targeting system. Bullets get shot towards the mouse. I used the basic Projectile class that is built into Unreal for my bullets and wrote a simple state machine for my gun that just spawned a bullet on a timer.

Behold!

This however was about from a week ago. This weekend I decided that it was time to give the game a full visual overhaul and get some sound up and running. You can see what the result of all that effort was beneath the cut:

I think it’s quite spiffy myself. The balls are still there but just hidden so the physics remains the same (although I’ve gone back to using impulses and not torque to avoid the angular velocity issue).

As well as giving the game a complete new look there were innumerable tweaks, bug fixes and indulgences that went on. Just getting the explosions to change hue over time was a couple of hours work alone and there was about 3 hours of completely failing to understand the math behind line-circle intersections in order to fix an issue with one of the enemy spawners (the friendly people in #Unrealscript will recall me appearing briefly just to rant about it last night).

Right now however I have a huge list of things to add, I have lots of different enemy types to add as well as more feedback and effects to implement and one game mechanic in particular that I think will be very interesting.

It’s been tentatively titled “Zero Point” by the way. It’s not a great name but I was tired of calling it “TestGame” feel free to leave suggestions in the comments thread.

They all then rushed to the forums to ask how you make a game.

Fortunately I’m an old hand with Unreal, starting back in 2000 modding Deus Ex and then progressing pretty much hand in hand with the engine through each version to the current one often being paid for the pleasure. I’m one of the few people in the world who can say they have worked with every version of Unreal that doesn’t work for Epic.

So rather than rush to forums asking how to make games I just made a game.

BEHOLD! One short weekend of fiddling with UDK later and I have something that can be very loosely called a game…

Ok so it’s a ball that rolls around a simple level collecting glowy yellow things.

More beneath the cut…

If I’m honest I spent more time fiddling with particle effects and lighting than I did actually writing code. Some people liken it to Pacman, other mention Marble Madness. At this point I didn’t really have any plans of what I was going to make and was really just poking the code to get something to happen with a minimum of effort.

However as more people encountered my little endeavour I was encouraged to maybe make something a bit more interesting.

Here is my list of restrictions that I’m bound by:

• Project can only use content that I can create myself.
• Project must support online multiplayer.
• Project should epitomise Systemic Game Design.

With this in mind I decided to expand on the physics theme and spent a few hours on monday and tuesday implementing support for buoyancy (which PhysX doesn’t support out of the box) and fiddling around with Fluid Surfaces.

It’s during this phase that I relise how lucky I am to be an Unreal Developer by day as I stumble across one of the more annoying features: The C++ Black Box.

UDK doesn’t give you the C++ source code. This means that there are times when the engine is doing something that doesn’t make sense and has disappeared into the Black Box of Native code. In this case it was the calculation of a physics objects mass.

This means that some constants and formulas are locked up beyond the prying eyes of the UDK programmer.

To cut a long story short however it turns out that Mass in Unreal is calculated as:

(Volume x Density)^0.75  x MassScale

The argument being that it reduces the difference between small and large objects because PhysX behaves funny when you have wildly different Masses involved.

Whatever the formula though so long as you know what it is you can at least be sure your simulation is internally consistent even if it isn’t a 100% accurate recreation of the real world.

With this version I change the Balls physics to apply Torque rather than an impulse which gives a more satisfying and “Physicsy” feel and even allows the ball to climb walls a little (hurrah for friction!).

So far however I’m still just playing around with tech and not really concentrating on the “Game” part. I have vague ideas involving fire, wind and fracture meshes. I also have an idea for making enemy cubes that stomp around the map but it’s early days yet.

Watch this space.

An interesting problem that crops up occassionally in Second Life is the question of Whether or not a Viewer bug that affects rendering should be fixed.

In most MMO’s the idea of fixing a bug is a very simple thing. Bugs are bad and there to be squashed. However as soon as you have an economy that pushes roughly $450m a year around the world you start to get into all sorts of problems.

The most recent issue is a fix to the order of Alpha rendering on Avatar Skins. Ever since I can remember The Eyebrows and Lips were rendered below the texture and this has been used by Skin makers to allow users to modify their skins without destroying them by making the lips a little darker or adjusting the overall skintone.

As you can se ein the picture above though changing the render order to draw these elements above the texture can have some very nasty side-effects that could threaten to ruin the Skin industry.

Fortunately this fix is being reverted by Linden Labs as they aren’t so stupid as to incur the wrath of their entire customer base and destroy a lucrative industry with a few lines of code.

The original bug report (and hysterical comments) can be found here.

You can find my musings on the impact of Second Lifes economy on it’s technical progression beneath the cut.

Over the last ten years we have witnessed significant changes in Videogames rendering technology that have made games look more realistic than ever before. However these changes have always come at the cost of increasing the amount of art and amount of skill required to make that art.

Take the mode scene for Unreal Tournament or Half Life. These two games have a HUGE amount of fan-made content of a good quality. Fast-forward to today and there are less mods and maps being made for Half Life 2 and UT3 than previously despite the communities actually getting larger (well at least in the case of Half Life).

The problem lies in the difficulty of creating content for these games compared to their older more simplistic versions. Mods require bigger teams with more talent and skill. It’s harder to make a fun Deathmatch map for UT3 than it used to be not because of any gameplay reasons but because nobody will download your map if it doesn’t look any good. You may be a great Level Designer but if you aren’t also a good artist nobody will care.

This problem is even worse for a Virtual World like Second Life. For years now it’s residents have been creatively working around the Viewers limitations and even using bugs to their advantage (the entire Jewelry industry is based on twisting Primitives into sizes that they technically shouldn’t be capable of).

Second Life is stuck in a position where embracing technological advances can destroy existing industries and as a result the livlihood of countless entrepeneurs.

That’s alot of pressure to be under.

Take Shaders for example. Second Life can’t afford to increase it’s minimum requirements to support more advanced shaders for several reasons.

1. A huge number of Residents are using very old hardware that won’t support it.
2. A Two-Tier economy is created between those who can’t take advantage of this new technology and those who can.

The first point is fairly self-explanatory. Linden Labs don’t want Residents to leave the world and take their money with them.

The second point is slightly tricky though.

Taking the Skins industry as an example I would love to see a viewer that supported advanced shaders so I could see even mor erealistic Avatars with better lighting and shadows etc etc. However anybody that decides to create content that takes advantage of this new technology will find themselves in a situation of creating content twice. The High-definition versions for those with the Hardware to render it and a Fallback for those that cannot. After all even if you can render and see your spiffy Normal Mapped Avatar somebody stood next to you in-world may not. However they still need to see something and you don’t want to show up as the default avatar after spending all that money on your new look.

Could the economy in Second Life support this route of premium content for players with modern hardware? I don’t know. That’s really for an economist to answer. I do however know that it will put alot of pressure on Skin makers to support this market in addition to the existing one and only reduce competition driving out those who aren’t able to adapt to the demands required by the new technologies.

So for the time being the rendering in the viewer remains largely untouched in an effort to retain the status-quo and a stable economy.

What does this mean for Second Life in the long-term with lots of new Virtual Worlds coming along claiming super-realistic graphics as a feature? I believe these newer worlds will struggle to generate enough worthwhile content to draw people away from Second Life until it is as easy to make content as it is in Second Life.

Second Lifes biggest advantage in the battle of the Virtual Worlds is in it’s low barrier to entry by using older more stable technology.

Now if they would just let me rate Places with a star rating so their in-game search engine no longer sucked that would be abug worth fixing!

Day of Darkness II from Dire Lauthris on Vimeo.

It is a real shame however that the actual fleet combat in the game isn’t anywhere near as fast-paced or close-in as the combat in this video.

To CCP: If you want an experienced Designer to head up a project to create a single player narrative driven space combat game based on the history of Eve with a direct control combat model then I am volunteering for the job!

The new Scout Update has brought Crowd Control (or CC as it is known in MMO land) to my favorite online shooter.

This was rightly feared by players as perhaps being overpowered at worst and annoying at best.

Well after a quick lunchtime session I can confirm that right now I don’t think the stun effect is Overpowered at all. The difficulty of actually pulling it off versus the lost utility by carrying the Sandman has pretty much balanced it out.

It is however Annoying.

One of the cornerstones of multiplayer game design (well one of MY cornerstones anyway) is to never take away the all of a players abilities all at once.

If you’re going to stop a player attacking then you don’t stop them being able to move. If you want to stop them moving then let them attack.

Left 4 Dead does this very well when you get incapcitated (and I expect this to get ripped off by more games please). You can’t move but you can still shoot (albeit at a reduced rate with horrible accuracy). 

If I was making a war game with multiplayer then I would ensure that a “Dead” player can choose to either stay still and shoot with reduced accuracy OR they can try and crawl around to try and pull themselves into cover.

To remove all capability of interaction results in players essentially waiting to Die.

So how should Valve fix this mild annoyance from an otherwise fairly balanced ability?

1. Allow Stunned players to wander around very slowly in cartoon fashion. 
2. Do not force the camera into third person. 
3. Play some birds circling the Players vision and some Tweeting sound effects.

None of the changes above will change how the Stun affects gameplay. The Stunned player is still largely helpless and unable to defend themselves but they are still interacting with the game.

They are no longer waiting to Die.

As I covered recently the most important thing to recognise is that your players will leave you. There are too many things competing for your customers attention to rely on a hardcore of long-term subscribers for revenue. These players make up a tiny fraction of your earnings compared to the casual players who may only subscribe for 2-3 months (obviously if your game is awesome you’re more likely to convert casuals into Hardcores but that’s a different blog post).

So knowing that your players will leave you it’s important that you replace them. Constantly.

How do you replace these players? Advertising. Marketting. Special Offers. Anything. You need to keep your game constantly at the front of the media.

Lets look at some graphs from Google Trends:

The above is a chart showing World of Warcraft and Runescape. Two of the most successful MMO’s in the west right now. Note how both lines stay relatively level with fairly regular spikes.

This chart shows that both WoW and Runescape have managed to keep themselves at the forefront of the internets attention. Both games advertise heavily year round as well as having a strong element of word of mouth.

This chart shows Age of Conan and GTA4. Note the similarity in the curves. A small ramp up with a very distinct spike around their launch/release followed by a sharp decline. This is a completely traditional shape for a regular boxed videogame (try putting any recent console game into Google Trends and you’ll get a similar shape, I chose GTA4 because of their proximity on the graph).

GTA4 has actually managed to regain some mindshare with the PC release and the new DLC.

Age of Conan however has languished in complete obscurity since it was released.

On a hunch I decided to look up the following chart:

Warhammer Online has been following a similar pattern to Age of Conan. There was a huge amount of publicity around it’s launch (the pre-order numbers grabbed alot of headlines) but then that momentum completely dropped off once the game was running.

Now we discover that those 1.5million pre-orders have translated into maybe 300k paying subscribers and the game has been forced to merge servers due to a dropping average population.

Looking at these charts it’s very easy to draw the conclusion that using traditional videogames marketting techniques just doesn’t work well for a subscription based business model.

In order to maintain consistent subscriber numbers (nevermind growing them year on year like Runescape or Eve Online) you must market your product outside of your existing customer base every day from the moment you launch without taking a break.

First some context: I was previously using XP Pro as my main OS on two machines (my Gaming PC and my Netbook). I never looked at Vista because I didn’t want to spend any money on a new OS and had heard that the performance wasn’t as good as XP.

However I had heard that Windows 7 was proving to be faster and use less memory than Vista and since I was wanting to reinstall my machine anyway as it had started to slow down I decided to give the Beta a go. Worst case scenario I end up reinstalling XP which was the original plan in any case.

Find out what I thought below…

First off I’ll start by saying that Windows 7 has been the easiest to install version of Windows I’ve ever used. Aside from having to select my keyboard layout and language the installer was completely autonomous. This is largely because Windows 7 installs everything. If you want to add or remove certain parts you can do so without having to put the disc in the drive. This makes a lot of sense to me.

PERFORMANCE

First thing I checked was the memory use. I only have 2Gig in my gaming rig (Which will at some point go up to 4) and with XP I was sitting at an idle memory use of about 35–40% and using about 10% cpu.

After a fresh boot Windows 7 would sit at around 35% memory (usually a little less) but after 30 minutes or so this grows to about 50%. This is most likely because of a feature where it keeps the files used by frequently used applications in memory so every time I open an application that I’ve had open before it opens much faster.

CPU usage when idle sits at under 1% (and I include playing music on iTunes as “Idle”) and everything seems much faster in general (file operations like move and copy seem to be faster and applications install quicker). I’m not sure how much of this is due to running a 64bit OS as opposed to 32bit though.

Overall performance though is definitely better than XP. Here I probably differ from hard-core tech web sites because I quantify performance as how quickly I perceive something to run and not how few processor cycles or how little memory it used to achieve it. The OS may be using more memory than XP but that memory was just sitting there not doing anything.

I’m yet to notice any adverse effects on gaming but I’ve not been playing cutting-edge super-graphics/memory intensive games recently.

THE TASKBAR

There is no longer an option to have the “Classic” Start Menu anymore so I finally had to face the future and get used to something new.

For me however new things were good. I had recently taken to using RocketDock extensively because I realised I was only using the same half-dozen programs frequently and Quick Launch just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

The new “Pin-To-Taskbar” functionality turns the Taskbar into a Dock which is awesome. The fact that the Taskbar is still a Taskbar is a good thing too and makes it better than a pure Dock. The amount of effort that has been put into revamping this age-old concept is huge and has been very much worthwhile. It took some getting used to; as any new feature does, but it quickly became second-nature.

If you want more details on the changes to the Taskbar then have a look here.

I still have RocketDock installed however. The Taskbar treats all Folders pinned to it as a single Explorer Icon which is a bit crap. RocketDock now sits hidden on the left of my screen and holds shortcuts to my drives, Networks and Libraries.

LIBRARIES

Ah Libraries. Libraries for those not aware, are abstract locations which represent many different locations. You have 4 (Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures) out of the box. By default these will point to both your own “My n” Folder and the machines Public version. This makes it easier to share files between users as you can drop the file into the Public folder and anybody on that machine who opens up their Videos library will be able to access both their own Videos and Public videos.

Some people are unconvinced about these but I have to say they are growing on me a lot. I have a media server at home that stores all my music and films as I use my Xbox as a Media Centre and I often like to watch movies on my Netbook. With the Libraries I just add the remote drive to the respective libraries and I can browse through my files as if they were on my local machine.

GENERAL OTHER STUFF

I did a lot of file-copying and moving at the weekend as a result of the reformat of my main PC. This was a pain on XP but a joy on Windows 7.

The reason for this is that on Windows 7 you can just drag a window (any window) to the left or right sides of the screen and it will dock it to the side, resizing it to take up exactly half the width of your desktop. This made moving files between drives much easier as I can hit Windows+E twice to open two file explorers, drag one to each side of the screen and then just drag files between the two.

For those people who used an Amiga extensively in the past it’s a bit like using Dopus. This is a good thing. That the docking works for any windows based app is incredibly useful so you can compare two websites side-by side or drag files from an Explorer into FileZilla easily. This is all stuff you could do before but this just makes it much easier to do it.

Windows Messenger is not built-in. This is great news as I have always disabled it on every machine I use.

UAC I disabled after about ten minutes use. This meant that Gadgets wouldn’t work (no great loss really) but they can be re-enabled with a little registry poking.

The System Tray no longer annoys you. The default behaviour of an icon is to not show up but still display balloon notifications. Given the new taskbar pinning this makes sense as anything you may have wanted to open from the System Tray you probably wanted to pin anyway.

Being able to search inside the start menu is more useful than I thought it would be and I often find myself hitting the windows key and typing in “Calc” to get to the Calculator rather than navigating the programs list.

THE NETBOOK

I have an Advent 4211 (a re-badged MSI Wind) with 1 Gig of ram and the 80gig hard drive. Windows 7 installed very easily onto the machine from a USB hard drive and detected almost every piece of hardware straight away. The only drivers it didn’t have were for the WiFi but with a wired network connection it managed to pull them off Windows Update in a few seconds.

The Wireless networking is much nicer than XP and is incredibly easy to setup (and has a useful signal strength indicator on the system tray). Battery life seems to be about the same as XP but again the charge indicator on the system tray is now much easier to read.

Overall I’m quite impressed with the performance on this low-power machine especially considering the beta is the “Ultimate” edition and MS are making an OEM edition that should run faster on Netbook type machines.

CONCLUSION

So far I’m very impressed with Windows 7. In terms of usability it is a step up from XP and appears to perform better in day to day use. There are a few little niggles but they are just that: niggles. XP is full of problems that have been solved in 7 and while 7 has a few new ones they are tiny in comparison.

We’ll see how it fares over the long-term as I plan to use it as my main OS at least until August when the Beta expires. For now though the new-user experience is looking pretty good.