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Tag: Game development

Why I Feel Double Fine Studios Are Taking The Piss

Disclaimer: The following is an opinion piece. People may not agree with what is being said, but I by all means encourage readers to engage in discussion about the following views and opinions.

I originally wanted to write an article about the frustration I felt towards Double Fine when they announced that Broken Age would be split up into two pieces and the first part would be sold on Steam Early Access. I felt that Double Fine were taking advantage of their fanbase, and were gambling with fan’s money as if no risk is involved. Double Fine themselves had admitted that they had taken their idea to publishers before, only for publishers to turn them down, saying there wasn’t a market for adventure games. For all we know, Double Fine has that entire market already invested in its project, but are acting as if their sales for Broken Age in January are all but confirmed. I decided to skip writing this article in the end as I felt it was a bit hypocritical of me to be frustrated when I hadn’t kickstarted the project, and let it be.

To the public’s surprise, yesterday saw Double Fine release a new game called Spacebase DF9, a game that was conceived during their “Amnesia Fortnight” where the whole company makes new game concepts that may one day turn into a product. I say this is a surprise as Double Fine still have 2 other projects that are yet to finish, and they’ve decided to add a third to the fray.

Broken Age does indeed look pretty, but was it really necessary considering it’s over budget? Double Fine are from the same camp that says graphics do not make a game, yet go out of their way to generate reflections in water, something which I would class as “graphics and aesthetic not needed to fulfil the core game”.

In the past, Double Fine have indeed worked on multiple projects, as many fans have been quick to point out. The difference this time is their use of Kickstarter and Steam Early Access, 2 services that were built to support and maintain indie developers that don’t have access to publishers, something which Double Fine has. In the past, fans didn’t complain about these multiple projects because Double Fine were using publisher’s money, which is the same for every developer in the industry. What makes this wrong is that Double Fine are now messing with their own fan’s money directly, rather than fans just being annoyed that a game has been delayed. It sets a bad precedent that Kickstarter can indeed fail if Broken Age’s sales don’t meet expectations in January, something which everyone seems to gloss over and act as if it’s not a big deal.

I can’t help but feel that Double Fine has been getting a free pass with fans lately. First they overspend on their project which made 8x as much as was needed, and the fans rushed to bless them for making a more ambitious game and being open and transparent with everyone. Next, we don’t hear much about their second game in development, Massive Chalice, and now we get a new alpha game that is still early in development, yet is being sold at a premium price. If any other company were to do any of the above, the gaming industry would be up in arms, telling the developers where they could stick it. But ohhhh no, since Double Fine have a few legendary staff who helped make nostalgic games of yesteryear, fans rush to save them from hostility. It’s a bit ridiculous when you look at it from afar, as Double Fine are still yet to deliver on any of the promises they have made with Broken Age and Massive Chalice, and yet fans are still eager to trust them. Some may claim that Double Fine is composed of 60 employees, and they can’t have people sat around doing nothing, so why not make another game? Which would usually be true in most studios, but when Double Fine have the press and the whole community of Kickstarter watching them, why would you risk your game being mediocre? You’d ensure as many staff were working on the main game as possible to ensure that your reputation isn’t tarnished.

Whilst massive chalice wasn’t as big of a success as Broken Age, it still broke $1million, meaning it easily has a bigger budget than a lot of indie games and Kickstarter projects out there.

Finally, I’m not sure how I feel about early access games recently. I believe that if a customer is willing to buy your broken unfinished game, they should be given an incentive to do so, similar to Minecraft. I bought Minecraft for £8 when it was in beta and was still being fixed and expanded. I felt that was a good price, and it continued to get better and better. With the £8 I spent, I got to watch an enterprising, ambitious and unique project grow into the huge success it is today, whilst becoming engrossed in a diverse, intelligently made world, seeing requests and demands for game additions being fulfilled, brilliant customer service in several other ways and a copy of the game in its entirety upon official release. I was rewarded for my belief in an otherwise unproven product and company. But I’m seeing a growing trend of developers charging premium for this “early access”, like with Double Fine’s recent release. As it stands while I type this, they’re charging £18.99 for the privilege of playing a short, broken game, because apparently at that price it’s already a better game than Fez, Super Meat Boy and Braid, to name a few. Fans should be rewarded, not punished, for supporting developers.

Double Fine have access to publishers, have access to the industry at large, and have a loyal fan base. These means of funding were made for small, independent developers who don’t have access to the same contacts as big businesses, yet Double Fine seem to be abusing the system. They want all the money to develop a game without any of the responsibility. If Double Fine had to go to a publisher and announce they were delaying their product, the publisher would go insane, possibly dropping funding for the rest of the project, yet if Double Fine do the same with fans that invested and they get applauded for being so open and transparent.

And that, my friends, is why I think Double Fine are taking the piss.

16/10/2013
Help and Advice from Reddit
This is a screenshot from my iPhone running iOS 7. The game can run forever and is indeed a endless runner.

So the other day I asked the great community of Reddit for help and advice on where I should go next in terms of optimisation for my current project; Project Dandelion.

If you want to try the current build, click the link below and install the Unity web player:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/project%20dandelion.html

I do apologise on the quality of the current build. There are 2 different types of level to be generated, one with trees and one a open field, but due to the frequency of the instantiating, it may take you a while to see both levels. Everything also needs to be tweaked, so try not to hit the booster too many times. The one great thing about this build though is that most of the core mechanics are there and working, they just need to be tweaked and expanded upon, so bare with me as I continue to progress in the making of this game.

So just to explain whats currently going on in the scene:
- I have a player (the cylinder) that constantly moves forward in the world and consistently moves down using gravity. The players model rotates left and right when the player moves left or right. I at first was only going to play an animation making the player rotate, but this wouldn’t rotate the model, and would screw up any collision detection made by the player.
- When a player collides with the white boxes, the gravity variable is increased to 20, meaning the player moves up 20 metres. This very quickly runs back down to -0.5 as the update function is called every frame, and every frame the gravity is made sure to be pushed back down to -0.5. These are all variables that can be adjusted in the future to make sure the feel of my game is spot on. (The white blocks are randomly generated across the scene, and are generated 3 metres below the player so that in the 3 seconds it takes to reach one, the player has descended that amount to hit them.)
- In order for the world to generate, I have a separate gameObject that rushes off ahead of the player and generates the level piece by piece. This was fine in testing, but as I incorporate better 3d models in the future, I worry the performance of the game will be affected due to too much being rendered at once.
It was the last point I was worried about and decided to ask the question to fellow redactors about whether I was heading in the right direction or not.

The overwhelming feedback was that I should keep the player stationary, and instead get the level itself to move backwards to give the illusion of moving forwards. Now I had this idea a while back, but decided it was silly and would be too taxing on the system, but something clicked in my mind when most people agreed this is what I should be doing: By having my objects forever instantiate at a certain distance away from the player, I would only ever have to worry about 4-5 objects max, meaning no need to worry about performance!

I’m currently in the process of making this work, but I’m certainly glad I reached out to the community for this feedback, it’s fantastic and hopefully is a step in the right direction for my game.
03/08/2013
Shadows!

As you may or may not be aware, I’m using Unity to make my current project as I have experience with the platform from my university dissertation and it’s very easy and fast to get a working prototype up and running. It’s always been my thinking that once I get to a certain point in my game, I would pay for the pro version of Unity, to allow my game to take on a fidelity level similar to that of a PS3 or 360. It seems that’s no longer the case! With unity 4.2, they’ve included hard shadows for free! Take a look:

SHADOWSSSSS!!!!!

This is fantastic, and allows for my game to finally start taking shape. Every day that I work on it, I get a little bit closer to what I want to produce. It’s amazing.

23/07/2013
Screenshot Monday

So I’ve decided to show people what my game can do so far and what I’ve implemented, so here it is:

Here’s project dandelion working on my iPad mini. The timer works well, and accelerometer is ok, but needs a bit of tweaking.

The only problem I’ve ran into so far is working with the iPads accelerometer. When the app first loads up, it grabs the iPads current accelerometer speed on the y-axis, and subtracts that from all further movements. This works fine for allowing the user to keep the iPad in the initial orientation they had, but means moving down on the y-axis is very slow, as it has less room to choose from. This should be fixed soon.

16/07/2013
Gaming Tutorials

It’s not much, but it’s something

So recently I’ve been working on gaming tutorials to get me back into game programming, which has been great. My recent project is below, it’s a space invaders clone, where you use z to fire and the directional buttons to move left and right.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/SpaceInvader.html

It’s not much, but it’s definitely helping me find my way again when it comes to game development.

19/06/2013
How Thomas Was Alone has changed my thinking on platformers and emotion in games.

Thomas was alone is a strange strange game that I’m falling in love with in a weird and wonderful way. Its a game about some programming errors (represented as squares and rectangles) that each have their own personalities, and are trying to find their way through this strange and confusing world. Each character has his/her own opinions on the others, and each have their own motives. It’s really quite crazy how much Mike Bithell has made me care about a mere set of squares and rectangles. He stripes away all of the pretty graphics, and shows that in order to care for a character you need a story/personality, not fancy art.

This has really changed my mindset in regards to my own game, and has got me in turmoil at the moment as to what I want my game to look like. I mean, you don’t need a gorgeously realistic character to feel empathy for a character, you just need a good backstory, and a good distinctive personality for the player to relate. It’s amazing how I remember each of the shapes names, but genuinely can’t recall anyones name from something like Game of Thrones.

I’ll post more in the coming weeks of character design, and let my imagination go wild. I want to take all my gaming habits into consideration for this project, and everything I’ve ever read, so here’s to hoping I come up with something pretty original.

07/05/2013
Expansion

I felt I needed to expand on my idea I put forward to other day, as I didn’t really put across any of the specifics of this project. (mainly because I don’t have specifics yet, just a bunch of ideas!)

But here are some pics of what I have planned so far:

The initial ideas of my platformer

So my initial idea was to switch between realities so that the world changed, and maybe the physics was different (so the character could jump further/higher). I liked this idea, so decided on 3 different worlds that you chose between; Normal, Future, and 3D. (Which for the moment, don’t have any different physics, but this may change in due time.)

My thinking was that you could come across stumbling blocks in one dimension, that would be solved by jumping to another dimension. An example of which I’ve provided below:

Here, a player jumps between dimensions to get past obstacles

In this example, the character needs to get to the other end of the level, but the gap between the platforms is too large, so they switch to the 3D dimension and rotate the camera, enabling them to see a hidden switch, like the example below:

The switch to 3D camera allows the player to find things that wouldn’t usually be seen

Using this switch, the player then extracts a drawbridge, which allows the character to continue across the level, until they reach a new gap that has no switches and is impossible to jump across. The player then switches to the last dimension, the future, where everything is destroyed and desolate. Here, a tree has fallen in place of the gap, and allows the player to advance. Finally, in this example, the player can only advance in the normal dimension, since debris and a black hole are blocking the paths in the future and 3D dimensions. The player then finishes the level.

Although these are very simple examples, I feel that using this game mechanic can present a lot of challenges to a player, and give my game a unique twist on the platforming genre.

I’ll update more over the coming days.

21/03/2013