Lucidity Log 7:Making a Rat a Constable

For the outside area I was approached to program the AI for the constable. After the design of the constable AI was explained to me, I realized that the constable would function very similiarly to the rat AI. With that as a starting point I implemented a node system into the code of the rat AI and Voila, Constable.

Lucidiy Log 6: Crate Dropping Extravaganza

For the outside area, one feature that was needed was an object that was blocking the entrance to a different area. Sammy(Designer) told me that this object was a crate suspended by a rope or chain and then when activated by a lever the crate was to go up and then fall. The crate breaks and the player can proceed.
The challenge with this was getting the rope to disappear one segment at a time so that there was not rope sticking out of the top of the winch that the crate was connected to. I winded up making the rope a number of different objects that self destroy when the collide with an unkown object.

Micro Dude Log: After Math

Well the time has come to reflect on how well Micro Dude was received. What I did right, what I did wrong and all that Jazz. The first thing that I would like to address is that after the first week of poor sales I decided to make Micro Dude free for download. I decided to do this because, Intial Sales had been so low.  It was highly unlikely that Micro Dude would make the minimum amount necessary for Desura to send me any of money. Realizing that I would never see a cent of the measly sum Micro Dude had garnered during the first couple weeks, I made Micro Dude free so at least I could tell people that it had had a few hundred(537 currently) installs. I also want to point out that I considered making Micro Dude free from very early in development.I didn't because I wanted to see how the whole process of submitting your game and marketing and things like that worked. If I had made Micro Dude free from the beginning I wouldn't have gotten the experience of trying to sell a product. I do regret a little that I didn't get to see how much money Micro Dude would have made if It had remained at the price it was, But I know It wouldn't have been anything spectacular. I also realize that I could have Marketed it more after it had come out but I still don't think it would have made a difference.

Now onto reasons that Micro Dude failed:
1. Poor Marketing.
I had pages for the standard social networking cites(FaceBook,Twitter), a youtube trailer, and a Steam Greenlight page. These were my only avenues of marketing besides being featured on Desura and they were obviously was not enough. I should have strove to increase my facebook and twitter audience as well as had a host of different videos of MicroDude. I should have been a more active member of the online indie community and posted more articles on public forums. I should have just overall talked more about my game and been more enthusiastic about my game.

2. Desura Isnt Popular.
This one surprised me for some reason even though it shouldn't have. Desura just isnt as popular as Steam and why I thought it would still make decent sales simply for being on Desura I have no idea. I submitted Micro Dude to Desura simply because it was my only option. In the future I will make certain to have a better plan than to just rely on the quality of the game to sell copies.

3.Over Saturation.
Micro Dude was just a drop in a sea of classic 8bit style indie platform games. Indie platformers are truly in no short supply. Platformers are an easy genre to make so naturally many Indie Developers are going to make them. Also, so many developers now use a simple 8bit style for their games that many players have become tired of the aesthetic. I know I have. Having a retro style doesn't set you a part any more, it has the opposite effect.

Regardless of how poorly MicroDude sold I still dont regret making it. It taught me quite a few valuable lessons that will come in handy during the rest of my career as a game Developer. Also I still think that Micro Dude is a fun little game that will look good in my portfolio. Currently Micro Dude has an average Desura Rating of 9, with 8 ratings in total. I am very glad that people enjoyed Micro Dude enough that they felt they should leave a high rating.

~Jon

Lucidity Log 5: RATS!

I've been meaning to blog about this for quite a while now but somehow managed to skip over it so bare in mind that I programmed the AI for the Rat Enemy a Couple Months ago. When I first started programming the AI for the rat enemy, Raid+'s lead designer David had a rough idea of what the rat was supposed to do but most of the rats AI was not specifically written down. The way I programmed the rat was when the player would come into a certain range of the rat, the rat would become active and it would move forward while rotating towards the player.As shown by this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lovLT_dhXOs

Later David told me that the rats should have a home point that they return to when they are out of range of the player. This wasn't to big a feature to add and it wasn't a problem but it would have been nice to have had that information from the beginning.

Lucidity Log 4: Now That is what I Call a Clock GUI

My most recent task for Lucidity has been to get an analog clock face and a digital clock to show up in the GUI. It was relatively easy and I had both done the day I got the task though I did still need to tweak a few things. I still needed to change the type of font,size and color of the text. Again this was pretty easy and designer probably could have figured this out but at this point in development there aren't a whole lot of tech tasks left.

Also please not that the font type is not Permanent.

MicroDude Log 4:Promoting Your Indie Game and Other Annoyances

I new going into developing a game that I would have to work with other organizations besides myself. I would have to rely on other people to distribute my game, To advertise my game, Etc. At first I was very cautious to do this, I was afraid of seeming unprofessional and being mocked, because I had never done this before, because I didn't have much promotional material, because Micro Dude is made with an engine and isn't used all that often in a professional sense. Then as I became more acquainted with self publishing I realized that the process was less involved and easier than I had imagined. I did still manage to make some mistakes.

Mistake Number One:
Be consistent with the title of your game. I know this one seems like common sense yet I still managed to make it anyway. On Desura the title is "Micro Dude". On Facebook the title is "Microdude".On twitter the title is "MicroDude". The title is all over the place. I wish I had just Picked one title and then just Stuck with it because every time I see a title that isn't "Micro Dude" I kick myself.

Mistake Number Two:
Make sure that the other organizations that you work with know when you want to release your game, also be specific I totally messed up in giving one of the developer relations guys that I work with an approximate release date even though I already had a preferred release date in mind. I made the terrible assumption that releasing Micro Dude was simply a matter of uploading a file setting a date then setting a price. When you go to release a game on any platform tell the dev relations guy what date you want and then ask him exactly how to make your game ship on that date.

I've made many more mistakes than just those two but these two seemed probably the dumbest. Micro Dude hasn't actually been released yet so I'm sure there are plenty of other mistakes I made that I just don't realize yet but I will be sure to never make them again.

Lucidity Log 3: The Annoying Pendulum

Since my last Lucidity related post Raid+ has moved on to sprint 2 for Lucidity and I have since joined a feature team working on the third and second floor clock tower puzzle. I am responsible for programming the puzzle though surprisingly the hardest part so far hasn't been the puzzle itself but has animating the pendulum part of the puzzle of unity. At first I thought that this was going to be something that the animators would take care of but I quickly realized that this was something that was probably going to need to be programmed since the player needed to be able to interact with the pendulum dynamically. It seemed simple but getting the pendulum to swing smoothly was quite a beast to conquer. At first I got the pendulum to swing but at the apex of the swing it would sharply start swinging the other way. To fix this I tried adding decay. It worked smoothing out before getting to the apex but for some reason it didn't want to work coming back down and would sharply go the other way. I tinkered at this for longer than it probably should have taken but eventually I had a pendulum that swung smoothly back and forth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o315IIAo080

MicroDude Log 3: Sound Design

I never really realized the importance of sound design until working on MicoDude. I previously thought that it wasn't necessary because most games can be played with the sound being turned off. I typically like to play certain games without the sound, games like pokemon or minecraft and put a podcast on in the background to catch up on news. I never realized that sound gives the player instant feedback like no visual cue can give. The player can only look at one small location on the screen at a time. If the player needs to be alerted that somthing is happening in a space they arent looking at, sound effects really come in handy. The player is able to focus on events in a certain area while being reminded of events in a different area. I just recently had a friend test out MicroDude and what I found was that he didnt know how certain objects behaved. I had taken for granted all that I knew from designing, programming and countless hours of testing. One of the ways that I combated this was to use sound effects. If my friend is playing and he triggers a trap he wouldnt know how long it takes for the bullets to be shot and then reach him. With sound effects he would have been more accurate in estimating the time because he knows that the shooting sound effect comes after the alert sound effect. The sounds mark at what time he should start evading the oncoming bullet rather than possibly just seeing a sprite moving once out of the corner of his eye.

MicroDude Log 2: AI Challenges

One of the first big hurdles I had to overcome when I was programming MicroDude was the main stealth mechanic. How were enemies going to sense that the player was near? I ended up going with a system that would spew sensor objects from the enemy npc in a different direction depending on where the enemy was facing. When the sensor objects would collide with the player, it would set the enemy into an alert state where it would stop in its current position then fire a projectile toward the player. The flaws of this method were that since the sensor objects would spawn on a timer, the player could jump through gaps in the sensors and avoiding detection in plain sight. One I made the sensors invisible though it became much more difficult to do. Another flaw was that the sensors move at a certain speed and it is actually possible for the player to out run the sensor before the sensor deletes itself. The advantage to this method of stealth system was that enemies could not detect the player through walls which was the reason that I chose this system. I originally though that a system that checked the relative position of the player would suffice but there was no way to not detect the player through walls.

Microdude Log 1: Should Have Blogged Sooner

Im going to start this blog post by saying that I regret not blogging about Microdude sooner. For those who don't know Microdude is a indie game pet project that I had been working on in my plentiful spare time. It has now become a fully fledged release title that I will eventually release on gog.com and Desura. I kept Microdude on the down low for quite some time because I was still unsure if I wanted to release it or not. Now about 5 months after I first concieved the idea for Microdude, I am uploading the first trailer for the game and creating the facebook page for it. That being said I will start writing about the Intitial design and development of Microdude.

Microdude had a very unconventional inital design period where I wasnt designing the game on paper first. I figured that I would start off with a rough idea of what i wanted to make and then program and design the rest at the same time. This eventually came back and bit me in the ass but at the time everything seemed to move smoothly. The general idea that I had for the game was that I wanted to make a platform game that had elements of stealth. Initally I wanted to make the game very slow paced with a lot of waiting and puzzle elements. I eventually dropped that concept and went for a more fast paced stealth approach. I programmed the player to have fast and fluid movement. The player could Move left/right, Jump, Cling to walls and ceilings and I eventually made a grappling hook that the player could fire upward and then go up and down when the hook attached to a ceiling. All of these features have made it into the current build today.