WID Journal 3

Ive completed the the projectile script that I talked about in journal 2. I changed it however so that the projectile works like a boomerang to be more consistent with the weapon that the designers had in mind. The way that the boomerang works is that when the boomerang is instantiated a timer is set and when that timer hits zero the direction reverses. My new task is to program the boss for level 1. Like the projectile the boss is also going to be timer based. At this rate however this is going to be the only boss in the game. I've worked on  programming bosses before in works that I've made in game maker and even with a drag and drop interface it still takes some time to program. Right now ive got the boss to walk left and right on a timer, ive programmed the game object that triggers the battle, and ive added the colliders to the boss as shone below.

I still have to add the beserk mode where the boss follows the player. Im not sure how well this is going to work with the timer system or if i have time to even add beserk mode at all. After having a meeting with the designers i realize that many of them are working very hard actually. Though i still wish they knew the difficulty to code some of the things they design.

~Jon

Wait I'm Dead? Journal 2

I am just getting done with my spring break and it was nice to finally have a little time to relax and reflect on progress for Wait I'm Dead? Over the Break I completed work on the script that allows the skeleton to  launch projectiles. At first the skeletons attack looked like he would toss crazy ass boomerang pancakes all around the world. however after a little tweaking i was able to get him to throw pancakes like a normal human being.

I also begun thinking about the script for the AOE attack and I realized it would be very similiar to the melee system that I have already written.

With only six weeks left in the semester I am a little concerned that the groups designers have just sort been relaxing when the build is no where near being completed. It would be nice to see them actually paying attention to whats currently in the build and managing the trello board. I also feel that we should have more than one level model created. I also think that a lot of them dont take into account the fact that we need to be testing this game long before the semesters end.

~Jon 

Wait Im Dead? Journal 1

Wait Im Dead is the game that me and my team are currently working on in CSG Production. It is a 2D platformer about a skeleton who seeks to avenge his own death.

 I am a programmer on the project one of the things that I have been working on recently was programming the melee combat. The way that Ive been implementing the combat is that i create a hit box on one side of the skeleton and then upon hitting the melee button if an enemy is in the hit box they are killed or they take damage. I made it this way because  if i just did a check to see if an enemy is at a certain point and if there was some sort of bug i would be able to see if the hit box is making contact with somhting or not. The below picture shows the skeletons hit box and the attack hit boxes. For right now there are two attack boxes because we are still working on getting the player to turn.

Together they form together to create a penis looking hitbox.

My Thoughts on Free to Play

In recent years the free to play business model has amassed popularity between devs and players. Popular to players because it is a free game, Developers like it because it opens your game up to a larger audience so that you can hit the smaller audience that you are trying to sell in game items to. In theory this seems like an ingenious concept however I worry about the kinds of experiences both players have. I worry that the players who dont like to spend any money are turned off by the unfairness of being able to buy overpowered items that are never available to you unless you pay. I worry that players that like  to pay for items simply buy all the cool weapons and armor and then the game is too easy for them and they lose interest. As a player that doesnt like to spend money on these sort of things I typically will play a free to play game for a couple of days before i quit and never pick it up again. Games like this that ive played include Vindictus and Microvolts. I enjoyed these games for the two days i played them but i quit because i knew that there was no  way i could be as cool as somebody who had spent loads of money. There are a few exceptions to this. One game that i enjoy once in a while is called Realm of the Mad God. it is a MMO bullet hell shooter with a fantasy theme. I like this game because you dont need to spend loads of money to build your character when it is fun and addiction just to level up. the option to buy weapons and armor are not even available. Instead you can buy encounters with high level bosses that will gain you lots of xp and some rare loot. you are not garunteed the loot though and it is not garunteed what the loot will be. I like this model because although it is technically unfair the player must still work and have fun defeating the boss to get the awesome loot. I think in order to create a successful free to play game, you have to essentially design two different games. one game that is fun for the player that isnt paying, and a game that is fun for the player that is paying. I also think that if players knew that they would be playing for a long. the will be more likely to invest in micro transactions.
these have been my thoughts on free to play.
Jon out.

Why DRMs are BS.

If you want to read about my personal experience with stupid DRMs see my Freaking Spore. blog post. Digital Rights Management has been in the spotlight recently because of EA and their DRM system for Sim City 4. This system is used to confirm that the game was purchased legitimately. The save system also depends on the servers because it is entirely cloud based. In order to play Sim City 4 you need to connect to the EA servers. this is immediately a turn off for me because sometimes I dont have access to the internet and like to be able to play them without internet access. It is also inconvevient that you can only save using the cloud system. I prefer to have local saves because i hate the idea that my saves are being managed by somone else. On top of that when the game was released the game had server problems out the shizzle wizzle resulting in crashes and saves being wiped. These are all examples of why DRMs are not going to be popular in the future because they make the game to inconvenient to play. I know that because of this system i am probaly never going to buy Sim city 4. I think that preventing privacy is a matter of making the product or service better than the free illegal alternative. I dont pirate those games for that exact reason.

Jon out.

Freaking Spore.

Digital rights management is BS. Before I delve into why DRM doesnt work and only encourages pirating. Im going to tell you the tale of my experience with the EA  game Spore. When I was around 13 years old I received the game Spore for christmas. I was really excited to play it. The idea of being able to create your own microscopic creature and evolve it to a galactic superpower was an awesome concept. I recieved the galactic edition(essentially the special edition) which included an art book and a behind the scenes dvd.
I looked through the little white book as the game installed on my computer. Before the game installed i was prompted to type in the key code located on the back of the instruction manual  This was the first time i had seen a game with this system. I typed in the code unbeknownst to me that five years later that prompt would be the bane of my existence. In 2013 I found my game of spore in my basement and decided to pop the disc into my laptop to relive the nostalgia of my younger years. Just like before I recieved the prompt to enter the security code. I looked through the cool white  galactic edition box to discover that i no longer had the code. I turned my whole basement upside down looking for the manual. I tried using keygens to no avail. I wanted to avoid downloading a cracked copy since the install alone had taken 2 hours. In a state of rage I drove to walmart and purchased a new copy of the game for 20 dollars . I used the code from that game to unlock my installed game. I played for 2 hours. Anger had sullied any hopes i had of feeling nostalgia. It just blew my mind that i couldnt use somthing that i had owned for years because i didnt have some stupid code that supposedly prevents piracy. Looking online i could see that that other people have had this problem and that the DRM does not work. In fact spore is actually the most pirated game ever made because the DRM is so flawed. From then on I swore a hiatus from EA games until further notice.

Jon out.

Why the Steam Box is going to be Awesome

Steam Box is the new "Console" being developed by Valve and from what i hear it sounds like Its going to be awesome.The steam box is going to be open to third party customization. Im not exactly sure why but that just sounds awesome to me. The idea that somone can have just a really pimped out version of somthing that everyone has is cool. I also think it is awesome that the standard box is going to come with 8 hdmi ports allowing for up to 8 player local play. Also Gabe Newell is discarding their current method of selecting indie games for market and he is opening it up entirely to indie developers. Meaning that there are going to be cheap indie games galore. It also means more opportunity for me. The only concern i have is that valves version of steam box is only going to run linux. I'm not exactly sure what that entails for developers. But Yeah that is why the steam box is going to be Epic.
Jon out.

Things That Surprised Me About the Gaming Industry

I have learned a lot since I started the gaming program at Matc but many of the things that I learned about the  gaming industry in general really surprised me when I first learned about them. In high school I was very enthusiastic about films and film production and lately I've been thinking and comparing the two industries in my head vigorously. I feel like coming from a school of thought that searches for a deeper meaning and looks for ways to express the feelings of one person is what causes this confusion.

In my film classes and in all other school experiences in general using other peoples work and using it to supplement your own work was a very touchy matter. Teachers encouraged students to quote external sources. How ever they must give credit to the person even if they are long dead. Teachers wanted you to come up with your own ideas entirely on your own. The way of thinking seemed to be that you should come up with all your ideas on your own and in return you will receive 100% of the credit for your ideas.

In the Matc program it would seem that team work is a huge focus. Any ideas that you come up with are free to use by anyone else and any they come up with you are free to use or modify in any way. For example if you need a script  that applies jumping to a character I would be entirely acceptable to go online and copy and paste a script without giving any credit to the original creator.

The mentality  of  film makers seems to be that only one person is responsible for the success of the movie: The director. The director is made out to be the only person that makes the movie even though he really isnt because there must have been at least a few other people involved. Yet the Director gets all the credit and all the blame if something goes wrong. The mentality of game devs is that everyone is in a project together and credit is split equally among everyone who worked on the project. When some body is talking about who created a movie its always a single person that is referenced. For example somone would say "James Cameron made Avatar." even though plenty of people worked to make Avatar what it is. When somone is talking about games It is always the studio that is referenced. If the studio cannot be remembered the creator is still referenced as they. For Example nobody would say "Gabe Newell made Portal 2" even though Gabe Newell might have lead the making of the game he is not credited as the sole creator.

My Experience at the Global Game Jam 2013

For those of you who are not aware of the Global Game Jam, The GGJ is a global event where small teams assemble across the planet with the goal to create a video game within 48 hours. This was an event that I, Jon Harwood participated in, in the year 2013. With only minimal knowledge of the unity engine and no experiences in C# I walked into MATC Main building. I was paired with 8 other people who had same knowlege as me. I learned a lot during this event i learned how invaluable it was to learn how to code. I learned that copying and pasting scripts that others had written does not count as plagerism. I learned what a good team lead should be like because my team's lead, Dane was fantastic at leading us and with out him I don't think our game would have been nearly as good. I think the most important thing that I learned was how a team should behave. Constant communication is a necessity. Establishing a proper vocabulary is also incredibly important. For example in the game that we made for GGJ we established differences between different visual assets. Instead of someone saying "I am sending the pictures over to you." they would say "I 

am sending the Icons over to you" It was also important to specify which means they would send the file. I also learned that the unity 3d engine is terrible for trying to make 2d sprite based games. At the end of the 48 days we stunk to high heaven but we had modified and existing tower defense with its own paths textures and models. I was hardly competition for any of the other groups but I felt good about it and it received high praise since we essentially had no prior experience. A few days later I was checked in on a let's play channel that I fancy called the Yogscast. There most recent lets play featured a game called Surgeon Simulator. This game was made at the 2013 game jam and it was a strange experience to watch a bunch of internet celebrities that ive had no contact with, reference and event that I participated in.

Jon out   

Introductions

Video games have been a big part of my life ever since i was a small boy growing up on the north side of Milwaukee Wisconsin. My father was a custodian at a nearby elementary school. One day he was emptying the trash from one the offices, when he saw two rectangles lying at the bottom of the bin. He thought that i might like them so he brought them home for me to play with. What he brought home was a n old game boy and a green game boy color with copy of Mortal Kombat lodged in the cartridge slot. This was my first introduction to video games. I kicked and punched characters like like scorpion and sub-zero on a microscopic colorless screen and for a time, it was pretty rad. Eventually though i grew tired of  Mortal Kombat. I was tired of being confined to the similar looking arenas in the game. I wanted to explore. One day my father returned home from visiting my grandmother he snuck down to the basement. after a while he called me down stairs sitting in front of the television was a gray box That read Nintendo Entertainment System The television displayed duck hunt  my father handed me the gray light gun and i shot ducks down all day long. Just like mortal combat however it soon became tedious and i longed to explore more areas then duck hunt could provide. after playing with the buttons of the front of the NES i notice that the duck hunt cartidge contained another game. A game called Super Mario Bros. I loaded this game up and I was perplexed. I didn't even realize that you had to try to avoid the goombas by jumping over them. I thought you had to punch them like in mortal kombat or try to shoot the with the light gun. I figured it out eventually and after that I was hooked. It blew my mind that there was a world that had its own physics, logic and environment that was entirely different from reality. Every day from then on after school i went down to my basement and stomped goombas, collected coins, defeated bowser, and rage quit because the princess was in another castle. I navigated pits, found secret areas, broke bricks and powered up until I couldn't feel my thumbs. And to this day Super Mario Bros. is still one of my favorite games. I am 18 now . Since my first step into the virtual world I have amassed tons of knowledge regarding video games.So much that i think i can make them myself. This blog will document my journey to becoming a video game developer. I look forward to the future anxiously.

~Jon Harwood

01/29/2013