Can I Haz Monsters? Rating Analysis

Hey guys. Seeing that this is my (Taro’s) fourth Ludum Dare (and first for John), I figured it might be a good idea to look into how I’ve been doing for the past few entries. First with the latest: how did Can I Haz Monsters? do?

canIHazMonsters

canIHazMonstersRatings

Not bad at all! Certainly got my innovation groove back, which I’m really proud of. As mentioned to some Let’s Players, John Ceceri III was the one who pitched the game idea about adopting in an alien world, so kudos to him. I simply helped out simplifying that idea to something that can be implemented into the game.

In comparison, this is how I did in the previous Compos & Jams:

The Sentient Cube (Ludum Dare 26)

theSentientCube

Tragically, the first Ludum Dare I participated in was the first game I had to put down due to legal reasons. So no ratings, here. Even then, I was well-practiced with Unity and game jams in general, so it was pretty clear from the comments I was doing pretty well for a first-timer.

Laundry Day (Ludum Dare 31)

laundryDay

Screen Shot 2015-09-15 at 2.09.50 PM

Laundry Day was our first attempt at organizing a real-world meeting at Tech Valley Game Space. As a consequence, nearly the entire group participated in this jam, including dreamlogician and Brightstar. It was also our first time learning Construct 2! Ultimately, a lot of raters figured out our game was making fun of the free-to-play style games with pointlessly addictive gameplay, leading to high marks on humor.

Star Driller Ultra (Ludum Dare 32)

starDrillerUltra

StarDrillerUltraRatings

Star Driller Ultra was well-praised for its graphics and overall presentation. It didn’t do nearly as well on fun, which I extensively wrote a post-mortem about. Either way, it definitely was an improvement from the last two projects I’ve worked on. It certainly showed my talent on creating well-polished games.

Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator (Ludum Dare 32)

usss

Screen Shot 2015-09-15 at 2.32.53 PM

And of course, the curveball: the joke entry, Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator! This was just a fun exercise of getting a game done in 12 hours, so I figured I’d get low rankings here. And I was not disappointed!


Plotting everything together, here’s how I did (Audio and Graphics are assumed to be 0s if opted out):

RatingsProgression

PrecentileProgression

Overall and Innovation categories looks like a slow but progressive improvements, and I couldn’t be happier with that. Fun and Mood, on the other hand, are rocky. It looks like I might need to focus on these two categories a little more. Other than that, looks like things are improving smoothly!

The #OneGameAMonth 2013 Post-Mortem

Having established the company at 2013, #OneGameAMonth proved to be a perfect opportunity to get a head-start on creating a library of games to work for in 2014. Brace yourself, because we’ll be looking through several games at once in this long 2013 post-mortem.

According to my profile’s list, I’ve successfully created 11 games out of the 12 months, which is rather impressive if I do say so myself. The games were:

  1. SWARM! icon
    SWARM!, a 3D-ball-rolling-platformer on the iPad.
  2. The Heart of Darkness icon
    The Heart of Darkness, Global Game Jam 2013 entry.
  3. Touch Yoga icon
    Touch Yoga, “finger twister” on your Android tablet (if it supports 5-touches or more).
  4. The Sentient Cube icon
    The Sentient Cube, Katamari Damacy made in 48-hours.
  5. Touch Yoga icon
    Touch Yoga, “finger twister” on your iPad and iPhone.
  6. ABCs Learn & Sing icon
    ABCs Learn & Sing, a fun way to teach your kids ABCs on the iPhone and iPad.
  7. String Theory icon
    String Theory, a bizarre first-person physics game about collecting larger stuff.
  8. Prototype: Munch icon
    Prototype: Munch, an exploration of 2nd-person perspective.
  9. Touch Yoga icon
    Touch Yoga, “finger twister” on your Kindle Fire HD.
  10. Touch Yoga icon
    Touch Yoga, “finger twister” on your Nook HD.
  11. Galactic NEON icon
    Galactic NEON, twin-stick shooter set in the infinitely vast space.

If you looked at the above list and said, “that’s a lot of Touch Yogas,” well you’d be right. Ports were allowed in #OneGameAMonth, and I decided to take full advantage of it. If anything, however, the fact that I resorted to taking shortcuts shows that I underestimated my ability to manage time this year, which will be something that’ll haunt me throughout this post-mortem.

SWARM!

SWARM! was a major project e4 Software and I started two years ago. The game was first available on late December last year on the Android, and was approved in early January this year for the iPad. The game was a ball-roller on the tablet where tilting the tablet would cause the character to roll into that direction, while tapping the screen would make the character jump. The key feature of the game were its large number of enemies. Since all the characters were pacifists, the player had to lure the enemies into environmental hazards to kill them.

Since the game is made by e4 Software, I won’t go into deeper details about development. I will say that project was one of the largest I’ve worked on since being indie. The game unfortunately had lukewarm sales, which had a very negative impact on my ability to make games throughout the year.

Take-away: Beautiful graphics (great work, Chris Totten!) and solid, innovative controls does not make a game a success. The game had an intentionally passive gameplay, but this turned out to be the largest criticism on our game. Also, not being able to sell a game really hurts emotionally, hindering my development capabilities throughout the entire year.

The Heart of Darkness

The Heart of Darkness was made in 48-hours for Global Game Jam 2013. We initially started with five members in our team, but one of the members had to stay home sick (the one who came up with the idea, no less), leaving only four of us to rummage together whatever design notes we had left. The theme was based on a sound of a heartbeat, and we decided to go with a 2D platformer where the game is so dark, none of the platforms are visible. Instead, the player must rely on the commands given by a robot telling you when to jump.

When starting on developing this game, most members of the team had little experience working on a game, let alone a game jam. Since I was the most experienced with game jams, I took the role of putting together what tools were necessary to make the game (Unity and SVN), teaching how to use those tools, and help guide everyone on a more productive path. This “mentor” role tend to make me feel very useless, because it felt like I wasn’t directly helping on making the game. Regardless, while the beginning was very bumpy with everyone trying to learn Unity and SVN as fast as possible, a lot of progress was made in the last two days. Special credit has to go to Alec Slayden for finding and putting together a ton of graphics into a beautiful, haunting space scenery.

Take-away: version controls are ridiculously important in team settings, but it’s very difficult to teach how to use it. Taking a “mentor” role is a lot more difficult than expected. Unity post-processing effects and particles goes a long way in making a game very pretty.

Touch Yoga

On February, I registered my company, Omiya Games. It’s first debut game, Touch Yoga, was made in about a month and a half. I was strongly inspired by Hundreds, and decided to develop a much more minimal version of it. Touch Yoga is basically finger Twister: the player must keep his/her fingers on all the circles on-screen for 4 seconds. Said circles usually moves in a predictable pattern, which means every stage has an optimal solution. The game requires a multi-touch device supporting 5 or more touches.

Developing my first game on my own was a pretty crazy experience, if anything. A lot of problems arises when you’re doing something on your own compared to working on a team. For example, I’m a programmer by trade, which meant I immediately knew art and sound was going to be a major problem. Furthermore, since this game was developed for Omiya Games, I didn’t use tools for SWARM! to keep my company legally clean. I had to program my own multi-touch buttons since Unity 3.5’s built-in GUI performs terribly on mobile devices (no clue how 4.3’s GUI performs). Lastly, I had to do some research on the maximum number of multi-touches that were allowed on each device, which proved to be a ordeal on its own.

For example, I decided to go with a max limit of 5 circles for each level since iPhone supports 5 touches. While porting to most tablets were easy, Android proved to be the hardest. Android devices provides a way to limit devices on the number of touches they support, but their thresholds are only 1-touch, 2-touch, and 3-touch or more. Thus, I had to spend an extra time implementing a starting menu that lets the player test whether their device can support 5 touches, and if not, to click a button to get a refund from the Google Play store.

This was also the first project where I started posting prototype pictures. My first prototype had a Windows 8 like aesthetic, with numbers indicating the order the circles needs to be touched.
MiroPrototype01
Playing this iteration, I quickly discovered how unintuitive the numbers on the circles were. I quickly took them out, letting the player tap the circles in any order they prefer. I did eventually bring back the “tap circles in correct order” feature with a much more intuitive and visually pleasing effect: tapping certain circles would make more circles appear, branching out from the original one.
MiroPrototype05
Rather late in development, a colleague from e4 Software mentioned that I should toss the Windows 8 aesthetic in favor of something more shiny. I grudgingly agreed (I actually like Windows 8’s flat and simple aesthetic), and created a more sparkly graphics as the final product.
Touch Yoga

Since I produced the game on a rush, there was virtually no advertising done on the game. This, unfortunately, lead to abysmal sales for the game.

Take-away: marketing is much more important than I’d like to admit. I should have also spent a little more time in researching into how other games with similar gameplay, such as Fingle, did (I seriously did not know about that game until after I put Touch Yoga into the market). Making your own tools suck. They take a lot of time and effort, although fortunately for this game, it wasn’t that bad. I learned far too late that bringing back the level select screen after clearing a level was incredibly confusing. Leading the player to the next level is much more intuitive. Touch Yoga also began my rather abstract art style, since I’m not exactly the most talented artist.

The Sentient Cube

If I had any doubts about working alone last month (remember, I worked in teams before then), The Sentient Cube cemented my confidence. Created for Ludum Dare 26, The Sentient Cube was a 48-hour solo project that can be described as Katamari Damacy with a finish line to cross over. Since the goal post was too large for the very small starting cube to see, the player had to increase it size to find the finish line. I frequently compared the game to Crazy Taxi because finding the finish line was part of the fun. This was made more obvious by a big arrow on the top of the screen that would always point to the direction of the goal post.

I’ve had a lot of fun making this game. Thanks to Phillip Ludington’s wise advices, I was able to get plenty of food and sleep throughout the event. It also introduced me to live-streaming via Twitch.tv, where I had a lot of fun playing other competitors’ games. The Sentient Cube itself was surprisingly easy to make in Unity. I was able to have a decent prototype by the first night, as seen in the screenshot below.
LudumDareProgress2
Much like The Heart of Darkness, I used a lot of post-processing effects to create a grainy cartoon visuals. I was actually inspired by a Japanese Pokemon fan-art that had outlined shadows. I think I did a pretty good job emulating the same effect with these filters.
LudumDareScreenshot6
The rest of the event was used for implementing a few special obstacles and power-ups (the rockets in particular comes to mind), putting together high scores, making unobtainable objects dark and obtainable objects brightly colored, and constructing levels. I’ve had very minor blunders in between development, but for the most part, it went very smoothly. Almost too smoothly.

Then I learned via Wikipedia that both Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi are patented.

That hit me hard. Even though I didn’t receive any Cease and Desist orders, I wasn’t going to take any legal risks: I immediately put the game down, leaving only a few gameplay trailers and several screenshots as a short memory of the game’s existence. Added on top of the fact that I was still feeling terrible from SWARM!‘s disappointing sales, that particular week was very depressing to me.

Take-away: I learned a lot about patents. While the damages were minimal, it was a brutal experience. Despite this, Ludum Dare helped confirm that, yes, I’m very capable of working alone.

ABCs Learn & Sing

ABCs Learn & Sing was a month-long project e4 Software and I made last year. As the name implies, it was a fun toy app to let smaller children learn the ABCs. It was actually very fascinating to make this project, as it surprised me how much kids like pushing buttons, so long as it provided some sort of feedback.

Since the game is made by e4 Software, I won’t get into too much details about development. I do admit I had no hand in porting the Nook tablet game to the iOS devices, but I was heavily involved in the somewhat stressful month-long development. Another shout-out to Chris Totten who also made the graphics for this game last year, and has done a beautiful job at it.

Take-away: Smaller kids have a very different criteria for what games they find fun. It’s actually very fascinating to make games for a different audience. This was probably the first confirmation for e4 Software that it was possible to make games in a very short time-frame.

String Theory

String Theory was a 2-month solo project that was (unusual for me) in first-person. The game involves using a fishing line with a magical lure that can stick to and create a string of larger and larger objects, similar to Katamari Damacy (minus the patent infringement). Said line of objects becomes useful for hitting targets and pushing aside barriers. I think this game had the best tutorial of all the games I’ve made, which made it very easy for new players to jump in.

When I was originally developing String Theory, I was thinking about a fishing game where you caught flying fishes. The fish you’ve caught would be usable as bait for catching even larger fishes. I abandoned this idea, though, when I was deeply unsatisfied with the string physics I was using. Plus, creating an AI for all the fishes seemed like a bit of a chore.
Prototype: Monet
Instead, I borrowed a ton of code from The Sentient Cube and implemented it into String Theory. The game became about finding objects smaller than you (as indicated by their bright colors) and attaching them to your lure. Attached objects themselves become lures, making it easier to collect more objects just by using sweeping motions.
PrototypeMonet6
This time around, I opted for softer, more colorful toon graphics. Part of it was to make the game feel different from The Sentient Cube since comparisons to it were inevitable, but also because I was getting tired by the solid-colored graphics. I definitely like the brightly colored aesthetic this game had over the overbearing whiteness The Sentient Cube had, as well as the grim darkness Touch Yoga depicted.

On the other hand, String Theory was really, really hard to design. Since I provide no precise controls to change the movement of each collected object, the only features I could implement without frustrating the player were puzzles that can be beaten with brute force. It was really annoying dealing with this limitation, and it certainly didn’t help that I was still healing from The Sentient Cube pain.

Take-away: if you’re going to make a new game concept, make sure that it provides the player some sort of precision control that requires skill. A lack of this element will be greatly harmful to the game design overall. Always keep your old game’s code. You never know when it comes in use! Experimenting is very important, but remember that it will take a lot of your time away from actual development, with a huge risk that it’ll result in absolutely nothing.

Prototype: Munch

Prototype: Munch helped answer one of my biggest questions with games: what would second-person perspective feel like? I also took this opportunity to educate myself about Unity’s free feature, path-finding. As the name implies, though, this project was unfinished due to my light-depression.

Munch

I spent about a month working on this prototype. Taking every free Unity assets in the Asset Store I can find, I think I did a great job putting together an aesthetically pleasing experiment about controlling a teddy bear through a maze. The catch, of course, is that the camera is an AI-controlled non-playable character that is slower than the teddy bear. I actually did have a parental horror game in mind when making this, but the final vision never came through, only leaving a dreadful, red-tinted graphics that has a jarringly optimistic music.

At least the prototype did have one very good intended effect: I learned a lot about Unity path-finding, and was able to implement it in Dead Man’s Trail very quickly.

Take-away: depression is a serious productivity killer. Unity path-finding is surprisingly easy to implement. Second-person perspective gameplay is pretty awesome, I don’t know why only a few games have it as their main form of gameplay.

Galactic NEON

Between Prototype: Munch and Galactic NEON, I had a lot of time to recover. For one, I started playing video games again, and actually cried tears of joy when playing Okami for the Wii. It was great to discover that yes, I still loved playing video games and my drive for making them were justified. For another, e4 Software and I were trying to finish a game we started this year. The game missed its initial deadline, which left me with a nice long winter vacation from my day job (Boeing) and side jobs (e4 Software and Pie for Breakfast Studios). I took the opportunity to reunite with my family, rest for a few days, then get started in learning the new 2D engine in Unity.

Galactic NEON was always intended to be a hybrid of Asteroids and Geometry Wars. It’s a neon-colored super-precise twin-stick shooter set in the infinite space. Much like any arcade game, the game becomes progressively harder as you kill more enemies. To spice up the action, there are many randomly generated power-ups, most of them changing the ship’s weapon. The game was designed for the player to either constantly adopt to a new weapon, or to avoid all power-ups if the player obtained his/her favorite weapon.

The bulk of the game was made in a week and a half. The first time I started working on the game was during Thanksgiving, where I had a moving ship and 6 stationary asteroids to destroy.
oneDayPrototype
I got back to the project again during the Winter break, and started working on making enemies appear off-screen to give the infinite space impression. My brother thankfully helped as a wonderful playtester who would identify different problems. With the first iteration, for example, my brother quickly found out that simply standing still and waiting for the enemies to get near the ship was the most optimal way to play the game. To fix this, I’ve added power-ups to encourage the player to move, as well as adding enemies that chases after the ship.
Seurat
Most of my time was spent on implementing new weapons, enemies, and bombs. I also spent a fair bit of time polishing the difficulty curve. Implementing the new graphics as well as a combo scoring system came about towards the last 2 days of development. Initially, I had all the enemies color-coded, but realized very quickly how boring that looked. Instead, I randomly generate their color, and use the same technique to create the brightly colored background.
Galactic NEON
I had the game done 2 days before 2014, giving me a good amount of time to rest before MAGFest. During MAGFest, I took the opportunity to sign up to a 2-hour table slot near the indie booth, and managed to receive a lot of feedback on Galactic NEON and Touch Yoga. Both games had incredibly positive receptions, giving me the much needed morale boost.

Take-away: when feeling down, playing video games helps a lot. Unity 2D engine is pretty simple to use, though its easy to get confused with its layering scheme. Having a constant playtester is a godsend. It really helps the iterative development process crucial to making interactive software. Interactive backgrounds adds a lot to the game. Having a lot of variety in graphics is very important. MAGFest is pretty awesome. So is Okami and Xenoblade Chronicles.

The Leftovers

In between The Sentient Cube and String Theory, I’ve made 2 other prototypes. Prototype: Warhol was made in 2 weekends, and was intended to be FallDown! with ragdolls. While I learned a lot about Unity ragdolls, I couldn’t continue making a game about essentially torturing a person. It simply wasn’t my style, and I dropped the prototype entirely.
WarholPrototype2

The other game was Prototype: Van Gogh (notice a pattern?). This one I created in one weekend based on a joke my friend made when he said I should make a mountain climbing simulator. I had a really hard time putting together any sort of objective to the mountain climbing, and decided to abandon it quickly.
Van Gogh

Take-away: it’s not my style to make games about torturing people. While I admit this probably won’t prevent me from making violent video games, it does mean I have a limit in what I can tolerate.

Making a game based off of gameplay is good and all, but it’s difficult to make it fun without an obvious objective.

In Summary

If releasing SWARM! was the climax to a story, the rest of 2013 was the falling action where I’ve hit into a lot of pressure and personal limitations. I heavily overestimated my stamina when I took on 3 part-time jobs on top of my current full-time job. This left me with very little time on my own, which caused both my mental and physical health to degrade significantly.

Fortunately, taking large breaks in between helped out greatly. I was able to discover several games that I absolutely loved, which motivated me to continue what I do. Furthermore, I’ve managed to create a wonderful game at the end of the year that has a very strong potential.

With this in mind, the goals for 2014 becomes very clear. For one, I have to find a happy medium between my own time and developing games. I also need to develop my skill at marketing since all of my games are still obscure. Finally, while I’m great at creating short games in rapid intervals, it has become clear to me that a longer, more polished games are necessary to have bigger impact on players. I plan on fleshing out several of my past projects both from Omiya Games and college so I can create a much more fulfilling experience.

I have high hopes that 2014 will be where the optimistic conclusions begins. Happy belated new year, everyone, and keep making those games!

More Praises of The Sentient Cube

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has mentioned my game (among many others) via a Haiku:

The Sentient Cube
Hey, cubes do not roll!
Unless they’re katamaris
Who turned off physics?

On top of that, a little more Googling reveals far more wide-spread references.

For one, IGN Italia mentions the game:

Restando in tema di blocchi colorati voglio poi citarvi il bel The Sentient Cube, di Omiya Games, praticamente una versione ridotta di Katamari Damacy che con un un po’ di sviluppo extra (e controlli meno “svolazzanti”) potrebbe evolversi in un gioco davvero interessante. Lo scopo di ogni livello è semplicissimo: nei panni di un cubo rotolante (e senziente, almeno stando al titolo del gioco) dovremo toccare gli oggetti colorati per attaccarceli addosso, tramutandoci via via in un’ammasso di forme geometriche colorate che rotola. Mano a mano che le dimensioni di tale matassa di oggetti aumentano gli elementi del fondale che possiamo “inglobare” diventano colorati e le nostre abilità di movimento aumenteranno. Rotolando e assimilando bisognerà raggiungere l’uscita di ciascun livello entro il tempo limite. Facile, colorato e abbastanza efficace, senza contare che in ciascun livello c’è nascosta una patata da trovare e raccogliere. Così, come extra…

Another international location I’m apparently having a boom at is Russia. There’s Tiny Games, Small Games, and Игры YuWik.

As usual, thanks a lot for all the support!

Praises for The Sentient Cube!

There’s been several praises for The Sentient Cube!

Indie Statik

Only the length of The Sentient Cube reveals that it is a Ludum Dare game. It’s about ten minutes total, but the developer’s claim that The Sentient Cube combines the gameplay of Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi is justified.  In other words: YOU NEED TO PLAY IT RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

Katamari is the biggest point of reference for The Sentient Cube, and the timer and different route choices are the subtle results of the Crazy Taxi influence. Each object that gloms[sic.] onto the original cube affects the overall movement of the Death Ball in different ways. You can actually roll over rockets, which add strong momentum to whatever part of the Death Ball they are attached to, as you might imagine. The physics of the spheres, cubes, cones and rockets that attach themselves to your Death Ball are the defining feature of The Sentient Cube’s gameplay. Eventually, your Ball will end up flying crazily up into space, as you try to wrangle it toward the goal like a cowboy herding a single misshapen blob of a cow.

Blogger Chaser324 on Giant Bomb

The developer of this game describes it as combining “Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi” which is a pretty accurate comparison. The Sentient Cube puts you in control of the eponymous polygon and challenges you to roll up other objects in an increasingly larger mound and get your ball of junk into a goal within a time limit. The physics based gameplay and the camera control can at times spiral out of control to a point where it goes from entertaining to hair-pulling frustration, but I still managed to reach the ending without failing a level.

Thanasis on Game Connect

The Sentient Cube…is an action-puzzle game that combines Antichamber-like graphics, and feels like a mix of Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi in terms of gameplay. You play as a blue, sticky cube that can roll into other objects smaller than itself to grow bigger. By increasing the cube’s size, the cube can reach to the Goal with more ease. Scattered around the level are various physics-changing items and power-ups.

Thanks for all the compliments!

The rest of the game design notes

Here’s a dump of all the design decisions I’ve made on The Sentient Cube.

levelDebug

First, the debug level. Always gotta have one for Unity. It’s a great place to create prefabs, and tweak the numbers to apply to the rest of the levels. Also a great place to test stuff, like the water block (top-left), unattainable block (top), bouncy block (top-right, unused in game), ice block (not shown), and rocket boosters (red, left).

levelHowToPlay

How to Play was a nasty one. The first curve is there to give a clear and empty view for the player to practice the controls. It also puts the Goal out of view, making it easier for me to teach the basic objective of the game: collect smaller objects. The first bend is where I scatter the smallest objects, and provide the instructions to roll into them. I’ve put a lot of objects there to show them lighting up as you get bigger.

Proceeding forward, I have this weird bend that stretched all the way to the left. The straight-way itself is intended to let the player practice collecting bigger objects, in a true breadcrumb fashion. It’s also here that I mention the arrow at the top of the screen, that it indicates where the goal is (straight ahead). It’s worth mentioning that I call this bend “weird” because it was also intended to hide a problem: Unity’s default GUI shader draws over all other objects. By placing it to the far-left, the player wouldn’t see the text at the beginning of the level. The shader that corrects this weird overlap is openly available online, but to respect Compo rules, I didn’t copy this shader; I merely hid it.

level1

Level 1 was actually the second level I created, code-named “pyramid.”  This level simply acts like a practice level, where the goal was clearly above you, and the objective was simple get large enough to be able to climb up the steps.  The bouncing spheres was a small challenge I’ve added to make things a little more interesting, i.e. you have to time it correctly to obtain each sphere.  Past that, it’s a pretty generic Katamari level.

level2

In Level 2, I wanted to establish that the Goal could be anywhere.  In this level’s case, directly below you!  This was actually the first level I created, and you can tell from the knocked over objects I really just zoomed through this.  It was the first place, though, where I got a good handle on the amphitheater formation.

level3

In Level 3, I introduce the rockets!  I initially intended the rockets to help you fly upwards, but that was nearly impossible to do with the given control scheme.  Instead, I found it useful to traverse great distances due to its added speed, and decided to do a level designed to demonstrate just that.  To acknowledge that players may simply wants to play around with the rockets, I placed slopes around the Goal to make it easier for them to reach it.

level4

In Level 4, I introduce the water block and the ice block rather haphazardly.  This was the last level I created, and I simply had very little time left, so I dumped every new assets I had into it.  The walls surrounding the ice is there to prevent both you and the objects you’re trying to stick from falling out, making it easier to collect things.  The objects are placed almost randomly, partly because of the chaotic nature of the ice-block.  The water blocks were intended for helping you adjust your controls, but in the end, they ended up being pretty useless.

levelCredits

And the Credits. This was actually hard to design, mainly due to tweaking the size of the breadcrumbs so you can definitely grab each text. Other than that, it’s intentionally a breadcrumb-to-breadcrumb level with no other purpose than, well, providing the credits.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!

Post-compo improvements on The Sentient Cube

I’m not exactly fond of doing this, but the complaints were too strong to ignore.  I’ve decided to create a new web build to address the issues below.  Let me be clear that you should play the original build and rate it first before playing this one.  Otherwise, that’s unfair to everyone.

Played it?  Good.  Here’s the new webplayer:

http://wp.me/P3bFDA-5m

It contains the following improvements:

  1. Significantly improved the controls.  This was done by combining several methods:
    1. Re-calculating the center of gravity to where the camera is focused
    2. Increasing the gravity on the cube you’re controlling as you get bigger.
    3. Increasing movement assistance as your cube gets bigger.
  2. Added camera controls via mouse and right-control stick on the Xbox 360 controller (only supports Windows).
  3. Fixed the Goal’s 3D text shader to not show through objects.
  4. Changed the tutorial level to be more straight.  This makes the arrow direction less deceptive for beginning players. Also added camera control instructions in that level.
  5. Rocket boosters are adjusted to be more effective.
  6. Fixed bug where newly lit objects will sometimes not stick to the cube.
  7. Added a brief 0.1 second delay before the next object sticks to the cube.  This makes the poles in “Level 1” actually collapse first before it sticks to you.  Also note that that level has changed to accommodate for this change
  8. Slightly increased the threshold necessary to pick up objects.  Only slightly, though!
  9. Picking up bouncy spheres (and potato!) no longer makes you bouncy.

Please tell me in the comments below how these improvements fare to the original build.  I really want to work this into a full game in the near-future, so the sooner I know how to improve the game, the better!

And once again, thanks for all the help!

Understanding Katamari: the level design of The Sentient Cube

Designing the levels for The Sentient Cube was a fascinating exercise, and one that provided a great insight in how Katamari Damacy was designed.  Both games have very lenient win conditions, and as such, have equally lenient level design that can be both creative and flexible.  Broadly speaking, there are two types of object placements used in The Sentient Cube: the breadcrumb and amphitheater formation.

breadcrumbFormation

Breadcrumb Formation

The breadcrumb formation is the easier one to understand, yet harder to setup.  In short, it’s a placement of increasingly larger objects placed into a trail for the player to follow.  It’s purpose is simple: to lead the player towards a specific point of interest.  This is most obvious in The Sentient Cube under the “How to Play”, “Level 3”, and “Credits” levels where they’re designed to introduce the player a new concept.  In “How To Play”, the breadcrumbs literally lead the player to the goal.  In “Level 3,” it leads the player to the rockets, which they can use to traverse through the large expanse very quickly.  Furthermore, the rest is intended to lead the player to the goal, much like “How To Play.”  Lastly, the “Credits” leads the player to each text in the game, making it more likely that they’ll spend the time to read it.

One interesting tidbits I learned from using the breadcrumb formation was that making a simple, straight trail was actually the worst way to implement this idea.  With the exception of the “How to Play” where the player needs to be guided to the goal, a straight trail feels too easy and boring.  Instead, it’s better to have the trail curve, and even place obstacles around those curves to emphasize it.  This is most evident in “Level 2” where I zig-zag the breadcrumbs; “Level 3” where it creates a small ‘C’ to lead you to the rockets; and “Level 4” where obstacles obstructs your view from seeing the next breadcrumb.

amphitheaterFormation

Amphitheater Formation

The amphitheater formation is a little less easier to understand, yet easier to implement.  In this formation, objects are placed in concentric circles with each layer consisting of similar sized objects.  As the layer gets farther away from the center, the objects gets bigger.  The formation is like that of the breadcrumbs, but in all direction.  Unlike the breadcrumb formation, amphitheater is flexible enough to allow quite a difference in size for each circle, which gives the level designer some flexibility.  This is seen in “Level 1”, “Level 2”, and “Level 4” where the objective is simply to grow big enough to roll over walls.

Similar to breadcrumb formation, variation in sizes within each layer is a lot more interesting to the player than the same size.  Additionally, each layer should increase in size exponentially rather than linearly.  Other than that, you can be pretty creative with it, making it square-shaped, putting objects at different elevations, putting gaps between cross sections, or even making them bounce.

Conclusion

Honestly, this game genre is surprisingly simple when it comes to level design.  With its loose restrictions, it’s easy to get creative on what kind of setting you’d like to create, let it be in Japan, USA, underwater, in space, etc.  Hopefully this will help and encourage others in exploring this great idea.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!

Katamari love letter: The Sentient Cube post mortem

So much fun, chaotic, fresh and sweet.
McFunkypants

Katarami + Cube + Original Design = WIN
EdoMiyamoto

I love the music. I also love the reinvention of katamari. And the visuals are fantastic. By the time that I figured out what the game was about, i had a huge smile on my face.
eteeski

The Sentient Cube

There’s something to be said about a game that, within the first 3 hours of development, felt instantly magical. It’s one of those moment where you stop asking questions about the game, and instead just make it. Nothing could go wrong.

Usually, that feeling never lasts.

I’ve went to many Game Jams before: some 48 hours, some only 8 hours, some with team of up to 7, or as low as 1. Generally, in all of these cases, I’ve always felt like I had to compromise the vision to create a more popular game. I expected this when joining Ludum Dare for the first time. After all, I’m doing this alone. The lack of resource is a significant limiting factor.

The Sentient Cube was different. For one, I never felt limited by the tools I was given. Two, I never compromised with anyone else: it was just me. And three, making and playing the game remained fun even through the bug fixing phases. I can say with great confidence that this has been one of the best projects I’ve ever made in my Software Engineering career, and the comments above more than confirms it.

Without further ado, here’s the post mortem of The Sentient Cube, and how I made it happen:

The Sentient Cube

What went right:

  1. Being prepared.
    As mentioned earlier, I’ve been to enough Game Jams to know what to expect for this event.  The only real difference I felt this time was that I was going to work alone (I rarely do that).  Just in case, however, I did get in contact with MrPhil, and he helped address parts I may not have considered, including the food situation.
  2. Having a schedule.
    My schedule was pretty simple: first 30 minutes is brainstorming, and the first day was to test an idea out.  Since this idea worked great, I went straight to developing more concrete features, using Fossil’s ticket tracker system to keep trackthem.  I aimed at submitting the game an hour earlier from the deadline, to have a decent chance at submitting the game before the site crashes, and decided to make any final touches the hour before.
  3. Great tools.
    If there’s one thing I learned from Game Jams, it’s to take as many shortcuts as possible.  Unity, Garage Band, Photoshop, and others greatly helped this capability.  Additionally, the Fossil ticket tracker proved to be a great device to prioritize which tasks were more important, such as the tutorial, score-keeping, and so forth.
  4. Minimal modelling and texturing.
    I love cel-shading, from an artistic perspective (yay, Windwaker!). Both this theme (minimalism) and Unity’s toon shader gave me a great excuse to spend the minimal amount of effort modelling and texturing. Add that with the edge-detecting post image effect, and you’ve got a masterpiece! I further minimized the work by generating the object’s color random, and automatically calculating each object’s size on loading each level.
  5. Starting with the third level.
    In what seems like a counter-intuitive decision, I made the second level first.  This was a tip I took from the famed Mario creator, Miyamoto Shigeru-san (sorry, I’m Japanese.  I have to be extra formal to this legend!), and it worked wonders.  By creating the later levels first, I got a brilliant insight at Katamari Damacy‘s level design (an article I may write later), which helped plan how to create the first tutorial level.  With the exception of Credits, the rest of the levels came very easily.

What went wrong:

  1. Realizing I forgot to put the splash icon, and spending an hour on it.
    It was a complete waste of time for an inconvenience on the player. Worse, I attempted to fix this in the last 2 hours, and realized it wasn’t worth it.
  2. Tunnel vision: the controls.
    The biggest complaints I received were the controls and the floaty physics. The thing was, I knew I had this problem, and never bothered to fix it. For some reason, I didn’t think it was as important, which in hindsight was ridiculous! First rule of game design: a game is not fun until it’s playable.
  3. The scoreboard.
    I realized after playing other people’s games that during judging, the scores and replayability of your games aren’t all that important. All judges expect the game to be playable within 5 minutes, so they wouldn’t be too concerned about the longevity of the game. Programming stats tracking takes quite a bit of time, so I felt I wasted a lot of time on a feature very few people would be concerned with.
  4. Live-streaming with webcam.
    I deliberately keep myself as transparent to the internet as possible. Using my real name as the display name on the Ludum Dare’s website is part of this. But even I have my limits in privacy, and in this case, the webcam portion of the live-streaming really went over the edge. I failed to realize until too late that you can actually see me washing the laundry, cooking food, eating, and other aspects of my life I’d rather not reveal so openly. I think the live streaming is great, but on the next event, it won’t be with the webcam (only microphone).
  5. Timelaps fail.
    I didn’t have much hard drive space left on my dev computer, so I timelapsed every 10 minutes. Terrible idea: the resulting video just flashed meaninglessly. This is hilarious in hindsight, because I had 2 external hard drives available with plenty of GB to spare.
  6. No Linux export.
    I am so very, very sorry. Signed, Arch Linux user.

What will I do next:
I’m a busy guy, so the short answer is improving on games I was already working on long before Ludum Dare. In all seriousness, though, I will revisit this game. For one, it opened my eyes on what it’s like to produce the game online for free, and this was extremely gratifying. I’ve been eyeing on Kongregate and GameJolt, so I’ll probably start working on the game to make it compatible to such sites. It’s been stated by my colleagues that the game must distinguish itself from Katamari more, so I’ll be strategizing on that while covering all the other stated complaints. Lastly, I’ll probably learn Garage Band a little more to compose better music.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!