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This week not a lot of progress on the Dev Pipe project was made, but I did make a different game! Last weekend, April 11th – 13th was the Spring St. Louis Game Jam at Webster University and I participated as part of an extremely talented team of 4. We created a platformer called Metempsychosis.

Download it at http://www.stlgamejam.com/game_jam_game/metempsychosis/ to play it now or continue reading to find out more about it.

The themes for this Game Jam were created using a Random game design generator. You can try it out at this link: http://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen. Our team had a pretty difficult time with this challenge. The theme we got was “An adventure game where you go to war with manbeasts while balancing your karma.” We spent a very long time deliberating on what this game could be. We went back and forth between making a point and click adventure game where you play as a female in the modern day dating scene or a story-heavy game in a fantasy universe. As the team kind of felt out what these ideas would become, over time it became apparent we would never come up with something we could agree on.

Eventually someone mentioned, “what about something like Limbo?” and we changed our focus to more of a platformer. Suddenly things clicked for everyone and we quickly threw together a high level design that involved playing through levels that end in a moral decision that gives you different powers that evolve over the course of the game based on your choices. And with that decision made we quickly got to work.

The game made slow progress over the first day, but suddenly came together on Saturday, allowing us Sunday to polish it up and try to fit in the missing pieces of the vision. We all walked away feeling incredibly proud of what we’d accomplished, and the rest of the team has continued working on it after the jam. Keep an eye on the download site above because I have a feeling what you download today will be just a shadow of what’s there in a few weeks.

That said, this is supposed to be a development blog for Project Punchvania. As I mentioned before, with the Game Jam smack dab in the middle of my work week I didn’t accomplish much, but I was able to build something that imports maps from Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/) so that level design can be done easily and can be quickly iterated on over time. Having good tools will be critical to our development process as we’re hoping to quickly iterate on all aspects of the game until it’s at a point where we can release something we’re proud of. I’ll talk more about level creation in next week’s entry. See you then!

This week I’ll talk about how we decided on a platform and technology to use to make the game, mostly because I spent all week experimenting with our options. Stephen and I set out knowing that we were making a game that is very heavily dependent on having a controller in hand. It could work on a touchscreen mobile device, but it would be awkward given how we want the game to control. This basically leaves us with very few options these days.

We could make a game for Playstation 4, Wii U, or Xbox One, but the requirements for even getting a dev kit involve setting up a business and going through a lot of overhead that might not be worth it for our small 8-week game. We could make it for XNA and publish it on Xbox 360, but Microsoft basically killed it off and I don’t get the impression that it has many players these days. We could publish on Ouya, but I feel like nobody takes it very seriously. That leaves us with the Playstation Vita as a last resort. Thankfully, the Vita is a really great system where our game won’t get totally lost in a flood of releases.

Unfortunately, because we don’t want to deal with any overhead it means we’ll likely be going the Playstation Mobile route rather than native Vita. This means we lose access to certain hardware features, can’t do cool things like trophies, and are put in this weird offshoot store that not many people visit, but there are some perks as well. I’ve gotten approved as a developer already, so I am ready to deploy on an actual Vita to test the game and publishing games should be relatively painless. We’re considering taking an episodic approach, where we release the game in separate parts and grow it over time. This might not be possible if we were in the Vita App Store, but it should be with the reduced oversight that comes from targeting the Playstation Mobile store.

With that in mind, I spent the week experimenting with the Playstation Mobile SDK. It has a few nice features, but overall it’s kind of a mess. The SDK itself seems relatively competent, but the documentation and example projects are poorly written and not very comprehensive. I tried for several days to get the Physics 2D Framework to work and ended up getting pretty close, but not being able to move at all once the character came to a complete standstill. I probably could have figured it out, but my gut reaction was that if I was having trouble so soon I would likely end up running into more roadblocks. It was time for a change.

I downloaded Unity and starting thinking really hard about going through a tutorial. I’ve heard from many people that Unity isn’t great for 2D games and I envisioned a future where I spent a week learning the basics and ending up feeling like it wasn’t going to work. It’s then that I remembered Monogame. Monogame is a cross-platform port of Microsoft’s indie game development framework XNA. I have a lot of experience in XNA, but haven’t yet attempted to convert any of my projects over. If it would work though, it would be perfect. I called my local developer friend Jesse Chounard from Third Party Ninjas for a second opinion and he affirmed my choice. So Monogame it is!

Unfortunately, since I spent all week picking out a development tool I’m a lot less far along than I planned to be. That’s what right now is for though! Time to write some code!

-Wes

I’ve decided to challenge myself by pairing with a local game designer/artist to make a fun, polished game in under 8 weeks. I’ll be chronicling my progress in these posts, which I’ll cross post everywhere, including my own blog at https://www.superwes.com

One of more prolific and awesome game development shops in St. Louis is Butterscotch Shenanigans, which consists of two brothers, Sam and Seth Coster, who make really great Android and iOS games. A few weeks ago they made a post offering a mentorship course called 8-bit Dev Pipe to virtually anyone in St. Louis that was willing to take it seriously.

I was intrigued when it went up because I’ve been trying for many years to work up the motivation to actually get something to a releasable state. I often work on games until they’ve proven or disproven themselves and then move on to something else, afraid to get myself too invested in them. I have a folder with literally 30 unfinished games in it (I just counted) that I haven’t seen through to the end and I saw this mentorship as an opportunity to be accountable for finishing something and humble myself by accepting that I have a lot to learn about certain areas of game development. I wanted to participate, but I didn’t have a team.

Enter Stephen.

Stephen is a designer at local game development house Simutronics. He commented on the Coster’s dev-pipe announcement saying that he would love to do pixel art on a team, but didn’t have a project. I didn’t say anything at the time, but we randomly bumped into each other at Buffalo Wild Wings and decided to pair up.

We reached out to the Costers to see if they were still accepting applicants and they offered to let us apply. After a short application we were in! But what game to make? Stephen and I tossed a few ideas back and forth, eventually settling on one that uses the core mechanics from something in my unfinished backlog. We’re going to work on a Metroidvania that uses punching as the only interaction. Want to jump? Punch the ground! Want to open a door? Punch it! What to talk to someone? Punch them! It’s a simple verb with a lot of clearly practical uses.

Our first meeting was Tuesday, April 1st, and after a few hours of high level discussion we forged a path forward. Our current goal is getting a character on the screen and making basic movements and interactions that work well and feel tight. Theoretically, if we can nail this goal the rest should be cake. Check back next week for videos of our progress! A tertiary goal is to make my bed every day. I guess I’ll find out why in a few weeks!

If you can read the writing, you can see the milestone goals for each week below. I’ll be trying to post progress updates every week so you can follow along if you’re interested.

This is going to be fun. I’ll post progress videos along the way, and in the end you’ll hopefully be able to download and play the game yourself. Stephen will be posting design and art updates as well, so you should be able to follow this project from both angles. Please post your comments of encouragement or general suggestions below. The game isn’t fully designed and we’re listening, so this is a great opportunity to help make it into the kind of game you want to play! Let’s do this together!

Over the weekend of Jan 25-27, 2013 I co-organized and participated in the St. Louis Global Game Jam 2013. See my posts over at http://www.stlgamejam.com for more posts by me. I’m particularly proud of this post: http://www.stlgamejam.com/everyones-a-designer/, which is about what the role of a designer is at a Game Jam.

Our jam site was the 19th biggest in the world, and the 4th largest in the United States. We had 143 registered participants, and created 20 games altogether.

My team consisted of me, Andrew Rauscher, Clayton, Maxwell Oldt, Jordan Covert, and Giovanni Baldi. We team used Sifteo Cubes as the target platform. I bought a set in December, and I’ve been thinking about how having three cubes would make an awesome two player game where each player has a cube and the third cube sits between them as a scoreboard. This was a perfect opportunity to create a game like that and learn a bit of C++, which nobody on the team had ever coded in before the event. It was challenging to move outside of my comfort zone, but it was extremely gratifying to learn what I’m capable of learning and producing in just 48 hours.

The theme of this Game Jam was “sound of a beating heart”, and our team interpreted that as the feeling of being in love. As a result, the game we created is Love Tester 1985. It’s a game that’s meant to be played by lovers/potential lovers. Love Tester 1985 is structured as a series of cooperative mini-games where a pair can only win by communication,  knowing each other, and working together.

The game begins by having the players put their cubes together to form a heart. When they do this, the game notices and a heart on the scoreboard lights up. A few seconds later, the first game begins. This gets the players used to interacting with each other using the cubes and gets them in the mood to play cooperatively.

The first mini-game is a question that tests how well the players know each other. Each of the cubes displays “Me” and “You”, but one of the words is upside down so the player has to flip their cube over in order to highlight their answer. For example, if the question is “Who is more ‘experienced’?” one of the players might hold the cube so that it reads “Me”, and the other would hold it so that it reads “You,” and when the players press their cubes together they would win the mini game. The hope is that the couples talk about the results and get to know each other better or playfully fight about the answer.

Next up is a super fun cooperative dexterity mini game. In this mini game the players’ cubes show a different color on each of the four sides and the center cube shows a solid color. The players need to push their cubes together so that the color of the touching edges matches the color of the center cube. When they do this, the color on the center cube changes and they need to quickly rotate their cubes to match again. This is really fast paced and fun! We got this game working on Friday night and immediately knew we were onto something.

Next up is another question round, just like the first game. This is followed by a communication game where each player’s cube has a four-sided shape that they hide from the other player and attempt to explain which edge fits into one of the edges of the other player’s cube without peeking. This is a unique use of the cubes, and an interesting design since it relies on the players willfully hiding information from each other to be fun.

When the players are done with this game, their total score is tallied up and they are given a “Love Tester” like label, such as “Hot Stuff” or “Frigid”.

This is as far as we got during the Game Jam, but ideally we’d like to polish some of these games and make even more mini-games. Thankfully, we might have that opportunity! There’s a contest that I’m using this post to enter, and if we make it to the second round, Andrew and I are going to put some time into making these games even cooler and adding in some of the other mini-game ideas that we liked.

If you happen to have a set of these cubes you can download and install our game right now (it doesn’t play well in the Sifteo cubes simulator):

https://www.superwes.com/lovetester/loveTester1985.zip

Also check out a video of people playing it!

* Special thanks to Jason Lemons and Kayli Elizabeth for modeling in these screenshots

Shortly after my game/lecture on Game Design Using In-Game Editors a call went out for lunch and learn presentations at my work. I wanted to expand the audience for my talk so I decided to give the same lecture again, figuring it wouldn’t take much effort. After committing to present, I went back and played the game again only to realize that the topic didn’t translate perfectly to my new audience. The programmers at work might share the same desire to make games, but they’re definitely more the type of people who want to make games as a programming challenge rather than a design one.

I decided to modify my game in an attempt to challenge their preconceptions of what makes a good game. I’m not sure how successful I was, but if nothing else, this new version prompts discussion, as it asserts a lot of somewhat controversial things about what constitutes good game design. Unlike my previous demo, I’ve published the text of the game below. In my previous post I explained how to download Knytt and play the level, so go back to that post if you’d like to play the game.

The updated files for this new talk are:

• Knytt Stories Level Folder (to drop in the Worlds directory) – Wes-Ehrlichman-Game-Design-is-Art-not-Science.zip
• Knytt Stories Importable Binary Format – Wes Ehrlichman – Game Design is Art not Science.knytt.bin

I’m assuming most of you won’t play the game though, so I’ll go ahead and post the text of the game below for all the lazy folks out there. As you read through these pretend like each one is on a sign post in the world.

• The theme of today’s talk is…



• Game Design is an art, not a science. Don’t let technology prevent you from making games.
• And. Uhh, press “S” to Jump. (That’s not the theme)
• You don’t have to be a programmer to try your hand at game design.
• This may seem obvious, but if you’re like me, the technical hurdles sometimes scare you from getting started.
• Creating is hard work, and if you want to make a game, the amount of effort may not seem worth it.
• When that happens, we can handle it in a few ways:
• (For this lecture we’re ignoring the “man the hell up and learn something” option)
• <- Create using something easy
• Never create anything ->
• Good choice! Going the other way has never solved anything.
• Today I will show you one of the simplest and most versatile tools I know of to make a platformer.
• Some of what I show will hopefully inspire you. This presentation was made in just a few nights.
• This is a freeware game called Knytt Stories. As you can see, it has a pretty snazzy level editor!



• The game isn’t actually about reading signs, I made it like this because it’s more fun than PowerPoint.
• Go to the next room and grab the high jump!
• This lets you jump higher so that you can reach taller platforms.
• You could probably use this in some pretty advanced designs, right?
• To advance from here you’ll need to climb a wall. Get the wall climb!
• Shoot! someone must have “forgotten” to put in the wall climb ability!
• Better go to the level editor and add it.
• Put Object 4 from Bank 0 on layer 4. Don’t forget to save before quitting! (press down when on the light)
• So yeah, that was the level editor. You can also add in enemies, people, hazards, and pretty birdies.
• You may have thought about how cool it would be to make a game like this before.
• You probably thought it was too hard. From scratch it is! But using this you can design one easily.
• Moves like a high jump, wall climb, super speed, and umbrella are very inspiring.
• It was super easy to throw this together and it’s even easier to do something that’s actually fun!
• I’m not trying to sell you on Knytt, just that you that you don’t need to program to design games.
• Now that you’re 100% convinced, let’s talk more about game design.
• Game Design is more about psychology than physics engines.
• This is why there is a need to inspire non-programmers to experiment with game design.
• And this is why tools like this one are becoming ever more important.
• A game with good design teaches the player how to play without realizing that they’re learning.
• This doesn’t happen in the programming, it happens in the content creation.
• Consider how game design has changed over time.



• In the early days, the goal was to take money from the player 25 cents at a time.
• It was all about preventing the player from progressing.
• What’s fun about games is learning, so the player would pay another quarter to try a different strategy.



• Players were good about learning, but games weren’t always very good at teaching.
• Asking the player to learn grew naturally from the challenge, so designers didn’t have to work as hard to teach.
• Since arcades began disappearing, this idea has made a 180.
• Designers now want players to play as long as they want without getting frustrated.
• Though the goals have changed, what’s fun about games hasn’t: learning to become better.
• This sort of put designers in rough spot.
• They want their games to be engaging, but they don’t want the player to fail and quit.
• Games accomplished this by becoming better at teaching.
• Challenge and complexity increase at such a rate that the player barely realizes they’re improving.
• But challenge and complexity have to increase so that the player stays engaged.
• A good game is a good teacher.
• It repeats its lesson just enough that the student can learn it, but not so often that they stop listening.



• If this sounds difficult, that’s because it is. You can’t get there by simply having a cool idea for a game.
• And you can’t REALLY teach by throwing a bunch of signs up in place of a powerpoint.
• You need to let the player learn through play.
• You have to think about what the player is going to do when presented with a certain situation.
• You have to account for the choices they make with an interesting and believable outcome.
• Push D to use this umbrella!
• It’s not something you get better at by programming game logic.
• And playing games will only get you so far.



• You have to design levels to improve.
• You might design so that the player goes right, when in actuality they tend to go left.
• This has obvious and direct parallels to software usability testing.
• But that’s a talk for another day and another game.
• It’s boring to have dead ends.
• So you’ve got to lead them somewhere interesting.
• For now I’ll leave you with this:
• Remember how I said that you don’t need to program to make games?
• This game, Knytt Stories, (including its level editor) was made using a drag and drop tool.
• By one Person.
• There’s no reason you can’t make something even better!
• Get out there and create!



• Thanks for playing!

And that’s it for the game! After the lunch and learn we had an interesting conversation about what constitutes teaching and learning within the context of a game. If you’d like to continue the discussion or have any other comments about the text of the presentation please leave them below. If you’d like to give a similar presentation, contact me and I’ll do what I can to help.

As a bonus for reaching this far I’m posting a link to a Kyntt stories level I made a few years ago as part of a forum I frequently visit. The idea behind this level was that several different people would all work on different parts of the same level with no forehand knowledge of what the person before them did. The person in charge of the idea sent out a template with all of the other sections blocked off, leaving you no idea what they did. The result is a varied, uneven level that’s surprisingly fun!

• Select Button – From Saltwater Breach.knytt.bin

On the evening of Monday March 7th I gave a talk at the St. Louis Game Developer MeetUp Group about using in-game level editors as outlets for game design creativity. The theme honestly felt like a bit of a stretch, but it’s a lesson I think a lot more people should pay attention to. It may seem like I’m preaching to the choir since this is a game developer meetup group, but we have a lot of nontechnical attendees who sometimes seem to get lost in the more advanced talks.

Regardless, I think everyone should hear this. A lot of people want to be game designers, but when it comes down to it, the most common excuse is that they aren’t an artist or a programmer. That excuse is getting further and further from legitimacy every single day, and this talk is meant to be a motivator that broadens people’s understanding of what’s possible in easily available, high-level toolsets.

I would publish the text of the talk here, but the talk wasn’t actually done in text – a majority of it took place within or surrounding levels I designed specifically for this discussion. To experience the talk, follow the steps below. If you would like to forgo the level creation part you can simply read along by downloading the level in a Knytt Stories importable format, but I suggest following the steps below for the full experience.

1. Download version 1.2.1 of Knytt Stories and unzip it into a local directory
2. Drop the contents of this zip file into the “Worlds” directory
3. Launch Knytt Stories and start playing. Come back when you get to the level editor part and I’ll explain what you need to do. This section should be blatantly obvious.
4. The editor should look like the image below. If it doesn’t, navigate to room x998y1001 using the arrow keys or by clicking on the map in the lower left to select a room to edit. It should look like the picture below.



5. Select Object 4 from the system pallet. To do this, make sure that Bank 0 is selected (far upper-right), and left click on the “OBJ” number below it until OBJ 4 is selected.
6. Now click on the play area to place the Wall Climb ability wherever you would like (preferably on the ground).
7. Choose File > Save or hit Control-S to save the game.
8. Launch the game again and continue from your last save.

You’ll notice that this demo doesn’t have very many enemies or opportunities to die. I did this on purpose because the demonstration would not have been very interesting for people to watch if the player kept dieing. Knytt Stories has plenty of enemies available though, and you can make some seriously devious levels. When you’re done reading get to it!

After the Knytt Stories part of the talk I showed off some levels I created in the PS3 game Little Big Planet 2. I didn’t do this to show how cool I am (but I am pretty cool!), I did it to demonstrate that getting a level from your head into game form isn’t as hard as you might think. You’ll need a PS3 and a copy of Little Big Planet 2 to fully experience this, but if you don’t have one you can still get the gist of what was created by reading on.

A few months ago, the members of our MeetUp group drew levels on paper for a platformer we’re slowly working toward creating. Moving these levels from concept to implementation in Little Big Planet 2 took just a few nights. Below are the levels that were drawn up, followed by links to the Little Big Planet 2 equivalent. You can add them to your Little Big Planet 2 game directly from the links.

John Anderson’s Level Design

John’s Rock Level

Steve G’s Level Design (only the top half was made)

Reactors

I embellished each of these levels slightly to make them easier to implement and more fun. In the first one I added a lot of collectibles to give people a reason to explore the empty space. In the second level there weren’t explicit instructions on how the platforms should act, so I took the liberty of making the movement of the platforms into a puzzle itself. Watching where they go and how their actions change as you destroy the reactors is a big part of what I’m hoping makes this level interesting. The core idea of the original level is there, but it’s enhanced to give the level a theme of increasing chaos as the reactors are destroyed.

I think everyone got something out this discussion, but even if they didn’t, at least I had fun making the levels. There’s a lot going on in the St. Louis Game Development scene right now and I don’t want anyone to feel like they can’t be a part of it. I genuinely feel that everyone can make games, and if you’re not already a part of the scene the best place to get started is by attending the St. Louis Game Developer Meetup. Scratch that, the best place to get started is by creating something today. Grab some tools and get started!

Relevant Links from talk:

Meetup Page for this meeting

Knytt Stories Download

Auntie Pixelante Indie Games Rant

Little Big Planet Community

Multimedia Fusion Homepage

News on the Infamous 2 Mission Creator