If the idea of playing a game on an Always sanitary towel disgusts you, just imagine how I felt developing this one!
Dispite the dubious concept, this little maze game is reasonably fun. Use cursor keys to race across the maze as fast as you can, avoiding the enemy cars.
You have just 30 seconds to anticipate your opponent’s thoughts, give your troops orders and move them into position in this multiplayer ballistic fighting game. Then everyone opens fire, and another turn starts.
UPDATE! On playing this recently it seems to have been updated by someone, and broken in the process. The game now crashes often when you’re walking around, which never used to happen. What a shame.
Postmortem:
I could hardly believe it! Not only were we doing a game for the giant Star Wars Clone Wars franchise, but we’d pursuaded them to try something risky and unusual too! A custom-made ultra-light PHP back end would join random players together in an almost anonymous way over the internet so that they could battle each other rather than some shonky AI.
Not only that, but it worked too! In a little over a week, I’d built the game engine and back end and proven the concept. Then the public was unleashed on it. The server coped admirably with the strain of thousands of people playing it over and over. Success!
It could have been better, of course. Just about all things can be improved. In this game, I’d have liked to have spent a little longer getting a few of the interface details working smoother. It’s fiddly to set up shots, which is an area that could do with as little interface-friction as possible. That aside though, I’d really like to have improved the multiplayer features.
I designed the game to put a game together for every two visitors to the site. You get paired off with the next random that comes along, and you’re playing. Minimum fuss, minimum barrier to entry. My experience with lots of multiplayer games is that you get to a daunting room full of 11yo kids who are just waiting for a newbie to kick about the place. I specifically designed against that effect here by removing the ability to pick your opponent, or play them again, or even to know who they are. All you get is a rank – a single number to hint at whether they’ve played before, and whether they were any good or not.
This really works – people dive in and play in generally fair games, which is great. It also means we never have to store user accounts on the server, which is also great. Each player keeps their rank in their shared-object, and it is exchanged at the start of the game. At the end of the game, each player calculates their new rank based on the Elo chess ranking system, and stores it away for next time. Yeah, you could fiddle the number and cheat, but really, who cares? There’s no leaderboard, and no way to shout out how great you are, so there’s very little incentive to cheat. That’s the best cheat-protection system I’ve ever come across!
The downside is that whilst it’s addictive for a while, it won’t hold people for a great length of time. After a while you get bored of there being no further progression. Of not being able to chat with your opponent and of not being able to have a rematch if it was a great game. These features I’d add in another similar game.
I’d give the players a chat box, that they could use at any point especially including whilst waiting for the server to sync up and exchange the moves. I’d also add a ‘play this person again’ checkbox that appears mid-game, so if you both clicked it and left it selected, it’d arrange your next match against each other. I’d also consider an optional match-up room of some sort, so you could meet up with friends. I’d definitely let you enter a name for yourself and exchange that with the other player, so you had some idea who you were playing. Maybe allow a pictorial avatar too. And some sort of earned rankings beyond a simple number. Maybe a veteran’s medal after 10 games, a high-roller medal after they hit a rank of 1600 and so on. You could even allow different things in-game based on what they had earned. Maybe veterans get the ability to pick their fights more carefully. Perhaps high ranked people get access to new weapons when playing against other high ranked people. Giving the player some sort of progression, something to work towards, would go a long way.
Lessons:
Pick your favourite character from Charlie and Lola and help them Hooley Hoop their way through this simple kids game. Tap left and right in time with the hoop to keep it spinning.
Combine the best stats of all the fighters on Nuts TV into one super-character, then use him to beat all comers in this Top-Trumps style game.
Use the mouse to dodge incoming missiles in this fast paced side scrolling action game. How long can you last?
Postmortem:
Behind this basic looking game lies a well tuned piece of gameplay. Anyone can pick this game up in seconds and it feels good to float about on a flying surfboard, but mastery is a tricky task. At it’s heart, there’s just one task – dodge missiles. And only two types of missile too – straight ones and seeking ones. Behind the scenes though there’s a subtle level progression that takes you through some 15 or so different stages of types of attacks. From one at a time, through waves of attacks, to an endless onslaught. You can really get into a rythem of dodging and it feels great when you get into that flow state, diving one way or another almost omnisciently.
The game played awful for a while due to not being able to see/anticipate where the next missile was coming from before it was on top of you. The addition of arrows at the edges that grew as the missiles got closer helped a lot, then the final touch of a launch sound that subtly prompts the player to look out for a new arrow finalised the gameplay feel.
The motion of the Surfer himself mattered a lot too. He needs to be flingable, but also controllable. To move fast when needed, but also to have precise control when required. This is achieved with a fairly complex system of accelerating towards the mouse faster the further away he is, and progressively more damping the closer to the mouse he gets so he doesn’t overshoot and oscillate wildly.
The game looks like a sideways scroller, whizzing over trees at a tremendous rate. The background scroll is a simple looping tween however, and all the gameplay is static on top. Even when I tell myself this whilst playing, it’s a powerful enough illusion to give me a real sense of speed.
One of the few issues I have with the game is that it only becomes really fun for the player when they are challenged to their skill level. When you’re learning to play, the game ramps up appropriately, but when you’ve played a few times already, you have to wade through the early easy levels to get to the fun bits. There wasn’t much scope for changing this in the project, but if I were to revisit this game I’d think up something to let you play on from where you were before.
Lessons:
Dodge the meanies and collect all the dots in this isometric Pacman-style game. It’s not massively original, but the graphics and sound are lovely, and it plays great too. Collect the ingredients for a big breakfast amongst the 10 uniquely psychadellic levels to get the chance to take out the baddie trucks. Combos earn you bigger points if you can manage them without getting caught.
I created this TV listings Flash application to go on the new Warner Bros TV on demand site. You can zoom in and out to see what shows are scheduled to start and end over the next few weeks.
Use cursor keys to drive in this high-speed racing game. Hit spacebar to deploy your car’s weapon, and shift to launch into the air. Can you beat all the other players, which are recordings of other real human drivers?
Postmortem:
Ah, a chance to do a pure arcade racing game, with actual racing cars rather than trollies or reindeer or airport baggage karts! Brilliant. I was determined to make a really good Flash racing game, with arcade but partially realistic handling, fun tracks, weapons and a little bit of a multiplayer twist.
AI in racing games is hard. Even the big name consold games don’t get it right, and have either unrealistically good AI drivers or comically bad ones. In a lot of games, the computer AI just bulldozes through your car sticking to its pre-programmed lines like a limpet. It feels unfair, and it’s not good enough! Rather than build a crappy AI for this game, I came up with the idea of recording people’s gameplay whilst they were racing and storing them on the server (stored by their starting position and overall performance). Then, when a new game is started, the server puts you in a random grid position and sends out 8 replays – one from each remaining grid slot. They are picked at random, but in a skewed way so that you play against a mix of the best, worst and mediocre players out there. That’s self-ballancing – the range of opponents you meet is determined by the actual range of skills out there, from good to bad. There is a par time over which your score isn’t recorded to avoid skewing the results towards people who just leave the game running forever, but other than that it’s a level playing field. This strategy really worked for this game, and everyone gets opponents who play roughly at their level – and some who are faster that they can work towards beating.
The big problem with storing and serving replays is that there’s a lot of data. AS2 doesn’t handle binary data very well except in pre-given formats that are delt with internally like jpegs, sounds or SWFs. So, a replay consists of a great long string of car coordinates etc in a text format. There’s very little encoding, as I found that simply processing the raw strings was enough of a task for Flash, let alone processing an encoding on top of that. I’d have liked to have compressed the strings, or base-64 encoded them or similar, but it just wasn’t feasable. The remaining problem was that each play of the game required about a 1mb download of replay data from the server, which was very bad for bandwidth when the number of plays started to climb dramatically. We had to trim back the number of replays sent to the client to just 4, then 2, then none as the load increased. The URL presented here allows you to have all 8 opponents switched on, as it’s going to be pretty low-load from this website.
Car handling was a major area of improvement in this game over previous racers I’ve built. The cars have a single giant virtual tyre that they run on, which resists sideways motion and promotes forwards motion. When the car turns, this virtual tyre turns with it, causing the car to grip and change direction. This is reasonably analogous to the way a real car turns in many ways, and leads to a decent feel. Rather than programming in effects like sliding if you turn too fast, or if you land a jump facing sideways to the direction of travel, it just naturally falls out of the physics model. Likewise, slow speed turning works better this way too. The model is also very tunable to different car styles, so some are fast but have little grip, some have too much grip and are hard to control, some are ballanced and so on. There is no ‘best’ car, although there tends to be a couple per track that people end up using predominantly over the others.
A big part of the Speed Racer film was the twisting looping jumping corkscrewing tracks. In a 2D game you’re limited to how far you can recreate these effects, but the tracks certainly do have these stunts in them, which is a nice effect. Even better, you can short-cut them in cunning ways using your car’s jump ability, which adds a little depth.
Another requirement from the film is the use of car-to-car weapons. This poses a problem with the replay technology, as a replay is by its nature an asynchronous event. It does not contain data saying how the human player reacted to being hit by a weapon at any random point. The simple rules I adopted were to never fire weapons at the human player (ie, weapon usage is not recorded in the replays), and if a replay car gets hit, to simply spin it around in a straight line along its direction of travel until it falls off the track edge.
The other thing you can’t do with a replay is car-to-car collisions. You can’t purturb the replay car from its course, as that would put you ‘off’ the replay line with no obvious way to get back on it. You can’t just slow or collide the human player either, since that would get recorded in their replay and when played back to another player, would look strange as they randomly react to a collision that didn’t happen. There was nothing better I could think of than simply allowing cars to overlap. Not completely satisfying, but that’s all I could do.
As cheating features quite heavily in the film races, I’ve deliberately allowed for it in the game. If you use your car’s jump facility carefully, there are a number of places you can take shortcuts by jumping sections of track. It’s risky of course – you stand a fair chance of falling off the track instead of saving time, but that’s good for ballance.
There’s an issue with the pace of the game and some of the cars. If the player picks one of the faster cars, it’s hard to see what’s coming and to keep the car on the track whilst cornering. Falling off track is punishing to your time at least, but doesn’t throw you out of the race because it’s really rather easy to do. If you opt for a slower, more controllable car, you stand less chance of keeping up overall.
Performance is vital in a game like this. Keeping the framerate high was always a priority, right from the beginning. There’s a huge amount of stuff bitmap-cached to aid this. The background is a short loop, scrolled around as required and flipped to the other side of the loop when needed. There are a few layers of it, but each is just a series of bitmap cached effects. The track itself is created from segments at the start of the game. The track exists as metadata in the code, as a simple array of segment IDs. The IDs are itterated as the track is created at the start, and each segment is instantiated into its own movieclip from an end-marker clip in the previous segment, then bitmap-cached. This allows for much bigger tracks, as it neatly gets round the 2880px bitmap limits by having lots of smaller ones instead. It does take a while to produce the track at the start though. This is what’s happening behind the silver “creating track” screen before the race. Without the bitmap caching, the length of time that screen appears for (several seconds on most machines) would happen to be the in-game framerate too!
Generating the track in segments gives me a nice convenient way to tell how far through the track each car is. They are hit-tested against the segment they are in and the next one too, and their position is updated when they are in the ‘next’ segment. If they are over no piece of track, their position is hit-tested against all segments as they may be about to perform a shortcut jump. Whilst in the air however, they are considered to be on the piece of track they last touched. That’s where they get reset to if they crash, and where they are positioned in terms of the race order.
Lessons:
Take control of your favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in this classic beat-em-up. Use cursor keys and C + D to fight increasingly tough stop-motion baddies photographed from the real toys.
Postmortem:
The Street Fighter 2 games and their endless series of sequels have long been favorites of mine. There’s something about the feel and the flow that is just right in those games. Skill really plays a part, which I just haven’t found to be the case in a lot of Street Fighter’s competitors. So, when we decided to build a beat-em-up for the new Turtles movie (which is frighteningly bad by the way, don’t bother watching it if at all possible), I was quite excited.
The timeframe for this game was a little over a week – 6 or 7 days of code work alongside a day or so of photographing the characters in absurd ninja poses. It turned out an illness shot around the office for most of that week too. I don’t get ill a lot, but this particular bug hit me hard and I distinctly remember coding away at the game with my head slumped on the desk just in front of the keyboard, peering up at the screen to see what I’d typed! It’s a minor miracle that the game even got finished, let alone was a half-competent fighting game.
I was determined to get a lot of my favorite parts from the Street Fighter games into this, and for the most part I think, managed it. I wanted all the moves to be different from character to character (achieved). I wanted special moves based on quick performance of key-combos (achieved). I wanted freeform hit-combos against the opposing player (achieved). I wanted the AI player to put up a decent fight (achieved), and to be able to play to the character’s strengths in set-combos (achieved). I wanted it to play fairly, so the computer had its own set of virtual controls that it pressed and clicked just as if it were a human player (achieved).
In fact, that last feature means that with a bit of code hacking, you could play as any character, and the computer could play as any character. You could arrange for computer-Vs-computer battles too, which were fun. That and a high framerate actually made for an excellent character ballancing tool – I ran lots of computer-Vs-computer battles to test out the various pairings, as well as playing lots of the combinations too.
We hit upon the idea to use the real plastic figures, and play the game out as if it were literally a fight between the toys themselves. This works fairly well, but took a lot of work to take the photographs and process them into usable graphics. Also, the range of movement of some of the toys’ limbs left a lot to be desired. The turtles themselves are largely OK, but the baddies are mixed quality at best! The lady fighter in particular looks gangly and strange in a lot of her moves. I’d have liked more animation frames too, but we just didn’t have time to prepare all the extra graphics we’d have needed.
The game was widely played, and received mixed ratings. Lots of people ‘got’ it, saw how it was similar to Street Fighter and enjoyed it. Lots more were used to the more button-bashing type of fighting game, and didn’t like it at all. That’s fair comment really – and represents a failing of the game to lead them into the right techniques and strategies. Perhaps more of a training mode than it ended up with would have been helpful here.
Lessons:
Use your mouse to wind back the mallet, then unleash it on a Scissor Sister when they light up and make a sound. The harder you can hit, the more you’ll score in this whack-a-mole style game.
Watch for the real-time ripple effect wherever you hit. It’s a bigger effect if you wind the mallet back further, and I haven’t seen this effect done elsewhere on the web yet. It’s produced by animating a displacement colour map filter over the clip that holds the Sisters.
RSS 2.0 full site