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Rumour has it there may be a few more posts about to surface on Psyncinteractive.com… Though purely because I said that there will never be another post again!

As a child I had many hobbies, countless attempts to make boats out of Lego that didn’t sink, building dens and making films with my dad’s camcorder to name but a few. I think it’s fair to say I’ve always enjoyed the creative side of everything.

I was fascinated by all things interactive. Literally anything, Bamboozle on teletext was as good as it got! Until I got a second hand Commadore 16 then Rolf Harris’s animator, the amazing 2 frame animation application that took 20 odd minuets to load, was spectacular. I remember designing games for the Atari 2600 on sheets of lined paper with the intention of posting them off to Atari HQ because of course that’s how games get made. Eventually someone explained that I wasn’t going to get any response from such company and so the quest to make things interactive began.

The first attempt came in the form of a terribly spelt, barely legible adventure book, you remember those? “The lord of the frogs stands in front of you, you think to yourself how odd it is his breath smells of tic-tac’s.
To swing your massive fist at it’s minty face turn to page 17
To french the rubbery sod turn to page 8
To walk past it turn to page 11″, you know, those sort of books.
I never read any myself, they didn’t sound much cop and nor was mine, made absolutely no sense, though was full of dinosaurs! I don’t recommend any budding game designer try this, it’s not the most rewarding thing in the world…

The next low tech approach I remember trying was to invent new rules for old board games (these too featured mostly dinosaurs) which were a little more exciting, but still very much not worth the hassle! Eventually computers came along that had MS Paint and so some real designing could take place, kinda. Using techniques previously learnt from making bad book games it was obvious the way to make a real computer game would be to get rid of those silly pages and replace them with bitmaps. This time the games featured less dinosaurs and mostly kids that got bullied at school (amazingly non of whome were myself!). With a badly drawn nasty picture of one of the poor chaps and pixely text at the bottom of the picture the new inspiring game play went something like this:

“the lord of the nob-ends stands in front of you. You think to yourself how odd it is his breath smells of cat-balls.
To swing your massive fist at it’s pussy face open 2.BMP
To french the rubbery sod open GAY.BMP
To walk past it open 3.BMP”

True, it wasn’t the most innovative or mature content, but it was a nice introduction into the creative thinking necessary to make a computer game with no technical knowledge. There was also the slight disadvantage that you could only fit 4-5 bitmaps on a floppy disk, so not the most economical thing either.

When school eventually taught us about Microsoft Access, it was obvious the database driven wonder could be used for slightly less cruder gaming, which meant using real buttons to navigate (all of which were totally visible as there was no opacity control) and every time a sound played it had to open up in a separate window. It was a big load of rubbish, but it did have clip art which meant you could fit more than 4 pictures on a floppy disk! Eventually Power Point came along and Jim will take it from there.

This is all well and good and it turned out ok for me the lonely designer with no code skills, but had the events Jim described not happened, how could one go about making a game without a programmer?

Back in the day this was, to my knowledge, basically impossible. There are now a number of tools and even games for you to get creative with. Little Big Planet for example is a game I’d have loved to get my hands on back in the days of Rolf Harris’s animation studio. There are also a range of tools from the game makers that allow you with no knowledge of such things to put games together.

game making tools

2D and retro yoyo  game  maker
3D Game maker
3D First person Shooter creator

So, it is absolutely possible to go about this madness with only ideas and an ability to make pictures, but personally I have no interest in these any more. Once you’ve been lucky enough to find people that can program and you have put together a game from scratch, I guarantee you’ll never want to try and make a game using someone else’s tools. A game needs 2 half’s, one creative and one technical, but until you’ve been lucky enough to find someone to fill the other half you’ve no excuses to not be making cracking games!

That’s not the kind of destruction I’m talking about here though. I’m talking about the various game engines, and I use the term very loosely (as you’ll know doubt have seen in other articles), that have been unable to cope with the stresses we’ve placed on the poor souls and as they’ve failed, in turn our hopes and dreams have failed too. Oh yes, an awful lot of things have fallen to pieces just as they began to look like they could be our saviour.

The first time I can really recall this happening was during the first attempted development of Zip n’ West, when we were using Flash MX as a game engine. It all began so well, John was more than happy working out key frame animation and the like. I’d discovered that actionscript was essentially javascript and therefore very easy to code. There were also massive amounts of tutorials and forums that we could turn to if we ran into difficulties. I’d started producing a working prototype of the game and as time passed I coded more and more features to accompany the wonderful imagery that was coming my way from the other lads. We had a grand plan in place of how the game would play out from start to finish, that was admittedly probably far too grand for us to achieve at the time, but that was pretty standard so we weren’t worried about that at all.

During the development we found ourselves repeatedly asking the same question, “Why, if there are all these articles showing you how to do brilliant things in flash, hadn’t the people who wrote them made a game like we were instead of phaffing around on forums?”. Well, soon enough the answer became all too apparent. Whilst flash was wonderful at all the little features we wanted to use in our game, when you tried to put them all together it failed miserably.

Essentially flash was not designed to be used to create the kind of game that we wanted to. Our plan was quite simply far too grand for it. We’d pushed flash further than it should ever have been pushed at that time, and it had broken. It was the most productive we’d ever been at that point and although we’d learned a valuable lesson, it had been a painful way to do it. It left us with no choice but to abandon the game without really having anything to move on to, which was the first time we’d found ourselves in that situation.

My advice to you is the same advice that’s lead us to where we are now, there’s a reason people all over the world are out there making games the hard way, that reason is simple, because it’s the best way.

We’ve essentially covered this topic without spelling it out as I’m about to. After Jim’s very lovely powerpoint article, I got to thinking about the ill fated Hydris and it’s sequels and came to the conclusion that it’s all the fault of bloody ambition! It has genuinely killed many, many projects. I attributed the death of untitled “Space Horror” to the dreaded 60% in an earlier article, though in retrospect it never even got that far, it never got beyond concept art and a few 3D models. The ambition had utterly creamed that project before it had a chance. At the time, our greatest achievement was a slideshow, but Johnny Ambition had visions of Resident Evil bettering gaming! How was this going to be made? I’ve no idea, but Hydris was definitely worth jilting for it.

One of the few images from Untitled Space Horror

It’s a relative of the same beast that climbs lamp posts shouting “sequel!”, the ambition either outgrows the current project or guts it before it reaches the starting blocks. The Space Horror game is a good example of this. Our untitled survival horror game (set in space, if you hadn’t guessed) began with a prison riot… there it is, the first two words, the first two dominos falling in a very short line of domino shaped dreams, killing the game to bits.

I think this is definitely something that comes with experience. During the dark days of the even darker basic, I remember countless forum posts from people saying, “I’m making a massive multiplayer online game”… no you’re not, you’ve got an idea for something and probably some mad computer skills, but that is still a little unrealistic. Don’t stop thinking about it though! Ambition is a great, great thing, if you have an idea for something mental and completely unachievable, write it the hell down! The more you understand what you’re capable of achieving in any given time frame, the more your original grand idea will evolve to fit and become workable. Zip n’ West for example is still evolving years after it was first conceived.

I like to try and offer some sort of solution to these things, Dome is a good case study. Again the ambition monster was out in force with that one and the game ended with a stand off between Race and a massive Dragon in some sort of cathedral, I believe it was. At about a tenth of the way through, with a deadline rapidly approaching, the painful decision was made to chop the epic in two and finish it at the half-way stage boss. I think it’s human nature to always want what could have been. For me, it was like finding out the original planned ending to Jurassic park 2 and wanting to know what the film would have been like had they never left the damn island!! I too wonder how awesome Dome would have been, had it ended like we planned. At the same time I know if we’d have tried that, the project would never have been finished and so it’s all the better for cutting it in half.

Be ambitious, be damned ambitious! But be preprepared to scale that ambition down to a manageable size and maybe whip a non-alcoholic beverage or 2 in after that 9th pint… yeah as if! (the ambition thing still stands though).

However, this time, I’m afraid I will lose the fight despite my best efforts. The beast that is the subject of this article is one of my least favourite things and my feelings will flow throughout the next few paragraphs. For that reason I strongly advise anyone of a nervous disposition to use your back button and find a less aggressive article for your reading pleasure. Thank you.

Theories! I hate the (insert your own expletives here) things! The amount of times I’ve had to stop coding to listen to someone’s (yes, that’s you John) brand new idea that’s going to require you to re-do the whole engine just to find out that it didn’t work after all. They’re just stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!!! What a waste of time. Yes, they sound sensible first time out, yes, it’s all plausible and like it might well work when you first hear it, but invariably they don’t.

The time when they usually first rear their ugly heads is when you’ve been busily working your way through coding each and every feature required by your latest creation, only to find yourself stuck on one particular thing. It’s usually nothing major, just a little snag that’s going to slow you down a bit, but because you’ve got a headache and haven’t slept for a while, you try airing your concerns out loud. It’s not that you’re after reply as such, the question “How the bloody hell am I going to do this?”, is usually more rhetorical than anything, but once you’ve said it, it’s out there and you can’t take it back. Whoever’s sat nearby realises you’ve got a problem and they want to help you get through it in order to get the game back on track. They’ve got the best of intentions, this is true, but the problem is that they haven’t got much of a grasp on how you’ve done everything up to that point and as a result, they don’t realise how much they are asking of you when they say, “Why don’t you do it like this…?”.

Suddenly your brain is clouded. Maybe everything you’ve done up to this point has been in vain, maybe it’s all been one massive mistake from start to finish. What were you thinking?! You’ll have to start over, but you can’t, you’ll just have to dive in and try and ressurrect the poor creature. So, you start coding whilst half listening to the latest theory that’s going to solve the problem and then the cloud lifts and you realise all too quickly that it’s bollocks. It’s never going to work, you’ve just reworked half your code for nothing and you’re now pretty much lost, with code that’s half of one thing and half of another. You’re even more tired and your head is burning. Panic sets in just in time for you to hear the immortal words, “Ooh, I’ve had another idea, how about this?!”.

Once coding has begun on a particular feature, it should not be interrupted by anyone’s latest theory, no matter how wonderful it seems to be at first glance. Mark my words, it will only lead to misery, headaches and alcoholism. The worst offender of our back catalogue occurred during the development of Zip n’ West in Flash MX. Some features had more theories than I’d had hours sleep the night before, some went well in to double figures. At home I have folders full of scraps of paper with titles along the lines of “Collision theory #27″. I’m not sure we ever did come up with one that worked as well as we’d have liked.

It wasn’t all bad though, in amongst the hundreds of theories were some elements that would become invaluable and when viewed with a clear head could have directed us towards a very well made game, but unfortunately something else got in our way. That’s for another article though. For now, just heed my words, theories should be resigned to the time prior to coding, once you’ve started try and stick to your own tried and tested techniques.

There you go, I feel much better now.

It occurs to me that my childhood of climbing trees and playing computer games may not have been a complete loss. It’s somehow brilliant that I can be whisked back to a period in my life by just listening to a soundtrack from a game of that time. It hasn’t escaped my attention that this is pretty much what I said last time regarding Shenmue and how that experience was so easily accessed when I heard the theme. With that in mind I think I may have to cut this series of articles short, as all I really have to say is, “remember how good this was”, which is no help to anyone. Alternatively, I could just post soundtracks that I genuinely deem to be good, but it would only be opinion pieces and you’re not that bothered about my biased opinions on things. If I have anything constructive to bang on about, regarding game soundtracks in the future, I will. For now though, I’m calling an end to this filler provoking series and I’ll leave you back in the 90’s with some Mega Drive classics!

Playlist

1] Sonic 1 – Green Hill Zone
2] Streets of Rage – Level 1
3] Columns – Main Game
4] Xenon 2 – Main Game
5] Space Harrier – Main Game

Although I think that this pair of articles clearly say something about how important a game soundtrack is, most indie games I’ve played never give much consideration to it, they are usually just some tunes lifted from another soundtrack. It’s a great opportunity to leave a lasting impression with the player and even our own Dome and Hydris themes (yes I am blowing my own trumpet) still take me back to the time when they were being made. It might just be that I am extra sensitive to the old sensory triggered memories (smell gets me to those places quite rapidly too), but don’t pass up the opportunity to create something unique that could possibly stay with the player for a long time. It might even bring them back for another go! If, unlike us, you have no aspiring musicians to create wonderfully catchy tunes, look online and there will be thousands of budding musicians looking for projects to work on, get to it!

Now go and play Dome.

Back in the day, when our combined knowledge of programming consisted of something done a long time ago on ZX Spectrum, the thing we were making the most of, was PowerPoint. We were big fans of Myst and Riven, which had come out for the Sega Saturn a year or two earlier. Now to most people, PowerPoint doesn’t exactly connect with the world of games development, unless you’re thinking of those high powered meetings where men in suits try to convince other men in t-shirts that making a game for their latest blockbuster movie is a really good idea…

However, fortunately for us, one young lad saw another use altogether. He realised that a PowerPoint presentation wasn’t a million miles away from a point and click adventure game, like Myst, and once he found out you could save a presentation as an exe… well, he was half way there. I mean, think about it, isn’t it obvious? Put some pictures in a slideshow with buttons for left and right and you can be walking around anywhere you like in no time. How long would it take someone to make something that could do that with any amount of programming knowledge? The fundamentals are already there for you.

Admittedly, we never actually finished a game using PowerPoint, we always moved on to something else before we really got going, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be done. I’d say that even now, it’s not only distinctly possible, but it wouldn’t be half bad either. Some of our versions included in-game video to show moving doors and the like, as well as audio. We’d even got as far as implementing a few puzzles to give the player something to think about.

What makes a game good isn’t all about the fancy effects you can put in anyway. A gripping storyline can draw you through anything, even if the surroundings are a bit low res and there’s no ‘jump’ button. Can’t exactly remember if we’d worked out a way to save your progress though, but then who needs that anyway? I’m pretty sure there would also have been issues with lag when there was a lot on screen and I’ve no idea how it would’ve coped when the levels got really big, but should you really be thinking that big when you’re using PowerPoint as game engine for goodness sake?

Yep, if we’d had the time and the inclination to finish development, we’d have had a PowerPoint based version of Hydris that would have worked, and we’d have been bloody happy with it too.

So, there you go, however ridiculous something might sound, it’s usually worth having a proper look at. You never know where it might lead…

A core mechanic is a term coined by myself so I didn’t have to write game play. It’s quite an obvious thing, but if you set out to make a platformer you would most probably dive head first into making levels, characters and physics engines to make it all work. This was definitely my own and the majority of Psync’s approach in the past. Did any thought really go into making PowerPoint games other than “lets make this do what Myst does”? Nope, that being said, we had our reasons and did pretty bloody well! Still, until the now quite unique Blitz, even when opportunities to genuinely produce something not so generic presented themselves, we time and time again fell back on the “let’s make ___ do what ___ does” approach.

Super Mario Galaxy, Just Beautiful.

One of my all time favourite games is Super Mario Galaxy. Just so you are aware this is coming from a life long sonic fan. You wouldn’t have caught me loving Mario back in the 16bit days, oh no, it was Sonic ’til I die! (or at least until he started becoming rubbish). My point is that it’s not the mascot I care about in the game. I’ve heard people rave about the fact Luigi turns up, but at the risk of being hated by Italian loving plumbers I couldn’t care less. There are so many things the game does so well but, for now, lets stay on topic.

Before I start contradicting myself, the Mario developers started with Mario as an Atari game (yes he was in Donkey Kong before that if we’re going to be anal about it, but the first Mario Bros game was on the Atari 2600). As we all know he’s had many-a-sequel since, so yes quite possibly the developers originally dived head first into making levels, characters and physics engines to make it all work, but they got there first, so live with it. If we’re going to make any stand out games we’re going to have to be a bit smarter, kapish?

Super Mario Galaxy takes the 3D platformer (that again the Mario dev’s pretty much invented) and wraps it round a ball. Sounds so simple, gimmicky even, but it works so well! Now again you would have forgiven the creators for basing the entire game around that concept and had Mario legging it around a planet for every level, except they don’t. This brings me nicely to an obvious, but again quite easily forgotten, rule that is:

Don’t base an entire game around an un-expandable concept.

When planing a game I think it’s very important to see where you can take the concept. Keeping with Mario Galaxy, when Mario is running around the outside of a planet in the above image, there is a course of holes he must avoid and crystals to smash. On a similar planet later on, rolling boulders are added, then electrified barriers and then homing missiles, so there are four elements that can be mixed and matched to create a unique level, and these are just four out of literally hundreds of unique elements that this game constantly throws at the player, which stops the game from ever feeling tired or repetitive.

Portal, Just Genius.

While Super Mario Galaxy constantly throws new ideas that compliment the core mechanic, another brilliant game I’ve been promoting around the Psync forums lately is Portal. While Portal does employ quite a few different elements and obstacles, at the heart of all of them sits it’s core mechanic, which is essentially shoot a doorway at one wall then shoot a doorway somewhere else.

The developers of Portal could have relied simply on shooting portals and physics based puzzles, but by including a few extra elements they increased the depth of the game and the fun aspect went through the roof (quite literally)!

Before I started thinking about these games, my initial intention with this article was to highlight the importance of having a strong core mechanic, but throughout writing this it’s become clear that for a game to ensure longevity, you really need a concept that can be tweaked and altered to keep a player’s interest, but without betraying the game. You wouldn’t want to change the whole style or genre of a game half way through because the original concept had become so mind numbingly repetitive that it was the only thing you could do to keep it interesting.

The Company of Myself, Just Clever.

The company of myself is another fine example of a strong core mechanic, but with just enough added elements (and there are literally only about four) it becomes a very enjoyable and clever game.

My humble advice to myself and everyone is to be bloody inventive with your approach and don’t simply try to clone a game you particularly like. Most importantly, before diving in, make sure the game play can be expanded upon without becoming something completely different. It’s almost another dreaded, but at least if you feel you are working on something unique, it’s an added drive to see it through.

In between looking for work and residence, the group set about planning for their next project. The obvious choice was to play it safe and make a sequel to the project that had given them such a sense of achievement, but the planned Dome XIV was unfortunately ill fated. Let’s face it, educational games are a bit boring when all’s said and done. The next thought was to return to good old Zip n’ West, but in an unforseen act of sanity, the group realised that it was probably too big a project for them at that time, so they decided to do something new.

The only thing they were sure of at this point, was that they wanted to create their next project using C++ and, preferably, DirectX. This proved to be something of a stumbling block, as despite their numerous degrees and awards, none of them could program in C++ (De ja vous anyone?). Fortunately, Jim knew a man who could…

Let’s look back a few years to 2003 when Jim was still studying at Coventry University. There’s a group of friends sitting in a pub that they refer to as ‘the library’, for reasons best known to them, who’ve recently formed a ’study group’ known as ‘The Pork Pie Club’, for reasons best known to no-one. Now, one of the group is someone we’ve met before, Jim, who at this point, as we’ve mentioned, still has a fairly large amount to learn about programming, but he is getting there. Fortunately there’s another lad sitting close by who’s far more adept at the aforementioned artform, known as Chris Siddall, or to the group as ’Little Chris’ or ‘Other Chris’ (all the good nicknames were apparently taken…).

Now, at this time Chris was, unfortunately, not a great Pool player and he most certainly could not hold his liquor, but what he could do, what he could do better than anyone else in the ‘Pork Pie Club’ and possibly better than anyone else at their University, was program. He’d been programming for years and could code in VB, Java, C, C++ and most likely many more besides. Clearly, him and Jim had a lot to offer each other. Many games of pool and even more pints of beer, plus one rather dubiously completed Java coursework, followed and not only were the two now friends, but ‘Chris’ had become known as ‘Sid’ (now that’s a much better nickname isn’t it?).

After introducing Sid to the rest of the team, some modest plans were made for the next project. It was a top down, 2D, flash style affair that could be completed very quickly and would be a stepping stone to the next, more modern and professional, game. Those more avid readers of this here website will know that, in typical Psync style, it didn’t quite work out that way…

…

Anyway, that brings us up to date. It’s 2010 and not only can Sid handle his drink a lot better and play a mighty fine game of pool, but we’ve also nearly finished our first attempt at a game since we grew into a five piece band. If all goes well ’BL!TZ: Requiem’ will be finished and released soon, then we can get on to the next stage of Psync Interactive, which will hopefully lead to that shelf in HMV before we’re too long in the tooth. Fingers crossed!

Out there in the ever growing, ever changing, ever more mental internet there are so many things. Some of which are brilliant, brilliant games. Most, if not all of which, you will never have heard of. This isn’t surprising, as there are quite possibly more web pages than there are ants in the world these days, so it’s all a little cluttered. Creating yourself a web page with your super-awesome game on and hoping people will find it is a bit like flicking a bogey on the London Gherkin and not only expecting all window cleaners from here to Australia to hear about it, but come over and give it a damn good cleaning as well. It’s very unlikely.

So how does one promote their creation? Well, start by making that website I damned in the previous paragraph. True it’s not going to attract the masses on it’s own, but you need a place for said masses to descend on. Game development forums are the place to start. Sign up to some as you are developing the game. If you start spamming forums with messages about your finished game straight away, you are likely to be ignored no matter how mind blowing it is. If you join these forums earlier on, you can get feed back and generate a fair bit of hype as your game gets nearer to completion. This is all well and good, but why are you actually going to complete your game? Because you are entering it into an indie game development competition, that’s why.

Game development competitions are great for wannabe game devs, not only do they give you that must have deadline, but they also bring more publicity than you could hope for. There is also the bonus that people have to play your game in order to judge it. The down side to this is there will be criticism, but the knowledge that so many people have been engaged and drawn into your game to play it should be gratifying enough to offset any bad press. Grow from it and try to fix the bugs ready for version 2, which will be so much easier than version 1 ever was. You now have fans, drive, promotion and that pesky deadline is no longer an issue. See, easy!

Indie developer competitions

IGF: http://www.igf.com/
IndieCade: http://www.indiecade.com/
Indie Game Challenge: http://www.indiegamechallenge.com/home/
2beegames: http://www.zoogamesinc.com/splash/splash.php
Intel: http://software.intel.com/en-us/cont…0/contests.php