jdnx429

A month has passed since I released “Aliens Over Hawaii” and I found the reception of the game to a bit frustrating.  When I initially listed the game on Whirled, many of the comments were complaints about the game being too hard. I realize I’m the one who made the game and have played it at least a hundred times so I may have a different perspective on the game than everyone else. However, I never thought the game was “impossibly hard”.  Sure, there are stage segments where I died a dozen times but those were Stages 7 and 8 - on Hard Mode.  I honestly found it baffling that there would be people finding the game to be hard on Stage 1, even on Easy.

So soon after the Whirled release, I loosened up the game a bit and added the auto-fire (which in retrospect should’ve been there in the first place).  A short while after that I uploaded the game to Newgrounds and Kongregate. More complaints that the game was too hard followed and so I loosened the game a bit more.  I eased up on some trophy requirements, I made the bosses a bit easier, I increased the shield regeneration rate and then I loosened everything again just a bit more.

However, there’s a certain point where I got tired of listening to people complain that the game was too hard. I also became increasingly uncomfortable loosening the game past a certain point. I had tested and re-tested the game many, many times so I was confident that the original game was ‘hard enough’ - not impossibly hard, but certainly challenging. That’s when I decided to reset the game back closer to it’s originally difficulty level and create the ItemPacks. If people still thought the game was too tough, well then here are some things you can buy to make it easier.

One mistake I did make, though, was making some of the trophies too hard to get. When I was first planning out how the trophies were to be given out, I had a goal in mind that all trophies would be earned in 50 full playthroughs of the game. That’s why the final Lifetime Points trophy was set at 150 million points (3 million points per game * 50 games). The enemy trophies were spread out amongst those 50 playthroughs. I spread them out so that at least one would be earned every few playthroughs. However, I realize now that 50 full playthroughs is too much. I reduced the trophy requirements so that all trophies would be able to earned in at most 20 playthroughs which translates to roughly more than 20 hours of play time.

Anyways, with the release of the Item Packs  I will just let the game rest for the time being - no updates or significant changes for a while, maybe some minor bug fixes. From here on,  I’ll be working on fixing up some things on the games that are currently live and then it’s off to make some new ones.

I spent a short time yesterday updating some things around the site:

*The favicon is no longer the ugly Yahoo one.
*The game pages go directly to Whirled.
*Added pages for Auction Poker & Aliens Over Hawaii.
*Updated the Coins Bar Data Page since I noticed the gadget stopped showing the updates after April 14th.

Anyways, while updating things around here I noticed that Paint Factory needs a big graphical update. I’ll be doing that after finishing up some minor stuff for Aliens Over Hawaii and listing Blackjack Square.

As for the Aliens Over Hawaii video - that’s about as complete as it’s going to get unless I somehow have a lot more free time. I storyboarded the whole thing out so maybe in the future I’ll finish it up. (Just like the Auction Poker AI posts..ha!). In this economy, however, a lot more free time might be coming sooner than I want.

So I came back after a fun evening in the town, one that involved alcohol and karaoke - never a good combination - and saw an announcement on Whirled about the winners for the Game Developer Design Challenge.  I really thought I had a shot at winning one of the prizes with Aliens Over Hawaii but I was very, very disappointed to see that it didn’t even merit an honorable mention.

“Wow” is all I can think of right now.

I had planned this weekend on finishing up a video I was creating on the making of Aliens Over Hawaii but I really need to re-evaluate the time spent on making it.  I don’t think many people are going to be interested on seeing how the game was built considering the results of the contest. I’ll probably work on finishing up Blackjack Square.

However, I uploaded to YouTube the middle two minutes of the video which is definitely my favorite part - the making of the stages. You can see it here.

Well I posted a couple of my games - Cribbage Square and Poker Square on Kongregate and Newgrounds this weekend. The results have been somewhat positive. I noticed a spike of played games this weekend. Cribbage Square was being played almost as much as Paint Factory on Sunday! I don’t think that’s ever happened. Paint Factory has always been a steady performer bringing a bit of bling every day. The one drawback have been the commenters on Kongregate - they are not as friendly as the people on Whirled and they are quick to jump the gun on “Stolen!” amongst other off-color comments.  But jerks on the internet are nothing new so it’s best to brush them off.

I also found a nasty bug that wasn’t that visible on Whirled but became much more visible on the external sites so I had to go back and fix some things. I’ll definitely have to be more careful in the future about testing some of the games for outside Whirled. It’s a good thing that I did a test for a couple of games before uploading everything at once.

I originally wanted to make Poker Square and Cribbage Square into multi-player games but now I think my time would be better spent in fixing up my single-player games. I just don’t think that Poker Square or Cribbage Square are going to get a lot of multi-player action. Paint Factory Challenge, the multi-player version of Paint Factory gets played 1/10th as much as the original Paint Factory. However as soon as I placed Poker Square and Cribbage Square on the other two sites the number of games played increased by about 400-500%. Of course, that only translates to a few hundred plays each day and I don’t expect the spikes to be sustain themselves but any trickle of blings and cents is nice.  With a few more of my games uploaded all those little trickles add up to some of spending money.

In addition, there are plenty of more fun multi-player games on Whirled, many of which I enjoy. Cribbage Square multiplayer can’t really compete against them.  My niche is definitely single-player games and I’m going to stick with them. After finishing my Aliens Over Hawaii video, I’ll finish up Blackjack Square then fix up some bugs on some of the other games - Auction Poker & Paint Factory - and upload those two to Newgrounds and Kongregate.  Even Aliens Over Hawaii will find their way to the other two sites, but I’ll have to do so lightening up on the difficulty and tweak some things since they won’t be able to save or  continue a game using the Whirled cookie. I’ll probably lighten some difficulty spikes to make it a bit more casual but even then it’s still a long game to go on one playthrough - about an hour.  Anyways, we’ll see how it goes.

Well I finally listed Aliens Over Hawaii, just in time before the Game Developer deadline. I didn’t realize how helpful the auto-fire would be until I finished several hours of testing over the weekend and finding my finger still sore on Tuesday. I  must have clicked several thousand times! Auto-fire was actually in the game early in the process but I removed it later because I thought it made the game too easy. However, after a bit of tweaking, I think I found a good balance for it and put it back in. Most of the code was still there anyways.

I’m hoping to create and release a video in the next month showing how much effort it took to create the game, similar to those videos on Whirled showing how much effort it takes to make an avatar. I took plenty of screenshots and notes so the process was well-documented. Maybe I’ll compose a track for it as well. I had collected a bunch of different songs and clips that I was going to use as inspiration for the background music of the stages and I didn’t get to use them.

I think it will be a long time before I do a game as long as AOH again. I severely underestimated the time it took to create it but now that it’s finished and released it’s time to finish up some of the other projects I have on my list. It will definitely be a nice change of pace to get back to doing a fairly simple card game such as Blackjack Square, which was about 40% finished when I began working on AOH.

In the next week or so, I’m also planning to fix up a couple of minor bugs on Poker Square and Cirbbage Square and try out the Whirled affiliate program by placing the games on Kongregate, Newgrounds and Mochi. Both of those games are easy and casual so it’s a good test to try out the system. We’ll see how that goes. After that, I’ll be working on making my card games multiplayer, fixing up Paint Factory and working on another game that’s been sitting on my shelf too long – Gravitation.

About two weeks left and I’m cutting it quite close.  All the bosses are finished, except for the final boss which I’ve had to redo a bit.  The final fight was a bit too short with only two phases so I’ll be adding a third.  The artwork for all the trophies, except for a few, is also done. The big push after this is all the Whirled stuff - cookies, scoring, etc.  Anyways, there will be about 65-70 trophies in the game.  Here’s a few of them:

That’s all for now.

Less than a month to go before the contest deadline! This weekend I’m hoping to finish up the programming for the bosses. I’ve already drawn most of them, but I still need to do some fixing and touching up. The programming should go fairly smoothly since I’ve already written up outlines on their behaviors and vulnerabilities.

I’m also at a point where I have to start thinking of the scoring system as well as possible trophies. I’m hoping to have about 75 trophies for the game. Right now I have the requirements for about 40 of them set and as I test the game more, I get more ideas for more.  The scoring system, however, is going to a bit more complicated than I originally thought.  At first, I was thinking of making it fairly simple  - the score that’s sent to Whirled is the score you achieved during a stage segment. However, some stage segments are much harder than others and the scores aren’t exactly comparable. I was thinking of setting a par score for each stage segment and then adjusting the score sent to Whirled based on that par. In addition there would be adjustments for level of difficulty and stage number - I want the latter stages to payout more.

At this point there really isn’t any hope of getting sound effects or music in the game. There just isn’t enough time before the deadline. That has always been a low-priority item, however, since I’m usually listening to music while playing games and I assume many other people are too.

Anyways, here’s a screenshot of the player with the first level boss:

Well, things keep moving along with Aliens Over Hawaii. If I could spend a full 8 hours each day working on the game I probably could have started it and finished it in a month, but real life and the job takes up most of my time. I’m not complaining, though, I’m glad to still have a job in this economy even though my new commute is now an hour long each way.

At this point I’ve finished coding up all the main enemies and started programming & drawing the 8 bosses. I have a real good idea of how the final boss is going to be and a couple of the other ones, but I only have some notes on the rest.

I’m also in the process of balancing the stages, making sure that there aren’t many easy enemies on the later stages or lots of hard enemies on the early stages. I have also have to make sure that Hard difficulty is just hard but not impossible. I originally had 4 difficulty levels – Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard but I think I’ll stick to the just the first three. The Very Hard mode was very frustrating.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to include music in the game. I still have to figure out how I want to do sound effects as well. If the game makes a noise every time a shot or laser is fired, the game will quickly become annoying.

In addition, I’m getting a bit worried about the game size. Currently it’s running just under 2.5 MB. With additional sound effects and music, the size will quickly grow. I also don’t want anyone to be waiting for 5 MB download before starting the game.  I may host the music here on this site and have it load as the player plays through the stage, but we’ll see how that works out.

There still a lot of work to do and about six weeks left do it. I suspect I will get lots done this weekend since it seems like we’ll have a weekend full of rain here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Anyways, here a couple of more screenshots for the game.

Now that the deadline has been pushed back to March 31st, I’ll have a good amount of time to finish the game. Especially since Cleaver told me to go back to work….ha.

I spent a bit of time last last night coding some basic behaviors for a couple of the UFOs, which was kind of fun. I’m looking forward to coding the rest of the enemies. I’ve yet to start on the bosses which I hope will be fun to beat but also a tad difficult.

I don’t want the game to be a simple side-scroller where you have to shoot everything to win. Since the story of the game is that of a lone airplane flying against a fleet of alien ships there will be segments in the game where the best course of action is to sit still and have the UFO pass by in order to survive and reach the mothership.

In a lot of side-scrollers, the enemies fly in a predicatble, repeatable pattern for no reason and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can. If the enemies are flying in a pattern, it’s because they have a reason for it. They will either be moving to get past the player’s ship or to shoot it. In that respect, I’m trying to get into the enemies head and think about what they would do. Some enemies would just want to ignore the player and be on their way to do their job, some will aggressively attack the player and others will only attack if provoked.

Since the game will be a bit long to do it all in one sitting, about an hour not including deaths, I planned for the game to save the player’s progress after every stage. Each stage consists of 3 two-minute segments plus a boss fight. When I was doing some testing, I realized it was pretty easy to have the game restart at the beginning of a segment so I’ll probably have the game save after each segment. That way progress can be made even if the players only plays for 3-4 minutes. That also means that I’ll increase the difficulty a bit of each segment. I want the player to just get by each segment. It shouldn’t be easy, even on Easy Mode.

Now that the holidays are over and I’ve finished up some other projects that were taking most of my free time, I have more time to code “Aliens Over Hawaii”. I haven’t actually touched the game in at least a couple of weeks. I played around a bit with some side scrolling games on a NES emulator to check out what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, here’s a couple of early screenshot of the games, there’s still a bunch of work to do but the look is pretty much solid.

I’ve also noticed there’s been a discussion on the Whirled boards about coin prices and Wyvern giving out loads and loads of coins. I checked when Wyvern was released and added it to the Coin/Bar Ratio graph, see below. It’s location is quite interesting.

Remember, however, that correlation is not causation and there are probably many, many factors influencing the ratio.