Anna Irene

I've been working on my game a lot for the last couple of weeks which is one of the reasons I haven’t found time to post anything new on here. The other reason is that the work or maybe even the game itself feels a bit boring right now.

That doesn’t really come as a surprise, I know this cycle from other projects on different media, although Ron Gilbert probably put it best blogging about the development of Thimbleweed Park:

Beginnings are always fun, then there is the boring time, then you go though the dark period, then it becomes fun again, then super stressful, then you ship the game and you never want to see it again, then you come back to it years later and realize it was a pretty damn good game.

I’ve already entered the boring time which might not be a good sign because it feels a little early but it led me to take two days off and spend my time on something more exciting, namely two new prototypes.

I know, I know, it’s an old and well-known clicheé that new things always look more shiny, especially to inexperienced newcomers like myself, but I’m not really considering switching projects, just trying to learn something new from time to time.

The first prototype, I’m gonna call it Finger Struggle for now, is an extremely simple two player RTS game for tablets, which probably only works if there are two people actually sitting next to each other using one tablet (e.g. never), but it takes some elements from Bitmap Brothers’ Z which I loved, and it’s something I’ve never seen before.

Almost two weeks have gone by since I've started working on the prototype for Burglar Defense but I think I have more or less figured out what I want this game to be. The main idea is this: Instead of defending houses, museums, and other buildings against burglars (the original idea), the player will actually construct a museum from scratch!

Think of it as a simpler version of Theme Park or Prison Architect, although the later is based on pretty complex mechanics, so Theme Park is probably the better comparison. You'll build the museum, furnish it, travel around the globe to search for new pieces of art, send explorers on expeditions, enter auctions and black markets, trade art pieces with friends, and, yes, defend your museum against burglars.

Admittedly, this sounds like a lot of work for a single, inexperienced developer like me, and I'm sure a lot of things can and will go wrong. But I know that I'll have to start things simple, that the first version of the game will probably play more like Farmville than like Theme Park, and that's totally fine.

The prototype is coming along nicely enough to let me hope it won't end up being a total disaster -- and even if it does, I will definitely learn something from it.

After playing around with the Burglar Defense prototype a bit, I'm a bit unsure about where to go with it. The mechanics work and already allow some interesting puzzles but to me the building phase actually feels more exciting than the heist phase. Just watching the heist play out (and succeed or fail) isn't all that interesting without at least some interactivity but giving the player too much interactivity during the heist would distract from the heist phase.

I probably should get into my background a bit. Before creating Toothy's Blocks, I've only been an avid player of games but never a developer. I didn't even know how to program! But thanks to Unity 3D, its amazing tutorials, and the simplicity of C#, I was able to teach myself how to create a game in about three months or so.

That being said, "creating a game" is obviously a very broad term and developing a simple puzzle game doesn't mean I know all that much about game development and especially programming. I'm finding that out the hard way creating the prototype for Burglars Defense because I kind of understand C# by now but I don't know any solutions to the most common problems in programming games.

Pathfinding is one of those problems. It probably takes an average programmer about 10 minutes to come up with a decent pathfinding algorithm (especially for a grid-based game like the one I'm trying to create), but it took me almost a week to get from understanding the basics to writing an actual working algorithm. As always, the internet has been of great help though, teaching me the basics of A*, the seemingly most common pathfinding algorithm, and enabling me to write my own version of it.

And after a few days with many issues an experienced programmer would have never run into, I'm finally seeing some results. The burglars are looking for ways to reach their loot, they are avoiding cameras, if possible, they assess doors, windows and the time it would take to either destroy them or avoid them, and so on. They even understand when to cut corners and when not to!

As a kid, I played a PC game called "The Clou!" (itself heavily inspired by the C64 game "They Stole a Million"), which put the player in the role of Matt Stuyvesant, living as a burglar in London of the 1950s. The game consisted basically of three different parts.

1) Gather information on potential targets, buy new equipment, and meet potential accomplices. 2) Observe the target of next break-in and, with that information, plan the heist in detail. 3) Watch the heist play out (and have it magnificently fail).

It wasn't a perfect game but a fascinating one; part adventure, part RPG, part strategy. In retrospect, almost typical for the 90s. Since then, I think it was in 1994, I have seen a big heist movie come out of Hollywood almost every year, but I haven't played a single heist game, unless you'd count something like Thief or Splinter Cell.

Therefore, creating a heist game has essentially been on my agenda for about twenty years, way before I actually started considering becoming an actual game developer -- and when I had finally made that decision, The Masterplan was announced, which looks pretty similar to what I had in mind since being a child. I haven't played it yet but, judging from its Steam reviews, it seems to be coming along nicely, and even if it didn't, I don't see much of a point in creating a game that would be almost exactly like something else on the market.

So I was just about to move on to another project when an idea hit me: Maybe I won't create a heist simulator... but what if it's the other way around? If it's not about playing the burglars but the home owners, an architect, or someone from a security firm? And instead of planning a heist, the player has to prevent one by building alarm systems, cameras, doors, windows etc.?

This obviously changes the game and its genre a lot, from a strategy RPG to something in between a puzzle and a tower defense game, but at the same time, it probably also decreases the scale of the project quite a bit -- which makes it worth a shot in my book.