Games by Sam K.

It's been a while, but I have updates to share!! 1) My website has been revamped, go check it out! Its a major overhaul to HTML 5 layout, and it even has mobile design too!

2) I am still working on Thumbp. Right now I'm still stuck at a wall with certain bugs in the game. I'll need to dig deeper in to the Game Maker forums to figure it out, but for now, I'm working on adding more touches. I've added gems to the platforms. They give the player extra points if they hit them. It already feels more fun, it an enticing target to aim for other than straight up.

Hey kids, Iiiiiiiiii'm back! A little longer than I wanted to, but there is good news: My game has been restored to its pre-lost state! Hooray! Right now, I'm trying to fix two bugs that are hindering the flow of the controls. I'm waiting to see what the internet can provide for answers, as my current trial-and-error is not bearing any results. In the eternal struggle to working with game engines, you gotta learn to ask others, they is always someone that can help! Last weekend, I participated in one of my favorite events of the year, the Global Game Jam! The 3-day game-a-thon is a lot of fun and every exciting. You never know what awesome games you or your peers are going to create!

The theme this year was "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." In layman turns, we see the world how we want to see it for ourselves, rather than for what things truly are. The brainstorming process this year was unique. Being a quite rather than a symbol or a single word, it was open to much more interpretation than usual. Nonetheless, some of the themes I saw written on dry-erase boards revolved around self-image, deception, reflection, perspective, and somehow 'boobs'. (Please don't ask)

My experience at the jam this year was quite interesting. Our group started out with 6 people with a full game-dev team of talent. I thought prospects would be great, but then, our would up being 3 total. During our brainstorming session, all of us could not come to a consensus as to what we wanted to work on, or others simply didn't feel enthusiastic about it. With no hard feelings, people slowly peeled off our group to jam on their own game.

This left my and my remaining comrades in a bit of a pickle. We had some coding experience, but not enough to do anything outside of Game Maker (which I know). Thus began our 3-man project. We decided to start with the idea of a point-and-click adventure game where you are an alien that has landed in NYC and must observe humans, learn to communicate like them, and find your spaceship (the Astor Place cube) so you could return to your home planet. It sounded like it was going to be a great idea, until we ran into technical issues; Game Maker studio isn't compatible between Mac and PC! D'OH! That left us with only 1 last option:

Hearing about a nifty interactive-novel game engine called Twine, we literally learned how to use it in 10 minutes and began making the greatest Japanese Dating-Sim game we could pull out of our butts in 3 days!

My idea for this game was that it would seem like a typical dating-sim game where your goal was to try and win the heart of a girl. However, there was a big catch: Every time you made choices that where romantic advances, the results where negative, and the relationship between you and the girl got more distant.

(SPOILER WARNING) At the end of the game, the girl you are trying to pursue reveals that she is not interested in dating anyone, despite your best moves to win her over. At this point in the game, the player has two options: Accept that she doesn't want to date and be her best friend, or reject her denial and lose your friendship. Yes, that is right, I made a dating game about the 'friend zone.'

Playing along with the theme of the game jam, I decided to touch on the subject of adolescent love and the perception of self-entitlement; the idea that doing nice things for people aren't points you earn to trade in for a relationship. I wanted show that the 'friend zone' is not some shameful place, and that there is great value in the friendship you create with others, even if your relationship does not advance beyond that.

Click here to play my game for yourself. Its a download to a simple HTML page in a ZIP file that you can open in your web browser. Have fun!

On a side note, there was a company there called VoxieBox that was demonstrating a hologram-based gaming platform. It was totally cool and I want one!

Did you know that today, in 1942, pinball was banned in New York City by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia?

He banned them on the grounds of their association with gambling and organized crime. In a dramatic and sweeping movement, La Guardia had local authorities round up thousands of pinball machines, smashed them with a sledgehammer, then dumped them into the Hudson river! (I wonder if there are pieces still down there!) Soon after, the ban passed on to other major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

I find this tidbit of history important for video games because, before video games existed, their predecessor was being labeled with a bad reputation. I feel like it was an age where nobody 'knew' what pinball machines really where, or rather, what their intention was. People saw these machines and associated them with trouble (with a capital 'T'!) without understanding their identity.

To me, pinball machines brought about the next iteration of skill-based entertainment. They are like a cousin of the carnival games where you knocked over milk cartons or rang a bell with a mallet. Pinball machines where a little different though; you could find them outside of carnivals, so its easy to imagine their association with organized crime if they where routinely found in disreputable places. Pinball machines also had a different concept than a carnival game. You put your money into the machine and used the plunger and flippers to reach a high score - for what? A stuffed animal? Money? Its seems likely that most people would associate putting money into a machine to reach a desired result with gambling, like slot machines. The thought of using skill to achieve a high score for bragging rights was not a cultural concept until the video arcades of the 80's spawned the first world record holders. In the meantime, there was Roger Sharpe.

The pinball ban of 1942 was not lifted until 1976! Seriously! 34 years! In May of 1976, a young man named Robert Sharpe testified before a New York City council on behalf of the Music and Amusement Association that pinball was a game of skill, not luck. Using his pinball wizardry, Sharpe was able to repeatedly call out where he was going to guide the silver ball and successfully landed all of his shots. His demonstration convinced the council that pinball was indeed a game of skill, which lead to the lift on the pinball ban in New York City and the rest of the country soon after.

In trying to make fixes, I changed some code and messed up my game a lot. In referencing a backup file of my game to figure out where I made the change, it somehow overwrote my current file, removing my progress from last week. Its not hopeless or anything, its just frustrating to be set back by a week when I only have a few hours after work to develop. GAME DEVELOPMENT!

Minor tweak today, but very important. I adjusted the rate at which the player's speed is reduced when falling down through rocks, so that a miscalculation doesn't bury them in a hole 50-blocks deep. Don't worry, the player can still experience setbacks for their mistakes, but not as obnoxious as before.

Nothing interrupts the flow of a game more than elements that stop the pace of play. Fail states such as death or losing, while technically stopping your pace, usually pick up near where you left off to left you try again with the hopes that you learn from your error and are overcome what you previously failed. Image if every time you died in a game, you had to restart the entire level over again. Would you still want to play? Would you still want to try and master that one difficult jump near the end of the level that you keep missing?

Two games that come to mind that both punish and teach the player are Megaman and Dark Souls. Both games feature the element that dying to a boss costs you valuable resources the next time you face them. This includes lives, ammunition, and other inventory goods that are helpful in defeating the boss. Not to mention, having to go through more waves of enemies, again, just to reach the boss room, again, can be taxing.

What is different about the punishment in these games is that losing these resources can teach you how to play better. Since your supplies are limited, each piece of arsenal at your disposal becomes much more precious, requiring players to memorize attack patterns, keep their reflexes sharp, and have patience when executing their attacks. If you run out of a certain ammo in Megaman that is effective against a boss, you can use another one that, while dealing normal damage, has a 'homing' effect, allowing you to focus on dodging attacks instead of lining up accurate shots. In Dark Souls, you might find that leap-striking a boss from a tall ledge is much more effective than trying to dodge its attacks on the ground.

Once recent game I find that does punish the player upon death is, surprisingly, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. In this latest installment, Link has to 'rent' his items from a friendly NPC (so far in teh game). When you die, you lose all of your items, requiring you to buy them again. That means every death not only requires you to have enough rupees to 'rent' them back, but it will cost more as you obtain more items. Furthermore, physically getting them back will take more time. When you get your items back, you have to go through the dialogue interaction of picking up an item, talking to the NPC, and purchasing it - for every...single...item. It can result in literally having the same conversation 10+ times in a row! Don't get me wrong, I love this latest installment in the franchise, but it really hampers my mood to keep playing when continuing from where I left off becomes such a chore.

Today I updated the scoreboard for Thumbp (currently placeholder) and the sprite for my trajectory line (also placeholder).

The purpose behind the trajectory line is to help show the player how the primary mechanic of the game works: aiming, charging a shot, and launching yourself into blocks. As the player holds down the left mouse button (charge shot), the trajectory line stretches to show how the projectile path changes with a stronger force applied. 'Showing not telling' is a very important part of game design to me. Nothing is worse than tutorials that endlessly tell you with walls of text how to jump, walk, talk, and etc.

You can draw trajectories too!

If you are making a game in Game Maker Studio, here is how you can draw a trajectory line too!

Get the direction of travel. In my case, the direction drawn from the player character to the cursor's current position.

dir = point_direction(x1, y1, x2, y2);

spd = Force;

Origin of the trajectory line equal to the player's position. xx = Player.x yy = Player.y

Get a vector point based on the established direction (mouse cursor position) and speed (force of charged jump). vx = lengthdir_x(spd,dir); vy = lengthdir_y(spd,dir);

Establish parameters for setting up the trajectory line. 'grav' is the in-game gravity. 'detail' is the number of trajectory points to draw. 'scale' is the size of the sprite that will be drawn for each point of the trajectory. 'step' is used to determine the number of for loops to execute.

grav = .25;

detail = 20; scale = 20; step = (1/detail);

Begin drawing the trajectory line. Uses a for loop to create vector points in the direction the cursor is pointing. The points are drawn using draw_sprite_ext, with an emphasis on decreasing the scale of the sprite size each time a point is drawn within the for loop.

draw_primitive_begin(pr_pointlist); for (i=0; i<1+step; i+=step){ xx+=vx; //add dx yy+=vy; //add dy vy+=grav; //add gravity to dy draw_sprite_ext(spr_Trajectory,0,xx,yy, scale/20, scale/20, image_angle, image_blend, image_alpha ); scale -= 1; //draw_vertex_color(xx,yy,c_red,1); }

This is a project that I have been working on and off of for a little over a year now, its called Thumbp. It started off as an idea in a sketchbook I thought of while sitting on the floor of GDC during the Game Developers Choice Awards.

The game started out as a puzzle platformer. The player took the role of a pudgy little viking that could smash blocks with a hammer in order to navigate levels. Then, I took the title, added the 'b' in the middle, and soon enough, I ended up with this:

That Worms character look-a-like is actually a thumb. Well, a viking thumb to be more precise (also, placeholder art). The game is still a platformer, but with 'marathon' elements, similar to Canabalt. The goal of the game is to ascend the mountain as high as you can by smashing yourself through blocks. You do this by taking aim and charging up your leap, Angry-Birds style. More game elements are yet to come, but there are plans for power-ups to gain, bonus points to collect, and perils to avoid as you ascend higher and higher.

Hello all (alright, maybe 1) readers! This is the living will and testament of my progress in the development of my video game projects.

I am an aspiring game designer looking to get motivation back into my work. I have been working on and off of various projects for a few years now, all with little or no real progress than I want to show off. After much thought, I felt disciplining myself with a work schedule and regular journal of my progress will help motivate me to do better work.