48 Hour RPG Contest Post-Mortemy Thing
My goal this weekend was to participate in the 48 hour RPG competition. Build a simple RPG in 48 hours. It wasn't a "good" weekend for most participants - allocating much time to devote to just cranking away at a game can be challenging. But the results were pretty amazing for such a limited amount of time - you can check them out here and here.

To end the suspense here, I was unable to finish my game on time. With meetings, company, church, and so forth, I think I got a solid twelve hours I was able to put into the game. About half of that time was devoted to creating really horrible programmer art, though my brother Brian did help up with some graphics he whipped out on short notice (alas, much of it is not visible in the current tech demo).

That doesn't mean I'm done with it. While it now has to take a back seat to Frayed Knights, I think it's worthy of continued tinkering. But right now it's more of a stair-climbing tech demo.


If you are really, really bored, the download is here:

The Manor v. 0.1

Left and right buttons control movement. You can use the up and down buttons to climb and descend stairs - but you have to be right above (or below) the stairs - being next to them doesn't currently work. Don't say I didn't warn you - there's really no point to it right now. I'm just including it for the sake of example here.

The concept is the old haunted house story. In the spirit of some Steven King novels I've enjoyed in recent years, the house itself is bad. Your uncle has died, leaving the estate to whomever of his relatives can recover an artifact of his hidden in the house. There's more to it than just a silly contest. He knew how evil the house was, and it was only his own strength of will that kept the evil at bay. The new owner must be strong enough to take possession of the house, lest it take possession of the person.

So there's bad things happening in the house. Over the course of a weekend (or so), you must fight past the disturbing obstacles the house puts in your way - from fairly simple but terror-inspiring manifestations of its evil will, to more powerful semi-corporial apparitions and fiends and animated corpses, to finally taking on "the heart of the house" once you have unlocked the way and have the house weakened enough to take it on. Over the course of the game, the house becomes weaker as you defeat its minions, and stronger as you rest or are defeated. (Oops, sounds like one of those "positive feedback loops," but it's not, really. The game doesn't get more or less difficult as the house gains or loses power - it's just a distance to goal).

Well, that's the theory, at least. In practice, none of the cool stuff got in, so I'm left with a little maze-like Winchester Mystery House wannabe. I figure at least another twelve hours would be needed to get all the dialogs, NPC behavior, combat, and inventory system in place.

So here's a hit-list of what went right, wrong, and how I could do better in the future:

#1 - Should have had a clearer view of the design (and content requirements) up-front: Apparently, some design and asset / engine "preparation" was allowed prior to the contest's start, but I didn't have time. I had a somewhat vague idea of what I wanted it to be and look like on Friday, but I didn't go into the contest having a clear idea of exactly how I intended things to look and play. Not that any design survives contact with actual development and playtesting anyway, but it might have made for speedier development if I had been flying a little less by the seat of my pants.

#2 - Needed more familiarity with the engine: Admittedly, a big part of my goal with this exercise was to experiment some more with Torque Game Builder. But I spent a lot of time looking stuff up and trying to figure out how to do things I had never done before with the engine, and trying experiments with certain features that turned out to be a dead-end. Which brings me to the next point:

#3 - Inadequate Technical Support from Engine Vendor: *Sigh*. Okay, I could totally rant about GarageGames' dropping of the ball on support of everything that isn't new, shiny, and in initial development. But those who would actually care (Torque users of legacy products) are already well aware of the problem in general, so I'd just be preaching to the choir. But the Torque Development Network - which was somewhat of a "community self-support" site in the first place - has been on the blink for weeks now, and this weekend it finally became completely impossible for me to access anything. Apparently I am not the only one. This made it very difficult to look up information on how to use my engine. Sure, the offline reference docs are actually pretty decent, but they don't capture the wealth of information, experience, sample code, and bug work-arounds that you get online.

#4 - I Underestimated art creation time. Again: I do this a lot. You'd think my terrible programmer art could be bashed together in seconds. And really - I think it could be if I allowed myself to get very sloppy, and the differences between that and what I did would probably be undetectable to the human eye.

#5 - Enlisting my brother to help with art: Way too much of my time was spent making art assets, which is kind of embarassing because they aren't very good. My brother jumped in and offered to help. Even if some of his stuff didn't get into the game by the deadline, having that off-loaded helped free me up to work on actual coding. He also pointed me in the direction of a character maker for RPG Maker games which I used to make the main character. While he looks nothing like what I'd want in an actual release, it was very helpful for development.

#6 - Still Too Big of Scope: Um, yeah. I know something of my limits. Yet I continually try to violate them. I should have tried for something smaller. But - Meh. I'm still intrigued by this project.

Some bits of trickiness I discovered while working on the game and with TGB:

#1 - Mounting the camera to the player works, but is very limited in what it can do. I'd need to dig a lot deeper (possibly into the source code) to come up with a way to actually control the camera better.

#2 - Once I did that, I could find no way to set some images to be camera-relative as opposed to world-relative. So any UI-type elements or unmoving background images also had to be mounted to the player, which seemed really weird and convoluted. I hope there's an easier way that I just haven't discovered yet.

#3 - Trying to use physics and collisions for the player was an exercise in frustration. While I still use collisions to limit horizontal movement, it was far easier AND more robust to just to calculate where the floor "should" be algorithmically under the player based on where he was in the level. That solution doesn't scale well to a lot of varied levels, but it worked nicely for this project.

#4 - I could spend days playing with the particle editor. It's not as fully featured as I'd like, but it's definitely reasonable. Too bad there's only one place in the whole demo where I'm actually using them.

So there you go. Well, after not touching Frayed Knights all weekend, I'm ready to jump back into that one, but The Manor may see some future development!

Labels: productivity, programming

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