Rampant Coyote’s Best Posts of 2013
Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 31, 2013
So here it is, the last day of 2013. Time for me to start accidentally back-date forms and checks to the previous year again.
I thought I’d visit my stats and see what posts actually resonated with people and grabbed the most visitors. Interestingly, my most popular blog post from twelve months ago was actually exactly twelve months ago – posted on New Years Eve – “Five Steps to Get Motivated to Make Your Indie Game.” That’s definitely stuff I could review. Motivation hasn’t been a huge problem the last couple of months, but with all the traveling this year, writing projects, other day job demands, and so forth, it got a little challenging at times. But it always gets challenging. Making an indie game as a part-timer is always going to be difficult, and a big game like an RPG compounds the problem.
If we strictly limit it to posts that went up in 2013, the most popular post was, “Why Are Most Indie Games 2D Instead of 3D?” It was echoed a little bit with Friday’s game dev quote by Chris Roberts. As people have pointed out, I have a little bit of a blind side here. I tend to view 2D as a conceptual subset of 3D rather than as a separate beast. You are just making simplifications based on eliminating one plane, right? Blame it on one of my earliest favorite arcade games (Exidy’s Starfire) being a “fake” 3D space shooter. I was warped for life, getting overly thrilled by 3D worlds represented on 2D monitors. I don’t know that my view is necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t jibe with that of a lot of others.
And the most popular post of my blog for visitors in 2013, regardless of when the post was originally published? That would be my very first post: “The Black Triangle“, from 2004. Evidently, I started out awesome and haven’t been able to match it ever since…
As far as game development is concerned, I definitely have my regrets for the year. I blew an internal milestone pretty badly at the beginning of September and am still trying to make up for lost time. However, we’ve had some great victories as well, and some of the stuff that was completely overhauled has served the game well. I think Frayed Knights 2 – while holding true to its roots and the original concept – is really going to exceed its predecessor by leaps and bounds. I’m excited.
I hope you all have a very happy New Year!
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Maklak said,
> I tend to view 2D as a conceptual subset of 3D rather than as a separate beast.
Let me tell you, how a newb can see this. I haven’t used opengl, but I could do simple stuff with SDL or a GUI toolkit, like fltk or QT. Putting buttons and images on the screen is pretty straightforward. Just give the API the (x,y) coordinates (and maybe some other data, like size and what colour is transparent or what function to call when clicked) and you’re done.
3D? At worst it is totally incomprehensible and at best (such as making something like wolfenstein with flat walls), I’m kinda trying to fit a square peg (texture) into a trapezoind hole (how it looks on the screen). I could maybe do it, but it almost feels like bending my mind to some alien geometry where instead of 2 dimmensions, I suddenly have several more. For 3D, I’d need the location of the centre of the texture, location of the camera and maybe something else, like angles. To me this is an order of magnitude more complex than 2D.
So naturally, if I were to write a simple game, I would do it in 2D. Now, there were certain things (like arrays in programming languages) that just had to “click” for me to understand, and then became obvious in hindsight. Maybe 3D is like that and I could understand it if I actually tried long enough.
Rampant Coyote said,
Yeah, what you are talking about is another problem. In fact, that’s worthy of a whole blog post. Actually, I think I wrote one a long time ago, but it’s worth an update.
The thing is, while down at the lower layer 3D and 2D are really the same thing, the whole point (to me) is that it should be simplified. When you can abstract out the Z axis, a lot of things *DO* become simpler. That’s the way it should be. Conceptually, you may be working in a subset of the 3D space, but you can take shortcuts. You can say things like, “Position this HERE on the screen” instead of having to calculate where HERE is relative to the camera position and all that crap. It’s like dealing with an algebra equation where Z=0 which cuts the complexity in half.
There’s a whole ‘nother deal… back in the day, getting anything to look GOOD on the screen (or run quickly at arcade-game speeds) was a pain in the butt on the slow computers. But getting something up and running was pretty fast. The “Hello World” of game graphics was only about four or five lines of code. We still need that. People need an easy way to learn.
Anon said,
> The “Hello World” of game graphics was only about four or five lines of code. We still need that. People need an easy way to learn.
TRUE!
With all the advances we had in hardware and even operating systems we had astonishingly few in programming languages and general toolkits.
You have to get a high-powered toolkit to just get /some/ basic comfort and even then it’s complicated.
Do you know by chance the old 3D modeller on the Amiga (and later PC) with the name Caligari?
Back in the time it was so far advanced in basic construction and ease of use – compared to the other modellers on PCs and workstations – that nobody believed it and therefore didn’t jump on this ship. They all stayed with the AutoCAD family and Caligari ultimately sunk because of the lack of funds. A few of their great ideas were adopted by the competition but the general appeal was lost. It took about 10 years or so to get the same level of comfort with other applications.
What we need is *this* ease of use to bring 3D alive.
Programming most of a graphical application like a game shouldn’t even involve typing except for constants or string input!
Let the engine creating folks do all the typing – that’s what *they* make their money with.
Game creators should concentrate on creating the games and not re-invent the wheel for the umpteenth time.
Some day in the future we will perhaps have programming that looks like what Tom Cruise does in Minority Report (waving with his hands in 3D space) but I fear it’s still a long way…
In this regard I’m now having a close eye on applications like GameMaker, Clickteam Fusion and Construct2.
Yes, you can’t do every type of game with them and you still have to type but some folks would be surprised how much reduced it is and how good some results are.
They may not produce the next 3D wonder like Crysis (yet) but they have many commercial indie games on their belts now.
Maklak said,
> With all the advances we had in hardware and even operating systems we had astonishingly few in programming languages and general toolkits.
Well, the problems with that are legacy code and network effect. Once a programming language becomes popular, it tends to stay popular for a long time and grow an ecosystem with lots of libraries and tools. It also gets some features ported from other languages over time. There are some experimental OSes and programming languages with nice features, but they aren’t popular and mostly serve as a frontier to the things that are popular. Plus well, if there was some fundamental shift in programming, millions of people who now get the job done, would have to be retrained.
> Programming most of a graphical application like a game shouldn’t even involve typing except for constants or string input!
W00t? Even with a framework and a big library, you still need to browse through the 3000 pages “Book of classes, grimoire edition” and write glue code and the “business logic” of the game. I simply don’t see a way around it, unless you have a framework for some specific gerne (like a platformer) and a level editor with lots of options.
> Let the engine creating folks do all the typing – that’s what *they* make their money with.
Well, OK, they can make the part that translates shapes and textures into an image, plus give you a level editor, importing from 3D modelling software and some tools, but that’s it.
> Some day in the future we will perhaps have programming that looks like what Tom Cruise does in Minority Report (waving with his hands in 3D space) but I fear it’s still a long way
What? But that’s so insane. You know what, you may be right. People are making humanoidal robot receptionists instead of sticking to the factory assembly line arms kind and a lot of people think this type of hand-waving UI is “cool”, so someone will make it happen. I just don’t find this idea to be ergonomic, so I don’t understand the appeal.
Static analysis, function parameter hints and auto-generating boilerplate code are already here, but I don’t see how an expert system to help programmers could even work.