pureLIGHT - Pet Project

Last night I attended Gamecamp Edmonton – an excellent opportunity for industry networking (and similar interests) that I full intend to be a big part of in the future. Until then though, it also gave me a fairly good test session on Disc Game – stretching beyond the friends and family and actually getting into the hands of people who hadn’t even heard of the project.

This was a great test opportunity, and while I’m burning with excitement to continue working on it (I have had a busy morning so this is the first I’m back at my laptop) I figured I’d try to collect some thoughts I had from watching people play last night:

General Observations:

- There is absolutely a game here. The weird 3d navigation was clearly a joy on people’s face, and several actually came back and picked up the controls without prompting. I know I’m still only in the beginning of this project, but this gives me a lot of encouragement!

- The controls actually work pretty well! I’m still not sold about the right joystick tilt (I understand its purpose though) but the strafe / drive / turn navigation seems to work quite well.

- Weird 3d geometry and action gameplay does get people lost though… I think the current arena map works well for this in that you’re really not navigating a maze but rather sticking to two sides of a fairly simple coin; which watching people play seems to work fairly well. For more multiplayer type scenarios, the playable area (even if it shifts over a couple of rounds) needs to stay simple enough that people can get “lost” without too much pain (thus keeping the focus on the high energy / trippy distortion thing I have going)

- The aesthetics were very well received, especially the alternate world. I only heard one complaint that things are a little too bloomy (thus making it hard to keep track of what’s going on) but for the most part I think there is a style here that works to my needs and is enjoyable by the end users. (the bendy lasers were also a big hit)

- The 2 minute pitch of the game seems to resonate fairly well – and I agree 100% with the one fellow who called it “3d air hockey with lasers”

Negative Points:

- My speed-based camera pan broke down a little with the speed at which people were playing the game (flashing white as the camera intersected with the overhead “moons”). Easy enough fix, but I cringed every time!

- People seemed to drive the game a lot harder and faster than I or my testers do… which is interesting in that about 8 times people “broke” off the surface and started drifting out into space. While I am aware that this can possibly happen, hours of testing on the physics system has shown it to be nearly impossible – which means that I need to tweak the controls or figure out what people are doing differently. (that said, the couple of failures due to high speed boost around the sharp lip got cheers and a very positive reaction – I think I just need to ensure that the system is consistent there)

- The player avatar was a little (to my surprise) confusing to people! The way the 4 quadrants change colors had people thinking it was a radar or it showed where you were taking damage. The aesthetics (i.e. the lack of photorealistic little spaceships or such) were fine, but the player avatar needs work.

Power / Health:

- Again, this fundamental component seems to break down… the inverted ring scale I think works well but the ammo == health system was completely missing

- One person pointed out that rapid fire and otherwise sloppy weapons don’t work to well when you’re sacrificing your life force – where every shot should count

- I’m not sure if the randomly spawned coins are working too well… perhaps coins should all be based on enemy destruction or otherwise spawned a little more forcefully.

Regarding the Power / Health observations, I’m considering separating the two – making the ring describe perhaps your weapon power and keeping the health something a little more modern (the basic take damage and recharge when out of danger convention). Perhaps (this needs testing) the result will be two rings – so shooting separates your weapon from your general health – this works on paper, but I’m not sure if the visual information will be too much to the player.

Weapons:

- Other than the ammo / health connection, the basic weapon and aiming seemed to work quite well. Players had no trouble hitting enemies with a fairly solid accuracy – though one point is that the enemies tended to take about 75% damage then escape – repair, and repeat the process.

- Boost-head butting was a huge hit, and while it is a touch over powered it was probably the most “fun” component of the game so far. The penalty for boost in terms of control and coasting seemed to be dead on, but despite a significant power drain people never noticed (and suggested a few times that boost should drain power… ). Boost also became problematic in that people were single-shot-killing (or close to) the more interesting enemies I added – including the ones that actually shoot back! (meaning the players who favored boost quickly pushed through the waves until things got too difficult). I think I need to selectively tone this system down, without losing too much of the potential fun...

- Jonathon and Dave apparently hyped up the rocket launcher I wanted to have in… (which didn’t make it due to time constraints) but I think I’m on the right track for weapons. I’m not sure (watching people navigate) if pickup based weapons are the key – perhaps it may be more pickups / powerups modify an archetypical set.

Alt World:

Just in time for the demo I added simple support for the red alt world, allowing the user to switch world stages at the push of a button. I originally had a timer /delay type thing but that just didn’t work for people. Watching people play, the alt world was an aesthetic hit but had some major issues in the current implementation:

- Until the later waves, there were no red coins… thus no health in the red alt world. With weapons burning health, people would go into this essentially empty world, navigate around, shoot, burn power… and then return to the main world to get their ass kicked.

- Until the later waves as well, the red world is actually pretty boring. This says that either special enemies or objects need to be spawned upon entry (or the start of the game) OR the ability to enter the alternate world is limited (perhaps with some sort of pickup or the like).

- By becoming invulnerable to enemies (or at least the basic enemies in the root world) the red alt world became a viable place to escape too when combat got a little too heated. Only a few players picked up on this, but there is definite potential here. (that said, it may become too easy to avoid combat)

Enemies:

- The behavior of the basic first enemy was a big hit – especially the “AI” where it tended to make a J shaped past around the player and “kick them in the ass” (all a simple balance of attraction and repulsion forces!).

- The second enemy, which shoots back, was also a hit… when people stopped long enough to notice it shooting back. The enemy’s use of the weapon worked quite well, but the avatar itself (despite by best efforts) was not visually distinct enough. Also, the susceptibility to boost didn’t help much.

- Most people seemed to understand (after a very quick introduction to the concept) how the red enemies and red coins worked in relation to the red alt world.

- People suggested using alternate colors and potentially having a set of 4 colored worlds… but I did get a word of caution that relying on color to differentiate core gameplay pieces becomes an accessibility issue on people who are even partially color blind. I honestly hadn’t thought of this before, but its an interesting problem (and quite manageable if I consider it in advance)

- Enemies were most successful in groups of 1-3. I tried having the later waves get a little more crazy but this just ramped the difficulty to almost guaranteed failure. Also, the more enemies, the more the player tended to get confused and frustrated. I think the balance is that this game needs to focus more on distinct battles – 1 gold enemy, 1 gold enemy with lasers, 2 gold enemies and 1 with a laser, 1 red enemy, etc. The waves could better communicate this as well, and if I do implement some sort of compass (which I will discuss momentarily) a smaller number is easier to manage.

The biggest issue with enemies was that there were distinct moments of dead air, where the enemy was stuck in some corner on the other side of the world and people were trying to find it. Several times a simple compass or radar was suggested (though I can say from my own thoughts on the topic that this gets extremely weird with the type of world geometry I’m dealing with). I think that improving the AI will help, but even with the tendency of the enemies to wander back into the playable area, I think this is a significant problem. The ideas I have to solve this issue are either some form of rotating 3d compass (simple little wireframe mesh of the world), some form of 3d guide (say lines penetrating through the player avatar pointing to where the enemies are) or perhaps some sort of shader trick (where enemies are visible through the world mesh). I’ll do some testing and see what works out the best.

I think that pretty much covers up my thoughts… I want to try my hand at implementing some of the ideas and adjustments while they are still fresh, and as soon as I’m done that I’ll capture another view. Until then, cheers!

Categories: Design, Testers

Despite a rather distracted weekend, there have been quite a few developments on Disc Game here. I want to make a few more visually distinct changes before I take another video (it looks very similar to before) but the gameplay experience is quite different.

First off, I have support for the xbox gamepad! You can still play completely with the keyboard, but the strafe adds a whole new level of control to the game (it handles more like driving a Warthog in Halo than playing Geometry Wars). The gamepad also allowed me to tweak the handling a fair bit – there is a fairly aggressive braking system but in a way that is (hopefully) transparent to the user: if you’re pushing forwards, its retarding your velocity backwards, etc. If you let go of controls or use the boost you still coast very freely – but the result is that the controls feel a lot tighter to the user.

I have also changed how the status rings / power reserve concept works. Previously, the larger your ring the more power you had. Now, the more power you have, the smaller your ring. This is a huge improvement from a gameplay perspective (as your need decreases, it becomes more challenging to harvest) and I think the first pass at the visuals helps sell this to the player… small rings buzz with bright energy and larger rings get thin and weak looking. First playtests have been really encouraging.

I also connected the weapon strength your power system. This is far more intuitive and allows for an interesting dynamic with a super-charge: you can keep collecting power above 100%, but any boost or damage will drop you back to 99%. I’m a little disappointed in that I had high hopes for connecting the weapon power to the intensity / color of the lighting around the player… but this just wasn’t working with my testers. The new ring concept though, and super charge effect, is working quite well though – so while I see a few improvements, I think this settles on the direction.

Now that I have the power dynamic down to a point I’m comfortable with, the next big hurdle is the alternate color spaces. I really want this to be central to the gameplay, but the few options I’ve tried just don’t work well. I’m leaning now to an almost Ikaruga idea where the red-coins (which currently are considered “corrupted” coins made so by the one enemy type) would become positive when the user jumps to the red world… and potentially the red enemies could become vulnerable or the like. Perhaps the ability to switch could be enabled by a pickup as well. This needs to be explored a little more, but if I make any progress on the topic I hope to show it in the next video.

Categories: Design, Development, Pics

As I think about the aesthetic behind enemies, I'm reminded of Thexder - a game I used to play as a kid on Dad's Apple II-GS. The graphics and technology is almost painfully crude, but I appreciate the wide range of visually distinct enemies they managed to get with very simple abstract graphics and basic patterns of behavior.

Categories: Design

I’ve now had a chance to start putting these fundamental pieces together and it’s time to show them off in another video! (music the Hanging Gardens track curtsey of dj://spaz)

I hope you can see where this is progressing, if only compared to the first few samples. Here we see the new map (“light” world only though I do have a few other colors ready to go), simple enemies spawned in waves and a basic weapon. (The controls and camera are also a little more friendly). Before I start musing about some of my gameplay concepts and critique on this first version, here are the “rules” as they exist now:

- Your power (both health and ammo) is represented by the white ring around your disc. This also defines your influence on coins, and the point at which you repel enemies. You gain this power back by collecting coins.

- The weapon does damage based on the current lighting you are in – if you noticed, the beam intensity and color changes to reflect this. When in the direct sunlight you do massive damage, and when on the underside, you are comparatively weak.

- Boosting into an enemy does damage as well – boost results in a loss of control though, and can break you free from some parts of the map.

- Enemies also collect coins (except for the enemy type that “corrupts” them) – when an enemy is destroyed, it spawns coins based on how many it had collected. (note that corrupt coins don’t do anything yet).

Some parts of this are proving really fun – the abstract surface navigation is a huge hit for my testers, as is the surface hugging laser beam, the fluid interaction with the coins and the general aesthetic (note simple textures and normal maps while keeping the surface clean and lighting friendly). I still want to add a lot of ambient flem (particles, crazy background, etc) but I think this is narrowing in on a general aesthetic that is easy and fun to produce yet visually stimulating and interesting. (even though it relies on high res lightmaps, the size of these maps is fairly small as well – I know it wouldn’t run as-is on the iPhone, but I want to avoid needing a super high powered computer to run what is really a glorified arcade game)

Other parts are a bit questionable though – the “lighting = weapon power” feature is mostly ignored by the testers, though my Fiancé learned (without prompting!) to lure the enemies to the top side where they were more vulnerable. Still, this needs to be more clear and I’m wondering if that’s simply a visual cue or something more drastic – I have a wonderful way to sample lighting at a given point, but making this lighting relevant to gameplay is harder than I thought!

The influence ring is a big hit, but using it as a health meter breaks down… it seems backwards almost, in that you have an easy time collecting coins (and thus health) when you don’t need them but have difficulty when you do. You also repel enemies when you are your strongest, they are all but attracted to you just when you have the most to lose. I need to explore this more and find a way that is clear yet perhaps a little more reasonable from a gameplay perspective.

I also want to work in the means by which you can switch to the alternate worlds (colors) – aesthetically I love them but I’m still not sure how to activate them. I did some test with “portal” meshes, but that was just confusing to the testers.

Besides these gameplay questions, I also have a lot of ideas where to keep adding development. Concepts for enemies, powerups, weapons, and affectors are practically writing themselves (affectors being things like bumpers or force fields that spawn in the world and shake things up). The way the one enemy type can corrupt coins has also been a big hit – now to figure out which of the dozen or so directions I should go to making those corrupt coins matter from a gameplay perspective.

I could add these little parts all day, but I think the next step is to try and resolve some of the fundamental gameplay questions. I’m going to try and nail some of that this weekend, as well as hookup a gamepad as a controller (the lack of strafe was bothering a few people) and perhaps another weapon, enemy or two. I want to be a little careful as it’s easy to get distracted at this point and I’d rather have as strong a beginning as possible without having to rewrite large sections down the road. After this next stage I also want to look into adding multiplayer support – though despite almost 10 years working with one form of Unreal or another, netcode still scares me. Should be an interesting experience though – half of this project is to try and stretch my skills a little… (and if I didn’t start thinking multiplayer, I fear my testers would probably lynch me, so it’s not like I have much choice!)

Categories: Design, Development, Gameplay, Video

I've been showing this prototype to quite a few people and have been getting some interesting feedback... Here are some of the more notable points:

- Make the game sounds in the same key as the music; I love the idea of making the audio more cohesive and relevant. Currently we have a mix of my old game sounds and some library elements, but for this to work audio is just as important as any particle effect. I also would like to arrange custom music for the game - looking at you DJ://Spaz, but anyone up to help out with this is more than welcome!

- Make the foreground elements fade when in front of your view (I think this can be done with a simple shader)

- Make the player avatar less symmetrical and potentially a little more interesting (more variation in the shapes for all the coins / enemies / etc)

- Gamepad support (easier controls for strafing)

- Ability to “lock on” to an enemy (not sure on this one – I see where it makes sense but at the same time it breaks some of the free-flow gameplay)

- More world interaction (jumps, bumpers, force fields, etc)

- More weapons (pickups, mines, etc - but some interesting suggestions including one that’s basically an energy beam grappling hook sounds really slick)

- Make the "repulse" aspect more of a shield with associated visuals

- Have a second level of charge once you max out on power / health (though this may change with some of the power / influence adjustments I'm working on the key point I guess is that you never cap out when gaining power)

- Multiplayer (single most asked for feature...)

I have had lots of other suggestions and ideas really are pouring out but the ones above seem to come up over and over (or are very pertinent, such as the sound effect suggestion). Thank you everyone for your feedback (I'm always open to suggestion via andrewc[at]purelighttech.com ) - I'll keep you posted as this develops!

Categories: Design

So I’ve done a lot of work on the backend system behind Disc-Game. This stage isn’t very exciting (though I think its nifty when it pre-caches 18,000 points evenly off a weirdly shaped surface and uses the network to efficiently spawn things!) but it lays the foundation of what I need to take this from a prototype to a game. The player’s disc is now a physics based Pawn, and I have a system for NPCs, also based on Pawns. For these Pawns, I'm using Unreal's inventory and weapon system which can give me pickups or guns that can also be shared by the NPCs. I also have basic support for a “wave” concept where enemies / coins are spawn across the map at various times and that new waves are triggered when the current hostiles are destroyed. All of this is functional from a code perspective, and I’m working at putting the pieces together into a rudimentary game. I also have some thoughts on a new map – I plan to show all these pieces together in a new video which I’ll be making shortly. Cheers!

Categories: Development

In a flurry of inspiration and code this project (which I holds the uninspired working title “disc game”) came to life this weekend. There is still a long way to go, and admittedly the parts are still rough around the edges, but I my instincts say there is a seed of something really interesting here.

So without any more preamble, here is the first video:

Now that you’ve had a chance to watch the video, let me break down a little of what is going on there. The basic idea is that the player is controlling a dist that is hovering a short distance above a surface. You could think of this like a magnet over a superconductor or an air hockey puck. The controls give a small force to the puck (forwards / backwards / turn) and while there are some limits to prevent extreme cases, you essentially coast without friction. The puck also has extremely high restitution, meaning it will have a fairly pronounced kickback against collisions (not unlike an air hockey puck). For all intents and purposes, gravity for this world follows the normal of the playable surface.

The interesting part in all this is that the surface can be any abstract shape (though things like sharp corners would understandably cause problems). This “surface hugging” approach makes what is really a very simple 2d control schema into something rather wild. The system I have here works on a sphere, inside of a tube, all over any sort of wildly twisted geometry… I’m even interested in making a mobius loop at some point!

I don’t want to get to much into the code of how this works – suffice to say it’s a rather odd interpretation of Unreal’s PhysX. Despite quite a few more quaternions than I’d ever like to see again, this implementation is entirely in UScript (which is a real testament to the capability of UDK). I’ll also point out that the system works for not just the player’s disc, but potentially dozens (if not hundreds) of discs active at once. (with only a few minor optimizations, I maintain a solid 60 fps with over 1000 live discs floating about the world).

This brings me to the second half of the video – now that I have a discs on a surface, where is the “game”? My first test involved randomly spawning 100 “coins” onto the surface – which can be physically influenced by the player (or potentially each other, enemies, etc). I see a whole library of possible surface-bound objects that range from small health-style pickups (like the coins in the video) to enemies, pickups, projectiles, weapons, etc. I also see this game as a potential multiplayer experience – so while it could be “hungry hungry hippos on acid” I see I’m seeing something a little more aggressive – with plenty of explosions and particles to go around. (Mario Kart battle on non-rational geometry?)

I also want to incorporate pureLIGHT into the gameplay. As part of this, I have a small object that (through a little development black magic curtsey of my co-worker Jason) reads the current color of the world under the player’s disc. This has performance limitations (I couldn’t sample hundreds of points at the same time) but it does allow me to (with more development black magic) read the pureLIGHT result for the world at the given location… meaning I could have the color or intensity of the light affect the player. One of the original inspirations in all this was a “physics game where light of the color blue was slippery”. I’m not quite sure how to integrate all this yet (the first test where you’re speed / power was based on lighting was confusing to my testers) but an idea is that the light you are in will affect your influence – shown in the video as a white ring around the pawn. I have to do some testing on this still – I’m interested to see where this will go.

(I also have ideas for switching the lighting state for the scene – going from this white light to something high contrast black and red, etc. I love the aesthetic possibilities in this, but I don’t know how this will relate to the gameplay yet – I have to do some more thinking on the subject)

As for the world, this first test has a few notable parts – I really like the distortion when you go around the fold in the world or get close to the sloped ground at the “red” end of the track. I also really like the bounce, but if anything, I find the environment a little constraining – I’m not sure if this is an arena type battle game or a linear puzzle game like Marble Madness. The more I think of it though, I wonder if it’s both – the movement mechanics would make for a very interesting linear game… but a spatially distorted combat game like Geometry Wars could also work. For ease of testing I think I’ll start with more of an arena focus, but I definitely think there is a single player puzzle / navigation aspect to this as well (all based on the same gameplay mechanics). In the short term though, I do think the current world breaks down. While it has some really interesting pieces, I’m not sold on the scale or layout. I have a few thoughts floating around for a more appropriate world test (I may revisit this first one in the future) – I’ll post some screenshots as that one comes together.

Categories: Design, Gameplay, Physics, Video