Game Development | Gamedev Brain

What’s a Good Game?

Posted on February 11, 2018 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been asking myself the question, what’s a good game. It’s a hard question to answer. Most of the time it comes with a reference, like XCom, or Civilization. The problem is what makes a good game. To some it must be graphically amazing. Some people a story must grab them personally. It is so personal, that no two people are alike.

So for me, I love a tactical game. It can be real-time, it can be turn based, but I love strategy and besting an opponent. I hate multiplayer though. I want to crush an AI that does not tell me how bad my mom is. The thing is, I think that good games are probably more generic than this.

Can we take every game and say if it is good or not? The problem is every game is liked by somebody. So we can at least say there are never any truly bad games to 100% of people. So what makes a game good? Have you ever told anyone about a game that you thought was awesome that you only played for 2 minutes and never will play again?

So, at least one characteristic of a good game is that people play it for a long time. But, then you look at Steam and see that tons of people are playing games for a long time and reviewing them poorly, so why is that? So if you play something for a long time but hate it was the game bad? I don’t think it really was.

You put your life into a game, if you play it for hours, it was good. Even if it strikes you in the end as not being that great, it grabbed you for hours of your short life. You were giving it a shot, it had enough greatness in it to have you give priceless time. So I contend that your final thoughts on a game don’t really matter if you played it long enough. That could be crazy to state, because you could wish you never bought it, but if it made you feel something, isn’t that what a good game does?

What do you think? What makes a great/good game to you? Try to not use a reference to describe it. It’s a challenge to nail down. That is why I love making games.

The Power of Threading

Posted on October 14, 2017 by magicrat_larry

I know a lot of people are afraid of threads when programming. I kinda was for a long time. They are confusing at times and can get out of hand as well. The problem is to make a complicated game of any kind you have to learn them. You don’t have to love them, but you have to get used to them so you can do things that games need, like streaming content, animated loading screens, and much more.

In short threading is powerful, but without planning it will knock you on your butt.

In the early days of developing Violent Sol Worlds we did not use any threading. We quickly realized that to do a giant streaming world you would need them. The issue with plugging threading in is that it has to be planned. If you do not plan it out, things will get out of hand quick. The critical issue is design. When you start your game, make sure you think of it in terms of what has to be running on the main thread and what can happen, out of time, with the main thread.

content loading is fairly easy to have happen in the background

What do I mean about main thread? That is the main game loop, often times you care about rendering in that loop and player input etc. The other stuff, like loading content, physics, AI, other strange interesting game-like things, can all be done outside of the main game loop. I learned having something like content loading is fairly easy to have happen in the background.

How you ask? You need to plan that out well. If the game has a list of render entities that get drawn to the screen, you need to code that in a way that things can be added and removed from that list at a random time and not have things blow up. In this way you can have the main thread put requests out to the loader thread to load in and create entities to draw. The loader will work on them on its own timeline and eventually just pop them onto the list to be drawn to the screen.

In short threading is powerful, but without planning it will knock you on your butt. Keep in mind that if planned out from the beginning you will have a powerful tool at your games side. Often times some of the neatest things are done with threading and allow for a better user experience in your game. Happy threading everyone!

Violent Sol Worlds Now On Kickstarter

Posted on August 18, 2017 by magicrat_larry

Violent Sol Worlds has officially launched its Kickstarter project – here

Violent Sol Worlds is a story driven, single player, action hero combat game with a massively procedural generated planet covered in caves and complexes with an AI director that injects events and stories into the world. The entire game is highly mod-able including gear improvements, vehicles, drops, and much, much more.

The Power of POC in Game Development

Posted on October 30, 2016 by magicrat_larry

What is a POC? It stands for “Proof of Concept”

Ok, so that is out of the way, what is a POC used for? We used it for Violent Sol Worlds early on to verify to ourselves that certain game play elements would be fun. We made three POC’s. The first was the top down walking and shooting, the second was the car driving, and the third was crafting.

Each one of these POC’s had a singular purpose. They were built to determine if the individual game play element was entertaining enough to be in a game. We saw the potential for all three to be entertaining so Violent Sol Worlds was born into development. The POC’s were very useful and we used them effectively to understand if the game idea we had was actually a game that would be entertaining.

Now we are far along in development and we found another reason to use a POC. That reason was physics. We have had several iterations of our physics now and wanted to get a version that would be the correct version for Violent Sol Worlds. So we determined that a POC would be a good way to get there.

So we started making a new program that would simulate closely the game when it pertains to physics. The purpose was for a simple, only physics, POC that would show that the physics implementation was more correct for the game. Once we had something that worked well we began to plug it into the game.

Once we plugged the physics into the game, we began to debug the integration issues. Here is where a POC is proving very useful. The integration of the new physics required a lot of changes in the game. This was complex, but the physics system itself remained intact from the POC. We are having an interesting mathematics issue which is causing the player to be able to move through objects in specific directions.

Tracing through the code was not good enough and proved to be misleading. So we took the exact physics body files from the game and put them into the physics POC and tried to duplicate the problem there. Turns out the POC works great.

What do we do now? We plan on debugging the two implementations at the same time and walking through the code step by step and seeing what part of the math deviates and when. This will help pinpoint the problem and get us closer to fixing this problem.

So it turns out writing POC’s is a very powerful tool in all stages of game development. I strongly recommend that you use them to help you develop systems for your games. It simplifies things and gives you a tool that helps in your debugging and learning. Let us all know how you’ve used POC’s in your game development by leaving a comment.

Also come check out the game here on IndieDB

50 Reasons You Need to Support Violent Sol Worlds

Posted on November 25, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I asked myself this question, if I cannot come up with 50 reasons to support Violent Sol Worlds then why would you? So here is my list…

The Art – It’s a top-down stylized survival experience that looks like a graphic novel in action.

The AI Overlord – Nothing will remain the same for long. If you get good at surviving in your current situation then the AI overlord will generate a special experience to mix things up for you.

The Cars – What good is a near infinite world you get to walk around? In this game you can walk or drive, gotta love that!

The Creatures – There are an absolute ton of creatures going in to the game. All I have to say is Rhino Turtle.

Crafting Cars – There have been plenty of games with crafting in them, how about crafting a car? Can anyone say tank?

Crafting Guns – you don’t just buy guns, you can make them. Put the coolest laser rifle together to match your game play. Heck just make a laser chainsaw.

The Corporations – The universe is being colonized with massive help from companies. Here are a few – Mal-Atomic, Avrio, The RTA

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

The Biomes – the planet will be diverse and varied. There will be a ton of biomes for all he creatures to live in, from forests, to deserts and every other thing you can think of.

Building – You don’t just survive on a distant planet, you survive by building and adapting. Construction of buildings is a huge part of the game.

The Universe – Trust me the universe has a level of backstory that a sandbox survival game has not touched. Each corporation, each faction, came from somewhere. Nothing just exists, it all has purpose and evolution.

Farming – A man has to eat. You will be able to plant crops and grow your own food for survival or profit.

The Maker – A key part of your survival in Violent Sol Worlds is the Maker. It is the technology that allows for you to store molecular configurations of object and essentially print them from raw matter for use in your daily activities. Need a gun, make it. Need a car, make it.

The Technology – There is a huge mix of technology to be used. Anything from an automatic miner to some old-time cars. You will be shooting laser rifles, and conventional weapons. You might even see some sort of hover bike, or laser chainsaws.

The History – How did a recycling company go from Earth to helping people light years away reconfigure molecules to form a lase pistol? Well the history of Renew tells you that. Nothing in Violent Sol Worlds is just thrown in, it all makes sense in the history of the universe.

Laser Weapons – Who does not love the idea of some top-down action with lasers? I’m in.

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

Aircraft – So you can drive cars, why not fly? So there are aircraft, and you can craft them.

Car Physics – Each car is simulated in a physics engine. This allows for different terrain to change how a car handles as well as tires blown from gun shots.

Lighting – It’s not enough to have a cool comic book feel. How about true lighting and shadows to help with the feeling of explosions and lasers flying around?

Conventional Weapons – Not everything is high tech. Sometimes a nice shotgun does that job well and cheaply.

Top-down – Survival is awesome. How about survival from a tactical top down view with action combat?

The Mal-Atomic Device – You get to use a scifi device called the Mal-Atomic to help with your crafting. It’s like an iPhone but more scifi and can help rearrange molecules.

Pets – You can have a pet cat, dog, or whatever. Yes this is a thing.

Turrets – The game might just be cruel to you, so build some turrets for defense. Laser turrets to help ward off attackers, expensive but effective.

Wild West Scifi – We landed on a wild west settler vibe for the game. So it is scifi, but there are some wonderful wild west feels to the world as you attempt to settle the wilds of the Rim.

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

Living World – You are a settler on a planet that will not stop trying to kill you. Much like the old west on Earth it will keep throwing events at you that change up how you need to play to survive.

The Team – I like to call our team a dream team of game development. Not one with super stars on it but one that is truly a team built for an unforeseen victory. Meet the Team

Weather – There will be sun and there will be rain. Each weather event can help or hurt you.

Open Development – Join our development by giving suggestions and feedback starting now. You can also just watch us on Twitter and our website and see the progress of nearly everything we do.

@magicrat_larry

@TheRealF1tZy

@doublemintben

Modding – The game is being built from the ground up for you to mod. This game will be able to live longer than most because of the new content you can produce for it at its core.

The Music – The music is composed purely for this game. You will not hear the music anywhere else.

Don’t Walk Drive Mentality – This is a huge world you are settling on. Don’t just walk for miles, drive. We want you to be able to see a lot of places so cars are vital to this survival game and will be in from the early stages.

The Dream – The idea of the Violent Sol Universe is huge. There are plans for many things beyond Violent Sol Worlds. Supporting us early keeps this dream alive. See the dream here

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

Play With Friends – Surviving with friends is often times harder than alone, but oh so much more fun.

Play Alone – See if you can make it alone in a world that is harsh and unforgiving.

Run your own server – Take control of a server for your own gaming community. Don’t like most people, just your friends? start up a server and only let those who you want in.

Continuous Development – Our team is a special one. We move fast and get things done. We will not stop this game and plan on a very long haul here. We often times talk about the potential for ten years of development for content. We will develop new and fresh things for this game as long as people keep supporting it.

Create a Colony – Why are you surviving on a planet 4 light years away from Earth if not to create something larger. Work toward building a complete settlement to support more and more NPCs and players.

News Ticker – The universe is not dead while you are settling the planet. Keep track of the news as things happen. If Pirates start pestering Rim settlements yours might be next.

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

Expand-ability – Violent Sol Worlds concentrates on planetary explorations. We are making sure we can expand into space when we want to.

Laser Chainsaw – Yes, a laser chainsaw. You gotta get wood somehow and swinging it at creatures sounds like a blast too.

Calling Home For Population – Need a mechanic? Call home and request one. They probably will need a facility, and place to live though so be prepared to have some requirements met.

The World hates you – Yes, being one of the first people to land on a planet is going to be difficult. The environment will not enjoy you and the AI overlord will make sure you have a challenge.

Equipment – It’s about the equipment. Pick up resources. Craft an awesome laser pistol. Build a car with a turret. Construct better armor.

Everything is a Resource – Kill a creature, use its horns for a new hood ornament.

Is that enough yet? Come see our Greenlight and give us a quick vote.

Action Combat – This is a top-down game so the action is going to be both tactical and fast paced.

Car Combat – Sometimes while driving things happen. Sometimes those things require a high powered laser turret. Sometimes they require missiles. All I know is be prepared to drive and shoot.

The Crystals – We are in love with the crystals. They have many properties and are the dynamic element in the universe that allows for many awesome crafting opportunities. Read a story about them here.

Your Colony Ship – You we placed on the planet by an elaborate process. Like the rest of the universe we figured it all out. About your colony ship

Simulation – We not only have action we also have simulation elements to the game as well. Many systems work under the hood of this game to make the world feel alive

Your Crate – You get dropped off on the planet on day one in your crate. Much like a train car, but this one is your home. Don’t worry in no time you will modify it and make it a lot less terrible and a little more like home.

Support Violent Sol Worlds Today by checking out our KickStarter, our Greenlight and our website. With your help and support we can make all of this a reality.

KickStarter and Greenlight and Bears Oh My

Posted on November 19, 2015 by magicrat_larry

So it has been a bit since we launched both Greenlight and KickStarter . It has been interesting so far. I am encouraged by Greenlight and blown away by the severe lack of KickStarter wanting to make money.

Let’s start with Greenlight. We launched that thing and we blew up with traffic. We got votes by the bucket load. We unfortunately had some improvements to make and had a lower than what we had hoped yes percentage of 37%. It was still fantastic and that percentage is nothign to be sad about. Since then we fixed the wording on our page to better explain the game. So for the past 8 days our yes percentage is 62% on average which is more like where we thought we should be.

So Greenlight is rocking forward and people are really liking Violent Sol Worlds and would like to see it on Steam in the future. We have a lot more votes to go though, your vote would help greatly in promoting our title. Please head over to our Greenlight page and login to vote it up.

Now for KickStarter. We expected more from KickStarter than what they offered. I know you should not rely on somebody else to drive traffic to you, but the difference between Steam on launch day and KickStarter was like the difference between a Saturn V rocket and a rubber band. Both fly, but one gets somewhere substantial and quickly.

I’m just saying that They can make a ton more money if they actively improved their own traffic and pointed more people in an active way to new projects at least for a day or two to see if they catch or not. The truth that we did not know is that your first day will be the exact same as your sixth day. They did not seem to do what Steam did and drive people to you for a few days. They simply provide you a website and that is it.

Really we have learned a ton about game development in the past few months and have really gotten a ton more fired up about our Title Violent Sol Worlds. Mathematically all our current adventures are proving very good for us. All signs still point to people loving the idea of Violent Sol Worlds and the development is going forward full steam. With all that being said let’s go vote on the Greenlight and promote the KickStarter, let’s get this thing rolling.

Thank you all for your support.

Steam Greenlight, It Can Be Fun

Posted on November 12, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been live with the Violent Sol Worlds team on Steam Greenlight for a few days now. It is fun, and stressful. We are really enjoying it so far. The first few days we hit hard and were at a great trajectory and traffic was massive. Now it is slowing down right as I expected it to. So now comes the slow climb to the top 100.

The thing is we really wanted to get to at least 50% of the way to top 100 in the first high traffic time, and we did. Now I would like to see about 2 percentage points a day go up, not sure exactly how hard that is to get. The amount of traffic after about 3 days on Steam Greenlight goes way down. You really need to drive traffic there yourself after that it seems.

So I am pushing a bit of Twitter today to see if I can get more voters there in that manner. It always boils down to marketing. If anyone tells you anything about indie game development it should be about marketing. Get good at it and you will be fine. If you are shy or think everything you do is not interesting you are doomed.

Anyway, Greenlight is going great so far I just hope it does not take 6 months to get there. One thing I noticed is a lot of people really want only completely or near finished games on Greenlight. This kinda stinks because that is the reason why a ton of games never even get to take advantage of things like Workshop, or acheivements etc. They get so far in to their design, then here comes valve 90% into their project, with awesome things to integrate that everyone wants and they are hard if not impossible to integrate in.

We want to be greenlit early, so we can have that working relationship with Valve and their APIs early as to have a tightly integrated experience on Steam as soon as we can and not have people having to wait on or never get things like Workshop mods. To get there We do need your vote so please do come by our greenlight page and join the cause to get Violent Sol Worlds Greenlit.

There are Milestones Nearby, Let’s Not Hang Out Here Long

Posted on November 11, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been doing indie game development for a long time now and what has contributed to my lack of finishing has been staying on a milestone for far too long. When you do this you tend to slowly lose steam. You need to keep moving and keep a pace that will allow for excitement in your development cycle.

You should setup goals and milestones because they setup victories. Remember though, there is nothing worse than never getting past one. If you set a milestone, those checkpoints are often the areas of your project where you will tend to bog down in details that might not matter. Dose everything need to be perfect to mark that off, no. Get to a point where the basics of a milestone are done and working and move on.

Iteration is the key to not stalling out at a major milestone in game development. Say you want character movement done. Set your first milestone for simplistic walking, not all of it including jump, crouch, climb, and crawling. See each one of those can be a small victory not just one. A lot of people tend to want to bundle large amounts of features in to one game.

Take time to think about the victory points in your project and make sure they are not too large. Break things down to smaller victories so you can have one every couple of days. Large milestones will slowly kill your momentum and make it mentally harder to continue to push on a project where you might not be getting paid to do it.

Come be a part of our Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Vote for Greenlight here

Check out more information on Violent Sol here

Follow me on Twitter @magicrat_larry

New on Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Posted on November 9, 2015 by magicrat_larry

We are proudly announcing Violent Sol Worlds has been launched on Kickstarter. Now everyone can see the top-down scifi survival shooter where you can craft cars, weapons, and buildings. You can help us increase the awareness of Violent Sol Worlds and help create the momentum it needs to become an amazing reality. If you find the game to be of interest please help us promote it by telling the world about it. Take a look and discover what we are so passionate about.

Violent Sol Worlds on Kickstarter – we need your support

Violent Sol Worlds on Steam Greenlight – we need your yes vote to get into the store

Violent Sol Homepage – keep informed about the Violent Sol Universe

I personally am so excited, freaked out, and a bit nervous all at the same time. It is by far one of the most interesting feelings to work on something this hard and then finally launch it to the public. For those who follow me on Twitter you already know that this process has taken a long time for our team. We have put a ton of work in to get to this point. We really look forward to the next phase of the project which is very exciting for me.

We have already began to design the final game so it can be expanded greatly over the next few years. This is truly a dream project to work on and I hope you will join me in my journey to bring it to the world. We are creating something magical here that I love and hope you will too. If you are a scifi fan and love a good survival game I am sure you will be pleased with what we are putting together.

Thank all of you who follow my blog and everything else I do. You are the best and I am truly grateful for each and every one of you.

If You Don’t Do It, I’ll Do It Myself

Posted on November 8, 2015 by magicrat_larry

A huge lesson that I have learned doing indie game development is that if you cannot pay a person to do some work chances are they will not do it. They can be the perfect talent for the job and be able to do it no problem, but if it is voluntary they probably won’t do it for you.

Nope, not even giving them a place in the future of your dream will make them do it for you. See most people are only driven by what they have now or what they can get now. So your dream means nothing to them personally until it can pay them. They are not bad people or anything, they are just motivated by their lives and their dreams. This makes it hard to rely on others while trying to start something new. You can throw tasks around as if people are getting paid but the truth is you will probably have to do them yourself.

I have a new rule in my life. If I am not paying for it and it is important I must be able to do it on my own. This does not stop me from handing tasks over, but I am my own safety net. For sure if it is important and there is a date attached to the task, just do it yourself. Don’t waste the time handing that task off to another person who has no skin in the game.

I know some of you are thinking, man this guy sounds like he has some bad experiences here. The response to that is, yes I do have experience here. I do not believe they are good or bad ones, but I have been in the places where I put things in the capable hands of another, or two, and they simply do nothing, or something terrible, for your vision or dream. Take it from somebody who’s been there, until money is involved make sure you can do it yourself and assume you will be doing it all.

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