Alternex UI Iteration

Alternex now looks like this:

The only immediately visible change is that the numbers under the cities have been replaced with a progress bar and separate city icons to indicate their size (town, city, metropolis).

The more important change was the drastic reduction in notification popups. Rather than giving a popup window every time population grew in an unsupported city, it happens only the first time and cities emanate an obvious red glow when they're in trouble.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the way the UI turned out here; there's a lot of floating point numbers floating around the screen. It works fine, but it's still ugly. But I realized that my time is not nearly as infinite as I had led myself to believe, and I'm now just focused on finishing the high-score functionality and the extra levels. One final result of all of this UI stress is that I'm seriously considering buying a UI design book in hopes of figuring it all out. I'd love to avoid this sort of situation in the future.

Physicality

Games have a feel.

It's especially noticeable in first-person games. How quickly does the player move? Does movement accelerate to a point or go at a constant rate? Is there a limit on how quickly you can turn? How fast does the game react to input? Does the player jump immediately after pressing the right button? Is there some recovery time after landing?

That's a small subset of the questions that could be asked about just two verbs: run and jump. Similar questions might be asked of other interfaces. In an RTS, do my units move as soon as I order it, or do they slowly turn and rev up first? In a flight sim, does the plane turn downwards by default or continue in a straight line (Battlefield 2 vs. HAWX)? In a tank driving game, does the tank move forwards when told to accelerate or turn to face the direction that the player is facing (Battlefield 2 vs. Halo)?

I don't think that quicker and more responsive is always better. Counter-Strike is considered more tactical than Quake III partially because the players move so much slower. Sins of a Solar Empire can be infuriating to an RTS player that's used to a faster pace, but its slowness, combined with its massive scale, turn it into a deeper-feeling strategy game. I was astonished by how slowly the player turned in the Xbox version of Fallout 3, but the game feels fine with the addition of VATS.

I wouldn't be so bold as to say that games ought to go in one direction or another; it's very probably a matter of personal preference. But it amazes me that this physical feeling of games is ignored in descriptions and reviews of games. A major element of games seems to be acknowledged only subconsciously, or sometimes obliquely in discussions about performance. It's a useful tool in the designer's box, and it ought to get the attention it deserves.

Alternex 1.1 Goals

With 50 days left before the deadline, it's time for me to get started on revising Alternex, my game for the Imagine Cup competiton. Here's what I intend to do:

• Improve the menu graphics by adding depth (possibly with a 3D tubes look).
• Add a border to the game window. For some reason this seems to add a lot to a game; it takes it from the realm of the OS window to its own context.
  
• Lower the information density of the main playing screen by converting some of the floating-point numbers into other graphical cues.
• Add more "juice" into the user interface.
• Build extra levels to play, and possibly new difficulty settings
• Finally allow the player to replace plants in one action rather than sell and build separately.
• Refine the endgame scoring system. Right now, it's just a barebones system, and I worry that it isn't satisfying. Perhaps a high-score list.
• Find a way to notify the player of important goings-on without using the current in-game popup windows. They annoy people and break the action

Three New Prototypes

Stuff I've been working on / playing with:


1) Auralstride:

An echolocation game. The player tries to navigate a maze strictly through audio cues (though the game will graphically display the player's orientation). I'm thinking of having the player go through the maze collecting limited-frequency bands of audio tracks that can be combined into a full song after they've all been collected. I worry, though, that this mechanic is too shallow. If I want to sustain the player's interest over several levels, I need to gradually increase the difficulty of this task, and simply making the maze more complex won't cut it.

So far I've got a working prototype of the basic echolocation gameplay in a maze composed of squares, but it's a long way from a functional game.


2) Maestro

I've written about this one before. You move the mouse to match a song's waveform. My goal is to smooth it out and fiddle with the data until that's fun, and then to allow the player to input any MP3 song to play. It's showing promise, but this sort of thing might be above my skill level. Look at Audiosurf and how imprecise its game-to-song matching is. Maestro works very well for some songs and very poorly for others.

It's currently the furthest along of any of these prototypes; in fact, I shouldn't even be calling it a prototype at this point. I'm still trying to find a good way to display the waveform and such graphically (since just displaying it as a graph seems inelegant), but the basic gameplay and song-importing works fine.


3) MUTE

Imagine a simple conversation game wrapped in the skin of an IM program. MUTE is a backronym for Madup University Text Express, since I imagine that the first conversation will be set in a college social context. Nothing's been implemented on this one, to my shame, but I've been working out the conceptual design since the idea came to me. The basic gameplay is simply picking a response from a preset menu.

The big flaw in any branching-conversation game is the amount of text that needs to be written. It increases exponentially with conversation depth if (as I intend to do) you avoid looping back to earlier parts of the conversation. But I'm hoping that this will be a plus, since I hope to flex my writing muscles and possibly to bring in other people to do writing (maybe within a custom-built authoring tool).

There are a couple of basic features beyond the basic conversation gameplay that I'd like to include. I hope to have several computer actors that you can initiate conversation with, as well as actors that will sign on to the IM program and contact you. I'd like to have persistent game-wide variables that can be turned on or off within the conversations, such that an ambitious author could expand the game into one involving concrete goals. And I'd like to programmatically ensure that no conversations in the game will repeat dialogue within the same game session. The point of putting this in a mock IM program is to build immersion cheaply, and I don't want to throw that away.

Imagine Cup - Round 2

Earlier, I entered the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition.

I'm proud to say that my team, Epsylon Games, which comprises me, has advanced on to round 2.

The leaderboards suggest that about 600 teams from around the globe entered into the competition. 150 continue on to round 2. When you consider that I was a single-man team (others had up to four members plus a mentor) and that I started my game three weeks before the deadline, I'm immensely satisfied with achieving semi-finalist status.

My prize is a 12-month XNA Creator's Club Premium membership and, more importantly, two more months of development before I have to turn in the final product. The teams will be whittled down to six finalists for round 3, and those teams go to Egypt and get a shot at some nice prize packages.

I've started putting together a list of extra features and alterations I'd like to add to the game in these precious months. I'd like to add depth to the graphics, get rid of all the floating-point numbers, add in mouse wheel-controlled map zooming, fix the game's balance, and flesh out the playable content through additional levels and possibly level progression.

Somehow, I'll fit this all in amongst the other three small game projects I'd like to do, new work in the Dartmouth Tiltfactor lab, and three college classes.