FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Spandex For All! KarjaSoft Announces Spandex Force: Superhero U

Stockholm, Sweden — July 16, 2011 — Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of Spandex Force: Superhero U, a tongue-in-cheek puzzle game with RPG and adventure elements.

Spandex Force: Superhero U is a superhero-themed puzzle game for Windows and Mac that lets the player create his or her own hero and attend the prestigious university Superhero U in Vigilance Valley. The game features many different kinds of minigames, including, but not limited to match-3 battles against teachers, other students and nefarious villains threatening the school.

Other minigames let the player rescue old ladies in distress, collect the precious metal Absurdium, or focus on physical, elemental and mental training. Three different match-3 mechanics and a large variety of puzzles are available, and everything is presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner that pokes fun at superhero cliches. The player can also customize his or her hero with different accessories and weapons, choose from various superpowers and develop the hero further by collecting experience and reputation points.

Screenshots:

http://www.spandexforce.com/screenshots/ss1.jpg
http://www.spandexforce.com/screenshots/ss2.jpg
http://www.spandexforce.com/screenshots/ss3.jpg
http://www.spandexforce.com/screenshots/ss4.jpg

“Spandex Force: Superhero U is definitely the best superhero RPG-puzzle-adventure game currently on the market,” says Miro Karjalainen, owner of KarjaSoft, not in the least bit deterred by the fact that the only two such games available are Spandex Force: Superhero U and its prequel, Spandex Force.

More information, screenshots and downloads can be found on the official webpage:

http://www.spandexforce.com

About KarjaSoft:

KarjaSoft started developing casual computer games in 2006. The first release was the fluffy arcade game Sheeplings in 2007, followed by Spandex Force in 2008 and the adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow in 2009. Current plans involve world-wide market domination in superhero puzzle/RPG games by 2012.

Contact:

Miro Karjalainen
KarjaSoft
info@karjasoft.com
http://www.karjasoft.com

Now I’m going to watch the new X-Men movie to celebrate!

Tomorrow I will go to Croatia for some sun, sea, beer and hiking in a national park.

Next week, unless something unforeseen shows up, I will release Spandex Force: Superhero U on an unsuspecting public.

But right now I intend to muse about difficulty in RPGs. The Rampant Coyote posted an entry about this and it got me thinking. He argues that a difficulty setting doesn’t necessarily have to mean just a more difficult game – it could also entail a new way of playing the game. It does make sense. Almost all games are full of (more or less) meta games – collect extra lives in SMB3, get all collectables in a casual game, and so on. A difficulty level that would result in a new way of playing the game is an intriguing thought, and might simply mean putting focus on some of the metagames instead of simply the main game.

Also, I agree with the necessity for difficulty levels in action RPGs. I just suck at action games and if I have to spend time on learning how to get my motor skills to work I’d rather press a big fat DELETE button and do something else. Give me the easiest setting, or give me hell!

Then again, I am strongly against difficulty levels in turn based RPGs and strategy games. For some reason I like the idea of playing the game like a puzzle; learn what I need to do to overcome this obstacle, and once I’ve come up with a solution it’s reproducable. An environment like that also lends itself well to meta games. What’s the lowest level I can beat Final Fantasy 5 at? What spells can I get at a ridiculously early stage of the game? Can I kill the dragon on Emerald Isle?

However, I realize that that point of view can be a bit obsessive and might not reflect the “normal” gamer. So I’ve actually opted for a different method with variable difficulty in Spandex Force: Superhero U. I imagine that the majority of players would rather just play and have everything adapt itself automatically.

Every minigame has a difficulty rating, from 1 to infinity. 1 is extremely easy, 20 getting challenging, 100 is very very hard. This difficulty determines how many tokens you have to collect to finish a minigame, or the opponent’s level (and the levels of his superpowers).

How is this difficulty determined? I’m glad you asked!

A base difficulty value is determined based on the player’s level. This value can range between the player’s level and the player’s level times 3. Then, each task has a relative difficulty from 1-10. Tasks in the first missions have a relative difficulty of 1-2, but the fights in the last episode have a difficulty of 9-10. The relative difficulty determines if the lower or the higher end of the base difficulty will be chosen. Let’s take an example:

Justice Guy is level 5, and will enter a task with relative difficulty 4.
Base difficulty = 5-15
Modified difficulty = (max – min) / 10 * relative difficulty + min = (15 – 5)/10 * 4 + 5 = 9

So, that’s it? The difficulty will be 9? Well, not exactly.

During gameplay, the player has a variable keeping track of how well he does. This variable starts at 50 and depending on whether or not he loses or wins minigames it increases and decreases to range between 0-100. This variable determines how likely it is that a new token falling onto the board will create a match. In other words: if you play well, it’s less likely that you’ll receive “free” chains when matching tokens, but more likely if things aren’t going so well for you.

Also, this variable affects the modified difficulty too. It can modify the value by 50%-200%. Let’s continue our previous example:

Justice Guy is level 5, and will enter a task with relative difficulty 4. He has a success variable rating of 78.
Modified difficulty = 9
After the variable of 78 has been taken into account, the difficulty is = 9 * 1.8 = 16

The final difficulty will actually be 16, in other words? Yes, almost. For scaling reasons I divide that value by two, though. So the final difficulty is 8.

In fact, I was toying with applying a quadratic transformation afterwards to smooth out the value, and give it a ceiling. It turned out to be a bad idea, though – it was hard finding a formula that would give suitable difficulty early as well as in the end. I tried this one, for example:

Justice Guy is level 5, and will enter a task with relative difficulty 4. He has a success variable rating of 78.
Modified difficulty = 16
Transformed difficulty = -0.0025x*x + 1x + 0.0025 = -0,64 + 16 + 0.0025 = 15.3625

Not much difference, eh? It would have been more of a difference if x was 100:

Transformed difficulty = -0.0025x*x + 1x + 0.0025 = -25 + 100 + 0.0025 = 75.0025

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in the end I let the difficulty remain pretty linear. Theoretically I think that this means that a player can level up too much to finish the game…but if anyone has that much time to spare, I’ll eat my hat!

“Okay, okay! Tell us which game won already,” I hear you exclaim. Superhero Princess Maker, that’s what!

Of course, I can’t go on calling it Superhero Princess Maker, so I thought of a more fitting name: Spandex Force: Champion Rising. And here is some concept art to boot:

So, what’s this game all about? Imagine the setting:

There’s a superhero convention in town, and the Blizzard Wizard is getting into a heated argument with Infinitorax Supreme.

Infinitorax: “Superheroes today… No skill, no power, no concept of ethics or morality!”
Blizzard: “Well, I for one blame society for that. With proper guidance every superpowered being could be a paragon of justice.”
Infinitorax: “Is that what you believe? No, dear Blizzard Wizard, a hero’s mettle is predetermined and nothing we can do changes that.”
Blizzard: “Is not!”
Infinitorax: “Is too!”
Blizzard: “Is NOT!”
Infinitorax: “Really? How about…THAT…one? That pathetic, useless, witless excuse for a hero lurking in the corner? Is that a creature destined for greatness?”
Blizzard: “Well… Yes! I truly believe that even such a miserable hero could be made great with the right guidance!”
Infinitorax: “I see… Fancy a wager, my dear Blizzard Wizard? You have one year to turn that useless pile of excrement into a fine jewel.”
Blizzard: “It’s a deal!”

The game will take place over 365 days. You guide the young hero in his/her daily routine, ensure that the stats are raised, that powers are learned, and that the proper ethics are upheld. If you fail to raise the stats, he/she will become a useless, powerless hero and you will lose the bet. If you fail to keep the ethics up, the hero will become a supervillain instead.

Throughout the year there will be everyday chores, meetings with strange heroes and villains, puzzles and many weird encounters. Most of the details are undetermined so far, and everything stated so far is just a concept…but it wouldn’t surprise me if this is similar to what the end product will be like.

But before I start working on this game I intend to release Spandex Force: Superhero U, of course!

I’ve previously talked about my ideas file for different games, but I’ve revised that list and added some new and interesting prospects. I’ll go into the details soon, but first of all, here’s a nifty poll where you can decide (sorta) what game KarjaSoft should start working on:

Note: Err… It seems that my custom theme for WordPress didn’t support the polls plugin. It should be fixed now, so feel free to vote!

Some brief notes about the different options:

• Daily Sudoku – a sudoku game that gives you one puzzle per day, and you match your time against all other players. You collect points depending on your time, there’s a leaderboard and all that jazz. This one is obviosuly aimed at smartphones primarily, but an online version would work well too. A very quick and easy project to try out Monkey with.
• Exploration Game with Quests – I like The Wager. The combination of exploration, upgrades and a very interesting NPC to play against makes it fun. But I want to make an exploration game with randomly generated quests that are generated from randomly generated relationships between quirky NPCs. Explore a world, talk to silly people, do quests, run into encounters and upgrade your ships.
• Superhero Princess Maker – Princess Maker 2 is completely awesome. And since I’ve already made two superhero games and have some existing characters to use, this might be very interesting. The basic concept is: you have one year to make a common loser into a superhero.
• Fantasy Parody City Builder – When I was young…er I had an idea for an RTS called Gully Dwarves that would feature reluctant subjects. They’d constantly bicker and sulk when you gave them orders. I’m thinking of expanding that idea into a city builder game instead, in a fantasy mileau, featuring tongue-in-cheek pokes at the genre.
• TV Show Producer – Not much of an idea yet, but I like the setting. Management game with minigames to create TV shows.
• Shampires – Adventure game with ridiculous vampires. I have some cool ideas for this, and most center around geeky goth wannabe vampires and a parody of Twilight.
• The Amazing Adventures of Jules Verne – Jules Verne wrote a lot of amazing books. But what no one knows is that those aren’t fiction: Verne himself went through all those adventures! I’m thinking of something like a multi-episode puzzle adventure game.
• Tigris – A city-state builder game. Start at the dawn of civilization and expand your culture, your city and your territory. Yes, I’m a Civilization geek, why do you ask?
• Futhark – Odin was a god of wisdom, and he gave humans the runes. (Futhar is the runic alphabet.) So, I’m thinking of a viking puzzle game where you’re a human trying to unravel the mystery of the runes. Solve puzzles, talk to the gods, do quests for them, and so on.

Anything that sounds like fun? Let me know by voting in the poll!

The current version of the game is 0.3 BETA, and it’s pretty much feature-complete. You can create your own hero, there’s an Adventure Mode divided into 5 chapters, 15 different school classes to choose from, randomly composed artifacts to purchase, 27 superpowers to buy and level up, your hero collects experience points and reputation, fellow students offer a few optional side quests, and there are lots and lots of different villains, students and teachers to battle. Additionally, there are 20 achievements/trophies to unlock, a Relaxed Mode for some non-timed relaxed play, and a Battle Arena where you can battle other players’ characters. All in all, the game is starting to look rather nifty.

So, why don’t I release it already?

There are a few reasons:

• I’m waiting for feedback from the distributor
• I need to add some minor things – shield artifacts, areas on the screens to examine in order to get a few silly messages and some other small details
• And most importantly, I need to examine the difficulty and the balancing

Anyone feel like doing some beta testing to help out with the third point? Send me an e-mail at info@karjasoft.com!

First of all, the main reason for the online accounts is to allow a user to play his game on various platforms. Windows, Mac, online, iPhone, Android, etc. All clients will connect to the online account and be able to access the available heroes.

In order to allow this, I have some basic criteria:

• A simple REST based API. No SSL encryption since all platforms cannot support it
• Extremely easy to use. There’s no use in having online accounts if it introduces problems for the end user
• Light-weight. I’ll be using my webserver for this, so I hope that it’ll cope with this if the traffic is light-weight

My first approach included email and password authentication, and the user had to register an account in order to activate these features. Pretty simple, but not simple enough. In version 2 of my API I’m going for this approach instead:

• An unregistered version of the game will request an ID from the server. The unregistered version will store everything both locally and online.
• As soon as a registration code is entered, the server will check if another ID already has used that registration code. If so, it will tell the client to start using that ID instead, and synchronize the heroes between the two IDs. If no ID has used the registration code, it simply assigns it to the existing ID.
• The client automatically remembers the registration code and which ID to connect to, and does a local and online save of everything.

The benefit of this approach is that the user doesn’t have to register an account – he only has to enter a registration code. Also, he doesn’t have to give up any personal information at all. Also, it’s a bit of a piracy deterrent: since a registration code is connected with the heroes that are saved, anyone who spreads his registration code will let others access his stuff…

Additionally, the actual API has been changed a bit:

• Seed (input: ID) – Generate a new seed value for this user
• ID (input: ID, registration key, old ID) – Get a new ID, or get an ID connected to a registration code (depending on the input)
• Login (input: ID, hash) – Authenticate the user
• Heroes (input: ID, hash) – Get a list of this user’s heroes
• Save (input: ID, hash, revision, hero data) – Save a hero
• Load (input: ID, hash, hero name) – Load a hero
• Delete (input: ID, hash, hero name) – Delete a hero
• Opponents (input: ID, hash, hero name) – Get suitable opponents for a hero
• Set achievement (input: ID, hash, achievement) – Store an achievement status
• Get achievements (input: ID, hash) – Get a list of all achievements

You can see that the API has been expanded with getting opponents to fight (used in the Battle Arena) and storing/getting achievements. All in all, I think that this is a step in the right direction. Everything seems to be working smoothly now and the only downside is that it can take a few seconds to log in or get the list of current heroes, as opposed to if everything was done locally.

Can’t wait to see all the problems that will pop up once I let people actually use this…

No, this is not my game. It’s FF2.

It is possible to win the battle, and I assume that someone somewhere will actually level up and find good enough artifacts to beat up the Protector Mk III. What happens then? In the original Spandex Force I had a similar situation, where nothing really happened at all. The game just pretended that you lost. This time I’m better prepared, and a special dialogue will be invoked:

<text id=”hero” text=”Man, that was tough!”/>
<text id=”villain” text=”You… Defeated the Protector Mk III?!”/>
<text id=”villain” text=”That wasn’t supposed to happen.”/>
<text id=”hero” text=”Yeah, I can imagine that you think so!”/>
<text id=”villain” text=”No, seriously! That was not supposed to happen.”/>
<text id=”villain” text=”The storyline and the ending assumes that you lost this battle.”/>
<text id=”villain” text=”Let’s all just pretend that you got beat up by the robot, OK?”/>
<text id=”hero” text=”Um… I guess I can play along.”/>
<text id=”hero” text=”Alright, everyone! That robot was WAY too tough for me!”/>
<text id=”hero” text=”Let’s return to the university and think of something else.”/>

I can’t be arsed to prettify things, so you get to see my wonderful dialogue XML notation too.

Speaking of unwinnable RPG battles, many people view them as dull, predictible tropes that must be avoided. I like clichés and prefer to use them instead. The entire game is tongue-in-cheek and tries to acknowledge that the plotlines are silly, that there are major plot holes, that the game world is rather ridiculous and so on. Using clichés fit in wonderfully in that context.

Additionally, there’s one thing that makes an unwinnable battle even more acceptable in this game: you never lose anything (except for your precious time) if you fail a battle. You won’t spend any potions, any consumables – you won’t be tempted into using your precious elixirs (á la Final Fantasy) in vain.

I think that that is the primary reason that many people feel cheated by unwinnable battles: they invest too much into trying to win the battle, and only too late realize that the game is cheating and won’t allow them to win.

I moved to Stockholm less than half a year ago, and in that move I “lost” most of my electronic infrastructure. Well. Technically, I still have a couple of computers and hard drives and whatnot in boxes in the cellar, but since I’m now living with a semi technophobe I’m not allowed to have unsightly and noisy machinery lying around in the house. Instead, I’ve come to rely on a single laptop and my Qnap NAS (that’s hidden in a closet).

The problem is that my NAS started making angry noises a couple of weeks ago, signifying that the hard drives might be getting a bit old and tired. Like me. So, I had to re-think my storage solutions.

What type of storage do I need?

• Short-term media storage – stuff I intend to consume and then remove.
• Long-term media storage – rare TV series, bought apps and games, and so on.
• Old backups – gigs and gigs of music, drawings, photos, game projects, app projects, and much more.
• Game project storage – non-version-handled files that take up a lot of space. Art, designs, music mixes, and much more.
• Code repository – I previously had an SVN repository on my Qnap. Something with version handling is needed.
• Documents – various documents that I need to access.

After a lot of tinkering I’ve come up with a solution that seems to work fine. If anyone feels like drinking from my experience and avoid messing around with various dead ends, here’s what I’ve decided on for now:

• Short-term media storage – Laptop
• Long-term media storage – ZyXEL NAS
• Old project backups – ZyXEL NAS
• Game project storage – Dropbox
• Code repository – Bitbucket
• Documents – Dropbox

In other words, I have four different locations to place data:

• My laptop – great for instant accessibility, but not much space.
• ZyXEL NAS – good for storing stuff semi-permanently. A NAS breaks down sooner or later, so I have to make sure to duplicate the data from this one in a while. This is my weakest link right now.
• Bitbucket – pretty awesome online code repository that uses Mercurial. Relatively easy to use together with TortoiseHG, the free account gives you a lot of stuff, plus I love how the meta files are NOT mixed with the checked out repository like in SVN.
• Dropbox – I was a bit sceptical about this at first, but after trying out the free version (2 GB) for a while I upgraded it to 50 GB. So far it’s working great for always having access to my documents and game project files. I love how it synchronizes the files in the background without making a big fuss. And it’s pretty neat to be able to access my documents from my Android phone too.

As you can see, I’ve gone all online storage! Who would’a thunk it? The good think about both Bitbucket and Dropbox is that a perfectly fine local copy is retained. So, as long as I have two “checked out” versions on different computers plus everything stored online I think that I’m safe enough.

In fact, I’m so pleased with my experiences that I toyed with the idea of having everything I need stored online. Alas, that’s simply not feasible. Storing a few gigs online is just fine, but the common down and upload speeds are way too slow to make it feasibly for 500+ GB. So, I’m going to have to stay with a NAS as well for a few more years. Maybe until 4G is common enough to give reasonable speeds everywhere.

One of the most crucial choices right now is what game engine to use for my next game. I use the term “game engine” very loosely – I don’t care about all the added bling bling right now. In fact, I would be just fine with a low-level engine that provided graphics and audio abstraction layers. Granted, extra functionality will result in a shorter development time, but first and foremost I am going to look at what platforms are available for distribution with the different game engines. For a small developer like me it means incredibly much if I can reach an extra market with not much extra effort!

It’s worth noting that this is a non-comprehensive list of all the available game engines. These are simply the ones I think are of most interest to me as an indie developer.

So, what’s this table all about? This is a list of different game engines/SDKs/development environments that are suitable for indie games. An X marks support, while an (X) marks dubious support that may or may not work correctly/easily.

The platforms are sorted in order of priority, from left to right. Web has a very high focus, but if the benefits of the other platforms outweigh that of web based distribution, I could definitely skip it. After all, iPhone (which includes iPad) and Android might be emerging as quite valid alternatives.

Based on the platform support, each engine is listed in order of priority. Essentially, a development environment that e.g. lacks support for Mac will be at the bottom of the list, plain and simple.

A quick look would show that haXe is the way to go, but that’s not the entire truth. The language is not widely spread, and the support is quite lacking. Actionscript is what I’m using for my current game, but it’s not really a great environment to develop in. Other than those two, Unity and LWJGL have some sort of support for web based games, but I still claim that the Unity plugin and Java work pretty poorly in browsers. I’m not dismissing LWJGL completely, though – I’d love to develop in Java.

If I were to decide that web based distribution isn’t all that cool after all, I think that SDL is a clear winner. I have made a small game in it earlier and it’s decent to work with. The problem is that the Android port is of an old version, and I’m not sure how functional the iPhone port is.

Lastly, I have to make some honorary mentions regarding ExEn and Monkey. ExEn is a project to port XNA to various platforms, and it’s really very interesting. Monkey, on the other hand, is a new upcoming language + graphics framework by the developer behind BlitzMax. Not only will it support the listed platforms, but also HTML5. Quite, quite interesting!

Have I missed something?

Here’s Spandex Force: Superhero U in numbers. Note: this only covers the first three episodes, so these numbers will increase…

Number of unique minigame types: 8
Number of superpowers: 47
Number of words in the dialogue: 10 229
Number of missions available: 22
Number of sidequests: 3
Number of villains/other characters to fight: 25
Number of episodes completely finished: 3
Approximate number of minigames played per episode: 28
Speedrun of the first three episodes: 2 h 48 min
Amount of space needed for the videoclips I’ve taken to create a teaser trailer: 4.59 GB

All in all, I think that there will be plenty of content in this game to keep people busy…