As a side project to my adventure/management game Wildhollow I’m working on a simple Flash game for the website – a Wildhollow teaser, so to speak. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too.

Flash development is something that’s completely new to me, so this is a fun opportunity to learn more about how to make web games. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

In this version you can drag food items and drag them to the bovine animal. Feeding it something it likes results in a big boost of the score, but feeding it something it dislikes results in negative points. You can see that bovine beasts don’t like fish or meat, for example.

Right now there’s just one animal, but – as the “Stage 1″ text in the beginning hints at – I’m planning on having several stages with different animal types.

Still not very impressive. But from the last time I’ve refactored a lot of the code, learned how to use external Actionscript files, learned about creating MovieClips and applying filters through the code, and learned that it’s very easy to extend a MovieClip with needed variables. For example, each food item (and the animal) have a value assigned to it to identify what type it is.

Still a lot of things missing, though:

• More animals
• Maybe animations for the animals
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Decide how a game stage should work
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

We’ll see how far I get next week!

A playable and finishable version of Wildhollow is ready, but I’m still expecting some feedback to determine what else needs to be done before I can release a public version of the game. In the meantime I’ve decided to delve into the dark arts of web game development – more specifically, Flash and Actionscript coding.

As a side project to Wildhollow I’m planning on creating a simple Flash game for the website – a Wildhollow teaser, so to speak. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

You can drag the food items if you click and hold the mouse button. My plan is to let the player feed animals this way later.

Not very impressive, no. But so far I’ve learned how to create instances of movie clips, deal with arrays, handle mouse input and make a single main loop function that takes care of all instances.

So, what’s missing? A lot:

• Animals to feed with the foodstuffs
• Animations for the animals
• Scoring
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

Still, it’s not much work at all compared to the complete Wildhollow game…

“Say, Karja, whatever happened to the game you were developing? What was it called? Woodhollow or something? Did you forget about it?”

Why, not at all! Wildhollow has been delayed due to work, personal issues and a long frigging trip to China among other things, but at long last I’m on track again. I’m planning an autumn release, and judging from the v0.3 that I finished today things are looking good.

Here are some screenshots to tease you with:

But you’re not getting a download just yet. I need to have a quick sanity check: some people need to test it before I can make a public release. Just in case I’ve left some horrible bug or other issue that makes the game unplayable and/or unenjoyable.

This year has been full of good games so far. Not only did I get caught playing Eternal Eden; on a whim I decided to try out Totem Tribe by Enkord as well. And boy do I regret that. Not because the game is bad, but because it’s too darn addictive!

After reading the description I didn’t have very high expectations on the game:

“High adventure, real time strategy and hidden object gameplay come together for the first time in Totem Tribe.”

Hidden object gameplay. Meh.

Still, eager to broaden my horizon, I decided to give the game a go – and I was pleasantly surprised. The game is divided into different islands on which you have to perform various tasks ranging from finding objects strewn all over the island, to building your village and defeating various kinds of enemies á la classical real-time strategy games. It’s easy to suspect that a casual real-time strategy game would fall into a single type of RTS. Tower defense style, or build-stuff-and-overwhelm-your-opponent style, for example. The beauty of Totem Tribe is that both these gameplay styles are included – and many more as well, as there’s great variety between the tasks given.

The RTS part is in general fairly simple but surprisingly fun despite that. There are lots of units, lots of different tasks, and lots of things to see and do. And most importantly – for a game I play as a diversion, for relaxation – it’s hard to lose. Not impossible, though. So don’t get too cocky, thinking that you’ll breeze through every single island of the game. Especially not the last stage of the game. Sweet mercy, the difficulty ramps up incredibly for that one!

In fact, that’s one of the game’s negative sides. I dislike backtracking or redoing things in casual games – I want to see steady progress. I really hated having to restart an island in Totem Tribe, the few times it happened. It’s hard to balance loss/gain/challenge/boredom but I have a suspicion that it could have been done a bit better.

Another annoying thing is the hidden object parts. Trust me, I was pleasantly surprised by those too, but I still found myself grinding my teeth now and then as I found myself missing an orange, or a single bleeding turtle shell that was nowhere to be found. I really really really hated the fact that I didn’t even have a hint button, or some way to purchase (maybe with some in-game currency) hints, or anything at all to guide me toward the missing items.

On a final note I have to mention that the game is gorgeous and sounds very nice indeed, and that I’m very pleased with my gaming experience – despite a few irritating moments.

Graphics

Good graphics, nice sprites. Really, there’s nothing that I feel that I have to complain about.

4/5

Sound

To be honest I can’t recall the music at the time of this writing…but I think that it serves as evidence that it is integrated properly and works quite well.

3/5

Gameplay

Build stuff! Explore! Battle! Find hidden things! There’s a lot to do here, and I like it.

4/5

Addictiveness

I was seriously debating with myself what grade this game should get. It’s very addictive, but also annoying at times. Either way, the game is highly recommended.

4/5

Technical notes

The only annoyance was the usual problem with dual displays and fullscreen mode. Running the game in fullscreen messes up the display on the other screen. One of these days I’m going to have to look into the reason for that – many games I try display the same behaviour.

The new year is upon us, and despite the fact that it’s been a pretty awful year so far there have been a few good points too. A few glimpses of light to brighten this dark and dreary January. One of those lights is an excellent CRPG by Blossomsoft, called Eternal Eden. “What’s a CRPG,” I hear you wonder. It’s short for Console Role-Playing Game, and essentially means “kinda like the good ol’ RPG games you played on 16-bit systems like the SNES.” You can also call this JRPG if you wish. I don’t care.

In this game you assume the role of young Noah, an inhabitant in the eternal land of Eden. Together with your friend Downey and other assorted heroic types you roam the obligatory two dimensions (there’s always a light world and a dark world isn’t there?) and try to set things straight after someone messed things up by eating the forbidden fruits whom the enigmatic Father explicitly told everyone to leave well alone. The game is obviously quite inspired by Christian mythology and the Bible, and as an atheist fascinated with these things, that is exactly what drew me to the game in the first place.

Unfortunately Eternal Eden doesn’t follow up on the promise of religious interpretation very well; I was let down a bit by the common, secular storyline that emerged from this extremely promising beginning. Maybe I’m simply missing some of the more religious points, but it feels that Blossomsoft missed out on an opportunity to create something deeper and more thought-provoking. Still, what the game delivers is a well-designed and interesting RPG experience that lasted some 15-16 hours. Much of it was filled with battles and the usual leveling up, but there was surprisingly little forced level grinding – not a single time did I have to backtrack and fight stuff in order to become stronger.

One of the reason for this is that there are no random battles. Hallelujah! Praise the lawd and all that jazz. All the enemies are clearly visible and avoidable if one chooses. Much appreciated move. What this means is that the game is more streamlined, more simple in a way since the designer placed enough enemies so that you’ll always be prepared for what comes next as long as you fight your alloted fights. But it also means that you always see how many fights you have ahead of you – at least in the current area. This may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt like an enormous relief to be able to plan how many of the sodding sasquatches I had to slay before I got to where I wanted.

There are other neat things about the game. The graphics are good (although fairly simple compared to games like FF IV, FF V, FF VI, etc), the sound is good (but nothing special), and there are a few interesting minigames like bounty hunting and turtle hunting. Yes, turtle hunting. You go around an island looking for turtles. It sounds insane, but it really is fun! I never found all those stealth turtles though…

The most important thing about the game is that it has that elusive addictive quality, though. The areas never become too big or long-winded, and there is always more to see just around the corner. The scope of the game is much smaller than FF IV or FF V or FF VI (yes yes, I use them as examples again), but I most definitely think that that’s one of its major strengths as well. Because of its limited length this is a game I wanted to buy and finish, unlike most RPGs I’ve played lately. The relative shortness of the game might even be why it felt so addictive – it wasn’t stuffed with too much filler content. Kudos to you for that, Blossomsoft.

Graphics

Good graphics and special FX. Even though the resolution is higher than that of SNES RPGs, the latter win in comparison by virtue of better animation, design and variation.

3/5

Sound

Decent music, although a bit synthetic. The sound effects were okay. In the end I chose to not have the audio on throughout the whole game.

2/5

Gameplay

If you like the standard JRPG/CRPG deal you’ll definitely like this.

4/5

Addictiveness

Could it be? Could this be the first game I review to get a full score in addictiveness? Indeed it is! I couldn’t put the game down. I rarely buy games, but this was well worth the dough.

5/5

Technical notes

Eternal Eden was made with Game Maker or RPG Maker or some other kind of engine like that, but it’s not very noticeable – it performed well and felt like a solid game. One annoyance is that I’d like a larger window, more resolution choices or a scalable window – I want to play windowed, but the default resolution is just too small on my laptop! Also, when I alt-tab the game is paused (good!) but that music just keeps on playing (bad!)

My Tribe by Grubby Games is an island simulator in which a tribe of people are stranded on an island and have to learn how to survive. This includes gathering food, building shelter, chopping down trees and harvesting rocks (um…) among other things. I’ve debated with myself whether or not to call it a blatant clone of Virtual Villagers, but there really is no getting around it – My Tribe is a blatant clone. But it’s also a very good game.

The graphics are adorable. The intro was very cute and I like the look in general – a slightly more painted look than the standard CG colored or pixel art look often present in casual games. The animation also receives some bonus points as it’s fluid and pleasant, and the game screen is full of life. Butterflies and stuff fluttering around everywhere. Very nice. At times it’s hard to differentiate between objects one can interact with and a colorful bird that’s just decoration, but that’s a small price to pay for a lively background. The audio is also quite pleasant, and I was impressed by the speech in the tutorials. Nice touch.

The gameplay quite simply is fun. There’s a lot to do, a lot to explore, and you always have the urge to solve the next mystery or see what the next technology level will bring. While My Tribe is a ripoff of Virtual Villagers, it does bring some new things such as random islands instead of just a static one. Also, the island is a bit bigger and more dynamic – chopping down trees cause them to disappear and you have the option to plant new ones as well. In general there are more ways to affect the environment than in Virtual Villagers.

After a while I started feeling that the island was limited, though. I think that there needs to be more stuff to do – a bigger set of things to interact with. I may not be the ideal person for these kinds of simulators but I feel that there ought to be more to do all the time. Sure, I need to let my little islanders work in order to improve their skills, but I’d like to have minigames to play at the same time. Something to occupy my restless mind with. The game is still fun, but I can’t concentrate on it since there’s often nothing to do. Which brings me to another aspect of the game…

The game is progressing even when it’s not running, so while you’re away your islanders are still chopping up wood and fishing and researching. This is a neat idea, but also a very frustrating one: you need to remember to play now and then in order to not wipe out your entire tribe. I left the game a couple of days and feared that white skeletons would greet me upon my return, but I was pleasantly surprised. They had managed to take care of themselves and had given me an excrement-load of science points to boot! Great! I assumed that the game wasn’t all that keen on that death thing, so I got cocky and left the game a couple of more days.

Disaster! Tombstones littered the island. My once proud tribe was reduced to its bare minimum. I did find two survivors though: Jeremy and Hannah were starving but mysteriously still alive. Also, a young girl was alive as well. I wonder if this is a contingency plan by the developers? “That lame dude left all his islanders to die! Well, we’d better make sure that he has enough to breed more people at least.” If so, it’s a brilliant idea. However, it doesn’t work in practice.

This is where the game enters a downward spiral. With so few people left it’s no fun to play the game, which means that you won’t be arsed to start up the game very often. Which of course means that the tribe won’t expand very quickly – or at all. In the end I had a tribe consisting of 54 year old Xavier, an aged woman and a young girl. It’s impossible to breed more people once they are too old, so these few are the remnants of a once proud budding civilization now destined for extinction.

By the way, when you click on an islander you can see his or her thoughts. I kept seeing “Xavier is very happy to live on the island” and “Xavier thinks this island has no equal.” No shit. Here’s a guy who’s lived a nice and cozy life alone with two women on a deserted island. You old goat, you.

Finally I have to mention that despite the game’s flaws it’s strangely addictive. My current tribe is doomed but I have the urge to start a new one – see if I can get things right this time. The game is still a bit limited, but fun nonetheless.

Graphics

Quite nice! Good animations and lovely painted look in the intro.

4/5

Sound

Nice music, and good sound effects. Extra credit for the voice acting even though the girl sounds smug. You biatch! Don’t smirk at me while you tell me how to play!

3/5

Gameplay

My Tribes is fun, there’s no getting around that. A bit lacking in variety and things to do on the island.

3/5

Addictiveness

I want to make my tribe great! I want to solve the mysteries! I want to explore lots of islands! I guess that means that the game is pretty addictive?

4/5

Technical notes

The game started up in fullscreen and did awful things to my two-screen setup. Everything was restored fine when I put it in windowed mode, though, so no harm done aside from messing up my desktop brightness. I like the loading screen – “sailing to your island” and a boat moving to the right to indicate the progress instead of a simple loading bar.

Edit: As was mentioned by Olivia in the comments below, the game can be set in slow mode if one intends to leave it for a while. The problem for me is that I never know in advance if I’ll be gone for a few days – I play games when I feel like it and have the time to spare, so it’s not always easy to predict these things.

My recent non-public release of Wildhollow (v0.2) has received some very interesting feedback. First of all, many seem to enjoy the art and the writing. Yayness! That’s actually pretty damn cool – I’ve been freetting over whether or not I’m a moron for putting so much emphasis on dialogue in the game. My reasoning is sound: Spandex Force received praise for its humorous writing, so this time I’m concentrating on much more of that. But it is a bit of a gamble. The audio received some mixed comments, but the only thing I really have to change is the typewriter sound in the dialogues. I agree that it’s a tad anachronistic in a fantasy game…but on the other hand I’ve added heavy metal songs for the dramatic scenes as well. What can I say, I like contrasts!

Other than that there are three worrying tendencies in the feedback: the minigames suck (I’m fixing that), the animal management needs to be improved (I’m fixing that)…and I have a sneaky suspicion that some people feel that there’s not enough guidance in the quests.

I’m all for easy-to-play games that one can pick up instantly. But Wildhollow requires you to read a lot of dialogue and deduce what to do based on that. I’ve done my best to have “quest hints” for each stage of the quests and have characters repeat important bits of information if they’re relevant to a quest, but there still might be a lot of exploration required to solve some of the puzzles.

I’m still on the fence whether or not this is a good thing. My initial response is “It’s a good thing, dammit! It encourages immersion and makes the quests flow naturally rather than appear forced.” But yesterday I played Rise of the Argonauts and now I’m not so sure anymore…

I consider myself a casual gamer, and Rise of the Argonauts is a pretty casual action RPG. I click some buttons, and the dude runs around like a scorched ferret, cutting and clubbing people all over the place. I love it! Epic violence, beautifully performed, that requires almost no skill at all. I don’t have to spend hours to learn how to do weird combos – they simply appear out of nowhere!

But all is not well in ancient Greece… The game gives almost no indication as to what I need to do next. I can’t be arsed to read all the text in an action game – I’m playing the game to spear people on my enormous barbeque stick! But if I skip too much I end up with my hero standing around looking dumb, and me sitting there feeling even more dumb. “So… Uh… What? What do I have to do now? Do I have to talk to someone? Is there a list of active quests? I don’t know what to do!”

Now, Wildhollow and Rise of the Argonauts aren’t comparable at all. Not in the very least, and not only because RotA is a frigging multi-million production. My choice to rely on text in Wildhollow is a major part of the design – it’s an integral part of the game. RotA’s focus is on action, with text added on. In Wildhollow you can quickly click around to try out things or talk to people; in RotA you have to physically move your character between the scenic vistas to see if this was where you needed to go…and retrace your steps if not. But at its core, Wildhollow relies on the player to explore to proceed – just like RotA.

I’ve been toying with the idea of adding graphic indicators for whom to talk to next, but… That feels cheap. It breaks the immersion. And it just might make the puzzles too easy. Another approach might be to make conversations pop up more often – make some NPCs initiate conversations on their own. That’s probably a better approach, but I’m still not sure if that would work. What I want is to make a game that’s easy to play and follow, but still not ridiculously simple or lacking in immersion.

Any suggestions for good games I ought to play to get inspiration for how to solve my dilemma?

No one?

Not a single suggestion?

Man, you suck.

After a short vacation I find myself filled with energy and inspiration, so what better way to spend it than to improve Wildhollow, the strange adventure/management game I’m working on? The general game code is pretty solid by now, but I’ve had some really irritating issues regarding the GUI art.

1. My placeholder GUI art has been atrocious, which makes me unwilling to work on the GUI parts.
2. In order to improve the GUI art I need to find an artist for all the general design/icons/buttons details.
3. But in order to show artists what I need, I ought to have a working game with placeholder art that they can improve.
4. Which I’m of course not keen on doing since it looks like crap.

Now, this is a nice pickle! A pickle of the catch 22 flavour.

Sooo, what would a sensible person do? Find an artist that one can have an open dialogue with, in order to build the GUI alongside the GUI art?

Hell no. Why take the easy route when one can spend an unnecessary amount of time on making slightly-less-worse placeholder art in order to get inspired enough to work on the GUI! That said, I’ll just show some work in progress screenshots from the game:

Look! A title screen! With lots of sparkles that aren’t very visible here. And some weird buttons. I was going for a “semi-bark-looking” theme for the interface. Meh. I’ll dig up some wood textures and see what else I can come up with later.

Our hero is about to finish the first quest: find and bring back Barber Jack’s glasses that he dropped at Zachary’s place when he was trimming some animals. Oh yeah. A sweet $20 reward awaits…

Wildhollow Ranch is destroyed! Solve quests in order to collect cash; after rebuilding the ranch you can buy and breed animals. My goal is that the player should be able to solve some quests, do a first repair of the ranch, and crossbreed his first set of animals within one hour. Why one hour? Because that’s where the demo time limit will run out, and sneaky me thinks that this will be enough of a teaser to make people want to play more…

I’m the first person to admit that this is all very experimental. I have no idea if this concept will work, or if people will shun the game. Shun! Shuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnn…..

Yesterday I received a very kind e-mail thanking me for developing Spandex Force, heaping enough praise over the game to make me blush like a little girl.

This morning I blushed almost as much, as I got another mail from the same source, suggesting that The Crossdresser (one of the villains in Spandex Force) bears quite some similarity to me. I leave it up to you to decide:

The Crossdresser to the left. No, right.

Arguments for:

• Both have long hair and a beard.
• I have been known to wear a dress in order to disguise myself.
• The Crossdresser is completely insane; I think most people would say that we share that trait.

Arguments against:

• The Crossdresser’s wearing a wig in that picture.
• Uh…
• It’s not me, I promise!

Man! Outwitted by my own lists!

I’m sure you’re dying to know how people have reacted to the Spandex Force beta which was released recently. I sure am, at least! Or, I would be if I didn’t already know.

Overall, I must say that I’m pleased with the reception. I’ve received positive feedback, and people do seem to enjoy the game. Sales from the game’s webpage are up to what Sheeplings sold during six months; granted, I poured more into this second game, but it’s still going better than I thought. I wonder what will happen when I announce the proper release in a little while, along with a photo contest! (Intrigued? You should be. Stay tuned for more information!)

Other positive notes include that the game is mentioned on Gamershell, IGN, Gamespy and other news sites. Still no whisper about it on Gamespot, despite a press release I sent there, but maybe that will change after the real release. Other places have also picked up news about the game; for example Lesbian Gamers and Gay Gamer. Hmm… I wonder if it has something to do with the spandex?

As for feedback, most of what I’ve received comes from forums and e-mails. I won’t toot my own horn, but the concept seems to work very well, and the variation in the minigames works its magic for most people. But – as always – there’s just no pleasing everybody. Here is a list of user reviews, and Spandex Force has received both praise and scorn. And speaking of more scorn, here’s a scathing review from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I was initially crushed until I started analysing the complaints and compared them to the positive feedback I’ve received. I’m first to admit that my game isn’t as “good” (subjective term of course) as Puzzle Quest; I don’t have the budget or the time for that amount of polish. But I’m not competing directly against Puzzle Quest either - I’m targeting another set of customers. Sure, there’s some overlap – myself for example! I like both casual games and hardcore RPGs. But while Puzzle Quest is aimed at the RPG crowd, my intention is to bring something exciting to the casual crowd instead.

I doubt that this is obvious, though, so I think I’ll have to be prepared for some bad reviews coming up comparing Spandex Force unfavourably to Puzzle Quest.

Back to more positive things, I received a request for a Linux version of the game, and I figured that it shouldn’t be much of a problem. True enough, I’ve done some initial testing and I think I can get it to run on Ubuntu at least. I’ll probably only support Ubuntu, and then have a “see if it works for you – good if it does” clause for other distributions. There’s no way I’m going to offer support for multiple distributions – Linux is simply too problematic. I don’t think I’ll actually gain much from having a Linux version either, but it’s a good learning experience at least. Incidentally, the person asking for a Linux version also mentioned that this game would fit well on Nintendo DS, and even supplied a hint about a publisher working with DS. I’ll see how the game is received after the release, but hey – who knows. Thinking about playing my own game on a DS almost makes me come. Not that you wanted to know that. And not that it’ll happen. But it sure would be nice…

Anyway, I’m feeling positive about the upcoming release. I’ve optimized the game a little, sorted out a Mac bug, received many suggestions for improvements, and the game is slowly coming together properly. The biggest thing left is to playtest the game thoroughly and balance it even more. I really hope people will be pleased about the game’s length – I anticipate that it’s well over 8 hours game play in it, and quite possibly more along the lines of dozens of hours. That may sound cool to you, but for me it sounds like damn hard work, playing through the whole game….again….and again.