A Ludum Dare space cluedo, some greenlight, a mysterious project and a happy new year!

Hi to all of you!

First things first: I wish you all a happy new year 2015! I hope it will be filled with fun, achievement and great gaming experiences!

For Oddly Shaped Pixels, it will certainly be a great year (let's hope so), primarily because:

 Super Rocket Shootout has been greenlit! 

That's a wonderful news for me and for everybody who has been following and supporting the game. That means that the game will get to a final state where it can be considered as a fully delivered game, and not just a fun demo as it has been up until now.

The future of the game will be largely discussed on the Steam page so I invite you to go and check it out, and follow the game to get all the news and have the opportunity to be part of the development process.


Now, some other great news: Oddly Shaped Pixels will be releasing (at least) one other game in 2015! I've been contacted by a publisher and we've come to an agreement so I'm really pleased to tell you that some game of mine you've already playing will be expanded and will come to your favorite handheld device during the first semester of 2015! I'm still a bit mysterious because I have to check first with my publisher if I can talk freely about it, but anyway, I'll make an official announcement when I'm given the permission!


And to conclude this post and to remember the last bits of 2014, here's a game I've had the opportunity to make during the Ludum Dare #31 with some really talented people that are:
- Deconstructeam, the guys behind the great "Gods Will Be Watching"
- Kevin Cerdá, the great game designer behind Nihilumbra and now part of the team working on "Rime"

It's called Atticus VII and it's about playing a ship's AI while a crew member has been mysteriously murdered. It mixes elements of story telling, deductions and micro management. It also has a great replay value since there's not (or almost not) a unique right ending, but 12 different endings, each with its own meaning and set of revelations about the whole picture.

You can play the game on the Ludum Dare entrye page.

This Ludum Dare was for me the occasion to experiment making a game as part of a team, and it has taught me a lot. Firstly because I had the chance to participate in the game design with certainly two of the most emergent and talented spanish game designers (Jordi de Paco and Kevin Cerdá), and secondly because I've had to learn being part of the team and not a self centered one-man-army. I have to confess it has been hard, especially with the turn of events (I had to withdraw from beeing the lead programer due to technical setbacks), letting aside the ego boost of making a game on my own. But what an enriching experience and what an amazing game we made!! It clearly could'nt have been possible being on my own.

The game has been really well received and I'm really proud to say that it has ranked #12 on overall. It's great to see that players have felt compelled to play the game and to replay it until they understood the whole story. You can check the reddit thread just to see how players exchange their clues and views of the story, it's great to see!

Yet the game still has some design and game design issues, not because we didn't see (or foresee) them, but mainly because we decided that what had to prevail was to make this rich story fit in the 3 days of competition. Almost 2000 lines of dialogs have been written and arranged to create a complex narrative structure!! It's just amazing to have been able to make so much content in do little time, and I guess it's thanks to a natural and almost unspoken task repartition we've come up with. The counterpart is that the game still has some bugs and several elements of the mechanics, interface and story sill could benefit from a bit of polishing.

But anyway, the game is great and it has been a wonderful way to close 2014, a year that has allowed me to enter the world of game design and to start the foundation of what I hope will be a long path of creations and personal achievements.

Thank's for the reading and stay tuned for more news!

R3nD

Awe: a Ludum Dare post-mortem

Hi folks!

A new post about the last Ludum Dare (#30) whose theme was "Connected worlds", and which resulted in the creation of a lot of wonderful games.

Mine is called Awe and you can play it there on Gamejolt.

The game

Before starting the Ludum Dare, I was already thinking of making a game about peace and calm. I wanted to have a go at a totally non-violent and non-conflict-based game. I also wanted to start experimenting on multiplayer games, especially the way games like Journey did.

Don't know if you've played the game (as a matter of fact, I haven't, since I don't own a PS3 or PS4, but I've watched so many gameplay vids on Youtube that it almost feels as if I'd had my hands on it), but in Journey, the multiplayer part integrates seamlessly with the solo part, and in a totally strange way: you can only communicate with other random players by emitting some musical note and interacting with your surroundings. A striking point is that there's no identification or personalization possible, all players have the same looking avatar. It results in a strange communication process based solely on the goals and attitudes of each player.

And that's what I tried to do with Awe: you can play offline but you have a multiplayer mode where you'll be able to play with a random stranger (if someone else is playing the game of course) and interact with him on the same planet.

The gameplay itself is kind of simple, although not really explained, what leaves the player self-exploring all the possibilities. I won't explain it in detail, in case you haven't played it yet, but I'll only say that it's based on colors and musical note (although the musical aspect is purely atmosphere-related and doesn't have any impact on the gameplay).

As for the design, since gamejams are (for me at least) a way to step out of you comfort zone and since all my games were 2D, I decided to go with a simple low poly render.

What went right

Well, I'm really pleased to say that the game has been well received by all that have tried it. Here you have the results of the Ludum Dare and as you can see, it's a lot of improvement since my last participation.

I've also had the honor to appear in various web sites (the biggest of all may certainly be the article of Rock Paper Shotgun) and several gameplay vids have been made of the game (you have to check this one, it's just hilarious)

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the general look and feel of the game and I can say that I made what I intended to achieve, which is pretty great. I've had lots of compliments about the music and the ambience for being relaxing and peaceful. Exactly the feeling I wanted to give!


What went wrong

The first thing that went wrong was about the color recognition mechanic. In order to see if a color picked by the player is inside a pattern and since the number of colors on the planet are potentially (!) infinite (a base color modulated by two colored light sources), I had to measure the distance between the clicked color and the fixed colors used in the pattern.

At first it was a simple distance between the R, G and B components of each color, but I soon discovered that the result was really bad and from the point of view of the player, was interpreted as almost a game-breaking bug. I had to investigate a bit on the color theory on Internet and it helped me a lot fine-tuning my algorithm.

At the end, it's still not perfect but it's way better and less frustrating for the player that at the beginning.

The second aspect of the game that didn't come out as planned was the multiplayer part. First, the fact that somebody must be playing the game at the same time without being already connected to an other player is a bit limiting. Just after the Ludum Dare finished, there was plenty of people and it was easy to find somebody to play with. Now, it's kind of difficult since the traffic has reduced a lot.

The other point about multiplayer that didn't come out as planned was that "silent" interaction idea. I had the chance to have a play session with somebody in which we gradually found a way to communicate and to interact together to build the larger patterns. Unfortunately, it was one of many experiences and all my other attempts were only unsynchronized and chaotic clicking between the two of us that never allowed us to complete a single pattern. I guess it's not specifically related to my game but to any multiplayer experience but still, it's an interesting situation to experience.

What from there

I've had lots of comments telling me that players would be delighted to see an extended version of Awe, with more patterns to discover, more stuffs to build, more interactions between players.

The truth is that, although I don't have the time right now with all my ongoing projects, I'm really considering expanding it cause there're lots of interesting concepts in the game that'd deserve to be deepened: the color pattern discovery mechanics, the possibility for the player to "create" his own music, the god-like aspect, the "silent" interaction between 2 (or maybe more) players. There's plenty of room for a bigger and better project, that's for sure!

Ludum Dare 29 - Postmortem

Last month I participated to my first Ludum Dare whose theme was "Beneath the surface".
I made a game called "Digable Planet", that you can play here (Postcompo version of it).

Here you have the results (ranking is over some 1450 entries in the composition category).

What went right:

First of all, completing a "full" game in 48 hours is in itself an achievement for me.
Besides, as the results show, I made an overall rank of #124 (the top 10%) which I guess it's not bad. I was a bit deceived I must confess but seeing my game and the ones that made better scores, I can understand why.
Overall the reception was great, I had some nice comments and even someone donated some money.
It's really encouraging!!
I'm quite happy with the music and graphics in general, and although I started deep playtest 1 or 2 hours before the submission deadline, the gameplay is quite balanced, at least for a play session of 15min to 1 hour. Then you can find the best way to solve the problem every time.



What went wrong:

Before the beginning of this LD, I had told myself that I would make a game entirely and only playable with the mouse, since all the games I had made until then were only play with the keyboard.
Problem is I totally forgot to take in account people that don't have a mouse, and specifically that don't have a mouse wheel (people playing with the gamepad). The game was just to hard to play for them as the selection of the different machines was made to fast.
An other critic made was the lack of feedback, especially when you're about to drill the core, and that the game over screen seemed to popup without any reason. I indeed hadn't put any alert that the end of the game was near.
And, as always in my case, the final critic was that the gameplay was not explained clearly. I have to say that gameplay was exlpained clearly, but outside of the game and it's true that when you test a game in a game jam, you don't want to go through a full page of text to understand what it's all about. My problem was that there wasn't any explanation or tutorial ingame and players had to wonder a bit in order to understand what to do and how to do it.


What from there:

After all the feedback, I made a post compo version with better feedback and alternat controls. I guess in this state, the game is more enjoyable and closer to what I had in mind.
Overall, I've learnt some valuable lessons from this game jam:
- the feedback of any user action is one of the key feature that make a can enjoyable. Sounds, graphics, text, effects, anything has to be made so that the player knows instantly that the game has taken his action in account and what effect on the game his action has had. It seems self obvious, especially in well designed games, but that's most of the time the difference between a regular game and a great game.
- a game should explain ingame the basic actions so that the player knows what it's all about and what the basic controls are, so that he can start playing right away
- controls should be the more universal and accesible possible: give the option to play with keyboard and/or mouse, take in acount left or right-handed people, take in account keyboard with different key layouts (QWERTY vs AZERTY), even give the option to remap the key.

To conclude, I'd say that it has been a really useful and fun experience and I'm pretty sure I'll hop on the next Ludum Dare!