Ian – Page 42 – MagicalTimeBean

Finding the Hook for Escape Goat

One of the great things about living and working in the Emeryville area is the local game development scene. Case in point: this afternoon, at the local coffee shop I ran into none other than the Chris Hecker, developer of Spy Party. We had spoken before briefly after a talk he gave at UC Berkeley, but this was the first chance I got to really chat with him.

Chris is the nicest guy ever, and was gracious enough to give me an hour out of his work day to check out Escape Goat and give me some feedback on it. Laptop only, and I had left my 360 controller at home. Chris happened to have one on him. Preparedness.

I got some great feedback on “initial impression” details such as the tutorial and mouse summon controls. The real value was in Chris’s perspective as an uber indie artist (he might even say perfectionist?) which is a new role among my playtesting group. (To contrast, an actual quote from my friend Ryan: “You’re giving them too much for $3. Get this thing out the door.”)

Soulcaster I Behind the Scenes Part 2: The Design Doc

By popular demand, I’m going to continue this series and dig up some of the relics of the Soulcaster design process. In part 1 I talked about lightweight design and posted shots of a few levels that ended up on the scrap heap. Well for today I’ve found a special treat: the original design document of Soulcaster 1.

I haven’t edited anything besides coloring the text. Stuff in red is stuff that never made it into the final design. Italics are annotations I’m writing today.

Tower Defense Adventure

like tarchon, but more focused on individual rooms with finite enemies and handling “waves” perhaps [Tarchon was an earlier concept featuring one-player party-based dungeon exploration]

take your party into a dungeon room and you start to get attacked. you need to fight your way from room to room within a floor, surviving waves of mobs. when one aggros, all others in a small radius aggro, so they start filing in for the attack. [I never tested this behavior, and it would be cool to have leader and following types of enemies in the future]

there are choke points like in any tower defense so you are facing waves of guys.

basically you set up your defenses by placing party members at key locations. you have ranged units who can fire at enemies, or over walls. aoe based attacks and that sort of thing. there are melee units, some of them can set up barricades. other disables such as stuns are also available. [There were no barricades or stuns. Status effects is something I hope to introduce in SC3, though it will be time consuming to balance.]

when you place a party member, he stays in one spot and executes a simple script. usually it will mean just firing at any enemy in range. it can also mean moving within a small radius to melee attack enemies that come that way. [The random skeleton friends in SC2 were an experiment with melee allies. I could experiment with it a bit more, but for the first game it took away from the unit placement strategy.]

Continue reading Soulcaster I Behind the Scenes Part 2: The Design Doc

Soulcaster I Behind the Scenes

This post is about Soulcaster I, and how it evolved from the first stages. This was the first project I designed and built from scratch, and my philosophy has been to keep the design as minimal as possible. Rather than write a lengthy design document and try to detail all the enemies, their behaviors, the items, etc., I just jotted down some rough ideas and used it as a starting point. To be extra careful, I didn’t even use Word, I just did plain text in Notepad, and didn’t bother with formatting–or even capitalization. This was not intended to be a blueprint I would refer to throughout the project.

Congratulations SuperGiantGames

Tonight was the Bastion launch party, an awesome event for many reasons. First, I got to play a new game called Joust, which I suppose every indie developer should know about, but I somehow didn’t. Here is me playing:

I lost every round but one.

Second, it was great to see the crew after they had accomplished something many set out to do but few succeed in: band together and create a high quality title independently. This is somewhere I want to be in a little while. It can be done.

Third, something Amir said during a brief toast, really struck a chord with me: that most of the people here he did not know before he began building Bastion, and that he never expected that making a game would make him this many friends. Hell yeah! This is game development at its finest.