Infiltrator E47 - Assault Master Design

"So... how 'bout them assault masters," you may be asking. The answer is that the most powerful non-boss enemy in Infiltrator, the Assault Master, has been redesigned more than three times. If you factor in the AI programming, pixel art, design, testing, etc, then each iteration is bound to take awhile. That said, this latest one is much more elegantly put together. I kept the tactical and strategic ideas of the enemy in mind along with rest of the game this time.

All of that in mind, the new design is going to be much more time consuming and meticulous to implement, for reasons I will outline below. Since it's going to be a bit before I finish, I thought it might be interesting to explain the design, the logic behind it, and the challenges it presents.

Infiltrator E46 - Video Playback

Those of you who checked out my Infiltrator pre-alpha demo video awhile back probably know that I had a spiffy animated background with circuit patterns on the main menu. Those of you who didn't: I had a spiffy animated background with-you get the point. I bet you guys didn't know that I don't have that anymore, did you? I'm hoping to get it back at some point, but the problems that led to its removal are deep and annoying.

Let's talk about them!

Multiplayer

I'd hate to be one of those people who refuses to get with the times, fighting progress and trying to force the things I've become accustomed to on everyone. But there is one place I have been accused of this, and where this accusation againt peeps in my position is accepted. That place is multiplayer gaming.

Infiltrator E45 - Enough With the GUI Already!

This session went almost entirely into GUI work. I've finally got the menu art and editor interface up to a point where I feel comfortable moving on though, and that is a good thing. I've been getting pretty sick of working on these same GUI's for so long. The fruit of all of this work is pretty sweet though.

Crono Trigger: Five Minutes After

It is argued between fans of media used for story telling whether or not fridge logic is inherently bad. I personally don't think it to be bad in all cases, but I do believe that certain circumstances can cause it to be so. That is why I've taken to recording my thoughts about a game just after I finish it, coming back later when it has stewed in my mind for awhile. Maybe I'll follow up on things I missed and complain about any story braking fridge logic at that time. For now, I'll just talk about a few things that stuck out to me.

Today's game is Crono Trigger, the first JRPG I have played through from beginning to end. I usually don't like JPRG's, but I liked this one a lot. I set a high bar for if a game was worth my time in retrospective or not, and this game effortlessly sailed over it with plenty of room to spare.

Scope, Ambition, and Realism

I like to think of myself as having some understanding of how to balance anything-is-possible-ambition with where-is-the-feasible-profit-realism. After all, I've released three music albums I care to mention and several hours of music production tutorials. In order to release anything really, you have to understand when you need to spend more time to make something perfect, and when it's good enough and needs to be shipped. You also need to know how to set goals that are ambitious but achievable, especially when working independently in an art like game development. How to balance these ideas while planning the development of a game is the topic of today's article

Mandatory Defeat

Today I want to discuss- mainly by analysis of examples -a videogame story concept, the closest TVTrope article of which I could find calls Hopeless Boss Fight. It actually applies to any battle in any genre that needs the player to be defeated for the purposes of the story, be it in gameplay or in a cutscene. This tool could obviously be used to the great benefit or great detriment of a story. We will therefore be looking at a good and bad example from the games Megaman X and awful ol' Mass Effect 3.

And yes, this article will obviously be laden with spoilers from all of those games. Also, I feel like I need to warn you that this page conatians TVTropes links, which have been shown to lead to the eating up of countless hours of time when clicked. Unless you aren't familiar with the tropes mentioned, click at your own risk.

Infiltrator Part 43 - Sights On Editor

Do you think this blog is becoming an Infiltrator dev journal with random game design articles and music updates popping up every once in awhile? Then congratulations, you passed the being observative test! Now shut up and read this Infiltrator dev update because I'm already spreading myself thinner than the peanut butter on your sandwich when your little sister Julibop who prefers Jam makes it for you just to get the giant stack of ridonkulous things I do done.

Infiltrator Part 41 - Video Time

This time you get your Infiltrator discussion in video form!

    --LazerBlade

RPG Classes and Encounters

When this originally came up I wasn't provoked enough to write about it. There was one particular encounter early in the first Mass Effect Game that I had a load of trouble with. At the time I figured that I just hadn't built up my character enough, had put my XP into the wrong skills, chose to bring the wrong squad with me, or was just plain new enough to the game to have difficulty with something easy. I eventually learned that almost every Mass Effect player who chose the character class that I did died more times than they bothered to count at this encounter, not for any fault of their own, but because this encounter was almost perfectly tailored to a different class.

Infiltrator Part 40 - Swarmer Skeleton

So... swarmers. It turned out to be a ridiculous pain to get the swarmers to even home in on a target, but I got through it. The resulting swarmers will now launch and home in on enemies. But which enemies?

Unfortunately, not the most intelligently chosen ones yet. Currently they just target the onscreen enemy spawned longest ago, which is pretty arbitrary and exists only because it was the quickest and easiest to add. I have a few different target choosing algorithms in mind. I'll have to try and weigh each of them in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, and that will be fun.

That's actually it. The swarmer art, as you can see, is basically placeholder. The final swarmers will also be tiny, but they will have a glowing contrail so it will be easy to see them and where they are going. I put so much into working out the simple things that I didn't have time for details.


    --LazerBlade

Infiltrator Part 39 - Tedious Baselines and Reworkings

Aside from the hustle and bustle of the other parts of my life this session has also gone slowly because it was mostly design work. There are some changes that can be expressed via screenshot though, and there is plenty to talk about.

Backtracking and Persistent Worlds

There are some things that are love or hate for gamers. Half of the gamers really love to go back through an old area of a game and pick up the things they missed, refill their health with a medkit  they left just in case, or hunt for secrets that they previously could not access. On the other hand, many simply cannot stand the way it can break flow or impede on the time they want to be shooting things. While this example uses action games, the idea of backtracking applies to many genres and is looked upon similarly in most of them.

Storytelling in Games

So you have this great story. It has interesting characters, clever twists, and asks deep and profound questions that make the person who finally receives the story really think. Then, random game pundits in the massive chunk of oddness that is the realm of cyberspace completely forbid the idea of offloading your story to a bunch of cutscenes. "After all, this is an interactive medium," we say, "If we wanted to watch a movie, we would. We are here to play." And no, we-ahem-they don't like the idea of you making the player sit through a bunch of audio logs or pause to read giant chunks of text either.

"Okay, fine!" you say, throwing your hands up as part of your sarcastic concession. "How do I get this amazing story into the game? How can I narrate it? How can I get all of this exposition out without making the player sit through cutscenes or read walls of text?" First, I congratulate you for being truly unique in that you are willing to write a good story for your game, and then be willing to try to find the best way to express it. Second, I would like to answer your question by writing about it in the time when I'm not busy doing school, producing music, creating videogames, experimenting with electronics, or saving the world from trans-dimensional jelly toads.

Infiltrator Part 38 - HUD, EMP, and stability

It seems like I have this internal clock that every few months says "Hey! That HUD could totally be better designed!" I then proceed to completely rewrite the code for it and move everything around. That happened again, but this time I found that I had anticipated this earlier and redesigned the HUD code to be more accommodative to change in the future.

Also, accommodative should totally be a word.

Artistic Workflow vs. Technical Fidelity

I've had thoughts about this topic for awhile and just kind of kept them to myself. Now it's starting to flare up in more and more places, so I would like to get behind the increasing number of people saying that pushing new game technology should now be in the direction of improving the artistic workflow rather than the game fidelity. I believe that this should be applied to every aspect of creating the complex piece of art that is a game, but for now I am going to stick to the visual and level creation side of things for simplicity. It also provides a perfect example and happens to be the direction that most tech R&D has been pushing for higher fidelity rather than better artistic flow.

Infiltrator Part 35 - Here is the Menu

I absolutely hate creating GUI's and menu's. I also love it. I'm awesome like that, so this is the session in which I've tackled the task of creating Infiltrator's menu system.

Infiltrator Part 33 - Design Explanation #2

There are some pretty sweet updates and features brewing to talk about for the next session summary, but I want to throttle back and discuss the design a bit more before it gets stale. Or maybe it already is stale. Doesn't matter.

Infiltrator Part 31 - With a two in it!

The long and painful move from SFML 1.6 to SFML 2 is finally complete. There actually isn't a whole ton of difference, except that now my framerate has taken a giant tan- GUN BLAM IT! Just a minute...

Okay, so now the long and painful-aw skip it.

Infiltrator Part 30 - Shredders + SFML 2

This particular feature addition stretched out over a long period of time for many reasons. All of which are completely unimportant. The shredder AI is almost 100% up and kicking and that's what matters.