Hey Tom,
I guess for me, it's the daunting task of writing all those map levels down,
pixel by pixel so to speak, and it's going to be even more challenging since
the game is truly 3d. Right now, if you lay Heli, you'll see just how far I
have to go in the game before I can even think about maps and levels. Half
the time, the AI just freezes when it sees you, when it's really supposed to
be diving and moving to the side. Oh well, such is programming lol.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 4:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] A Proposal for Game Developers
Well, Ken. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Its less a matter of blind gamers being able to come up with decent game
ideas, but more a matter of converting those ideas into code. I think the
reason for this is the lack of professional training. A lot of amateur
developers download free instructional material from the web, perhaps look
at some sample games, but they aren't getting step by step training in
programming.
For example, most programmers when they take college level courses start
out with a class on pseudo code. The purpose of that class is to teach new
programming students how to logically construct programs, to design an
outline for his/her program, and to get an idea of how a program works.
Once a new programmer learns the basic logic taught in those classes that
programmer is ready to move onto the simpler languages like Python.
Unfortunately, I think what happens is this essential step of learning the
logic behind programming gets lost and some blind game developers try
learning a language without fully understanding how it works. Therefore
they aren't able to convert ideas into code.
For example, you said you aren't sure how to create map files. So let's
look at this step by step together and see if we can break it down into
some very logical steps. Then, convert those steps into actual code.
To begin with let's ask the question, "what is a map?" Well, a map is a
flat 2 dimmentional image of the game world. You can think of it as a game
board broken up into rows and colums of squares that need to be filled in
with data. Basically, its just a table containing the location of rivers,
mountains, walls, and whatever else you want to add to your map. So how do
we create a 2d table in programming?
Well, easy. We use a 2d array of course. Then, we fill that 2d array with
specific information of where castles, maps, rivers, bridges, and
everything else is by saving that information to the x and y location in
the array.
For example, if we have a 2d array called map and we want to add a castle
to (5, 5) on that map in Python we could do something like
map[5][5] = "castle"
which just added castle to the center of our map. Now we want to add
mountains to the north end of our map like this
while i < 10:
map[i][9] = "mountains"
i++
which would add several mountins to the top of our map.
Once we have created that map we need to save it to a file. In most
programming languages we would convert that array to binary, something
called serialization, and then save it to a dat file. If we ever need to
reload that map we deserialize it, convert binary data back into a string
array like above, and then can use it for loading and saving different map
files. This is essentially how all the level map files work in my game
engine. It just deserializes an array of walls, doors, traps, whatever and
I check the array to figure out where this or that is in relation to the
player. its a very simple concept in practice, but unless someone has been
taught to think of arrays in that way they might not ever think of using
them for 2d maps.
Of course, there is a more professional way of handling maps and that is
by using collision detection. You create an object, asign it an x/y
location, and then calculate the distance and direction to that object. If
they intersect a collision occurs. However, as bounded boxes is beyond the
scope of this message let's just say there are multiple ways to handle map
files.
Anyway, I think that is the problem most audio game developers have. They
don't know the logic behind how this or that works so aren't able to
convert ideas into working code. They might not even know the language as
well as they think which would compound the issue. The key to being a
good programmer is knowing the language very well and understanding how
each and everything works in it.
As to the issue of Fraze Madness. Unfortunately, that is another side
effect of being an audio game developer. Some games do fairly well and
others don't do well at all. Since we are dealing with a very small market
the games that don't do well end up with only a handful of sales making it
barely worth the effort of developing the game. You aren't the first
person who tried to sell an audio game only to find it wasn't a commercial
success.
Cheers!
On 3/27/2012 11:03 PM, Ken wrote:
I know that for me, it's not the lack of ideas, but rather the lack of
the mastery of programming. I really wish I could get a look at a game
like swamp and learn, for exmple, how to have the game incorporate map
files and so on. Another problem I am having is with AI. I understand
fuzzy logic and was using it way before I even knew about it, but
programming AI isn't as simple as just thinking how it should behave and
writing it down, you've got to code in such a way that it does what it's
supposed to.
Finally, my last barrier is that no one buys my games. I thought Phrase
Madness would be a big success, yet it's only seen five buyers. To me,
the ability not only to make new and funny phrases, but also to be able
to comment on them and upload those comments made the game unique, as
well as the fact that it could be played on a windows mobile device, but
nobody was all that interested. Oh well, maybe I'll have better luck
with Space Attack--if I ever getting around to finishing it lol.
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