Archive for August, 2006
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
Apart from finishing up the tutorial, Determinance is basically feature complete. Now, the thing with me is that when something is actually complete, I never announce it or celebrate it, as I’m generally too worried that something could be better. When I celebrate something is when the end is in sight, as it is today. All that’s standing between us and a release candidate is a couple of gui tweaks, some frikking flags for Duel Arena, and bugs.
We have a big deadline on September 1st for our first release candidate. Now, we’ll be rushing our asses off to do that and I know the candidate on that day will be… probably a tiny bit messy. But having a release candidate, any release candidate, is one big screaming deal. September is a long month to get a candidate we’re happy with.
Okay, so here’s the Determinance feature list.
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Seven different AI opponents
Nine different characters to play as
Five huge environments to play in
Fifteen different swords to choose from
Epic nine-track dynamic music score from huge up-and-coming trance and techno artist Nervous Test Pilot
Full tutorial
Core game mode Duel Arena: Duel one-on-one in a typical fighting game setting – with a ring, ring outs, timer, rounds etc – with Determinance’s unique freeform fighting system. Up to sixteen players in the tournament at once, fighting each other in separate arenas. Scores and stats kept, people can observe others duelling.
Game mode Free For All: Up to eight people flying around levels of unlimited size in an epic battle.
In-built Custom Special Move editor: make any move you can dream of, and unleash them online.
In-built commercial-standard level editor.
Complete modding support: from new character models to new gui conversions to different fighting styles (freeform kick-boxing?) to total new game modes.
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It has always been my dream to make an indie game with the ambition, scope, features, and most importantly the feel of the best AAA titles from the golden era of PC games: 1995 – 2001. With Determinance I think I have, finally, succeeded.
Tell me what you think.
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
Long term readers will know I’m a huge NFL fan. I haven’t been able to play anywhere near as much of Head Coach as I wanted – despite it’s flaws being very, very serious; I find the matches themselves highly enjoyable. I’m not a giant stats-freak, I just like the atmosphere and the situation.
I wasn’t planning on buying Madden 07, as Madden generally pisses me off. The “do anything or everything” on-the-field completely turns me off. I don’t like having to choose what to do at every moment, I like being given a role.
So now I hear about Superstar mode, and I am going to buy it. Bill Harris’ write-up is what you need to read. The feature sounds seriously compromised by EA’s deadline behavour (if it isn’t actually a ploy to get you to buy ’08…), but it’s enough for me. Getting to play as one player in that way sounds damn good.
Finally, let me tell you something. If Detroit get off to a good start this year – which no-one expects them to – one guy called it. That guy? NFL Head Coach. Every 2006 season I’ve seen in HC has the Lions doing surprisingly well. Just bear that in mind if they do well enough to be .500 at mid-season.
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
I’m interviewed about Mode7 and Determinance in this month’s PC Zone. If you’re in the UK, pick it up and take a look.
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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
Prairie Games’ Minions Of Mirth is a TGE MMO. By all accounts the one-year-old title is a pretty solid fantasy genre-title that could, with a bit of luck or marketing, go the way of Jagex’ Runescape and make a pretty good amount of money.
Prarie has just sold a major stake to some guy who’s interested in helping them make that jump. That’s very good news and congratulations to Josh Ritter and his crew.
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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
GarageGames’ Indie Games Conference (IGC) is the event of the Indie calendar year, and this year it has been “cancelled“.
The inverted commas there are because the conference is, to a certain extent, still going ahead. GG realised they had too much on their plate to throw a “proper” conference – with food, speakers and so on – but are still inviting the hard-core to their space to show off their games and talk. It sounds to me like it’ll simply be a more intimate event: fewer people, but much higher quality; probably like IGC 03 was. There are plenty of positives to that, and I’m still very much looking forward to going and showing Determinance to the (reduced) crowd.
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Monday, August 21st, 2006
Apparently, EA thinks the industry has failed women.
The piece has a lot of numbers and commentary from EA, but it basically comes down to this completely amazing fact:
GIRLS IN ‘NOT AS INTERESTED IN GAMES AS BOYS’ SHOCK
would rather be playing with their dolls or buying clothes
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Monday, August 21st, 2006
Fixed an absolutely massive sword trail collision bug today, which should solve the false hits and false not-hits. Very good news.
I was given a lot of extremely classified, extremely interesting information about… well, I can’t say what about, just that it’s in the area of Indie development and it will affect a lot of the people who read this blog. I’ll post as soon as I’m allowed, but some of this is very positive for Determinance’s future. Consider yourselves teased.
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Monday, August 21st, 2006
It’s been a bit quiet over the last few days, as I took the weekend off and my esteemed colleague set off for a week’s holiday in Devon. I’m back on task, and it’s time to finish the tutorial.
A damage bug in the tutorial, which I was ignoring because I assumed it was some mis-forwarding somewhere, has turned out to be rather larger than I imagined, and possibly a stem of the big bug tree that affects bogus sword-trail collisions. Looks like my day just got booked solid. I won’t keep you updated, because that would be boring as hell.
I spent my days off with Mr Beer and Mrs CFL, so I don’t have much video-game commentary this week (again). I did however look at the 360 backwards compatibility list to see if there was anything I could buy cheap (as 360 games are precisely twice as expensive as they should be). Unfortunately, as has been talked about many times elsewhere, the list is complete shit. Where is Orta and Unreal Championship 2?
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Thursday, August 17th, 2006
The AI is now done, seven different opponents to beat in order as a single player game. Our original, original, plans for the single player portion of the game were of course far more epic, and fell fowl to indie-pressures. After that, our “arcade mode” Land Dispute (very much my esteemed colleague’s child) was perfect for a period of the game’s development, but became slightly obselete. We’ll be attempting to give it as the most bonus of games as soon as possible.
But now we have a group of AIs, attached to different character models and levels, and I’m extremely happy that we have a single player game at all. More and more recently I’ve been measuring Determinance against “standard” fighting games – finally realising they count as Determinance’s nearest neighbour on the genre-archipelago, despite inhabiting different islands. Standard fighting games are expected to have basically useless AI: or rather, AI that gives a challenge and some fun but doesn’t really feel at all like playing against a human. I would say the Determinance AI beats this standard in most ways.
On my travels doing some research into this area, I found that Tekken Dark Resurrection for PSP has some feature where it can “record” your fighting style as a ghost and then others can play against this ghost. Not an exact recording you understand, but one that acts and reacts supposedly how you do. I’ve searched the internet and can’t find any explanation of how this system actually works, but I desperately want to know. A beta slot and fifteen cookies to anyone who can help me out.
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Sunday, August 13th, 2006
I got a good sleep last night, having been pretty restrained with my fridge full of beer, and decided to spend the resulting energy on the Determinance AI.
Determinance AI has been an ever present menace to my life. Back when the game was bad/difficult to play (however charitable you’re being) I found it very hard to play with other people for anywhere near the amount of time I needed to in order to improve it. So periodically (about every six months) I would decide to write AI to play against. The problem is, this is a ludicrous way around to do it. If you’re making a multiplayer duelling game, you must near-finalise the gameplay by playing it with people before you write the AI. Playing with people lets you shape the gameplay into what you want it to be. Playing against bots does not.
Anyway.
AI, believe it or not, counts as a non-essential on my esteemed colleague and I’s list of Things That Must Be Done By September. Now, the essential things on that list are quite daunting enough, but I finally decided today that we absolutely needed a Duel Arena AI that:
1. Was fun to play against
2. Acted at least a bit like a human
3. Trained you to a certain extent
Now, writing AI from the ground up to play Determinance to those specifications would not be a minor undertaking. Luckily, the last time I decided to prematurely attempt AI-birth I got as far as putting almost all the ground-work for a very nice, state-based, clean to write AI system, including all the standard functions you might need such as: go forward and slash now, strafe, block, and so on. I had, in essence, already done all the hard work.
So eight hours ago I started… and now we have what I’d call a buggy but workable AI. By the end of tomorrow it may be done.
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