and from the art dept

our artist has churned out new designs after mda's comments,
and she made the effort to color it too.

i'm still working with her to create the character designs..

luciola has updates!

oh yay,
luciola has code updates!

some of the 'highlights':
1) everything for a location is stored in assets/loc# where # is the location number.
2) the location bg is always called bg and it's stored inside assets/loc#/images. i tot that made sense cos i can't think of reasons y it shud have many different bgs.
3) the names are all stored in the strings.xml , what happens is if i have to switch location, based on the id, i combine to form a string,
"loc"+id+"name", and store it in my accLocs (accessible Locations) vector. then i create buttons using the same old method.

so now things are more automated now. u press a button u want to go, and i boot up the location with its bg image, and the places that it can go to.

note now that,
1) only the top most button is working. cos i'm sleepy and is KO soon. will add in tmr morn.
2) u see a blank bg first, click once on the screen to make the buttons pop up. will add in the move menu button to do this later.

however, it's not all rosy.
i've got a big problem. detected memory leaks.

luciola speaks~

ok, so we've sorta got a first puzzle working,
and i must admit that things look a hell load better with pro graphics,
compared to placeholders we got from the net.
even if it's 'ceteris paribus'.

even though something seems to be working,
we've got a lot to do..
settling the story, creating the entire look-and-feel.
and i think the most impt,
the codes structure have to be settled,
cos i really don't know how and what to code sometimes.

well,
things will work out i guess.

A mixed bag

I let 2 of my friends tried out the first puzzle today and here are their comments and my observations. (Negative comments have a - and positive comments have a + in front of them)
- Comment was that it looks boring
+ Puzzle is quite fun
- Irrelevant dialog should be cut and only dialog related to the puzzle or other puzzles should be used
- Player was lost with regards on where to click and where to do a mouse over
- Player did not read the dialog and clicked on it rapidly to get to the gameplay aspect
- Something must be done to let the player read the dialog
+ Puzzle gameplay was intuitive and player actually read the information after doing a mouse over on the items and succeeded in combining the items correctly on the first try
+ Player solved the puzzle on the first try and that is due to reading the item description on what was needed to solve the puzzle
- There should be an introduction to the background story for the game
- Keywords in the dialog should be colored red and set to bold
- There should be some animation for the background and the character as it looks too static now

Seems like we are on the right track with the puzzle, but these comments and observations also tell us that we have a long way to go in polishing this game.

Profile of my 2 friends
- 1 is a sales and marketing executive. Age 28 and married. Not technically inclined, but is a game player. Plays games on her PDA on a very regular basis, but never actively seeks out games to play. Only plays whatever games that she can find. Westernized outlook.

- 2 is a TV serial producer. Single, aged 29. Not technically inclined, but plays casual games on a regular basis. Favorite games include Puzzle Bobble, Tetris, Bejewelled and Time Crisis (All share a similarity in that the gameplay is of the pick-up-and-play variety). Westernized outlook and actively seeks out new games on the internet to play. Avoids hardcore games such as RTS, FPS, RPGs etc and those with excessive violence, sex and gore. So no UT or Quake for her.

luciola mumbles!

here's the latest i got from our artist yest. i liked the girls on the far right,
but gib thought they are all still too young. oh well, let's see what our artist can churn out.

am taking apart all the codes and trying to understand the workflow, and it's my first time doing LUA. and of course first time with playground's engine. the learning curve is not half as steep as some other platforms, but still. grr. i hope gib doesn't haunt me soon. ><

Some more artwork from our concept artist

Here are some more artwork from our concept artist. Not all will be in the game, though.

Different Time Zones

Having finally located our 2 artists, I discovered that working with people in different time zones has its pros and cons and is not a bed of roses as others might say.

1 of our artist is located in North America and there is a time difference of almost 12 hours. With this huge time difference, there is an advantage in that when the artist is working, I will be offline and when I am online again, I can see the results of the artwork in my email 1st thing in the morning. But that is also where the problem comes in, when I see the artwork and need some minor changes and tweaks to it, I cannot get the artist to tweak and change it immediately as the artist would be offline then. So the next best alternative would be to email the artist and seeing the changes in the next cycle.

With game art production being a process where there will be countless iterations before the final product is approved. Small delays in between each iteration of change can add up to quite a large sum towards the end. This is definitely not a good thing to have especially when the schedule is tight.

Right now, my solution is to give the artist as much detail as possible before the game art production begins. This is so that the artist will have all the information and details needed to produce the game art and hopefully, this will cut down on the number of iteration needed before a piece of game art is finally approved.

Development schedule

We have fixed our development schedule and XP and me are in agreeance that this is the schedule that we have to adhere to.

Week of	Programming	Art
12 nov	Connect with MDA and the artists on the agreed game design process
19 nov	Standardize and develop features for the game platform	Develop the Concept Art of main character
26 nov	Optimize the features for the game platform	Develop the Concept Background Images
3 dec	Focus on the Generation of game content	Develop the Game Interface
10 dec	Focus on the Generation of game content	Develop the Character in game images
17 dec	Integrate and optimize the game platform	Develop the other game images
24 dec	Integrate and optimize the game platform	Develop the other game images
31 dec	Optimize the game content	Touching up and Optimize the artwork.

Preliminary artwork from 1 of our artist

Here is a sample of a piece of concept art which we have just received from 1 of the artist.

back from japan

greetings! just got back from japan, trying to resettle into the warm and humid weather again. right now am writing the new design doc for our game. again.

Logs of my posts in Playground SDK forum

Using the Playground SDK on a very regular basis, I have decided to keep a simple log of all my posts regarding technical questions about the Playground SDK so that I can refer to it again next time and my fellow developer, XP, can also refer to it if needed.

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/557
Generating buttons dynamically

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/552
Setting image of a bitmap window using C++

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/534
Generating a window using C++

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/535
Displaying 2 images as a single cursor

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/529
Resetting of place account information

https://developer.playfirst.com/node/527
Mission

TPlayform and FillRect
TRectangle and FillRect

Movng a TSprite around

All your base are belong to us

Rant mode on
The title of this post may sound funny, but with my almost religious habit of downloading casual games daily from Bigfishgames.com. I have noticed a small, but noticeable trend and, that is spelling errors in the most obvious of places which are reminiscent of the title of this blog post.

Now, I am no grammar nazi and am definitely not formally educated in the field of linguistics, but spelling errors and poor usage of English just irks me. I would fully understand the usage of colloquialism to bring out the full flavor of the game environment and design, but poor usage of English is just plain sloppy.

The latest example came from a casual game where the word "puzzle" was displayed as "pazzle" on my screen and that was in the help screen which is a very important screen for casual games, no less.

Anyway, it is imperative that all game text should be translated by people who have a good grasp of the language itself, or are native speakers of that language itself. When there is a need to localize the text for our casual game for countries such as France, I would definitely hire a French native speaker to translate the text for me. Thank god that I have friends residing in France and other European countries who are willing to do this small favor for me.

But if they are not available, paying for a good translator is the very least that I can do to ensure a certain level of quality. After all, quality in a game is not just confined to the stability of the code and the fun factor of the game itself.
Rant mode off

Time difference issues

Playfirst's Playground SDK has been great so far, but as it is a relatively new SDK, the documentation could be further improved. But Playfirst has provided an excellent forum for people to post questions and queries about the Playground SDK. As Playfirst is based in San Francisco which is a good 8 hours ahead of us, I have discovered on occasions that the time difference is having a noticeable impact on our timeline. Let's say, I post a question at 8 PM Singapore time, that would mean that it is 4 AM San Francisco time, so I will not expect a reply until about 11 AM the next day which is about 3 AM Singapore time. So when I actually do see the reply to my question, it would be about 10 AM Singapore time and which equates to 6 PM San Francisco time.

This large time difference illustrates the example of me being unable to get the replies to my questions due to us and Playfirst being situated in different locations and time zones. Thank goodness that 2 of Playfirst's developers, Tim and Ryan Salsman have a habit of responding to forum queries from people, in an informative and prompt manner. This has eased the steep learning curve of the Playground SDK by a considerable amount and credit definitely goes to my fellow developer, XP, for recommending Playfirst's Playground SDK.

Replayability, seldom seen in casual games

Having made it a point to download and try every new game released daily from BigFishGames.com. I discover that only a few have me playing them a second time and even fewer have made me reach for my credit card to pay for them. To date, the only casual games that I have bought are Kudos and Aveyond. I would consider those 2 games to be a life simulator game and a RPG respectively, and I do not see how they can be considered as casual games in my book compared to games such as Tetris, Peggle or Diner Dash. But since these 2 games are listed in BigFishGames.com and BigFishGames.com is a large casual game portal, so they must be casual games.

Anyway, what keeps a player going back to a game is replayability so that every time a game is loaded, a new game experience will await the player with the click of a button. Replayability is sorely lacking in most casual games that I have tried and that is one of the main features that I intend to have in our casual game. My intention is to have multiple branches which leads to multiple puzzles and also multiple endings for our casual game. So a player can play session #1 and go through puzzle A and puzzle B to see ending C while session #2 will involve the playing going through puzzle X and puzzle Y to see ending Z instead. Multiple paths, branches and endings will make for a unique and compelling gaming experience which, hopefully, will keep the player coming back for more.

The importance of scripting

Using Playground, the SDK from Playfirst. I have sought to make as much of the game content reliant on scripts as possible. With Playground's excellent LUA scripting feature, this has been made pretty easy since I do not have to bother with LUA binding issues and just concentrate on making as much of my game content reliant on LUA as possible. Plus, Playground has some pretty nifty functions to facilitate LUA debugging and development.

Right now, for the game. The character dialogues, background images and puzzles has been made so that all of them has been scripted in LUA. So changes can be made and checked in the game pretty fast without the need for compilation of source code. The plus side is that I can pass it to a non-programmer and get him to make changes to the dialogue, character information, background images and puzzles with ever needing to compile the source code.

The creation of a specific LUA framework to link our game specific content to LUA scripts have taken up a chunk of the timeline, but the effort spent will pay for itself down the road when there is a sizable saving in time and effort regarding generation of content for our game. The framework definitely has room for improvement down the road, but it should suffice for our current needs and I will continue to tweak and change it down the road as and when needed.

I recall reading in Game Developer magazine quite some time ago where a post mortem article said that the creation of tools will more than pay for itself in the later stage of development and I absolutely agree with that.

The artists are ready

The past few days have seen me look for artists on Deviant Art and finally, the search is over. We have 1 artist who is willing to do the in-game art for us and her rates are pretty reasonable even though she is not based in Singapore. Now, our current status is that we have 1 concept art who is responsible for churning out concepts and 1 in-game artist who will handle all 2D artwork.