iDevGames

Drunk with this new-found power, I made the rather sudden (even, perhaps, presumptuous) move to enter uDevGames 2003. Excitedly I began to think up ideas, draw graphics, and make music simultaneously, and with no real order or plan. This was probably my first mistake. In the grand scheme of things, I hoped to create a platform game I had an idea for a while ago.

Because I had no real experience or reference to anything at all, I was just making things up and improving as I went along. If you have the patience, then this kind of self-taught approach to learning how to make games is probably the best path for a beginner. The way I see it, if you base everything you do on your own first impulses and ideas, you are virtually guaranteed to have a somewhat original game. And then you can go back and improve upon bits and pieces that need tidying up. That was my basic philosophy for making Druid. Too bad I never got around to the tidying up part. :)

Music Creation

Oddly enough, Druid’s music was not only the first thing I started doing, and the thing I ended up most happy with, but also the only thing I used a PC for; the music was done completely with FruityLoops on Windows 98. (Lucky me, I get the music producer with a professional recording studio in his backyard for a dad. Boy did I take advantage of that!)

I had a reasonable amount of experience with music-making already, and I put it to use. I really tried to give each music track a distinct “feel,” so that you could recognize which tile set it belonged to automatically. You can make a catchy tune, but if it doesn’t have instruments and a melody to fit the environment of the game, it’s wasted in my opinion.

So, I tried to pick instruments and sound effects which suited each environment. For the Forest music track, I used a sample of a female singer, slowed it down, and voilà , instant Druidical hum. I used a lot of tribal-sounding drums and other instruments, and tried to keep it reasonably simple. I think the end result for that piece was quite good; it had a nice feel to it while remaining not too overpowering or attention-grabbing (it is, after all, background music). I followed a similar pattern for the other two sound tracks, using quasi-environmental instruments, and using excessive Fruity filters to get that echo-y, cave-like sound for the Cave track (which I believe only appears on one level).

The music creation wasn’t really coordinated with the rest of the project. I basically just worked on it when coding and drawing graphics was getting boring. Even so, I think it suits the style of the individual levels quite well and did a lot to help the overall feel of the game.

Graphic Creation

All the level graphics and sprites were done with AppleWorks 6, which I find invaluable for such hand-drawn pixel graphics. For the characters I did on the main menu (which aren’t really that good, I just needed something to put in the menu background) I used Flash 5, then did finishing touches (fire on the arrow of the red Druid, etc.) with Photoshop 6.

Like my code, my graphics drawing was really a learn-as-I-go experience. It took me ages to start off—I tried to draw a decent-looking rock about 20 times before it looked okay. I drew a lot of inspiration for my graphics by playing some good old Atari ST platform games, with cute-looking, excessively colorful graphics. After some experimentation, I was onto the right train of thought, which was basically drawing the outlines of objects, filling them in with a solid color, then subtly shading around the edges. I think it gave the game a cute, quasi-cartoony appearance, which was what I was after.

Animation I find to be the trickiest part of drawing graphics. After a lot of experimentation, I ended up drawing the animation of the Druid running in Flash 5, by overlaying each image as semitransparent layer, then using that as a guide for drawing each individual frame in AppleWorks. I’m not sure if this is the best method, though. I would really like to learn a bit more about animation.

Of course, drawing decent graphics by hand took me a long time, and I was quickly running out of time and patience. So, unfortunately, I began to get lazy, and ended up merely changing the color of the sky and tinting in order to create differing tile sets, and I only ended up making one Druid sprite.

Coding

I of course began Druid with very little knowledge of programming, and because of this the basis for my game was highly unstructured. Druid was built on this rather unstable foundation, and suffered greatly in terms of speed and stability. It also made it very difficult to expand and customize, so in a way it also slowed down the project and damaged polish.

Now that I have proper knowledge of how programming operates and how a game should be written, I will not make the same mistakes again when I re-write Druid from scratch, nor if I make another game.

Ideally, for next year’s competition I’d like to team up with someone who knows a good deal about programming with something like Cocoa, and then just make game assets (graphics and music). There is only so much that you can physically do in the time limit. I really doubt I could develop a good code in something other than TNT Basic and still make quality graphics and sound within those time restrictions.

What Went Right

Music & Graphics

I’m really happy with the music I made for the game. I think that it gave Druid a really good environmental feel. However, it did considerably add to the file size (about 6MB).

Likewise, I think I did quite well in terms of graphics for a first shot. Several people have commented that they like the colorful world and cute Druids.

Weather Effects

Weather Effects gave my game a much-needed depth and feel for environment. Although I desperately wanted to make animated levels and parallax scrolling, this was not possible at a decent speed with TNT Basic. Without the weather effects, the levels would have simply been a completely flat plain.

TNT Basic

TNT Basic allowed me to create a reasonable game with virtually no experience, in two months! This is something I don’t think many other (if any) game-building apps for Mac can do, at least not with that level of ease.

What Went Wrong

Speed

The speed of Druid is really terrible. It usually only goes at about 10-15 FPS on my Power Mac G4 (it does run a bit faster in Mac OS 9 and with weather effects off). This is largely due to my poorly-structured, inefficient code, but it also has to do with TNT Basic’s restrictions in terms of the number of sprites on-screen.

Polish

Druid didn’t turn out particularly polished at all. I’m embarrassed at my horrid, pointless renditions of Druidical characters on the main menu, people have complained that the menu system is awful (and it is), and the randomly-flashing text impossible to see. This is largely due to the fact that Druid was only half-finished when the due date arrived for uDevGames 2003. When I re-write it, I vow to keep polish and overall interface smoothness firmly in mind.

TNT Basic

TNT Basic, while being remarkably powerful considering its ease of use, does have its restrictions. I’m particularly disappointed at being unable to do parallax scrolling or animated levels, as I mentioned earlier.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very pleased with my first attempt at serious game-making, especially the game assets (graphics and music).

Participating in uDevGames couldn’t have been a more interesting and rewarding experience. It gave me an incentive to learn programming and graphics very quickly, which I did. And I even ended up coming in 4th for originality, and winning prizes!

Working with TNT Basic was also a good move. It introduced me to programming very quickly and easily, and let me program a basic game quickly enough for me to still have time to make graphics and music.

I’m very much looking forward to uDevGames 2004. I intend to use proper art tools and techniques to hopefully produce a more visually stunning title next year. And with my experience in programming, I won’t make the same coding mistakes again, for a faster, more stable game, with more polish. It will also leave more time for improving the game and assets, instead of spending most of my time learning what to do by trial-and-error.

I’m going to continue working on Druid, of course. I’ll finally finish the game I originally intended it to be…

• Developer: Miles de la Hunty
• Genre: Platform
• Site:
• Team Size: 1
• Project Length: 4.5 months
• Development Hardware: Power Mac G4, Windows 98 PC

• Critical Applications: TNT Basic, AppleWorks 6, FruityLoops 4 (PC)