Daz 3D Content & Software offers free downloads of its Bryce 5.0 3D Design Software for Mac or PC through September 6. This version adds faster rendering, plugins, enhanced OpenGL previews, improved network rendering, and more on top of Bryce 4. Of note, Bryce 5 does not run on Mac OS Tiger.
I began to produce Raptor to educate myself. I wanted to learn everything there was to know about TNT Basic, a new IDE I had purchased. As a result, I designed Raptor to take advantage of nearly every technical aspect of TNT, including the special sprite functions, music, sound effects with stereo panning, and more. Patrick Graham and Miyaka Cochrane joined the team when they realized how cool Raptor could be. As Raptor grew and reached many people, its final purpose has served to help us gain recognition and to entertain people.
The Raptor team, Constant Variable, was formed out of a group of friends. Patrick Graham, being a close friend of mine, has always been eager to help in anything I do. Patrick ended up designing the latter levels when I was too burnt out to continue on. Miyaka Cochrane, whom I met through Patrick, loves the genre of top-down scrollers so he was eager to volunteer his music skills. After the first few weeks of development, when things got more serious, we started having meetings over at my place.
The meetings were an interesting experience in cooperation. We sat at a circular table, each of us at our respective computer. I would work at my PowerBook G4 667MHz. Miyaka worked at his PowerBook G4 as well. Miyaka’s PowerBook is adorned with a bumper sticker that reads “Not all who wander are lost,” which reflects his personality well. He would work while a constant stream of music pumped out of his heavy duty headphones. Patrick would work on our old iMac, learning a bit about programming, making levels, and every so often checking out what I was doing. Being physically together helped with the motivation factor in getting things going. In a single meeting we might have been able to pump out one music track, one level, and one or two new types of enemies.
During the process of developing Raptor we used a lot of software tools. For example, when producing an enemy, I might start by designing it in Macromedia Flash 4. I used this because I had no other vector drawing programs. Once I finished drawing, I would take a screenshot, open that in Adobe Photoshop and format the graphic, as well as add special effects like dodging and burning to give depth. I would also use Photoshop for the image mask. Map tiles were first made in Bryce 4, then formatted in Adobe Photoshop. Interfaces and backgrounds were done completely in Photoshop. Miyaka’s music was done in Ableton Live. All this, as well as the code, was then put together in TNT Basic.
TNT Basic is an excellent program for beginners as well as more advanced programmers who just want to create a game at a faster rate. For Raptor, it acted as the central hub, managing code, sounds, music, and map files. Its integrated map editor was a joy to use. Using it we could easily place map tiles, and map objects. Map objects could then be read through a simple bit of code which could then spawn enemies at the coordinates they would be on the map. In general, TNT Basic is very easy to use, and there are lots of well-documented examples on TNT Basic ‘s web site. This, combined with an easy to reference user manual, makes TNT Basic a formidable choice for rapid game development.
In the production of Raptor, we had all the right software. Using TNT Basic allowed for rapid development; its map editor suited our purposes perfectly. Adobe Photoshop also worked well, especially for compressing the graphics to comply with the contest’s 10MB imposed limit on file size. We also had access to the professional music software Ableton Live, which Miyaka was able to use very well to create music that fit the mood of the game.
Having someone besides me do the music was a real plus. Not only did it free me up to do what I really do, it also allowed for music much better than I could have found in some copyright free database. We’ve gotten a very positive reaction regarding the music.
Another positive reaction came from the fact that Raptor is freeware. I would suggest to anyone who isn’t going to make much money off of a shareware game to just avoid the whole hassle of setting up registration and release it for free. Keep in mind that people appreciate things that are free. People will rate things higher if they are free. People will send you fan e-mails if you give them a product for free.
Finally, distributing Raptor over the internet was a great experience. Submitting it to sites like Version Tracker, Mac Update, and Mac Game Files made it easy to put our game in the hands of tens of thousands of people. This instant and wide user base, which wouldn’t have been possible in the days of floppy disks, resulted in a ton of feedback. It also gave us our first fan mail. Of course for every fan e-mail we got, there were around two or three reporting bugs.
Not much went wrong with Raptor except that it suffered from an identity crisis. I had originally programmed Raptor just to teach myself TNT Basic. I didn’t know when I was just beginning the amount of time I would eventually spend on it. Therefore, I never took the time to create a design document for Raptor. In the beginning I never even asked myself what I set out to do. I just sat down and programmed.
My approach to making Raptor followed a pattern something like this: I would ask myself, “I wonder if I could program a scrolling landscape made from map tiles.” Then I’d do it. Then I’d say to myself, “That’s pretty cool, I wonder if I could add a plane that flies around.” Then, of course, I’d do that. Afterwards, being very proud, I’d ask myself if I could program a map object of a cloud and have it be read from the map file into the spawning code. The process would continue for a long time. Since I didn’t even know what what I was programming would become, there was no chance of me producing a design document.
Although it is true that sometimes games never get off the ground due to too much planning and not enough doing, Raptor suffered from the opposite. Raptor soared like an eagle unsure of its direction. I think that if I had planned by giving Raptor a plot-line, an original setting, or an original objective, it would have stood out more from the long line of scrolling games that had preceded it.
Raptor is my first entry to the uDevGames Contest, and my first contribution to the Macintosh gaming community. I value the uDevGames Contest because it offers incentive to develop in the form of prizes, and, more importantly for someone making shareware, it offers a deadline! A wise man once said that games are never finished, you just stop working on them. If not for the time frame set by the contest, Raptor’s development might have gone on indefinitely, and thus it would never be finished. Thankfully it’s done, and now I can look on to the future.
I’m currently learning OpenGL use that in the future to create state-of-the-art 3D games. With the prizes I’m getting out of the uDevGames Contest, I hope to be able to export the 3D models I create into a format in which a function in my future game could load. It’s going to be a long haul, but this isn’t the last you’ve heard from Constant Variable!