Fight for it

Game Update

I had to spend some extra time getting the game files over to my mentor. We’re still having issues with save data that is returning after it’s been deleted for troops in the game. It’s been a real bane to the project and at this point I feel that my time will be better spent working on levels, polishing, and getting art in place.

My Canadian artist found some time to get face art over to me for my wraiths. I always love seeing what he comes up with. I’m not sure what the next artwork I will ask for will be. It’s possible I might have him work on the necromancer in the game. I looked back through what he already built for me and I see I have some great golem face art. Unfortunately I don’t have it in any of the enemy squads right now. It’s kind of a large troop and so I felt that I might wait to get it working.

I still need to get the key artwork done. I made some strides to talk to a friend but it looks like a dead end again. It’s likely that I should just take a stab at it myself. I also should take some time to create a new video for my game. It’s been so long since I’ve done one.

Personal Update

I picked up a job doing some DJ stuff this week. I was just asked to mix 5 songs together and ended up buying some software to complete the job. Still it made me think that it’s about time to add a section to the website so that I can start offering DJ services to people in the area. I did change the name of my company so that I could do just that. This first job was pretty minimal at just $10 but it’s a start. It’s important to have a goal and getting that validation from doing work is also important.

Some other personal stuff got a little rough this week. I had to spend a lot of time in introspection to really figure out what I wanted. Someone once told me that I wasn’t willing to fight for what I wanted and I always remembered that. It frustrated me a lot, because I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to act. I have been told that life will continually make you fail until you learn or give up. I was determined not to fail again, and so I hope I made the right choice. Only time will tell really.

The World of Six Aspects

These stories set in the world of Six Aspects are not cannon but might become cannon in the future.

I saw the Zeteris army passing by our house today. Mom says that we are lucky to have them around to protect us from those outside the empire. I have been told that they hate us, just for being alive! I wouldn’t wish harm on anyone, but these outsiders aren’t like us. They look different then us and worship god using aspects that are lower. We rely on our earth aspect to worship our lord. It is the only true way. I know because that’s what my mommy taught me. I hope that one day when I’m big and strong I can join the great Zeteris army and fight for our way of life. I would do anything to protect that which I hold dear.

1 Step Forward 3 Steps Back

Game Update

Well the troop saving bug has reared it’s ugly head yet again. I didn’t expect it to be so easy to deal with, but it’s pretty frustrating still. It has become bad enough that I’m actually handing the problem over to my mentor to see what he can make out of it. I feel like my time will be much better spent working on mundane things like adding more sounds to all the buttons and skills that launch during combat.

On the art front I’ve started talks with someone to work out getting the key art done. I spoke with an old friend from high school to see what he could do, but he felt like he would be a bad fit for the style I would need. I have a lead on another artist which I will be pursuing.

This past week I had to spend most of my free time studying as I learn new material for my day job. It cut into my game development time which is to be expected. Hoping to get all the new information on lock down soon so that I can reallocate time to the game.

Personal Update

My kids were a lot of help this week as I had to do a lot more studying. My oldest son helped out a lot with some of the typical chores I do. He’s really growing into a fine young man. Being a single parent is tough of course and so you just hope that your kids get what they need from you to mature properly.

My girlfriend came to visit this past weekend and she’s starting the move in process. I love the things she brought with to add to the house. It’s great to get more insight into who she is as a person by seeing her art. I catch myself admiring it from time to time. We got the chance to go out dancing together which I haven’t done in a long time. It was a really great time out just getting crazy and even riding a mechanical bull. I have a lot to learn about that if I decide to do it some more in the future.

The World of Six Aspects

These stories set in the world of Six Aspects are not cannon but might become cannon in the future.

The winds of change are upon us. We the people of the Air live high up in the mountains separated from typical society. A simple life where we can enjoy living away from large crowds of people. Some among us have been so lucky to have gained the power of flight. We fly with wings that we grew into as we matured. We always knew in our hearts that we were meant for the sky and so here we are. We care not for the politics of the day, or which empire is running the world. We only wish to live in peace and isolation away from everything.

Game Update

More play testing this week as I look deeply into the data that needs to be balanced better on the spreadsheets. The good news is that my musician Moriah that created all the tracks in the game said he spent 8 hours playing the game! He gave me a long list of things he liked and issues he found with the game. My 11 year old son has also taken more of an interest in the game. He runs to me wherever I am in the house when he finds bugs in the game.

We still need to get the key art made, and I might do a play through to take some more screenshots soon. I also spent some time hooking up my streaming desktop computer. I can now stream my game dev and play throughs of the game. That won’t be happening until I am caught up at work however. I’m taking on new tasks and so my nights need to be focused on those tasks.

Alignment is climbing far to quickly in the game which is problematic as it completely closes off some character classes. That said there is a way to tank alignment for troops. It’s likely that it’s getting tweaked to often. I need to take a hard look at it and make some changes.

Personal Update

September 11 was this past week. I feel it’s important to remember what happened but not to dwell in it. The events that unfolded defined most of my military career focus over the years. We live in a fallen world and it’s not going to change any time soon.

My youngest son turned 5 this past week. We had a nice birthday party for him and our family in the area was able to attend. I feel really blessed to have the ability to give him a nice party at the house. This is the first kids birthday in my new house.

Looking forward to next weekend when I will have my girlfriend in town. We match up in a lot of ways, which is very exciting! We’re looking at a collaboration for a couple of different ideas. She’s given me some great support and feedback as well.

The world of Six Aspects

These stories set in the world of Six Aspects are not cannon but might become cannon in the future.

The Glorious Empire

Zeteris (Zet-air-iss) is a glorious empire. It takes care of everything for its citizens. My family has successfully run this empire for the past four generations. Before our time there were many bloody battles to unify this great nation! Now there is word that a small band of rabble in the eastern islands has risen up to defy us. I suppose that there will always be those that would rather fight with their leaders to prove something. Sometimes people feel the need to be individuals, but we believe that ignores the needs of the masses. This happens from time to time, and the solution will simply be to quell this uprising. It’s so laughable that they believe they can stand up to the armies of Zelteris. They will be but a footnote in history.

Labor Day and a New Beta Build!

Game Update

We primarily spent time cleaning up Trello and doing test plays of the game this week. It’s nice to look at a list of things that we’ve been working on for so long to see all the progress that we’re making. I made sure to have a build that I could play while I was away for some time this past week. It was a pretty tiring week overall.

I need to go back and fix a problem that has to do with enemy boss squads. Right now they aren’t moving even when defeated which is great, but the player squads aren’t being pushed back. This creates a situation where when the player wins a combat, the enemy does not move backwards and the player squad moves through the enemy. At least this means that the enemy base can’t easily be taken over, but it’s still an issue.

There are a couple of stages that need some more polish. Some look to plain, while others have way to many trees. I need to do some more sweeps for sure. There was also some missing sounds on the stages and we made a change to our skyboxes which is creating weird reflections in water.

Personal Update

I wasn’t able to do as much work as home as I would have liked this past week due to being out of town. Like I mentioned earlier I managed to get some work done by creating a build for the game and playing it on my laptop while I traveled.

A friend of mine connected me with Strongbox games and they asked for a more updated video of the game-play for the game. That made me realize that I had a reasonably good beta that I could send their way so I built that this morning and pushed it over to them. I also pushed the beta over to a small group of people that I trust. This allowed me to make some connections and catch up on how things were going in their lives. I enjoy sending organic messages for something like this.

Things are progressing well with my girlfriend. I’m happy to have her in my life and look forward to the next time that I can spend time with her. I texted her today and said that I’m continually impressed with the way she reacts and handles things. It’s pretty refreshing to meet someone that’s so understanding.

The world of Six Aspects

More stories from the world of Six Aspects. Again none of these are specifically cannon right now but they might become cannon sometime in the future.

Father and Son

My father was a great man once. I suppose that he still is. I grew up wanting to be just like him, and now I’m getting my chance to lead the rebel army myself. We have been training for a long time, and I’ve been on many campaigns with my old man.

Things are different this time though. I won’t have the safety net that I once had. If I fail then all the things we’ve worked for will be for nothing. He still believes in the cause of freedom, but he has grown to old to do much more. It’s our turn now to take up the mantle and fight for what we believe in.

The ruling government has continually pushed policies to control the population. The people have to produce food and work for the good over everyone. That’s what they say at least. We are the few, living on the outskirts of civilization. I believe the people want to be free, just like my father who came before me.

This cause of freedom means everything to us. I expect there will be a lot of bloodshed, and there will be situations in which the decisions I will have to make will not be good or bad, they will be bad decision or worse decision. My father will still be involved in training the troops, but I will be on the front lines. I have to be successful, for my family, and for my people.

Punch Through the Problem

Game Update

We finally think we figured out the character ghosting problem. Often we would move characters in and out of the toy box and or delete them. We would then save the game and after returning those deleted characters would return due to corrupt save data.

Interestingly, the issue wasn’t anything in our new functionality of deleting characters which is what I had originally thought was the issue. The issue was the way we created a relationship on the toy box area and the buttons for the troops inside it. There was a toggle group on the toy box for the buttons which would not allow multiple buttons to read as pressed at the same time. We broke this when we added scrolling functionality.

In order to add scrolling functionality we needed to add a new invisible panel for all the character buttons in the toy box. This wouldn’t be an issue but the script for the button toggle group was a level higher. This means that the parent for the buttons was in the location.

Ultimately, this meant we had to place a toggle group on the invisible scrolling panel, and go back into the script in order to change the child referencing to a level lower than it was originally. For now this seems to have fixed the issue, but more testing is necessary. It’s possible that this will crop up again, and it might have been a multi-faceted problem that I’m unaware of.

The good news is that this means the only thing standing in the way of early release on Steam will be getting the key art right. Quite a relief overall. I’m still trying to squeeze in some sort of consumable item system for the game before early release as I see an issue with troops that have to much or to little alignment that the player wants to push into certain class archetypes.

Personal Update

I continue to improve my office to make the area more conducive for getting work done. I need to start streaming again, but I won’t feel comfortable to do that until I have the proper back drop. Still it’s a lot nice to sit in front of my computer now which means a lot.

I have to go out of town next week which might make it a little difficult to get some things complete. Then again I should probably take advantage of this time to put a build on my laptop and play it, then document all the issues. There’s still a lot of balancing that needs to get done.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been chatting with a great girl that I feel fits with my lifestyle and understands my needs really well. She really impressed me this past weekend when she spent her own money to take time to fly in just to spend time with me and get to know me. She’s even braving a hurricane that’s close by. I can’t say that I’ve been impressed like this in quite a while. She’s really good at making me feel comfortable and encouraging me. I have high hopes that we can keep moving forward with the relationship.

The World of Six Aspects

I’m going to start a new segment this week to talk a little about the world of “Six Aspects” as it’s a good idea to bring people in on my general ideas when creating this world. I might write some short stories in this section which could become part of the game. For now these are a lot of ideas and so I would stress that they be taken with a grain of salt as they are subject to change. For now I don’t have a definitive cannon for the world. I’m primarily doing some exploring.

First I think I should focus on the Aspects themselves. There is some confusion from people I talk to about this and so I’d like to clear this up here. The format for this will be a question and answer one. The Aspects are Earth, Lightning, Fire, Wind, Water, and Ice.

Question - “Why not just make them elements?

The Aspects are supposed to represent 6 different parts to a mono-theistic society. Each Aspect is one part of god, and represents a part of gods personality. The Aspects create a hexagon in which Aspects that are directly across from each other are opposed while Aspects that are to the immediate left and right are allied.

  • Earth - vitality

  • Lightning - unpredictability

  • Fire - intensity

  • Air - liberation

  • Water - invigoration

  • Ice - fortification

Individuals in the world will primarily focus their religious practices on one of gods Aspects which causes problems as those people will disagree with each other. It’s supposed to mirror the world we live in with different parts of religion arguing with each other over differences. It would be nice to create a situation in which the player as the commander of the troops needs to bring opposing viewpoints together in order to become victorious. This idea was first birthed in my RPG Maker game “Constantine”. It has room to grow quite a bit.

Also aren’t the Aspects Ice, and Water basically the same?

They have a lot of similarities which helped inform my decision to put them next to each other on the Aspect Hexagon. I feel that I can make them different enough to ensure they don’t have a ton of overlap.

Why include Lightning, seems like an odd choice?

Lightning is very interesting as the way I think about it is as if it was plasma. It’s somewhere between being solid and liquid which makes it different than fire. Lightning also has a close relationship to earth as it’s part of the requirement for its existence which made it a good fit for me.

Are there unbelievers in this world?

Absolutely, there are plenty of people that prefer to look to science or their own strength instead of submitting to a higher power.

Which Aspects are good and which ones are evil?

Elements are not good or bad. It’s how the user that’s aligned to them chooses to use them that decides that. We relate that to an alignment stat on troops. Zero represents an evil troop and one hundred represents a good troop. For now it’s difficult to make troops become evil on purpose. Still working on balancing this system. I’m considering reducing alignment of troops as they fight with opposing troops in the same squad. This would make for some interesting troop combinations.

How to the Aspects relate to the troops in the game?

Troops in the game have a primary aspect assigned to them. This aspect impacts how they fight on different terrain, and also might increase or decrease incoming damage depending on the match up of the spell being used against them. A fireball will deal less damage to a troop with a fire aspect, and more damage to a troop with an ice aspect. For now there is no way to shift a troops aspect but we may open this up in the future. For now if the player wants a squad to all have matching aspects they will have to move them around and use the recruit (duplicate) option as this will make a copy of a troop with all of their stats in tact.

What kind of other things have you considered doing with the Aspects system?

I’ve thought about matching it up with some sort of Zodiac as each Aspect could account for 2 Zodiac symbols. I’ve also considered restricting classes to specific Aspects. At some point I want to have more troops that fly and have something to do with ice aspects. Those feel like the most neglected right now. I’ve also thought about having god be a 7th element and explaining that somehow. In this way the people of the world would have access to 6 Aspects but only god would have access to 7. This would mirror the idea of mans imperfect nature and gods perfect nature in a Biblical sense.

I also considered creating some sort of situation in which players would play as the rebel faction that’s taking down some sort of empire and then swap roles to play as the empire to get perspective. I’m a big fan of stories that show you two sides of the story. I want my enemies to have some depth, and this could be a great way to do it. It feels like it would be really hard to implement and do well however.

I am a Game Developer

Game Update

I did some testing this week, but a lot of my efforts were focused on cleaning up my office. I took a look at some more ideas about creating a consumable system for the game. If I add any new features they have to already use what I’ve built and connect it in some way.

I keep going back to the game “Slay the Spire” mostly because I’m asking myself “why do I keep playing this game?” I feel like my answer is that it’s a combination of random cards and a lot of ideas of “what if x happens? How could that change my play pattern?” I’m trying to replicate some of that with the idea of some global artifacts. Again these global artifacts need to use the systems that I already have in place which could be difficult in and of itself.

Spent some time with my artist to get the things she needs to get the key art done. Hoping that we can move that along soon. It’s holding a lot of stuff up. I would say that I’m a little bit frustrated with the amount of direction I need to give in this area. That said, I’m sure that the final product will be worth it. This also led me to remember that I still don’t have a company logo, but more and more it might turn into the Six Aspects Color Wheel. I wouldn’t say that’s an official name for it.

Personal Update

Last week my sisters church had to vacate their storefront location which was pretty sad. It’s something they have been bracing for, for a while now. I’m doing the best I can to support them but it can be difficult here for them. It feels like a lot of changes are happening to me and the people I love lately. I hope that they will find something that will be a great fit for our church soon.

Next weekend I have a lot of exciting plans! I have to be careful not to project to much and just be in the moment so that I’m not let down, but it’s hard for me to help it. It’s interesting that it worked out so soon. I’m interested to see where things will go, and of course there will be a lot of drinking and dancing to be had.

Game Development Insight

I think I’m done talking about Dark Patterns for the foreseeable future. Instead I’d like to talk this week about “Atomic Habits” some more. Specifically, the idea that the things we do cast votes for the person we want to be. It’s pretty clear that the person I want to be is a Game Developer.

Halfway through my military career I told myself that I wanted to follow this path but I had no idea what that meant. At the time that didn’t amount to very much. Primarily, I listened to a YouTube channel called Extra Credits, I purchased a book titled “Game Programming All In One” which didn’t help much, and I went on twitter to talk about game development.

Then providence struck. Due to a work situation I was placed in a holding area in which I had extreme autonomy. I purchased a laptop and started to explore game development using RPG Maker, and I also met my now mentor Chris DeLeon. We have been working together for the past 8 years now. It’s why whenever someone asks about getting into game development I tell them to get a mentor and start paying them. It was life changing for me. I had direction now, and I had someone that could help me punch through barriers that I was continually hitting.

From there he encouraged me to start my own Game Development Club which I did in various capacities. Often I would be the only one to show up. I also spent time reading his book. Eventually I returned to work, but the fire had been lit now. I was still doing game streaming, but eventually I had to give that up due to my separation and eventual divorce.

There were some weeks in which the only game development I did was the one hour with Chris during our Skype sessions, but little by little we kept chipping away at Six Aspects. I also focused and finished my Computer Science Degree. Little by little without even knowing it I was becoming a Game Developer.

I tried a lot of things like 3D modeling in Blender, Pixel Art, etc… Eventually I figured out where my strengths were and so I focused on those areas. To me there was no such thing as wasted time, just choices which informed decisions. I never beat myself up, it was just exploring.

I wouldn’t say I became obsessed with what I was doing, but often I would get some motivation and take my work with me somewhere. On my lunch hours I would spend time working instead of socializing with people I worked with. I would take it to a coffee date and work before she showed up. I would work on an idea on the floor of my house moving cards and pieces around. I even took work to the bathroom to make more use of my time.

I made sacrifices, putting time into work instead of watching TV or being social. It’s likely that my choice to try and get the game to market in 2020 contributed to breaking up with someone very special to me. There were other things going on, but it can’t be denied that it contributed.

I spent my own money to hire out artists, and purchase assets. I was scrupulous in finding what I could afford learning how I wanted to run that part of the business. I experienced starting a business, and filing taxes even though I had no income due to my project not being completed yet. I took a month in Austin just to focus and really work on things holding myself to a schedule.

I created my own atomic habits without even knowing it, and I’m glad I fell into them now. At the beginning of this process I really didn’t know what I was doing and I would tell people, “I’m an aspiring Game Developer” but now I would say “I am a Game Developer.” I don’t think I could have done what I’ve accomplished without Chris working with me to set a schedule and keep me accountable to show up and “get my reps in”. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

I haven’t always been the most focused on game development over the years. I’ve had a life which has pulled me in many different directions. But just like the book “Atomic Habits” says, “You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be consistent and not break the chain. Every time you do your habit you are casting a vote for the person you want to be. You only need a majority.” For me that vote tells me I am a Game Developer. This has become my identity now, and the only way someone could take it away would be to kill me.

1% Better

Game Update

We’re getting a little closer to fix our character issue on the Force Organization screen. It’s become a real pain, but it seems to have something to do with the way we move troops to and from our toy box. Last week in particular I wasn’t in the mood to work on it, but I did anyway. A lot of my entries this week are going to be related to the book “Atomic Habits.” In the book it talks about how every time you do an action you are casting a vote for the person you want to be. That means that if I work on my game even when I don’t want to it’s casting another vote that says I am a game developer. It’s a choice to become 1% better each day.

I felt inspired this week to start working on a new feature. I know that feature creep can be a real problem when I’m working on the game but I wanted to strike while my motivation was high. I ended up duplicating and cannibalizing the class change section. In this way I figure I should be able to build a consumable section which will allow players to increase stats of troops. Once I have the basic increase working on a button I should be able to create a cost associated. It will definitely have to include money as we aren’t using that much yet, and then maybe adding a consumable resource. Maybe we could call it “Aspect Dust” or something.

Personal Update

The first day of school started this week, and it went smoother than I expected which is a good thing. I was really worried about the transition this year but everything seems to have been taken care of. Here in Florida we have a tropical depression moving through the area. It looks like it’s going to just miss where I live but there will likely be a lot of rain.

Game Development Insight

While working through the book “Atomic Habits” I’ve started to become more aware of some things I do each day as well as different habits I have each day. It’s interesting to break everything down to see some of the causality in my life. I think this is an important thing to know as a game developer as often it takes long hours to get tasks done. Often starting on a task, having motivation, and understanding yourself are the best path to getting that 1% better.

My main task this week, the thing that’s been primarily on my mind this whole time has been getting my game development area into a state where I will want to enter it to do work. Honestly right now my office where my desktop computer is has paper all over the floor, and is such a mess that I hate coming in here. I wanted to stream my development but I hated what I had behind me in the room, and so it felt like I couldn’t yet.

There were so many road blocks that I was completely unaware of. After reading “Atomic Habits” I discovered that often there are things that stop us from doing habits and one of them is when things are unattractive, and difficult. The book talks about how if you want to stop a habit one of the tools you can use is to make it difficult, or unattractive. As an example if my phone is becoming to distracting I can turn it off or put it in another room to make it more difficult to use.

Another concept from the book is to have singular areas for certain activities so that you don’t confuse habits. I could sit and my computer and work on my computer, or play a game, or communicate with people, or even work on music for when I DJ. I’m in a phase where I am creating areas and it’s likely that at some point I will remove some of those possibilities from this area, so that I can get in the right mindset when I walk into my office.

Finally, the book talks about habit stacking. This is the method of stacking one habit right after another one that you are already doing. For me I need to habit stack what happens after the kids are in bed as I believe that will be the best time to get work done on the game. I need to start a habit stack that way to really zone in and get more work done. It says to use the two minute rule when starting a new habit. The idea is to do just the minimum to start something and then later I will be in a place where I will want to do even more.

I have to be careful as habit stacking also works with habits I want to avoid. Things like waking up and looking at my phone first instead of getting up to start my day. It might be best to make it difficult to get to the phone by placing it somewhere other than my night stand. This might also help in the middle of the night when I wake up sometimes.

By writing all these ideas down I will be more likely to follow through so I suppose that’s why I’m doing this. This book has really opened up my eyes to what’s possible. I don’t think that I’ll see a lot of benefits soon but eventually if I keep up good habits I’ll get a watershed moment with a lot of gains all at once. At least that’s what the book says will happen. Even if it doesn’t I like the idea of being more aware of myself and gaining more control to do the things I want to do.

Progress

Game Update

Still working at fixing our data save issue with troops not deleting properly. This sort of thing can be frustrating but I started reading a book this week that really helped me put things in perspective. It’s crazy to go back a number of years to when I started all this to realize just how far I’ve come. I need to also realize that I’m very limited with what I’m able to do, and I’ve done more than some products that are already on the market.

Besides the technical issue, I should start working on more video for the game and maybe start streaming again. I’ve said before that even things like doing taxes, setting up steam, and getting my business licence are still “game development” in the sense that they have to be done in order to move forward. In the same area as that I think my next game development item will be cleaning up this office to make it conducive for development, and streaming games. It’s about time and if I focus on it I should have it done quickly enough, maybe even this week.

Still hoping to get some sort of capsule art together for steam, and I need to get back on steam and make some adjustments with my business licence swapping from Texas to Florida. There are plenty of “game development” things to do that have less to do with game play and more to do with game release.

Personal Update

YouTube made a suggestion that I read “Atomic Habits”. I like to reclaim time driving to work or doing chores by listening to books. YouTube has been a great way to do that to keep improving on myself, my habits, and thought patterns. This book had me crying in my car on the way home with the story that the author told. It’s one of those overcoming adversity stories. I’m trying to feed myself more stories like this as it feels like a lot of what has been happening lately in our media is well…. not that. I would prefer to feed myself a narrative that talks about working hard and being successful.

One of the most interesting ideas in the book so far is the idea of becoming 1% stronger each day and seeing no results until a watershed moment. One of the examples from the book is a room where the temperature is turned up one degree at a time from zero and there is an ice cube in the room. For the first 32 degrees there is absolutely no change, but as soon as the threshold of 33 is reached it starts to melt. Working on a skill can be like this where there is little or no progress that is seemingly made. Then a lot of progress happens all at once. That’s not an accident. Often though we focus on the outcomes and forget about the first 32 degrees and just think about the 1 degree changes from 32 to 33.

I remember experiencing this when I played guitar. It felt like I wasn’t getting anything done when I was learning chords, due to the speed and accuracy I could play them at. Eventually I learned my first song and could play it from beginning to end at the proper tempo. That was a real watershed moment for me.

Often we measure our success based on final outcomes. In my case completing this game could have been that, because realistically it’s been 8 years and that hasn’t happened. I would say that along the way there have been so many epiphany’s and water shed moments that I can’t even count them. Things as simple as understanding how to produce a statement to display variables with Debug.Log properly, or understanding the “Update” function, how to read in a spreadsheet as comma separated values, how to create object files for my characters, saving data, displaying models, launching particle effects, coordinating external contracts, setting up a business, I could go on… None of these things happened overnight but they were all tiny victories on the road to finishing.

The most important thing I think I learned from the book so far is the idea of saying to myself, “I’m the kind of person that…. “ This is the same idea of limiting beliefs that we talk about in self development circles. Instead of saying, “I’m the kind of person that binge watches Netflix” I have the power to change that narrative and say to myself, “I’m the kind of person that spends the bulk of my time working on my projects and I do my leisurely activities in a controlled way.” I need to internalize the kind of person I want to be, and possibly make habitual changes. It’s going to be painful for sure.

Game Development Insight

I’m going to take a break from talking about dark patterns this week. Instead I’d like to touch on simple randomization.

Randomization in games, especially in the indie game scene can be a real boon to giving replay value to a game. Often we see fully randomized environments in games like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, and Faster Than Light. It does a great job of keeping things fresh for sure. The thing is for a lot of game developers the number of things that have to happen in order to make an environment random is likely to much. I know it’s definitely out of reach for me. Something more simple could be much more achievable however. Doing something as simple as having a pool of generated stages that can be played is a great solution. That has worked for a lot of games like Populous. Populous had so many stages that the developer said the QA team would not be able to play them all in order to test them out. That’s pretty crazy if they were all created by hand, although I suppose that we’re only talking about a couple of variables.

I’ve started to look into simple things that I can do with Six Aspects to give more variation to the game. Making some sort of repeatable “hunting” areas has always been an idea. I now have a map icon that can launch random stages. All I need to do is add more to it. I feel the next step will be to randomize the enemy spawning on the map, that’s an easy win. A more difficult task would be randomizing their way points in such a way that it makes some sense. Assigning those manually would be better.

I also feel that I can randomize the town spawning fairly easily and just keep them in the same spots. The issue with this is primarily a narrative one as it’s not typical to have towns that just appear and disappear. I could explain this by saying that the towns are “magical” and as such they can teleport around to different locations. I might also make it some sort of decent into Hades, or a demon realm in which the landscape is always shifting which explains the randomness of the towns.

I suppose while I’m at it I might also see if there’s a way I can randomly spawn features with their environment collider. This is a lot more difficult due to the way we interact with the terrain through scripts attached to troops that move them about. It would be especially difficult to randomize terrain heights and add in the movement zones properly. A forest would work a lot like a town so that might be OK.

I think the basic idea I’m getting at here is one of turning enemies on or off that have been assigned to a stage randomly. If you think about a Mario game this could be done by randomly turning on turtles in a stage. They would work as expected otherwise. This would be pretty simple to do. The other option of changing terrain in the level would be very difficult, maybe even creating unplayable levels that are mostly nonsense without some sort of intelligent randomization. I’m sure it would be a fun challenge though.

They're back!

Game Update

Still working hard on some of the problems we’re having with troops that are supposed to be deleted re-appearing. I wasn’t able to do a lot of work on this week but I still got some other items completed. This issue has been a real tangle and we cannot release like this.

A major milestone completed this week when I finished building all of the particle effects for humanoid troops. The monster enemies will probably need some but often the enemies will be humanoid as well. It can’t be to much more to do, and I feel comfortable releasing in early access this way.

I have some other business type things to start swapping around. I haven’t been on the steam page in a while to check on requirements and still need to get the capsule image art done. Hoping to get that finished soon, but it may take some extra time. Also I think making a solid video would go a long way so I’ll probably start work on that.

I did a lot of driving this past weekend and while I was on the road I started to think about how I could do some additional customization without having to build an entirely new system. I feel that making a consumable screen might be the easiest thing to do here. On top of that I’m thinking about a drawback that will go along with buffing stats. The idea I like the most is allowing some dead troops to be removed from army due to passing on so they can’t heal. This would be a random chance, but that random chance would be increased with some of these consumable item buffs. I love this risk reward idea and it shouldn’t be tough to implement with systems we already have available. Additionally, we could tie it to the end of stage actions as some actions would have negative rep results but give better consumable rewards.

Personal Update

Picked up my boys this weekend. It’s a lot of driving to do all at one time. I’m just glad we’re all home safe again now. It gave me some time to think about things. I’m also very worried and praying for someone I know that’s in the hospital. If that weren’t enough I’m also concerned about a local church that needs a new place to meet as their rent just got raised on them. It feels like things are really crashing down on a lot of the people I care about lately. I wish I had more power to help.

Game Development Insight

Doing a short entry this week as I’m very tired. Next week I’ll continue with more Dark Patterns insight.

Feature creep is a real problem with everything in game development. It’s easy to get so excited about an idea and want to implement it without really counting the cost. I figure that’s why understanding the core game loop and what your development pillars are is so very important.

First the core game loop tells you where the fun is. It’s important to strip everything else away that’s not that to see it in its purest form. As an example for my arcade board game I have a mechanic where the player rolls dice for 30 seconds over and over while discarding any rolls of 1. The player keeps track each time they don’t roll a 1 and that is their money for the round. This mechanic that makes the game fun could easily be used for a lot of different games, and of course there’s buying things with the money and then rolling again. I’d say the mechanic, plus the purchasing of things is the core game loop here. Everything else comes second to that and must serve that loop. If it takes away focus, or takes over as the dominate loop it can’t be a part of the game.

I mentioned earlier about the consumable items, and it’s one of those things that had to fit with everything else without making it take longer, or taking over to become to dominant. It also needed to be easy to implement at this stage and I think it does that extremely well.

I suppose you could even apply this to other parts of life. Understanding the core of something and then removing parts that really don’t serve it. I feel like that’s a Biblical thing too. Mathew 6:24 “No man can serve to masters for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” This seems to fit nicely with the concept of focus. Often I will tell student’s “You can’t do everything you have to make your choices. You may be good enough to be a professional soccer player and an astronaut but not both you have to choose.” This is even true of where our time goes. We choose to watch TV or be leisurely instead of working on things we’re passionate about. Nothing wrong with leisure but it’s important to recognize the choice made.

Frustration, Mentors, and Premium Currency

Game Update

We waded into a new problem in which deleting characters sometimes creates new ones that have gone from level 1 to level 9. It’s a really strange, and I’m not sure all the machinery that might be causing this. It’s likely tied to a script that automatically levels up enemies in a stage when we start so we can start with templates for them. Then again it might just be some sort of data scumming that’s really screwing things up. Data integrity is super important for programs.

I fixed another issue all on my own. It would seem that changing classes was not updating the “leader” field correctly. Right now that’s supposed to be tied to which class (job) the troop is. I did start thinking about this and it’s possible that in the future I will change it to be a promotion the player will pay for which will also increase the cost of the troop permanently. Maybe being a leader shouldn’t be tied to the job of a troop. That said it might also be important to not allow most creatures to be leaders if we allow the players access to them. I’m not sure how I would use the systems I have to allow the player the ability to recruit creatures right now however.

I also thought this week about a way that I could possibly make random stages. I should be able to make a pool of stages and a special map button and then add a small portion to the script that executes when the button is pressed to spawn one of the stages at random. The only thing that would need to be added would be a way to control the level of the enemies on those stages. It shouldn’t take to much to do that much. If we want to go full random we would need to do things with the landscape, set locations for enemies along with way points, and cities. If I could build multiple small areas that could be linked together that would also work. Something like fitting nine pieces together that are selected randomly from a pool would work well.

Personal Update

Some stressful issues came up this week, and I’m a little concerned where things will end up. Still I’m fighting to keep everything normal and moving forward. Still sometimes life doesn’t go the way you expect and you get surprised. Sometimes life isn’t about the problems we have, it’s about how we react to them.

I had an interesting conversation this week about mentors. I mentioned that this person should look into getting a mentor and paying them. I’ve said this pretty often to people interested in game development. This time I got an interesting response however and it made me think. The response was that they felt mentors should not be paid. They should be doing it because they want to.

I would say that for me paying my mentor does help keep me on track while validating the work that he does with me. If anything I’m not paying him enough. After paying for training, and also for artwork for the game I found that I rather enjoy it. I guess it’s one reason that I want the game to do well. I want to compensate those people that were instrumental in the project better.

On the flip side I see where my friend is coming from. We both had previous experience in the military and so I could see where they were coming from. With money in the picture there could be an ulterior motive, or other dynamics that are less than preferred.

Game Development Insight - Dark Patterns Premium Currency

Premium currency is when a player purchases in game currency with real money for the purposes of buying in game items. The issues are that this often hides the amount of money the player has spent. Additionally, spending more money often nets more in game currency for the player which tempts the player to spend more. Reading some more of an entry from the darkpattern.games website it also would seem that it’s a key component to waste aversion and loot boxes. Just like before I’m not against in game currency if the game is solid.

Waste aversion is an interesting concept. The idea is that people want to use all of their in game currency and they don’t want to have any left over. Knowing this the developers purposefully create situations in which the players have left over currency. This makes them want to re-purchase more to attempt to use it all up.

One of the biggest controversies in the games industry is that of Loot Boxes. Loot boxes give the players additional content randomly. This plays on the Skinner Box mechanism inside everyone’s brain. This behavioral conditioning of players which can cause addiction to dopamine which could be compared to drug addiction.

Here’s how the Skinner Box works. B. F. Skinner placed a rat in a box and allowed it to get food when it pressed a button. This was fine, and so next he tried setting the button to a set number of presses. This also worked well and didn’t interfere with the rats typical behavior. However, when he made the button hand out random rewards the rat became obsessed with the button. Pressing the button and not knowing when the food is coming creates an expectation. It’s the same reason that people gamble, roll dice, open packs of cards, or buy lottery tickets. Everyone believes they will win and get what they want, and when they don’t they try again. Even failure serves to reinforce the need to try again.

Seems pretty evil, and I feel that for some people with addictive personalities it is a way to take control and exploit those players. On the flip side I’ve been in the position of having had a bad day or week and suddenly pulling a very rare card from a pack, and feeling how good it felt to get that result. There are times when it does feel really good to get that, but it’s important for players to know what they are getting into. Sadly most players are likely pretty ignorant to what’s happening inside of them.

Temporal Dark Patterns

Game Update

We managed to fix the problem with the menu system that occurs when we press buttons and sometimes the last action from the last button we pressed tries to execute. This might have also fixed an issue with selecting troops in the toy box. There are some issues with the way we’re deleting troops however and so we will be focused on that this week.

I made some more updates to the spreadsheets to further balance them. I put out a new build and did some more play testing as well. Everything is going to take some time to get just right. There’s still an issue with leaders not updating and I took some time to work on that as well, but wasn’t able to find that line in the code.

My girlfriend is stepping up to work on the key art for the game, and I did some work to talk about a couple of options we could go with. I’m excited to see what she comes up with as she did a great job making some art for the Six Elements in the game.

Personal Update

Not much to report here. I took some time to walk this week and do some much needed household chores. Sometimes it’s nice to disconnect from technology. I spent some time on the beach with my girlfriend to unwind, and finally got to try out the board game Nemesis. I felt pretty tired most of this week, I don’t know if I’m getting enough rest hours.

Game Development Insight - Dark Patters

This week I got pulled into a game that uses some of the elements of Pokemon Go mixed with Clash of Clans. Both games which leverage dark patterns to addict their player base. I used it to motivate myself to walk, and so it wasn’t all bad. I came to the realization that dark patterns in games can be fine, if the game has some substance to it. Often the games that are available for free on the phone heavily leverage dark patterns with minimal substance.

The specific dark pattern I want to talk about this week temporal dark patterns. I like to call this “sit and wait”. Darkpattern.games mentions “playing by appointment”, “daily rewards”, “grinding”, and “advertisements”. I’m going to talk about everything accept for grinding which I mentioned in a previous dark patterns post.

Playing by appointment is the basic dark pattern that we first saw in some games where players could build virtual structures like a city simulation or real time strategy. The twist is that instead of the building taking seconds to build they would stretch it out over hours, days, or even months. This was done in an effort to make players feel like they were building “realistic” structures. I’m not sure when it was discovered that this game play loop created an expectation for players to respond which is similar to conditional training we do with animals.

Daily rewards follow the playing by appointment pattern as well. Again this can be OK if the game has substance to make the game play valuable, but at some point it’s just tiring to do that daily quest for the 60th time to improve your reputation or make in game money. Often though the game just wants players to log in and click a button.

Advertisements have become another way for games to make money through making players wait which takes them away from the game they are playing. I can’t imagine that this increases the players enjoyment of the game. It would seem that it delays them from playing the game. That said I have watched plenty of commercials to get in game rewards. Players feel that it’s OK to do this for free games so that the developers can get some incidental money from advertisers. I often wonder how often these ads actually cause players to complete a transaction or download a new app.

I can only guess at what societal conditions led to us creating games that are focused on these dark patterns. It’s possible that just the proliferation of cell phones to so many people made the market irresistible to make games like this. It’s difficult for many of us to ignore text messages, which also feeds into these temporal dark patterns. It’s not like it has to be bad, but often if the substance of the game is just the dark patterns then it’s not much of a game. These things are just add ons that need to be taken under consideration instead of just automatically tacking them on.

Goodbye Lancer Games

Game Update

Lot’s of good work done this week, and I have to say it’s mostly thanks to my girlfriend being supportive and helping me focus. It also helped that I did an embarrassing play test last weekend, and one this weekend. I probably spent close to 15 hours working on various problems. I made a lot of content changes to the troops in the game fixing a lot of the issues from last week.

Fixing the XP curve, the upgrade for some troops, and the money issues were pretty easy. I also stepped up the speed at which the squads move on the map which helped to speed up game play as well. I also spent a lot of time going through all the animations in the game. There are probably 50 different animators to go through when I do a scrub like this. Luckily groups of troops with different colors use the same animator. I standardized animations that used to be “Cast Fireball” to “castMagic” in order to allow the same animation to be used whenever magic is happening, not solely when a fireball is being used etc…

The force organization screen issues are more pronounced and it will probably primarily be something I will need to work through with my mentor. It’s strange how buttons are trying to do the last action that’s being pressed right now. It’s really screwing with functionality.

A problem that plagued combat for some time was the way that enemies were maintaining temp healing from fight to fight. I made some changes to fix this issue but another exact issue I didn’t want cropped up. I ended up with some combats in which troops weren’t taking enough damage and healing was keeping battles running over and over again. Due to that I reduced defense and increased damage output. I will need to start a new save to understand if it’s doing what I need to happen. Healing shouldn’t be as strong as it is, that goes against our level speed pillar of keeping stages around 15 minutes. It might be ok to break this for a final boss stage, but otherwise it feels pretty bad.

Personal Update

I’ve always said that game development isn’t just making games, or selling them it’s a lot of other things as well. This week I managed to put in my new business licence in Florida and with that an exciting new thing happened. The name of my LLC changed from Lancer Games to Lancer Entertainment.

The end of the month will see the return of my kids which will limit my time again. Due to that I really need to keep working hard on the game to get it out the door. The next big steps will be re-visiting steam to see what steps I need to take there. Getting the artwork set and my new business information updated will be an important step. Again it’s game development, but it’s the business side.

Game Development Insight - Dark Patterns

This week I want to talk about the Dark Pattern - Badges/Endowed Progress. According to darkpattern.games giving badges/achievements etc… gives the player a sense of “Endowed Progress. It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect which simply means that people are more likely to remember uncompleted tasks than ones finished. Often the tasks are on timers which give players a sense of FOMO (Fear of missing out).

On the plus side there are times when I play board games like the new Dune game, or one of my favorites Agricola and I have no focus or idea where to go. Having a quest or something can be very helpful. Ticket to Ride also does this in a way with it’s ticket system to complete routes. I would say that any time the player needs guidance, endowed progress items like quests can be helpful.

The problem is when they take away agency from the player. The player may feel like they are chained to complete certain actions. Some of the daily quests in Arena of Valor are a bit to demanding for instance. With the average match taking around 20 minutes doing 2-4 matches a day is pretty doable. However there was a time in which they pushed players to play 10 games in one day for maximum rewards. On top of that they created some quests for modes that require other players and are to unpopular to get enough players to launch. It’s frustrating to open up a menu and see uncompleted tasks. The psychological pressure really works.

All that said, I’ve thought for some time about how I want to build in some achievements for Six Aspects to integrate into Steam. This is a pretty exciting thought for me. I kind of want to set a bunch of goals in the game and then complete them. Even without prompting when I was younger I remember working through Chrono Trigger to get all the endings.

Just like most of these dark patterns there are good and bad parts to it. The important thing to think about as a company is how to make the patterns work well for the games I release to take care of the player, instead of making them into cages. Just like most things we need to make sure that things are dialed in properly.

Happy Forth of July!

Game Update

I did some testing this week and found a laundry list of issues with the game. It’s a little frustrating when I’ve been working on something for so long to find so many issues. Luckily we fixed the flanking issue which was working perfectly.

Here’s some of the things that came up.

  • Balancing experience so that the player can progress more quickly

  • Enemies are to strong in combat need to re-tool their stats

  • Not enough money is being produced by the player in stages

  • Lots of issues in the force organization screen as clicking on buttons isn’t responsive, and deleted characters aren’t staying deleted through saves

  • Some characters minimums aren’t set properly for class changes

I guess I should expect that this is just part of the process. I knew that there would be some balancing to do. It might be good to build some sort of editing screen for troops instead of depending on spreadsheets. It might also be good to build something to allow us to make characters more quickly.

Personal Update

I did a lot of extra work this week to flex my hours and have some additional time off this week. I’m excited to go see the fireworks with my girlfriend tonight. It’s been quite a number of years since I had the chance to watch them with a love interest. I’m sure it will be special.

I’ve taken to working on getting ready for Dungeons and Dragons as the Dungeon master. Today will be my first time running a session. I’m excited to finally be able to put all my Dwarven Forge terrain to good use. I’m a little nervous about it, but I think that overall it should be a good time.

I also managed to make some time to work with my friend Jacob on his board game. I think he has a lot of good things going on. We started our play testing session by talking about our views on development and I think it was important just like the book “Start with Why” talks about. We need to make sure that we both have the same “Why”. I showed him some of my arcade board game idea, and the more I play test it the less fun it gets. Then again I might need to play it with a human opponent to make it work. That might make all the difference.

Lots of set backs for my game development this week as I found all the bugs with my game, I had an embarrassing showing with my friend Jacob and my board game is really not working right now. I keep seeing the same thing with my players. They are having a hard time with the force organization screen. I figure I can either make a video to explain the game or I can try to develop an actual tutorial stage. I’m leaning towards an instructional video as I feel like I can build that more quickly and easily.

Game Development Insight - Dark Patterns

From competitive ELO there are a lot of dark patterns we can discuss. Interestingly a dark pattern surfaced for the phone game that I play on my phone this past week. It would seem that either players have figured out how to run bots in this 5v5 MOBA style game, which is quite a feat, or the company itself is sending bot teams into the battlegrounds because there aren’t enough players due to recent competition in the market place. Either way competitive matches became auto win for about 4 days with about 1/10 matches being against actual players. I could resist taking advantage however and I pushed up the ladder with a character that sees minimal play. Due to that I’m number 2 in the US on that character as per the way the competitive system in the game works. I wouldn’t say I’m actually the 2nd best at playing the character, I just took advantage of a system. Thus I don’t put much faith into the system giving real feedback on how good or bad a player is.

I suppose this would fit primarily into the dark pattern of grinding. Grind is a mechanic where players are required to perform repetitive tasks to gain experience points, levels, items, money or general power. Somewhere deep down inside most people we like feeling like we “earned” something. Grinding gives us that sensation and like most things I discuss I can see two sides to this issue. Typically, the negative to this is “stealing” players time to get them unnecessarily hooked on your product.

The thing is it would be simple to just give people items or money, but that doesn’t feel very satisfying. It’s a sure way to have people lose interest. A lot of playing any game comes down to a persons belief system. In the self development community this comes up a lot. It’s called “Limiting Beliefs.” Limiting beliefs are things that keep individuals controlled and in some ways they can be good or bad. Having a belief that driving to fast, or while texting is dangerous keeps other people from possible harm. Having a belief that no matter what a person does they won’t be successful will stop a person from trying at all.

The recurring theme I think that I’m going to have for most dark patterns is as long as the individual understands what they are getting into and what’s happening to them they can be fine, or even good. In this case I would say that I enjoy grinding for items in games most of the time. Other times it does push itself into becoming a chore and that’s where I should stop. Often I don’t though and that’s when it’s a problem. This is where I believe we can get into video game addiction. Basically when it’s not healthy to be gaming, and we do it anyway.

Competitive ELO Part 3

Game Update

Further issues were discovered with the flanking problem and we managed to solve the spell casting problem for single targets. For some reason the area of effect spells are also not working properly. We have some further work to do to fix them as well.

This week is pretty thin on game updates as I’ve put some efforts into other places and had a couple of other things happen. I am looking forward to a time when I have my business licence, artwork, and early access release on steam. I do like how everything looks when we have a lot of different particle effects triggering at the same time.

Personal Update

This week my cell phone of the past 6 years died. It was a pretty big loss as a lot of things that were on that phone cannot be recovered. I suppose it’s a lesson in keeping a backup of things. A lot of memories and conversations have been lost forever. It hit me pretty hard. I got another phone, but the damage had been done.

I ended up frittering my weekend away on board games and Dungeons and Dragons, but there was a small ray of light. I felt better after getting back to my roots and I felt very motivated to start running Dungeons and Dragons again as a Dungeon Master. It’s been ten years since I ran games. The last time I did that was when I was stationed in Iraq. It made me feel really good. I’m so happy that my girlfriend told me to relax this weekend. Sometimes she knows what I need even when I don’t know.

Game Development Insight - Competitive Elo Part 3

The last two weeks I’ve talked a bit about the competitive systems that have drawbacks and benefits in both realms. I try to take a tempered approach whenever I’m looking at two sides of an issue. I will always remember doing a CLEP test in which I was asked to take one side of an issue and I simply couldn’t do it.

Which system is truly better? It’s difficult to say which I guess is a bit of a cop out. If I had to choose I would pick the original chess ELO, but in team games like League of Legends I feel that this system is to punishing for players in random groups.

That said I’ve always held a fondness for simple tournament structures. Although this way of determining the best is limited as it has no way to handle flukes or performances that don’t represent a team, or individuals true abilities. At the same time this format gives each match a lot of wait and drama. When competition leads to a surprise that’s unexpected it’s very exciting. This contributes to the meta game for future competitions.

I remember playing in a tournament in which my opponent mentioned that the online meta was a couple of iterations ahead of the physical game for this reason. This makes me question if it’s almost better to play less games in order to keep the meta game from developing into its final resting position at the end of the season. Then again what are long time classic games like chess in order to make sure that players don’t have to worry about a changing meta from season to season. Then again the lack of change is probably what makes games like chess less interesting to me.

I think this will be the end of my ELO series. I think I’m going to progress to talking about dark patterns next week. Dark patterns came up while I was doing this series when I did a little research. I feel like it will be a great next subject to talk about.

Happy Fathers Day! & Competitive Elo part 2

Game Update

Spent quite a long time working through the flanking issue with my mentor Chris. We were almost done and so I stayed up a little longer to put the finishing touches on the problem. It was a portion of the script that we hadn’t accounted for and so far it seems to be working. I just need to make sure that there aren’t any problems in a full stage situation. There’s a possibility that we may have accidentally set new positions permanently after the combat.

I missed last weeks blog entry due to taking a quick week of vacation. It gave me some time to think about the game and I ran a back up which is always a good idea as well. I need to play a build and take some new pictures with all the great new particle effects we’ve built. Hopefully I won’t run into any other really problematic bugs.

Another idea I had which may be difficult (maybe impossible) to implement would be playing the game from both ends. What I mean by that is playing the game as a liberating army and having the game record your armies movements and then playing it from the perspective of the defending empire. I’ve really started to warm up to the idea of seeing both sides of a conflict and this would really amp up what we would offer with this game. Given the state of factions across media, politics, etc… this seems like something that could be really interesting. The idea is to show that both sides of a conflict have their issues. Everyone loses in a war time situation.

Personal Update

I was able to visit a place that I love with my girlfriend over my time off after dropping off my children for the summer. It was a lot of fun to show her some places that I remember the last time I was there. It was surprising how many places we tried to go to that were closed though. The 2020 virus really wreaked havoc on businesses all over. Probably five different places were completely shut down. Additionally, we seem to be in a labor shortage which means it was difficult for a lot of places to keep up with orders.

I’ve been watching the markets a lot lately too. AMC stock has my attention and I’m wondering just how high it’s going to go. I just started investing during the pandemic and so everything that’s happening in the investment financial sector is really interesting to me. Talk of “naked shorts” and all the retail investors vs the establishment mutual funds has been really crazy. I wouldn’t say that I understand all of it. I’m hoping this will drive policy changes in the markets to make things better for everyone.

Game Development Insight - Competitive Elo Part 2

Two weeks ago I left off before talking about typical Elo where players start with a score and then take points away from others when they win. This week I’m going to talk about systems that tried a different approach in order to encourage more game playing and not less. Often players under Elo will achieve a point total and then protect their points by not playing.

Wizards of the Coast introduced a new system for Magic the Gathering. It was a system in which players could only earn points and not lose them. Players points would reset to zero each season. At first this seems like a great solution. Play games, earn points and get some benefits like first or second round bypasses in major tournaments etc… The issues that arise are that this benefits players that have the time to play more, pay more, travel more, and devote more time to the game. Not to say that players that devote a lot of time to a game shouldn’t be rewarded, but it creates a system of haves and have nots.

I’ve seen a lot of dark pattern behavior around this system. Dark patterns are what game developers call “a pattern that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer” (citation - darkpattern.games). Specifically I would cite this type of competitive system as grinding. It creates situations in which the best player isn’t always represented, instead we often see players that are simply able to sink more time or money into the game.

One of the most frustrating things that I saw at tournaments was during pre-release tournaments more points were handed to players just for attending. So in order to “game the system” players would sign up for multiple pre-release tournaments in the same city, show up collect their cards and drop before starting round 1. I mentioned this problem to other players and they ensured me that it wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be as the points they would get wouldn’t matter compared to someone that won a major tournament with 100 players. The issue to me is that they purchased their points, and didn’t play to earn them. I understand the importance of having participation points for players that are just starting out, but this seemed like an abuse of the good will inherent to the system.

This system benefits the company of course, because more gaming means players are more compelled to spend more money on cards. The system also creates a situation in which players with more money are at an extreme advantage. It’s possible that this is one of the things that card games and video games could learn from the world of sports. There are some sports in which the cost to play are pretty high like hockey, but many others like soccer, football, baseball, and basketball have relatively low barriers to entry. On that note I would say that chess and games that aren’t expandable fit this category well which makes them more accessible and fair. The trick as a company is how to make money continually on a game like chess. How many chess boards does someone really need? It’s likely the focus should be more on paid tournament play with cash pay outs, but the issue with that is that it falls under gambling laws which is also a big issue.

There’s never going to be a perfect solution, but I think that it’s worth opening up a discussion about it to at least think about some solutions.

Fair Competition

Game Update

Managed to get the spell effects working for healing. We opted to have them spawn on each troop instead of centering one large effect in the center of the squad. Typically healing effects have a caster and a target which would be fine accept that when it’s happening to everyone it’s just simply duplicating the effects for each troop. It’s likely I will still need a spell effect that will be empty to ensure that it still functions and isn’t to overwhelming.

We had enough time to start looking at the issue of flanking, and back attacking squads not changing the attack types. I’m feeling pretty good about this, although it isn’t fixed yet. The grids in the game are five by five and thanks to it being in the computer the numbers associated with each square are 0-4 (a total of 5 numbers for each x and y axis). The trick is we needed to come up with math that would reverse a 0 to a 4, a 1 to a 3, and leave a 2 alone. My mentor came up with logic to test which we take 4 minus the current position and then assign that number. So if a troop is in row 3 the math would be 4-3 changing their position to 1.

The logic is in place but it’s not working yet and so there’s probably one other part of machinery that’s creating the problem. As a code base expands this sort of thing is inevitable. It’s nice when I assume something will take a long time to fix and it takes much less time. I’m reminded of a GDC conference story in which the developer for the original Diablo had to change the game from a turn based game to a real time game. He assumed it would take a couple of weeks and completed it in a weekend.

Personal Update

Moving to day shift has been a bit of a transition but it’s been good overall. There were a couple of times when I had to attend to personal issues which took away time and energy but it’s like I always say, “you have to make your choices.”

My car needed some maintenance this week and that was a little scary as it was riding really rough. What was more concerning was attending to some family issues. Just like the car sometimes you need to take the time to maintain relationships.

Still I managed to push ahead a little further with my board game, although I haven’t done much testing yet. I printed out a bunch of cards and placed them in card protectors for some trial games. I have a first draft of my rules now and I have to wonder how good or bad it will be.

My sister had a birthday party this week for her daughter and my girlfriend made an amazing princess cake for it. I’m so amazed with her artistic ability. I’m glad to be with someone that can really compliment me to support my vision artistically. I want to support her dreams too. She’s someone that deserves to be successful in this world.

Game Development Insight - Competitive Elo Part 1

Sometimes this section is all about things I’ve heard or seen, and other times I leave my personal opinion. This week I thought I might talk a bit about competitive measurement systems. Specifically I want to compare the chess Elo rating system, and Wizards of the Coast Arena Rating System. As a disclaimer it’s been quite a few years since I’ve played competitive all day Magic Tournaments and I’ve never been in the chess tournament scene. This will primarily be some of my thoughts on competitive systems. Before I get started I will say that I don’t think there will be a perfect system for assessing a player, just like there’s no perfect assessment system in business for workers. Having something is better than nothing however.

The chess Elo system starts all new players being given points for an initial rating. That rating increases and decreases based on matches played and the opponents rating. This means playing an opponent with a higher rating can net more points. Players are taking points from each other, and taking a risk each time they choose to play. For some time this was the system that was used for Magic the Gathering however it produced some problems for their business model. Chess is a game in which players make a few purchases. Primarily a chess set. This means that it makes little difference if a player plays the game or not for years, the game simply doesn’t change. It also has no variance like a card game and so it may be a poor comparison to begin with. Still, they did use the same system for a while.

I distinctly remember traveling around and playing at random shops as my military career took me to many different places, often to the disdain of the regular players. After defeating an opponent he was visibly frustrated to lose rating because he would have to make it back up by winning 2-3 games compared to the one game I played him to take it away. It makes players very outcome dependent. This is also addressed in the anime about shogi called “March of Lions.” It creates a lot of drama for sure. It also creates a play pattern in which players play less to maintain their rating, which effectively takes their points out of the pool.

If players are playing less Magic the Gathering that means they’re probably spending less money on new cards, and tournament fees. This doesn’t make a lot of sense for business when you need to sell a new set every 3-4 months to shake up the tournament scene. Again Magic isn’t chess, it’s always pushing new product to keep players interested.

The general public was pretty outraged to hear about how EA is pushing Star Wars Battlefront 2 to match under powered players against higher level players against lower level ones to make them want to spend money on the game. This is the basic idea of all card games however. There’s a price to pay to be competitive, just like anything else. The issue comes in when a company might be eliminating some players due to affluence, but much of the competitive sports and e-sports scene is this way. I don’t personally have an issue with this idea within reason, but I think it’s something that typically gets ignored by most game journalists in both the main stream, and off brand spheres.

The answer for many companies was to move away from chess Elo and to other systems to measure players. I’ll talk more about solutions that have been used next week.

Happy Memorial Day

Game Update

Still working on he mass healing for squads in combat. All the numbers are doing what they are supposed to do but our particle effect isn’t spawning as we expected. The options were to make a large effect that would display on the entire squad or to make an effect that would spawn on each troop.

Now that I’m thinking about it, this might be an issue as we may need more functionality to make it possible for one troop to spawn multiple particle effects on multiple targets. It might be easier to set the center to the squad and just use one large effect. Sometimes walking away from the problem and then revisiting it later helps to clear your head a bit.

The big focus after finishing this particle effect problem will be ensuring that troops that are flanked or attacked from behind are using the proper skills. Right now it would seem that only their graphics are swapping over which is a major issue as that’s a primary game feature.

Personal Update

Happy Memorial day to all our uniformed personnel in the military and civilian sector. It not easy wearing the uniform as there are times when we become the least popular person in the room. I’m happy for the time that I spent in the service and for the ability to keep serving now.

Still looking toward a small vacation in Austin after taking my children to be with my ex-wife’s family for most of the summer time. I’m also hoping to have a small vacation with the boys when they come back to me later this summer. I really need to focus and take advantage of the time.

I really want to get the game to early access, and so I hope that I can line all of that up and get a solid release date soon. The major hurdles right now are getting the new business licence, putting the key art together, and fixing this new bug related to rotated squads in combat. Luckily my girlfriend has really jumped in to the key art role and we’ve been slowly building it up. She out works me and that makes me want to work even harder. She’s very inspirational to me.

Game Development Insight

I deviated a little this week and when I revisited an old idea to make a board game with the idea of building a specific type of business. I’m being vague on purpose. It might use dice rolling, and deck building. The main thing is I had to be inspired to create fun mechanics that also play quickly. I was recently at a hobby shop for a board game with a buddy and we were looking for more players. One person said that, “an hour was to long for a board game.” Kind of a cop out, but I get it. It would seem that attention spans are continually getting worse.

On the flip side we have mega board games and to the same extent video games that dominate all of a players time. Some of these board games take 4-6 hours to play one session. I suppose it depends on what type of player you’re building the experience for. The game I’ve played the most lately has been “Marvel United” due to its 30 minute play time. I’ve also been playing a lot of Root, mostly on my phone.

When I design my board game, time is very much a factor I have on my mind. It comes down to being focused and understanding the core game loop. I’ve decided for this game the core game loop is generating money (probably through dice rolls) and purchasing items to build up the business. The other mechanics like hiring staff, responsive game play from competitors, buying more equipment, paying rent, and getting a larger space are all secondary to that. As far as responsive game play I want to put things into the game which encourage players to build their economy together instead of throwing negative events at each other. It’s possible that’s less interesting than purely adversarial responsive game play. I would need to test it to see how it goes.

End of an Era and New Possibilities

Game Update

Mostly fixed the issue with the mass healing. It was interesting going through the code and realizing that we do healing in a much different way than other games. We give the troops temporary hit points during the combat which take damage first and then restore 20% of whatever is left over at the end of combat if they haven’t been expended. We still need to add the ability to use the particle effects with it though.

I did a little testing to see what all the new particle effects look like working together, and I found a new issue. It turns out that when troops are flanked or back attacked they are rotated on screen but they are likely still reporting their old positions in code. That means that a mage that should be doing a staff attack due to being in the front row due to a back attack is still firing off a fireball. That’s a major mechanics problem although it’s not game breaking I cannot release the game in this state.

Personal Update

For the last couple months I’ve been talking about moving my business licence from Texas to Florida which really means closing out my old business licence there and starting a new LLC here. As of this last week I finally completed step one of closing out my old LLC. This is kind of a big deal but it also means I need to figure out if I want to change the name of my LLC. I have a lot to consider but it’s likely I will be changing to Lancer Entertainment. By moving to this business name I can also use it when I DJ or do any other type of entertaining. I also have considered shortening it all the way down to just “Lancer”.

The next couple of weeks will go quick as I get ready for my boys to go away for the summer. I want to do my best to get the game out the door this summer. It needs to be all I think about. There have been times in my life when I really focused on something. Painting up an entirely new group of miniatures for a Warhammer Tournament, or writing out deck ideas for Magic the Gathering, or thinking about and dwelling on any number of other things. That’s what’s called meditation, not just reading something or doing it sometimes but dwelling in it and on it. I need to be that way or I won’t get this thing out the door.

I can’t wait to spend some time with my girlfriend as well. She’s shown a lot of interest in helping me out with the art for the game. I hope she can get as excited about the game as I am. I also had my musician tell me that he had some time to get a new track done for the boss stage. That said early access won’t have all of the stages. It’s hard to say what all I will be working on once it’s released as it could be a ton of bugs or it could be additional content.

Game Development Insight

Paying it forward to yourself is important. We do this by taking notes everywhere. I spoke earlier about dwelling and meditating on what you’re working on. I’d say that most people in the AAA industry would call that being passionate. It’s interesting because when you are truly passionate about something it can be hard to explain to other people.

In 2019 I found myself severely lacking in social skills that I had neglected for most of my life. After working on it I realized something. It’s really easy to go from zero to pretty good at a skill. Often you don’t have to do that much to get to a place that’s passable or pretty good. As you progress though it takes more and more to reach those higher platitudes. People in self development often say that your friends, and even your family might ask you things like, “Why are you working so hard?” etc... It’s possible they don’t understand or maybe they don’t want to be left behind.

At some point you have to realize that you aren’t the person that you used to be, but you are always the person you choose to be. It’s like I told my son, and my students so many times over. In life you make your choices. You can’t do everything. Count the cost, make your choices, don’t look back. This week felt a little more unfocused and existential than others. I suppose I’m asking myself what I have to show for my work, or some of the choices that I’ve made. Time marches on though, I keep pushing forward. It’s nice to have the luxury to ask questions like this, as I know so many other people are concerned with just getting by. Just remember to pay it forward to yourself.

Scheduling

Game Update

We continue to move forward working on adding more functionality to the combat script as it looks like we only have the ability to do single target healing right now. It looks like we should be able to add AOE healing to the game. We’re at a stage where anything we add to the game can’t be anything that won’t give us a lot of bang for the buck. Cutting down on feature creep is a big deal here.

I spent some time trying to close out my old business licence in Texas this week. I had some issues getting it done and so I might need to make a phone call this week. I also am looking into setting up a business licence here in Florida so I’m thinking about what the new name for my company will be. It might be a good idea to try out some different designs for the logo.

Personal Update

The biggest thing that I completed this week was a new planed schedule for how to spend my time during the week. I needed to build two different schedules as my day job can fluctuate from days to nights and vice versa. I also built in some time to work out which I think will be a a major boon to my productivity. As I run out of other one off chores that need to get done around the house I gain more time that can be poured into game development.

I’m thinking about setting a bunch of alarms during the day to remind me about major scheduled parts of the day. It gets a lot easier to focus when I don’t have to continually look at the clock. I might come up with some work rituals as well to do. It took a while but doing this blog entry every week has become a ritual that keeps me focused. For the first few years of working on my game development skill set I hardly touched it unless I was going to a convention or putting out a major update.

Still looking forward to getting some time away from my kids to focus this summer. Who knows maybe things will be productive enough that I can finally get the game to early access. That’s kind of a big deal as I focused so hard to make it happen last year. I’m glad that it fell through last year. I was in no mental place to be able to handle release. I have the support that I need to make it happen this year. Something I was sorely lacking last year.

Game Development Insight

Momentum and drive to keep working on the game are a big deal. I spent a lot of time running a Twitch and YouTube channel while having many other pans in the fire. Often I would meet new content creators that would say, “I’m going to make one or two videos a day.” It’s not like that isn’t possible, but I would always tell them to make a lower commitment and if they want to do more then they can make that decision if they felt up to it. At the time I set the bar at one 1-hour live stream to talk about news and build a deck for the game Hex the Shards of Fate. I felt it was important to have a commitment, but also to make sure that it was something that was attainable.

I while back I watched a game development conference talk that mentioned setting specific time to work and creating hard stops even when you have momentum. In this way you will want to get back to what you were doing and intensify your interest. I suppose is similar to the concept of buyer and seller/supply and demand. If you give yourself limited time to work then you should make better use of it by being focused during that time. We want what we can’t have, and so denying yourself something can intensify your desire to do it. That said you still have to keep the fire going by allowing it from time to time. It’s a balance. I was hoping to utilize this concept with my schedule in a focused way.

Happy Mothers Day!

Game Update

I’m continuing to work through all the spell effects for each troop in the game and the momentum is building. We ran into a possible new problem when I found a healing AOE effect. I’m not sure if it’s functioning as intended and it’s likely that I may need to add more combat script functionality to make it work. It’s likely that if I have to do that it won’t be in this version of the game and it will have to wait for final release.

I’m excited to see what it’s going to be like to have all the new particle effects running at the same time. It might be a bit of a mess so we will see how it goes. It’s definitely different than your typical tactical RPG which waits for each attack in order to make it a spectacle. We built a spell effect for a punch attack which we purposefully made look less powerful. It might be pretty important to make some attacks more mundane. That’s the typical thing that’s done. We use comparisons to signal when something is stronger or weaker to give the player a sense of becoming more powerful.

Personal Update

Happy Mothers day to all the moms out there! 2020 was tough for everyone, and without the help of my Mom and Dad I would have had a hard time stabilizing to the place that I am now. I’ve always said that my Mom might be the only one that reads my blog entries. A bit of a joke, but it’s nice to know that Mom is always there.

The school year is coming to a close and that means that my kids will be going away for the summer. I really need to pick it up and get this thing on early access Steam. I still have a couple of items that are ahead of it but I won’t have much of an excuse not to finish this year. I’m pretty proud that I’ve come as far as I have mostly under my own power. Sometimes I look at products on the market and I’m amazed at some of the things that are honestly bad products, but somehow they still exist. I need to stop worrying so much about having an absolutely perfect product.

I’m really happy about my girlfriend right now. She recently drew an icon for the game, and I think she’s going to make that key art that I’ve been looking for since 2020 when I tried to initially launch. For the first time I don’t have to worry about the person I’m with. I can just focus on what I’m doing and they support me. She has her dreams too, and I hope I’m adding to her endeavors as well. She’s an amazing artist.

Game Development Insight

Feature creep is a real issue with game development no matter if you’re an indie or a triple A developer. Feature creep is when a developer keeps adding more features to a game, or plans far to many. I’ve seen this with released games that have to many mechanics. Sometimes less is more, meaning that having core mechanics that define your game are the most important thing. It’s all about what makes your game fun. That’s the question you need to ask yourself.

For me in Six Aspects I wanted the player to enjoy fast battles, leveling up, getting stronger, and building tactical squads of troops. Tooling up squads and spending time to let the player feel creative are important. I want to do all sorts of things with the combat like adding a pre-combat phase and character movement on the grid during combat. Those features don’t add enough to the basic game play to make it worth adding right now however. So they go on a features list for future iterations of the game, so I don’t lose those ideas.

Some of those ideas may never happen, but that’s alright as producing an actual playable game has to come first. It’s important to have pillars of development in place to focus. It’s likely that a lot of triple A games have had a major issue with feature creep at times. Of course some of that may also be due to corporate decisions being made without taking into account the state of the game. Expectations of players are a lot higher for triple A games as well.