Does Not Compute

Game Design podcast of epic epicyness

dkoontz — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:03:32 +0000

I had the idea to wrastle up some local game designers and lock them all in a room until they unraveled the deepest darkest mysteries of game design for all to understand. Or perhaps they were just in my living room. Either way, what resulted was a massive first episode, full of disagreement and often contentious discourse that cuts to the very nature of what we think of as games. Intrigued? Luckily for you we recorded the whole 3.5 hour extravaganza and it’s now available for you to consume at your leisure. Direct all hate mail to me.

Star. Ship. Story.

dkoontz — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:56:52 +0000

The aforementioned project that I found that I think other people might actually be interested in finally got a name and a writeup. It’s named Star. Ship. Story. and the basic gist is skill based co-op with a procedurally generated world and short form gameplay so you’re always in a unique setting and the game only expects 30 or so minutes of your time. There’s lots of details at that link so I encourage you to head over there if you want more info.

Habits

dkoontz — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:24:49 +0000

Blogging is a habit. Posting on Facebook and Twitter are as well, but blogging is much more difficult I find. It’s far to easy to tell yourself that what you have to say is not interesting or that it would be better served by a small tweet. So I became lazy, gave into that voice and stopped updating things here which basically meant that I wasn’t writing anything more significant than what could fit in 140 characters (I’m not really big on the Facebook).

So, to reacap the last (almost) 2 years.

Started tons of game projects. Cancelled most of them. Got divorced. Worked full time at ASU doing educational game development.

Students of mine were in the 2011 IGF Student Showcase for their game Dust for which I was super duper proud. Left ASU and am now contracting and doing my own projects a bit more full-bore. Spent lots of time with Xander. Met a wonderful woman. Finally found a great project that I think other people might actually be interested in playing. Released some assets on the Unity Asset store and made approximately zero monies when not part of a madness sale. Helped several local indies with their games which went on to make lots of monies.

Now I’m looking forward to my game being complete, or at least complete enough to Kickstart/Indie Fund. I’ll be writing more about that on the Happy Camper Studios blog. I’m also getting back into doing contract work, all Unity3D this time, which I of course hate rounding up as it’s lots of work for speculative returns. Currently though I’m working with the most awesome Archaeology Southwest on a 3d kiosk to be placed in Chaco Canyon. I’ve never worked on something that is a physical product, so that’s pretty dang exciting. That will be ending soon though, so then it’s back to the contractor (data) mines to find some new clients.

Pneumatic

dkoontz — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:13:20 +0000

Download (Windows | OSX)
Web Version

Another Phoenix IGDA game jam has brought forth yet another game. This time around the theme was much more open ended with 5 options to choose from (you had to pick at least 2). An artist, Blake Bjerke, was “assigned” to me by the jam’s organizer Tyler Coleman and for which I was very grateful to have. Blake turned out to be quite a competent artist and he was able to produce assets at a rate that often exceeded my ability to get them into the game (and looked quite good to boot!).

The themes we chose were torque and wholesale. The original design involved launching a taxi full of customers through a city in order to deliver them with as little force needed as possible. The eventual design strayed from this a bit, as the city setting was not very interesting and the concept of customers in a taxi was too hard to get across in such a short time frame. So we settled on a capsule full of colors delivering to stations that matched the same color. With a bit of extra time those colors could easily become passengers, or widgets, or energy, or whatever fluff was needed for the final presentation.

I ended up wasting about 6 hours trying to get the capsule pathing around corners to look good and work consistently. In the end I opted for my original solution, which had some problems that could be covered up by level design and a hacky little “fix up” script that looked for errors in the capsule placement and corrected them. In the end, I thought of a solution that would actually work in all situations and be free from the issues that plagued each of my 3 prior attempts, but there was at that point no time to implement it. So if you see the capsule stray from inside the tube and then snap back, that’s my hacky solution at work.

On the design front, the variety of puzzles we were able to create felt a bit limited. We had several hours at the end to just make levels, which was a fantastic change of pace for my normal game jam timeline. The problem was, we needed another special type for one of the tubes to add some more tools to our palette. It’s easy to come up with a handful of ideas, we just were constrained by time. I believe the first and last levels of the main game are the best we created, but even those feel quite basic and easy to solve. With a few more components I believe we could have some devilishly difficult challenges, as befits any proper puzzle game.

Overall I’m quite pleased with how this one turned out. It’s certainly the most polished game I’ve created in a game jam and it feels nice to have something playable and mostly complete. My goal this jam was to build the tech part as fast as possible so I’d have a long time to polish and refine. My capsule pathing issues sort of held that goal back, so that’s something to consider for next time. I should have just taken my hacky solution and stuck with it from the beginning. That would possibly have bought me the time to implement a new pipe type that would have provided a lot more interesting puzzle design.

Arrrr! It’s been a long time

dkoontz — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:17:55 +0000

Well I’ve been rather silent on this blog for quite some time so I wanted to post a bit of what I’ve been working on.

This game includes:

Sailing around and shooting stuff
Procedurally generated worlds
Voxels!
And of course, buried treasure

Target platform is online gaming portals such as Kongregate. ETA is still unknown but now that the game is moving along again at a good pace I expect it to be within a month or so. I know, famous last words…

The human side of esports

dkoontz — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:46:52 +0000

If you’ve ever heard of this “esport” thing but never really got what it was or why people would be as passionate about some game as they are about, say, soccer, I have some videos for you. First off is the well known and very excellent Day[9] Daily Episode #100 in which Sean “Day[9]” Plott recalls how the game of Starcraft has influenced and shaped his life. What I only recently came across was two videos relating to the 2005 WCG USA finals that coincides nicely with Sean’s story. It’s fascinating to see big esports personalities such as Artosis and Tasteless right before they “made it” and started their professional careers. Hope you enjoy.

Day[9] Daily Episode #100

WCG 2005 Footage

WCG 2005 Footage cut with episode #100

iTween Visual Editor’s new home

dkoontz — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:09:54 +0000

In case anyone didn’t notice, I’m not doing updates as blog posts here anymore, but on a page dedicated to the visual editor. Also, I’ve stopped maintaining my own unity package and have just been releasing new versions to the asset store.

iTween Visual Editor 0.5

dkoontz — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 05:26:05 +0000

Added integration with Bob’s iTween Path Editor. If you have iTween Path components on your game object you can just select one of them from a nice drop-down list to use as the path for your tween.

Since this integration means the editor requires a copy of the path editor and the visual editor has always required a copy of iTween I’ve decided to start just bundling all of it together. So with version 0.5 when you install the package you’ve got everything you need to get started. It’s laid out in a structure that will work for C# or Javascript based projects.

Download here

When UFO’s attack

dkoontz — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:22:24 +0000

This is a highly delayed post, mainly because I was waiting on Unity 3 to not be in beta anymore, and then once the full release happened my project crashed when opening. Well that’s all resolved now and I can finally publish UFO No!. This game was produced on the weekend of August 13, 2010 at a game jam hosted by UAT. The theme was “continuous motion” which I thought was a great theme for a game jam, much better than most.

I worked with a partner this time, an student artist from UAT named Arielle. She did some fantastic work and far exceeded my ability to implement features to use the artwork she created. One of our biggest issues was that since Unity was still in beta I couldn’t get a copy for Arielle to use for level design and layout. So a larger portion of my time went into level layout than I would have liked. Which leads me to all easily identifiable mistakes I made:

Mistake #1 – Choosing the wrong tool. Not Unity in general, but the Unity 3 beta. I should have just started the project in Unity 2.6 so we each could have a copy to work from.

Mistake #2 – Building the wrong game. When we developed the general idea for the game it quickly evolved into humans being hunted by a big alien ship. Initially we drew out a 2d design but my eyes being bigger than my (programmer) stomach I bit off a nice big chunk of 3d. Visions of using the detonator framework to make awesome cinematic cutscenes ran roughshod over what would have been a far superior game in 2d. In the end the 3d gameplay made the level design and basic character control much more complex than it needed to be leaving not enough time for creating more level and refining the game.

Mistake #3 – Spending too much time on things that don’t matter. I got distracted by the shiny pebble of awesome cinematic cutscenes when I should have been building more levels or implementing a proper menu system. Those things are not sexy though and so the cutscene won out. This was not a situation where theatrics wins out over weak gameplay.

So that about wraps it up. Not the most successful game jam game I’ve ever done, but not a terrible distaster either. Thanks again to Arielle for putting up with me for 48 hours and building basically any asset I asked for on super short notice.

Play the web version or download it for Windows or Mac

Hair is still relevant

dkoontz — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:44:14 +0000

Last night I saw the musical Hair for the first time. This was of course a revival as the original premiered in 1967. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, the soundtrack doesn’t feature any timeless songs that stick with you they way a Wicked, Phantom, or LesMis does. What Hair does have to offer, however, is a fantastic look at the counterculture movement of the late 1960′s and a message that is shockingly relevant 43 years later. I actually think right now is the perfect time for a revival as Hair’s message seems much more pertinent to the last 10 years than the 80′s or 90′s. The tone is cheerfully dark, much like a lot of the folk music of the time (Simon & Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas), which suits my tastes perfectly (for a modern version of this see The Weepies).

So, if you’ve never seen Hair, if you’re interested in what the hippie movement was all about or you just want to be moved by a dark and emotional musical, go run out and see Hair. If you’re in Phoenix the show runs through Sunday.