Category Archives: indie life

The importance of randomness

In the screenshot above, the new random items in all their splendor!

I’ve been recently playing Diablo3 on the PS3. I can hear a voice in my head saying:

“What? You’re playing!? Go back immediately to work on the games!”

But NO! Doing research is important for every business, so I decided to force myself to play it (also an excuse to use the PS3 for something since the recent PS+ games have been a bit disappointing for my tastes).

I played more and… I had the idea to implement random items on my next RPG, Seasons Of The Wolf 🙂

One of the strong points of Diablo has always been the use of the random element. I am not sure if other games before it used it so well. I fairly remember the first game, and how every match was different.

Obviously, since I make story-based games, I cannot rely too much on the randomness, since the plot follow a linear path, some locations must be fixed, the characters too, etc. I cannot also generate random maps or dungeon (at least for now!) so the only random element I could add was in the items/loot.

A test for the looting screen. Of course in the real game you rarely will get so much stuff!

And I must say that it works VERY WELL. Now whenever I kill an enemy during testing I wonder what item I’ll get – is pretty exciting! Of course the drop rate is not high, rather than flooding the inventory with garbage that you’d have to resell it immediately I decided to limit the amount, but increase the average quality.

In general the rare items are, rare, but also depends on the enemy. Boss enemies now will drop obviously higher level loot 😉

I decided to go with the following tiers: Rusty, Standard, Fine, Quality, Excellent, Masterwork, Rare and Legendary. Legendary is the only item that is not randomly generated, since I still want to have control over the most powerful items, so I’ll define those manually. They’ll also be unique and have a unique name.

To help the player recognize better the top items, the Fine/Masterwork/Rare/Legendary have a different color and a small letter with the initial of the word near the item icon in the inventory.

Overall, it took me a week of hard work (last weekend I worked 10h/day straight!!) but now that is working I must say that was time well spent! 🙂

I’ve seen the (green)light

In other, but no less important, news, three more of my games were greenlit yesterday! They are Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, Always Remember Me and of course Planet Stronghold (was about time!).

I plan to release Always Remember Me next weekend, if all goes well. And the others coming shortly after in next weeks. Stay tuned 🙂

How open source changed my life as indie dev

8 Replies

My game Planet Stronghold is present in the Humble Weekly bundle, celebrating Open Source! I thought was cool to share how I moved from closed source engine to open source.

It was Summer 2008. I had just finished coding a new space wargame in C++, using commercial libraries. They were good, but the real problem was that developing a game with them was taking so long! I’m not a good coder, and not having a big community or easy access to code examples, support, was a big deal for me.

At same time, I had an idea for a college dating sim, but I wasn’t an expert at all with it. So I contacted my friends at Hanako Games who made the game Summer Session using Ren’Py for me.

I never heard of it, but seeing the final result, I got curious and started to look into it more carefully. At those times, Ren’Py really wasn’t as good as is today, and doing anything except visual novels or simple dating sim was a real effort.

I must say that I immediately was impressed by the community at Lemmasoft (Ren’Py official forums) and Ren’Py author himself, always trying to do his best to do support for the engine. The fact that the engine was open source was a big plus, there were a lot of examples/code snippets available, and so I decided to learn it.

I was shocked to see how easy was to use, and how cross-platform it was, thanks also to the decision to use the powerful Python as language.

Six years later, I now use Ren’Py to do all my games, and adopting it was probably the best decision of my indie career ever. Without it, games like Loren would have taken at least twice the time, and ports of my games to Android or iOS wouldn’t have been so easy. And in times when having Linux support is going to be crucial in the next few years (SteamOS anyone?) is good to know that Ren’Py is already supporting it without the need of any big change! 🙂

Of course, there are other cool open source engines: I just wanted to share my experience with one of them. If you’re a game developer, check all the ones supported by the bundle!

So that’s my story. Thank you, Ren’Py, it was a blast so far! The minimum I could do was to offer one of my games to support your cause 🙂

Get ready! … or not

4 Replies

Max is showing an iron-logic here!

This weekend I had planned to start the Roommates beta testing… but as always, that bastard of Murphy had to remind me of his laws! I had a light flu since 5 days, but was slowly getting better up to last Tuesday when I was feeling almost normal. Then, Wednesday was a total fail 🙁

Suddenly it got worse and now I’m coughing and I turned into a sort of giant gelatinous cube. A gelatinous cube can’t work, right?

However, I could have fun with the Ooze girl! One of the many avatars of Undead Lily (work in progress)

Anyway, I’ve decided that as soon as I get the missing activity images, I’ll do a last minute check and then start the beta. Roommates is such a big game that I need to do a good / long public beta testing anyway, so don’t want to wait anymore.

While I can’t announce it now, stay tuned because I might start it in the next days! 😉

Meanwhile work on other games goes well. Soon will be able to announce a certain otome game about an archeologist, with some introductory posts by a guest blogger 🙂 and also, I got more help for coding SOTW, this way the game will be done faster!

One last news, I added the bonus content (wallpapers+OST) on Steam as well, so if you want you can get it here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/275240

Game development is a puzzle game

5 Replies

Rebecca will help you train to keep in shape…! (from Planet Stronghold 2)

Game development feels like a puzzle game to me. How? Simple, let’s consider one of my games. How many roles/elements are needed to make one?

Let’s try to make a list:

gameplay/rules = work of the game designer
programming/coding = work of the coder
artwork = work of the artist (in many cases, 2 or more for backgrounds and GUI)
story/text = work of the writer
music/sfx = work of the musician
marketing/promotion = work of the PR guy
hosting/demo/support = support / web dev guy

So as you can see, for each of my games there should be the need of 8 people. In reality, I almost always do point 1,2,6,7 myself, and sometimes I also do some GUI and write storyboards for the texts!

In the past I used to to really EVERYTHING on my own (using Poser 3d and royalty free music tracks) but luckily I realized that was much better to hire other people to help 🙂

The main problem when working with external people, is that since to finish a game you need all those roles/elements, often happens that I have some areas covered/completed, while others not. Some people work fast in an aspect of a game, others slow downs in different aspects.

In the end that’s why I say it’s like a puzzle game. You need all the pieces to finish and release the product. Unfortunately very often that takes a lot of effort 😀 but like all things in life, nothing comes easy, you have to sweat and work hard.

Another thing I often have to decide is the scope of the game. For example now I am playing with the great freeware tilemap editor Tiled, trying to make isometric tilemaps. For which game? well for Planet Stronghold 2, but also thinking if to make them for Seasons Of The Wolf.

The idea was to have a big map like Loren, that once clicked would let you zoom-in and explore the areas in more details, rendered as isometric map. I think the idea is great and I’m sure that I can make it, the only problem is: how long will take me? will I need extra tiles, so contact artist to make more?

When making those decisions I need to consider that there are two types of fans: those who wants the games fast and pressure you to finish them, and others that say “take as much time as you need”. But besides what fans say, I need to keep releasing games at regular intervals to survive in the competitive world of indie games, so right now, I am unsure if to use this system.

I set myself a deadline – if I can have the isometric map thing working in 2 weeks I’ll use it, otherwise not. Also because in theory very shortly Roommates public beta should start, and then will have even less time to make tests… 🙂

A stressful week, but it’s over :D

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva