No Time To Play

Vector graphics are convenient in games, especially for a programmer with little artistic skill such as myself. But there is only so much you can do with them. Sooner or later, you’re going to need raster images, and those have an interesting characteristic: being external to the code, they have to be loaded explicitly; we call them assets.

Now, in the general case, that’s not an issue; you simply load the assets before starting the game. But web browsers load images asynchronously. And so it happens that the tech demo for Ballistic: Snowballz was only displaying a blank background on first page load.

The solution was obvious: write a preloader.

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At first sight, there is little to say about Canabalt: a little Flash game with greyscale pixel art for graphics, an odd aspect ratio and just one key for interaction! (It does have a catchy soundtrack, though.) But play a few times, and you’ll begin to notice all kinds of nice details that make it incredibly attractive.

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I’ve just discovered Raph Koster’s essay on game design (via Lost Garden), and while it’s a classic, I can’t help but think that most would-be game designers stumble long before getting to those advanced considerations. Why? Because of a few myths that endure and keep luring people into mental traps. So I decided to tackle some of them in the hope of bringing them down.

Myth #1: My ideas! My preciousss ideas!

This is the big bad wolf of myths, not just about game design but all creativity: that ideas are somehow rare, unique and valuable. Well, sorry to disappoint you: I have more ideas for games than I can shake a stick at. Most of them are probably bad; the rest are likely to end up unrecognizable when (if…) they’re going to be made into something playable. As for uniqueness, where do you think your ideas come from? The same place as mine: everything we see, hear, play, read and generally experience. Guess what, we live in the same world; our experiences are likely to overlap a lot. Speaking of which.

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As living legend Chris Crawford points out in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, any game must revolve around a central concept. So when I started thinking of a new one, the first step was to figure out what the game was going to be about. I had already decided to make a first-person shooting game, simply because they’re so immersive, and it’s an uncommon perspective in 2D, so it wasn’t going to seem too unoriginal. For the same reason, it was also an easy decision to have projectiles with ballistic trajectories. And since martial games where you go around shooting stuff with guns are oh so common, why not simulate a snowball fight for a change?

But in order to do that, we first need to make those snowballs fly.

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I normally consider myself a fan of strategy games, as most of my all-time favorites belong to this genre. But my latest game happens to be a shooter, and the next will be one as well. Trouble is, I’m not really familiar with the genre. I’ve played R-Type, Chronos and Star Force back in the day, and that’s about it, unless Galaxian counts. So, what’s a developer supposed to do? Why, don the player hat and blast some aliens for a change!

To achieve this noble goal, I turned to the vast selection of games in the Fedora Linux repositories. After filtering out any title with 3D graphics, as well as a racing game filed under shooters for some reason (I think it’s the kind where cars have cannons), I stopped at three titles that seemed the most promising. Here’s how it went.

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