I’m no artist, but I tried!

by Tami on January 24, 2012

If there is one thing I wish I could do, it would be making art.  I have always admired the work of artists.  I have dabbled a bit here and there with Photoshop or Illustrator, but I definitely am lacking in artistic vision.  I can copy things alright and follow tutorials, but when it comes time to be creative and come up with something new, I fall flat.

I found a website called 2D Game Art for Programmers and despite not being a programmer I thought the tutorials seemed easy enough to follow.  I downloaded Inkscape for Mac and started playing around and made this little character guy and a grass tile.

I find vector art to be fun since it’s just manipulating shapes, but unless I’m following a tutorial I can not visualize the final piece.  The first game I’m making in GameSalad doesn’t require grass tiles or a funny little character, but I am familiar enough to get by with Inkscape now and I feel like I could try bigger things.  Anyone know of any other easy-to-follow art tutorials?

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Hero Academy owns my soul

by Tami on January 24, 2012

What do you get when you cross Final Fantasy Tactics with League of Legends with Words With Friends?  You get Hero Academy, an awesome turn-based strategy game by Robot Entertainment (developers of the popular indie title Orcs Must Die).  One of my coworkers introduced me to this game and I haven’t been able to stop playing.  The majority of my office are playing at work, which is likely hurting our productivity.  I’d say that is a problem considering I’m a producer, but our bosses have arranged for a tournament of the game to be held this week.  It’s that good.

The way it works is by doing asynchronous games with your friends.  You can challenge other players to a game, which gives you a grid and and 5 moves per turn that you can take.  Moves can include placing a unit, buffing a unit, moving on the grid, attacking another player, or attacking your opponent’s crystal.  There are additional strategies as well such as healing your opponents, resurrecting your fallen troops and turning them into annoying little ghouls, and casting spells.  The game continues until all of a player’s crystals have been destroyed, or a player runs out of units.  There are currently two available teams right now, with more coming in the future. Hero Academy is free to download, but does offer some IAPs such as avatar packs, removing ads for a one-time fee, and buying additional ‘taunts’ to torment your friends with.

What is so compelling about the game is how you can play it throughout the day similar to Words With Friends.  I can have many games going on at a time and I can hop in and take my turns during downtime at work or while I’m laying in bed at night or waiting in line for a movie.  Taking a turn is quick.  The animations in the game are very well done, and Hero Academy has a tremendous amount of polish.  I continue to die to almost every opponent I face, which means there is definitely some strategy to winning that I’m not getting.  The game feels tactical and fun, and it has consumed the soul of almost everyone I know who has tried it.

This kind of gameplay leads me to wonder what we’ll see next.  Puzzle style games are a natural fit for this, but there are so many 2 person board games that could be adapted to this format.  However, I can’t help but wonder how fun this would be with more than 2 people.  I had an intense night of playing the board game 7 wonders over the weekend and I think it could actually be super fun adapted to a mobile game.  Although it wouldn’t be mass market, I could see it being interesting.  There are countless board games that could hold up nicely on iOS if the limitation was increased beyond a total of two players.  Just some food for thought. :)

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Speaking of cloning mobile games…

Zynga released their new mobile game Dream Heights into the Canadian App Store today.  I’m not going to dignify it by linking to it.  The game is a clone of the game Tiny Tower, the iPhone game of the year (which is one of the most addictive games ever, by the way).

One of Nimblebit’s 3 employees posted an awesome infographic on his Twitter today, sending some well-deserved snark over to Zynga for their blatant copy with zero innovation.  He also mentioned that if you look into the app binary, the game is named TowerVille and the little inhabitants are named Zitizens (a play on Tiny Tower’s bitizens).

This isn’t anything new for Zynga, they’ve been making enemies in the game industry left and right since they’ve started.  In this particular case, they’re cloning a wildly successful game, however they are still stealing innovation from an indie developer.  Nimblebit are a tiny 3 person studio with lots of philanthropic efforts who have taken no funding from an outside source.

I’m sure Zynga have no plans to take down Dream Heights, but at least they know how Nimblebit feel about all this.

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GameSalad fun: making a pony move!

by Tami on January 23, 2012

So, I’m playing around with GameSalad tonight and my first attempt was just to be able to have an Actor on the screen that moves when I press a button and stops when I let go of that button.  It was surprisingly simple once I figured out that if you change behaviors and attributes on an actor, you have to delete it and place another new one.  Derp.

Let’s talk through exactly how I did this.  First of all, I had to change a couple settings on the scene itself.  This included changing the background behind the pony to white instead of black.  I also changed the “Wrap X” setting to true so that my pony would wrap back onto the left side when I went off the screen on the right.  That was a simple click of a button.  Next, I needed to create my actual pony that would move.

To create the pony, I created a new actor, then did a Google image search for a clip art of Rainbow Dash.  (if SOPA were to pass, I could get in lots of trouble for this by the way).  I dragged the image onto my actor and it was automatically set.  I then dragged my actor onto the background in the starting position.  Onto the behaviors!

First, I created a rule for my controls.  I made it so that the Actor was looking for a spacebar key press of “down”.  Once I created that, I need to tell GameSalad what I want the pony to actually DO when I press spacebar.  I put on an “Accelerate” behavior and changed the direction so it would move off to the right.  I didn’t change the Acceleration speed, I left it at the default of 100.  I then wanted to test out the debugging functionality of GameSalad so I put on a custom attribute on the pony of “isMoving” and made it a boolean so that it would be true or false.  I used the “Log Debugging Statement” on that rule as well, and told it to print out “self.isMoving” when I pressed down the spacebar.

So then I tested it.  I pressed down the spacebar and my pony ZOOMED off the right of the screen.  I stopped pressing the spacebar but the pony didn’t care — it kept zooming.  I figured I should put in a way to stop said Rainbow Dash pony.  Important, I know.  I created another rule for when the spacebar is UP instead of down.  In this rule, I added the behavior “Move” and changed the speed to 0, hoping that it would tell the actor to stop.  I deleted my actor and replaced it, and voila – it worked!  After I was done laughing my ass off at my creation, I decided I had to blog about it.  Here are the rules I made for reference:

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Getting started with GameSalad

by Tami on January 22, 2012

Ever since I first heard about GameSalad, I’ve been itching to try it out.  It’s a downloadable game creation tool for Mac that allows anyone to make HTML5, Android, and iOS games without needing to know any code.  It sounds right up my alley, because I don’t have the technical chops to make something with Unity or Love2D, but I have all sorts of ideas for little games I’d like to make.  It allows you to test out your games by beaming them to your iDevice, which is incredibly neat.

I signed up today and downloaded the software to my MacBook Pro, and was immediately overwhelmed.  Though when you’re creating a new project you can choose to start from a number of base templates (like platformer, adventure, shoot-em-up, etc.) I was still completely lost when I opened up the program.  I can tell immediately that I’m going to be fascinated by it.  It isn’t so dead simple that it allows for zero customization, yet it isn’t so techie that it requires use of scripting.  It has actors and scenes and attributes and properties, and everything you need to customize your game. So many options that I realized I should dive into the tutorials rather than try figuring out things on my own and getting frustrated.

The tutorials are a mix of text and video, and give you ‘points’ for completing them and answering a short quiz afterward.  The first tutorial walks you through the basic interface of the GameSalad Creator.  The second tutorial teaches about scenes, which are used to construct your game.  For example, your main menu can be a scene, then your first level can be a scene, your game over screen can be a scene, and so on.  Scenes have editable properties such as the screen resolution, what happens when an object leaves the screen (does it wrap) and whether your screen should auto-rotate when a player rotates their device.  Next is a tutorial about Actors, which are all of the items within the game. This can be powerups, your avatar, NPCs, environmental objects, etc.  Actors have all sorts of attributes that you can control, such as their rotation, their size, color, and their starting position.  They also have attributes that you cannot control, such as the length of time they have been in the scene.  I could see this being helpful for a game that requires you to tap something within a certain amount of time.  Interestingly, a scene has the same attribute so I could imagine that being used for a level with a time limit.  I could be wrong here though, I’m literally an hour in to my GameSalad experience at this point.

I’m not sure what kind of game I’m going to make first, but I think I’m going to do a very simple trivia game for my first attempt.  This might be ambitious because I don’t see any trivia game templates, but I think the concept is simple enough that I could figure out how to do it.  If not, I may scrap the idea.

I’m going to update on my progress with GameSalad, but for now I’m going to jump into more tutorials and make an honest attempt to create a few indie iPhone/iPad games this year. :)  More to come!

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Social game innovation does not mean cloning and copying

January 19, 2012

Triple Town, a fantastic indie puzzler game from Spry Fox launched on iOS and Android today.  If it’s familiar, I hope it’s because you played it on Facebook where it first launched.  But there is a better chance you played the 6waves/LOLapps title Yeti Town on iPhone, which is the same exact game with a different [...]

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Where did my MMO spark go?

January 12, 2012

I love MMOs.  No wait, I’m fanatical about them.  I just can’t figure out then, why it is that I cannot play one for longer than a few days anymore without feeling tired and bored by the whole thing.  What is it about MMORPGs that has them all feeling like the exact same game over [...]

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Not good at posting every day

January 9, 2012

Well crap.  Barely into 2012 and I already missed a couple days in a row of blogging.  My bad.  Admittedly, I played exactly zero games over the weekend and didn’t spend all that much time browsing the internet either.  I didn’t really have much to talk about.  I still don’t. The first bit of news [...]

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I have a vision for a gaming website…

January 5, 2012

I have this utopian vision in my head for a gaming website, one that is unique and fresh and inclusive of everyone who plays video games. The authors of this website would be gay, straight, women, men, transgender, genderless, people of color, mentally and physically disabled, young, old, all economic statuses, casual and hardcore. Our [...]

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Vox Games is introduced and doesn’t have women writers…yet.

January 4, 2012

I’m pretty interested in games journalism overall — I have almost every single gaming news site saved in Google Reader and I at least skim every single thing posted if I don’t spend the time actually reading the full content.  I tend to gravitate toward reading the longwinded theorycrafting and analysis of the industry at [...]

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