On the mission, Part 1

so i havent quite figured out how im going to go about doing this blog. maybe ill get into some kind of routine and do it once a week? that'd probably be the best. maybe ill write them up sunday nights and post them like this. it seems to be a good time, and im pretty sure ill be free to do that then.

its settled. sunday night video game blogs with ty! its a thing now. dont miss out. for real. 

this week, i thought id update you all on a little bit of the status of what im working on.

as of this week, i ordered my developer kit from nintendo, and it has been shipped. so im hoping by the end of next week ill have that here and be able to get it all set up. a part of becoming a developer and publisher for nintendo games means i had to sign some contracts and non-disclosures, so i wont be able to show the hardware or anything like that. but i can say im working on making my first game with the nintendo web framework and construct 2. as some of you know, i have a background in web development, so this seemed like a perfect fit for me to be able to make games with as little learning curve as possible on the programming end. 

as im waiting for that hardware to come, ive been playing around with making some various demos for myself, to try and achieve various levels of control, function, action, etc. and to be honest, ive kind of surprised myself with the pace i was able to get something that kind of worked. its in no way related to what i hope to make for the wii u, but it was really awesome to get something working! its essentially a little top-down shooting game (meaning everything is taken from the vantage point of being above the level, where you would see the top of the head of the player and monsters). maybe itll be fun to kind of break down how it progressed. (until i really comb through the NDA and contracts im under, im not going to be posting any kind of images or code of any kind. ill just be speaking in concepts and steps)

so it all starts with a white page, right? aaaaand game complete! the polar bear in a snowstorm!! you'd buy that right?! hell no you wouldnt. weve gotta spruce that up a bit! so you have to have some kind of background that gives some idea of where the hell you are. so i had this background that looks something like a desolate, empty area of cracked earth. looks kind of cool, but we arent looking to have mars sim 1960 as a game, so we have to go a little further. we need a player... no, we need a fucking hero! so we put him out on our planet of doom. guys like this have a name, basically things you add to a level that will eventually move around or be used in motion are called 'sprites'. this bubbly soda man gets kind of lonely just standing on this big rock. i mean how can you be a hero with nothing to save or fight, right? so then its time to add some more sprites, these will be meanies though. the worst of the worst. mostly because im incompetent and drawing most of the time and who cares only im gonna see it. so here comes this fella, this little mean guy. 

now we have a conundrum....whats our hero gonna do when he has to face the meanie?! now we need another sprite, a bullet to come out of his gun! guns dont kill meanies, our hero does. but without this bullet, he's kinda screwed. so we make a bullet, and put it off to the side for now. we dont need to see the bullet on the screen all the time, only when he shoots the gun. and then, for giggles, well have a little explosion looking sprite also, for when the bullets hit the meanies. because im a child and i think theyre neat. get over it, i know bullets dont explode. anyway, we'll put that explosion off to the side too, since theres no real need for it until, like we said before, the bullets hit the meanies. 

so if i look at whats gone on in a web browser so far, ive got a rock world, some silly looking characters, and thats about it. nothing happens. its just like looking at a dopey picture. so much fun, right? i sold like 20 copies of that game in the first hour. ok, thats a lie. the next step is to give these things some logic! think about this: every time you play a video game, pretty much every single thing you see doing something on the screen has its own set of logic. everything! i dont know about you, but that blows my mind! for our sake, lets start with our hero.

we want to give him a few different types of logic. lets see if you can guess what all they would be? think about it for a second. what do you need this player to do? well, it would be nice if he could walk around, right? so thats step one. lets make him move. so he gets a set of logic that tells him 'when the chubby kid presses up on the keyboard, im gonna move up on the screen!'. so you start there, with all of the different directions. you also have to give him some logic that says 'hey, im not a snail or a cheetah! i move at a sort of moderate pace'. so he has to have a certain speed he moves. and what happens if hes moving around, and walks totally off the level? we cant have that! so he has to have some logic that says 'shit, the earth is flat! i dont wanna walk off the edge of it! when i get here, lets pretend theres an invisible wall so i dont perish!' this logic is called 'collision detection'. it will give you the courage of christopher columbus! collision detection means whenever the sprite makes contact with something, whether its another sprite, a wall, or whatever, you can give it instructions on what to do. remember that term, because im going to ask you about it later! (i know, theres no actual feedback in this, but i dont care its more fun this way to me)

so now we have this guy that walks around, but he kind of looks dumb doing it. why? because the picture of him is always looking one direction, and thats not what makes him beautiful! we have to give our hero some way to look around. so, we issue some logic that first states where the center of the character is. pretty much a dot right in the center of his head. this will work as our axis for rotating. then, we give some logic that says 'hey, you see that weird looking arrow floating around on the screen? thats the mouse, and you aim where its pointing! thats an order!' we're gonna revisit our hero later on for more logic, but thats essentially the basics of getting him to move around! after you get all of that logic in there and fire the game up, it gets to be exciting! you can move and look around, and not walk off the edge of the earth!

howd you do? did you think it would take all those steps to make our hero do that little bit of walking? babies first steps are hard, huh? when you see your character moving around for the first time, theres so much excitement! its such an awesome feeling to be able to control something like that, especially when you've made it! at least i think so. im probably biased though.

well, when i started this, i said id be doing sunday blogs. and thats going to be true. but i got so into this, im gonna split it up into multiple parts, and put them up throughout the week! so tomorrow night, ill write up part 2 of this little series. or i guess ill call it a series. leave me some comments or questions if you have any! im glad you made it through this novel! thanks for reading, and ill see you all tomorrow.

-t

The Pursuit of a Dream

So, here I am. Starting something I've always wanted to do. ME ME ME SO EXCITED!

As some of you may know, I was approved to be a Wii U Indie developer a few weeks back. Well, I took the plunge, and ordered my development kit this week. If you know me, you know how much I fucking love video games. Now, I'm going to try and contribute in whatever way I can to what I consider the pinnacle of art forms. I'm going to make my own game. Maybe I'll make another after that. Pshh. Maybe. Of course I'm going to make as many of these as I can. Everything has a beginning, and this is going to be the chronicles of my beginning. I hope to share what I'm learning and experiencing as I embark on this trek. It's going to be fun, maybe painful at times, but fun. I'll also apologize for how scatterbrained this will probably read. Im not the most linear in my thought processes. Bear with me. It might get better.

Anyway, I decided in the shower today that I would do a sort of developer blog. In part to keep myself accountable, to the one person that may or may not read this and think what im doing i moderately interesting. and (did you catch how i just totally stopped using the shift key? i know right?) in part as a due diligence type of thing for myself. see where i was when i started, and what ive learned along the way. maybe a yearbook of a developing developer.

So why do i want to make a game? (holy fuck i used the shift key once there) Well, throughout my life, video games have played a very important role to me. ive always viewed them as something that have taught me lessons applicable to so many things in my life. problem solving, pattern recognition, risk/reward analysis, game theory, reflex development, the value of muscle memory. so many things. i remember being amazed when i first saw super mario brothers. my god, what a moment. all of a sudden theres this little guy on a screen, a beautiful blue sky, those geeky little smiling clouds that were the same as the bushes, and that ridiculous goomba that crept in from the right of the screen. picking up a controller and dying over and over again was so satisfying to me, because it would happen just a little bit further in 1-1 each time. then this kid shows up at my house and jumps after the 4th pipe in the level and exposes the hidden 1-up. holy fuck. my mind was totally blown. this thing took a grasp on my like nothing had before, and few things have since.

earlier, i called video games the pinnacle of art. and i whole heartedly believe that to be true. in no other art form do you combine beautiful visuals, music, and story with the ability to give control to the person playing. its interactive. as a player, you get to decide you experience. this is what enthralled me the most. you gained ability as you played. you gained a skillset, even if it was limited in scope to the game you had in. now, you could call it having an avatar. but that was a very foreign concept, to me at least, in the infancy of it. all i knew was i couldnt get enough. the beautiful scores of games like donkey kong country, ocarina of time, mega man, super mario bros. i feel like they led me to my passion of music.

watching these things grow into the ridiculous productions they are now has been nothing short of incredible. game visuals rivaling the stuff you see in your history books. its fucking incredible! its so hard for me to not be enthralled by it all. and when the curtain of oz was lifted, and i learned it all pretty much starts on a blank white (or black) screen with a few bits of text that resembles english, i knew it would eventually be something i had to sink my teeth into. so now, here i am. trying to do just that. well, i have tried before, but never with the focus i have today.

so, here it is. the start of something. the pursuit of a dream. the birth of a brain baby. im gonna try my best to learn all i can, treat this like the games i love. learn through trying. learn through doing. what a great example theyve set for me. how fucking cool would it be to have some kid discover games through my game, and years down the road he sits on the floor in his living room and writes is little blog explaining that he wants to take the plunge? heady bro. super heady. anyway, im gonna stop now because i want to go grab some steamable veggies at the grocery store.

heres to beginnings

-t