Strike Eagle Icon

It’s been a couple days since Strike Eagle has hit the Internet on MochiAds, NewGrounds, and Kongregate.  And none of the ratings and feedback really surprise me.  There were a couple bugs I had to quickly remediate and repost, but nothing drastically bad.

On NewGrounds, the folks there asked for more enemies, bosses, power-ups – the usual fare that you find in a shooter.  But overall, I got positive feedback and a score of 7.8.  I think it mostly has to do with the technical merit of the game.

The 2.5D effect was incredibly hard to achieve.  My original design idea was just to make a regular 2D shooter that had a transition screen that used the FreeSpin3D component as an effect.  But after some consideration, I thought that it was a cop-out and that the folks at FreeSpin3D were hoping for something that would truly showcase their product’s strengths.  So after some fiddling with the ActionScript 3.0 API for FreeSpin3D, I decided to do an “Afterburner”-like game.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into in terms of technical difficulty.

Mig-23

The game itself is really 2D.  There isn’t any 3D background, much less z-ordering or z-calculations going on for the background or enemies.  That is what made it really difficult because I had to somehow “fake” a way of making it act like it was 3D with no clue whatsoever of the z-location of the enemy planes, player players, missiles, etc.  I originally wanted to do gunfire with tracer rounds like it was in Afterburner, but without a z-location, I couldn’t do a proper collision test.  So I left it largely to the mouse location.  I also wanted planes to have hit-points, so it took more than one shot to take it down.   But considering the difficulty it would be to track the planes with a mouse, I left it at one-shot kill.

I think I’ll be revisiting the shooter genre later this summer when I have more time to create more a thought out design.  But I think I’ll cut it down to a 2D shooter with robust particle effects similar to Space ROX than making it 2.5D/3D.  3D is hard enough to achieve, and good-looking 3D is impossible without a dedicated artist.  There have been quite a few indie games out there that use 3D and unfortunately look very amateurish because of how difficult it is to create good looking 3D models.  Sometimes I think that it is better to stick with great looking 2D than it is to go for a decent 3D look.  Strike Eagle suffers from that.

Landing Strip

With the less than 5 weeks of time I had, working only in the late evenings, and with no real 2D or 3D artist support, I had to make due with any art I could find online.  In either case, I had to do with the minimum available.  As it was, the artist of Space ROX, only really created the runway.  The rest of the game was taken from free sources and modified slightly to make it look more appropriate for the game.  For my next shooter game, I’ll be sure to make some extra time to really take more time to produce some quality art assets.

The other factor is sound.  I really didn’t feel like I had enough time to truly dig up some great music or buy some decent sound effects for the game, so I made due with whatever was free online.  The  music was something that was dug up from the archives of older songs that the artist of Space ROX, had done.  If I could have had the choice, I would have loved to have kept Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” still in the game, just for sheer comedic effect.  But it would not have been legal to do so.

All around, this is a complete game with excellent technical merit for the 2.5D effect, but it isn’t polished to the level that I think it should have been for a full release.  But given the time-constraints and limited resources I had on hand, I think that it turned out rather nicely.  But if I had all the time in the world, I would have put a more robust z-calculations to make it look even more realistic, longer levels with refueling cutscenes, and an end scene where you would be gunning down the actual missile silo for the nuclear warheads.

Code Boom

I think that I will have to do a follow-up “post-mortem” for the Actionscript code because that is the ugliest part of the game.  I’ve learned a lot about design techniques from just getting my hands dirty in Actionscript 3.0 and there are a ton of things that I would never do again.  But that is the strength of the Agile development method I used to get the game out.

Rather than focusing on proper object-oriented techniques and planning and fully thought out requirements – the game was finished in an astonishingly fast pace with many clean iterations to review and look at.  Halfway through, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to determine collisions and attacks because I created the 3D ground effect without one.  But instead of focusing on what I hadn’t designed, I kept on going with the current design and found ways to “cheat” a 3D effect and produce a game rather.  It would have been counterproductive to have scrapped the game design to do things “properly” but instead, I kept going with what I had.

My initial attempts of game development were really slow and because I tended to “over-think” the game-design and thus I ended up doing nothing.  I’m sure many indie game developers suffer from “analysis paralysis.”  So doing things the “Agile” way really broke me free from spinning my wheels.  Fast-iterations and tangible results are the best way to getting feedback and excitement over a product.

Jennifer Ann and her Father

For my next contest, I’ll once again be putting my interim builds in private for others to comment on and review until I submit it.  The game will be for Jennifer Ann’s group who want a game that is both fun and educational that talks about “Teen Dating Violence”.  The big design constraint is that the game itself cannot use violence.

I’ll be starting in about a week and a half.  I first need to finish a minor freelancing job.  I may post screenshots ofmy freelancing product online as a demonstration of the Agile methodology at work once again.

The majority of my professional life has been spent in solving operational problems both in private and public industries.  After spending a few weeks developing my own games, I’ve come to the realization how vastly different the design and development approaches are between consulting and game development – even though I am applying the same software development methodologies.

Game development is very nebulous.  The designer has a vision and through research and development you can find the limitations of achieving that vision between the constraints of time, talent and technology.  Often, the designer will find that he has to compromise or alter his vision to meet the constraints of the solution his team can provide.  But in the end, the audience has no knowledge of what that original vision entailed and the final product can be made to appear as if it was completely and fully intended from the start.

In consulting, you find that you run into very concrete business problems that you have to solve.  And just like in game development, you can find the limitations of solving that problem between the constraints of time, talent and technology.  And compromises must be made in perspective of those limitations.  The difficult part is that the audience is fully aware that there was a compromise made and that the completed solution was not what was fully intended from the start.

Another thing is that game development tends to cater to the latest and greatest technologies.  The greater the technology, the better the ability to express the true vision of the designer.  However, consulting is usually dealing with antiquated technology and trying to stretch the uppermost limit of often antiquated technologies.

It is often asked, “Why don’t they upgrade?”  As a young developer, that was my main complaint when dealing with the Government and many of its antiquated systems.  But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that I agree with the majority of CFOs and Government procurement agencies.  Why upgrade when the vast majority of users only use Word, Excel and email?  There are very few offices that need even a fraction of improvements that newer operating systems offer, much less improvements in how Word or Excel documents are created.  Then you multiply that by the hundreds and possibly tens of thousands of computers that this organization maintains, catalogs, and services.

There are massive differences between the two industries and in some ways, I’d rather deal with the pain of compromising artistic vision than compromising critical system functionality in a government system.  But nothing beats the feeling of solving a problem and making people’s lives easier and their jobs more fulfilling when you create a system that not only works, but is a joy to use.

Because of its close association with toys, gaming has not yet achieved a sense of “legitimacy” as other artistic mediums such as the cinema, despite it’s close associations.  There are a lot of people who wish for the medium to fully mature into a full artistic medium and to be recognized by and large by the art community.  But this failure is largely due to the fault of the game makers themselves – even the big-AAA producers.

A lot of my rants against the blatant sexualization of women in games may be taken as moralizing, but in reality, cheap sex is never taken seriously – even in the field of art.

For the medium of game development and design to achieve true legitimacy is to maintain artistic integrity and cultural relevance while balancing it with putting food on the table.  “Art for art’s sake” is also self-defeating because it takes the opposite extreme.  True art maintains the balance between being socially relevant, artistic in skill, and popular in appeal.

Gaming yet needs its Shakespeare who perfectly balanced all those elements – and even played a dangerous political game of social protest against religious descrimination.

Perhaps this is a cue for me to enter this contest:

The 2009 Life, Love Game Design Challenge – Can you create a game about Teen Dating Violence, without using violence.

The origin of this contest is a very sad story and well worth reading, but I believe games like this need to happen more often.