T w e n t y S i d e d

No pretty screenshots for you today, just walls of text and some confused ramblings. I’m a little out of sorts and not really in any mental shape to be accomplishing interesting things.

I’m feeling a bit un-creative and run down today. So I want to get away from the stuff that requires a lot of creativity (gameplay, writing, art) and just work on something straightforward and mechanical. I’m trying to make sure I do something on the project every day, but it’s probably a bad idea to do anything tricky while I’m all muddle-brained. I check out my miles-long to-do list and find something really dull: reading ini files.

You know ini files. Stuff like this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 22: Text Files”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

You know what the hardest feature of this game was so far? Fullscreen mode. Well, not so much fullscreen as the ability to allow the user to change the window size, which crops up most often when toggling fullscreen mode. I don’t think it was the most time consuming feature, but it was certainly the most effort for the most mundane and uninteresting payoff.

It’s not something you can skip, really. I’m long past the point where I’ll put up with a game that wants to restart because you changed the resolution. We’re all accustomed to being able to smack alt-enter to toggle fullscreen or to resize a window by dragging. It’s just part of making civilized software and not something a developer can leave out. On the other hand, it’s infuriatingly difficult and troublesome and adds all kinds of unwelcome complexity to systems that would otherwise be graceful and elementally simple.

Ever wonder why some old games (and a few modern ones) won’t change the resolution until you restart the program? I’ll tell you.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 21: Resource Usage”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Good news and bad news: Yesterday we had an impromptu hangout where Josh played the latest build of Good Robot and streamed the game for all to see. It was supposed to be a simple test: I wanted to see Josh play the game to hunt for bugs and gather gameplay feedback. But then I Tweeted a link to the stream and the internet showed up.

Friends joined in and we had a little party where Josh played through all of the available content for Good Robot. It was funny and fun, although the best part of the show was when Josh got to the end and began using the console to spawn clouds of enemies in an effort to break the game.

The bad news is that Twitch.tv didn’t save the footage. We don’t know why. So the event is gone forever. Sorry.

The crowd feedback was invaluable, and Josh’s skill at finding bugs was… irritating. (But also valuable.)

I’m kind of surprised at how many people are interested in modding or changing the game. It’s already pretty mod-able. I mean, this is the level data for level 9:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 20: Gamespace”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I don’t know if they’ve appeared in any of the screenshots yet, but one of the mechanics in the game is a system of power-ups. The leveling system provides numerical improvements: More speed, more shields, more damage, etc. The powerups provide functional improvements: bouncing laser shots, homing for your missiles, highlighting of obscured enemies, etc. The game is currently set to drop one on every level. If there’s a boss on this level, then the boss has it.

For a while you could only carry one of these at a time, but that wasn’t very interesting. When you picked one up you would drop the previous one. You could pick it up again if you didn’t like the new one, but I quickly found that I liked some better than others and once I had my favorite they were no longer useful as a reward. Since they were random, it was possible to get my favorite on level 1 and then never care about powerups again until I died. (Powerups last until death.) That’s like a first person shooter that gives you the best weapon in the game at the start. It’s just setting the player up for disappointment.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 19: Unbalancing the Game”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.