I’ve updated the BeInteractive Scripting Engine to Version 1.04.
It’s a simple but important change – I’ve formalized the code, adding types to untyped variables and return values to functions that were missing them.
As a result, Flash IDEs such as FlashDevelop, which default to a strict mode of compiling, can compile and run the library without complaining.
The city of Hampton is an ordinary medium-sized city in North America; it has its uptown and downtown, its suburbs and inner city, its local news and events – the same as any other city.
But unique to Hampton is its own Hampton Federation. It started decades ago, during a time when street gangs and crime were a lot more wild than they are now. In order to keep relative peace, they agreed to fight each other in sport combat, settling their disputes with dueling rather than fighting directly.
Decades later, the Hampton Federation is now a gentrified and mainstreamed tourist attraction. Every day, there are matches booked, and the fights occur all over the city, in front of Hampton’s appreciative public. Fighters come not only from Hampton but all over the world, to seek honor and glory in the Federation’s rankings.
But what most people don’t realize; is that behind it all, the Hampton Federation still matters. When the Federation became so central to Hampton life, it became important to its politics as well; what originally started as a way to keep street gangs in check now keeps in check the entire city in check.
Organized crime know that their own power is tied to the success of their fighters in the Federation; the police now that they must honor the results of Federation matches to keep the respect of, and keep a lid on, the city’s underworld.
Not only that, but forces around the world have come to Hampton – to stake their own power and honor on the matches as well. Though nobody says it out loud, the Hampton Federation is one of the biggest movers and shakers in the entire world.
It’s madness to stake so much on what was originally mere street fighting. But one thing’s for sure, Hampton and the world live in exciting times – and the future of Hampton is fought for every day.
The Future Of Hampton is my latest game project. It’s a card battle game based on either one-on-one, or team-based street fighting.
Not only do players fight matches, though – they determine the plot arcs and events which happen in Hampton. They pick what matches will be fought, who they want to root for, and whether things go well or badly for the heroes and villains of the game.
Think of it as a “solitaire RPG” – where the computer acts as an easy-going Game Master who throws out lots of suggestions on what you and your characters might like to do, and is willing to take your own suggestions for the game as well.
People who play Champions Of The Galaxy might notice some similarities between that game and Future Of Hampton – in the basic idea of one-on-one fighting, and in the idea that players act as bookers and storytellers more than anything else.
Indeed, Future Of Hampton started out as an alternate play ruleset for Champions Of The Galaxy – but as it evolved, it grew into its own entity, and I decided it was suited to being its own separate game as well.
That said, I think that when it’s done, I think CotG fans could look at it and see it as a good example of how CotG might work as a full-fledged computer game.
The project is about 25% done right now. I’ve gotten a lot of basics down – the fighting engine, which had several major changes as it evolved, and how the UI works, giving players an ever-present menu with which they can break from planning or working through each week’s current events to look up encyclopedia entries about Hampton, or read up on the federation’s history.
The other 75% of the game is going to be a lot of content – writing up characters, plot arcs, skits, and other details of the game and its world.
My goal is to create a game that offers two years’ worth of events; letting players choose their own matches from week to week, letting them set up small feuds and small plot arcs and plugging in their choice of characters into those small arcs, while also being offered larger and more dramatic plot arcs, tied to major villains, which loom over the whole federation until the player resolves them (or, I suppose, dismisses them if they’re not actually interested.)
The game would record the history of the federation as it happens, and also keep track of statistics for matches and titles.
The game will mostly be text-based. However, I wanted to take the idea of an old-school 80s computer text-based game and modernize it with Future Of Hampton; so, I’ll be including text formatting, graphical design in some places, and inline illustrations.
I’ve got a lot of work ahead, I’m pleased with how things are going so far.
October 18th, 2009 in
Project Report |
3 Comments
Aura Braver tries to emulate the ideals of shooters such as Ikuruga, Warning Forever, and the various “bullet hell” games – take a basic shooter, add a technical twist, and then see what explorations you can make with the idea. And oh yes – make sure the game is hard.
I’m pleased with how the “auras” – standalone fields that change bullet speeds or arcs in various ways – turned out. Getting them to animate like they did in my mind’s eye actually required a fair bit of state information – each bullet needs to keep track of a list of auras they’ve entered and left, and auras will not only influence bullets inside them, but bullets which have left and now need to have their auras gradually diminished. The programming was worth it, though – when a bullet enters a STP aura, it slowly glides to a halt, and when the STP decays, the bullet slowly starts up again, going back to its original speed – unless it catches on a still-alive scrap of the decaying aura, in which case, the bullet’s recovery is staggered a bit. Watching a cloud of bullets crawl out of a decaying STP aura looks just as I imagined, and I consider it a win.
I wanted to see interesting and emergent things happen to the bullets when auras stacked or mixed, and I got a few surprises; for instance, I knew while programming that a combination of 3WY (splitting a bullet into three copies), and REF (change a bullet’s alignment, and its trajectory 180 degrees) would cause a bullet to double-back on the 3WY and cause a cloud of enemy bullets to rain back on the unlucky player. But I didn’t realize that if a third aura, TDN (bend a bullet’s path downward as it passes through) was involved, a spectacular death blossom would erupt, showing a wide arc of blue bullets one direction and red bullets another. It was a rare event to have happen, but the times it did would bring the game to its knees with tens of thousands of bullets. (I eventually put a hard limit on how many bullets a 3WY could spawn.)
One of the things I’m less pleased with is how I had trouble thinking of good set pieces – puzzles and strategic/tactical situations that I could spring on the player with a certain combination of auras and enemies. While the different auras are interesting to watch in a random or chaotic situation – and level 3 was designed just to see that happen - I think that the form of the game – a side-scrolling shooter, where the player was always heading and shooting to the right, and the enemies to the left – limited the number of good situations you get set up with the auras; everyone’s in a rush to get to the other side, and just doesn’t have time for an interesting tactical situation.
If I made this game again, I think making the game an overhead shooter, with terrain, would let me think of a greater range of situations. But overall, the game turned out to be a fast and breezy shooter, with the effect of auras forcing the player to think quickly and step up their game.
All right, it’s out.
CotG Desktop 2
Well – when I started getting messages that the old CotG Desktop was having trouble running, I realized that it was probably due to conflicts caused by Flash Player 10 starting to make the rounds on most people’s computers.
That’ll happen sometimes. A program gets old after a while – not because of anything it did, but because of the surrounding environment – a changed OS, a few different dependencies, and the program breaks.
So, I knew I had to make a new version of CotG Desktop.
But ah! I’ve actually been working on one for a long time now! Which means that the new version won’t just be a “repaired” version of 1.1.3 – rather, you’re going to get a brand new program with all sorts of features!
Let’s make a list:
Adobe AIR. Rather than being a Flash engine wrapped in a Windows program, the new desktop uses Adobe’s own official way of delivering Flash to a desktop application – Adobe AIR.
Adobe AIR is a framework, much like Java or .NET – and its specialty is taking web programming techniques (i.e. writing in either Javascript, or Flash) and giving them the ability to work on the desktop in full-fledged desktop applications.
The upshot of all this? You can run CotG Desktop 2 on either Windows, Macs, or Linux machines.
Roster Tag Filtering. CotG Desktop 2 now has a simple tagging system. Instead of hunting alphabetically through your hundred and some wrestlers, you can type some tags in a box at the bottom, and have the list filtered to ones that match the tags you’ve given those wrestlers.
You can filter either positively or negatively – for instance, “cpc male -manager” gives you all your male CPC characters, except the ones that are managers.
If you’ve ever had trouble running multiple federations in CotG Desktop, tagging will make life easier. You can switch federations just by switching the main tag that you filter by.
Random summoning respects filters, too. For instance, if you want to have a run-in by a wrestler’s ally, then just filter by the stable of that wrestler, click the Totals line at the top and boom – random ally wrestler!
Triggers. When I looked CotG Online, Filsinger Games’s own Desktop spinoff, one of the features I liked was the ability to click on one of the wrestler’s situation-grades, and have the appropriate chart pop up and rolled on.
It was great automation, and I wanted something like it – but I had to be careful, because I wanted to keep the program rule-neutral; make sure people who made custom rules didn’t get left out.
My solution was “triggers”. When you roll on a wrestler’s offense or defense charts, the program does a text search on the result – and if it matches a pre-defined trigger you’ve set up, the appropriate chart pops up automatically.
For instance, you can match “into the ropes” for your Into The Ropes chart – obviously. But, suppose you had custom rules attached to Add 1 moves. Make a trigger for “Add 1″, and your custom chart pops up whenever an Add 1 move occurs.
Improved Sheets. “Sheets” and “Charts” are now the same thing in CotG Desktop – collections of text, charts, and/or other devices. A single sheet can have some opening commentary, and then be followed with either a single chart, or all the charts and sub-charts you might want in one place.
There’s even the ability to make “card decks” that you can draw randomly from – and the engine behind the Sheets feature is robust enough that more devices are sure to follow in future versions.
Improved Backgrounds. In the old version, you had a fixed list of background images, and one slot that you had to make yourself, name ‘custom.jpg’, and drop in the right folder. Now, you can just open any JPG or PNG file you please, and either stretch, tile, or center it as your background, without fuss.
New Card Look-and-Feel. I fussed over this, trying to figure out what I could do to improve the workflow. Buttons for manipulating the card have moved, into what I feel are handier places – and they’ve gotten out of each other’s way now, hopefully avoiding those errors where you closed a card when you wanted to do something else. Extra rules for a card are overlaid on top with a button click, instead of hanging off the bottom. Minimizing a card is done by shift-clicking, and simply hides the bottom while leaving the non-movelist stats all readable.
So, when is this coming out? Well, it’s nearly done – I have the documentation to write, and some polishing to do, but it’ll be out in just a few days, and maybe even sooner than that!
