There’s some kind of joke about a picture and a thousand words here, but I can’t seem to find it.

Anyway, hello again!  I’ve been starting to work on the dialogue mechanics for Fix, and I’ve got a nice little screenshot to show what it looks like so far.  The chat bubble graphic is still a placeholder for now, but even so, the presence of dialogue at all is welcome.

The dialogue doesn’t interrupt gameplay, so you’re free to move around normally while the characters discuss their stupid problems.  Gears of War immediately comes to mind–during the parts of the game when your dude is talking on his radio, you’re not allowed to aim, shoot, or run.  You can only walk slowly and wait for the dialogue to end.  It’s kind of infuriating to have your input arbitrarily hindered like this, so I made sure to keep the player control totally normal while dialogue is going on.  Also, some people very plainly won’t give a shit about the dialogue, so these guys don’t even have to worry about it.  They can just spam through it while they’re going about their business.

I’ll admit that a screenshot of a chat bubble may not seem particularly exciting, but the dialogue is an extremely important part of this project…so I’m excited, at least.  Maybe that’s enough for you to be excited, too.

I’d like every level in the game to involve someone saying something, or at least thinking something, so these little talky snippets need to be succinct or else they might get in the player’s way while they’re trying to play the game.  I love writing short dialogues like this–it’s a neat challenge to make people sound natural even though they’re being really terse.

Aside from the obvious story-advancement and tutorial text, though, the dialogue also serves another very important gameplay purpose.

My current goal is something like 40 or 50 levels, so I can’t have the player just solving puzzles for that entire time or else they’ll get worn out and grumpy.  The solution to this problem is pacing!  Every once in a while, a level with no difficult puzzles can give the player’s delicate brain a bit of a breather.  These non-puzzles can easily become boring, though, so these levels involve more dialogue than normal to give the player something non-strenuous to keep occupied with.  I can also use these extended dialogue segments to really bring out the little details about the characters, and it’s difficult to even explain how important this is to me.

And since you bothered to read all the way down here, here’s a little bit of info about the four non-player characters in the game.

Jack:  The protagonist from Company of Myself.  He is friendly and well meaning, but he is also addicted to an unspecified drug which has made him unstable and hard to be around.  He used to be a magician, but his habit made him lose his job and credibility.

Penelope:  Kathryn’s roommate.  She is a good person, but is heavily insecure and needs constant validation from her peers or she gets temperamental and anxious.  As a result, she is dating Thomas.

Thomas/TheSphinx:  “TheSphinx” is a pretentious and irritating video game addict.  He has carefully perfected the art of complimenting women, and because of this alone, he has managed to make himself irresistible to Penelope.

Henry:  Kathryn’s psychologist.  He provides guidance and advice about Kathryn’s smoking addiction, also giving insight about her various friends.

Have a nice Monday!

So, first off, I’ve been doing more work on Fix (which is going to get a new title some time between now and release), and I’ve got a little video to show one particular aspect of it:  NPCs!  I haven’t worked on the NPCs for very long yet, but it’s already looking promising.  Here’s a video to demonstrate:

Pathfinding test

The behavior that explains how to follow the player is still pretty clunky, but the pathfinding itself is really solid.  It works with more complex levels than this, like ones with doors that open and close, etc.  It’s also insanely fast–way faster than I expected.  The last time I made any pathfinding in ActionScript, I was using AS2 and it was so slow I had to calculate it over the course of several frames.  This time, even though the logic is much more complex (mostly because it’s a platformer, so gravity applies…), a path can usually be computed in less than one millisecond on my machine.  A big part of this is AS3′s improved performance, but I assume that I’ve also gotten at least a little better at coding.  Regardless of the reason, I’m definitely pleased with how it’s coming along and I think that the NPCs in this game will really shine by the time I’m finished.  Since the “other people” are one of the big focuses in this game (in contrast to Company of Myself, which is all about Jack), this is a very, very good thing.

I’ve also got a little bit of news involving what I’ll be doing next year, but first, a little refresher on what I’m doing now.

I’ve been in a four-game sponsorship contract with Armor Games for a long time now.  Viricide was the first game for this contract, followed by Work of Fiction, and most recently, Fisher-Diver.  Fix will be the fourth and final game.  This contract has been incredible for me because it equates to consistent work in a market where I previously never knew the value of a project until it was already completed.  (For all of you who have never tried making Flash games, imagine trying to organize a project involving several paid artists when you don’t have any idea how much money you’ll be able to pay them until some time after all of their work is complete.  Summary:  It’s balls.)

Anyway, recently, I got an email from an old friend about a possible games industry job for me.  I’ve been following through, and it’s looking very plausible.  I don’t want to bother getting into details about it here because I still don’t know how it’ll turn out, but it’s for a very notable company and it seems that they like me.  I’m not looking for a permanent job right now, but having some experience/presence at a company like this seems like a good idea to me.

What does this mean for you guys?  Well, if I don’t get the job, it means nothing will change.  If I do, however, then Fix might be my last independent project for a little while.

I guess that means I’ll have to make it extra good, just in case!

Now that Fisher-Diver is released, I can finally get back to work on the prequel to Company.  Be afraid!

But in the meantime…

Hit the “Ascii Wave Demo” up top for a little toy I’ve been making over the past few days.  Particularly difficult math compared to what I have to do for my actual games, which I guess made it particularly good practice.  I find that I enjoy math a lot more now that I’m not doing it in a classroom.  Actually, this seems to be true for pretty much any activity I can think of.

Flash Player 11 is recommended, because it seems to help this gizmo’s awful performance quite a bit.

Oh, and by the way, the original impetus for this was a post on ProgramThis.net (a neat website for bored programmers) challenging people to create a script that rendered circles to the output console.  Thanks to Jordan for that!

Fisher-Diver’s weeklong exclusivity with Armor is over, so I just uploaded it to Kongregate.  Let’s all say hello to our friends from there.

(Hello, K folks!)

Also, it’s my birthday tomorrow!  How exciting.

Seems like Fisher-Diver is doing pretty well on Armor so far.  Their audience usually like my stuff less than some other websites (like Kongregate, in particular), so it’s super reassuring to see a lot of positive comments coming in.  And none of the negative feedback has been surprising, so that’s extremely good.  A lot of people were complaining about the lack of a save function (for some reason I thought I could get away with leaving this out???), so I went ahead and put that in.  Hopefully it’ll boost my scores a bit!

The game goes out to other websites later this week, which is when the real party gets started.

Hey everybody!  Fisher-Diver went live yesterday.  It’s site-locked to ArmorGames.com for a week, and after that we’ll start allowing it to spread around.  I’ll also be able to use this time to make some final adjustments and bug fixes according to the feedback that comes through.

Click here to play the game.

First off, you noticed the new layout, right?  Maybe this is how coquettes feel when they decide on a new hair style.

Basically, I fucked up the old website with my goofy shenanigans and couldn’t seem to fix it, so I reinstalled WordPress and picked a shiny new template.  It’s wonderfully simple and ought to make browsing this site a little more pleasant.  Props to the designer (whose link is sitting at the very bottom of the page)!

Second, Fisher-Diver is juuuuuuuust about ready for release.  Literally any day now.  Not sure how long Armor will take to put it up (since they have all this stuff prescheduled), but they usually take a week or less.

Finally, just for fun, here are two photographs I took a couple of days ago.

David Carney and Tristan Costanzo have been hard at work on the audio for Fisher-Diver, and it sounds fantastic!  I recorded a really quick video to show how it’s coming along.  What do you think?

I’m thinking about using the title “Fisher-Diver” now.  It’s not flashy, but it’s easy to remember, explains the main gameplay in very simple terms, and seems to be surprisingly Google-friendly.  For the moment, it’s good enough.  I might think of something better, but I’d be okay with releasing under this title.

The game has been playtesting very well in the past few days, which is extremely encouraging.  If you’d like to play the new build, hit the tab near the top of the page. David’s still working on the audio, but the music that I’ve heard so far has been the radness and he sounds really pleased with where the sound effects are going.  Even though the current version is still silent, there are various other updates throughout.  If you have any friends who’d enjoy trying it out, maybe you could ask them to give it a playthrough?  That would make you a good person.

Anyway, release can’t be too far away, now!

There’s a new version of the fishing game (is “Fishing Dream” a stupid title?) in the tab near the top of the page.  Most of the changes are focused on shaping the “fun-ness” of the gameplay.  Up until now the game has (hopefully) been fun to play with because the mechanics are interesting, but now I’m starting to make the actual gameplay choices more compelling on their own.  Oxygen management is one of the biggest changes–the game looks almost the exact same as last week, but just because of the oxygen meter, it plays pretty differently.  As always, I’ll love you for always and forever if you give me any kind of (honest) feedback.