If you were to take a competitive game like Counter-Strike and look at map data, you'd see this: Most games are played on the same few maps. Just a handful. Then take another, more casual game like Team Fortress 2. Image Credit: Teamwork.tf
Look at that trend! Over 1/4 of official games are played on just three maps, and half of all games are played on just nine maps. So why is this trend happening? The first thing that I can ascribe this too is nostalgia. Four of the top five maps listed: 2fort, Upward, Badwater and Dustbowl, have been in the game since launch. That's fifteen years ago! Despite all the newer maps that exist, people keep returning to the same ones. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. Playing the same map you played years ago will immediately invoke a sense of familiarity and comfort. It's exactly how you remember it and you don't have to worry.
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I love puzzles. Puzzles are incredible games because they are able to stimulate your thoughts like no other medium. Whether it's solving a mystery or a code, or maybe finding what pieces fit together, puzzles are able to captivate. My favorite genera of puzzle is called the "Riddle Game" but do not be confused. These riddles are not like your normal ones. No, they're totally different. The online riddle game has simple mechanics: Using the information presented to you, you need to find the next level's URL. I think the reason why this system works so well for an online game is that it doesn't require fancy coding, graphics or music to captivate players. As long as a player is dedicated, they won't need a fantastic PC. It can be played anywhere on anything. It is this that I think is the core of a good puzzle. It needs to be able to be enjoyed by anyone anywhere.
The process for creating this game was surprisingly long to me. I started with just the forest area where I created floors and a wall. Then I made a particle system to simulate rain which took a days worth of work. After that, I took seamless images of the ground and turned them into complex lit textures to apply to the forest floor. I also created a flashlight and put it under the camera so it follows it. Next, I created the side areas and put in the trees. After that I created my maze, textured it using the same technique of seamless textures and then I needed to think of what I wanted to come next. I decided to return to the first forest thing, but change things up by going surreal. I got rid of the walls and had floating impossible trees to make it interesting. Finally I made a cave using a very crumpled and distorted tunnel made from a cube. At the very end I put a small room where I placed my 3d object. My 3d object is the Untextured Dodecahedron on a Pedestal which I made very quickly in 3DS Max.
Below: This shows some of the tokens in the game, including the cards and die that are used for determining random chance aspects of the game. Below: Shows a portion of the game. As you can see, it shows players moving in different directions as they attempt to explore the cave as quickly as possible. Below: Shows the exit of the cave and two players who won.
Recently I remembered an old game I had on my computer. It's called Superpower 2 and it's a geopolitical simulator. I decided that maybe multiplayer would peak my interest and suffice to say I got hooked to playing with people. The game has war, diplomacy, economics and more. I took on the challenge in one game to play Greece. It was 2001 and I had to dodge the impending economic crisis that I knew would strike before my economy was destroyed. Suffice to say I pulled an economic miracle for the country. I made it one of the top economies in the world, and it was a great teacher for real world economics. It taught me the principals of interest rates, sector taxes and so on. This posed an interesting question to me.
I've owned Clickteam Fusion 2.5 since June, and in that time I've gathered a good bit of knowledge on game development and programming. Of course it isn't the same programming as Unity or UnrealEngine 4, but I've learned how to make games with it. I've collected my knowledge into one game, a platforming game, with simple vector graphics. I'll be explaining various aspects of how I made it in a few sections. The art, the code and the design. The art: I went with my tried and true minimalist vector style, designing assets in Illustrator before rendering them and sending them to Fusion. As for backgrounds, I used my traditional style which are much more complex than my foreground graphics for an interesting blend of styles that mesh rather than clashing. Image one is of 'Level 3' and image two is a background. They weren't hard to make and maybe took about 15 mins to make each one. Next I worked on the code. Fusion's coding can be confusing to look at but is rather simple when you get the hang of it. The gist of the coding is that instead of writing out commands, I make qualifiers on the left and results on the right. This way I can see exactly how every object is interact with each other and if there's a red X it means there is a bug (which there are none!) and that saves me a lot of time. One confusing thing though is how there are different "tiers" of code. This screen is for one level and has to be replicated for every single level, but other pieces of code are universal and don't require me to relist them every level. Learning what code should go where is part of the learning curve. The game's design came from many places. The first influence was a fangame I was working on. It was an extension of an unfinished Flash game which I've talked about on here with my blogpost about "Coding with Unicode." That game was a platforming game and the knowledge I aquired working on it was very important for this game and influences from that game can be seen in mine. Another key part was earlier games I have made in Fusion. Both art and code wise, the game shares a lot of it's "DNA" with another game I made. That one was complete and can be seen below: It was a horror puzzle game and I'm currently working on a sequel that has a lot better graphics and animations, plus an into animation made in Adobe Animate and multiple endings and many secrets. I'll have to talk about it in the future but for now this is my current project which I'm excited to see how it turns out.
Some people really like Incremental games. I am one of those people, when it's done right. Some people hate them, and a lot of people don't know what they are at all. Incremental games are also known as 'Idle games' or 'Clicker games' (Huge waves of groans) but I think that they don't represent what the genera could be. Critics of the genera generally say "What's there to do, It's just clicking!" but that's a real understatement. First though, what is an incremental game? That's a fairly complicated question. In their most basic form, you click on something to get a bigger number of a currency. Currency is spent in a shop to get items that get you more currency without clicking. That is a really basic form of the game and I do agree, it sounds a bit monotonous. But that's like saying "FPS games are only, click to reduce enemy's heath." Then an FPS doesn't seem very fun either but tons of people (myself included) love them. Incremental games became popular with the release of a game called 'Cookie Clicker'. It was simple. click the cookie, you get cookies, spend cookies on upgrades, get MORE COOKIES! It very much set the tone for future games to come. I love Cookie Clicker as a guily pleasure. I've beaten the game multiple times which takes weeks to do, but let's talk about some of the more interesting takes on the genera.
Sandcastle builder was created by the webcomic artist XKCD. It's a very slow and tedious game. You may remember my game review of 'Pathologic'. It actually reminds me of that. The game is great, but not fun. I love it, but it makes me frustrated. It sounds like a paradox but it really isn't. The game is really, really, slow. I reached the second stage of the game on day TWO. I don't even know how many stages there are. It's crazy to me how much effort went into that game. Candy Box is also really different. It's almost an adventure game in disguise. It starts out very simple. Click the button (it's all basic HTML, no graphics) and you get candy. Spend candy on upgrades. Not this again! But, it changes very quickly. After only maybe 10 mins of clicking, you unlock a map. The map shows you a town with this super cool ascii art. You now have a character, and you can go and explore, talk to people, and complete missions. It's really fun! If you like searching on the internet for the most obscure games ever, it's possible you may find a link to a mysterious online game. It's called E.B.O.N.Y and I cannot state how creative and fun the game is. If you click on the name, it will take you to the site. I discovered it 6 years ago when I was 9 and didn't make it far. The game requires a fair bit of knowledge to play and also image manipulation. The game is considered one of the hardest games on the internet and it's not an understatement. The levels can range from fairly easy to oh lord no. There's a server where 20 or so of us talk about the game. One level had people stumped for over half a year. I got through that level in a week but I was already going fast. Giving hints is ok but actual answers is banned. With some help from them, I was able to reach a temp ending from about half way through in about 4 months. The game is not complete. It was created in 2008 and plans to have 200 on each individual branch of which there are 4-5. The creator is in Hungary and is a very busy man so not much work gets done. It's still a herculean task to reach the temporary goal of level 67. This isn't including a whole host of secrets scattered around and cool dialogue. The game is so complex and interesting that I could not recommend it more.
While stuck at home, I begin to get ideas for games. I don't know how to code in things like Unity or ClickTeam, so I am stuck using old faithful, Scratch. The little MIT project that's kept me making games since I was five years old. Since then, I have been 'coding' many games into existence. My tools are limited, so I have to make do with as much as possible, but it hasn't stopped me from coming up with ideas. I have many ideas, sometimes I curse myself for not knowing Unity or ClickTeam, and blocking myself from being the next Indie millionaire like Toby Fox or Scott Cawthon, both being examples of people who were average and made a hit indie game and are now millionaires. It's these success stories that keep me thinking up ideas. My process is to think of a setting and a theme. My most recent idea was a top down shooter in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It's always something random and specific like that which gives me the motivation to keep going. However, determination can only carry me so far. The mid-development hell is the worst for anybody. You see what your game will become but the effort to do it isn't quite in you yet. I feel it to, so for now, I just have a lot of ideas and time to make them. But the mental block of game development is strong, and I think it's what holds most developers back from greatness.
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AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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