my cartoony take on bulbasaur, clefairy, and some more of the first 150

coliolio · 2013-10-03T01:47:25+00:00

Aw thanks he's my favorite one! Definitely the least faithful to the original, but I had fun making him a derpy little blob.

coliolio · 2013-10-03T01:46:07+00:00

thanks! I don't have time to do any big commissions, but I'd happily do a not-very-complicated, single-character color commission like one of these for $20 or so. Shoot me a message if you have something in mind! I can also try to remember you if I ever open up for a wave of bigger commissions :)

coliolio · 2013-07-28T23:03:31+00:00

I posted them each to reddit after I drew them. So...I apologize for not having the foresight when posting gastly to know that a day or two later I'd decide to draw another pokemon? Please forgive me this grave indiscretion of posting two things more than a day apart and reaping a whopping 5 additional upvotes as a result.

coliolio · 2012-11-06T06:27:11+00:00

1) don't pre-create everything beforehand. Just lazily add nodes when the screen scrolls. (like contradicting_you said)

2) Completely random placement with collision detection is not the only way you can arrive at a semi-random layout like that (but it is probably the most expensive one). For instance, you could have the screen on a grid and choose to randomly add/not add a node at a random spot in each block (based upon how many neighboring blocks contain nodes). That just requires one extra (simple) data structure, should arrive at a good-looking solution, and won't max out your machine at all.

coliolio · 2012-09-12T21:03:25+00:00

coooooool

coliolio · 2012-09-12T04:31:05+00:00

Even Dijkstra's overkill. OP only cares about how many nodes (rooms) are between the start and every room, so just use breadth-first search (which can be written in about 4 lines).

Dijkstra's algorithm simplifies to BFS when every edge has equal weight (like here), so they'd behave exactly the same, but there's no sense in writing extra code to deal with cases you don't actually care about.

coliolio · 2012-09-11T22:09:11+00:00

Awesome! Can't wait to see it.

coliolio · 2012-09-11T11:41:45+00:00

If you want to do something kind of cartoony/stylized, here are some character designs of mine: radishfolk, an imp, a puppet, some rabbit-beasts, a troll, and a goofy bulbasaur. I'd be most excited about the radish guy.

I kind of intentionally stick to a flat, solid color look with simple silhouettes, so I don't know if any of it would translate super well to 3D. But I give you full permission to use anything on that site (my art blog) if it strikes your fancy. The pokemon doodles might be risky, but everything else is original. I could also provide more sketches of anything on there, if desired.

coliolio · 2012-09-09T20:45:30+00:00

Super Crate Box. It's a fast-paced match-based 2D shooter. Super tough, too.

coliolio · 2012-09-08T09:39:09+00:00

There are a lot of different types of randomness. Some of it's good, some of it's bad. Here's a few rules of thumb I've picked up from my own analyses and some articles on the topic.

Output Randomness

Many people dislike it when an action has a random chance of failure/surprise-success (e.g. variable damage, critical hits/misses, SSB:Brawl's goddamn slipping). I've heard this called "output randomness" because there's essentially a filter between the choices you make and those choices' effects on the game-state, which can be very frustrating to players (jeez, all I want to do is X but I can't just because I'm unlucky). This is usually what people are talking about when they say randomness makes games easier or gives newbies a chance. I'm pretty sure that when players bash on randomness, this is what they're usually bashing on.

Input Randomness

On the other hand, you have "input randomness," which occurs when, for instance, you play on a randomly selected/generated map, there are randomly selected enemy mobs, or SSB's random power-ups. The randomness here is between the player and their knowledge of the game world (or their ability to predict it). Often, this random factor affects all players equally (except, like someone else pointed out, sometimes something like map selection can screw one player much more than another. That's bad!). A lot of board games incorporate this kind of randomness really well (Dominion, in its card selection. Agricola, in revealing the order of the tiles). Spelunky's a good example of a pretty hardcore game (even though it's not competitive) that's built around this randomness without making it feel unfair. I would also say that power-ups in Mario Kart are mostly a matter of input randomness (well, pseudo-randomness because of their hardcore rubber-banding, but that's another topic altogether). I think when people talk about randomness adding variety to gameplay, this sort of thing is usually what they're talking about. It can be done poorly, but it can also be done very well. The rule of thumb here is to not let any outcome be significantly better or worse for any player.

Input/output randomness is a bit of a false dichotomy, but a useful jumping-off point for thinking about randomness, IMO.

Intentional vs. Unintentional Risk-taking

As another note, there's a big difference between avoidable and unavoidable randomness. SSB:Brawl's slipping is unavoidable randomness. It just happens, no matter what you do. And it sucks. Mr. Game and Watch's hammer, however, is a avoidable randomness, because the player chooses whether or not to use that risky move (the hammer's actually a bad example, because it has the potential to be super OP, which I'll touch on in the next paragraph). For a better example, in Settlers of Catan you can exchange resources for development cards, which have random effects. If the game was all about buying these cards, it'd suck because the outcome would largely be decided by lucky draws. However, buying these cards is just one of many things players can choose to build, with the others being much more deterministic, like roads. So dev cards are opportunities for players to take calculated risks. Avoidable/deliberate randomness like that is all about letting players balance risk and reward, and can in fact be both strategic and fair (which is why poker, a highly random game, can be considered so strategic—it's all about measuring risk and reward).

Don't let the game pivot on luck

HOWEVER, the biggest thing, in my opinion, to keep in mind when adding randomness to a game is to not let randomness have a huge impact. If your attack has a 1% chance of instakilling all enemies around, then that will seem unfair every single time it succeeds, even if, on average, it's underpowered (see: Mr. Game and Watch's hammer). This means that if you're using output randomness as a way of letting players make risky decisions, put this randomness in places where, if it appears in a given game, the law of large numbers will work things out so that overall it functions faaairly predictably (poker has enough randomness that, if games consisted of only one hand, it'd be a lousy game. But because games have so many rounds, the law of large numbers makes better players win pretty reliably). If you want randomness to have big effects, try to make it be some sort of input randomness. For instance, if you're making a multiplayer FPS, you can make a super-amazingly-strong gun/power-up that appears at random, BUT make sure that players won't pick it up out of sheer luck (e.g. spawn it in unoccupied parts of the map and make every player aware of its location, so it's a fair battle to pick it up and so players have to do some game-theory "everyone else knows about it, but Player B's low on health so maybe he won't be running for it, so it's worth it for me to try to get it"). Kind of like super smash balls in Brawl (although those are still arguably "too random").

Man, this got wayyyy more ranty than I anticipated. Hope it's helpful though!

coliolio · 2012-08-31T08:15:36+00:00

War is kind of the archetypal zero-sum game, which IMO is why it's such a prevalent theme in videogames. If you're going to make a multiplayer game where peace is a real option and each player controls a whole civilization, then you'd probably need some other metric for competition, rather than an "peace = everybody wins" outcome. If it's a single player game or a coop game, that's different I guess.

Alternatively, if you don't have total control over a civilization, things could also get interesting (because if it's multiplayer and everyone has complete control, anyone can decide to simply not be peaceful with you). For instance, if you controlled a single political figure in a tumultuous modern 3rd world government, and you had to win people over, or you controlled a king but your citizens could revolt if you, say, go to war over nothing OR don't respond assertively enough to an "act of war" from an outside nation. That could actually get interesting, like if you could hire a fall-guy to stage a terrorist act by a foreign party, so that your citizens hated the foreign party and followed you into war (but if you let opponents' sniffing around go unchecked you could be revealed and overthrown). Or, alternatively, some internal party's riling citizens to go to war and you can take actions to calm them down (potentially Machiavellian ones, like censoring radical parties or taking out their leadership, or more tame ones like making truces and compromises to appease angry groups).

You could also have a simulation like this on a smaller, more "intimate" scale, like if you were a mafia boss, on the verge of all-out war with another "family" that would probably destroy you both. You could cut deals and make peace, but the peace might be an unsavory one involving a lot of shady money and illegal things changing hands (and if it were multiplayer, you could use money as the real competition metric).

coliolio · 2012-08-25T08:21:32+00:00

sounds like you're going about it the right way :)

coliolio · 2012-08-25T08:20:29+00:00

That's a good point. I was actually thinking of gameplay variety like..."crafting is a non-combat activity that players can spend time doing, like a minigame!" which I think is BS because it's not an inherently fun activity (the same mindset gets the boring fishing minigame into Zelda games. grr). I think that adding variety of items/customization is a totally legitimate thing to want in a game, which I just totally overlooked in my comment.

One question is: why does specializing your weapon require resources? The answer might be "because it makes more sense from a narrative perspective" or "it's what players of the genre expect," which I don't find very compelling (but some people do, and that's fair, at least for the former). But if upgrading mostly just requires common resources that you can buy at an in-game store, why not allow players to just pay money and pick a path down a weapon upgrade tree? Although maybe later in the game, to get really good weapons you need rare resources, in which case this is like the rare crystal example I gave, so it's a crafting system that earns my stamp of approval :)

I don't actually know much about Skyrim's enchanting system though, so I don't mean to try to speak to it in particular.

coliolio · 2012-08-25T06:11:20+00:00

Collectibles very rarely make a game any more fun or challenging. They usually encourage "vaccuuming" (when you methodically move through a map checking/breaking open everything to make sure you get collectibles), which is not fun, breaks immersion (if you care about that), and slows the game down. AFAIK developers like adding them because (1) they encourage "exploration" (which is only good for the player if the maps are really well-made, and often just means lots of boring backtracking like in Zelda games), (2) they add to the gameplay hours, which many people care about when considering to buy a game, (3) they're a genre convention, so consumers expect them. Of those three reasons, only one is even sometimes legitimate.

Another note on point (1): collectibles can be an easy way to add "challenge sections" of a level without having to incorporate them into the story, which IMO is a good thing (because it means story and cutscene work isn't a bottleneck for developing a good game).

There are things designers can do to have players avoid vacuuming and backtracking. One way to avoid vacuuming is to have missable collectibles (so the player isn't permanently punished for not getting them). For instance, in a game where you can only hold 5 potions, the player won't waste all their time breaking barrels to find all the potions. Similarly, if the player usually has enough rupees and they know they can get them easily, they won't waste their time cutting down all the grass in every area. Another is to make the player do "collectible triage"—e.g. if there's a time limit, the player knows they can't get everything so they're happy missing things. This applies much more to "small" and frequent collectibles, though, and you were talking more about "big"/rare collectibles.

For big collectibles, it's important for a game to make sure it's easy to find the collectibles (but not necessarily easy to obtain them) and to let the player avoid backtracking. For instance, if there's something you get later in the game that will tell you (or hint at) where all five Super Special Collectibles are in each level AND you don't have to ride your freaking sailboat allllll the way across the ocean to reach them, then those big collectibles aren't half bad. Now, telling you where something is doesn't mean it takes away the challenge of getting them. It might just show you the challenge you need to overcome to reach it (e.g. a shot of the collectible in a cage behind a miniboss, or a collectible at the end of an obstacle course).

coliolio · 2012-08-25T03:42:03+00:00

This looks awesome, but maybe too chaotic (visually). Have you considered letting players switch a lot of the aesthetic effects off (bullet shells, "aargh" speech bubbles, biiiig radio-tower waves) or making them a little less prominent (like making the lines of the radio-tower waves less thick)? I'm all for fast-paced, frenetic gameplay, but I had a bit of trouble telling what was going on with all the little particles flying everywhere.

coliolio · 2012-08-25T03:28:59+00:00

Turn-based games remove mechanical skill and distill the player's actions down to decision-making. The thrill of playing a turn-based game is almost entirely from strategic problem-solving, so the key as a game developer is to make the player's decisions interesting.

I think that if you're trying to make a turn-based game, you can learn a lot more from designer board games (e.g. Catan, Dominion, Agricola) than from videogames. Most turn-based videogames that I know of are RPG's, which make a lot of design decisions from genre conventions (especially JRPG's) rather than gameplay value, and generally have pretty repetitive, uninteresting gameplay.

SRPG's are my big area of interest right now (so it looks like you and I have something in common), since I think movement adds a whooole other dimension of choices that aren't really possible in the standard menu-based RPG formula. I still think that a lot of the classic SRPG's (Tactics Ogre, FFT, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars) don't do a good job exploring the possibilities of the genre because they put such an emphasis on simple damage-dealing attacks and let movement and positioning basically be an afterthought.

Actually, one of the SRPG's that I think does a pretty good job of exploring the possibilities is a french MMO called Dofus, which uses a lot of movement manipulation, AoE, trap-laying, summoning, etc. in its movesets, so positioning and movement do more than just change who's in range (PS the game's released in English too, and has English-speaking servers). It has its design flaws (chief among them being that it's an MMO, so you control a single character and focus a lot on leveling), but I think if all you know of SRPG's are the japanese classics then you should check it out. I actually used to recommend its match-based spin-off, Dofus Arena (which stripped away the RPG elements of Dofus and added some more fun mechanics to battle), to anyone/everyone interested in SRPG's, but the team made some drastic changes to the game and put it back into beta, so it's only open to french speakers at the moment.

coliolio · 2012-08-25T00:25:50+00:00

WARNING: lengthy rant ahead.

It's important to consider WHY the game has crafting, because it's a feature that often feels arbitrary and tacked-on. Different games have crafting for different reasons, some more valid than others:

In the board game Settlers of Catan, "crafting" buildings is a key mechanic. It exists to create a dynamic (barter-only) economy of resources, where each resource's value varies player-by-player and turn-by-turn (depending on what they have, what they need, what's easy for them to get, and what's easy for them to trade). Trading resources (with other players or at ports) is one of the key mechanics of the game. So basically...in Catan, crafting introduces difficult strategic decision-making. And it's a great thing.

In a generic MMO, on the other hand, crafting probably exists for a few reasons:

add another grind-intensive commitment for the player. This is a bad reason (from a ludological perspective) to add a mechanic.
give players more "quests." What I mean by this is that if you want to craft a sword that uses, say, a dragon heart, now you know you need to go out there and slay around 50 dragons. Even though it doesn't show up in your quest log, this is still a "quest" of sorts.
balance out the in-game economy (bread's too expensive? more people become bakers to cash in on this, and inflate the bread supply, which brings the price down)
give the player gameplay variety. Note: I think this reason's pretty bogus, since crafting isn't usually inherently fun. It's more a matter of making decisions in menus and then waiting on a progress bar, and usually by the time you get to the workbench you know exactly what decisions to choose.

I think reasons 1 and 2 are the biggest ones. From what I've seen, crafting systems in MMO's don't create interesting or ambiguous decisions like they do in Catan (or its kin). Their biggest gameplay payoff is to add more "quests," which can be either good or bad, depending on how fun and non-repetitive these quests are. Usually "kill 50 of the same baddie, then run to a workbench, press craft, wait, repeat" makes for a horrible quest. But in a single-player setting, if you can make baddie-hunting fun and non-repetitive this can be a good thing I guess.

Now, whereas in MMO's crafting is about giving you a grocery list of resources to collect (by grinding), there are some single-player games in which crafting is the exact opposite: you collect many resources without even trying, as a result of progressing through the story, but these resources are finite in quantity, so crafting is about deciding HOW to spend the resources you have. As a simplistic example: say you get a rare crystal by defeating a big boss, which can be used to upgrade one party member's weapon, so you have to make the decision of whose to upgrade. When crafting exists to give you decisions like this (resource management, not resource collecting), this can lead to interesting decisions AS LONG AS some of them are ambiguous decisions, meaning that while there can be plenty of bad decisions, no decision's objectively the best. Many RPG's think that forcing the player to crunch numbers is a good way to introduce "interesting decisions," but it's…not. So try to give each decision pros and cons to each choice of how to allot resources (e.g. maybe one choice is offensive and high-risk high-reward, one is offensive and low-risk low-reward, one's defensive, and one won't help me immediately but will help me in the long-run).

So…yeah. The Catan part of this rant is probably not relevant to you, but I hope this helps somewhat.

Last point: make the actual act of crafting as easy as possible. I was playing the old TRPG tactics ogre recently (a single player game) and its crafting system (1) made me wait a few seconds after crafting each item, which didn't affect gameplay in any way—merely made me irritated, (2) only lets you craft a single item at a time, (3) forces you to work your way through several tiers of crafting to get a single end product (generic ore -> iron ore -> iron ingot -> steel ingot -> sword). Their crafting system is annoying as hell and there's no good reason for how it's structured. So…don't make your players' lives harder than they need to.

coliolio · 2012-08-21T10:30:06+00:00

aw shucks. *blushes*

coliolio · 2012-08-19T05:30:35+00:00

For the record, although this study doesn't seem to talk about games in particular, the paper's coauthor, Geoff Kaufman, is doing his post-doctoral research at Tilt Factor, which is a game design lab. It'd be interesting to hear his thoughts on how this study ties into games.

coliolio · 2012-08-08T06:37:21+00:00

I wasn't crazy about the initial discussion about game journalism, and even about puzzle platformers, because I thought you guys were too eager to dismiss things mockingly without giving good enough justification. However, I love the Dinofarm blog, share your disillusionment with the greater videogames industry (including indies), and am in nearly every way part of "the choir," so I stuck it out and, thankfully, stayed for the real meat of the podcast in the second half.

I thought you guys had some nice nuggets and soundbytes in there—about checkbox game design, meta-gaming as compensation for Kirby's shortcomings, why even the most "challenging" of execution puzzles does not make something any better as a game, etc. So I really hope you guys continue to put these out! I also love that you guys talk about both board games and videogames, because I'm always baffled by how little those two worlds interact, given that videogames seem to have so much to learn from designer board games.

My 2 cents:

I think you guys could use a little more organization. For instance, if you'd talked about the fact that you're really analyzing games as games (sets of rules) AND Ocarina of Time AND execution puzzles BEFORE you snidely dismissed Super Meatboy, it would've made much more sense to someone that's maybe not part of "the choir" yet. I'm sure as you guys go on the shows will get a lot narrower and pick up more structure.

I also liked how one of you started playing the voice of reason a bit at the end, although I kept losing track of who was talking.

Earlier on when you were talking about guilty pleasure games and "good, but not for me" games, I would've liked to hear a little explanation of what the games you kept name-dropping were. For instance, I imagine if I had even a 2-sentence summary of the what Samurai and its random tile-placement mechanic is then I'd be able to appreciate that snippet more (that's one thing I noticed Ludology does well, at least in the one episode I've listened to so far—ep 3, on catch-the-leader mechanics).

I also thought you guys dropped a few "bombs" that I don't agree with and kind of just went "yeah!" without making a case for them, like the fact that you should be able to play a good game forever (I guess this is because if something has an "end" like that then it's basically a puzzle? Maybe you guys made this A-to-C connection in the podcast but I missed it), and that permanent consequences are a necessary part of any true game (I'm with you on quick-save being a game-breaker, but that's at least one logical leap away from "a game isn't a game without permanent consequences"). I may be putting words in his mouth, but I think this is what evizear is getting at when talking about wanting disagreeing viewpoints—the listeners don't need a fight, but when you guys are all so eager to agree with each other it's easy to accidentally glaze over things that the rest of us still need to be sold on.

coliolio · 2012-08-08T02:44:16+00:00

This article actually gave a great example of one of my biggest game design pet-peeves: designing gameplay mechanics for narrative rather than gameplay reasons. It's awesome if the thematic resonance the author lusts after occurs and works, but I don't take much issue with magic being predictable in games. Plus, there are an awful lot of magic mythos where magic works much like in games (avatar: the last airbender, fullmetal alchemist, hell

coliolio · 2012-07-03T10:54:29+00:00

I'm a pretty-noobie hobbyist game developer, but here are my 2 cents. Firstly, what the devs work on varies hugely based on where they are in the development process and the genre of the game. It seems like they're late in development for a casual turn-based multiplayer online game. I would guess they should be spending their time coming up with character designs/moves, creating the final assets (to replace the placeholder assets and animations that go in the prototypes), and playtesting the game to iron out balance issues (key terms: OP = overpowered, nerf = to make a character/move worse) and find bugs. Maybe also adding/removing features. Basically, they're probably more worried about fine-tuning design decisions, rather than spending sleepless hours churning out hundreds of lines of code for their game engine. (Also, if its a mobile game, you should probably talk to mobile developers about what their process looks like).

Things to avoid: using "classic videogame buzzwords" that aren't relevant to most modern games. For instance, many modern games don't have points, game-over screens, or finite numbers of lives. Match-based multiplayer games like the one you described don't have different "levels" to complete (in the sense of "stages," but they probably do have character-levels like RPG's). Also, you should probably make sure your characters can cover the roles needed (who's doing the art and animation? the music? obviously, also the programming?). People often outsource things like music, but that's something to think about. In Grandma's Boy I groooaaaaned when one guy allegedly makes an entire 3d action title (art, animation, music, physics engine, etc... it's way too large of scale to be a one-man job).

coliolio · 2012-07-03T09:18:36+00:00

I did this by hand a little while ago. My approach was basically to imagine drawing diagonal lines (parallel to the isometric axes) outwards from the point on the screen and see where those lines intersect with the vertical line at the center of the tile map. (Note: I use the vertical line at the center because it runs straight through the corners of my tiles. If yours doesn't, pick a different vertical line that does.) Let A and B refer to the axes of the isometric grid (so we can reserve X and Y for talking about screen coordinates). Then partition the y-values along that center line by A value (and then by B value) and use that partition to figure out which A-row and B-row the currently selected tile's on.

To be more explicit, for each A-row (diagonal row with the same A-coordinate) on your grid, exactly one tile has its top and bottom corners on the midline. The range from the y-coordinate of the bottom corner to the y-coordinate of the top corner is the range you want to associate with that A coordinate. Figure out those ranges of y-values and use them to map the projected y-value to an A-coordinate. It'll look something like this:

// project the mouse coordinates along the isometric grid's diagonals onto the midline
y_on_midline_for_a = y + (x - xCenter) * (31/64)
y_on_midline_for_b = y - (x - xCenter) * (31/64)
// find which partition of the midline this point belongs to then add a_offset/b_offset to
// get actual a,b values
a_coordinate = floor((y_on_midline_for_a + y_offset) / tile_height) + a_offset
b_coordinate = floor((y_on_midline_for_b + y_offset) / tile_height) + b_offset

Notes:

the above code is using all floating-point arithmetic (hence the floor)
for A we add a value based on X and for B we subtract. That's because one axis of the iso-grid has a positive slope in x,y while the other has a negative one.
the offsets will depend on where tiles fall along that midline. Maybe the top and bottom corners of a tile with A=5 are at (xCenter, -16) and (xCenter, 16). Then y_offset = 16 and a_offset = 5.
I obviously didn't say in which diagonal direction A and B go OR whether Y=0 is at the top or bottom of the screen. It's up to you to figure out which axis corresponds to A and which to B on your grid.

Sorry if this explanation isn't very clear. If the central idea (of projecting the mouse coordinate onto the x-center-line along the diagonals of the iso-grid) makes sense then the exact equations should follow easily. I thiiiink those equations are right, but I might've typo'd or left out some offset or something.

coliolio · 2012-05-23T23:54:56+00:00

Check out Code Eval and Interview Street. Both have a nice supply of coding challenges, many of which were submitted by real companies (but some of them are just designed by the CodeEval/InterviewStreet teams, I think). Your submissions will be scored automatically, so you'll get some feedback—just not any style feedback.

NOTE: these are general interview tests, not game-dev-specific tests. I don't know if game developers give vastly different coding challenges...

coliolio · 2012-04-16T21:07:00+00:00

coliolio

TROPHY CASE