The Serious Art of Designing Fun

It's official.

Due to the economy, Nexon was forced to shut down the Vancouver development studio that I worked at. This cataclysmic event (or at least that's how it felt) occurred on January 27. Things haven't been the same since.

As my first experience of losing a job, I'd like to extend a hearty thanks to the executives for handling the situation with grace and compassion. I don't know how most studio closures are handled, but our studio ended with a few rounds of applause for the studio executives and for the company culture. This was then followed up with a round of drinks and friendly chatter at a nearby pub. I'm not an emotional person by nature, but I was deeply moved that day. Humanature Studios, you will be remembered fondly.

... which brings me to my announcement. Legally, I'm now free to talk about the technical implementation techniques. In addition, I can now freely develop my own indie free-to-play MMO game. As such, I'm officially announcing that this site will no longer focus on the generalities of game design - rather it will be a day-to-day blog of my (first time) experience of an indie developer.

Please note that I've updated my Bio page to reflect the recent changes including the removal of the legal blurb.

A belated Happy New Year to all my readers!

It's been awile since I last posted anything on the blog. That's because December is usually THE busiest month for me. With Christmas in the air, thoughts of my family are in the forefront.

... and that's exactly what happened. I had a fantastic month spending lots of quality time with my wife and my two children. Of course, something had to give - the blog in this case.

The good news is that I'm climbing back on my blog saddle and I'm ready to continue sharing my design perspective - starting with the conclusion of my post regarding game design requirements. However, the bad news is that I didn't get as much done on my game prototype as I'd like. Still, I did manage to integrate TileStudio data into the engine.

Still, there's plenty of time left in the year so stay tuned for posts about my game prototype.

It's official. I'm moving ahead with Tile Editor as my official map editor. What changed my mind? There were several factors:

1. It turns out that it did have the capability of embedding tags directly on the map instead of into a tile. It's not exactly how I would have wanted it, but it'll suffice.
2. The ability to customize the output from the editor is a huge time saver. I can focus on getting the maps working properly in the game as opposed to getting the map data loaded correctly into the game.
3. It had the most complete set of editing features - at least with respect to my work process.
4. I can add/modify features to the editor as its source code is freely available and compiles right out-of-the-box.

I cannot emphasize the importance of making sure that code packages should be a no-fuss install-and-compile procedure. This means not having to manually search and download Open Source libraries that a project is dependent on, not having to alter makefiles/project files, and/or not having to make obscure alterations to my environment variables prior to compilation.

The fact of the matter is that I'm not interested in how the project is compiled or what libraries it relies on. I'm sure at some point in time, I'll probably need to know these details (these details are documented in the package, right?). However, it doesn't change the fact that delivering a package that compiles as-is is a good policy - especially if you intend to turn said package into a business opportunity.

Next up, I'm working on integrating the map data into my game engine. This means my game development is now back on track albeit 2 weeks late.

This week's looking to be a washout in terms of my personal game project. I blame it all on the on-and-off-again cold that's driving me crazy. My physical health seems to be directly related to the number of hours of sleep I'm getting - so I'm planning to go on a sleep binge and, literally, sleep away my illness. In light of that, I'm going to take it easy and just post a development update on the game so far.

The current challenge facing my game development is finding a level editor. Can I develop my own level editor? Yes - but is it prudent to spend time rolling my own level editor as opposed to working on the actual game design itself? Absolutely not. I still remember the advice my project lead once gave me - work on what you're interested in, for everything else, there's the Internet.

OK, so that's not exactly what he said. However, the main gist of it is true. Building a game requires a programmer to delve into many different areas - sound, graphics, AI, infrastructure, and databases to name a few. In turn, each of these areas will have game-specific issues you'll need to resolve. Let's face it, not all problems are equally interesting - so why spend the time working on a problem that (a) does not cater to your strengths, (b) has probably been solved before and (c) that you're not interested in?

For me, the area of least interest are tools. Don't misunderstand - tools (and pipelines) are crucial towards the development and iteration on a game. It's just that I don't find tools and its problems of particular interest.

... which bring me back to my plight - the search for THE map editor. For the past week, I've been searching for a 2D map editor for Tanktics. The most popular ones so far (if you trust Google) seems to be Mappy and Tile Studio. Both of these are pretty good 2D tile editors with their own strengths and weaknesses. However, what they both lack is the ability to embed events/scripts tags directly into the map or to attach them to tiles. Mappy had the closest functionality in that it had the capability of attaching strings and/or user number tags to tiles. However, neither had the ability to display the tag information on the map directly.

So far, I've resorted to trolling through SourceForge and Google Code looking for Open Source projects that meets my needs, or which I can easily extend to meet my needs.

Hopefully, my game will have a map editor by the end of the week. Stay tuned for further updates on this.

Recently, I've been searching the web for resources pertaining to game design theories. I was a little disappointed but unsurprised to discover that the search yielded information about the technical development of a game rather than the fundamentals of a game design. Whenever searches yielded hits regarding game design theories, it usually focused on availability of game design courses. Still, there were some really compelling online game design papers.

The following is my list of top picks:

1. The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford

   A game design book that talks heavily about the interdependency between design and technology. It was written in the early years of computer games but its theories are just as relevant today for the most part.

2. The Chemistry of Game Design by Daniel Cook

   The article talks about decomposing the game design into a testable model of skill chains. A must read.

The search for high quality online game design resources continue...