Blog for Kevin Ryan at GarageGames.com

Minigolf Mania - New Free Course Now Available

Kevin Ryan — 2007-01-03T03:12:22+00:00

Hodge Podge Course

There is a new free 18 hole course available for Minigolf Mania.

You can download the Hodge Podge Course using the links below. It is around a 1.5 Mb download:

Click here to download the Hodge Podge Course for the Mac.
Click here to download the Hodge Podge Course for Windows.

Minigolf Mania Download

Note that you need to own and have installed Minigolf Mania in order to play this new course.

If you don't already have it, you can download Minigolf Mania from the links below:

Click here to download Minigolf Mania for the Mac.
Click here to download Minigolf Mania for Windows.

Some Hodge Podge Holes Screenshots

Mac Minigolf Mania, Cheeseheads, and GGE

Kevin Ryan — 2006-12-19T04:43:32+00:00

Mac Minigolf Mania

The Mac version of Minigolf Mania is now done. It will soon be available for download from the GarageGames site, but you can download it and start playing right now.

It was a relatively painless to create a Universal Binary build on the Mac. I updated to the latest version of OS X, got the latest version of Xcode, and set up my project settings to be just like TGE 1.4.2. The only change I had to make was to disable the Torque Memory Manager because of a problem on Intel Macs.

Minigolf Mania won second place in Game Tunnel's 2006 Sports Game of the Year awards. Game Tunnel is a fun site to read and they have an Indie Games Roundup every month.

Cheeseheads

I've been a 49er fan since back when John Brodie was their quaterback. Somehow my son has become a big Brett Favre/Packer fan. When they play each other we usually watch on tv, but last week the Packers played the 49ers in San Francisco so we drove over to watch the game. This was my first time back at Candlestick Park (now called Monster Park) since I saw Willie Mays play baseball there in the early 1970s.

Here was the view from our seats:

Final score Packers 30 - 49ers 19.

I've now watched four 49er-Packer games with my son and my team is 0-4. Where's Joe Montana when you need him?

Great Games Experiment

The Great Games Experiment site is starting to look nice. Check it out if you haven't already and get a GGE badge.

Minigolf Mania Ships - Thanks

Kevin Ryan — 2006-11-10T19:37:19+00:00

I don't have the energy right now to write a long blog - been fighting a cold the last week - but I wanted to get out some thanks to the people that helped get Minigolf Mania out the door. Eventually I'll write a long postmortem and make public whatever code from minigolf that I think would be useful for others.

First (marketing hat on) Download Minigolf Mania. It lets you play the full version for 60 minutes for free.

Alex Swanson did all the Art Direction and most of the artwork that you see in the game. Jeff Tunnell helped me hone the game as he does on most everything that we do together. Liam Ryan did some 3D stuff, artwork, and had to deal with Quark and the older version of map2dif. Brian Hahn also did a little artwork. Special thanks to Joshua Dallman for doing a heck of lot the last few weeks (and continuing work) to get Minigolf Mania out the door. The whole GarageGames guys have been helpful as a whole with informal feedback and suggestions.

One nice thing about this GarageGames community is how helpful people are on the forums and on chat. Here is the thanks page from the game:

Thanks guys/gals you made getting the game out the door easier.

Did I mention you can Download Minigolf Mania from here?

Feel free to buy it too. :-)

Late Night Reading

Kevin Ryan — 2006-08-24T18:37:51+00:00

This will be a very short plan.

Last night I was reading through the latest issue of Computer Gaming World before going to watch an episode from the first season of "Lost in Space" (thanks NetFlix) with the kids. I turn the page and there is a game that Jeff and I did many years ago. I was very surprised and happy. :^)

Minigolf Mania's Flying Text

Kevin Ryan — 2006-08-19T02:38:00+00:00

Background

As I've worked on Minigolf Mania for the last few decades I've made several changes to stock the Torque Game Engine to accomplish various things. As I get the time I'm going to write up what I did and include the source code that hopefully someone finds useful for their own games. Some of the stuff, like the following, is all script so I can release it here publicly. And in future plans, some of the stuff is more tied to the Torque code so I'll have to talk about in a general way in the plans and post the actual code in one of the Torque private areas.

Except for the alphanumeric graphic files (alpha.zip), feel free to use/modify the following in any way you want - commercial - non-commercial - whatever. You can use my PNG letter/numbers for your own internal testing, but please don't release them in any games or demos.

Oh, and it really wasn't a few decades of work on Minigolf Mania, it just feels that way sometimes.

What it does

For Minigolf Mania I wanted to have some dynamic text that could fly out onto the screen and then animate for a while before going away. So I have a script function that can be called with the text to display, how it should make its appearance, and then how it should animate after it is in it's final position on the screen. What it does is create a GuiBitmapCtrl for each letter and then move them around on top of my 3D scene. Once the animation is complete it will delete all of the created controls.

Here is a screen shot of the "Hole in One!! Birdie" text in the middle of combo sin bounce/cos side-to-side animation on the screen:

Hmmm, hard to visualize the animation, if I get the time I'll put a link to a short video here.

Edit: Okay, here is a link to a video. It is just the first Tutorial hole with the text animating showing a hole-in-one.

Rather than explain everything I'll just post the script file header from popUpText.cs below. It has most of the information on how the function call works:

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// function showPopupMessage( %textToShow, %appearMethod, %showMethod)
//
//
// Notes: The first parameter is the text that is to be displayed.  Tabs are used (\t)
//        to indicate multiple lines.  Second parameter is the appearance method - first
//        word is the method (see below) and second word is how long it takes to appear
//        in miliseconds (ie 1,000 means on second).  Third parameter is the show method - first
//        word is the method (see below), second word is how long it appears on screen, and
//        the third word is how long each animation cycle is.
//
// showPopupMessage( "text line 1/ttext line 2",
//                   "appearanceMethod appearanceLength",
//                   "showMethod showLength showCycle");
//
//
// Appearance Methods (appearanceMethod)
// ==================
// -1 - Random Method (any but 'None' method)
//  0 - None
//  1 - Rise Up
//  2 - Zoom from the left
//  3 - Drop Down
//  4 - Zoom from the right
//  5 - Diagonal to straight
//  6 - Four Corners
//  7 - Circle in from right
//
//
// Show Methods (showMethod) (bits set - more than one method can be selected)
// ============
// 0 - Steady
// 1 - Sin bounce
// 2 - Cos side-to-side
// 4 - Whole word sin bounce
// 8 - Whole word cos side-to-side
//
//
//
//  Some sample calls
//  -----------------
//
//  showPopupMessage($PlayerName[%playerNum] @ "\tYour Putt", "2 700", "2 1800 800");
//
//    This will show player name on 1st line and "Your Putt" on the second line.  It
//    will zoom in from the left and take 0.7 seconds to appear.  It will then animate
//    for 1.8 seconds using the Cos side-to-side method cycling every 0.8 seconds.
//   
//-------------------
//
//  showPopupMessage( "Got it!", "0 0", "1 1200 800");
//
//    This will show "Got it!" on the screen.  It will appear immediately with no
//    appearance animation.  It will animate for 1.2 seconds using the Sin bound 
//    method with a cycle of 0.8 seconds.
//
//-------------------
//
//  showPopupMessage("Hole-In-One!!/tBirdie", "7 1200", "3 3200 900");
//
//    This will show "Hole-In-One!!" on the 1st line and "Birdie" on the second 
//    line.  It will circle in from the right and take 1.2 seconds to appear.  It
//    will then animation for 3.2 seconds using both the Sin bounce and Cos side-to-side
//    methods with a cycle of 0.9 seconds.

Once you have it running it would be very easy to add your own appearance and show methods.

What you need

You will need the script file: popUpText.cs
and the text in graphic format: alpha.zip

I have the popUpText.cs file in the client\scripts folder on my computer. Doesn't really matter where you put it.

I have a bitmap for each letter of the alphabet, numbers, and also for some puncutation. You will find all of these in the alpha.zip file. I am storing all of these files in the client\ui\alpha folder. If you store them in a different place then you will need to modify the script to point to your location. You can find this folder location in the script right before the GuiBitmapCtrl is created.

A few other useful notes

I am including the popUpText.cs script file exactly as I have it in Minigolf Mania. There are a couple of minigolf specific things in there that you'll probably want to delete. It is pretty obvious what they are, but it should run fine even with them in there.

My main game window is called PlayGui - actually here it is without all the controls contained within it:

new GameTSCtrl(PlayGUI) {
   profile = "GuiContentProfile";
   horizSizing = "right";
   vertSizing = "bottom";
   position = "0 0";
   extent = "800 600";
   minExtent = "8 8";
   visible = "1";
   helpTag = "0";
   cameraZRot = "0";
   forceFOV = "0";
      noCursor = "1";
};

You will need to replace all instances of PlayGui in popUpText.cs with whatever your game window is called.

I am making a call to updatePopupMessage() once per frame at the very start of GuiCanvas::renderFrame(). You can call it from anywhere you want, but it should be called once per rendered frame so it can update the letter locations.

In Closing

I think that is it. Nothing real fancy, but it looks nice. If I've missed something or if something is unclear let me know and I'll edit this plan so it is up-to-date. Minigolf Mania is getting close to being complete. I'll try to get a video posted that includes the flying text sometime in the next week.

In my next plan I'll post about how I made the automatic ball-following obstacle-avoiding camera.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, ...

Kevin Ryan — 2006-08-15T23:18:36+00:00

Something old

I wrote Black Belt in the fall of 1983 for the Apple II computer. It was a side view game with different keys mapped to different Twai Kon Do moves and used the actual rules from competition. Two people could play against each other on the same computer.

I did all the artwork myself trying to match the actual moves as best I could. It looked, uh, not too good.

For the music I went to the University of Oregon library and checked out some books on Japanese Music and found one that was fairly short and had an oriental feel to it.

To make sound on the Apple II you would access (read or write) a memory location and it would make the speaker move back and forth once. So to make musical notes you would need to burn up the correct number of 6502 cycles between access to the speaker memory location so you'd get the speaker vibrating at the correct number of times per second. Access it more often for a higher pitch and less often for a lower pitch. It was a big pain.

Looking at the packaging I remember that I supported the Mockingboard sound/music card. It had this phoneme based speech chip on board and it was fun to hear the Apple talk, but it sounded funny.

After finishing off the Apple version I created a C64 version of the game. The C64 was also based upon the 6502 so they only major differences/problems were that the graphics were different and the sectors/tracks on the disk drive were laid out differently. I'd read/write info sector by sector from the disk drive rathter than use files. You could also alter the pattern you read sectors from the drive to more than double your speed. C64 disk drives were very slow.

Anyone remember Load "*",8,1 and then listen to the C64 clunk around for while (a long while)?

Something new

I don't know if I have ever completed a game, but there are about 25 to 30 or so that I stopped working on that made their way out into the marketplace. One of the benefits of creating downloadable indie game is that you can continue to make changes after you have shipped and still get into the player's hands.

I have added a new game mode to Puzzle Poker called Chips Mania. It is a just a little more action oriented than the other game modes, but still has some strategic elements in it. You can download this new version by clicking here. This is an unoffical version right now, but it feels pretty solid/bug-free and will probably be rolled into the shipping version sometime.

Please, if you have the time, try it our for a short while and let me know if there are any problems.

Something borrowed

I borrowed this from Damon Slye back when we were working on Arctic Fox and found it the other day when I was going through a bunch of old CDs. If I remember correctly CD players were fairly new at the time. Damon, I'll trade this back for that EA trophy you snagged for me back when Dyanmix closed down. :^)

Something blue

I had to ask my wife how this whole "something old, something new, something borrowed, ..." thing ended. So here you go...

All those years ago...

Kevin Ryan — 2006-07-28T06:39:47+00:00

I'm been spending the last few days cleaning up my computer, my office and my web site and found some interesting older game development stuff. Some of it older than some of the people in the Garage Games community.

Minigolf Mania

First, going back all the way to last week. Here are some Minigolf Mania shots:

It is very close to being shipable.

Puzzle Poker

I've been making a few very minor changes to Puzzle Poker on and off over the last few weeks since its soft launch here on Garage Games. Notice that new hint on/off button on the screen shot to the right.

If you haven't downloaded it yet, go ahead and give it a try, it is only a 3.4 Mb Windows download and 5.6 Mb Mac download.

It was made using Torque Game Builder.

Ball Blast

Ball Blast is actually only a couple of years old. I created it for the August 14, 2004 Game in a Day (GID). If you haven't heard of GID, it was started up by Tom Bampton and is a great way to rip through a lot of code to quickly come up with a game prototype.

I wrote a journal while working on Ball Blast. Not a very exciting read, but you can see how things developed throughout the 24 hours.

While rearranging things on my computer I realized I never uploaded the final version for people to try out. This version allows Internet/lan play for up to 4 players. If there aren't 4 humans than total random no AI computer opponents will fill in for them.

You can download the final Ball Blast GID version by clicking here. It uses one of the earlier versions of the Torque Game Engine. You should be able play against up to four other players over a Lan or the Internet.

It has no gameplay polish and many obvious flaws. It was an experiment on my part to see if I could come up with a game idea where you play by only moving the mouse and don't use either mouse button.

All those years ago...

I worked on Zoo Master during my senior year the University of Oregon in 1983. It was written for the 48k Apple II Plus in 6502 machine language. The Apple II was 1 Mhz so you would want to do coding tricks like unroll your loops for speed. Most of the instructions took between 2 and 4 cycles.

I think I remember the resolution being 280x192. The Apple II also had a interesting way of specificing pixel colors. If two neighboring bits were set then the color would be white otherwise the color would be either red, green, blue, or purple depending upon if the pixel was on a even or odd screen pixel location and also whether the 8th bit was set or not. Three zero bits in a row would give you at least one black pixel.

At the time I did not have an assembler so I wrote it by typing in all the instructions in HEX code into the Apple. The branch instructions in 6502 were relative to the current instruction memory location. So if I wanted to branch forward to an instruction 10 bytes ahead I'd use $0A and for branching backwards I'd use a negative number like $F4. For forward branches I had to estimate how many bytes my code would need to jump over and then go back and fix the branch instruction if I got it wrong.

Since I wasn't using an assembler everything ended up being hard coded to fixed memory locations on the Apple. The upshot of this was that I had to write bug-free code because they would be a pain to fix. I actually did have a couple bugs where I ended up I having to JMP to a free memory area do what I needed to do and then JMP back using some NOPs to clean up in the patch area. Went against my structed code college stuff, but what else could I do. I think there was an assembler available for the Apple back then, but it was beyond my college days budget.

Funny how I can still remember what hex values correspond with which 6502 instructions - for example:

 $20 - JSR
 $4C - JMP
 $60 - RTS

You had three 8 bit registers available to do computation with, but only the A register could be used for addition or subtraction. You could only increment (INX,INY) or decrement (DEX,DEY) the X and Y registers. There was an add with carry (ADC) instruction so you could do 16-bit computations easier.

I wrote this game for the technical fun of it. It was published by Earthware Computer Services, but never really sold. I actually played it online a few months ago somewhere online.

After Zoo Master came out I made my home town paper which made Mom and Dad proud.

What is the date on the newspaper anyway? My eyes do not work as well as they used to.

In Closing

If anyone finds this at all interesting let me know. I've got lots of notes, concept artwork, and design stuff going back through the years. I could write short plans on older games for different platforms and also on some game projects that never saw the light of day.

Oh, one other thing, I've set up all my previous plans on a web page.

Puzzle Poker - New Music/Mac- Minigolf Mania

Kevin Ryan — 2006-07-08T04:53:35+00:00

New Music

Puzzle Poker now has new songs thanks to the work of Matt Sayre. I was never very happy with the music in the original release of PP and you may have noticed that I had the default music volume turned down low in the first release. Matt did a great job and came up with music that completely fits the theme. Go ahead and download it and take a listen. It is really cool and catchy - the default music volume is now turned up to full.

Mac Build

The Mac version of Puzzle Poker went live yesterday. Thanks to Paul Scott for getting the port done.

Top Scores

I noticed that the Gargage Games Guys (like Jay Moore who gave great design feedback) have been knocked out of the top spot and the only GG person I still see in the top ten list is Eric "Secret Sauce" Fritz. One person tried to hack scores into the top ten list and actually found a vulnerability that I fixed. They were not able to get new scores in the top scores list, but were able to submit the same score more than once.

Minigolf Mania

Minigolf Mania is now almost complete - just a few tweaks here and there still need to be done. It uses the Torque Game Engine (TGE) with a few modifications to handle rotating platforms and some custom rendering here and there. The art direction and most of the artwork was done by Alex Swanson. Here are a few screen shots...

("Hug the Wall" hole)

("Lavaplow Madness" hole)

("Lavafalls" hole)

(Booster Beam - derived from class Item with special rendering code)

(Three Golf Balls - not DTS shapes - created on the fly with DOT3 bump map rendering stuff)

(Super Grow super power - several super power types can be found)

(Collect animals to open the cup in the Safari game)

Aidan

Almost forgot to mention my little guy Aidan. He had his 7th birthday, had surgery to have his feeding tube removed, and is doing great. Here he is the day after surgery:

"My g-tube is gone forever." - Aidan

Puzzle Poker - Another game out the door (finally)

Kevin Ryan — 2006-05-11T03:21:14+00:00

It has been a busy last couple of weeks and its very nice to get this one out the door. Before I go and get a little rest let me lay out a very short time line of its development.

Starting Out

Last November I asked Jeff to get a copy of Torque Game Builder so I could take a look at it. Played around with TGB for a while and then over the next few days created a little prototype of a game that I knew my 6-year-old Aidan would enjoy. He is always hanging out in my office - one of the fringe benefits of working at home. I can't talk about this game much because its going to be coming out sometime in the next few months. Digging in and finishing a short little game prototype is a good way to get familiar with an engine.

After this first prototype to get familiar with TGB I started work on the idea I had for Puzzle Poker. Started work on a Wednesday afternoon and by Thursday afternoon I had a prototype that played very much like the final game. TGB is great! It let me focus on game design and getting a game up and running quickly to see how fun it is.

Here is what the gameplay screen of this first prototype looked like:

When starting out on a new game I don't care at all about looks - just gameplay. I quicly draw very bad artwork to use. The main menu was just functional:

I then sent both prototypes to Jeff to check out and see what he thought of them. He liked both them -- that was good and made me happy.

Experimenting

I spent December and January experimenting with different things on both Puzzle Poker and the other game. Got feedback from Jeff and Jay on what was working and what wasn't. Pretty much nailed down what the final game would be like at this point.

Alex came on board in January and checked in the first pass at the artwork on Febuary 7th. It was awesome! All the artwork you see in the game is by him. He is very creative and easy to work with.

From there - lot's of hard work. Crafting. Modifying. Making fun is hard work.

Mom's Hooked

Actually my Mom wasn't hooked at first - instead she had a little problem getting how to play. I just stood and watched and tried to remember what I told her and then put that in the tutorial. I got the idea for pop-up card-moving-hints from telling her "try moving that card from here to there."

She is hooked now which is a first for any of my games. For some reason she wasn't very interested in aliens invading the Antarctic.

Clubs

The clubhouse idea was that you could get top scores for a smaller group of people - like friends and family. Anyone can create a club and password protect it for their own group or just leave it open to anyone.

We crafted this over time to try and make the clubhouse concept more obvious. I'm still not sure if it is clear enough in the game as to what clubs are. The suggest-a-clubhouse button was a late addition along with the clubhouse websites to get people to try it out. We are going to amp up the clubhouse website end of things soon.

Garage Games

I visited the GG offices for a few days at the start of March. It was fun to hang out in such a creative and dynamic atmosphere. They are a very busy group of people. One of the nice benefits of this trip was I got to meet Melv because he was at GG for a short working visit.

I hesitate to list names because I know I'll miss someone, but thanks to: Benjamin, Justin, Eric, Mark, Tim, Rick, Joe, Paul (up til 5am working on a short Mac deadline!), Matt(s), Robert, Melv, Josh, and the whole TGB team who made Puzzle Poker possible, Ben, and I know I am missing some people.

In Closing

Anyway, I'm tired and I've written more than I planned. You can try the full game for free for 60 minutes. See if you can beat my top score. I'm not as good as some of the Garage Game guys. Now I'm going to have a beer and relax for a while.

Aidan postscript

If you've read any of my previous plans you know that my son Aidan has had some medical problems. He has been doing real well lately. He gave us a scare in January where I drove faster than I had since Ray Tobey drove me down to Amiga headquarters a long time ago. Aidan is playing and enjoying t-ball this spring even though he really doesn't get it.

This indie game business works well when you or a family member have off and on medical problems. It gives you a flexiblity that you would not have in a regular job.

Minigolf, Camera, A Blast from the Past, and Aidan

Kevin Ryan — 2004-11-09T20:00:10+00:00

Minigolf

First, while you are still reading, I'm very close to having a test build of Minigolf available. If you would like to check it out and give feedback email me at kevin@netptc.net. Feedback from kids, wife, husband, non-computer development types would be great.

Here's a couple of screen shots:

On the Move hole

Plows hole

Since the conference in Eugene last month I have been working on fixing gameplay issues with the holes and also creating a few more dynamic holes. The last few days I have been working on a camera system which leads to the next section....

Camera

An automatic ball following system presents some interesting challenges because the ball can get itself into some very tight spaces.

My first pass at this was very simple just to see how it felt - place the camera 45 degrees off of directly behind the ball and looking down at a 45 degree angle. It checks ahead every so often and if the camera's view of the ball is going to be blocked then it switchs sides. Here is a rough top-down look at it:

This wasn't too bad - a little robotic feeling though. Since I was using the ball's forward velocity to orient the camera, the pitch would vary too widely as the ball bounced - very jarring on the eyes. I ended up damping the ball's z velocity quite a bit so the camera's pitch only varied slightly. I may end up taking the z velocity completely out of the equation.

From here I went on to implement a system where I could define a set of camera viewpoints relative to the camera and then automatically choose the best one. Here are top and side views of where the camera would be relative to the ball:

Once a view has been choosen it stays with that view until it is blocked and then it finds another best non-blocked camera view. This worked pretty well except for a visual-feel problem when the ball bounced off a wall and reversed direction.

Right now the camera moves linearly from its current position to where it wants to be. When the ball bounces off a wall the camera ends up passing over the top of the ball to get back behind it and it just doesn't feel good.

If anyone is interested I can post this version of the code. I hesitate a little bit about posting it publicly because at this point of a project sometimes expediency takes the place of elegance and the code can get a little brute force and ugly. This code is a little ugly :^)

To get the camera code final from here I am just going to compute the camera offset from the ball initially when the putt occurs and then only when the view is blocked. This will allow the ball to roll towards that camera and the camera will not always be maneuvering to get behind the ball. I think a less busy camera will feel better and it will only require minor changes to my current code.

Other solutions that I considered were using spherical linear interpolation instead of linear interpolation to get the camera from where it currently is to where it wants it to be. I think this would look and feel pretty neat. I also thought about building a path over each hole that the camera was constrained to. The camera could move along this path and with a rule that it always had to keep the ball in view.

I'm not doing either of these because while it would be fun to implement - shipping a product sooner would be more fun.

A Blast from the Past

As Jeff mentioned at the conference there was an earlier version of a ball racing game back in the mid-90s. It never got past the early design phase and the only thing that Marble Blast took from it was the rolling ball concept.

For your amusement here are a couple of pieces of art from the design:

Kevin's concept art

Artist's slightly better version

Can you tell that I'm not an artist?

Aidan

Aidan is my 5 year old son who has had some medical problems throughout his life. For those who have been folling his saga, he is currently doing very well.

This summer his liver numbers started going up again. In September he had a liver biopsy and the result showed that had EBV. He is on an anti-viral med for the next year because EBV can turn into PTLD for guys like Aidan.

Basically, he is very happy and if it wasn't for the blood test you would never know that he has some new medical problems.

Aidan likes Indie Games