Blog for Jared Coliadis at GarageGames.com

I'm still here...again.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-08-14T06:20:40+00:00

Oh my. I suppose I should start with a large apology. My free time this summer has been eaten up mostly by work and by a computer graphics research project. Both involve large amounts of coding over large periods of time, and for the first time my normally code-fiending self has been too physically and mentally tired to be able to work on the Adventure Core/Issue #37 with much effort.

With the new version of TGB all but eliminating the old way I handle level-loading (which is a good thing!), it finally is time to approach the beast of recoding to conform with the new system. This is really just a large amount of small changes, but it adds up pretty quickly. In the end though, it will be much cleaner, memory-friendly, and time-saving.

My goal was to get a demo out by the end of summer, but as of right now, it'll be close. My computer graphics research has been submitted and I can feel my motivation rise again. The top-end *works*, but it does not work completely to my liking. I do not want to release anything until it meets my high standards.

I suppose now is a good a time as ever to announce our studio's name. We previously considered Nevo Games, but it actually turns out that there is already a product called a Nevo. After some discussion, our studio's official name is Isomorphic Entertainment. It's a long name, but it flows off the tongue well and relates to one of my personal philosophies of game design. We do have a website, but besides a core Wordpress and phpBB installation, it hasn't been touched yet. If you do want to sign up on our forum, you can at our phpBB site, and I will gladly answer any questions you may have.

So that this .plan isn't a complete waste of time, here 2 out of several additional places you will encounter in Issue #37:

The City Museum

The School's Office

On a semi-unrelated note, I was learning TGB's network code last month. To test it out, I wrote a networked version of the first game I created to learn Torquescript, a version of Mancala. If anyone is interested in playing a prototype version, let me know and I'll give you a copy to try out.

I suppose I am back in action now, and hope to create great things.

Until next time,
/Jared.

P.S.: I've been getting more and more interested in Homebrew game development on the Nintendo DS. If anyone here has any experience with it, I'd be interested in any pointers or other advice.

I'm still here.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-05-15T06:48:14+00:00

Hello everybody.

I realize I've been a bit of a recluse recently, and I apologize. As usual, school and work are keeping my development schedule tight. My OpenGL class is a ton of fun though, and if I'm lucky I'll be able to do some undergrad graphics research over the summer under my professor. I also discovered that I'll most likely be graduating a bit earlier than I thought I was going to (I planned for 2 years from now, but it'll probably be just over a year), so I should start preparing myself to enter the "real world" pretty soon. My ideal is to get a respectable gamedev job right out of college, but if that doesn't work out I'll continue my indie dev time on the side while working at a "real" Computer Science related job.

Anyhow, I recently ported the Adventure Core to TGB Beta 3. There were a couple minor tweaks that needed to be done, but it was a mostly flawless port (Thanks again GG!). Now, since the Adventure Core has been in development since 1.0.2, it currently has a heavy reliance on TileMaps and a several algorithms that were written when I was still learning TorqueScript. Now that I have access to the Level Editor scripts, I've started the process of reverse engineering the Level Editor to allow users to drag and drop the objects that the Adventure Core is reliant on directly from the Level Editor sidebar. This will of course also require me to make pretty significant modifications to my current code to load .t2d files instead of TileMaps. I'm hoping it'll be a smooth transition, since using the Level Editor will both increase the user-friendliness of creating levels and take away a lot of the overhead that TileMaps are currently supplying.

In addition to my optimizations, one of the last "little" features I added one night was automatic shadow generation underneath the characters. A "light source" can be defined at any point in a level, and all of the characters in the scene will have a shadow underneath them that changes size and direction as they move closer/further to the light source. Since this is 2D and I'm not doing any ray-tracing or any "real" calculation like that, it's just an estimation. Regardless, it adds a nice little touch and was fun to write to break out of the monotony of code restructuring/GUI touch-ups.

Ooh...shadows.

As for now, I'm still shooting for mid-summer for a playable demo of Issue #37 and at least a beta of the Adventure Core to be released. This project has been a great experience so far, and hopefully in the end our feet will be a few steps closer to the door.

I just need to make sure my shoes are tied.
/Jared

GIDj: SpaceChase

Jared Coliadis — 2006-04-10T06:35:50+00:00

I actually had some spare time this weekend, so I figured that I would take a break from my current development to work on a Game in a Day. This is going to be brief because I need to get to bed. In the simplest terms, my game is a top-down space shooter. The player can collect a pseudo powerup "currency" to acquire powerups. When a powerup is collected, the GUI will say what the player can trade in exchange. Of course, the more items the player collects, the better his powerup can be. I'll explain the process in more detail later if anyone would like, but again I need to get some sleep.

Controls:
WASD : movement
Space: Fire lasers
E: Fire Tailgun
C: Cash In powerup "currency" for a powerup.

Anyhow, try it out here. Obviously, there needs to be a lot of polish, namely in the front-end (you have to alt-f4 to quit), and there are a couple bugs around, but this was done in about 15 hours.

Let me know your feedback,
/Jared

Motivation, Reaching that last 25%, and plans for the future.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-04-04T05:36:37+00:00

Hello again. I flew down to Florida a week ago to visit my parents on my Spring break from school. For my flight, I brought along the latest issue of Wired which happened to be a special issue on games edited by Will Wright. As I'm sure most of you know, Will Wright is one of the few designers out there who is truly challenging how games should be approached. His article was fascinating and very motivating to me as an aspiring game designer. I really think that our industry is about to have a renaissance of sorts within the next 5 years. The focus will hopefully drop from graphics and shift towards actual innovating game designs.

I do have a new game idea still in the design stages. From playing the game in my head and with my near archive-like knowledge of computer/video games to compare it to, I think I have a winner on my hands, er, in my head. I do obviously want to get a prototype going before I get too excited about it, but I've run the concept across a few other people (including 2 people that I sat next to on the plane) and recieved very positive responses. If my prototype is as fun as my head plays it out to be (I know that doesn't happen often, I've tried it one too many times, but I have a good feeling about this one), I'll be sure to go into great detail about it in the future.

In other news, the T2D(I'm still not used to the new name) Adventure Core is inches away from being feature complete. I ported it to the 1.1 Beta 2 but there have been some odd glitches in the porting process. I'm sure it'll straighten out soon. Anyhow, there are only a couple more features to add and my first pass on the core will be complete! Of course, this is the mirage stage of any Software Engineering. Once the first pass is finished, I have to go over every single thing I wrote and make it work better. I've also been drafting a list of 2nd pass features I'd like to add. My current goal for the core is mid-Summer time. As for "Issue #37" itself? It's going, but it's going slower than the core development (and the core devtime is much slower than I would like it to be). Short answer? Our whole devteam is made up of 3rd year college students; we don't have much time on our hands. Still, I'd like a demo to be out at approximately the same time as the core.

Sorry, no new pictures this .plan, but maybe we can have a nice discussion here instead? How about a prompt inspired by the Will Wright article: How do we allow players to feel like they have a "free will" to explore as wide of a possibility space as they would like but without making the world around them seem generic or filled with artificial constraints? What games have come close to doing this, and how could they have improved? Most importantly, how can such a design be realistically executed?

Here's to the future,
/Jared

Interfaces, Inspiration, Intrigue, and Intent.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-02-19T11:13:05+00:00

Hello everybody. My past few weeks have been swamped mostly by midterm after midterm after project after midterm at school and getting ready for beta testing our application at work. I've also been gaining an interest in the game Go, but I am of no actual skill just yet. Even with all of the work laid on top of me, I've made some pretty significant steps in the Adventure Core.

This section has nothing to do with the Adventure Core

Before I get to that, I want to talk about some personal motivation/inspiration that has come to me in several forms recently. I have an ever increasing realization that game design/programming is what I want to do with my life. Not only do I want to do it, I'm discovering that I am getting pretty decent at it. Normally, every person that I show a personal project of mine (whether it be a program, song, or other random work I have done) responds with as little enthusiasm as it takes to not make me feel bad. This current undertaking of mine is a radical exception. Everyone I've demonstrated it to is extremely impressed with my work so far and is excited to see how it progresses. I really am starting to be confident in my work (for once) and will hopefully continue to increase my skills to create manageable, larger-scaled games.

I recently purchased the Mega Man X Collection on Gamecube, and it got me thinking back to my Mega Man obsession I once had as a kid. Mega Man 2 was the first game I had played that made me look into how games are made. I was hooked on the game and was fascinated by every little element of it: the open-ended level selection, the excellent music throughout, the creative enemy/level designs, etc.

Anyhow, this continued into thinking of what games have kept me interested in games. Why is it that I am sticking with games, even though I'm dissapointed by so many every year? Immediately, the first game that popped in my head was "Tribes". I've been a Tribes junkie since early 1999 and have yet to play a multplayer game with such perfection ever since. There have been a frenzy of rumors on Tribalwar the past couple of days about a Tech Demo GG is showing off at GDC that is very Tribes inspired. I can honestly say that I was more excited about this rumor than I have been about most games in the past few years. Other games that have kept me interested in games and have kept me interested in game design are Fallout, System Shock 2, SimCity 2000, TIE Fighter, pretty much every Lucasarts adventure game, and a few other classics.

Where am I going with this? I know that there are some absolutely amazing game designs out there that still stand up to their excellence today. Behind those amazing game designs are amazing game designers. If anyone has heard Will Wright give a lecture on game design, he knows exactly what is going on in his games on every single level imaginable. I have been studying the art of game design on a personal level for a few years now. I've begun to take some notes on some ideas I have for what could be my next project once Issue 37 is complete. If anyone wants to talk to me about my current idea or about game design in general, go ahead and email me at nevogames *at* gmail.com.

This section is about the Adventure Core.

So anyhow, my recent updates. The largest and most noticable update is the brand new GUI to help with level creation. Heavily relying on Justin Dujardin's Tab Book gui control, the interface is clean, informative, and powerful! There still is a lot of tweaking/functionality/features/aesthetics to finish, but it's looking nice in its current state. Bringing up the menu will display this screen:

The currently loaded level will automatically populate the related data on the GUI. This initial menu is used for tweaking general properties about the level. Nothing too fancy, but if you notice the "New Level" and "Save World" buttons, those are functioning. "New Level" will allow you to quickly generate the .map file based off of a template and setting your own background/foreground via a menu. It's enough to get your characters set up, then can be tweaked with all of the layers already placed down using the tile editor. "Save World" will save all of the loaded levels. characters, items and completed goals into one file for easy file structuring.

Saving the levels are cool I guess, but how do I manage game content? How can I keep everything in context with the story?

This is a fun one. It took a little messing around with, but once again Action Sequences save the day! As you can (sort of) see in this picture, there will be a list of goals on the left side of the gui. The developer can then select a goal and set what actually happens when a goal is completed. The next time the level is loaded, any goals that have been completed since the player last visited the location will be updated according to the settings made in this (and the next) menu. If you would want to just write a function in script to handle the call instead of (or additionally to) the Action Sequence editor, you can just specify the name of the function. Otherwise, you can use this...

...and make that line-by-line uninteresting script really, really easy to write. Each tab has a similar button layout to the one shown in the image, but that mindless but necessary instructional code can be made quickly, even allowing specific edits if at all necessary. This normally painful to write code will be the bulk of the game content work, but hopefully the ActionSequence editor will make it a lot less painful.

There are at least 1-2 major hurdles and about 30-50 lesser hurdles to jump before I can consider the Adventure Core near completion. Finals are coming up in a few weeks, so I don't know how much time I'll have to dedicate. I'll still be plugging away at it, but my pace probably won't be as fast as I would like.

Happy pre-emptive President's Day!
/Jared

Streamlining! Streamlining. Streamlining?

Jared Coliadis — 2006-01-29T07:37:28+00:00

Hello again. It's been a couple weeks and I've only been able to poke around for a couple days at my code. Even so, I've made a few significant steps in the T2D Adventure Core.

First and foremost, levels can be dynamically loaded/unloaded without losing the contents of the level. For example, let's say the game has a character and two items inside a bedroom, say called "shadyGuy", "blueKey" and "oldBook". After setting up the proper datablocks, all that needs to be coded is:

level("bedroom").load();
character("shadyGuy").load();
item("blueKey").load();
item("oldBook").load();

Then, any code relating to the t2dSceneObject itself can just be called from a member variable. All object properties, such as scaling the sprites, dialog boxes, and all state data is automatically handled. Say now that the player character leaves the area through a (now functioning) door. All of the current level objects are removed from the scene and the new stage and all of its characters are loaded, but no worries! Whenever the character re-enters the original scene, everything is back exactly where it was before! The programmer doesn't need to track any positional/logical data of the objects in the current scene, it is all automatically handled by the Adventure Core. This is also the first step to saving/loading the complete game state to/from a file.

I have set an intentional limitation to this though. All characters and items can only exist in one location at a time. This means that if any character moves to a new scene, he is not considered a part of the old scene anymore. The reasoning of this limitation is, in fact, to reduce continuity errors in the game story. It prevents a programmer from accidently leaving a character in two different game locations at a certain time when the player travels between the two areas. Also, this will mean that each game item doesn't have any clones cropping up if an item would have to change locations or is part of the player's inventory.

I've been working hard on the Adventure Core to make actual content creation extremely simple on the end coder. Besides the effortless loading/sequencing, I'm trying to keep as much of the object data available to the programmer as possible with little to no modification to suit their specific game. I've been getting the code simple enough now that I think it's becoming more and more feasible to have a GUI to even handle most of the code for content creation. No promises yet, but it's looking pretty good.

The Adventure Core still has a number of large hurdles to pass that I have yet to even attempt to cross. I think the largest of these hurdles will be the dialog trees. I am trying to keep the core as 100% script, so a script-based tree-algorithm might be a bit too straining on the engine and on me when a simpler solution probably exists. I still have a bit of research to do here, but I'll figure something out. Another large task that I think I have an idea to approach is changing the game context throughout the game based off of various events ingame. I want this to be more powerful than a simple solution will allow, but like I said, I think I have a solution in my head. I haven't touched the inventory yet still, but it looks to be pretty simple.

So overall, I'm getting more and more impressed with the Adventure Core, but there are still a number of things to accomplish. To conclude, here's the newest subtle feature. Hovering over any game object will reveal it's name or destination. The .jpg compression wasn't friendly to the text, but it says "Comic Book Store" on it. Also if you notice, I re-scanned the level/character and stopped chickening out about the texture size. It looks nice in the new high-resolution. I keep getting giddy while working on this. Monica (our artist) hit the style for Issue #37 perfectly. The actual game is still waiting for the Adventure Core to be completed, but using the few art assets she's supplied makes me happy.

It doesn't look that much different gameplay-wise from my last few .plans, but there is so much going on behind the scenes that is running the show. It's like how I describe to computer illiterate people what it is that programmers do. "You know how you push a button, some magic things happen, and then you have the information you need? I work the magic."

I hope I'm not the only one excited about this,
/Jared

Issue #37/T2D Adventure Core Update #3.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-01-12T06:12:55+00:00

Hello again. The adventure core has made a little more progress this week, but still has a decent way to go.

Item selection has become relatively stable mostly due to ActionSequence objects. A stream of actions can occur from any one single action, and it's beautiful in its simplicity. The player can't actually pick up the objects just yet (the inventory system has yet to be started), but any item can have any number of interactions with the player (we plan on only using 3 for most objects in Issue #37).

I've begun the process of level transitions, and I must say that Simsets are wonderful things. Any character/item/level can be referenced at any time with

character("grandma");
item("book");
level("meetingRoom");

with no effort from the end user, allowing even easier ways to call occasionally complex objects.

Pathfinding still has a few kinks in it, but it gets the job done. It will find a path 99 times out of 100, but sometimes it gets really twitchy in the avoidence code around obstructions. It's not worth using too complex of an algorithm (A*) in script as that creates too much overhead for how little "real" pathfinding the characters need to make.

Finally, the more subtle but nice addition of the week: dynamic dialog box resizing. If the character says a mouthful, the dialog box will never be too small to be able to handle the text.

As for the game itself, our writer is becoming intimidated at the size of the project and doesn't think she'll be able to meet deadlines. We're going to have a team meeting soon to discuss what we can do to help, but I also need to figure out what I should do as a team leader. I don't want to press too hard and have her back out under pressure, but I also can't let her work at any pace she wants or else the writing will slip behind, leaving a bottleneck in the development cycle. Hopefully the meeting will come up with a solution.

Here is the screenshot of the week(or so). You can see the action boxes for the object. They actually rotate around the cursor (by accident, but it looks interesting) when the player holds down RMB, then dissapear when either an action is selected or RMB is let go.

Ancient history awaits me in 7 hours, so time for bed.
/Jared

Issue #37/T2D Adventure Core .plan #2.

Jared Coliadis — 2006-01-04T06:52:40+00:00

I'll try to keep this short since I have to be at class in 8 hours, and I need to start sleeping before then.

In case you missed my last plan, I'm the lead developer of a T2D-powered point-and-click adventure game. In addition to the game itself, I'll make the front-end tools available if the community has a demand for it. Anyhow, my first progress report...

The front-end process is going rather smoothly, but I've just been busy with numerous other things to dedicate entire days to it right now.

I'm making sure that the levels are as painless as possible to create. All that a developer needs to do to make a room work with the tools is dedicate a layer of collisions for where the characters can't walk, a layer defining what objects in the playing field the characters should maneuver around, and a layer to specify where to place nodes for pathfinding.

Characters are defined with a single call, with just a parameter specifying what group of imagemaps to use. All a developer needs to do is use my naming scheme for animations (e.g. grandmaLeft, grandmaTalk, etc...) and it will handle the rest. If there are other tweaks such as walking speed and other minor things that need to be changed, they are only a call away. Each character gets their own dialog box as well, and it's just as simple as:

%grandma.speakLine("How's it going?");

to have it handle the animations, dialog box, and other minor tasks.

I have also developed a task queuing system, which I call ActionSequence objects. Each character is assigned one, and adding an action to the queue is as easy as:

%grandma.addLine("What's this?", 3000);
%grandma.addLine("That's not what I ordered...", 4000);
%grandma.addMove(%item.getPosition(), 10000);
%grandma.startSequence();

and all of the actions are done with the delay specified in the second parameter. If the player is the type who likes to skip dialog fast, he can easily skip lines by clicking the mouse and the ActionSequence still executes properly.

Item selection is my most recent task and ActionSequence objects are making it a breeze. I can see broad potential for these objects throughout pretty much any game that want scripted sequences, or multiple actions performed.

A nice subtle effect I've automated as well is sprite scaling. A scene has a user-defined value to how largely the characters will scale their size based off of their y-position. It gives a really nice pseudo-3D effect, and is automatically handled by any characters.

Next on the agenda is transitioning between scenes, starting up the inventory system, and fixing some more pathfinding bugs. Hopefully these tools will soon be stable enough to actually start development on actual game content.

This picture doesn't really show much of what is going on, but this level instance was created with just with a few tweaks in the tile editor and approximately 10 lines of level specific code.

I'll try to keep everyone updated,
/Jared

Thursday Dec 15 7:15

Jared Coliadis — 2005-12-15T07:15:10+00:00

Official announcement of both the first title from Nevo Games: Issue #37, and the T2D Adventure Core.

After several months of pre-production planning/writing, Nevo Games (name pending) is proud to announce that production has begun on our T2D point-and-click adventure game Issue #37. We are currently estimating approximately a year of development time, but our progress has been promising so far.

If anyone is fimiliar with the classic Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games, (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, The Dig, etc.) you'll be excited to hear that these gaming classics are our greatest inspiration. While SCUMM and similar engines are available as freeware, these platforms are very dated. We wanted non-pixelated graphics and a lot of flexibility, so I have taken it upon myself to create the T2D Adventure Core (name also pending) to power Issue #37.

So, what's the T2D Adventure Core consist of?
This is my first draft of what the Adventure Core will contain. It lists what streamlined modifications I think will be needed to simplify the development cycle of Issue #37, or any other point-and-click adventure games. Note that this is a first draft, and features may be added/cut as development/testing is perfomed.

Yes, I do plan on keeping this as abstract as I can so other games can use these tools easily. If there is enough of a demand for it, (or if GG might be interested in supporting it, ;) ) I might release it as a pack when it is stable enough to use.

First Draft Specifications

Navigation

Pathfinding
Scene Transitions
Item Selection
Inventory

Dialog

Transitioning multiple statements
Response Options
Altering Options depending on events/response given
Removing Responses that have become irrelevant
Keeping conversation in context!
Sub-dialogs within a dialog (e.g. multiple responses to a question that can be answered multiple times)
Dialog as a response to an action
UI to create conversations

Scripted Sequences

Timing
Limiting player control, but allowing him to skip dialogue
Possible UI to create scripted sequences
Keeping code simple for end programmer

Game State

Objective Triggers
Conversation Triggers
Item Triggers
Keeping state data clean and in context

Game World

Animated Objects (mostly players and anything that moves)
Inventory Item (Anything that can be stored in the inventory)
World Item (Switches and other puzzle-ish interactive items)
Map
Locational Data (Level Data and World Data)
Streamlined Saving/Loading
Spawning/Destroying objects

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the Adventure Core sounds neat, but what's this game you were talking about?

Very Brief Issue #37 Synopsis

A group of comic-book and science obsessed teenagers are dedicated to find the rarest issue of their favorite comic book series. They must earn the rest of the money they need through jobs, favors, and other mischevious deeds. Conflict brews when they face a rival comic-book gang in pursuit of the same coveted item. All of this, and much, much more just to somehow locate this final comic of their favorite scientist super-hero.

Our artist is creating some wonderful work for us so far, and we may pick up a second artist to handle animations and other art.

Here is some early concept art of a few characters...

...and here are some of her amazing environments she's been creating...
The meeting room...

A little sister's room...

And finally, we have our first animated character. This is the main character's grandma.

Like I said, we're all very excited about this project. Our current goal to shoot for is next year's IGF student showcase, but if we are continually making good progress, we might even enter in the "official" IGF competition instead.

I'd love to hear what the community has to say about our project, so feel free to ask comments/questions/etc.

Thanks for reading,
/Jared

Wednesday Oct 26 15:59

Jared Coliadis — 2005-10-26T15:59:03+00:00

So it's been quite some time since I've last updated. My Computer Science and Engineering classes are only getting more intense, although I hear that one of my current classes is as busy as it gets. (Building my own x86 assembler/linker/loader from scratch, woo!) I've been spending literally every single minute of every weekend that I am awake in the school's computer lab working on this school project with my team, but we're tredding through it slowly. On the other hand, my Artificial Intelligence class is teaching me a lot of the algorithms that I hear about in game design but never got around to figuring out on my own (A*, genetic algorithms, priority searching, etc.). In addition to this large demand on schoolwork, I have also picked up a web development job for an agency in the Ohio government. It's a pretty nice job and will hopefully help as a good start into a CSE career.

Anyway, all this burden placed on me has greatly crippled any progress on my T2D projects, even though I have come up with some ideas/planning for some. I can't wait for my workload to slow down so I can actually get some progress on my "main" project, a point-and-click adventure game in sort of a Lucasarts-ish style, but I am planning on picking up a second programmer to increase the development team to 4 (making it 2 programmers, 1 artist, 1 writer) and taking an entire year to develop it hopefully in time for NEXT year's IGF student presentation. I think a year should be plenty of time to make it a near professional length, rather polished, and hopefully bug-free presentable game as opposed to the original plan of 3.5 months to make a demo-length version. Our writer and artist are collaborating pretty well and I might be able to show some concept art soon if they think it's presentable/ready to show to the public.

In other news, I recieved a random message from someone I've never talked to before and have no affiliations with this community about how they enjoy my T2D Mancala game I made quite a while ago. I got a great feeling from the complement, and it's motivating me to come up with new projects. I have a 2-player T2D game lined up, but in very very early stages that I might talk about more in future .plans if some progress comes out of it.

Well, I'm off to physics. Woo.

/Jared