Frog The Door Games

You might be wondering what's up with Vintage Hero and rest assured, it's still in the development pipeline. After picking up the HTC Trophy, I started messing with Silverlight on Windows Phone 7. The result is a new game I'll be releasing very soon called Cryptogram.

Based on the classic puzzle game that uses a substitution cipher to obfuscate a quote or phrase, uncover the solution by swapping an encrypted letter for the correct letter. When all the letters have been solved, the phrase becomes clear.

Here's a few screenshots of the game in action. Click to enlarge.

Expect Cryptogram to be released on the Windows Phone Marketplace soon!

While making the Silverlight app served as a good diversion to recharge my batteries, work on Vintage Hero will resume full time. Being a more complex game with a lot of content, it takes time to design and make all the parts I need to put in the game. But I am eager to get back to it as it is a project close to my heart and I want nothing more than to see people playing it. Once work commences, I'll gather what I need to put together the promised video of progress on the game. In the meantime, if you have a Windows Phone, look for the new app soon. I'll let you know when it's out.

Let's face it. Rumble and XNA haven't had the best history. I still hear people refer to "massage games" and such when people talk about Xbox Live Indies, but there are many out there who can now look past the sea of undesirables and see the potential and successful. It's come a long way since it's innocent beginnings. Yet many developers still shy away from utilizing force feedback and some that do, use it in a brute force kind of way that can annoy the player. Even some AAA titles seem to just set the motors at full blast for three seconds when you crash off the road. Ugh. When it comes to rumble, subtle is the way to go.

Before I go on, I'd like to say that the following code is free to use in your game and is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License with one caveat. You can not use this component in a game where the sole purpose is to vibrate the controller. You cannot use this for a "massage game" or any other where the purpose of the application is rumble based. You can only use it to enhance existing gameplay where otherwise, not having rumble will not change the objective of the game. Hate that I have to say it, but it needs to be said.

Here I've implemented a time dependent, dynamic based rumble component. I've played many indie games that accidentally leave the motors running until I quit to the dashboard. You can get around this by using time based triggers. When an event happens that requires force feedback (say a collision) just add a new rumble for a set amount of time and when the times up, the rumble stops.

To make things subtle I use the idea of dynamics. Since sound is a vibration, we can use it as an example in which to compare. In music, dynamics are control over the volume of the sound, or intensity of the vibration. By varying the dynamics over time, I could apply a "shape" to the controller's rumble. I've added the ability to change to different rumble shapes by calling them by name, such as binary (on/off), linear (start at minimum and increase to maximum over time) or parabolic (fade in to maximum by time/2 and fade out to minimum by time).

Since joining Twitter I've been uploading some new screens of Vintage Hero to Twitpic. If you follow me, you might have noticed some of these tweets are marked with a #screenshotsaturday hashtag. Screen Shot Saturday is part of an independent initiative that collects images game developers post to twitter on Saturdays using the hashtag. Here are some of the ones I've posted as well some concept art for the cutscenes.

The first update for Space Racer has hit the marketplace. The next time you play the game the patch will automatically install. Lot's of new features this time around including:
-3 new bonus tracks unlocked when all 12 main tracks are beaten.
-Switch between normal and hard difficulties in single player mode at the track select screen.
-When playing 2-player, the loser won't get bumped out after the first race when "Play All" is selected for the circuit.
-You can now pick the same ship to race with in 2-player mode.
-New trial version is a better representation of how the game plays.
-You'll see a congratulations screen after beating all twelve tracks.

Thanks to all who played the game and I hope these changes make the experience more enjoyable. I'll be working at break-neck speed on Old School Hero for the next few weeks and hope to get some new video up soon. I also have some blog ideas to write up on the technical side, including how I did the faux 3-D effect of two sprite circling each other on the congrats screen in Space Racer and the as promised Tile Ripper for tile based games. I'd also like to share some press the new game's received, including being picked by IndieGames.com as one of the best of January's Xbox Indies! Till then...

Looking at the new samples on the creators.xna.com I see they have an example for using virtual thumb sticks in a Windows Phone 7 game. I like it, but I decided I wanted a version with the thumbs sticks fixed in place, much like you'd see in an iPhone shooter like Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies. Here's a screen of the result.

The first thing I decided was to not make the Virtual Thumbstick class static, but instead a DrawableGameComponet. While not consistent with other XNA input implementations, it allows you to add one or more thumbsticks to the list of components and let them load, draw and update without calling any methods. You can simply look at the thumbstick position, see if it's greater than zero, and determine what to do with it when it is.

Alawishus Pixel is in playtest and getting some great feedback. It'll be a much better game because of it. When I first thought of the idea for the game, I decided to grab a pencil and paper instead of the keyboard and mouse. Even though I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, having thoughts and ideas on paper made all the difference for me. At least from the start it was clear to me the gameplay could stand as an allegory to the Sisyphus story.

After a couple of failed attempts I settled on a draft of the look of Alawishus. I originally wanted him 16 pixels high. Since the tiles in the game were also 16 pixels high, the plan was to let him and the block fit into those tile high small spaces. After drawing the pixel art I decided it wasn't enough detail for a character that the player will be staring at for 40 levels, so I upped the height to one and half tiles high and the width to one tile wide. It worked well since keeping the block one tile high allowed puzzle opportunities for the block to go where Alawishus couldn't.

Some more things to do:
-Trial Mode
-Saving is implemented, but not fully tested.
-Redo some bitmap fonts so they look better.
-Some small sections of music and FX need to be finished.
-"De-brown" the graphics in the first several levels.
-Redraw the exit doors for the later levels.

On another note, I squashed an annoying bug that's been bothering me for a while. Not long ago I noticed the game would drop a bunch of frames right after a load. My initial though was "obviously, the garbage collector." Profiling revealed no problem at all in the GC. Nothing but a stray string here and there was being allocated after loading all the assets. I decided to ignore it for as long as could and instead just focus on the game.

Frog The Door's first commercial game is almost done. A few things to finish up before release:
-Scripting (tutorials and story)
-Finish up Music/FX
-Prolog/Epilog
-Polish (including rumble, timing and graphical tweeks, some minor bugs)
And on the community side:
-Evil/Not so Evil checklist and Indie games best practices.
-Playtest