Game 6: "Adventure Game" Released

Game #6 - Adventure Game - is done! This is our first original game, inspired by an iOS hit game Device 6. Making an original game is hard. It's like trying to find your way from the middle of a desert, no landmarks, all directions looking the same. In retrospect a great game seems obvious, but finding that right set of features is hard. We spent many hours discussing the plot, the puzzles, the art style, and there was often no way to know how well something works without building it and testing in a prototype. That takes a lot of time. Our productivity was one day of effort to make one minute of gameplay, the lowest of all the games we made.

Here is a video:

I am releasing the code with an open source license. The art and the sounds are for your personal use only.

We wanted to make an atmospheric adventure game and sound is very important for creating the atmosphere. We used Audacity software to record and edit the voiceovers and the sounds. Syncing the voiceovers to the text was hard, I got it only approximately right. Doing it well would require special files formats like those used for subtitles.

The organizer in me was not happy with this game. Everything is a one-off: each puzzle appears once, the special effects appear once, there is little that can be factored out into general classes or routines. The code does not have the beauty of simple elegance. But it works, and at the end that's what matters.

Game #5: "Word Origami" Released!

Game #5 - Word Origami - is done. In fact, it was done two weeks ago, but then my laptop broke, and notwithstanding all the virtues of living on Bali, replacing a Mac turned out to be a long affair.

We had a great time developing this game, and it's one of the games we eventually want to polish up for the full release. Here is a video:

As before, I am releasing the code with an open source license. The art and the sounds are for your personal use only.

There were three parts to making this game: the UI, the board creation and the multiplayer. For UI Liza did a fantastic job coming up with an original design. We started with a boring looking variation on Ruzzle and iterated on it every day to make it beautiful. It can still use a few more iterations, but we are really happy with how it looks already. On my side, coding so much UI wasn't as tedious as I imagined. I reused quite a bit of code from our prior games, - the camera module, the scenes architecture. This is a general pattern, in every subsequent game I reuse more and more modules from prior games, to the point where some kind of general game architecture is starting to emerge. I have wondered why is there no framework for Corona that does for games what Rails did for web apps?

As for the board creation, there is secret sauce to it. If you compare other games in this genre such as Scramble with Friends to Wurdle, you will notice that the former has good boards with lots of words that are fun to play, while the latter has poor boards with few words. The secret is in the board design - it looks random, but it isn't. If you are curious how to do it, you will have to study my code :) I wrote a short Ruby script to generate good boards with lots of words. And that brings another point - word games live and die by the quality of their dictionaries. A day of googling showed that there are several public domain dictionaries, including the official Scrabble dictionary. The most popular public domain dictionary among word games seems to be ENABLE2K.

The last moving part we needed for Word Origami was the multiplayer piece. This is our first game with multiplayer so there was a lot of learning for me. There are a number of options available: iOS/Android game centers or Parse and others of its ilk or DIY server. The built-in game centers are the easiest to implement, but I wanted a cross platform solution. So I took Parse out for a test drive. It went well, in less than an hour I got the game to load a board from the server. But then I started implementing the full enchilada with the user signup, login, match-making and didn't finish by Sunday (so the demo and the source code don't any networking code). It would take a few more days to complete the multiplayer code.

So far Word Origami turned out to be our favorite game. One day we want to come back to it and take it all the way to a commercial release.