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| Since I'm writing this game, I should make the first post and explain it by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/17/2013, 9:20pm PDT | ||||
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| I decided to name the game "Cetka," which is Russian for "Grid." When I started the game, I originally gave it the internal name of "Square" until I thought of a name for it. I started on it because I was playing the game Dedale out of the "Bundle in a Box" which includes Jonsey's latest game "Necrotic Drift" (which I have not gotten around to playing, I've just been too busy.)
While playing Dedale, in which it's a series of squares, or sometimes rectangles - two squares linked together - you have several types of squares, regular ones in which you move to a square, "glass squares", which allow you to move off them, and move back, optional squares which can be turned over and become regular squares, and optional squares that become glass squares. You can't backtrack, once you touch a square you can't go back to it (unless it's a glass square). Your objective is to touch all regular squares at least once, and all glass squares twice. Do that and you win the level. Well, that got me interested in doing a game like that. Then, I got a thought. If I'm interested in designing this game, then I'll bet other people would love to be able to design their own levels, so, that got me thinking I should make it so that users could do exactly that if they want to: design their own levels. I then decided on an implementation system to program it in. I must have looked at a half dozen programs for creating games, and none of them could do what I wanted, the biggest thing being that trying to build a game was painful because of inability to edit the game board or the rules so that as I could update what it did. Nothing was available that I could use to create a game system that was workable. So, I was left with using a standard programming language. I decided on using Free Pascal for two reasons, it includes a form editor, same as Delphi and Visual Basic, and because it allows for creating an application for other platforms beyond Microsoft Windows, specifically for Mac and other machines. I wasn't even going to consider C or C++ as a language, trying to write a Windows application in C is an exercise in masochism. Apparently programmers for C, C++ or any derivatives take pride in how difficult it is to create forms and Windows applications or GUI windowed programs using that language. Criticize Visual Basic all you want, you couldn't build applications in C at anywhere the speed a programmer in VB could. Otherwise, I think someone would have spoken about the application prototyping features of Visual C/Visual C++/Visual C#, which I have never heard anyone mention the existence of any such thing. So anyway, once I had decided on the development language, then implementation details had to be decided upon. I worked on it a bit, thinking about what I wanted to accomplish, and realized that the rectangular game spots was too difficult, so I decided to go with single squares only. Then I had to decide on the size of the grid. I went with 10x10. So a particular level could be up to 100 squares. The end would be the same, clear all the regular squares and you won that level and went on to the next one. But I needed a way to test, same as the other game did, if the user had lost, say by trapping themselves in an area they can't get out of with untouched regular or double squares. Figured that out, then I needed to create a game editing tool in order to create the levels. Then I had to figure a way to save the levels. At first, I was going to have it just write the user data, but that meant it was just encoded information, if it wasn't something which might have an image component, people would have to do screen shots to show what their levels looked like. And, by using a standard file format, I could also make it so users could use something ordinary that they could print out their own levels and I wouldn't have to design my own level printer. So I decided to use the SVG file format, and just let them use Firefox to print them out. Because SVG is an XML format, I can store the game data as part of the image, and retrieve it using SVG tools; it also would automatically be validated by the SVG parser, so a corrupted level would be rejected with no work on my part. I don't have to check the map, the parser will do it for me. SVG is also a text-based vector graphic description language, which resizes larger or smaller with nice, crisp resolution at any size; as I noted in a separate article, resize a PNG or JPG or GIF bitmap image and at some point it becomes fuzzy or even unreadable. Then I thought about supporting other languages. I considered the fact that, as I've mentioned here, that the Steam on-line DRM system, offers some statistics about usage of its games, and one thing it has is a large component of users in languages other than English, and, surprisingly enough, one of the biggest is Russian. So I decided on the 5 other most popular languages beyond English, which is Russian, German, French, Italian and Spanish. This covers the major languages of North America and quite possibly the most popular ones I'd be capable of doing translations for (via Google Translate). The size of the game was also an issue. I have to make it something worth playing, so that means probably about 100 levels. As it turned out, by using 50% size printing in Firefox, one could get 6 maps on a page, so I decided to make the game to be, not 10 groups of 10, but 8 groups of 12, plus a bonus group of maybe 4 or maybe a few extras so there would be at least 100 maps total in the game. Something to make the game last at least in the neighborhood of a game that would take at least 5-20 hours to complete. I also thought about the fact if I do something that's fairly good, I could probably sell it at a not very expensive price, say in the 99c-$1.99 range. I mean, I figured, even if I could just sell, say, a couple thousand copies, that would be nice. Maybe it does really well, but if it just does enough to make me a nice chunk of change it would be worth it. It was at that point that I decided I needed an inexpensive way to discover the Macintosh OS X desktop experience, so I decided to buy an inexpensive Mac, and I also discovered that Free Pascal is available for OS X on Power PC, so it will also allow me to figure out what I have to do differently for Mac. (For example, I can't save user information - like what their default language is - in the Registry, since Macs don't have a registry, and so on. I think Linux uses files in a subdirectory of /etc, I'd have to look at what the Linux Standard Base rules say to use for application configuration files.) Then I had to stop for a while because this place is so craploaded I can't find anything and I had to stop for a week to do spring cleaning so I can find things. I still have work to do but it's fixed enough that at least I'm not blocked in getting things accomplished, if I need a spyglass, pair of scissors, batteries for my cameras or the battery charger I can find them. Then I took time off to go to FOSE which I've been looking forward to for weeks. Then once I get to the point that I've gotten the application finished I can consider finding an inexpensive Intel-based Mac and probably recompile for that without too much work to port over to the new machine. Possibly to other systems, such as Android. I'll probably want to find from 3-5 people to playtest Cetka and tell me about problems. When I get that far, I'll post a request. You don't get any money for doing playtesting, I don't have money to seriously pay people, but you get a free copy of the game, a chance to play it and try it out before anyone else not a tester, and if you're interested, you get your name or your handle in the credits as a tester. Plus I will listen to comments since it's the people who play it and (potentially) would be willing to pay for it who are the ones I have to be concerned about, not necessarily what I think is the right things to do. Like how big the teaser (free) version is going to be, my guess is probably 8 levels, grid 1 of the 12 main grids, and whether some grids are too complicated. One of the things that got me interested in doing my own game was that the guy who wrote the original game Dedale, which has a page on Facebook, has had several weeks and still hasn't posted any information on how to get past the block in a couple of levels, nothing beyond the original hint that comes with the game. (Oh yeah, Cetka will also have a hint system, too. You can ask for a hint in which I give a suggested place to start.) |
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