Some time later...

Update: Dungeon Number Three is on its way!

I'm finally close to adding a new dungeon to the game.  Yeah, it's been a while.

If anyone is kind enough to try it out for me, the dungeon beta is here.  But if you haven't played the game before, it's probably more sensible to start with the full game (without the new dungeon): Applet or Android.

The new dungeon is a bit bigger than the old ones.  And harder?  Tell me what you think!

Cheers,
Simon

Go ChrisM!

I watched Episode 1.

It was exactly as dumb, trashy, and grating as I'd expected, with anything resembling depth mercilessly edited out.

But there was something quite interesting about watching a developer try to justify their game.  Yeah, we know you've spent a lot of time on it, and you think you're really smart, but seriously, why do expect anyone else to be interested?

I think JGO should use the same approach for deciding if a game is allowed into the 'Featured' section.

Anyway, I known it's too late to matter, but Go Team Eli!

P.S. I always imagined you looked like the orangutan that used to be your avatar pic.

Wow!  This is like Aliens and Predators appearing - IN THE SAME MOVIE!

Videogames are like television programmes: there are lots of different kinds that fill different sorts of gaps in different peoples lives.

Arguing that MMORPGs aren't proper games is like arguing that soap operas aren't proper telly.

Iterate.  Have an idea and try it out.  If it works, build on it.  If it doesn't, be prepared to ditch it (no matter how much code/artwork/whatever it involves).

Interview  (Audio only.  Boo!)

Funny how different his voice is from the one in my head that reads out his posts.

In that case I'm surprised you're so unambitious.  We should be using this thread to build a MMORPG!

Just to be pedantic, I take it we're talking about a fixed frame-rate loop (no 'deltaTime' passed to the logic() function) in plain Java (Java2D).

For ultimate newb-friendliness, how about a demo applet/application that uses the loop so everyone can see how lovely and smooth the final result is?

Week 1: The internet says Ouya is the greatest thing ever.
Week 2: The internet says Ouya is a scam.
Reality: Probably somewhere in between.

As I understand it every Nintendo console has been sold at a profit (with the 3DS being a possible exception following it's price reduction).

But still I'd assume that the plan is for the Ouya to make money from its App/Game store rather than its hardware.

Personally I find the idea of a cheap, fun, hackable console quite appealing (more so than the Raspberry Pi, not that it's quite the same thing) although I wouldn't bet on it being successful.


Very true.  Also many existing games might not look too good when scaled up from a 4-inch screen to a telly.

Just to be clear, I'm not holding those up as examples of "games people want to play".  Quite the opposite.

Common reasons seem to be an out-of-date or broken plug-in, or Javascript not being enabled (since the applet launcher uses it).  Thanks for giving it a try anyway.

Back on topic...
Excellent analogy!  And like playing guitar and singing, programming games is fun, regardless of how much of an audience you have.

I suspect it's more general than that.  Don't expect many people to play your first game, whatever it is.  Or your second, third, fourth, etc.  Get used to the idea that making games that people actually want to play is harder than just making games.

(Or maybe I'm just feeling cynical this morning...)

Twelve hours left.  Tick tock tick tock...

Just for fun we can try putting a number on that.

Two of the games in our little list are Space Invaders/Galaxians clones, but at different ends of the spectrum.

Starbugs is at the 'hobby' end.  Gameplay is very basic, but I'd argue that it's reasonably polished (at least I remember it being a hard slog getting it into a state that I felt was finished).

Titan Attacks on the other hand offers the deluxe, award-winning (I'm too lazy to check but presumably ) alien-shooting experience, and is very obviously 'commercial'.

One took 80 hours to make, the other 1680 hours.

So we could claim that the difference between hobby-standard and commercial-standard is a factor of 20 in the development time.

As I say, just a bit of fun.

Simon

Doh!  I'll have to add a no-Javascript link or something.
Thanks for the info!
Simon

Ah, I see.  What a shame.  I'm using a plugin that's supposed to handle applets correctly - and clearly it's not doing its job.  What OS/browser are you using?  (The plugin does say it requires Javascript, but that's always present these days, isn't it?)

Simon

Lies?  You mean it hangs?

That's annoying.  If it's purely an applet problem then maybe the old webstart link will still work.  (I did see applets hanging on a Windows/IE9 machine recently.  It seemed that the browser plugin was completely broken - even the Oracle "which version of Java do I have" applet was hanging.  Updating the plugin fixed that.)

Ah well, I guess we're all used to applet problems by now.

Thanks for trying it though.  It does rather undermine the original discussion if I'm quoting development times for games no one can play.

Simon

Are you basing this on hard evidence?
I'd sort of assumed that everyone felt that way.

Of course any quoted development times are going to be very, very woolly, and I wouldn't read too much into them.  But I'd argue that things like developer's experience and choice of tools are actually minor factors compared to the overall size/quality of the game being developed.  (And let's assume that we're talking about developers who are sane enough not to spend ten years implementing something that could've been done in ten minutes. )

Man month = 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?

Quick sums:
Titan Attacks: 2080 hours
Ultratron: 1730 hours
Droid Assault: 3120 hours
Revenge of the Titans: 16,640 hours

Just for comparison.

A thought that's been bouncing around my head recently:

Everyone always massively underestimates how long it's going to take to finish making a game.  You start on a project that you think will take a couple of weeks, and after a few months of hard slog all you've got is a crummy-looking tech demo, so you give up and start a different project instead.

What if, when you first have an idea for a game, you could plausibly estimate how long it would take to turn that idea into reality?  How would that affect the projects you take on?

So what I'm thinking is, how about we make a list of example development times for different types of games?  To kick things off, here are some of mine:

Starbugs (a basic Galaxians clone) - 80 hours
Bug Bomb (a basic Scramble clone) - 250 hours
Bunny Golf (a simple mini-golf game) - 450 hours

Note 1.  I'm only thinking about finished games here.  (And by finished I mean properly finished, not just abandoned.)  Knowing how long it takes to make something half-finished isn't that useful when half-finished might actually mean tenth-finished or hundredth-finished.

Note 2.  The number of hours is a very, very rough guess.  I know rough start and end dates for the projects, and I'm assuming 10 hours of work per week (evenings and weekends) which is a balance between a typical productive week (20 hours work) and a typical not-so-productive week (ten minutes work).

Is this sort of thing useful?  Does anyone else want to share development times?

Simon

I just drooled over my keyboard.

Seeing graphics like that still makes me go weak at the knees.  Thirty years ago there was nothing in the universe that looked cooler...


It will prevent a lot of people from playing.  But those same people would never play a 'space trading' game anyway, so it's no loss.

More relevantly, it won't prevent 'indie' fans from playing, and they're the ones most likely to be interested.  (Try posting the demo on TIGSource if you want to test that assertion.)

At the end of the day, I think the graphics look good.  Whether people play the game or not depends exactly on that: the game.

Simon

P.S. That all said, on the question of using pixelated lines versus glowy lines, I'd have a slight leaning towards glowy lines.  They look the way I remember wireframe graphics looking, rather than how they actually looked.  But it's a very small preference.  Pixelated is good too.

Because I'm such a maverick, I'm going to answer without using the table.

Number of games developed:

[Typical development time: hours]
ZX81 (Basic): dozens (games were much simpler back then )
ZX Spectrum (Basic): dozens

[Typical development time: days or weeks]
ZX Spectrum (ASM): 8

[Typical development time: weeks]
PC (ASM/C): 2 (plus assorted graphics demos)

[Typical development time: months or years]
PC (Java): 6 (plus 2 unfinished)
Android (Java): 1 (ported from PC)

Nothing commercial (or even commercial-standard).

Didn't work for me I'm afraid.  Just not meant to be I guess.

"Insufficient space on device" when I tried to download it.  I'll try it again if I can clear enough internal memory (>20meg).

Obviously that's my problem not yours, but I'm just wondering whether you're setting "preferExternal" in the Android manifest.  I've got more than enough external storage to hold the game.  I don't know anything about how Android works, but I'm a little surprised that it's insisting on downloading the app to internal storage.

I managed to watch the trailer at least, and that looked pretty nice.

Simon

Worked fine for me.

There looked to be a slight graphical glitch at the edge of the flower tiles.  I'd guess it's an issue with the texture boundary filtering when scaling down to 320x480 resolution.  Presumably you'll be able to reproduce this by testing at that resolution.  Otherwise I'll have to send you a photo of my phone screen or something so you can see the problem.

Also because of the relatively low resolution, the text on the tutorial screen was a little tricky to read.  Not a big issue, but I guess it wouldn't be difficult to increase the font size a bit.

Overall I really like the game's new look.  The only negative thing I can say is that the "LEVEL UP" effect looks out of place now (it was more suited to the old game style).  But that's a really minor thing, and it may just be me.

Simon

I'll third the idea that the ball is way too difficult to hit at the start of a point.  First time I started the game, I'd lost a point before my fingers had even reached the keys, which doesn't endear me to the game.  At least start the ball at the far end of the court.

Aside from that, I think it's a really slick bit of work (with fantastically cool music).  Maybe 'challenge mode' could be more prominent though - it's very entertaining, but a bit too easy to overlook.

Simon

P.S. I'm not sure that 'Pong' is a great title to use.  It guarantees that if the game ever becomes popular, it will cease to exist.