waves

Waves Demo. Maybe. Possibly.

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So Waves is being made using UDK and it turns out that Epic are doing a promotional thing with IndieDB specifically for UDK games.

Now if you aren’t up to date with the UDK indie scene I’ll go over it for you. It’s got more in common with a modding community than a games development one. That is to say that more weapon renders get released to the public than evidence of actual gameplay so I’m in with a shot for this competition.

Now the problem is this: It requires that entrants release a public demo. They’ll accept private demos for the judging phase but if you win you have to release a public demo. This sucks as it would force me to release a demo of a game that I know isn’t finished and not in a state I consider ready for public consumption*.

So here is what we’re going to do. If you really want to play a buggy, unfinished unbalanced and 100% Work-in-Progress game that hasn’t even reached what I consider to be alpha yet then you need to let me know.

The best way is to follow @squidinabox on twitter.

If I hit 1000 followers by Monday the 6th then I will release a public demo of Waves that shows off essentially the first 3 minutes of the game in score attack mode. That’s basically up to the big cube boss. Defeat him and the round will end.

Essentially this:

In the final game Score Attack would just keep going until you run out of lives and there are going to be Time Attack, Practice and Challenge (aka levels, about 20 of them at least) modes in the full game with more enemies and some new mechanics.

If I don’t hit 1000 followers by Monday… well maybe. If you’re good.

* Yes I know it looks finished but believe me it isn’t.

Knowing what “Done” looks like

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It’s important to know what “Done” looks like. It’s a phrase one of my friends uses when talking about programming.

So far the development of Waves has been in what I would consider a pre-production phase. I know that alot of people think it looks finished because it’s graphically very polished but the reality is that while I could release what I have now to the world I wouldn’t be proud of the result. It’s not done yet.

I’ve actually spent the last few weeks figuring out what “Done” looks like and I now have a list of everything I need to do to ensure that I can hit it.

It’s a big list and as I work through the tasks it will only get bigger. That’s just how lists work.

This at last means that I am confident about what will actually be in Waves when it gets released for the first time since I started. If I had sat down at the start and designed an Arena Shooter then what I designed would not be what Waves has become and this would be bad. It would be far more generic and much less interesting. I’d be ticking off genre tropes on a list rather than finding out what works and why some things are fun and others aren’t.

Waves won’t be coming out this year. I’m confident of this. With only about 6 weeks left in the year to realistically get anything done it means that the first beta version won’t happen until sometime in January next year at the earliest.

Sadly the part that is going to take the longest time is as always going to be the GUI. I hate doing the GUI so if you happen to be an amazing (and cheap!) Flash designer then you might be able to help with that. Feel free to get in touch if that’s the case.

It’s a good feeling knowing what “Done” looks like.

September Round-up - New Video

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Hello! I must apologise for being late but there was a cat outside and I got distracted.

It’s been a while since we’ve done this hasn’t it? It feels like only yesterday but somehow it’s been over four months. Amazing.

While I like to think that you come to these events for the amazing conversation and my winning personality I suspect you’re really only here for the latest Videogram of Waves. Well if that’s the case I may as well get it out of the way early.

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Why Watching isn’t Playing

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This sounds like an incredibly obvious thing to say but watching a videogame being played is absolutely nothing like playing it yourself.

One bit of feedback I get after each video release is that the slowdowns that occur seem random and jarring and should perhaps be smoother and accompanied by a visual effect.

This is probably the best example of where watching isn’t playing. When watching a video of somebody playing a game you are missing a very important part - the intentions of the player. These days a lot of videogames are made so that they look good to the people who are watching them and often this can end up sacrificing the feel and fluidity of a games controls. Animations that flow nicely and blend well may look good in a gameplay trailer but you can be sure that the person playing it will be getting annoyed at just how long it takes to change direction or change weapon.

I have tried making the slow-motion in Waves look nicer and blend better. I’ve used tricks like smoothstep interpolation to ensure transitions are smooth not sudden and applying screen effects to indicate very obviously that you are using an intentional power.

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The Evolution of an Idea

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Back in November ’09 I started messing around with UDK one weekend. What I ended up with at the end of it was a short video of a tiny level that hinted at a physics based puzzle game.

8 months later that game has evolved into Waves.

Below is every video of the game since that first weekend until the most recent video of the May build. Waves has evolved rather than been designed with each new major addition being an experiment or the result of learning some new skill. I never set out to make an Arena shooter but somehow I ended up with one.

More videos beneath the cut…

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