Some teaser shots

Things have been quiet for a while on the blogging front, so I thought I'd share a few bits with folks, just so you know I'm not dead, and nor is Incoboto.


Spy-bots went in today and they're creepy as hell. I'm not yet sure if they clash too much with the general cute feel of the game, but I love their floaty movement. Very, very unnerving. Their little eye-stalks track you, and light up red or green depending if they've acquired you as a target or not. Brrr...

In other news, I'm trying to simplify the interaction at the moment. Up until now, EVERYTHING was a physics object. While my physics system managed perfectly well, the poor player had to contend with hundreds of clickable, draggable, carryable objects any time anything exploded, shattered or... well, did anything, really.

As of now, I'm doing the 'nethack logic' thing. If I can't think of 3 reasons why something should be in the game I'm either adding reasons, or jettisoning the idea off into deep space... or into Helios if that's a more terminal metaphor. Personally, Helios gives me the willies when he's angry:



Not a friendly character when he turns. No, he's not based on anyone I know. Honest.

Where does the time go?

So it's been a month since my side-tracked rant about gender images in the media... and longer since I've actually posted anything of note regarding Incoboto, so here's where we is at.

I spent some time making weird, droney noises like this. I may use this stuff as music in Incoboto. I may decide it's too 'cold'. We'll see as time goes on.

I've just returned from holiday in Iceland and am currently suffering from post-holiday blues. While there's a lot in Incoboto already, there's a lot to do to make it into a game, let alone polish that game to perfection.

- The movement/interaction/interface is pretty much done.

- I have 'creatures' in the game. They don't do much, but they are flammable. Believe it or not, that's important.

- The physics has been re-vamped yet again. It's now a very peculiar hybrid of verlet integrations and rigid body physics. From a consumer's point of view, this simply means: "I can make windmills you can stand on, turn by hand, chuck rocks at and so on, and it all reacts correctly." Yay! Seeing as my background isn't particularly academic or technical, that's a big deal to me.

So - why the delay?

The problem is that I've a huge feature set, but no actual level demonstrating how this all goes together. As such, I need to make a big choice. Generative, or edited content.

This isn't a game where you 'make stuff yourself', leaving all that lovely creation to the user. My 'meaningful' content has to come from somewhere. I'm loathed to spend another month and a half creating an editor, but the sheer wall of work that is required to generate the content in a non-game-breaking way is really quite scary.

At the moment I'm taking time to think and finish off a few technical bits and bobs that'll lead to a smoother, more polished experience (getting planetary atmospheres and stargates rendering quickly, for example).

Once this is done, I have to face the 'wall'.

As such, I'll post more screenies next time around when there's a game to show rather than a bucket of disparate features. Thanks for your patience.

Now if I can only stop myself playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 multiplayer...

Gender Polemic

So, I was sitting here working while my housemate was watching the television. An ad-break came on, during which I heard the refrain 'Here come the girls...' My reaction was quite extreme: I think the correct phrase is 'my blood boiled'.

I suddenly realised I had a profound loathing for the false gender-identities projected by the media. While men and women do have slightly different wobbly bits we are fundamentally the same species, and I find myself increasingly annoyed by the fractious, factious way in which gender differences are presented.

It starts when you're a baby. Walk down the infant aisles of any toy shop and you'll see what looks like a tactical battle-map of baby-blue and pastel pink intended to genderise us before we can even figure out where our own toes are.

With these gender lines drawn, childhood sets about reinforcing them. Certain toys are deemed 'appropriate' for certain genders, and parents not-so-subtly nudge their offspring into stereotyped roles in order to ensure their kid isn't pointed out as 'the funny peculiar one' at school and mobbed like a peculiarly hued crow... or a Muslim.

Adulthood offers no respite. Conversely, the situation worsens in relation to our spending power. According to marketing firms and the media, women are superficial, materialistic, overly-emotional airheads who only care about babies, their weight, Davina's hair-style of choice and whether Kerry Fucking Katona is fat/in rehab this week.

Worse, we hear phrases like 'us girls have got to stick together' and 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus'.

Really?

As a bloke I prefer to decide who I spend my time with based on shared values and tastes rather than the fact that we both stand up to pee. I like logical, clear people whose motivations and beliefs are consistent, well-considered and understandable (and preferably geeks in my case).

I imagine a majority of women feel similarly (bar the geeks bit).

Women: next time you hear 'Here come the girls' ask yourself if you feel included in their perfumed, vacuous number. I know a majority of you don't, just like many of us 'guys' aren't obsessed with shaving, football or beer.

We'll love you just as you are.

Physics and Input

Chuck Rock
So, the last couple of weeks have been a real challenge. My physics work is almost complete, but - as ever - edge cases cause lots and lots of problems. I had rocks that forced you back through 1-way walls, balls that went into a non-decaying orbit when thrown, clouds that made you flip into the air as you approached an edge, objects you could swing off causing the player to enter into a non-decaying orbit, and countless others.

The ultimate problem emerged when I realised the player wasn't gaining mass when carrying objects. My little (as yet unnamed) pal wandered around quite blithely, leaping all over the place with a boulder on his head the size of a small 4x4. It seemed a bit silly. When players walked against the boulder and thus pushed it, it felt suitably massive and rolled sullenly, like an overweight cat being shooed off a couch. However, flagging the boulder as 'carryable' allowed the player to loft the massive object into the air with ease.

I fixed this.

And then I realised why I hadn't fixed it before.

In game design there's a constant fight between realism, expectation and fun. Realistically, you shouldn't be able to move a heavy boulder. However, if you could lift it, you'd expect to stagger under its weight. However, that's no fun.

I realised I was going to have to be a little more binary in my treatment of all this stuff, and figure out why I was letting the player do these things in the first place. I always think that once you get into the psychology of game design, a lot of complicated issues become a little clearer.

So, why am I allowing the player to lift the rock? Because it's fun to carry stuff. Because it's necessary for some quests. Because you can throw rocks, and in order to throw them, you need to be able to carry them. See - all this stuff basically says: "Hey! I'm fun! You can do stuff with me!"

So, in this case I decided - even if it is hard to push a rock - if you can lift it, you can move it around with ease. If you try to throw it, it'll arc just like a small pebble.

'But surely that's nonsense!' I hear you cry.

'No,' I respond. The key is in the 'if you can lift it'. It's impossible for any normal person to lift a fecking great rock. However, if we're saying 'you can lift it' then you're super-strong. The end.


I remember the Halo team talking player expectation in relation to AIs, and how 'grey' rules really don't work. If you can make a squad of baddies run by killing their leader, it better happen every damned time, or else don't bother doing it. It'll just confuse the player.

In my case, if you can lift it, you can carry it. If you can throw it, you throw it in a manner identical to every other item you can throw. No exceptions.

Click, Swipe, Press, um... Lick... uh... Fondle?
Have I mentioned how much I hate on-screen controls? The little virtual joysticks that effectively say: "Sorry - I forgot I was designing for the machine you now hold." I think they're awful, lazy, impractical and fiddly.

However, I really wish I were using one.

At the moment, players can do the following, all by pressing, tapping or swiping the screen.

1) Walk
2) Run
3) Jump
4) Pick up
5) Throw
6) Swing

None of these use on-screen controls, nor the accelerometer*.

Balancing all these things involves careful tweaking of interaction radii, the minimum valid distance for a swipe and the maximum period you can keep your finger on the screen before it decides you're pressing rather than tapping

If you make jumping more responsive then you find stuff you're carrying around sticking to you like pathetic industry execs on a booth-babe. Make jumping less responsive and the merest flick of a finger causes stuff to fly off without your say-so. Watching my wife play the game last night was an exercise in frustration. She fundamentally doesn't understand the difference between 'tap' and 'press', nor how 'make the player jump on a press' simply wouldn't work (because that would mean you couldn't move without jumping first).

That's the thing with casual games - there's a lot of training involved because your audience has not had 10+years of tropes and rules to fall back on when faced with a new control system. It's irritating as hell. At some point I'll just draw a line in the sand and say: "Yup... I know. You don't know how to swipe the screen. Quite how you've managed with your iPhone so far, I don't know, but I think you and I part company here.' I'm thinking of giving away 'Act 1' of incoboto and then selling subsequent chapters, so that people who just can't deal with it don't feel too annoyed.

Despite the eventual training issues, it is working - and relatively well. There are no on-screen controls apart from 'Pause'. When you use the machines on the planets, there'll be no mini-game, GUI or other distraction. You'll be manipulating real, physical objects that spin, slide, rotate and otherwise give you tactile feedback.

It's taking a while, but there's the potential for this to be quite awesome.

Now, where's that bloody rock gone.. ow!


*I tried the accelerometer for a bit and then realised that using one on the iPad is no fun at all - and Incoboto is destined for the iPad at some point. Tilting the iPad makes me feel like I'm drunk while in charge of a vehicle, albeit with less lethality, lifelong guilt and prison sentences.

A Little Less Fog, a Little More Detail

So What's it All About?
It's been a while since I posted anything on the strange game I'm developing. It has grown quite a bit since the last time I posted. It now looks just like the screenshot - and better. I'm aware that I've not yet stated what the game actually is. I'll rectify that shortly, but first I should lay out what my aims were when I started.

1) Produce the best game on the iPhone... for geeks like me
I've grown rather dissatisfied over the last few months. The iPhone is such an excellent machine, but seems to be used to create nothing but 5-second twitch games (Flaboo! included). It can do so much more. So, rather than whining I decided to do something about it. I'm hoping that Incoboto will be something people can play in short spurts, but which also rewards a long afternoon of play.

I'm also bored with games that offer only a single, repetitive mechanic, or with so little content that there's nothing to discuss with friends between play-sessions. Nethack and Angband provide countless hours of content and fodder for water-cooler discussions despite their primitive appearance. Why doesn't this happen more?

I very much hope Incoboto brings this sense of depth and immersion onto the little machine.

I also want to make a game that doesn't involve killing - or at least not as a casual mechanic. This isn't some hippy vegan doctrine I'm following here. I just feel it's a bit trite and not in keeping with the childlike sense of wonder I want to evoke. More on that later.

2) Provide emotive content without resorting to (too much) dialogue
Since watching countless small animated films and seeing the efforts made by others such as Jason Rohrer (who have done marvellous things with lesser technology at their disposal) I've become increasingly interested in the emotional power of simple images and animation.

Incoboto's story is about wishes, loss, and understanding what's really important in life. Hopefully, with clearly designed characters and appropriate pieces of music, I should be able to wrench the odd tear from the audience.

As ever, David Lynch is on my mind, so along with pathos, I'm hoping to bring a sense of quiet unease into the world of Incoboto. As an example, Helios (the great, grinning sun-thing you saw in the last blog) should appear insane and menacing without ever having to say: "Hey! I'm insane and menacing!" or - god forbid - play a dialogue sample. Bleach.

Less is more. In Incoboto's case -hopefully a lot more.

3) Construct a Mythos
It's been a while since I left Lionhead now, and Fable along with it. I'm very proud that we managed to give players the sense that Albion was a real place. By the end of my time there, my job mostly consisted of being a filter for what was or was not Albiony or Fabley. I also experienced a great deal of frustration when others disagreed, or decided 'nobody would care' if we chose to do something out of character.

Incoboto is all mine. That's an enormous privilege. As such I have an opportunity to craft an entire universe of strange inhabitants, colossal machines, odd devices and mysterious planets.

It is unlikely that someone is going to say, "Helios should, you know, fart. It'll be funny."
Even then, if they do, I can ignore them rather than wishing I had a bottle of Draino to swig from.

What's in a Name?
I've had several people tell me that they don't understand the name 'Incoboto'. Others offer me the advice that nobody will remember it: "What is that... Japanese?".

Both are fair comments. At this precise point in time I don't care. The name is... what the game is. Perhaps that'll change in the next few months, but right now I can't imagine the game being called anything else. I'd be interested to hear how others feel about it - presuming anyone reads these.

Zoom and Rotate
One of the biggest things I'm battling against at the moment is the complexity of building a game with no fixed axis of movement or rotation. The whole universe can spin around you, planets rotate, satellites rotate around those, and you can stand on all of them and jump from one to the other. It's bonkers.

However - with all this fun comes potential nausea and a great deal of difficulty in maintaining a meaningful view of what's going on.

If I don't auto-rotate the camera, jumping on the leaves of a crystal-tree while upside-down feels quite... unnerving.

If I do auto-rotate the camera there's a strange sense of vertigo and a constant feeling that there's no 'up'. That's because there isn't one.

I'm thinking of allowing players to choose their own axis of movement at any time, but also leery of the fact that this adds yet another level of complexity into the controls of an already complex game.

I added zooming out/in today, and it looks fantastic. With any luck it'll go part-way toward fixing the issue.

Next Up...
The next task is to get AIs into the game. Like everything else in this game, there are no off-the-shelf solutions to navigation, and the fact that there's no clear axis of movement will make everything more difficult. So - by next blog, my aim is to have AIs wandering around and able to interact with the player-character. Then it's time for catacombs.

Never Neverland
As a final note, I'm also aware that what I'm trying to do is stupidly ambitious, and that most people fail miserably when they attempt something this big on their own. But then, if people didn't have a go the world would be so dull.

Incoboto Teaser Screen

I know I shouldn't do this so early, but it helps keep a record of my intent, and - believe it or not - giving an image public wings keeps me motivated.

So here it is: the first teaser screen of incoboto.















I'm trying something completely different, combining physics programming, my interest in generated content, cute-yet-unsettling moods and ambient music.

Game-play is really simple to control but has a lot of complex and chaotic repercussions.

I'm also going to be exploring the space between software-toys and games. Hopefully people will have fun with this even if they don't 'win'.

I'm also going to try and maintain a 'there are no bad things, only less-good things'. It'll be a challenge, but that's part of the fun.

First two tracks available...

Only a minor post. This is the first pair of Kitty Genovese songs to make it out into the world.

While You Sleep

Noone Knew Kitty Like Me

I'll post more as I go on.