T-Rex Poop Quest Release Announcement

Hyperlink your way over to potatoclockgames.com to check out T-Rex Poop Quest, a short text-based RPG featuring a T-Rex, some poop, and a bunch of quests, among other things. Other things like playground-terrorizing dinosaur punks, a drug addicted pterodactyl, Bill Clinton, a gang of yuppie raptors, plenty of stolen and unattributed art assets and intellectual property and lots, lots, more!

Actually, not that much more. It's pretty short. Have fun!

T-Rex Poop Quest

I'm just about finished with the Twine RPG that I mentioned earlier, just some proof reading & balancing & bug squashing to take care of.

When it comes to making a reasonably featured RPG, Twine really isn't the tool for the job. It was fun to make one, and you could certainly make something much more complicated with Twine, there just isn't much reason to. This game was a little experiment to see how far I could push Twine before it stopped being fun & I think I found that point.

It's a short, grindy, fetch questy RPG called T-Rex Poop Quest, and it features what is possibly the most shallow battle system ever implemented in any game ever. Still, I think it brings some things to the table, you know, enriches the genre somewhat. Like, you know how RPGs never have a "Sarah Palin's Fart in a Can" item that you have to carry around? Well, don't worry, we've ticked that box for sure.

T-Rex Poop Quest should be ready to play in like a week.

OSFBM'97 is Dead.

"In a shocking move, indie giant Potato Clock Games infuriated investors this morning when they announced the official cancellation of the year's most hotly anticipated title, Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997. Potato Clock Games could not be reached for comment."

-The Wall Street Journal

Giraffe Adventures Official Release & Origins Tale

Get it while it's hot from potatoclockgames.com!

The Origins of Giraffe Adventures

So, one day, many years ago, I was bored at work & realized that what little HTML I had learned in high school had evaporated out through my ears & into the cosmos. I threw together some simple linked pages just to assure myself that, in a life or death situation where the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML would come in handy, I would have a shot at survival. Those pages were the first few of Giraffe Adventures. I'd add a little more to it whenever I was bored & it soon grew into an unmanageable pile of HTML files with bizarre names meant to convey their position in the branching structure. I promptly forgot about it.

I stumbled back upon it recently & there were some laugh-out-loud moments, but still, it just seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to work on. For better or worse, someone introduced me to Twine at about this same time, which is a cool, free, open source tool for doing branching HTML story kinds of things. So, fuck, I figured I had to finish Giraffe Adventures now.

It took way longer than I thought it would. I can't believe I spent so much time on this thing. I mean, I'm glad that I did, if ever there were a story that had to be told, it is Giraffe Adventures, but jesus fuck. You know?

Anyway, if you're an alien in the future curating a museum exhibit on The Spectacular Downfall of The Human Race & you'd like to use Giraffe Adventures as an example of the horrifying decline of human culture & society, then maybe you could put the above paragraphs on a little plaque next to the exhibit. Otherwise, I'm not sure of how it could be of any use to anyone. What am I doing with my life?

Love,
Potato Clock Games

Giraffe Adventures Update #4

I've committed myself to never letting my "playtime over the past 2 weeks" stat on Steam go over 20 hours. This has had an embarrassingly positive effect on my productivity. I'm suddenly a week ahead on my homework, I've finished Giraffe Adventures, & I'm about halfway finished with a little Twine RPG which I'll talk more about later.

Giraffe Adventures Final Node Map

Right, so Giraffe Adventures is finally finished. It has its highs & lows but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There are a few laugh-out-louds in there, I think, swimming among the groans & the huh?s. I'm holding onto it for a bit of proofreading, but let's be real, this was not an entirely sober endeavor. It is going to be full of humiliating grammar & spelling errors, not to mention the irreconcilable plot holes & narrative jump cuts. What I'm saying is, I'm not planning on wasting a hell of a lot of time proofreading this. It is what it is & it should be out in the wild next week.

Potato Clock Games Summer Sabbatical

Giraffe Adventures is so close to being finished & it's the last thing I really wanted complete before school starts back up (which happens in two days), but you know what? I don't feel like working on it.

So there.

So that's it for a while, I probably won't get back to game development for a few months. TRY TO SURVIVE WITHOUT ME.

Giraffe Adventures Update #3

I got back to work on Giraffe Adventures today after avoiding it for quite a while. Here's the thing with choose your own adventure stories: even if you're only giving the reader binary choices, after just 10 pages you have 2^10 = 1,024 story threads. ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY GOD DAMN FOUR. In practice, of course, it doesn't necessarily work out to quite that many, as threads are terminated in story endings or merged with other threads.

Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.

Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.

The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.

YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.

Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz Official Release!

The internet's premier Beliebers-only puzzle game is now available from potatoclockgames.com!

While the first installment of Justin Bieber's now infamous Mega CockBlockaz puzzle game series was released in Japan to overwhelmingly positive reviews, legal battles over the game's graphically sexual nature and overtly racist message stalled & eventually prevented an official U.S. release. The game's sequel, Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2, has been censored heavily for U.S. audiences, though keen players will still find it difficult to ignore the game's racist overtones. Bieber has publicly denounced the U.S. version, complaining that it, "seriously detracts from [his] original message."

Get in on the controversy! See what all your favorite celebrities are blathering on about!

"While I am obviously disgusted by the game's shameless racist soapboxing, I cannot help but to find myself equally enthralled by the way that these brilliant puzzles have changed the way that I see the world. Everything that I have, I owe to this game."

-Kim Kardashian and also Bill Gates

LET'S BLOCK SOME COCKS!

Blocking the Last Few Cocks

CockBlockaz is at the point where I'd feel Ok about releasing it but there's still a lot that I could do. There are a few missing sound effects, a couple of puzzles I'd like to replace, a lot of placeholder text still hanging around. Also, at the moment nothing happens when you 100% the game, aside from a number on the screen unceremoniously changing from 96 to 100, which is a bit of a let down. I'll just keep working down the checklist until I get to the end of it or get bored of it. Either way, I'm saying one week to release.

GET READY TO BLOCK SOME COCKS.

Surprise Double Header!

STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES.

Head over to potatoclockgames.com to snag 2 of the worst games ever made! These were going to be part of Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 but just didn't quite fit in, so I'm releasing them on their own.

Revenge of the Vengeance from the Future of Outer Space is a short (like, 1 small level short) first person shooter made in Game Maker. PROTIP: you should not try to make a first person shooter in Game Maker. I can't believe it works at all. The music is pretty good & the enemy models are homemade stuffed animals but somehow that doesn't make up for the horrible controls & even worse level design.

HyperLincoln is an almost sort of cool fake computer hacking game. It's actually the first of like 10 levels that I just never got around to making. I'd kind of like to finish it but I had no idea of how to really program when I started it & the code is a god damn nightmare so this is all you get. It's winnable in about 2 minutes once you know what you're doing.

On Save State Hacking

CockBlockaz auto-saves the player's progress whenever a new puzzle is solved. Saving the game state is a pretty simple affair; there are 25 puzzles, each of which is in one of three possible states (locked, unlocked, or solved). So all I have to do is write a 25-character long string (one character per puzzle) to a text file, using the characters 0, 1 & 2 to represent the 3 possible states. For instance, "1000000000000000000000000" means that the first puzzle is unlocked while the rest are locked (this is the initial state of the game).

So that's fine. But, obviously, anyone could open up that text file and edit the string to mark every puzzle as available or completed. My general stance on this matter is, who gives a fuck? There's no cash prize for completing the game (as far as I know?) & no online leaderboards or anything, so the only motivation to hack the save file is for the pure joy that certain flavors of crypto-nerds get from doing those kinds of things. I think that's great. In fact, it makes me want people to hack my save states.

But now I have an unexpected problem. If I'm approaching save state hacking as a sort of meta-game, just a fun, geeky thing to do, then my current save file is way too easy to figure out! I could obfuscate the shit out of it so that only the serious cryptokids could figure it out, but that's not really what I want. How do you encrypt a string, but just enough to make it a little bit of a challenge, something that anyone with the motivation to try could figure out? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna give it a shot.

First person to successfully hack the CockBlockaz save state wins!

Introducing My Final Game Maker Project

So I've been yammering on a lot about quitting Game Maker (WHICH I AM) but after so many years of dicking around with it I've got all of these little demos & anti-games & failed experiments lying around that, you know, I can't just let go to waste. So I'm throwing them all together into a terrible & ridiculous game called Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997.

That is the title because I seriously have a game which is nothing but a title screen that says that & a huge design doc describing a game that I neither recall conceiving of nor have any desire to make.

Is the world ready for a game where the screen resolution changes with every level? Where the controls & mechanics are constantly changing with absolutely no explanation? Where you have no idea of what the fuck you're supposed to be doing but if you do it wrong you are harshly penalized?

Is the world ready ... for OUTER SPACE FUTURE BATTLE MASSACRE 1997?

SokoBondage!

Just finished the last 2 puzzles for CockBlockaz; "Homage" (based on a puzzle from Combiblock, which CockBlockaz rips right the fuck off) & "SokoBondage". Oh yeah, all the puzzles have sweet ass names.

I played through all of the puzzles & loosely ranked them in order of difficulty, just to give some logical structure to the order in which puzzles are unlocked. As the dude who made the puzzles, ranking their difficulty objectively is basically impossible, they mostly all seem way too easy. Maybe they are? I can't tell.

The only big thing left to do is to link the puzzles on the level select screen to the actual puzzles themselves, which will be easy but tedious (drunk programming!). Of course, I've also got an ever-growing list of little tweaks & touch-ups & edge-case bugs which will take more than a minute to push through, but still. Getting close.

CockBlockaz Title Screen

Finished the title screen & very limited options menu. I was planning on having audio & video options available, but you know, fuck that. Don't like the resolution? Deal, mang.

 

The hardest part was the humiliating task of googling Justin Bieber's signature without anyone around me noticing. It was nerve wracking.

Even with it's massively reduced scope, CockBlockaz is a puzzle or two short. I've got a fair amount of work to do with the level selection situation as well. But that's about all that's left except the pile of unexpected bugs & last minute tweaks that is sure to accumulate. I'm cutting the soundtrack, so that'll save a ton of time & effort & honestly, it's a puzzle game. The only reason to give it a soundtrack is because it's a video game & it's two thousand & god damn fifteen & that's what you're supposed to do. Psh.

POTATO CLOCK GAMES DON'T MARCH TO THE BEAT OF NO DRUMMER OR WHATEVER.

Back to Bieber

Taking a Giraffe Adventures break & getting back into CockBlockaz. When faced with a long to-do list as a project starts to wrap up, some people like to start with the biggest tasks while others prefer to get the little things out of the way first. Me, I like to waste a bunch of time MSPainting a giant pixelated Justin Bieber portrait by hand.

BABY BABY BABY OH

Summer Schemes

I have a final exam to get through tomorrow, then it's back to work on games. Here's what's left to do:

1. Finish Giraffe Adventures
2. Finish CockBlockaz
3. Throw together Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997

I don't think I've mentioned Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 yet. More on that later. These 3 projects all have very different sorts of to-do lists as they are very different sorts of projects so I'm thinking about working on all of them concurrently rather than lasering in one by one, just to keep it fresh. According to no study ever, multitasking is an efficient way for human beings to accomplish tasks.

Other things I'd like to do this summer if I have time:

1. Dig into Twine a little more
2. Play with PuzzleScript
3. Learn ENIGMA & maybe use it to start over with Lucha Cerveza

I also want to learn Haxe/OpenFL & Unity & I've been wanting to learn NES assembly just for kicks but, yeah. Chill out, dude. Now I'm just stressing myself out. Anyway.

Shout out to the fans in Germany!

Giraffe Adventures Update #2

Making a little bit of progress here & there on Giraffe Adventures, but I've been way too busy to really commit any time to it. So far so good, I like where it's going but there's a lot of writing left to do.

Node map update:

There are 19 different endings as of now, with exciting titles like "Exploding Dick Apocalypse" & "You Did Some Stuff I Guess." I'll keep plunkin' away, this might be finished a month or so from now.

Giraffe Adventures Update #1

I haven't started writing any new content yet, but I've got the project migrated over to Twine, just using the standard boilerplate template. I'll probably dig into Twine a little deeper this summer, but for now I'm just keeping it simple. Here's the Twine-generated node map of what the story looks like so far:

That's the title screen in the upper-left, then you can sort of trace how the story branches from there. This is way easier to make sense out of than the weirdo numbering hierarchy system I was using before.

Anyway, I'm stoked to see where this goes. It feels kind of good to be concentrating on writing & just having stupid fun instead of on programming, for a while at least.

Giraffe Adventures!

Next on the list is a little HTML choose-yr-own-adventure called Giraffe Adventures.

FIRST LINE SNEAK PREVIEW:
"You are a gay retarded baby giraffe. What will you do next?"

As fate would have it, I was recently introduced to Twine, a free & open-source HTML development tool focused on interactive text kinds of things. So I'm migrating Giraffe Adventures over to Twine; at the moment it's just a pile of .html files that I cranked out in notepad. The reason I never finished it is because it got too hard to keep track of branches & everything, but Twine pretty much handles that automatically, it looks like.

Gonna get my copy & paste on for a minute here.

Windows 8 Calamity!

Well, this is dumb. For boring reasons that I won't get into, all of my Game Maker games were crashing on Windows 8 under certain conditions; they seemed to play fine until too many sounds were played simultaneously, then BOOM they're done for. It actually turned out to be a Microsoft problem rather than Game Maker or an I-don't-know-what-the-fuck-I'm-doing problem. Anyway, I figured out how to fix it & I've uploaded updated versions of all the games to the website. #1 CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE FANS.

Edit: That's a lie. Only some of the games work reliably on Win8. Here are the ones that still don't:

Dog Catcher Jones of the Future
AlienSexist
Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations
Jack Ham Zero

They work mostly but they're pretty unstable. #0  CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE FANS. Maybe I'll fix them someday.

Sunrise Sunset Official Release!

Sunrise Sunset is finished & available for download at potatoclockgames.com!

About that exclamation point. I'm not here to betray your trust. I'm excited because I'm done with it, not because I'm proud of it.

Like I've said, this was like the 3rd game I ever started & it's a mess. But it's playable, it's short, & I think it offers a few interesting moments, at least.

INTERESTING MOMENTS, SEE. LIKE THIS ONE.

Changing up the Gameplan

Here's what's on the docket:

Sunrise Sunset
Giraffe Adventures
SquareWave
Lucha Cerveza
CockBlockaz

Well, I just played what I've finished of SquareWave, which is very little, & it's just not much fun. So fuck it. I've also decided that, unless inspiration really hits when I get back to work on CockBlockaz, I'm going to reduce the game's scope fairly dramatically: 25 levels instead of 49, no music, boom, call it a day. Lucha Cerveza could be fun but I'm so sick of patching & working around my old shitty code that I'd rather just start over from scratch. So I think I'll make that my first project with whatever new development tool I decide to learn. Actually, I want to learn a bunch of new tools this summer. Anyway, that makes the revised to do list look like this:

Sunrise Sunset (almost done)
Giraffe Adventures (almost done)
CockBlockaz (almost done if I decide to reduce the scope)

My chances of ditching Game Maker by the end of the summer just got a lot better. I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Sunrise Sunset Update #5

I knocked out about 2/3 of my Sunrise Sunset left-to-do list this morning. So there goes all the low-hanging fruit. Still, not much left to do. Mostly optimization work & a few bug fixes.

Development progress has been slow, & will probably continue to be for the next month & a half or so, mostly because of school. Finals are next week, then I have a week off (of school, anyway) before summer semester, which will only be about a month long.

So I'm hoping to have Sunrise Sunset finished by the time summer semester kicks off, & I think I can probably have Giraffe Adventures finished by the time it ends. Giraffe Adventures isn't even a game, it's a half-finished browser-based choose your own adventure story. Anyway, it shouldn't take long to finish.

I'm starting to reevaluate what I want to spend my time on once I'm done with school for the summer. I want to learn some new development tools & I really want to start working on some new games. That being said, I also want to finish what I've already started. & that being said, I am so sick of patching up my old bullshit code. So much work, so little reward.

LIFE.

Sunrise Sunset Update #4

I've finally got the music in the game; took a bit longer than expected, mostly because the game is such a bloated mess. The process of testing the game, watching it crash, fixing the one line of code that made it crash & retesting takes like 5 minutes due mostly to egregious loading times. Anyway, here's the lineup (although most of the in-game versions are edited down pretty hard):

Sunrise, Sunset (performed by Anthony O'Kane)
Razorblade Alcohol Slide (DJ Qbert)
Inner Space Dental Commander (DJ Qbert)
Water Theme from Super Mario Brothers (Composed by Koji Kondo)
Testone (Sweet Exorcist)
World Music (Sifl & Olly a.k.a. Liam Lynch & Matt Crocco)
Invasion of the Octopus People (DJ Qbert)
More Than Meets the Eye (The Shapeshifters)
Laser Eyes (Sifl & Olly a.k.a. Liam Lynch & Matt Crocco)
I Don't Want to Live on the Moon (performed (& probably written?) by Jim Henson)
Sunrise, Sunset (from the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof)

I mean, come on. This stupid game is worth playing just for the soundtrack.

I have a lot of optimization work to do, some audio gaps to fill in, a bunch of little things. The semester's wrapping up, which means I'll be busy with school, but I'd like to have this game finished in the next couple of weeks.

Sunrise Sunset Update #3

Sound effects are finished & in the game; they're mostly either reused from other games or phoned in with my favorite video game sound effects tool, sfxr (it's free, check it out). It still ended up taking like 8 hours of work because I was an idiot when I programmed this game & totally unrelated objects are controlling each other so it was kind of a scavenger hunt finding where certain events are triggered. BORING. Anyway.

I just got started on putting the music in the game. Here's the song that plays during the opening scene:

It's such a weird & haunting interpretation, I love it. I edited it down from about 5 to less than 2 minutes but watch the video for the full glory. I'm hoping to have the rest of the music in the game within the next week, then it's on to bullshit optimization & polishing work.

Sunrise Sunset Update #2

The health/damage system is in place, officially upgrading Sunrise Sunset: The Interactive Video Experience to Sunrise Sunset: The Video Game. As simple as the system was to implement, because of the broad way Game Maker handles collisions by default & the naive way that past me programmed the game, adding any sort of "make something happen when the player touches an enemy" function spawned a mid-size bug infestation. But I think it's all cleared up now. Here's what's left:

- Sound effects (I plan on keeping these relatively few & simple).
- Music (I'm using other people's music & almost have the track listing all figured out).
- Final touches, balancing, bugfixes & optimization (UGH).

Official release date is one month from today, shouldn't be a problem. As a side note, today was supposed to be the release day for Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2 ... ah, well. I really don't regret postponing that one.

Sunrise Sunset Update #1

I'm actually having quite a bit of fun finishing up this little piece of shit game. The ending sequence is finished & turned out quite well; a whole lot of stuff happens over the course of the half hour it takes to get through the game & the ending ties it all up pretty nicely. Be prepared, it is very emotional.

Also made a title screen that I'm happy with & got started on the health/damage system, which is going to be pretty simplistic, should be done soon. I even got started on putting the soundtrack together.

What you can't tell from the screenshot is that the sun & moon are constantly rising & setting, the background color & title text color change to new random colors to the rhythm of an endless loop of "Sunrise, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof, and random things from the game are flying around the screen, spinning around & changing shape, fading in & out. It's quite a party. Really should have just made a gif instead of typing all that out. Oh well.

Sunrise Sunset Update #0

I just played through the game in it's current state, it's a not-too-painful 30 minute long experience from start to finish. This is, I think, the 3rd game I ever started working on. It's a bullshit platformer, I guess, but it's more of a tourist game. Like, you walk through it & vaguely amusing things happen. Anyway, here's what's left to do:

- Finish Ending (an emotional journey set to the tune of my favorite Sesame Street song).
- Make it a Game (you have no sort of health currently & enemies do no damage).
- Title Screen, Game Over Screen, Etc. (all that bullshit).
- Music & Sound Effects (I'll be using other people's jams rather than writing my own).
- Optimization & Final Bugfixes (easier said than done).

So here we go, about to get blasted on Old Crow & crank out this end sequence. See you on the other side.

OH YEAH I'M SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Well, nothing to report, really. I'm using school & work as an excuse, but CockBlockaz is just at that boring point in development & I can't muster the motivation at the moment. There's no way that I'll make deadline even if I bust ass at this point so I'm going to move on & tack CockBlockaz onto the end of the list, hopefully get back to it by the end of summer.

Next up is Sunrise Sunset, which I am none too stoked about working on, either, but it's almost done & I don't care about making it good. I actually sort of like CockBlockaz, which makes the final development stages a slog, but I don't give a good god damn about Sunrise Sunset so wrapping it up shouldn't be too painful.

I Love You, Game Maker- I'm Leaving You

Game Maker has been my go-to development tool for as long as I've been making games. It's what taught me to love programming so much that I've gone back to school to study computer science. It allows stupid fast prototyping of games. It's easy to use. But I'm leaving. After I wrap up all the projects that I'm currently building with Game Maker, I've decided it's time to move on.

When I first bought Game Maker for $20 it was one dude's (Mark Overmars) labor of love & came with the promise of free updates for life. Then it was bought out & the free updates stopped. It was just recently bought out again, by some gambling company. I don't like the taste of it. It's still a great tool & I almost gave in & bought the most recent version anyway. It's only $50, but you want to develop for MacOS in addition to Windows? Extra $100. Linux? Another $100. HTML5? That's $200 more. Then there are the myriad known optimization & audio engine problems. None of these things on their own are enough of a reason for me to leave. But all together- the buyouts, the cost, all its quirky little issues, the fact that I've long outgrown the drag & drop interface that first got me hooked- it all adds up to time to say goodbye.

So I'm doing some research & finding lots of interesting sounding alternatives. OpenFL has my attention at the moment; free, open-source, & multi-platform. Some great games have already been developed with OpenFL (Papers, Please being one of my personal faves). There's also the free, open source ENIGMA,which is Game maker compatible, making it another tempting option. The point is, there are great, free alternatives. I'm not Big Mr. Open Source or anything, but given the choice I'll take GiMP over Photoshop any day.

I've got a lot of unfinished Game Maker business to wrap up so I'm not making any big decisions here, really, except that I'm committing myself to learning a new development tool once I flush all my current projects out of the pipeline.

It's been fun, Game Maker, & you'll always be my first. I hope we can still be friends.

Potato Clock Games: Officially In The Red!

Throughout the legendary history of Potato Clock Games, we have managed to remain not unprofitable by following a simple business plan: no money in, no money out. It was fun while it lasted, but it's time to get real. As of a few days ago, we are officially hemorrhaging exactly $12/year for the rights to our brand new, take-no-prisoners, URL: potatoclockgames.com! As the Buddha teaches, "you gotta spend money to make money."

 If you're like me you're going to miss having to type www.msu.edu/~will1907/potatoclockgames/main.html like nine times before getting it right every time you want to visit this shitty website. No worries, I've got you covered. potatoclockgames.com just forwards to the existing website so you can still use the old address.

Of greater concern at the moment, I don't know where the fuck I'm going to get the $1/month that I'll need to stay in business. But these are tough times. We're all making sacrifices.

POTATO CLOCK GAMES

BY THE PEOPLE. FOR THE PEOPLE.

CockBlockaz Level Select System Complete

I was pretty lazy about it, but the level select/unlock system is finally working & in place. I still have some UI work to do but the code's all there & I finished the save/load system as well since they kind of go hand-in-hand. Here's what it looks like; white squares are unlocked puzzles, blue ones are completed. Completing a puzzle unlocks the adjacent puzzles:

So, anyway, that's a wrap for all the major systems in the game.

I still have like 25 puzzles to make, all of the music to write, & a heavy buttload of tedious bullshit details to take care of. There's almost no way this is going to be done by my arbitrary & masochistic tentative release date of April 15th. I haven't decided if I'll just keep pushing through this one at the expense of all my future planned release dates, or just move on & come back to this one at the end of the summer. Probably the latter. The final stretch of game development is seriously such a drag.

Spooky Forest Screenshot

Just a quick screenshot of the spooky Zygotes forest.

Note the new character sprite & placeholder forest tileset (with climbable vines!). Most of the recent work is hard to show in a screenshot but the health/damage/lives systems are in place, though not quite finished. There's a lot of work left to do on the combat system & movement in general, just getting the feel right. Oh yeah, & then I guess we have to make it a game. Hmm. All in good time?

Jack Ham Zero Debriefing

Considering the fact that this is a game built on the foundation of failed levels from the second game that I ever made, I'd say Jack Ham Zero turned out pretty well.

HOT POTATOES:

Some good, challenging puzzles, a badass soundtrack, & that trademark sense of humor upon which the Potato Clock Games empire is built all conspire to make this game just barely worth playing. I think it's better than Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations, so I guess it's doing what a sequel is supposed to do. ATTABOY!

COLD POTATOES:

I mean, yeah, it's not actually good, but I can hardly hold that against the poor guy. If I'm forcing myself to be critical, though, I think the difficulty ramps up a little too fast, probably because the game started out as Maze of Tribulations "Brutal Mode." The early levels could stand to be a bit less. Brutal, I mean. I don't actually like the action sequences much (space shooter, sword-em-up, minecarts), they mostly just distract from the puzzling. So do things like lives, score, passwords (as opposed to auto-saved progress), limited restarts (because of limited lives), enemies all over the place that kill you if they barely touch you. I think this would have been a better game without all of those things.

CONCLUSION:

Look, people, there's going to be a third game in this series, like or not. I've got a pretty good idea now of what it's going to look like. Most of the problems identified above are easy fixes & that just leaves me to concentrate on the fun stuff: puzzles, jams & Jack Ham lore.

CockBlockaz Puzzle Select / Unlock System Design

The tutorial sequence is complete, I think, & I made a handful of new game-proper puzzles along the way. So, moving on, I dug out the sort-of-design doc for the CockBlockaz puzzle select system:

Sort of nestled in between doodles & notes on binary search trees. The idea is that you have this grid with the tutorial sequence in the middle; each of the other gridspaces represent individual puzzles. Completing a puzzle unlocks any adjacent still-locked puzzles, with the more difficult puzzles being at the outside edge.

I like it, aesthetically, & it imposes a nice constraint on how many puzzles I need to make. In order for this system to work, with the tutorial sequence in the middle, there obviously needs to be a middle square. So if I want the grid itself to be a perfect square, that means that the length of its side needs to be an odd number. A 5x5 grid would only hold 25 puzzles, that seems a bit skimpy. 9x9, forget about it, I don't want to be making CockBlockaz puzzles for the rest of my life. 7x7 seems like a good size & it gives me an exact number of puzzles to shoot for; 48 plus the tutorial sequence. I'm probably like halfway there at the moment.

Aesthetics aside, I think it's important for a puzzle game like this to give players a chance to quit a puzzle that they're stuck on & try another one. The obvious option is to just make all of the puzzles available from the start, which I think is a good design decision for a puzzle game, but I also think that unlocking levels like this provides a nice sense of progression while leaving the player with lots of available puzzles at any given time.

I haven't decided exactly how I want to implement this system at code-level, but the overall project is small enough that I feel Ok about just cracking a beer, banging out some code, & seeing what happens. Here we go!

CockBlockaz Tutorial Sequence

In the CockbBlockaz demo, the tutorial levels include text at the top of the window which basically amounts to "HEY DUMBASS, THIS IS WHAT I'M TRYING TO TEACH YOU." Which is fine, but I like the idea of a tutorial that teaches the rules of the game without any text or arrows or whatever. Just assume that the player will try hitting the arrow keys & let the learning experience build from there. I found these notes which I'm basically sticking to:

I guess you can ignore the search tree stuff & the dino-rooster man & the poem about Steven Segal. I ended up combining points 1 & 2 in the sequence & am working on #5 at the moment. I'm coming up with new puzzles as I go & am pretty happy with how things are coming together.

Zygotes Update: Platforming Engine

Just a few quick screenshots to show that the platforming engine for the new Zygotes minigame is more or less complete. Well, not more, definitely less. Pretty much done, I guess, is what I meant.

Introducing Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2

So next up is the blandly titled Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2. It's a sort of sokoban-ish puzzle game. It is inspired by / totally rips off a little demo game called Combiblock by this guy called Hrothgar which you can check out here, as of this writing. I've already got a demo version of CockBlockaz up on the Potato Clock Games website if you want to check it out.

The game works like this: you move a block around; when you touch other blocks they stick to you; & the goal is to exit the board after collecting all of the blocks. Pretty simple. There are a few other gameplay mechanics thrown in to complicate things but I think it's overall a respectably elegant puzzle game. The basic game engine is complete & I've got a few puzzles made already. So here's what's left to do:

1. Rework the tutorial sequence to teach the game mechanics without any text.
2. Design & implement a puzzle select / puzzle unlock system.
3. Design & implement a game save / load system.
4. Make some more puzzles.
5. Write a soundtrack.
6. Make a title screen, options menu, etc. All that little stuff.

My goal is to have this finished in a month & a half, which may be overoptimistic. Points 5 & 6 in the list above might push that date back, but we'll see.

Jack Ham Zero Official Release

Jack Ham Zero: Caverns of the Heart is complete & available for download from the Potato Clock Games website. Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack of the Heart is available as well.

I'll leave you with the game's intro text:

"Mayday, mayday, George Washington here with an urgent message from the past. Electro-gravitational time-space history waves are undulating across the cosmos. There is only one possible source: JACK HAM. Only you can stop him. Benjamin Franklin estimates the wave will crest on December 21, 2012. Franklin is kind of a douche but he just might be right. You must stop Jack Ham before it is too late! George Washington over and out."

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #4 (Complete!)

The soundtrack &, with the exception of a few little details, the game itself, are finally complete. The Mp3 soundtrack will be available for download along with the game, I think that it turned out pretty well. Here's what it includes:

1. Title Theme From Jack Ham Zero
2. The AstroTurf of Destiny
3. Welcome to the Space Ham
4. 40's with George
5. Sesame Street Theme Song (Hooper Spider Mix)
6. In the Caverns of the Heart
7. Music for the Obligatory Minecart Level
8. Battle For Sainthood (Zero Mix)

It's like 20 minutes long. I mean, this soundtrack ain't no masterpiece but it's more than good enough for the game that it's accompanying. So the sounds are mixed & the bugs that I'm aware of are all squashed, just a little bit of housekeeping left. Right on track for that March 1st release.

Elegy for Jack Ham

So back in like 2006, when Nintendo's Wii first came out, my cousin Chrissy Dubs & I were getting wasted on vodka & lemonade at his parent's house & playing through like $200 worth of rented Wii games. One of them was a Madden football game, I don't remember anything about it except that the loading screens offered up bits of football history & player biographies, including that of some guy called Jack Ham. All of the ingredients were there: a sweet name, a powerful vodka buzz, & loading screen induced boredom. By the end of the game we had developed a rich Jack Ham mythology & by the end of the day we had started work on a book of poems entitled 'Elegy for Jack Ham'. So that's how the whole Jack Ham thing started, just in case anyone wants to make a Potato Clock Games expansion for Trivial Pursuit or something.

Anyway, I just came across a copy of 'Elegy for Jack Ham', here are a few of my favorite short ones. Yeah, they're all titled 'Elegy for jack Ham':

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #3

I ended up writing (well, arranging, I guess) two songs for the two boss battles. I'm not worried about bloating the filesize with a couple of MIDI jams & they're both kind of cop outs so don't worry, it didn't put me out anything.

The first boss battle, if I haven't mentioned this, is against Mr. Hooper of "owning the bodega in old school Sesame Street" fame. He owns the liquor store that you rob with George Washington & barfs Mr. Hooper-faced spiders at you. I reworked a MIDI version of the Sesame Street theme song that I found online to accompany this brilliant sequence. I'm happy with the song but the whole fight is still buggy as shit; I haven't really looked into the code yet to see what sort of embarrassing noob mistakes I made but that's probably the biggest non-audio job left to knock out.

For the second & final battle (against Jack Ham, of course) I threw together a MIDI version of the boss battle jam from Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. It took like two minutes. GOOD ENOUGH. The battle sequence itself is working fine but it's more tedious than fun so I might rework it a little. Note that I'm not super concerned with the climax of the game being more tedious than fun. You must be waiting with bated breath for this one to be released.

After throwing quite a but of shit against the wall, something's finally stuck for the cavern music. It's not quite finished but I'm really happy with it so far. So I'm'a grind through some big fixin', then finish this last jam, & I think that's all there's left to do.

Potato Clock Schemes: Anticipated Release Dates

I really shouldn't do this to myself but I want to stay on track to have these all finished by the end of summer.

Release Date Goals:

Rogue Matrix ........... Finished on schedule

RGB ...................... Finished on schedule

Jack Ham Zero ......... 03.01.15

CockBlockaz ............ 04.15.15

Sunrise Sunset ......... 05.15.15

Giraffe Adventures .... 06.01.15

SquareWave ............ 08.01.15

Lucha Cerveza ......... 09.01.15

I think I'm being conservative here? I'm trying to take into account my job, school (including an accelerated summer course which I suspect will leave no time for game development), the Zygotes project &, you know, doing other shit with my life.

Oh yeah, & I added another game to the list. Forgot about Lucha Cerveza! How could I forget about Lucha Cerveza?

Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations 2015 Update

I've made some minor updates to Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations & uploaded the new definitive version to the Potato Clock Games website. Here's what's changed:

1. Picked some low-hanging fruit to reduce the filesize &, more importantly, loading time. I mean, the load time is still bullshit. I could do a lot more optimization & maybe I will someday, but this feels good enough for now.

2. Pushed through a bunch of little bug fixes, mostly involving the player getting stuck in walls & on George Washingtons due to cruddy collision detection. I didn't fix the cruddy collision detection, Ok, I just hacked out the bugs. Some of them.

3. Most importantly, & the reason I wanted to update the game in the first place, I rebalanced the end of the game. It's easier now, or, I think more accurately, it's less unfairly difficult now. There were occasional impossible-to-avoid fireballs, that kind of thing. The fireballs are a bit slower now & their hit boxes are a bit smaller so if you get hit it's your own damn fault.

Other than that it's the same game. I just wanted to give the fans a fair chance to experience the game in all its glory ahead of the release of Jack Ham Zero, which is very nearly complete! Give me like two weeks.

RGB Design Document

Found this in a notebook sandwiched between 2 pages of notes on floating point representation. Sort of an interesting artifact:

(Click to enlarge in case you've never used the internet before.)

This represents the first time that I bothered to plan shit out before coding a game. That's sort of  lie, I had already taken a failed crack at this game & decided to sketch out the next version, mostly because I am a rebel & was not paying attention to a lecture on floating point representation. Anyway, it turns out that a little bit of planning doesn't turn a bad idea into a good one but it does allow you to make crappy games more quickly & less buggy.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #2

Gonna kick this one off with a sneak peek of the Jack Ham Zero title screen & this link to download the title theme:

I just finished the minecart level music & put it into the game. The music control structure (which plays/stops the various tracks at the right times) is complete & I'm sound mixin', bug fixin' & filling in the sound effects gaps as I go.

Jack Ham Zero Origins & Futures

I'm not saying that I have any idea of what I'm doing now, but back when I made Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations I really, really had no idea what the fuck I was doing. When I finally finished the game I began working on an overambitious sort of new game plus called 'Brutal Mode.' There were more difficult versions of every level in the game plus a bunch of extra non-puzzle levels; a space shooter level, an obligatory runaway minecart level, and this ridiculous sequence where George Washington gives you a sword & you cut down police officers while he robs a liquor store. They all ended up being unplayable piles of bugs, just festering masses of earwigs crawling over the top of each other. I shelved it all & called the game complete sans Brutal Mode.

But, you know, I can't just let shit go. Plus, I mean, robbing a liquor store with George Washington, come on. So a few years later I put some work into making the levels playable (not GOOD, mind you, but playable) & then built a few more puzzle levels to put in between the new action levels & there you have it, it's most of a game. I let it sit for another couple of years before going back over it and taking care of all the tedious shit that turns a collection of levels into something that feels like a game (title screen, stupid plot, that kind of stuff). Then I got distracted again, that was probably like a year ago. & all of that took way longer than I have any way of justifying but now I'm close enough to finishing, there's just no reason not to.

At one point I had imagined the Jack Ham franchise stretching over 5 full games including a Benjamin Franklin spin-off game called Franklin's Quest: Semiconductor of Doom (I am sweet at titles & schemes, not so much at actually making games). I'm still thinking about rounding it out as a trilogy eventually; the puzzle levels are really fun to make & I have a few Jack Ham plot points that I need to get off my chest. I'm letting that simmer in the back somewhere, for now I just want to laser in & finish up Jack Ham Zero. I've been getting some more work done on the soundtrack, stay tuned for an update.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #1

I've finished up the title theme as well as the new version of '40's with George' & I'm really happy with both of them. The title theme is a goofy mock-metal jam, following in the footsteps of Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. '40's with George' is mostly just a new mix of the original version; I also made it a little bit longer & added a beepy interlude before the last chorus.

I threw together a first version of the music for the minecart levels; it's basically just a revoicing of the music for the space levels. The minecart & space levels serve similar functions in the game as weirdo action levels in between the puzzle levels, so it feels right for them to have similar music. Also, I don't want to put a whole lot of work into the minecart music; there are only 2 minecart levels, each about 1 minute long, & they're so stupid that you're actually allowed to skip the second one.

I'm thinking about making the boss jam a midi version of the title theme, which means I only have one song left to actually compose. So far so good.

Jack Ham Zero & The Return of The Zygotes

The next game I'd like to tackle is Jack Ham Zero, the riveting prequel to the second game I ever made. It's pretty much finished except for the soundtrack, & here's where that stands:

1. Title Theme: Written & recorded, just need to nail down the final mix.
2. Untitled Grass Level Jam: Complete! Er, except for the title.
3. Untitled Space Level Jam: Also complete!
4. 40s With George: This was a hidden song in the first game but I want to rework it a little.
5. Untitled Boss Jam: Does not exist yet.
6. Untitled Cave Level Jam: Does not exist yet.
7. Untitled Mine Level Jam: Does not exist yet.

Really hard to say how long this will take, maybe a couple of weeks? I expect to find some bugs & gameplay things I want to change so probably tack another couple of weeks on to that. I'll set the goal of finishing this in one month. But we'll see.

I've also got another project on my plate; Benny Lantz & I have resurrected the Zygote Intrafallopian Transfers video game. This was a project we started a quite a few years ago & was actually the reason I got into game making at all. The idea was to make a minigame for every song on our album, Sex & The Scientific Method. We only ended up making one game (Aliensexist, available at the website) before running out of steam but WE'RE BACK, BABY, making a little Castelvania-like game. I've been working on programming a respectable platforming engine while Benny's been getting his sprite on. Screenshots soon! Probably!

RGB Debriefing

RGB is the reason we prototype games. What seemed, in my head, to be a clever, elegant puzzle game turned out to be sort of a shallow, boring one.

HOT POTATOES:

One of my personal criteria for a good puzzle game is simple mechanics. Really good puzzle games take a small rule set (like the various Japanese number puzzles) or a single interesting mechanic (Portal, or the different chapters in Braid) & craft interesting puzzles from that minimal toolkit. If you have to remember a bunch of rules & relationships (looking at you, Road Not Taken) then it's not a good puzzle game.

However...

COLD POTATOES:

The problem in this case is that it's just not very fun or interesting. RGB puts a big check in the elegance box but the puzzles just don't end up feeling worth the player's effort. I really don't like randomly generated puzzles, like, at all. A good puzzle game should feel like you're playing one-on-one against the designer; it should feel like an interaction with the puzzle crafter. RGB isn't as cold as, say, Minesweeper, but it's not that far off. Hand crafting puzzles would have taken a long time & I don't think that the benefit it would provide would be enough to save the game. So yeah, I took the easy way out.

CONCLUSION:

I only put a few hours of effort into this one so I'm not sweating it. It's good for maybe an hour or two of achievement hunting if you're really into puzzle games. I might use this mechanic as a part of another game (it might work as a room in a Chip's Challenge-ish game or something) but it's just not deep enough to make an entire game out of.

Puzzle Generation in RGB & A Tale of Rapid Prototyping

Computer generated puzzles are usually no fun & RGB presents no exception to this rule.

The motivation for the basic gameplay mechanic of RGB came from another game I'm working on (more on that one later) that has a "crumbling floor" tile; you know, you can only walk over the tile once before it crumbles away & becomes impassable, forcing you to carefully choose your route. WHAT IF THAT WAS THE ENTIRE GAME, I thought to myself, IT WILL BE SO EASY TO PROGRAM DUDE JUST DO IT. So I did.

It was no fun.

A few iterations on that idea brought me to RGB but without the restriction on how many times you could visit each tile; spaces never became impassable. This was a mistake, I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, I still didn't love it & didn't care enough about the game to lovingly handcraft puzzles so I just had each game start with a random board.

That didn't work.

Sometimes interesting boards would be generated but it turned out that many truly random boards are simply unsolvable. This is probably easy to prove mathematically but it was easier to just try it & see it fail. So, instead, I had the computer start with a board of a solid color & play the game backwards in order to generate the boards.

The puzzles were terrible.

Because by "play the game backwards" I mean "randomly move around & change the tile colors." I had the computer make a certain number of moves & reaching that number was the end condition for completing the board. What often happened is that I would end up with a green board with like 2 red tiles in the corner. So I had the computer look at the surrounding spaces before making each move & made it more likely to choose the least visited surrounding tiles. After completing the puzzle it counts how many spaces there are of each color & if there's too much of an imbalance it just starts over. This is a terrible, terrible algorithm but who cares, at least it worked. Sort of.

Every puzzle was way too easy.

So I finally introduced the tile counting mechanic so that you could only visit each tile 3 times. This required rewriting the puzzle generator to ensure that every puzzle was solvable but it finally made RGB feel like a puzzle game.

It's still not a great puzzle game.

The End.

RGB Official Release

RGB is officially available from the Potato Clock Games website.

The save/load system took like 15 minutes to code & I decided not to worry about the shitty audio design. Instead of encrypting the save file in any way I just added a note in there that Jesus was watching. That oughta do it, yeah?

I'm still 2 achievements short of 100%ing my own game & I think that's the way it's going to stay.

Rogue Matrix Debriefing

I want to take a few minutes to collect my thoughts about what did & didn't work with Rogue Matrix. I think I should try to do this with all of my games, just to give myself some direction in terms of design.

HOT POTATOES:

Music Generation: This was a successful little experiment which I'll definitely be exploring further.

Dungeon Generation: I like the look of the dungeons, layout-wise. I'll probably use this same algorithm if I ever make another roguelike, which I almost certainly will.

Light Strategy: There's just enough strategy involved to keep the game a little interesting. Check it:

The more enemies there are wandering around the level, the more the loot is worth. So to maximize your score on a given level, the best strategy is usually to pick up all the loot first, then kill the enemies. However, having more enemies around also causes your time to decrease faster, shortening your overall playtime & making it difficult to reach the later stages where loot is worth more. So then it would seem that the best strategy is to sprint through the first few levels to get where the big points are. But then you miss out on all of the items you could have collected, which are often essential for survival in the late game. So it's a balance, but there are enough random elements to keep the player from guessing at an optimal strategy for a specific game until all of the items have been discovered.

Look, I'm not saying it's a great game, but I do think there's a little more depth to it than first meets the eye.

COLD POTATOES:

Exploration is Boring: This is an immediate deathblow to a roguelike. Every part of every level looks exactly the same. Every enemy looks exactly the same. Exploration is a central game mechanic here & it just isn't much fun.

Worst Graphics Award: I mean, have a little bit of pride. Jesus.

Terrible UI: All that text in the infobar needs to be there because the game does such a bad job of explaining itself to the player. The strategic elements should be communicated to the player more elegantly through gameplay. It's Ok for a game to be hard to figure out completely, but only if figuring out the rules is designed to be part of the fun or the challenge. Here, it's just shitball UI & UX design.

CONCLUSION:

I think this game turned out alright considering the minimal amount of effort I ended up putting into it. I'll probably use this game as a starting point for building another roguelike in the future.

Second Course: RGB

I've decided to finish up this little puzzle game called RGB. It wins both the Potato Clock Games Awards for Minimalism & Lamest Title. The puzzles are generated randomly (well, it's not really random) & look like this:

Moving the highlighted space to an adjacent space changes that space's color; from red to green, green to blue, or blue to red. GET IT, RGB. The goal is to get all of the spaces the same color:

The catch is that you can't visit any particular space more than 3 times (the markings on the squares in the completed puzzle indicate how many times I visited them).

There are 4 difficulty levels (the example above is "amateur" difficulty, level 2 of 4) & a simple achievement system, that's about it. All I have left to do is some audio work & a save/load system so that your achievements don't just get wiped when you close the game. In case you didn't know what saving & loading was.

I'll try to have this finished one week from today.

Rogue Matrix Official Release

Rogue Matrix is finished & has been uploaded to the Potato Clock Games website. I actually think it turned out pretty well for what it is, which is a shitty, low effort roguelike.

Enjoy! For like, a minute. Then do something else. In the meantime, I'll figure out which game I should get cracking on next.

Music Generation in Rogue Matrix

I should be able to wrap Rogue Matrix up tomorrow, just working some kinks out of the music engine. I want to get this in good working order because the music is the only thing I really like about Rogue Matrix. It's about the simplest procedural music generation system I could think of, & ignoring some technical constraints imposed by Game Maker which I'm still working through, it's been pretty simple to implement.

It works like this. I wrote five songs, each one minute long & loopable, all in the same key & at the same BPM. Each song has 4 parts: drum, bass, harmony, melody. Once the song is written, I save each part as its own track. So I have 5 drum tracks, 5 bass tracks, etc. Then, at the beginning of a level of Rogue Matrix, the system chooses at random one of the available drum parts, bass parts, etc. & plays them all at the same time on a loop. So the drum part of song C is played with the bass part of song A, the melody of song B & the harmony of song D. Or whatever. The five minutes of music that I wrote become over 10 hours worth of possible combinations:

5 songs, 4 parts each
So when generating a song there are 5 choices for each of the 4 parts
That's 5^4 = 625 possible unique songs
The parts, & therefore the songs, are all one minute long
625 minutes = 10.4167 hours
10.4167 hours > The amount of time anyone will ever spend playing this game

I think of this as a song template; because the key & tempo are always going to be the same, songs from the same template will be pretty similar to each other. This was just an experiment; Rogue Matrix uses a single song template, but adding more is just a matter of writing the base jams. Writing those songs, by the way, is a lot fun & relatively easy; you can't be bothered with obsessing over anything because it's just going to be disassembled & frankensteined together with the other songs. I'm really looking forward to scaling this system up for some future project.

Dungeon Generation in Rogue Matrix

I went through quite a few design iterations before landing on a dungeon-generating algorithm that I liked. First, what do we mean by dungeon? I'm talking about a top-down, 2-D representation of interconnected rooms & hallways with a traversable path between any 2 points. That last requirement is the trickier part. It's even more tricky to get something that's unpredictable, yet believable; like, not just a bullshit jumble that a computer obviously puked up. Like, maybe some dude really designed this dungeon.

Here's what I ended up with; it's pretty simple but I like the results:

1. Divide the play area into a 3x3 grid. This is just what happened to work with the screen resolution I was working with.

2. At each gridspace, decide with some probability to build a room there. You can get a lot of mileage out of tweeking that probability, depending on how room-dense you want your dungeon to be. This leaves the possibility of a roomless dungeon, which I didn't want, so if we end up with no rooms I just go ahead & build 2; a start room & an end room.

3. Build each room with randomly chosen widths, lengths, & starting point offsets. You've got to tweek the minimum & maximum values for all of those parameters depending on what you're going for. I used maximum values large enough to allow rooms to cross over gridlines & even over each other, which makes for much more interesting dungeons, I think.

4. Inside of each room, choose a random "anchor point" for creating hallways. I started out just using the room's midpoint but it made the dungeons sort of predictable &, I don't know, computery.

5. Build hallways. This is what really makes the dungeon. We have a list of rooms. Randomly choose one (room A) & remove it from the list. Then, randomly choose another (room B) & remove it from the list. Build a hallway between room A's anchor & room B's anchor. Choose another room (room C), remove it from the list, build a hallway between B & C, & so on until the list is empty. This guarantees that we can now choose any 2 random rooms & travel between them, very important. Note that we're allowing hallways to pass through rooms that happen to be in their way; this, again, makes the dungeon more interesting & unpredictable, compared to a procedure that just builds hallways between adjacent rooms, which is common in these kinds of games.

With the dungeon built, we can toss the player at a random spot in a random room, do the same for the exit object, & be confident that it's possible for the player to reach the exit. I didn't put any constraint on where the exit could be in relation to the player, so the exit could be like 2 steps away in the next room. This decision was informed more heavily by my not giving a good god damn than by any sort of design principal.

So next time you're in a jam & you need to write a procedural dungeon generating algorithm I guess you'll be all set.

First Up: Rogue Matrix

I just played what I think is the most recent build of Rogue Matrix, it seems pretty much finished so I think that's where I'll start. Low hanging fruit, yeah?

As the name implies, this is a computer hacking-themed roguelike. It is not good. It's pretty bare-bones as far as roguelikes go, but don't worry, it's got a hella hot soundtrack. This game is an experiment that got out of hand, I really just wanted to see if I could make a random dungeon generator that I liked. Once I got it working I figured I may as well get a dude walking around in there. Then, you know, may as well give him some loot to collect. Things to fight. & so on until a successful experiment became a shitty game. CIRCLE OF LIFE.

The effects of the items you can pick up in the game are randomized with each playthrough so I had to come up with a bunch of different things for items to do; some good, some bad, some just for kicks. One of the just for kicks effects was "matrix mode" where everything on the screen is made out of falling numbers. It took longer to get this stupid effect working properly than it did to get the dungeon generator working. I thought it would be hilarious if the game was just always in matrix mode & thus was born Rogue Matrix.

I just need to finish up some audio stuff, then this gem should be ready to go. Probably a few hours of work. Taking into consideration my real job, getting ready for next semester which begins on Monday, & the fact that every season of Friends just landed on Netflix, I'd say I should be able to have this one wrapped up by the end of the weekend.

I'LL BE THERE FOR YOOOOOOU.

PotatoLog Zero

I'm starting this undercover devlog to motivate myself by making my lack of progress unavoidably apparent.

I have a bunch of games that I started like 5 years ago that I need to finish so that I can start working on other things. All of these games are dumb. Why do I want to finish them? I'm sure that this is a question that has already been resolved by the scientific community. I am moving on.

I'll write more about them as I get to working on them, but here are the games:

Jack Ham Zero - prequel to the beloved Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations.

Sunrise Sunset - a terrible platformer / shroom tripping simulator.

Giraffe Adventures - a simple, browser-based choose your own adventure story.

RGB - a small puzzle game about colors & squares.

Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2 - a controversial puzzle game about colors & squares.

SquareWave - an action/puzzle game about colors & squares.

Rogue Matrix - a shitty roguelike with a sick soundtrack.

Jesus fuck, that's about twice as many games as I thought I had to finish. Where to start?