Afterlife: Roguelike where you fight your way down into a dungeon. When you die, you become a ghost and are sent to the bottom floor. You must now use your ghostly powers to sneak back upstairs to find your body and carry on.

Against the Rules: The story of a man working a dead-end job for a faceless megacorporation in a cyberpunk city where routine is law. The game really starts when he disregards protocol and finds himself on the run from the authorities.

Alternative Physics: Platformer where you’re swimming through a coral reef while wearing a life vest. You have to strain against its flotation and propel yourself down under the water.

Ancient Ruins: An endless racing game starring Nevada Clarke, intrepid explorer. Climb out of a collapsing pyramid and collect valuable artifacts before being swallowed up by the desert.

Apocalypse: Play as the earth as you try to divert earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters to areas where they’ll do the least amount of damage so the humans will have enough time to get to safety. Beware of rising panic levels leading to mass suicides and hysteria.

Chaos:  Orchestrate the perfect jailbreak and take over a high-security prison with hundreds of your fellow inmates. Could be a good application for a flocking algorithm.

Colony: A city building game set in space after an exodus from Earth due to resource scarcity. Terraforming is a key component.

Dreams: A point-and-click adventure in which you play a young girl who can interact with other peoples’ dreams. The items necessary to progress can be summoned by influencing her sleeping family into dreaming about them.

Electricity: You play a malevolent storm cloud. Use various types of lightning to rain destruction down on a peaceful city; lightning strikes cause chaining through water towers, sheet lightning blinds meteorologists, etc.

Everyone Is Dead: Survival horror where you are the last living person in a plague-stricken city. Your character mutters to himself about watching out for zombies and mutants. Plot twist: There’s nothing in the game that can hurt you.

Flammable: A god game in which you play a fire god. Your only means of communicating with your followers is by setting things on fire. Lead them in the winter and show them where to avoid in the summer.

Going Backwards: A stealth game in which your character can only moonwalk. Timing becomes paramount as you must move between hiding spots without being able to look in the direction you’re moving.

Industrial:  A rhythm game where you play a technician in charge of training assembly line machines. As you successfully perform each procedure, you move further down the line onto the next step in the line, each more complicated than the last.

Journey:  An adventure game where you play a sword. Throughout your owner’s quest, you must decide whether his cause is just and influence his fighting skill accordingly.

Keeping Control: An action game starring a brain. You have to suppress the right synapses and stimulate others in order to keep your owner, a mental patient on parole, from being recommitted.

Lifecycle: A tron-like in which you try to capture the most plots in a graveyard to raise an undead army.

Lost: Survive on a desert island after being marooned by your mutinous pirate crew. Survive long enough to signal a passing trade ship or settle down for the long-term.

Mutation: An RPG beat-em-up set in a science facility where you gain new powers by imbibing various chemicals and cultures from genetic experiments.

No Weapons Allowed: You play an assassin who specializes in penetrating highly secure government facilities. Your latest mission requires you to enter through the front door with a group of tourists, so bringing in weapons is out of the question. You’ll have to improvise with whatever you can find throughout the compound.

Point of No Return:  A metroidvania where every room is sealed after you exit it.

Rediscovery: A point-and-click detective story where the crime scene is slightly different every time you return.

Rise and Fall: A dating sim in which you play the Sun and try to find true love with the Moon.

Seasons: An art game in which you play a tree. You must balance your ability to survive the cycle of the seasons with your desire to cause happiness in people who look at your leaves and pick your fruit.

Surrounded: A simulation game where you manage a resort on a tiny tropical island.

Underworld: A tycoon game where you play a mob boss in his bid to become the kingpin of crime by rubbing out the competition.

I actually think my favorite part of this image is the ammo cartridge for the weapon. It’s a “shockgun” (get it? shotgun? shock….eh…), which shoots bursts of chain lightning. I’ve wanted to use the idea in a game for quite some time, and now I have a setting that makes sense to feature them.

Related: Every single piece of armor I’ve ever drawn has been super uninspired and boring.

Check it out!

It’s not a real pitch in that the game doesn’t exist and I don’t really have any inclination to make it, but it was a great thought experiment and I had a lot of fun planning it out. Let me know what you think!

Image by ~dmcblue on DeviantArt

I’ve recently been working on adding rich-text support to my engine, and while SFML does come with text rendering built in, it’s very simplistic. A text instance can only have one color and combination of styles in total, so if want to italicize a single word in a sentence you’re out of luck; you’ll have to split the text up into multiple chunks and position them independently. I’ve written a class that handles this all automatically, along with a simple markup parser to manage formatting. You can get the source here, and discuss it over at the SFML forums on the topic I made for it.

I’ve done some parser work before (notably for Slang), so the markup interpreter was fairly straightforward. All formatting is done with single-character delimiters (*bold*, ~italic~, and _underlined_), and the color tags can contain a hex value or color name. I’m sure it can use some optimizing, but so far it’s quite fast and works exactly as well as the vanilla Text class.

If you haven’t used SFML before, I highly recommend checking it out! The fact that I was able to put all of this together in just one day is a testament to the power and ease of use that it provides.

I bought Absolution shortly after it came out, hoping against hope that it would be a worthy sequel to one of my favorite all-time games, Hitman: Blood Money. I added Absolution it to my favorites list before Steam had even finished downloading it.

According to the Steam counter, I played for a total of 13 hours before I removed it from that list. I’d be willing to bet that the majority of that time was spent doing something else, leaving the game running in the background as I watched videos on Youtube or worked on one of my programming projects.

Two weeks after removing it from my favorites, I uninstalled it. I don’t think I’ll be back.

Hitman: Absolution is not a good game.

What do I mean by this? Several distinct things at once, actually;

• It is not a good Hitman game,
• It is not a good stealth game,
• It is not a game that respects my time, and
• It is not a game that respects my intellect.

I’ll go through these one by one.

Hitman: Absolution is not a good Hitman game

At its core, a Hitman game is about freedom. A stage is set, an objective is given, and then the player is released. Through an intricate interweaving of systems, each level feels like a living, breathing world, and for all intents and purposes, it is. It’s the type of game that you never fully understand — you can play for hours and still find something new each time.

Absolution fails spectacularly in this respect. Despite a few standout levels, most of the game involves moving through a linear series of rooms as you progress from one door to another, triggering cinematic cutscenes and events along the way. Often the only choice involved is whether you walk down a hallway or crawl through an air vent to reach the same exact place.

Another of Absolution’s failings is that it tries to deliver the experience of a systemic game without actually being one.  Instead of a small set of rules which interact organically, we are given a large set of rules which fail to interact with each other in any way that the developers didn’t explicitly design. Here’s an example:

• Cars have alarms which can be sounded to distract guards. These alarms can be triggered either by shooting the car or walking up to it and interacting with it.
• Throwing a physics object, such as a bottle or a brick, will cause a noise that guards will investigate.

One scenario in particular sticks in my mind. I could see a car that I could use to cause a distraction, but the only weapon I had was unsilenced. Shooting was out of the question, so I picked up a hammer and tossed it at the car.

Nothing happened. The car wasn’t scripted to react to physics objects. Absolution wants you to believe that you’re an actor in a complex, systemic world, but it’s just an illusion. Without the crucial elements that define the Hitman series, Absolution only manages to be a generic stealth game. This brings me to my next point…

Hitman: Absolution is not a good stealth game

The last few years have seen the release of a number of fantastic stealth titles. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hitman franchise was resurrected in part due to the success of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Unfortunately, Absolution takes the most superficial element of Human Revolution’s cover-based stealth system and leaves everything else behind, resulting in a messy, frustrating stealth experience.

A good stealth game features smooth, fluid movement. When I get caught sneaking around, it should be my fault, not the game’s. I don’t mind being busted due to my lack of skill as a player or an oversight in my planning, but I cannot tolerate a game that fights my efforts to interact with it. Agent 47 controls like a shopping cart, and a shopping cart has no business being an assassin.

A good stealth game is also deterministic, which means that scenarios happen the same way every time. Since planning ahead is such an integral part of stealth gameplay, it’s essential that things happen in a predictable way. In Absolution, nothing ever happens the same way twice. I spent an hour on one single mission just because the window of opportunity I was waiting for depended on two characters having a particular conversation; each time I reloaded the conversation and animations involved would be slightly different, changing the amount of time I was given to slip past.

To top it all off, the save-anywhere feature that the Hitman series has had almost since the beginning has been replaced by a checkpoint system, despite the fact that checkpoints simply are not sufficient for a stealth game. To add insult to injury, when a checkpoint is reloaded all non-target enemies respawn and return to their starting locations, and if you quit the game you’ll have to restart the entire level from the beginning. This is absurd on so many levels, and brings me to my next point.

Hitman: Absolution does not respect my time

Out of all the time I spent playing, my most prominent memory is that of crouching against a wall, listening to two police officers discuss the raid they were conducting. It wasn’t that the topic was interesting (it wasn’t), or that the writing was good (far from it); I remember this moment because it occurs right after a checkpoint, and every time I loaded the game I had to listen to it all the way through as I waited for them to leave so I could get past. Simply put, Absolution has things to show you, and you’ll darn well see them whether you like it or not, no matter how much of your precious time it takes.

Assassin’s Creed was an important game for me when I first played it. For one, it was the first M rated game I’d ever played; for another, I could only get it to work on a computer that I had access to roughly once a week. It has a special place in my heart, but I’ve only played through it twice due to its long unskippable cutscenes. If Assassin’s Creed, with its immersive gameplay and interesting story, can’t lure me back, Absolution, which has neither, doesn’t have a chance.

Speaking of story…

Hitman: Absolution does not respect my intellect

I’ll be honest; I didn’t get far enough into the game to experience much of the story. What little I did see, however, was comprised of the worst writing I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to encounter. The antagonists are cartoonishly, mustache-twirlingly evil. Dialogue is littered with “look Ma, I’m mature!” profanity. Random passers-by accosted me with grade-school insults and “your mom” jokes. It was never clear why I was even going after my targets, or why my objectives should matter to me. An entire mission takes place in a strip club.

The clever puzzles from Blood Money are long gone, and in their place are a set of tasks that can’t be described as puzzles at all. Steal a document to make the crooked cop panic and shoot his contact, unhook the gas pump and wait for the target to throw his cigarette away, or wait for a repairman to relieve himself on a sparking generator; these are cheap gags that involve pressing a single button to execute and virtually no exploration to discover. The moments of epiphany that previous games so often delivered are conspicuously absent, and neither the gameplay nor the story is good enough to stand without them.

On the whole, Hitman: Absolution is the most disappointing game I’ve played to date. At best it fails to deliver in every possible way, and at worst it actively insults me as a player. I came into it hoping for the same intelligent, emergent experience that I so fell in love with from the other games, but what I got was mass-market drivel that doesn’t deserve to share a franchise name with its predecessors.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play Blood Money again.

Over the past three weeks I’ve rewritten every piece of code in the game. Looking back at the original code, I’m literally terrified at the prospect of dealing with it. For the most part the gameplay is nothing complex, so I was able to build on the engine I wrote for Hypothermia. I created a data-driven cutscene scripting system using Slang, which I wrote about here. This was immensely helpful both in terms of writing reusable code and iterating quickly on the way each scene played out.

I’ve also redone almost all of the artwork. The art in the original version of Humphrey was composed entirely of large colored squares. This was mainly due to time constraints; the abstract style allowed me to spend very little time on each asset while still conveying the desired meaning. For the remake I did away with this restriction, and I’m very happy with the results. As usual, I used Inkscape for all the art.

Finally, this release includes a fantastic soundtrack by Chris Logsdon. It was composed specifically for the game, and you can download it here in high quality for the price of your choice.

Download the game here! I’d love to hear what you think of it!

Download here!

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with the way this jam turned out. We had a lot of fun designing the gameplay and systems, and the game is feature complete despite having only one level at the moment. Even after testing and debugging for 48 hours straight I still enjoy playing the game, which feels like an accomplishment of its own. Still, it’s not a game jam if you don’t make some stupid mistakes and learn a few things, so here are my Things That Went Right and Wrong.

What went right

Flashpunk

At this point I can’t imagine using anything but Flashpunk for my game jam needs. Paul was able to pick it up fairly quickly, despite the fact that he hadn’t used it at all until a few days before the jam. Chris and I have used it a number of times, and even so we both found new features that we’d never known about. The API feels complete and intuitive, and it seems like there’s a function or class for everything we could ever need.

Systemic design with message passing

We designed our base engine as a set of systems that communicated with each other indirectly through message broadcasting, instead of directly through function calls. This allowed us to focus on programming the rules of the game world instead of specific interactions between different entity types. Even though getting each system working correctly was a challenge, adding new rules and rule responses is quite simple.

Data-driven workflow

We did all of our level design using Ogmo Editor, and as usual it served us well. Since we used a tileset for our levels’ art and a grid for collision and pathfinding, I modified my OgmoWorld utility classes to automatically import each of these types automatically and take advantage of FLAKit‘s live reloading capabilities. These changes will be included when I get around to officially releasing OgmoWorld.

What went wrong

Systemic design with message passing

Yeah, I know this one is in both groups. That’s deliberate.

Despite the fact that message passing is really cool and allows for some interesting emergent interactions, it’s not a good fit for everything. One example of a poor application is updating each enemy with the player’s position. My solution was to broadcast a message that told the player to report back with his position. This was slower and less elegant than searching the world for the player instance, and I wish I had realized that sticking rigidly to message passing was a bad approach.

Preconceived ideas

Chris and I had decided we wanted to make a stealth game before the jam started. Even though we didn’t do any kind of brainstorming beforehand, that decision still limited our ability to be creative with our interpretation of the theme. Fortunately we still managed to stay in scope and get the game to feature-complete, but I still wish we had come into the jam without any plans.

Overall, I’d call this Game jam another success. Make sure you play the game!