New project at hand

I have just recently started working on a bot for IRC. Twitch channels to be specific. Yes, they are nothing new but it was surprisingly hard to find any information on how to get one working.

Long story short. I have finally managed to get the bot to log in to twitch and stay in the channel. It is also able to read and respond to the chat and it has a built-in flood timer in order for it to not get banned.

The next part is all concept and plans. I have nothing other than the base for a chat bot so far. It is written in C# by the way.

This bot is for a text based adventuregame where I plan on mixing up some roguelike and minecraft together. World will be generated as people play, difficulty depends on how far you are from the first tile, and what the next tile has in it will be determined from the tile you are moving from. For example if you were in a plains area, there’s a 90% chance for the next tile to also be plains. But the 10% consists of mountains, forest, ocean, lakes etc. If you were on a mountain tile there would be around a 40% chance for the next tile you step into to be a mountain as well. If you were to make a mountain tile then return back to the plains tile and go around the mountain there would be very little chance of the mountain being larger than just one tile.

As for what is in these tiles. Depending on the tile the things that can be randomized in them will be different, but in overall there will be “slots” for each tile. Sky, land, monster slots. These slots will get a randomly generated thing as the sky can have a flying object, maybe the winds are stronger in the area. In the land there could be a cave, trees, a house, well. And there is a chance of meeting monsters to fight.

The game will be based around leveling up your character, maybe cutting down a tree to build something. Visiting caves, towns, ruins etc. The further you are from the spawn the harder everything is and the better loot enemies will drop or you can find from the possibly generated things in the area.

For the bot to not be floody I will be adding a timer for every action that will depend on the amount of people in the chatroom. With only few people, cutting down a tree would take few minutes, but with a lot of people it could even take half an hour.

In addition to waiting, there will also be stamina. You can’t just do things, you will be limited by a number of actions you are able to take. This will fill over time.

Those are the basic free to play game mechanics and depending on the amount of people this bot will most likely get in the way of talking.

I am working on this for pure curiosity on how well a text based multiplayer adventure game of this sort would do, how much is too much text, is it possible to limit that, am I able to create something of this scale. This game will be combining most of what I’ve done in the past. Random generating stable world, scaling difficulty, internet connection requirements and also MySQL databases.

For the next few weeks I will work for an alpha version and then test it out during one of my streams. And from there we shall see how it will be developed. Wish me luck!

From Doggydog to Wuhwuh to this day

Hey everyone. I have been out of the pictures for over a year now. This update will cover all of the time I’ve been quiet.

After my last post in 2013 I did go to work with Taru Saukkonen and her company Pink Rose on a game called Doggydog. The game idea was simple and good: Make a tamagotchi type of game for children where they need to take care of a dog and get some real life questions and missions. a Good tool for parents to see if their kid can really be given responsibility over a real dog, or just for fun. The estimated release date was christmas 2013. The game platform was, of course, Windows Phone 8. I programmed it with XNA 4, which only supported Windows Phone 7, but those games would work on 8 as well so we didn’t think it was a problem at that time and I was confident with my skills.

I went to AppCampus for a month with Taru and learned a great deal about the gaming industry, marketing, costs, time requirements and of course programming. Also, the place was amazing. Sadly I left there about a week early while also hurting my foot on the way back to Kajaani but that’s besides the point.

AppCampus is this innovative thing from Microsoft, they take in applications with good game ideas and if they like it, they give a month of training on being a businessman/woman and also a funding if you release your idea to their platform for a certain amount of time before moving it to more platforms. My boss had an idea they approved of and I was wanted as the man to make that game a reality. It was the biggest responsibility I ever had in my life till then and I was pretty nervous.

Our project had a rough start. I was originally supposed to be the lesser programmer and only do as told. It took a week while in AppCampus that I found myself promoted to the team leader and given responsibility about so many things that I had no idea how to do. I took that as a chance to learn and did my best while doing mistakes here and there. My biggest fault must’ve been my lack of courage on speaking my mind aloud. This also started to slowly affect my coding work forcing me to take shortcuts where I could making the code a lot harder to edit after if it was needed to. And it was.

Our team consisted of me programming the game, my old boss from Kajaani Game Studios programming the connection and database related stuff and two graphics artists, and our boss Taru giving the picture of what the game needs to be of course. There were some changes on the team during the developement but I wont go into detail as it mostly stayed within those lines. And I can’t really remember everyone as I worked from home on my own time.

At some point early in developement we had to change the game name as it was already in use for some pet food shop and our Doggydoggame turned into Wuhwuh. It’s a nice name and I like it.

Right at the end of 2013 when the game was ready to be released, we noticed a lack of things that AppCampus requires from the games that teams work on. These things required editing a huge portion of the code and with the deadline closing in I had to redo and add code enough to match 1/3 of what I had already done. And I did in one week, editing and adding stuff equivalent to two months of work with the pace we had been able to keep up with till then.
These missing parts consisted tombstoning, way to return to the game if it was suddenly put down due to a phone call or other reason. A pretty important thing to forget, but for me that was the very first real project and my very first mobile app project at that. I had no idea what it required, neither did Taru.

We managed to release in time and I had a week-long break trying to sleep off my exhaustion from the allnighters I had to do to pull it off only to hear that the game was denied by even more missing parts that were impossible to add with pure XNA. Yes, really. I had to switch to SLXNA, Silverlight + XNA combination. It took me a LOT of time to get that working, never before had I used Silverlight so I had to learn in quickly and hope it didn’t break the code too badly, which it did.
At this point my code was a total mess, barely holding up patches here and there, building up and all I could do was to keep at it. Since our deadline was moved I had more time and I spent some of it trying to edit my old code to be more versatile and user-friendly, also reducing the load our game took into the battery life of phones. It ran smoothly even though there was no difference from the outside, the code was slightly better. By far, it was the worst AND the best code I’ve ever written after my very first game that I made but it worked and after fixing it, it looked decent.

It took half a year more after christmas to actually get the game in a state where AppCampus approved it and the work was finally done. Since I was to be paid after the work was finished I was pretty much hungry each day, worrying till I planked out for a weak amount of sleep each night. When the game was complete I wasnt really partying, I slept my first real night of sleep for the last half a year. THEN I partied for a day! You did see that coming 🙂

Long story short, I took on a half a year job that stretched into a full year, got paid for that half a year and lost all my motivation on game developement. After the game was released I could barely think about programming without the need of hiding into a corner and doing something else.
I did force myself to comment the code for Wuhwuh as much as I could but did a poor job out of it. Never forget to comment your code while you create it, makes up for a lot of time lost from the future!
I also did some small patching on different bugs and then parted with Pink Rose and started my Civil Duty, which I’ve been at for the last 10 months. And it’ll end in two months.

This year with no programming was what I needed after all the stress I had. At the start of my Civil Duty just thinking about code made me shut down but that didn’t stop me from planning game ideas after game ideas, only the part with programming was hard to think of.

Right now as I am writing this, I am still unsure of my future. I love games, I love creating games and programming is fun again, but programming for work still feels like a distant nightmare to happen. I plan on practicing some Unity3D after my Civil Duty ends and I am thinking on what to do in the future.
I am hoping to get a chance to give this forward to others, maybe even teach programming. But as for making games for living, I am considering on leaving it as a hobby that wont add stress.

The lack of writing in my blog is due to me pondering and still processing about the past two years but I haven’t disappeared. In fact, I’ve been streaming regularly again for the last four months or so. My new-found enthusiasm is from I Wanna Be The Guy fangames, there are thousands of them! They are hard, simple, fun, and the most of all, full of innovative game ideas!

Within the next two months left on my Civil Duty I will be deciding what the future holds for me on the gaming industry. Hopefully a lot of fun. 🙂

I am very proud of Wuhwuh. It is so far the biggest and most detailed game that I’ve been a part of making and it was also a success. Apparently it is in the top in finnish educational games and decently popular.
My time with Pink Rose taught me a lot of things that I never expected to learn and it helped me to see my own limits and weaknesses.

Now all I have to do is to face them in order to move forward.

Updates and stuff

After moving to our current home we’ve had a problem after problem with different things. I’ve managed to keep JVP-Team up and running with barely no work at all. Recyclix sold few times keeping me up and I managed to get some freelancer work from Kajaani Game Studios for mobile games. Since I haven’t really had anything worth writing about within the last year my blog has kinda died. Sorry about that!

I’ve been streaming a lot lately. I’m using my stream as a way to broaden my knowledge on different games (and to have fun!) as well as a way to practice on my spoken english skills. Anyone interested, do join me at http://www.twitch.tv/lukitari

I also have something worth writing now as well! As I mentioned I’ve been doing small programming for Kajaani Game Studios the last month or so, I was also accepted into a bigger project starting at 20th of May. At that date we are going into Espoo to attend AppCampus for four weeks. During that time we’re going to be working on a game for Windows Phone 7. A dog tamagotchi game that aims to teach the players how to live with dogs from basic knowledge as how often to feed the puppy, building your own agility course for your dog and even small things like deciding clothes and furniture for your virtual dog, yourself and the house. So far I dont really have much more information that I can give out, but we even have a celebrity working on the project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanja_Karpela She is the one giving us a lot of the important details for the project.

With this job JVP-Team will be able to go on and I will hopefully get more interesting work in the future too.

Oh, I also have a profile in LinkedIn now: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ville-vienonen/6a/37/6b2?trk=fbr

News on developement

Hey all. It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything in my blog, but I’m still alive.

I’ve had a ton of things going on and one month ago I moved to a new apartment. This move made the download links of my games unuseable since I cant use my server computer anymore but I’ll be fixing that soon so stay tuned as I’ll slowly pick up on my programming work again!

Finnish Game Jam – Bibliotheca Infinitum

While the school is closing in on the last months we still had the opportunity to attend Finnish Game Jam this year. This year the topic was Ouroboros, snake eating it’s own tail. This meant infinite or time and we took the infinite part and used it on our plan for a dungeon crawler game. And then there was a special competition of making the game a Windows Phone 7 game. This is my first wp7 game that I actually finished, the Jungle Race game is still unfinished. After the game jam weekend, we had one more week to finish our game and put it to the wp7 marketplace. Right today, monday 13th of 2nd. Our game was accepted in and that concluded our part for the competition.

Bibliotheca Infinitum (latin, means infinite library) is a game where the main hero is a simple librarian who got lost and has to find the book of portals to get back home. Your job is to navigate through a random generated library fighting different monsters with a familliar rock paper scissors -type of fighting mechanism. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper and paper beats rock. When I say beat, I mean it halves the losers stat for that attack type and the one who has higher stat gets to hit the other. When you or the enemy runs out of stamina, you or he dies. The battles give you time to decide what to do. You can attack, check the enemy stats or run away. The battle system itself is still a bit unbalanced and we’ll be updating some logic for the enemy attack choices along with some challenges later as we continue developing the game a bit further.

Game is unfinished and empty, but planned to be further developed in the future.

The team for this game was:

Vienonen Ville, (me) programmer.

Lintula Viivi, Map design and templates.

Hassinen Timo, GUI and menu’s.

Paasikivi Joni, Battlescreen, enemies and effects.

Hyvärinen Aki, Searching and choosing music.

Tiihonen Kimmo(not in FGJ team but we used his music), list of samples Aki chose two of our music from (Will change all of game musics into Kimmo’s music later)

Downloadable into Windows Phone 7 and up for free: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/bibliotheca/f46c863c-7bbe-4c43-9750-c8454baf7b32

Gameplay video: http://www.jvp-team.fi/jvpfiles/projects/bibliothecavid.flv

Jungle Race – still working on it

As I’ve worked on developing Jungle Race game with a friend on our work practice, we went through a lot of different choices for possible modes on the game, different ways of playing the same game. For the purpose of being able to try out different things I made a quick game simulation, a game that shows five iPhone screens at the same time that all have the same objects, but with different looks. The main point for this was to try out how, using the same server, it would be possible to add different versions of the game that would work together but depending on the game itself players would have different meaning on the objects appearing.

We developed several different gameplay modes with possibilities and tried to see how they would work. As we’re still working on them I can’t really say much, but instead of just going after the fruits, there would be a possibility to go after the players around you too, to maybe build something and even completely different games. All of what we’re planning, will show up in all of the games differently, do the same things, but still different. As our boss said it, people have different goals in life, the reason they are out walking down the street is different. Different versions of the game would give the player different reason in a different looking world while still interacting with everyone all the same.

As my work practice is nearing its end, i’m concentrating on one special worm mode for Jungle Race (not telling more than that yet!) and once it’s finished I’m sure it will be great! I’ll be sure to post more again next time.

Work practice – Jungle Race

Started my work practice at monday and my first task is to play a game and get other people to play it! It’s free so read more if your interested.

Kajaani Game Studios is working on a game called Jungle Race and its main point is to get gamers out there and do the work themselves instead of just sitting around pressing buttons, and they do it quite well. Although the game is under heavy development, it already has the most important part working, the reason for running.

In the game, player has to collect fruits that appear randomly on the map of the game, the game uses GPS so you’ll be moving in your own city. There are total of five different fruits in game and they move in different speeds. (The different fruits depend a bit on the phone you use, explained later) Getting the fruits isn’t hard, but it definitely gets you better score if you try to run them instead of just walking around or waiting. For every fruit you collect you get a point and for 10 points or more you’ll get your name in the high score list of the day/week/month. If there happens to be other players in the vicinity you’ll see them on the map and the fruits around are same for all players nearby, so go get them before the other players!

This game works on many phones using GPS, Nokia E52, E71, E72, C5, C7, E7 and N8, iPhones and pads can get it from the AppStore and smartphones can use the game with a browser (this version is quite new so the link isn’t visible anywhere yet) To download the game for Nokia phones, visit http://www.tarzani.com, and go there to see your scores as well as to compare yours with your friends!

The game is currently free and under heavy development and I’m tasked with collecting data on it and it’s bugs so people reading this should just download the game and report back to me in the comments part after playing a while, I want to hear all opinions and possible developing suggests 😉

There are differences in the versions of the game. The one developed most is for the Nokia phones, iPhone version currently only uses banana for the fruit images, but has the ability to shoot and leave a trap in the ground for stealing other player points if they happen to walk over it. Nokia version has the correct fruit images and most options to work with, although the settings menu is really hard to use at the moment.

As I get to work more with Kajaani Game Studios on the game I’ll be updating here. For now I only ask for people who see this post to try the game out and comment on the pro’s and cons of the game giving us the valuable data we need!

A new toy – iPhone4

I decided to start writing about my experiences on other games and what I’ve seen around the world, (not that I travel much just yet) so here’s the first one!

I got myself an iphone4 two days ago and the first thing I did, was to try out few top list games like Shadow Cities, and Solomon’s Keep, free great games. The phone itself cost me a bit over 500 € but luckily they also sold it by monthly fees and now i’m only paying 16 €/month for a while till I can one day just pay the rest in one big sum. (This actually saved me 5 € of the normal purchase, yay for Elisa shop, though it might’ve been cheaper to just buy it from the internet)

Solomon’s keep is the usual floor to floor mass fight game where you play as a mage. The system is good and leveling system interesting since you can choose from certain options of what to take. There’s nothing too special on the game except that it works and the last boss laughter along the way is just amazing.(especially when he coughs) It’s your usual dungeon with masses of monsters with great looking spells.

Shadow Cities uses your GPS to pinpoint you while you play, you, as a mage of your own city, collect spirits for one of the two sides in the game taking part in on a massive multiplayer game. If there are other players in your city, be ready for a lot of fighting, else you might just use the warping spell to go to the more crowded areas in the game “outside your physical form”. I kinda like the idea but it seems to lack a lot of what it could have in it (It also seems to be under heavy development so it’ll get better and better!). It’s limited to only one attack spell and healing spell and few other spells used on certain things and seems to limit in level 15, meaning that you’ll be as strong as you can get in just few weeks. http://www.shadowcities.com

Anyone who loves RPG games, should try these out since they’re free anyway, and on the top games list. Get them from the AppStore 🙂

Now that I have an iphone i’m already making up plans of developing games, especially thanks to Shadow Cities I got so many ideas. If someone knows other similar games as Shadow Cities, tell me please! I have to see if my ideas have been made already and I could just buy them and play, or if I can still create them myself 😉

Going into 3D – the roguelike dungeon generator. Also some threading.

Just recently during April 2011 I was finally able to get enough free time to keep on learning what I was planning on learning a year ago, 3D programming with C# XNA. I’ve turned my work for the new visual studio 2010 and XNA 4 and i’ve even managed to break my first laptop due to overuse. After spending my last savings for a new laptop (before starting JVP-Team) I decided to stop lazying around and do something. I started working on a 2D roguelike dungeon generator with the intention of unveiling the secrets of how Diablo and Diablo 2 we’re generated in the past. I’m a big fan of both games and i’m already dreaming of owning Diablo 3, but even more than that, i’ve always loved the ascii type games, roguelikes. A simple roleplaying game where dying is easy and will happel a lot of times making you to start completely from zero with a completely new character who has a chance to meet your old character as an evil ghost. Most of my love for roguelikes come from a single one called Dungeon Crawler that actually has graphics instead of ascii.

So I started searching info about how to generate something so big and still so random and I found myself reading about it in a website called roguebasin. From there I adapted the theory and made my own code with XNA, added some paint colors and a selfmade @ as the player. That’s how the first maze generator was created. I wasn’t happy how the field of view and fog of war we’re still a little bit buggy and even with my knowledge on memory management I found myself in a bind, the processor was going nuts by using only one core. I thought that this was my chance to finally try out the threading, using multiple cores in the game. In the end I got the basic knowledge about threading but it was no help for me so I ended up just reducing the amount it would draw at onces, it was only a number table so it was easy to control. I’m still working on the threading though.

After getting my 2D maze working I had the need to do more, it wasn’t unique, it was just one among the others, and buggy. I had the perfect base so I decided to learn 3D as well. It took me four hours to find out and create the 2D maze and an optional hour to learn about threading. Then it took me about two hours to add 3D into my maze generator and the outcome was pretty much what you can see on the second picture.

The generator itself loops 50 000 times checking the number table for possible places to add rooms or hallways and it ends up with around 2 000 – 3 000 rooms and hallways (the number created is shown in the left upper corner) then it creates from one to five endings into the game in the rooms. Currently this is only an attempt to create a dungeon generator and to do it in 3D and it worked the way I hoped it would. I have my future plans for this part of my coding and since they’re still a bit under development I won’t be writing about them here. It is one of the bigger plans for my company JVP-Team.

Maze2D: http://www.jvp-team.fi/jvpfiles/projects/Maze.rar

Maze3D: http://http://www.jvp-team.fi/jvpfiles/projects/Maze3D.rar

Required to play: http://www.jvp-team.fi/jvpfiles/projects/xnafx40_redist.msi

Work continues – Eko-Twist into the final version Recyclix

During the time from when Eko-Twist got finished, we’ve had some more requests for the game and from that was born Tanssii roskien kanssa, Roska-rock, Jätejamit and Sotkutonta päivää. These four are the exact same game as Eko-Twist but for us to sell the game forward, certain things needed to be changed. These things included the name and background graphics. Other city trash-recycling companies also had other needs for the game, for example, some trashes went into different places than here in Kajaani.

Now after the third game we began to think that maybe this could be more than just a small game for few companies. We contacted Eko-10 and made sure about our rights for that game and got their blessings to continue developing. It’s still under developement since there’s quite plenty to do before it’s done, but the final version of our game that we will start to marchetise will be called Recyclix. For that i’ve put up my own company at the start of year 2011 called JVP-Team just a bit before we finished Sotkutonta päivää for Jyväskylä. It will still be a while before Recyclix is ready but i’ll be sure to write about it here after it is.