The big project for TIGSource proved to be harder than I expected. About a week ago, I realized that anything that I could make by Thursday would not fit my original vision. Accordingly, the big project has been delayed for 1-2 months. In its stead I whipped together a 4-day game: Thunder Brigade.
Game rules below the break.
I’m working on a bigger project for the TIGSource competition, but I thought that I’d throw something in for October. Zama is an abstract strategy game about territory control and bidding. Get Zama here.
Special thanks to Mat and David for helping me playtest this. I couldn’t have made this game without their help.
Game rules below the break.
I was putting off writing this, but I had better get it down on paper before I forget all about it. There’s not much to say this time, so I’ll keep it short.
The monthly game enterprise got off to a rocky start. Overtime at work ate into my game development time and I had to scamble to get anything done. This month’s game is more of a toy; it’s about managing an ecological system.
If trying to save a bunch of crabs from extinction sounds interesting, you can get Gaia Dreams here. I’m going to post my thoughts on the development process after I get some sleep.
Those in the audience with mathematical inclinations will notice that the time between the releases of Andromeda and Swarm is approximately one month. This is, in fact, not at all accidental; indeed, it is quite intentional. One might say that I’m on a mission, a secret mission. A secret mission to release one indie game every month!
OK, so perhaps that was not so shocking. After all, I credited Kloonigames with inspiring me to start this whole thing. I didn’t want to make any grand proclamations in the beginning, because those tend to fall flat on their face. Right now, I feel that I have a nice momentum going. I’m chomping at the bit to start the September game and I was pretty happy at how Swarm turned out. Because of this, and my not quite awake state at the moment, I’m publicly committing to releasing one game, full of indie goodness before the end of each month. I might pause this to work on larger projects or if I get run over by a herd of mammoths, but until then let the games flow!
Why would I do such a thing? Read more to find out.
GameSetWatch has published an opinion piece on two competing models of game development: team collaboration and designer-as-author. I disagree with the thesis and the tone of the article strongly, which is why I felt compelled to pen this response.
The headache one has when trying to deploy Visual C++ programs is ridiculous. Microsoft is updating the runtime DLLs for Visual Studio with every release now. As a result, you can’t be sure if people have Visual Studio runtime or not. If they don’t, crypic error messages appear.
The official solution is to install the runtime DLLs; Microsoft provides a re-distributable package to do this. That may be an option for large software, but it isn’t for small games. Lately, I’ve been including the DLLs with the game, but some people were having problems anyway.
I’ve had enough mucking around with this stuff. On Friday I installed Code::Blocks with MinGW. VS is an excellent IDE - probably the best on the market right now. It’s too bad that I’ll have to leave it because Microsoft can’t sort out how things should be deployed. Requiring people to install stuff for small programs is not a good idea.
I’ve changed the Swarm downloadable to the MinGW version. If anyone had problems running with Wine (or Windows for that matter), you should try it again with new version.
The second seven-day game is done, and with it comes a new batch of lessons. I’m not going to repeat what I’ve said in the Andromeda postmortem, even though some of the points there could also apply here. Things didn’t turn out as well as I wanted, but becoming a better developer and designer is one of the reasons I’m making the games.
Swarm can be a bit confusing to new players. To keep people from getting lost on their first game, I’ve written a short guide to Swarm.
Waypoints lay out a path for your swarm to follow. They look like a flag with a circle around it. The arrows connecting the waypoints show which way the swarm will go. You can drag the waypoints with the left mouse button.
In order to create a waypoint, click the black flag button on the left. If you want to delete a waypoint, right-click it. You can connect waypoints to the hive by dragging from the hive to the waypoint.
An advanced way to make waypoints is to SHIFT-drag an exiting waypoint (or the hive). This will make a new waypoint, connected to the one you dragged.
HiveThe hive has 30 health points in the beginning of the game. When its health drops to zero, the owner of the hive loses. Protect your hive with your swarm and watch out for enemy flanking attacks.
Upgrade orbs periodically appear on the field. There are three types, each improving a different aspect of your swarm. The level of your upgrades can be seen on the upgrade meters to the left.
SPAWN RATE: This upgrade has an icon that looks like a bug. It will increase the rate at which your hive produces the swarm. Getting to level 10 will double your production rate from level 0.
SPEED: This upgrade looks like a lightning bolt. This will increase the speed of your swarm and the speed at which upgrades are taken to your hive.
ARMOUR: This upgrade looks like a shield and will make your swarm tougher. At level 10, your swarm will be twice as resilient as level 0.
In order to capture an upgrade, direct your swarm to it with a waypoint. Some of the swarm will sacrifice themselves to capture the upgrade. Once 20 swarmlings have attacked the upgrade it will start pulsing with your team color. After a short while it will start to move to your hive. Once it gets there, you will level up in that category. Of course, if the enemy intercepts the upgrade, they can take it back to their base.
The game has a difficulty switch that will give the computer or the player additional upgrades in the beginning. Run Swarm.exe with the “-difficulty X” where X is a number from -30 to 30. The default setting is 0, giving the computer no advantage. Positive values will help the AI.
You can run Swarm in full screen mode by passing “-fullscreen” parameter to Swarm.exe. You can also run the provided .bat file.
If you get tired of the awesome IndieBird splash screen, you can turn it off with “-nosplash”. Just be sure to view it once in a while to keep the subliminal messages active.
Also, the game can be paused by pressing “P“.
Swarm is out! Get it here.
Swarm is a game where you guide your insectoid minions to victory through guile and cunning. You accomplish this by setting a series of waypoints for your swarm to follow. The swarm originates at the hive and will follow whatever path you lay out. The object of the game is to assault the enemy hive and to ultimately destroy it.
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