…and yet it still must be written about, because it’s a milestone, of sorts. I’ve been plodding through O’Reilly’s Learning C# book as a way to properly introduce myself to C#, and re-introduce myself to game coding in general (been a while, the fingers are a bit rusty yet). I got to Chapter 14 without any troubles, blowing through the pages in rapid succession, but Chapter 14 felt really slapdash compared to the rest of the book; the topics were out of order (obGeek*: why would you teach custom collections before generics?) and drowned in minutae (obGeek*: why get lost in the details of implementing specific interfaces for custom collections at the same time as you’re teaching them?).

So I took this as a Sign from the Coding God, whoever he is, ditched the book and started coding.

Now, the reason this is lame, is because what I’m coding is Pong.

It’s always Pong. First game in any language simply has to be Pong. Not because of tradition or superstition, but because the assets are easy to generate, the rules are straightforward and the requirements easy to meet — and yet at the same time, it requires you to deal with many of the problems that will haunt you as a coder from now until the day you retire your fingers. AI implementation, asset management, sprite display, collision detection, events — and, if you’re smart, you’re going to code it as a full-on OO app so you can see how all the moving parts work in the framework you’ve chosen. Sure, it’s all basic, but it’s all there, so if you can nail it as a basic app, then you have a solid enough foundation to do a more advanced system.

So yeah. That’s OO Pong v.01 right there. Three balls, to show I’ve been playing with OO (it’s all OO naturally). Got a few things to do today (it is my weekend after all!) but maybe tonight I’ll post the final, complete Windows executable complete with tennis court lines, scores, AI, beeps, and, most especially, boops.

And as of right now, I really, really, really like XNA. Nice job, Microsoft.

*”obGeek” is an ancient term derived from Usenet posts; when side conversations used to drift into dangerously off-topic areas, the poster would add a section called “ob<whatever the topic is supposed to be>” to satisfy the group moderator and try to trick them into allowing their tangental-at-best post to remain — the ‘ob’ stood for ‘obligatory.’ obGeek, then, is the obligatory geek breakdown of my bitching.

Firearms were plentiful in the late 16th century, when our story takes place, but only rudimentary firing mechanisms were available for them — Snaplocks, cheaply mass-produced, and Wheel-locks, expensive but more reliable (some older guns might still have Matchlocks, but by and large they’re too unwieldy for our purposes, mainly because of the requirement of a constantly lit match; Flintlocks were yet to be developed). This meant that, in heated combat, guns were literally a one-shot affair: prohibitively long reload times meant you’d shoot your gun once, if you were lucky, and then engage the enemy in hand to hand combat.

So I was faced with a gameplay dilemma. For guns to appeal to the modern player, they have to be fun and provide immediate feedback and satisfaction. Click the mouse button, and BANG goes the gun. Click the mouse again and BANG it goes again, until you run out of ammo. Obviously, thirty seconds of game time spent reloading a weapon while demons are ripping your guts out via your throat isn’t really going to be received as much of a “feature.” That said, though, it doesn’t make any sense at all to let the modern player rip through legions of enemies, continuously blasting through scores of ammo rounds with his wheel-lock single-fire pistol. It’s out of place, it breaks the mood we’re looking for, and, well, it’s silly.

Around this time, ConceptGuy tossed me a work in progress of the latest Hero character sketch, and as I was ogling the new work, this vision came to me…

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“Hope Im doing this right…..(tap)(tap) is this thing on?”

these are the first couple ideas for the hero character. I’m a little leary of putting up concept sketches or idea work and would much rather just post a finished, polished rendering of our final design, but maybe some will enjoy seeing the idea phase as it leads to that finished design of our hero.

This first rough pencil sketch represents my impressions of the character based on discussions about the story and plot. In this phase Im just trying to get my ideas out of my head and onto paper, good or bad….. a sort of artistic brainstorming.

This second is along the same lines as the first but here I was only thinking through the hero’s silhouette and costume shapes, no particular details…just what would be on his outfit and how it all interacts…….very little detail, just shape.

I will post a couple more over the weekend….hope you enjoy.

I’ve had a great time tracking the game’s backstory all across Renaissance Europe, but up until today I really didn’t know much about our Hero. I knew he’d met and trained with Johann Weyer, I knew he’d be a tough, self-reliant son of a bitch and I knew he’d be a snappy dresser, because ConceptGuy likes to draw snappy dressers. But that’s about as far as I’d gotten.

Driving up to the family farm on Friday, though, I was generating potential dialogue for our upcoming concept video, and what kept coming to me was our bad boy, Ananias Dare, calling the hero ‘Lord Inquisitor’ and ‘Soldier of God’ in a soft, mocking voice. I wasn’t sure at the time if the timelines meshed or not, but it suddenly seemed to me as though ‘ex-Inquisitor’ would be the perfect background, and I figured there almost had to be one inquisition or another running during the period of our story.

As it turns out, there were several, and while Monty Python nearly required me to go with the Spanish one, the Roman Inquisition was far more appropriate for the story. Anyway, with that little jolt of information, I think I’ve suddenly got a much better handle on our hero — as well as some really excellent and nasty ideas for the plot…

So we’ve got a wiki set up for document storage and collaborative design, and we’ve got this blog for communications, thinking out loud and stuff. But there’s absolutely a need for something more robust — asset management, version control, threaded discussions and so forth. I was going to go the bog-standard route of either fudging it and putting up forums, or maybe putting together one of the usual groupware suspects on the server.

But then I found this wicked cool toy: Collanos. (complete with their development blog — I like how they think).

It’s Peer-To-Peer groupware. Discussions, filesharing (note to RIAA: OUR files, not YOUR files), task management and so forth. Just like server-based software, except there’s no server.

Is it perfect? No. Tasks are clunky and there’s no unified view of them. There’s no calendaring. And I’ve yet to determine whether it’ll play nice with my draconian corporate firewall. But it’s dynamic and interesting enough to give it a go, and at the very least it’s an excellent file distribution method — and maybe, just maybe, if we bash it hard enough, these guys might be interested in hearing our feedback and making some shifts in the code to better accommodate the needs of an indie game dev team.

If it passes the firewall test we’ll move ahead with it — it looks cool and very usable, so here’s hoping.

Not really any posts yet on ‘what the hell is this game, anyway?’ so it’s probably high time to do one.

Originally, Liber Juratus was just going to be a Diablo clone. We figured the way to approach it would be to use a really unusual setting for the game, since Diablo has been done to death so many times even zombies are jealous of it. So we bullshat liberally until we came up with the idea of setting it on the lost colony of Roanoke in the late 1500s, at which point the design quickly began switching from a generic Diablo rehash to something more resembling Deus Ex — only since almost everyone on the team is a World of Warcrack addict, we decided to go with a third person view, because we think WoW’s control setup is dreamy.

The theme obviously influences both art design and game design, but I’ll let ConceptGuy talk about how it affects art since he’s the expert there. As for the game design — we both loved Deus Ex, obviously, but it’s clear that the point-based skill advancement that was attached to DX’s character development system is a bit klunky and inaccessible compared to more recent games. That said, we still want each Hero to comform (to a large degree) to the player’s preferred playstyle.

What we’ve come up with in preliminary stages is a skill system where each skill has five levels of expertise, and where each level opens up more (and more powerful) play options and abilities. Accessing each new skill level requires the player to spend an Advancement Token or something to that effect, something we imagine players will collect by surviving encounters, discovering lore and so forth. There will be a limited number of these Tokens available throughout the game, so the player will have to choose what their Hero is good at, and what they can scrape by without. So, kind of a bastard child of Deus Ex and, say, Titan Quest.

There are three types of skills available to the Hero: Expertise, Professional, and Occult. Expertise skills define the ‘classes’ of the game (not that there are explicit classes, but your increasing prowess with Expertise skills will give you access to similarly themed abilities that feel a bit class-ish), and at the moment there are five of them: Marksmanship, Swordsmanship, Stealth, Survival and Perception. Professional skills define the extra bits the Hero is capable of; players can only select one for their hero, unlike Expertise skills, and while we don’t have a complete list of these yet, they’ll be things like blacksmith (for armor repair, tool fabrication, that sort of thing), gunsmith (shot-making, gun repair and refinement), and so forth. Nothing game-breaking, but definitely more than just flavor.

And Occult skills, of course. More on them later, I promise; for now, just understand that there will be lots and lots of opportunities to work the dark magic from the pages of the Liber Juratus. Whether it’s a good idea or not will no doubt be the subject of a later post, but you can be certain there will be… consequences.

So, XNA, right? Pretty cool platform so far. It’s a little deeper than I usually like to dive when it comes to 3D engines, but the level of control is much finer. Community’s solid so there’s lots of examples to learn from, and the help files, while typically Microsoft, still have some very useful reference material.

That said, all I’ve managed to do on my own is get keyboard navigation into the model viewer. In my defense it was late and I had a headache.

Now that I understand a little better what the engine is capable of, I think I’m better served blowing out my knowledge of C# than of trying to ^C^V Other Peoples’ Code, since I always end up wanting my own structure badly enough that I rewrite crap anyway. Out with the C# book then; give me a week and I’ll be more properly on my way. I’ll try not to bore with too many ‘Oh wow did you know C# could do this?’ type posts and just sum up progress as I go.

One of the elements I’ve been actively chasing in the design of this game is the authenticity of its backstory — not just because I can, but because it creates a what-if connect-the-dots puzzle with centuries of plausibly associated historical events that leaves the participant wondering how much of the story is real and how much is made up. Set in modern times, this sort of thing is most often associated with conspiracy theory tales, from the X-Files to First Wave* and anything in between.

One of the most intriguing movies done along these lines that I’ve ever seen was The Name of the Rose — a really, truly excellent movie, and if you’ve never seen it, go fix that right now. At any rate, of the many ways this movie distinguishes itself, one that has always stuck in my mind was how it managed to fit a very modern sort of tale into a very not-modern setting.

Call it inspiration, but that’s the sort of thing I’m hoping to accomplish with the game’s story. One way we’re doing this is by finding texts and drawings of the period and using them as deeply as possible in the game’s design. As it happens, the medieval grimoire that the game takes its name from — the Liber Juratus — is not only an actual 13th century grimoire, but its full text is available on-line.

I link it here for one very specific reason: since it’s one of our central source materials, we’ll be extracting as much detail as possible from it and using it in the game in every way we can. One example: according to the grimoire, there’s lots of crazy things you can do by summoning demons. Things like turning day to night, seeing spirits, causing thunder and lightning, going invisible, and so forth.

Those really sound like things you could do in a game, don’t they?

* bah, First Wave, why doesn’t someone release a bloody DVD with the episodes on it already? Damn you, Sci-Fi!

Both the blog and the game… well, sort of. Definitely of the blog — and while there’s very little info here yet, in the weeks that come we’ll chart the progress, or lack thereof, of a new indie title using Microsoft’s XNA platform, by a small but experienced development team.

As for the game — well, this really isn’t a game. What it is, is a successful run of our first XNA app, displaying a custom model and rotating it in realtime. Not at all impressive, as it’s mainly the same code as was included in the help files, but it’s a start, and it’s easy enough to see that the platform’s conceptually simple while still powerful enough to give us the oomph we’re looking for. What’s impressive is that while I coded it, I wasn’t on a PC with enough balls to run it, so P sent me the model, I brought it into the pipeline, I built the app, and then I sent the built app back to P so he could run it and see if it worked. Aside from some simple nub mistakes, it went pretty flawlessly, so it’s all good omens at the moment.

More, including the game’s idea, gameplay concepts and hints of the backstory will follow, but for now, welcome aboard and wish us luck.