Feeling Mopey? Get Moppy.

You know how sometimes you're not sure if life is worth living any more and then you clean the kitchen and you feel super proud of yourself and are convinced of your own virility. Kinda like mopping a whale.

The way mopping presently works is that your mop does 1 damage to each pair of footprints that it hits when you do a mop 'swipe'. Now, if your mop is wet, it does like 3 or 5 damage or something to the dirty footprints. These footprints come from players walking around on the back of the whale, by the way. Whenever a footpring is left or when it is mopped up, the whale checks the total number of footprints on its back. If it it's less than 20 or something, it is clean. Greater than 20, mildly dirty and the entire whale sprite gets tinted brown and there is a drag applied to any players walking on the whale's back. If there are more than 40 footprints (now that's a dirty whale!), the whale is considered quite dirty and is tinted an even darker shade of brown and even more drag is applied to players trying to waddle through the muck on deck. So what's depicted above is the lonely red player working all by himself to fly the whale into a nearby rain cloud and giving the whale a bath (and a drink, incidentally). Also, when you get the hose attachment for the whale, which can be used to spray down thirsty dogs, attck fire based enemies, put out fires on burning buildings, it can be also used to manually wet the whale deck, instead of needing to locate a rain cloud or to use drop mops. 

Mopping has been in the game a long time, but I felt like talking about it today. It serves a few design purposes. (A) I think it would be great to hear about how a group of friends struggled with the decision to upgrade their mops or their guns. (B) general upkeep task that requires time, competes for resources (water), and affects general gameplay (the drag as you walk on a dirty whale is not insiginficant, especially when you're carrying the heavy sack of dog food). (C) provides another motivation for finding rain clouds. Now, where I think it could perhaps use some refinement is in the visual communication department.  People don't notice the footprint specks and/or realize you have to mop up the specks specifically, rather than just the whale in general. I think having to target the footprints is important, because forcing the player to move around, get in the way of other players, and also leave more footprints while mopping, makes the activity more nuanced and more interesting as its own little minigame. And also, just mopping the fin over and over doesn't seem like that should count for cleaning the whale (however, it doesn't seeem like 20 footprints left only on the nose should dirty up the whole whale either...oh well). 

Just because you're curious, I'll also let you know that it used to be designed so that only when you walked through a footprint speck did you feel the drag. I basically decided against this, because while I want it to feel bad when you're moving slowly because it's a dirty whale, the stop and go of hitting dirty footprints felt more buggy than an intentional mechanic. Maybe this is because it's generally difficult to see the footprints, especially just one or two, especially when they're underneath your player sprite. With a whale-wide state of drag corresponding to a state of dirtiness as visually communicated by whale color tinting, at least you know what's happening, if you know how mopping and leaving footprints functions in general. Anyway, people think the dirtiness of the whale is indicating damage though. So I don't know. Maybe I'll just adds a bunch of blood splurting out all over the place for when the whale takes damage.

Bro and BFIG, Barnacling and Bullet Splattering

BFIG has come and gone. Kevin and Courtney are up and married. And I remain. In Starbucks. With my empty fruit and yogurt parfait cup.

My step bro, Matt Borchert, ran my booth at BFIG. And! He also has provided some music for the game. Anyway. BFIG seemed cool for the 1.5 hrs I was there, (before I left for Kevin and Courtney's wedding) before any attendees showed up. And I heard it continued being very cool all day. One of the coordinators and leader of the Game Makers Guild, Tim Blank, said that BFIG had perhaps a BFIG record attendance and he hadn't heard one negative statement about it. I put in a lot of effort getting the introductory/demo level working and figuring out the flow of introducing how to ride a flying dog, how to pilot a flying whale, how to heal injured dogs by feeding them them from the food sack, how to heal the whale by feeding it from the fruit tree, how to attach whale attachments, how to mop the whale, how to store gems in the belly of the whale, how to enter the belly of the whale to get your gems back and/or anything the whale has swallowed, how to use keys, how to shop, how to sleep in a bed together...anyway. Some of those things are taught much more clearly than others. But about a million things that used to go wrong don't go wrong. But it's kinda like when you hear about how a hand sanitizer cleans like 99.99% of bacteria and then realize that the remaining bacteria, that .01% accounts for like millions of little entities out there, trying to survive, placing its life before yours...willing to do whatever it takes.

Apparently, people still get stuck in walls. And sometimes you get flooded with oodles of dogs. Harpoons stick into things they shouldn't. Playeres somehow walk off the whale and just trot around in the air, leaving dirty foot prints everywhere, that people don't understand what use it is in mopping them up, and also, a giant black square will appear sometimes. And players don't know what to do with empty sacks of dog food (the answer is to toss them out, which is littering, and before you get upset and start forcing your own own moral predilections onto Flock of Dogs, it's definitely unclear what is or isn't biodegradeable or what kind of sustainability is possible really in this world).

While Flock of Dogs didn't win the curator chosen award for Multiplayer/Connected Gameplay (not surpring, the build I submitted in May was wildly buggy, visually unclear, and had a laughable tutorial), Matt said we did get a lot of attendees votes for game of the show. Flock of Dogs didn't win that either, but that's ok. The winning game (http://nextgenpants.com/refactor/) and many of the competing games have a much more public profile, bigger teams, and are much further along in the development. Actually, many had already been released.  And maybe it's ok to not be a winner? It would be nice to see how many attendee votes other games received or even get an exact number for how many Flock of Dogs received. Matt collected a bunch of emails of people interested in the game, so I guess I'll have to write a newsletter soon.

Anyway, I made some new particle effects leading up to BFIG, which is some of the only new visual polish the game has received in a while, so I'll share that with ya:

See how the bullets splatter? Jawesome. I also made the destructible environment have some particle effects and also split in to smaller pieces  instead of just disappearing. This is in accordance with the principle of 'barnacling' where, in nature, when there's large things, there's usually some medium sized things near it, and some small sized things near those. It still doesn't have a sound effect.

The simle, blended color gradients that generate when I take the base color of either the giant, floating tetrominoes or the players' bullets' colors, then choose 3 other colors that have slight, random variations in their RGB values absolutely thrill me. I'm also now going to try stockpiling gifs and start posting them to  Twitter for #screenshotsaturday in the future.

This is part of my whole plan of, you know, telling people about my game and maybe even letting them play it. I told a few people I'd send them access to a playable version of the game. One guy even said he wanted to play it for his YouTube channel. Craazy.

Careening Career

Well, my car and I made it to New York and back. Barely. The following day, my car's transmission died and I had to get a new engine. lol. Then I moved. I am now a nomad.

Anyway, the festival:

No one interviewed me! So I guess I was afraid to contact press, because I'm insecure, I suppose. However, half the reason I went to this thing was for press exposure. So instead of contacting anyone on the press list that was distributed to all exhibitors, I just hoped they'd come by and talk to me. And they didn't. It didn't help that I had the cheapest spot on the top floor in the corner. I wonder if there are parallels to my dating life here.

Admittedly, Saturday night, there was a press/exhibitor 'party' after the convention closed to the public. However, I had been up past 3 am the last two nights working on the game and my stepdad and my 'little brother' (from the Big Bro Little Bro organization) who had come with me and helped me at the convention weren't allowed to go to the event without a special badge, so I just had dinner with them and went to bed. You know, family is more important than career.

Anyway, the response from attendees seemed really good and very similar to the responses I've typically received at live events. It's funny tho that, to me, that the reaction to my game seems about the same, whether or not I fix the bugs. As long as I have the energy to make jokes and be self degrading and as long as there's basic functionality, people enjoy it. So, really, I shouldn't stay up late squashing little bugs, if I know I can just make a joke about it. I've never exhibited any other game than this game, so it's pretty hard to have any kind of reference point for trying to be object (and then there's all the everyday, psychological hurdles of for objectivity lol). It definitely felt good to see people having fun playing my game, especially several families and then the occasional gamer who expressed excitement the moment they realized this game is a Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime-alike. And one of the guys exhibiting at the booth next to me said he loved my game and was very excited to see where it goes and kept coming over and playing. Which, like, it's so simple, but it's such a nice feeling to hear that.

Anyway, there's other details about logistics and the convention experience I guess I could go into that could help others...maybe. But I recently read an article on something that said stop reading articles about how to do something and go and do something. So if you're reading this to figure out whether or not you should exhibit your game at a convention, .... I don't know. I regret not contacting press before going. I don't regret going. I regret my car breaking down a day after.

Right, so. Some news. I quit my day job. I'm going to try to find temporary housing/friends' couches thru the fall in Boston, to stick around Boston Festival of Indie Games (BFIG) on September 23 and also to finish out the BSSL (bssl.com) soccer season and try to help Eagles maintain their spot in the top flight. So I appraised my last house on Friday (it's now Wednesday) and finished up all my reports yesterday. I may receive a report or two back from quality control, and I'm also helping train my replacement, but dudes...I'm pretty stoked.

So now I'm working on the demo for BFIG on September 23rd. This will be a tricky test, because I'll need the game to be able to teach itself, for the most part, since I won't make it to BFIG, because I'm in a wedding. Because friends are more important than career. Also, soccer and dog are more important than career too. Maybe.