Tag Archive for 'fretta'

What’s Up

Published on September 28, 2010 in Console Gaming, PC Gaming and Programming. 2 Comments

Right now I’m on vacation and we’re driving from New York to Washington DC. I’m just relaxing in the back seat so I figured I could take a few minutes to update you peeps on what I’m up to.

We’re at the tail end of finishing Zinger. I can’t believe we’re the last gamemode to be submitted to Garry, but then again I guess it isn’t that big of a surprise. We have an incredible amount of custom content and we’re also OCD kind of perfectionists. It’s a curse really.

In between our workings on Zinger, we are also revamping an old website and converting it into an HTML5 web app. I don’t want to indulge everyone with all the details just yet, but those of you who use LuaBin will really be excited about this product. It’s going to have a community integrated into it as well… it’s super cool. We’ve already invited a few people into the alpha testing phase and we’ll invite more as we progress.

I’ve also been playing a bunch of games recently, mainly games I’ve owned for a while but never got around to playing.

Oh and I picked up Halo: Reach the other day but haven’t had a chance to play it yet because my Xbox RROD’d right when I put the disc in. No big deal because it’s under warranty. It just gives me more time to catch up on PC games, even though I’ve got a small collection of unplayed Xbox games building up (Reach, Splinter Cell, etc)

Anyway, more to come later…

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Updates on Zinger

Published on September 4, 2010 in Programming. 0 Comments

We’re in the final stretch! I don’t want to say we have a finish date, but we’re close. Here’s a rundown:

Theme, Teams & Colors

We changed the team names and colors and got rid of the silly team flags. No longer is it Red vs Blue, but it has become Purple Bandits vs Orange Sandbaggers. Why the change? Well, we wanted team colors to stand out against the rest of the world easier. Naturally, there are lots of red and blue elements everywhere in the environment and on your HUD. So to help distinguish between everything, we made the team colors completely unique.

But our changes are not limited to team colors. We’ve done a lot of color tweaking in these final step with various color matching techniques. We tried to bring everything together by ensuring we had a consistent pallet throughout the game.

Battle Rules

We implemented something dubbed Battle Rules. Its a way to plug new rules into the game. Think of it like a hook system… sorta. Previously, when a player went through a ring, we called the function GM:RingPassed( ring, pl ) or something like that. Instead of hard coding how that event is handled, we now do rules.Call( “RingPassed”, ring, pl ). The Battle Rules system checks whatever rules have been loaded (they could change randomly each hole if we wanted) and lets it do all the work.

There’s events called everywhere, even in some areas we don’t even currently handle. But down the road if we/someone else wanted to make a new set of rules for the game, they could manage that event. Its pretty sweet.

Statistics

After we got the Battle Rules working, it was really easy to pump in the stats system. All we did was feed every event from the Battle Rules into the stats. If there is a stat handler for the event, it manages the information passed. Pretty cut and dry but it allows us to track everything the teams/players are doing and give some cool bonuses based off the collected data.

HUD

We totally reworked the HUD in this version. In the first revision of Zinger we used monotone colors on the HUD… mainly white. It looked good but it just seemed “unfinished”. We went back and reevaluated the theme and began using some earth tones and it really looked good (not to mention the fact we completely redesigned almost every HUD element).

Then we started to look at how the HUD was arranged and it made us wonder… why don’t we just allow people to arrange it how they like? So we did…

   Default HUD HUD editor

Help

We did manage to work in a fully functional help system. Its 3D->2D based, which means you see the tips in 3D but when you read them they show up in a 2D panel. Some tips will purely be 2D, but we tried adding 3D hints all around the game to help new players understand what’s going on.

Help panel

More information to come…

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Zinger items and inventory

Published on August 7, 2010 in Programming. 1 Comment

Just a quick update:

We’re changing how the inventory is in Zinger!. Its going to be more Worms-esk, which means you can have more than 4 items and you’ll never have to destroy anything. If you pick up an item you already have, it will stack.

Also, you’re going to start with items now. Just some of the basic ones though. You’ll still have to find all the good stuff in crates, but at least you’ll have weapons to use at the beginning of the match.

Oh and by the way, Chad modeled and scripted this sign for mappers to use. The text and text color is totally customizable by the mapper. They can pick three lines of text and each line can have its own color:

zing_test0066

P.S. No, that’s not a typo. THERE HAS BEEN AN EARTHQUACK!

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Zinger! changes

Published on July 30, 2010 in Programming. 2 Comments

So we’re making a bunch of changes to Zinger!. I don’t want to go into all the details, but lets just say “trust us”. We’re breaking our work down into 2 major parts: playability and replayability… in that order:

Playability

Playability is simple… make the game easy and fun to play. Zinger! is already fun and easy to play FOR US. But when you add in total noobs you get a clusterfuck of “WTF IS GOING ON?!”. Understandable. We’d been playing Zinger!, or at least the concept of it, for a really long time and through many iterations. We need to remember there are people who’ve never played it before now playing it. Especially when it gets distributed on Steam (omg omg omg omg).

Along those same lines… we’re going to rethink or simplify some of the stuff we were doing before, or even remove it completely. Like the spectator mode and course randomizing. A perfect example of a bad choice is when we limited what you could spectate just to force you to watch what was going on in the current hole. It made spectator mode so obtrusive and restricted it felt like you were looking at the game through a tube. Fuck it, free roam!

Some of the other issues will require more drastic changes. There are certain elements that feel pointless and even a waste of time. We have plans to change that. Like what’s the point in shooting a guy into the water or out of the map if he just respawns right back where is was? We’re going to try to work in a damage system sorta like Super Smash Brothers. You can’t be damaged to death, but the more you get hurt the more it accumulates and affects you. (which means we’ll have to add healing related items into the game)

The other thing we’re worried about is a theme. The only reason we care about that is because of the lack of “flow” in the game. Sometimes Zinger! feels like its fractured a bit. Like you’re playing several mini games at the same time. Is it team deathmatch? Is it golf? Is it an adventure game? What is it? So to bring it all together and to help it make more sense we’re going to add a general theme to the game. That’s where the most dramatic changes will be. You’ll see the content getting tweaked and changed to help match. Don’t worry, we’re keeping the same artistic style… we just need to update the assets to match. Our goal is to have a bunch of reusable assets for mappers to use to keep a consistent feel. It sounds like a lot of work, and it might be, but it will be worth it. Chad and I are both super excited about it.

Replayability

The replayability is going to come after all that. First we make a fun and simple and easy to understand game… then we focus on keeping players interested in it over time. Stuff like unlockables and micro-achievements (no not the Steam achievements, just ones you earn in a hole or on a course).

We tried randomizing the course and rings and shit like that, but the problem is it leads to more problems than its worth… and really it doesn’t make the game feel any more fresh or new. In retrospect, does rearranging a couple of rings make anyone go “OH MAN! THIS IS GONNA BE FUN!” all over again? Nope. Fuck it.

We needed more interesting ideas: things like changing a simple mechanic on a hole. What if we randomly selected one hole to add huge amounts of recoil to every item? Or everyone has unlimited Bazookas but no crates dropped? Or everyone was invisible to the other team? Of course those are just random ideas off the top of my head, we’ll see where we go with that.

Reply here and let us know what you think.

P.S. If you wanna peek in on what we’re doing, you can always check our Twitter feed for SVN updates.

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We won second place!

Published on June 2, 2010 in Programming. 2 Comments

I know this is old fucking news but… In case you haven’t heard (which I’m sure most of you have) Arcadium Software’s Fretta gamemode Zinger! took second place in the Fretta Gamemode Contest!

What now? What does this mean? Where do we go from here?

Well, we’re looking forward to some feedback from Garry and Craig. We also have some touch ups we’d like to do. Once we’ve polished up the gamemode we send it to Garry and it will be included in Garry’s Mod!

We also get to add achievements to the gamemode and even push updates out once a month. Which is totally amazing. The prize money is totally great and all, but that comes and goes. The fact we’ve got a small piece of work in a retail game is definitely the most rewarding part.

Everyone keeps asking me what we’re doing with the money. Well, the majority is getting split up between Chad and I, and some will go to our sound guy and level designer. They both contributed great work so we’re looking forward to  showing them our appreciation.

Once again, I know this is literally last weeks news but I’ve been busy with a lot of shit lately… like moving… which I have yet to blog about. I’ll do that tomorrow, ok?

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Blog updated

Published on February 11, 2010 in General Stuff and Programming. 2 Comments

I decided my blog needed to be tinkered with. I didn’t do an overhaul or anything, just messed with fonts and added some more CSS3. I uploaded two more headers into the rotation, too.

I need to start writing more about what I’m working on. People are always asking me and I never know where to begin. Here’s the thing: I’m always working on something. What it is can be totally different each day. Although right now I’m pretty focused on Zinger!. We’re closing in on the deadline for the Fretta Contest and we’re really excited about it. Not much is left, actually we’re just finishing up a few odds and ends.

I’m going to be writing a few articles related to Lua soon so you can look forward to seeing those. Actually I’ve already started… I just need some spare time to finish the first one (work has kept me so busy lately!). Technically I shouldn’t even be writing this now, I should be writing those… GOTTA GO!

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Zinger! Gameplay Introduction

Published on December 28, 2009 in PC Gaming. 0 Comments

(this post will also serve as a test of WLW… thanks Garry!)

 Zinger!

Work! Work! Work! We’ve been busy on the newest installment of Zinger! designed to be a contest entry for the Fretta Contest.

For those of you who played the original, there has been some changes to the gameplay. We haven’t discussed much of the gameplay in the contest thread, so let me go over what we changed and why:

 

Teams

 Blue Birdies FlagIn the original Zinger! it was 1 vs. all. This was fine and we had great fun with it, but most of the time people teamed or paired up and beat the crap out of other people. Which again was just fine, but it normally pissed said people off because they didn’t have a chance in hell of winning. The other problem was as much as everyone wanted to mutilate others with their weapon arsenal, they had to focus on getting to the cup first or they end up losing anyways. So now, with teams, you can work together by helping one guy get to the cup while you collect items to protect him.

 

Asynchronous Turns

Many of you are probably thinking “wtf does that mean?”. Basically it means everyone has a turn at the same time, you’re not waiting on each other. Once you hit your ball, the game waits for you to stop moving then its your turn again. You don’t have to wait in a queue for your entire team to go before its your turn again. Why did we do this? Simple answer: Speed. In the previous Zinger! you spent a lot of time waiting for your turn to come around, which led to a lot of down time. We wanted to remedy that. This accomplished two things: a) less waiting around doing nothing, and b) increased the speed of the game dramatically.

 

Rings

We wanted to give the mappers the ability to create a less linear hole. Instead of just Ringsstarting at point A and trying to get to point B, we added in a feature to move the players around in all different directions. Basically there are a set amount of rings the mapper places on each hole; your team needs to go through each ring before you can finish the hole and sink the cup. This added in another element to the teamplay environment: working together to activate the rings as fast as possible while making progress toward the cup.

 

Randomizing

No longer do you have hole 1, hole 2, hole 3, and progress through in the same order each time you play a map. Now, all the holes are randomized and played in a different order. We’re also considering randomizing the rings, as in, let the mapper place 8 of them but only spawn 4 random ones.

 

Tee Off

Tee Off

The mapper also has the ability to create more than just 1 tee per hole; actually we’d prefer they make 2+ tees. 2 of the tees would be picked at random and assigned to each team. Once the hole starts, teams tee off player by player. Once the last player has teed off, the tee is removed.

 

This should shed some light on what we have planned. Remember, this is all preliminary and we reserve the right to change anything/everything before the official release.

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