Barchok Blog

I’ve been working on IsoTower (the current title for the isometric Sim Tower remake) for a few days now, and figured it’d be good to post about what I’ve been doing. Nothing that’s worthy of screenshots just yet, mostly a lot of smaller behind the scenes things, and stuff that’s based on getting the core engine done. I did implement shadows, which makes things like sky bridges actually look a bit more 3d, instead of the mostly flat layout earlier. The other major visible changes include a morning/day/evening/night system and a clock, though both are fairly simplistic right now.

In terms of things related to behind the scenes stuff, I’ve mostly been ripping out old code from Sim Mine and redoing some of the GUI system so it’s a bit more flexible. There’s still a lot left to work on in both of those elements, so it’ll be an ongoing project until I’m done. I’ve also been working on code to allow for a flexible room plugin system. Mostly likely, plugins will require an XML file and graphic file for the actual room graphics. I want the game to be flexible, and be able to load different room sets based on a settings file, most likely something similar to how OpenTTD works. It’s in the early stages right now, though.

I’ve been thinking about how the interface itself will function, as well. I will likely use category buttons along the top which will contain drop down menus with the actual build buttons in them, similar to Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4’s construction menu, combined with Rollarcoaster Tycoon’s icon menu along the top. I’m hoping this will be effective, but the only way to find out is to try it. I might look into making the interface configurable, but that will likely come at a later date than initial releases. The biggest stumbling block though is getting an interface for elevators. In the original, it was easy to expand (and shrink) the elevator shaft up or down a floor or three. Yes, you had to choose a specific tool to do it, but it was still pretty simple. With an isometric view, there’s a problem, since you can’t really see what’s happening with an elevator, nor can you easily raise an elevator up a floor when you have to view the building in slices, instead of the whole thing from the side. If anyone has ideas or comments for how to implement the elevator interface, I’d love to hear them.

The title says it all, really. An isometric remake of Sim Tower, the Maxis game from 1994. I know that various people have made attempts to do a straight remake of the original game, and I know there’s at least two attempts that are currently “active”. HighRise Developer seems to be the most successful so far, having actually released alpha versions. OpenTower looks to be pretty much dead. Other remakes are even less known about, and are either as unknown as this one currently is, or died before they got anywhere.

So, why isometric instead of straight up 3d or a straight 2d remake? Well, the original 2d lacked a lot of depth, in that you couldn’t really lay out the building with more designs beyond the basic large base, smaller top, or even the less exciting sold rectangular block. Yoot Tower improved things a bit with the ability to build multiple bases, and have sky bridges that spanned the gaps, but you were still limited to two dimensions. Actual towers are usually a bit wider than a few meters. Thus, the decision to include a third dimension. However, full 3d requires additional complexity with the code and graphics, and good 3d graphics take longer to do than good 2d graphics. Plus, I had an isometric engine that could do multiple levels already made, so why not?

So, what’s next? Currently, I don’t have much more done than most of the remake projects, and nothing that’s worthy of showing off. Any screenshots right now would consist of terrible graphics made within 5 minutes in Paint.net, downloadable version isn’t too exciting when there’s nothing to do outside of build some blank flooring. My next goal is to get some of the basic game elements in, such as offices, a lobby, and elevators, and possibly more. I hope to get there in a month. At that point, it will probably be worthy of a demo. For now, terrible graphics screenshots.

Skybridges are possible.

Cutaway view of the skybridge.

Sim Mine is a game where you build a small, old west style mining town from the ground up. The original version was created around September 2007, as was basically a flat 2d style game, with terrible, small graphics.

Additionally, the coding turned into a horrible mess and it got to the point where adding any more features would be too painful. The project was scrapped with plans to revisit it at a later date. I spent some time with Ludum Dare projects to get better at coding overall, and get a better grasp on what was needed to complete a game. Post Mortems of those games are on this blog.

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Game X, as I will call it, was an online web game that I made nearly three years ago, as a supplemental game to keep people occupied while I worked on another game in RPG Maker. While I eventually finished the game made in RPG Maker, it was an exercise in learning that I really didn’t do plot writing very well, and making it up as I go along can cause problems. Anyway, since the game was an online game that lasted for six months, and topped out at 300 registered players (and a top record of 10 online at a single time), this postmortem is going to be a bit different from my previous ones, consisting mostly of my rambling about how the entire thing failed.

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For LD11, the theme was Minimalism, and I decided to do a minimalist take on a Japanese style RPG battle system. The results were mediocre, and in the end, I averaged a score of about 2.8, the highest being 3.3 for theme, out of a possible five. As for what went right, and what went wrong, well, not much went ‘right’, but I still managed to complete something worthwhile, that might be a bit better once it gets fleshed out.

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Ludum Dare 11, the 48 hour game making competition, took place last weekend. The theme was “minimalist”, which, admittedly, is going to be most any game created in 48 hours. For my entry, I decided to make a minimalist RPG battle game, taking the standard Japanese RPG battle system and shrinking it down to the basic commands. It’s an idea I’ve had sitting around for a while, but there hadn’t been much progress on it until now. After getting the basic code set up, and running properly, I promptly went to sleep, hoping to get the majority of the game finished by the end of the day Saturday.

I managed to finish most of the basics Saturday, getting text to display, and allowing the player to fight the monsters, but at this point, the game amounted to a collection of text on a blue screen. I stopped early Saturday night to figure out where to take the game next, and eventually sleep.

Sunday, I woke up with about 12 hours left to the competition. Vowing to complete something by the end of it, I worked on making some major changes to how the text output was generated, as the current method, which worked, didn’t allow for a good way to make the “floating” text that I wanted to create. After spending way too much time on getting text to work, I decided to work on some basic graphics, so there’d be something to look at besides just numbers. My plan at that point was to have a collection of monster graphics, and the game would simply pull from a selection of monsters, more powerful ones showing up as you gained levels. However, I am not much of an artist, and after spending about 30 minutes on the two existing monsters and the background, I gave up on the art, and went back to the code. At this point, the game worked, and looked reasonably good, but the battles were too easy, and never got harder. I spent a few hours trying some numbers in OpenOffice Calc, hoping to come up with numbers and formulas that produced a challenging game. I wasn’t entirely successful, since the game starts out hard, and becomes incredibly easy within a few levels, but I decided to finish up and make sure the game worked. I posted the final version early, but I wanted to avoid a rushed post, and I couldn’t chance that I wouldn’t ruin the game within the next two hours.

Overall, even though the game didn’t turn out amazing, it’s coded better than my previous challenge game, and it’s more or less a finished product that doesn’t crash every few seconds. Voting is still going on, and I hope to write up a full postmortem once the game is given ratings. I already know that balance is a major issue, and the lack of any visible progression didn’t help much. In the meantime, I’m gearing up for my next project, and hopefully I can finish it in a reasonable period of time.

Rabbit Tycoon was created as part of a “make a game in 30 days” competition on the SA forums. Out of about 20-30 initial entries, there were only 7 or so game submitted. The theme was “based on a book”, and was followed to various degrees by the competitors. In my case, I decided to go with Watership Down as the book, and thus, base my game on the idea that you need to build a new burrow for the rabbits to live in.

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I’ve decided to put together a blog, focusing mostly on my experiences and thoughts on game and web development, along with any other random things that might occur.  Hopefully this’ll inspire me to finish up a few other project ideas that I’ve had, as well as write about previously failed projects.