also, if you can stand more than one video of me in a single day, the folks at san jose state university’s game dev club have posted a video of a presentation i gave at their meeting last night. it began as a lecture on a single screen in redder and how it changed between its first draft and final form – a level design lesson – but then opened up into a q&a session, mostly about redder and how i made it. they ask good questions.
i was totally impressed by their club. klik of the month was part of their fucking meeting agenda (which is why i’m talking about it at the beginning of the video). a bunch of them showed up to the post-gdc gameboree last week, and they’re actually meeting this saturday to participate in this month’s klik. you should too, by the way.
16 comments
ZZT prototyping, that’s rad.
Not everyone should use ZZT for prototyping but it would be nice if more did.
That shot of the entire map would make a swell desktop image, have you considered sticking that up somewhere so that people could access it.
i took notes! i am pasting them now
NOTES
note 1: THEY WENT TO GDC
note 2: THEY’RE DOING KOTM
note 3: WHAT IS GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS? IT IS FOR MAKING SHORT SHITTY GAMES AS FAST AS POSSIBLE
NOTES
note 4: ANNA GETS TO SAY SOMETHING
AND THEN I SAY SOMETHING
SHE IS IMPRESSED BY THEIR ORGANIZATION
SHE HAS A SHITTY MOUSE
SHES NEVER SEEN REDDER BEFORE? DID SHE NOT MAKE IT?
TALK ABOUT A SINGLE ROOM
THESE NOTES HAVE NO PURPOSE OTHER THAN KEEPING ME AWAKE
OH SHIT SHE DIDNT TELL ME WHAT FUCING LESBIAN SPIDER QUEENS FROM MARS
SHE DOES NOT LIKE THE TERM METROIDVANIA
RED ROBOTS HATE YOU V V MUCH OR MAHYBE V V V V V V MUCH? BECAUSE YOU SEE ITS A RIP OFF OF VVVVVV ITS FREE VVVVV
YOU CANT KILL ANYTHING
HOLY SHIT SOMEONE MADE A MAP OF THE ENTIRE GAME
THE WORLD IS 9 SECTIONS
THEY LOOK DISTINCT
YOU LOOK DE STINK
WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO
YOU HAVE TO PASS THROUGH AT LEAST FOUR OTHER AREAS TO APPROACH A CERTAIN AREA WHICH MEANS SHE COULD MAKE IT HARDER
WHY IS THIS IN CAPS ANYWAY
ahhhhh its like a fresh summer breeze
oh shit auto fix
look at that
vex my words
NOT VEX
A FIE ON YOU
PLATFORMING
HARDEST AREA IS PLATFORMING
HARDEST AREA IS MIGHTY JILL OFF
someone couched IT WASNT GETTING YOUR ATTENTION MA’AM N OT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU
IM GONNA MAKE MY TEXT BIGGER
BIG TEXT FOR BIG NOTES
WHERE THE FUCK IS SPINACH\\
BLUE LINES ARE DIVERGENT
OH GOD A PAUSE WHY DID YOU PAUSE DONT FUCK UP THE MOMENTUM
OH GOD HAD TO POOP WHAT DID I MISS\\
WAIT SO WHEN I PLAYED FOR THE FIRST TIME I WENT STRAIGHT FOR THE HARDEST BIT? HOW DID THAT EVEN HAPPEN
ONE BLOCK PIPE SWITCH MAKING ALL THE DIFFERENCE WHIOGJSKHGSDFKJHSKG FUCK
‘THE PLAYER JUMPS TO THE SWITCH’
SWITCH
SWITCH
I WANNA GET HIT WITH A SWITCH
after talking about solving the problem of one room:
OH BALLS IT TOOK NOT ENOUGH TIME Q AND A: (good thing it takes ma’am forty minutes to answer ONE FUCKING QUESTION)
Q: do you struggle over the design in such detail in every room?
A: YES EVERY ROOM
Q: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU HAVE TEST YOUR GAME AND HOW MUCH DO YOU CHANGE WHEN PEOPLE TEST IT
A. EVERYONE MUST PLAYTEST YOUR GAME (redder had 10 testers and several more designers advising as well)
(for redder playtesting changed the map screen (shows what room you are in, where your last checkpoint was [warp],
Q: tileset first or level design?
A: TILESET FIRST
Q: did you work with an artist to draw the map? if you’re working with an artist and making minute changes i guess the artist would get frustrated
A: I DID IT ALL MYSELF WAHH WAHH WAHH
Q: how long did redder take you?
A: started in september, laptop broke, but working on it constantly since then LOOK HERES REDDER PROTOTYPE, changed speed got rid of horizontal bouncing
Q: you had the controls and you designed the level around the controls?
A: yes let me show you this other thing
Q: YOUR BOUNCE SUCKS AND KILLED ME
a: i just like the fucking bounce okay
Q: when you’re making a game and it sucks to make should you quit or should you power through? does it suck to feel like your game sucks?
A: its fucking nervewracking, but i kept some elements HERE WATCH CYCLES VIDEO
Q: whats your take on random level design? not within the levels but random rooms that are pre designed mashed together randomly
A: i think generally thats a better way to go about things than to have the computer approximate real level design. people use procedural generation to make level design easier, when it acutally needs more design skill to make work
Q: what was your purpose with your use of negative space?
A: to make things more visually interesting, distinguish parts of the world from other, the more negatve space the easier the area usually
Q: do you make deisgn documents before you touch the computer
A: sometimes i build a prototype in something different, before i made this section of mazes (ALWAYS HAVE A LEVEL EDITOR) on the computer i wanted to have a layout so i made it in zzt HERE IT IS LOOK
q: HOW DID YOU DECIDE WHEN YOU WERE GONNA START ACTUALLY MAKING THE GAME AND THEN AFTER YOU MADE THE GAME AT WHAT POINT DID YOU DECIDE OK IM DONE
A: i started the game a few times but i started it a few times too early (guns astronaut, robots, electric fences and switches but no final design)
decided i was finished when i felt there was nothing i could add to the game that would make it better that would justify implementing it
Q: are you ever going to go back and fix your bugs
A: yeah sometime but im only gonna fix bugs not change the game, gonna have to patch a few holes but its not done
Q: was making a design in zzt an afterthought or was it…
A: zzt has been around since the early eighties and…
Q: tell me about areas and how you sort of got to these. also how did you decide to make it static screens?
A: scrolling is really fucking hard in flash. i hate flash, by the way. i’m sort of designing around what i’m capable of doing. each area had a shape i had in mind when i started designing it. i wanted each area to have a different shape that’s memorable. the difference in the way the areas look is also reinforced by the way you navigate them.
Q: how much did amon26’s music affect the things that happen to the game over time?
A: he as a designer has made me think about the way designers can suspend disbelief. it’s difficult to keep a secret, and amon’s work helped me to design the game in such a way that the player will think there is a part of the game that is not designed. amon ended up doing the music. i didn’t know when i started that amon would be doing the music, and before that the game wasn’t about what it ended up being in the end. hopefully, i didn’t let on too much.
Q: when it comes to animation, do you have a specific process?
A: i kind of just go for it. i spend a lot of time working on my animation, because for a long time i wasn’t a good animator. read the animator’s bible, it’s a good book, and a little bit sexist. [the animator's survival kit]
Q: how many people have played your game when did it come out
it came out on the 10th, 247 thousand people
Q: how do you promote it?
a: my sponsor mostly promoted it, but i wrote to a bunch of press saying MY GAME IS EASY TO SPOIL PLEASE DONT SPOIL IT IF YOU TALK ABOUT IT which was promoting it, and i talked about it during gdc
Q: how did player death promote game design
A: player death is useful narrative, trying to explain without spoilers
I really expected the crowd to cheer when you opened up ZZT.
After playing around with GraphicsGale for a bit, it seems you need to enable transparency in the Frame panel to save with transparency. This is true even if the image you’re saving isn’t animated at all. The palette also needs to be indexed for this to work (256 colours or fewer).
at least one person actually recognized zzt, which was enough to make me happy.
there are a few full maps of redder on the internet. if you google the game you should find one.
Interesting all around.
Note 1: Gah, if the cameraman had tilted the camera up a few seconds before at a certain point, I’d have played the redder prototype on my machine, mwuahahahahaa (yes, I know, I’m sad).
Note 2: Auntie, may I recommend getting (in any way you can) Paint shop pro 7? Besides being FAR LESS bloated than 8, it comes bundled with an uber cool program called Animation shop 3 (after psp v7 they discontinued it, the faggots). It sort of integrates better with psp and has a ton of cool features as well.
Note 3: You could give ProMotion a try as well, lots of pixel graphics people I know use it.
Note 4: How about mappy for making the maps?
Before I forget, thanks for mentioning the tools you use :)
Haha I still use Pain Shop Pro 7. (Spinning penis derek yu head proudly brought to you by Animation Shop.)
I still use Paint Shop Pro 3.0 SHAREWARE. And on my previous computer, I was past day 3000 of my 30 day trial. But most of my pixel art is really done in Deluxe Paint II SE for DOS.
I’m 2/3 of the way through right now and really enjoying it, but I have to stop for a second and STRONGLY RECOMMEND that you use irfanview for your crazy transparency picking and resizing, because it’s free and you can batch the resizing and transparency picking and do all of your 400 tiles in a couple of minutes.
OK, done now. Thanks! I’m so glad that someone was there to make a video of this so that it could be shared with all of the internets and not just a room full of people at SJSU! Yay, inclusionism!
The biggest nugget of wisdom I got from this was “theme areas around a specific mechanic or method of movement”, but there were numerous smaller nuggets, as well.
A very good talk.
I do like the honesty of “This was what I did. It’s bad, but it worked.” in places.
I think it’s a bit of a shame that you didn’t answer (or possibly didn’t quite understand) the question about setting jump height – plugging numbers into the accelration formula to get the desired height from a jump.
Trying to avoid spoilers: I got all the gems. This kinda ruined the last area I was going to explore (I didn’t get to see your lovely sunset gradient much)
I did not enjoy the thing you got from your audio guy (did that avoid spoilers ok?) – the very end of it was kinda amusing, but most of it was just irritating and didn’t make me uncertain and interested – just cross.
Also many of your areas could stand being a little bit more interconnected – several times I had to take huge detours. On the other hand – the coloured-rooms multi-switch puzzle was, if anything, overly connected.
Do you have any comments to make on how you decide and implement connection and flow?
The maze area was the hardest part of Redder for me, and I had to draw a map to get the last gem. I started off drawing a literal map, but ended up with a kind of “red goes this way, green goes that way” thing.
It made me wonder how you designed it in the first place – but I never would have guessed that you used a working ZZT prototype…
Thanks again for talking, Auntie, it was my favorite talk in the Club so far! One of my favorite talks on the INTERNET even, I feel that level design is a lot less intimidating now. I was gonna try level designing for the first time ever on KotM, but I was literally running around helping people with Game Maker from 3:30 to 6:30 and didn’t have time to make a game! (I didn’t even have time to READ THE CHAT and then the stupid Java applet threw away the transcripts when I got disconnected. Also at least 5 more games were made than were uploaded, I had to leave before I could ensure that everyone uploaded theirs!) Knytt of the Month though, woo woo
Sorry about the video cutting out on one of the most important parts, apparently someone tripped over the camera’s power cable. =/ About a minute ~ two minutes was lost, I think.
Blind_In_Texas: http://www.google.com/search?q=redder+map
I would also like to see the version of the map with all the arrows, though!
Daphny: Your I HEARD A RUMOR question was hilarious BTW
AGS: I don’t think most of us had even heard of ZZT! I knew what it was but I’d never seen it before.
GGN: Is http://www.dessgeega.com/flashmybox/ the one you mean? I guess we should start giving the camera guy a better spot in the room when we know the talk is going to be Popular On The Internet.
Hunty: I’m superglad that we record these things too! I wish I knew who jumped through the hoops to get us recording them initially, but the current cameraman/editor/uploader is a swell guy named Shea.
Auntie: The thing that happens when you get all the gems is my favorite ending in a game ever, by the way, I have been hoping for such a thing to happen in a game since I was THIRTEEN
I also took notes, I haven’t had a chance to write them up before now! I wrote them in lowercase on paper, I wasn’t going to post them but Conformity Calls
- vocab: “walls in place”
- since the level is out of the way, you can make it a harder section
- you have to pass through four areas to get to it
[sketch of that picture up there ^]
- theme of bottom-middle: jumping
- shape and height of the jump
- level made up of rails
“level flows” [a picture of level flows]
- lots of arrows, some one-way
- make use of negative space, since it’s already there
- this jump doesn’t work because you hit the thing after getting the thing
- game design/level design trick: “this was something else”
- fallen pipe
- visual symmetry is good, but not at the expense of ;aslkdfn;sd
- play symmetry: get at it from either side
- tileset first, for Anna
- design tiles for an area, then place them
- at the beginning Redder was linear
- she felt it wasn’t interesting like that
- have controls etc. in place (bouncing, jump shape) before designing levels
- use tiles and stuff not just for aesthetics, but for distinguishing parts of the world
- HAVE A LEVEL EDITOR lol
- she only uses Flash because it makes her money
- the differences in the way they look mirrors [something]
- GraphicsGale is wonderful
- Paint Shop Pro! now defunct
- exactly 400 tiles in the game
- Edmund yelled at her until she made the death animation short enough
- originally, every screen was a checkpoint
- but then the player could get stuck in a bad place, infinitely
- “life bar lends to sloppy design”
- something should happen -> then you die
i think i remember saying that i wanted the disctinctiveness of each area’s shape to mirror the distinctiveness of its tileset.
what was the part that got cut? i havn’t watched the video.
wow my comment looked much smaller in notepad, I should try to include typographic widows next time as a challenge
The video cut out at around 8:10.
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