Before I make my position on this issue clear, allow me to first explicitly outline the place from which I write. I hold a PhD in Media & Communications, in Game Studies. This means I have dedicated my entire adult life to understanding videogames as media, in the context of other media, and therefore in their social context in contemporary society. I am a humanities scholar, so I am interested and educated in the relationships that people have with their media, and with each other via or because of, their use of media. I am defined by virtue of holding a doctorate, and having pursued both a research and teaching career, as something of an expert on the nature of videogames and media. No one can take that from me, now.

Secondly, I hold a position of significant influence within an educational institute, largely based on that qualification. I am able to wield a degree of authority over our curriculum in regards to videogames in particular, and media studies more generally. Therefore, based on my educated judgement, we teach what I believe to be the most critical aspects of how to make and understand videogames. Of course I operate within a code of conduct, which guarantees many rights to my colleagues and my students, but also predicates a great deal of how I conduct my classes, how we devise curriculum and how we assess student work and behaviour on my own personal judgement. On having interviewed me, and now worked with me for two years, my employer is satisfied that my judgement in these matters is generally sound. I am literally paid to assess, and make judgements about media, and specifically about videogames.

I am also a heterosexual man, in my early 30s, white (and American to boot). I speak from a position of privilege as well as authority. I’ve also been playing videogames for literally as long as I can remember. I meet all the criteria.

I know I am not perfect, and I know I’ve made mistakes. I’ve even disagreed with the very people I am writing to support. But I also know I’m learning, and have always done my best.

So I speak as a man of power and influence, with an acute knowledge of my many advantages. I also possess the responsibility of developing the future generations of Australian game developers. Responsibility, and a degree of control. Indeed, I am able to push an agenda in my classrooms, and I will do so, because they are mine. I will employ others who whole similar values to extend that reach farther.

I will teach the plain and simple facts of the systems of power that have defined Western civilisation for as long as there has been a civilisation. I will explore and explain that the people who produce and sell media all have personal views, biases, prejudices, and agendas of their own. I will teach that what may seem perfectly natural to you, young game developer, may be completely foreign to someone else. That we all have an agenda, of some kind or another.

I will also teach the more subtle understanding of society as a system constantly imagining itself. That we highly complex social creatures are always in the process of creating our own culture by believing in what we do. So I will not just teach what is, but what should be, what could be.

I will teach my students that none of them are the centre of the universe. They are not, in fact, the only person on the planet.

I will teach the difference between fact and opinion. Between argument and dogma. Between evidence and imagination.

I will fight for equality, for a day when my classes are a random mix of races and genders, instead of the predictable homogeneity we see now.

I will teach them these things because I have already passed the tests that our culture sets, I have already been given the authority to do so. I have come by this power honestly, earning it through my hard work. I have kept it, perhaps, because our society is used to seeing a straight white man in power. I am not besieged on all sides by bigots fearful of my opinions because they might be different. I am not harassed, hacked, threatened, exposed or vilified on a daily basis. And when I am, it is because of my opinions rather than my looks or sexual partners. Strangely, those responsible have a way of backing down when I meet the challenge.

So I will continue on, spreading my agenda--the agenda of the modern world--where I may. Both professionally and privately, publicly in presentations or writing, or in class one student at a time. You cannot stop me. The very codes of conduct you would sift through Google to find were written by people like me. They are what give me the power to ensure that bigotry in all its forms is not welcome in my domain. I will provide what shelter I can. What support I am able.

Perhaps the ones who harass me from time to time back down because they know the truth:I am a social justice warrior they won’t beat.

Yeah, this is the bad guy we all have to watch out for. Apparently.

White Knight has come to be my most personally loathed term on the internet, probably because it its most likely to be the one aimed at me (yeah I can be selfish, sorry). But adding to that, mind-blowing levels of ignorant hypocrisy infest the term. So let's get straight to the point: the act of calling someone a white knight is in itself one of the more horrifying acts of sexism I've run across. Essentially, white knights are men who enter into debates, conversations or arguments about any gender issues, who support the same, or largely the same, arguments that a female participant supports. The term is used pejoratively, to accuse that "ally" of being somehow sexist themselves. 

The logic behind a white knight accusation follows on from the name: women are damsels in distress which need defending by their more capable male counterparts. So any man who is speaking in support or along the same lines as a woman is, the accusers claim, suggesting that the woman cannot speak for herself. Further (or perhaps alternately, I'd hate to try to speak to the motivations of all the WK accusers), the accuser believes that the white knight's sole reason for 'defending' the woman is to gain currency either with that particular woman, or with other women who see him behaving this way. Let me quote some random guy on the internet for example:

While sexism is a problem, an even bigger (or at the very least more annoying) problem is the one of white knighting. The white knights out there, and there’s an increasing number of them, will pounce on anything that seems evenly remotely offensive to women. They are severely overcompensating for something and somehow think this will garner them favour with women who, since this is the internet, aren’t going to sleep with them anyway. Their arguments are ridiculous, unwarranted, and downright pathetic. - Some Internet Dude

Apart from the fact that something the author finds "annoying" is "a bigger problem than sexism," this is as good an encapsulation of the problem of White Knighting as I've seen.

What WK Accusers fail to realise is that by positing that the "white knight" is only saying what he is saying in order to gain some feminine attention, the accuser reveals his own preoccupation with, and poor understanding of, gender relations. The term is meant to insult the accused, but all it does in my experience is call attention to the accuser's own sexism. Disturbingly, examples such as the one quoted above, believe themselves to be informed about, and even allies of, feminism, and are still using this term in this way. Perhaps there really are men who attempt to speak on behalf of women's arguments in order to gain positive attention--it certainly wouldn't be the worst method--but in my personal experience, the term is just as often leveled against genuinely conscientious and fair-minded individuals. Further, it seems to be more often uttered not by well-meaning-if-naive feminist allies, but by raging misogynists who are attempting to drag us all down to their level.

A WK accuser suggests that the only frame for a relationship between men and women is sexual, that all motivations eventually come back to sex, or the hope for sex (or attention, friendship, however ambitious the accusation is).

The stunning irony for me is that what finally motivated me to put these thoughts down in a post was the use of this term in a conversation criticising Anita Sarkeesian's first "Women in Tropes" video. Her first installment focused on the damsel in distress trope, and the accuser--as they do--was trying to demonstrate his superiour critical faculties in an argument with another man. Just let that percolate for a minute. The accuser was criticising Sarkeesian's video, and the accused was defending it. And the accuser called the defender a White. Knight.

What do White Knights do? (I really wish I could deliver this verbally--I can't really express the same exasperation in text that I could out loud) They rescue Damsels In Distress. Because they can't rescue themselves. Sarkeesian points out that these tropes don't exist in a vacuum, but have far-reaching reverberations. And the guy said White freaking Knight.

Personally, I'm training myself to view the term as a compliment. If I'm saying things that cause someone to rationalise things by assuming that I am after the sexual attention of a woman, then I'm probably pissing off the right people.

N.B. I am by no means a perfect person, and have said things which caused offense to women before. I'll probably do so again, and apologise for it when I realise. Such is life. 

Discussing game design is difficult because it is a second-order task. A designer constructs the rules, environment, etc. but always in hopes that the player will experience something that is greater than the sum of those parts. When set in motion, the player(s), rules, environment and fiction all combine and create something that is not obviously discernible from a list of the game's rules. Further, since it is the player whom we as designers are trying to affect somehow, their perception and personal interpretation of what is happening is more important than what the game design document says should be the result. (Not that players can't be wrong or ignorant, but we still have to deal with their perception of our work.)

Finally, discussing the design of the kinds of games I like is very difficult, because there is very little opportunity for experimentation to verify any hypotheses about the way the game works. That is, I'm not often able to change one rule and see how it plays out. The games are sealed and finished, I can't tamper with them myself very often. Even in franchise games such as Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect, which are largely similar, many changes have been made between iterations, so it becomes difficult to nail down exactly what cause has led to which effect.

For these reasons, I've been excited by the learning opportunities I've had while playing the latest post-DayZ Arma mod to sweep the Internet: Wasteland. In general, Wasteland is much like DayZ: a semi-persistent, on-going mission set in Chernarus (or other maps now) where players must contend with each other, as well as manage a hunger/thirst mechanic. There are no zombies in Wasteland, only players. Much higher-grade weapons are generally available than in DayZ, mostly found in the trunk of the many vehicles which randomly spawn throughout the settlements. So Wasteland is, broadly speaking, a very large, variably-paced deathmatch. There are 3 factions, BluFor, OpFor and Independents. The Op and Blu forces are designated as teams who are to work together, while Independents are free to do as they please--team up or lone wolf.

From this basic premise, each server begins to differentiate. In a digital version of "house rules" many server admins fancy themselves amateur game designers (or at least developers, more on that soon), and so start to tinker with the code that defines the Wasteland mission. These small changes ripple outward in unpredictable ways, and interact with other changes, to affect the overall experience.

From here I will explore two examples of rules which are affecting the experience on certain servers that I've been playing on. The beauty of this server situation is that I can jump between very similar games, and compare the two sets of rules in a much more "controlled" experimental way than is possible in many other games.

The first issue is really more of a problem than an example of a rule-change between servers, but serves to illustrate my point about game design. In Wasteland, players can use various kinds of building-materials to create bases. These include sniper platforms, sandbag walls, and other ready-made base buildings. Some of these items are quite large, and the mechanics whereby a single player can walk along carrying a small building around is quite ridiculous. However, the problematic aspect is that a BluFor player can pick up a ten meter-long wall, and by walking or turning it around, can kill the other players using the collision physics built into the game.

Obviously, no cooperative team mate would want to do this--but this is a game played on the internet where people are jerks, so it happens all the time. Some troll will go to the BluFor base, as a BluFor member, and simply move a base wall, killing as many of his faction as he until one of them shoots him. The issue here is that the collision physics do not track who is responsible for the deaths--the system has no way to know that it was BluFor Johnny that killed his own team. Thus, the punishment mechanic, which is a way for players killed by their own teammates using weapons to remove team-killers, doesn't work. In fact, it is the troll--once shot by BluFor--who is better equipped to punish his law-abiding teammates.

To me, this is more of a development problem or task, than a design concern. This is a sort of maintenance issue where the game is obviously not working "right." The rules that define how the game is designed to work aren't perfectly translated into computer logic, and we have a less than optimal result. That said, the rules, the design decisions, are already made: teams, base building, physics etc. We simply need to code them into the computer system better.

Finally we come to the meat of this article--a long enough build up I'm sure. Recently, one of the servers I play on has changed a few things in Wasteland. I'm going to report the situation backwards for rhetorical effect here: Users noticed the changes and started complaining. Mainly, the complaints where about the lack of vehicles in the spawn areas. People were spawning in and had to run a couple of kilometers to find a car. This was not the case as recently as last week; cars were generally easy to find. Cars, remember, also usually contain weapons. So people were complaining about being required to run around with just pistols for quite a while.

The obvious solution to this symptom is to increase the number or frequency of vehicle spawns in the game. However, this was not the actual problem. What the admin changed was where people were spawning. Players were spawning along the coast, a much narrower range of areas than previously. The result of this is that the people who spawn first get in a vehicle and drive away, die somewhere inland, and repeat. So eventually, players have organically moved all the cars that were at the coast to somewhere slightly inland. The perception was that there were fewer cars, when really the issue was that the players were moving them basically in one direction, away from the coast. Since no one was spawning inland, the cars that made it even to the first set of towns away from the coast were staying there. People weren't driving any cars from inland back out to the coast, or at least not enough to make a difference.

By changing the spawning area, the admin did not just create a vehicle shortage. Because the sixty-or-so players were all spawning in about ten locations, rather than forty or fifty, there were far more shoot-outs in those spawning locations than when the spawns were spread out. These shoot-outs were often between pistols, since very few people had any access to higher grade weapons. Secondly, they are usually fatal, so at least one of the participants respawns again on the coast, exacerbating the problem.

So, there are no vehicles on the coast, there are many players, who continue to fight, and kill each other, and respawn again on the coast. Getting inland became doubly difficult. This has another knock-on affect, impacting the experience of being inland itself. Prior to these changes, the distribution of spawn locations and the high mobility offered by vehicles led to the entire map being "in play." Unlike DayZ where certain obvious paths became well-worn between highly-valued locations, Wasteland was less predictable. One could expect an encounter at any moment, or could dig in almost anywhere and set up an ambush. After the changes, with a large percentage of the population stuck in a coastal deathmatch, the rest of the map is desolate.

I have asked, but have yet to hear a cogent answer as to the purpose of these spawn-point changes. I'm not sure what the admin was seeking to do, but I'm sure this isn't the effect he wanted. The example is illustrative though--how one change can have such dramatic impacts, and how the symptoms ("Why aren't there any vehicles anymore?!?!") do not always point to the real problem. As I said above, game design operates at one remove: you design rules, but what you want to create is play.

Apparently gamers have a particular kind of facial hair needs. Also we're all men.

Lately I’ve noticed a slew of products I can buy, which will subsequently force me to buy ‘refills’ of some description, in order to keep using them. On top of this, I have noticed an increase in the number of household products which determine how and when the consumable is used, to better schedule the re-purchases. Here are a couple examples:

• Dettol hand wash – dumps a precise amount of soap into your hand through the magic of infra-red sensors. Of course you can’t fill it up with any old soap…
• Auto-bug and freshener sprays – two different ways to fill your house with a fine mist of chemical sprays, set to a timer to empty the can right on schedule.
• Lots of cleaning supplies and body cleansers have transformed from bottles into wipes, which you run out of at a pretty steady rate. You can’t really use just ‘a little bit’ of a wet, soapy wipe the way you can use just a little bit of soap. Those cages you hang in the toilet to freshen it up operate on a similarly automatic principle, as do air or water filters.

The ‘Gillette model’ is a method of selling consumer products where the initial buy-in is very low-cost, but relies on the purchase of a complementary product which is relatively more expensive, and certainly a higher profit for the manufacturer. The most famous example is the source of its name, Gillette razor blades: you can buy the handle for your razor (with one or two blades) very cheaply. But the new blades are extremely expensive by comparison. But you must buy them, or the handle is useless, right? This isn’t all smoke and mirrors—obviously many products like disposable razors, ink-jet printer cartridges, and air fresheners need to be replaced, they are consumable. It’s the pricing model that’s important to note.

What it achieves is a more predictable, steady flow of revenue for the particular manufacturer. Since you have to buy new razor blades occasionally, if you already own a Gillette razor handle, you’re more likely to buy Gillette refills. The schedule mentioned above simply regulates this a bit. Dettol want you to buy their soap regularly, so they make sure you use a certain amount of it every time you wash your hands. The automatic freshener sprays promise to fill the air with a pleasant scent to mask odours before you even notice they are there—also they use up a can of spray like clockwork.

What the hell does potpourri spray, soap and shaving have to do with videogames?? 

Videogame publishers, like Gillette and SC Johnson are businesses. They want money just like any other business. Further, they’d love to have a nice predictable stream of revenue they can use to make investments and placate shareholders. As the price of development in the AAA range continues to increase, the risk of failure increases also. Publishers are searching for ways to mitigate that risk, and new financial models are one way to do so.

If a game costs two hundred million dollars to develop, and is sold in a traditional, $60-100 one-shot transaction, the risk to the publisher is huge. What if the players simply don’t buy that particular box? Even if players do buy, once they take the game home, the publisher never hears from them again. Firstly, the publishers won’t know very much about the reasons the customers did and did not spend the money. Secondly, what if some population of players was willing to spend more than the sticker price? Thirdly, once the initial rush of ‘new game release!’ purchases are over, that publisher’s revenue stream plummets to a tiny trickle until the next big release. That could be as far as two or three years away—not a good interval between pay days, I think we’d all agree.

There are a few possible answers, experiments that developers and publishers have already been trying for a number of years. The first is pretty obviously DLC: you buy the game, and then a month later shell out another few dollars to inject some fresh cash into the developer/publisher. The second is the GOTY Edition, a phenomenon that has little (or nothing) to do with critical awards, but exists merely as an opportunity to package the DLC together with the original game to perform another exercise in marketing.
In the end, though, both of these are merely repetitions of the first practice, on a smaller scale: create a game/content, fire it off into retail stores and hope.

A more fundamental change has been creeping across the videogame industry. Speaking very broadly, the goal of publishers is to avoid these big, one-off purchases which exist as a point in time. Instead, they wish to set up a dialog between game and player, a kind of ongoing conversation which is spoken with money. So, the player is continually engaged in the process of buying something, and the publisher is constantly engaged in providing whatever it is that’s being purchased. There is obviously a point at which this begins, but no clear point at which it ends. Think, for example, of buying a new MMO, and setting up a subscription. Many videogames, like air fresheners and hand soap, are transforming from a product into a service.

This kind of steady stream of revenue is far more predictable and less volatile. After launch (still a risky proposition), a publisher can observe positive or negative sales trends over time. Assuming that the launch goes well enough, the developer can try things in real time to increase subscribers, rather than wait until their next game is ready to try anything new. MMOs are currently the only genre of game to require these kinds of straight-forward subscription fees, and players expect a certain amount of content to be added to the game over time without cost. To me, this is very similar to the Gillette model described above. Buy into the game, keep on paying to access the content you are increasingly invested in.

Blizzard (and many other MMO-makers) have somehow managed to combine the box-buy (purchasing the CDs) and the subscription fee. That the initial WoW buy-in, as well as expansion packs, costs about the same as any other AAA game without the on-going fee strikes me as fairly remarkable, distinct from the cheap Gillette handle with expensive blades model. An even more precise comparison is found in ‘free to play’ videogames.

The other name for the Gillette model is ‘freebie marketing.’ That is, you can practically (or literally) give away the first chunk of whatever your product is (the handle and first blade, the first ink cartridge, first tier of gear in your RPG), and rely entirely on the steady flow of revenue that this initial buy-in encourages. Quite a lot has been said about the merits and faults of this kind of financial arrangement, I won’t repeat here. Suffice it to say that free to play videogames work to gain buy-in from their players by generating an emotional investment in the game, before halting progress and asking for some cash. This can continue for as long as the player wishes to continue to progress.

Blizzard have created two much more subtle examples of videogames as services: Starcraft II and Diablo III. Strangely, perhaps, Blizzard/Activision have not monetised Starcraft II in the way I might have predicted. Other than releasing what is ostensibly one game in three distinct parts, there is no other way to keep paying Blizzard money. However, on a technical level, Starcraft II represents a clear example of this new videogame service: an always-online experience, constantly updated, connected to a news server and social network. This is not a game you buy, consume, and put away when done. One can easily imagine fees being leveraged for access to the highest (or otherwise ‘special’) league ladders, or personalised livery being implemented. All the infrastructure is already in place.

Blizzard’s cleverest new business model, however, is the new Diablo III auction house. This is literally providing videogame players a service: a virtual eBay for virtual items of which Blizzard can create an infinite supply.

Diablo III is (at one level) a complex gothic-fantasy slot machine. Each time a player kills a monster, the wheels spin ‘round and every so often, the game pays out. It isn’t quarters or even nickels that spew forth, though, it’s a virtual item with no exchange value outside of Blizzard’s system. By integrating the real-money auction house into that system, Blizzard have made it possible to cash out of the Diablo casino, effectively allowing players to convert their play time into cash. But it works for Blizzard too. Each time anyone does cash out, Blizzard takes it’s slice of the earnings.

So Blizzard/Activision have found a way to turn your play time into dollars. Realising this is incredibly important for the developers of certain kinds of games. Diablo is not the kind of hyper-consumable or disposable experience bought for 99 cents on the App Store. Diablo is the kind of game many, many people will sink many hundreds of hours into, as the norm. This vast amount of play time is, effectively, an untapped resource. It even makes sense for the consumer, in that a game you are willing to spend 300 hours in might be worth more money to you than the kind you will play through the campaign of 15 hours once and put away. If we don’t have to cough up the grand total all at once, all the better. I know I would never have bought World of Warcraft up front for the total price of all the subscription fees I ever paid.

Not everyone will participate, of course, not everyone will cash out either. But a large number will. Anyone who uses the auction house at all is participating in this economy, in the monetised dialog between Blizzard and their player base. Anyone who turns their play time into a commodity by placing it on the auction house is creating the opportunity for Blizzard to make a little more money. This, and similarly long-lived relationships between publisher and player are a very important aspect of the future of videogames. One need only look to the other experiment Activision are running in a very different game, with Call of Duty: Elite, to see how widespread this trend is. Not all games will go down this route—there will probably still be a many game experiences sold and consumed like candy on the App Store, or like films enjoyed intensely for a relatively long. but finite. time. But increasingly, publishers will be finding ways to maintain and then monetise long-term relationships between themselves and players.

The first thing I had to do here was transfer all my assets and code to a new computer. I'm not terribly happy with how Game Maker has installed itself on this machine; the asset library is buried hideously deep in the invisible Roaming App Data folders in my user profile. Not ideal when you want to import a pre-existing sprite into a project. But so far its working.

The second thing I had to do was go over my design notes, which I'm thankful I kept. I still had to poke around quite a bit remembering how certain mechanics were written, where variables were set, that sort of thing. But surprisingly it didn't take me very long to get back into the swing.

So today I made a fair bit of progress on the first of the temples. I have implemented a number of mechanical obstacles, some of which you will probably be able to guess at by the screenshot I have included here.

I have the idea sketched out for the end of this little temple, but I'm just out of design and coding steam for the day. I might be able to crank out a bit more tomorrow, we'll see. For now, enjoy this little sneak peak.

Firstly, while doing some planning on paper a few days back, a guide-like NPC came into existence. I hadn't planned on including him, but as I wrote more and more of the plan, I thought he would make a good framing device to help the player out, as well as explain a couple aspects of the game scenario. So he exists!

I've also implemented a few dialog/exposition methods. Actually that reminds me. I redesigned the interface around a "small panels floating over the gameworld" metaphor, rather than a large frame within which the gameworld appears as a window. So that worked out pretty well. I had a bit of help on that one, talking to a more experienced Game Maker user, so thanks for that! Ok, so having established a better user interface, I have a couple ways to send text messages to the player, and have implemented a couple of them.

My game now has a 'hub' room, which is where the player will access the four other rooms/areas of challenges. Following that, the very first part of the first temple is in place. I have a final puzzle set out in my mind for that temple, but need a couple other challenges and tasks, so that's what I'll be working on in the next day or two. Oh, did someone say spiders??

Observe the AAA quality artwork in my game!

My troubles come in the form of the interface. I'm not sure how I should create an interface for the player in Game Maker. The logic of how Game Maker's design isn't immediately obvious to me at this point. I spent a couple hours drawing up measurements on graph paper and transferring them to Photoshop to create backgrounds. From there I took them into Game Maker, messing around with room sizes and views, but I'm just not happy with the results.

My first design was essentially leading me to create the interface as part of the room, just outside the area where the player can actually walk. That just didn't work right in my mind, and seems like it would be a real problem to replicate in rooms of various sizes. It also just felt wrong!

Following that, I'm questioning exactly what I need in the interface. Since I'm not intending to implement a full-blown inventory system, I don't really need the full 'backpack' sort of grid. I'd like to implement a way to represent what keys the player has picked up, for example, but that's not quite the same as a complete inventory system. So it's basically back to the drawing board today.

Today my progress was largely off-screen. That is, I made a lot of notes about the themes of the game, the overall structure and basic fiction that will give us some reason for playing. I won’t reproduce all those notes here, partly because that would be enormously tedious for me, and partly because I don’t want to spoil the little fiction that I am writing for this game before its even playable. Suffice it to say that there is a hub, with four ‘temples’ to explore/solve/complete, and a few new mechanics in each temple.

So, as for mechanical progress, I mainly implemented a torchlight system. I toyed around with a few different options. The first one I tried ended up being what I stuck with—using a huge dark sprite with a gradient-to-transparent circle centred on the player. That gives a great illusion of the player emitting light. I also created floor-mounted torches which will light up when the player touches them. Those I used the draw and blending functions to emit a soft yellow glow.

So, since that’s basically all the mechanical developments, I’m going to export an exe of the game as it stands now, and whoever is reading this can just play around in the room I’ve created. Just for reference: WASD to move one block at a time, left click on skeletons to destroy them, the rest is basically self-explanatory.

Download the game here. 

So I just tested this download link, and Chrome warned me that the file appears malicious. It isn't, really. I haven't created this RPG project as an elaborate ruse to distribute a virus to all my personal friends and blog readers. 

LOOK OUT, SKELETON!!

Much progress was made today! I am fairly pleased.

I had many more hours to work today, so I got to really get stuck into the Game Maker scripting language, as I had hoped to do. As it turns out, I’m coming up to speed with it pretty fast, so let’s look over at what I did today.

Firstly, I got the health system working. As it turns out, the built-in system seems to be focused mainly on one of your objects. It took me close to an hour to figure out that the variable ‘health’ is a reserved word, and tracks a value from 1-100. I was very annoyed at my skeletons who just wouldn’t die, because their health was 100, and then eventually they all died, because the global health variable was zero. So anyway, skeletons have ‘stam’ now, not health.

Bit of a detour: A corollary to the health system was learning to write text to the screen. That took quite some time too because I, at some point, had made the object responsible for writing invisible, so nothing I tried worked. Obviously. But after sorting that out, I quickly came up with a total health display. Ok, back on the skeletons. I wanted them to be dangerous, so any time the player is standing next to a skelly, they will do some damage at intervals and within a range randomly selected. So if the player just stands next to the immobile skeleton, the player-character’s health runs down. (Come to think of it, I haven’t actually programmed anything to happen with the player’s health reaches zero. Hmmm.)

Having worked that out, I decided these little buggers needed to move around. Now, pathing is another function Game Maker supports with the drag and drop interface, but like I’ve said I’m avoiding all that. Also, the paths don’t really jive with a more or less grid-based system I’ve decided on. So I had to code a simple AI behaviour by hand. Basically, the skeletons are idiots with no real goals. They just randomly pick one of the four compass directions and take a step if they can, then rest for a few dozen milliseconds. If the player character is next door, however, they will stay put and cause the player some damage!!

I had a lot of trouble with the case switch in my skeletons, which manifested in all the skeletons eventually moving through the whole set of cases, and winding up in the bottom left corner of the room. “Break;” is a pretty important function, if you didn’t know. All that took quite a while and got a bit frustrating, I’m not embarrassed to admit.

From then I had a pretty smooth time of implementing a locked door (an impassable tile with a lock-looking sprite) and a key with which to unlock it. Took a few tries to figure out how to make it all interact the way I wanted—for example, in my first iteration my character had to stand on top of the non-solid door tile for it to work, which just looked kinda wrong. Had a brainwave eventually, and now the player just clicks the door when he’s near enough and has the gold key—a bit like attacking the skeletons.

The last thing I actually implemented today was a health potion. Pretty simple, the player just walks on it and gains 10 health, but can’t go over 100.

From there on I really only did a couple cosmetic changes, browsing through the sprites included with Game Maker. I did make my own key sprite, having not seen the ones packaged in the folders already. It is pretty ugly, but it’s a pretty straight forward process.

Now, I’m to a point where I have basic, absolutely essential mechanics in place, so I’m back to brainstorming. What do I want to do to this framework? Do I want any kind of inventory system beyond a yes/no on keys? Do I want equipment or levelling up? Do I want any skills beyond left-clicking objects in the game world? And a fairly major question is about interface. At the moment, the only interface I have that isn’t the gameworld is a strip at the top with health, score and the single line of messages. Shall I create some kind of sidebar with an inventory and message panel? An action bar? These are fairly significant questions! I will have to think about them.

This skeleton guards the locked door and a health potion.

Finally, I went online again and had a look at one feature I quite like, and may have to figure out a way to implement: a light-based line-of-site system. Nothing fancy, but basically, to give a sense of exploration, I feel it would be effective to limit the player’s range of vision. At the moment, the player can see everything in the room at once. If, instead, you could only see four or five tiles in any direction, this would be much more of a ‘dungeon crawler’ suddenly. However, the function I looked up was pretty complex (relatively) and required the Pro version of Game Maker. I’m not really opposed to buying the full version, but I do want to understand what’s going on. So I’ve decided I won’t add any functions in through copy/pasting someone else’s work. The whole point of this is to be learning, so I want to learn, and hopefully internalise some of this, rather than just trust Google to fix all my problems.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about possible projects, possible environments to build them in, all possible. Today I decided to simply make a snap-decision, and just go with it. I know Game Maker can make top-down RPG type games, I know all the basic mechanics (in general, not in detail) and all I need is to just do it. I need to just build something, nothing that is going to change the world, but only going to change myself—I want to improve my skills.

So I did a bit of work tonight, just writing down a bunch of ideas, high level requirements for  a game like this. For one, I decided to go with a grid-based design, even though Game Maker is advanced enough to handle a pretty fine resolution, and do collision detection in real time. I’m really focused on making the design tasks simple, and working in a grid, and in a turn-based concept just seems a bit simpler to manage.

I fired up Game Maker already—I’m probably not meant to actually even be working in the tools at this early stage, I should be working on a requirements document and game bible, but hey, who’s gonna tell me otherwise? I’ll have a bit more time over the next few days to write down some more mini goals for the project, to test concepts and thrash out a few fundamental mechanics before I start designing and building the world.

So what did I accomplish today?

I finished a super-basic tutorial that helped remind me how Game Maker works. That was great. I reset a few features and managed to create a grid system, with a player-character that I can control step-by-step with WASD keys. Since Game Maker has such nice collision detection, it was pretty simple to create the room and walls that the player-character can’t pass through.

After that I created a cherry object that when I walk across, I pick up and gain a point in the score. Yay, cherries!

I accomplished this stuff pretty quickly, so I set out to create the first set of mechanics to ‘act on the world’ (read: attack bad guys). So I knocked up a skeleton object, and set about creating some kind of attacking mechanism. I thought about this for a while, trying to decide how to represent the kind of ‘walk up to and bash’ style combat vaguely reminiscent of Diablo. It took me a while, but the concept I came up with was a mouse-click on the target enemy, which checks to make sure the p-c is in range before being destroyed. That way the player has to be close enough (next grid box over) to kill the skeleton, rather than just clicking on everything on the screen while hiding in the corner.

I definitely want to add a health system, which is basically built into Game Maker already, but I had about hit my limit of brain power for the evening, so couldn’t figure out how to make it take more than one click to kill the skeleton. Tomorrow!

I did jump on the forum and I downloaded an example RPG walker, and had something of a revelation, about how to build functions out of code instead of the drag and drop interface. I think, from tomorrow, I’ll get into the Game Maker language and avoid the drag and drop stuff entirely. I’d rather learn a little bit of programming, and this GML seems really basic introduction just to brush up my basic logic and scripting skills. So I need to find some documentation on the language, but that’s for another day.