function FindExtraMonkeyBases()
{
local MonkeyPickupBase MP;
local array<MonkeyPickupBase> MPA;
local int i;

foreach AllActors(class'MonkeyPickupBase', MP)
MPA[MPA.length] = MP;

for(i = 1; i < MPA.length; i++)
MPA[i].Destroy();

MPA[0].SpawnMonkeyPickup();
}

I doubt it’ll ever be used, but I like to know it’s there. Also, once someone has collected the Monkey Pickup it never respawns. The only way after that to become the monkey is to kill the current monkey. But what if the monkey throws himself off a cliff and dies without a killer? So I put a little code into the “Died” function that gets called on a Pawn’s death to respawn the Monkey Pickup if the monkey didn’t have a killer (ie. committed suicide). That works nicely.

Then I did some very minor network replication stuff to make sure the client and server get the stuff they need in order to do the things they do. Fortunately I’ve been putting code in the Player/GameReplicationInfo classes properly and there’s really not many (any?) variables or functions that needed replicating from any custom classes so all I had to really do was add the following into the defaultproperties for the base class of my pickups:

RemoteRole=ROLE_SimulatedProxy
bAlwaysRelevant=true

First line says “You’ll run on the clients but only to mirror what’s happening on the server” and the second line says “The player can see and interact with you”.

Lastly I set up a Subversion repository online and got TortiseSVN hooked up to the Monkey Tag project so I can backup easily and other people will be able to get a copy easily when it’s time to test multiplayer functionality (which should be very soon!)

• Created the pickup which turns you into the monkey
• Once you’re the monkey your score starts ticking up 1pt/sec

Left to right: Large points pickup, small points pickup, monkey pickup

Next things to do:

• If you’re the monkey the points pickups go straight onto your score and not your temporary score
• If you’re killed as the monkey you respawn as human and your killer becomes the new monkey

So life’s been very busy. Lots of travel and work, and I took lessons to get my truck license to hopefully get in on the mining boom that’s happening here in Oz. Gained my licence (first go!) so the job hunting there is starting now. Hopefully make some real dollars in a fly-in-fly-out role where I get some decent days off in a row (the hard work I don’t mind).

But bla bla bla, what about game stuff? I’ve put Team Friendship on pause for the moment because I really wanted to learn some UScript. I think Team Friendship would really benefit from that, as Kismet and begging for favours from programmer friends can only go so far. So I’m working on a little game called Monkey Tag.

Monkey Tag is inspired by Monkey Frag from the Turok series. Basically one person is the monkey, and you can only earn points as the monkey. To become the monkey you must kill the monkey. Here are the rules:

• Everyone starts human
• First person to collect the monkey pickup becomes the monkey (pickup doesn’t respawn)
• Monkey earns 1 point per second
• To become the new monkey you must kill the current monkey
• Killed monkey respawns as human
• There are bonus point pickups in the arena
• If the monkey collects the bonus points they are added directly to its score
• If a player collects the bonus points they are added to a temporary score
• The temporary points will only be cashed in for real points by becoming the monkey
• A human can steal another human’s temporary points by killing them

First to X points or the person with the most points when time’s up will be the winner.

So that’s so far proving to be very educational but also very doable. Last night I got the player’s score to tick up 1 point ever second. Tonight I made a bonus point pickup that will add points to the temporary score when it’s picked up. Obviously later I need to do checks and balances to make sure the points go where they’re supposed to, set up the monkey, script some custom weapons, and so on. But I’m happy with the progress I’m making in my first real programming/scripting exercise.

Will post more often. Promise!

First video blog from the development of Team Friendship, the game I’m developing with UDK. I think I like this format better than written blogs!

Recently I’ve been working alongside My Tours App to get all the tours from Audio Tours Australia up and running as an app and I’m really happy with how that’s turned out. Previously I’d thought about doing that but it required getting a graphic designer and programmer on board and that was out of my budget. So that’s up and running now at the iTunes App Store.

So with that done I designed some DL sized flyers and phoned a heap of hostels in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne asking if I could mail some to them to put on display for their guests. Most were great about it. Only one or two said no because all their flyers are partnership agreements with tour providers. I imagine there’s a commission/affiliate agreement in there, which is fair enough. So in the end I had 33 backpacker hostels say I could send them some flyers. I sent the design away to a printing house and got 5000 flyers delivered the next week! So just this morning I’ve finished bundling them up into envelopes to send off on Monday when the post office is open again. Exciting!

Team Friendship is also still alive, just a tad dormant at the moment. But I’m going to dedicate a few hours to it this week now that the tour flyers are out of my hair for a while. Bear with me!

So as I mentioned last post I’m up to re-drafting the level designs from my pen & paper versions into Photoshop so they’re neater (which is to say; actually legible). I’ve shared a few of them below although I don’t expect them to make much sense without the walkthrough written up alongside them. But they’re there if you’re interested!

Team Friendship was designed as a four-player co-operative first person puzzle game, and it works well at being that (on paper at least). But there was a nagging voice in the back of my mind that said something was missing. Something was missing which would rear its ugly head come release day. Something I could avoid with a bit of foresight. That something was a single-player portion of the game.

Obviously a game designed specifically for four-players (i.e. the puzzles can’t be completed with less than four people playing) cannot easily be adapted to be a single-player experience. I could just use the same interactive elements as in multiplayer (switches, buttons, pressure plates, and timers) and try to craft some puzzles out of that. But it would feel too stripped back. Too bare and basic. Like comparing an eight-person running race to a guy going for a jog by himself. The ingredients are there but the interest is not. So I had to come to an equalibrium of keeping it absolutely in the same game world as the multiplayer component, while abstracting the gameplay enough that I could form an interesting and unique single-player experience out of it.

I’ll be the first to admit the Weighted Companion Cube from Portal was an early inspiration for the single-player gameplay. It was a gameplay element that could affect the environment by acting as a step or a shield, and it could interact with other gameplay elements such as pressure plates, energy balls, portals, and so on. This was the kind of thing that would help abstract the gameplay enough to make it different from mutliplayer, ground it in the same universe, and form the basis for new and interesting puzzles. But there were a few things that Portal does that I wanted to do differently.

Firstly I wanted the cube to be pushed, not picked up. By permanently grounding the cube (because it’s too big and heavy I suppose) it immediately does two things: it means you can go where the cube cannot (like over a step) which paves the way for puzzles right there, and it makes the cube dependent on the player. Which is something I want to expand on for a minute…

In Portal (and many other games that use spheres/cubes/whatever to drag around) the relationship between the player and the prop is co-dependent. The prop needs the player to take it safely from A to B and the player needs the prop to get them safely from C to D. The prop might be used as a shield from arrows, flames, spike pits, energy balls, etc. and it might also be used as a step, a floatation device across a lava flow, the list goes on. Basically: the prop keeps you safe. As well as that works for certain games it’s something I didn’t want for Team Friendship.

In games like ICO or Resident Evil 4 you’re escorting someone helpless (Yorda and Ashley respectively) and for the most part they don’t help you at all. The chemistry or bond between the characters develops accordingly. You, the player, are the protector. The white knight, the dominant one, the puzzle solver. And except for occasions where the AI goes wrong and Yorda refuses to follow you or Ashley runs gleefully into a bear-trap, you do develop a feeling of reponsibility for the escort-ee. An example of this in another medium is Tom Hanks’ friend Wilson the volleyball in Castaway. So in Team Friendship the box will never help you reach inaccessible areas and never protect you from harm. It will depress pressure plates when you put it on them. That’s about it, really. Each puzzle will be you trying to get the cube to the exit, and the entire single-player component of the game will involve taking the cube with you from start to finish. The relationship between the player and the prop has gone from co-dependent to flat out dependent. Now that I think of it, it’s very much like escorting the garden gnome from start to finish in Half-Life 2: Episode 2.

The other thing I’m doing relates more to the level design than the overall game design. There are a few reasons for it. One is to re-enforce the cohesion of the single and multiplayer components of the game, because gameplay-wise they’re quite separate. The other is to heighten the sense of… I don’t actually know what the word for it is. That “you were there” feeling you get when you leave an area then after a while you see it again in the background from a different angle. Like when you get lost and disoriented and then eventually you arrive back on a familiar street via a side-street that you’ve passed a million times but never ventured down. The world spins for a moment and you reorient yourself and see this familiar street from a new prespective. ICO and God of War do this a lot (as do a lot of games). The point: What I’m doing is intertwining both the single and multiplayer puzzle arenas, and the routes between them, into one whole single environment. So if in multiplayer you see a walkway going overhead that you can’t reach, in single-player you’ll cross that walkway and see down to where you were in multiplayer. With proper planning and foresight this is actually fairly easy to do and should give plenty of “oohhhh that’s cool” moments throughout the game as you start seeing previous areas from afar, walking through the same areas again, and even re-using puzzles from singleplayer in multiplayer (and vice versa) in completely different ways to open up different routes.

And the entire game (both the single and multiplayer routes) are enourmous loops where you arrive back at the beginning at the end of the game. Within that loop are smaller loops, and within those loops are loops, and so on. Yes this borrows heavily from ICO (again) but it’s a fantastic technique that squeezes plenty of emotional response from the players, and that’s what’s important. Oh, and also the single player component is only 20 rooms while the multiplayer is 30 rooms.

That thing in the background is a puzzle you completed ages ago.

So now that both single and multiplayer components of the game are designed on paper, I’ll find an order to put the rooms in, how the flow between them works, how the single/multi rooms tie together, and just really get the overarching flow down pat. Then get it all done up in Photoshop and walkthroughs written, which really isn’t too time consuming because there’s no design involved now. Then it’s whiteboxing! But that’s later.

Stay tuned via Facebook/Twitter! ~

You can check out the mobile version at mobile.audiotoursaustralia.com using any smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, even iPad). What I’ll actually be using it for mainly is when I start up a print campaign again, likely with TNT Magazine Australia which I’ve done before. I’ll just list both URL’s on the ad and probably also a scannable QR Code.

So feel free to check it out and let me know if anything’s not rendering properly and pass it around to your friends if you think it’ll be of use to them.

In other news; I’ve pretty much canned the built-in comments for this blog because my inbox was filling with spam that it wanted me to moderate. I’ve replaced it with Facebook commenting which seems pretty neat, as well as being an underhanded way to generate backlinks to my blog posts. But shhh!