Unity Indie is now free

Im not a Unity fan myself (it is in the list of pending tasks), but I have heard good things about this engine. I read in Gamedev that it has a free version for indies now. Go get it!

Torchlight released

At last the game is out! Torchlight is an action RPG created by former members of the Diablo team, that uses the Ogre engine. An online RPG is expected for the next year, so it seems that we are watching the birth of a new franchise. Torchlight can be purchased from Perfect World, Steam, Direct2Drive and other partners.

Writing game plots: interest and emotion

What makes a good game? The graphics? Probably not. Graphics tend to impress the in the first minutes of play, but an hour later we no longer see that nice cloud of dust, that detailed zombie hitting you with his forearm or the realistic scenario. Gameplay and storyline are the key elements that endure the whole game playing lifetime, and I will talk about the second here.

What makes us keep playing the game until the end? If you say interest, you are right. So, if you want that players actually finish your game, you have to build interest. Want more inmersion? Then you need emotion.

Emotion and interest are not the same. You can have the second, but completely miss the first. Fallout 3 creates interest. Mass Effect creates emotion. When there is interest, you look at the clock and say "it is 11 PM, I will continue tomorrow". When there is emotion you say "it is 1 AM, but I have to finish this quest before going bed!".

Gameplay can generate interest, but emotion is only generated by the plot. There are some well known elements to introduce emotion and interest in your plot, they are easy to spot if you read a best seller. Take a look at Harry Potter books. They have an almost predictable structure: there is a mistery, of course; invariably there is somebody we will hate and the rest is filler, what makes the book diferent from the others. Easy, don't you think? But, being a writer myself, I tell you that sometimes we can miss these elements.

A game plot is like a book plot with alternative pages. You can have a mistery based plot: the player is embarked in a quest to discover something, but won't achieve it until the end, or will reveal it progressively, piece by piece, in some cases finding that the object of his pursuit is totally different to what he thought in the beginning of the quest. Mistery can be built around anything: an item, an event, a character. Hide to the player why the item needs to be recovered, what really happened in that event or what are the true objectives of a character, or what are his own character true story.

The other plot element: a nemesis, somebody we will hate. This hate can be built through his/her actions: betrayal, murder, etc. Same as mistery, you can escalate by providing another more evil enemy when you reach the first one. A very useful element that fits in any plot, and in fact, it is found in virtually all plots. At the same time, the opposed figure can be used: a friend or somebody to admire.

Decisions can be another way to create emotion. Confront the player with a choice: should I save the village or just the girl/boy I love? My best friend has taken the wrong path, should I kill him? There is a wide range of possibilities. The interactive nature of a videogame makes this a very interesting resource, but do not overexploit it. Difficult decisions are good, but not to trust the whole emotion building process to them. You want to give the player something fun, not a greek tragedy.

Avoid excesively open worlds. Too much free roam disconnects the player from the storyline and dilutes the interest. It is good to have several paths to reach the end, but not too many paths taking you away from it. Introduce some reminder to bring the player back to the main quest.

Action (in the sense of fight) is another source of emotion. But not all action weights the same, it is more effective when you fight a particulary important and strong enemy. The rest is just interest, not emotion builder.

Build complex characters, both player and NPCs. Take some time to create a background for each one, and plan how to progressively revealing that information. Establish links among the player and NPCs, make the player feel that the party members are there for more than helping kill monsters.

That is a short list of techniques to create some emotion in your game, but Im sure it is far from complete. Like a professional writer told me once: you will learn to write only by writing. Go and experiment!

Testing SDL 1.3

Well, it is time to start looking the new branch, so I donwloaded it. I couldnt made any test under Windows, as there is no Code::blocks project yet and I didnt wanted to compile with VC and then try to link to the dll. So, I installed it on my home directory in Linux and tried to link a project against it. It worked fine! Right now there are no tutorials about the new features and I havent seen the API docs yet, but Im pretty sure that it is backwards compatible.
I still have more tests to do, I will post my results. My main interest is how the new OpenGL rendering works.

Art resources

This is my second hub, this time a pack of links to free game resources: art, sounds, etc.

SDL_image and SDL_mixer releases

The final version of SDL_mixer 1.2.9 and SDL_Image 1.2.8 has been released, with the usual list of bugfixes.
Also, Ember has released version 0.5.7, which includes a lot of new nifty authoring features, such as snap-to movement. Also some effort was put into getting it to run correctly (with all nice shader effects) on ATI cards (gret for me, I have an ATI card). And there are lots of speedups, especially in the terrain handling code.

Game developer links

I have created a hub with some links related to game development. I plan to continue adding links as soon as I find and check them. Also I will add another article about general programming links.

SDL 1.2.14

The final version is here. Now, all efforts will go to 1.3 branch, which is in beta state, well, sort of. So, it is time to start testing, because soon (dont know how soon) we will be dealing with a new branch.

OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2 samples

OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2 code samples are available to document the OpenGL API. These samples do not use any deprecated OpenGL code, and are aim at getting you started with the most recent API. As you know, version 3.1 of the standard changed drastically the API by deprecating all fixed pipeline and left us learning an almost different OpenGL.
This project is using SDL 1.3 beta, GLM 0.8.4.1 as a math library and a replacement for deprecated OpenGL fucntions and GLI 0.1.1.0 to load images.

SDL 1.2.14 prerelease

An SDL prerelease is available for testing. SDL 1.2.14 is going to be the last of the 1.2 branch, so developers insist that you test carefully this version before final release and report bugs. From now on, all efforts will be on 1.3. Get it here (zip) or here (tar.gz). You can also pull from svn:

svn co http://svn.libsdl.org/branches/SDL-1.2

Old news: Irrlicht 1.6

I copya and paste the most significant changes from the website:

• New mesh and image loaders (.PLY mesh loader, .RGB, .RGBA, .SGI, .INT, and .INTA textures)
• New Material properties ColorMask, Mipmap LOD, Depth test function, AlphaToCoverage, selective Anti-Aliasing
• New console device and possibility to create different devices from the same library
• OverrideMaterial for changing material properties globally
• New Filesystem with tighter integration of different archive types
• Improved Software rendering engine

A ton of papers

Feeling the need to read some complex stuff? The this is the place.