I forgot to post this review at the time. Oops. Posting it now to get it out of my drafts bin.
You can play either Red Alert or Tiberian Dawn multiplayer in CnC Remastered and one of the most interesting parts is just how much better Red Alert’s multiplayer is. The most obvious difference is that the maps are much larger, so you’re not micro-managing your base layout to avoid running out of room or blocking your harvesters. The Harvester AI also benefits from more room to move around. Gems mixed in gold fields add an extra micro element for people who want to mine more efficiently. And boy are those harvesters dumb. One of Starcraft’s best innovations was the hack of just letting harvesters ignore collisions.
Silly harvesters aside, it’s shocking how well Red Alert holds up, especially to a group of players now seasoned by 8 Bit Armies, Red Alert 2, Grey Goo, and Starcraft II. It helps that with huge screen resolutions available now, you can have just absurd numbers of units on screen without lag. You can blanket the map in tanks. The grittyness of Westwood’s RTS is on full display; a good tank micro will turn a column of infantry into a large puddle. Infantry will go to ground when fired upon. Moving units appear to be able to dodge some shots. Tesla coils appear to have glorious procedural lightning. While you can probably win with math (like any RTS) it at least feels like there’s an element of micro and an element of chance in there. Luck combines well with Light tanks, as it happens.
The music though, what about the music? As someone who’s been listening to the CnC and RA tracks since the mid 00s I can say confidently that the music is absolutely amazing. The cover versions, the remastered versions, they’re both awesome. I have this vivid memory of sharing music back in ’10 or ’11 and showing someone Bigfoot. The bitcrushed quality didn’t bother me, but others couldn’t see past it. That problem is a thing of the past. I forsee blasting these versions for far longer than I will be playing the game. Klepacki has done it again.
My vow to stop making EV-likes has had mixed results. Here, I’ll discuss some of the more interesting aspects of a recent EV-Like, Galactic Night.
Perspective on perspectives
While I did make a serious run at doing a vehicle game in Godot, it was hard to get around just how excellent the affordances of what I’d already built were, and what was lacking in Godot 3. But it didn’t start there. It started with an observation:
First Let’s Play google gives you for “EV Nova.” I haven’t listened to the whole thing, so I can’t vouch for it. But it’s got footage of the game.
Ships in EV Nova (and MPEVMVP, for that matter) are sprites rendered from 3d models. They are rendered with perspective so that when the front of a ship faces the screen, it appears larger than the back. It’s subtle on some ships, obvious on others.
Perspective camera isn’t the norm for sprite games. Most games with pre-rendered sprites use an isometric camera; here’s Starcraft as an example:
First result for broodwar gameplay. The Terran Siege Tanks are the best example of isometry.
For games where the units are in a rich world with lots of points of reference, rendering them in perspective might look wonky. Too much perspective might look wonky under any circumstances! However, the decision to use perspective in the sparse world of Nova lends the ships a sense of scale.
2.5d games that use a full 3d world instead of sprites tend to either use a perspective or isometric camera. It’s easy to implement either in Godot (and other engines) by changing the camera’s mode. But I was curious: could I implement something with a vertex shader that would deform a mesh such that it appeared to have perspective, even while rendered in an isometric view? Perspective, I should note, not truly relative to the camera, but relative to an imaginary camera ‘rendering’ the imaginary ‘sprite’?
This is difficult to convey with words, so I built a demo:
What’s interesting about this, at least to me, is how difficult it is to notice what’s going on. Your brain seems to happily accept the very unnatural perspective. At least mine does. But if you look closely, you can see that no matter where the spaceship (and thus actual iso camera) move, the spinning cubes maintain their fixed perspective, just like sprites in an old school video game.
Flying around was fun, I wanted to do more stuff. It got out of hand. It’s a whole game now.
More Ship Shader Fun
Using a 3d pipeline offered the possibility of using some nice 3d features, exploiting the fact that the textures and effects were in-engine rather than an external pipeline. Nova has engine glows and weapon glows; I implemented those too.
Nova also has an (unused) feature where you can stain your ship a different color. I wanted to try something similar, but nicer:
You can check out the full ship shader here. Note that in GD4 you can split shaders into multiple files, so the important parts are the perspective transform here, and the color swap logic here.
Union Bytes Painter allows for multiple texture layers, so it’s easy-ish to make separate textures for lights, engines, weapons, paint, and a base. It’s a little clunky for exporting though – I need to show/hide layers and export a few times. Still miles better than the Blender workflow I used while working on Flythrough.Space.
Flat Space
I wanted to create a nice set of planets and nail the EV Nova look, so I followed tradition and picked up the venerable LunarCell, which was also used to render the planets for EV Nova. This creates (gorgeous) 2d planet sprites:
Only problem? Lunar Cell doesn’t create masks, just planets on a black background. Solution? This remarkably simple shader:
You’ll notice though that that’s a 2d shader, and the game is 3d. That’s the neat part – the background is a 2d canvas! We use this class to make sure the sprite in 2d space tracks the correct position in 2.5d space:
The background itself is basically the same shader I used in Survive Spacebut with additional special effects you can cue up to make hyperspace more exciting:
I wanted to visually represent folding space, and the looped background made for a unique opportunity to do it. The shader is of course just dropping specific images (Screaming Brain’s awesome Nebula backgrounds) on a couple of layers, but it would look better looped if I did something with Perlin noise.
Procedural Generation
Flythrough.Space used a handmade universe I originally drew on graph paper. While charming, that took a whole lot of work for very little gain at the end of the day. For MPEVMVP I used universe maps generated by Mag Steel Glass’s spreadsheet. Which is fine by all accounts, but I wanted the player to be able to generate new universes on the fly. That’s where I ran into my new best friend: Delauny Triangulation.
Ok, you need to look a bit closely, but in both cases, you’ve got a point cloud that is stitched up by non-overlapping lines. So to generate an EV map, because there’s a library function for that all you need to do is feed it a set of points and get your EV map’s hyperlanes!
That same strategy carried over to Galactic Night, with some modifications, namely the division of space into quadrants to provide a difficulty curve, and the separation of growing biomes from growing faction influence. In Valheim, the game I imitated most on Survive Space, all three are effectively the same; a biome is a difficulty level is a spawn location for various monsters. In Galactic Night, spawns can depend on biome (for asteroid types) faction (for where to spawn enemies or allies) and quadrant (more difficult NPCs.)
Codex
The codex window loads up a folder tree of bbcode (weirdly, Godot’s rich text boxes support this) files and displays them. Item fluff that would usually be embedded in the interface in an EV goes here, a much more conventional placement for a modern game. I never did get around to writing a system for unlocking entries.
Retrospective
I’m proud of the technology and writing that went into Galactic Night, and some of it will certainly be recycled for future projects. I’d be happy if people get any use out of the code or design concepts tested out. I’ll close out with some final thoughts on how the project went.
I think the perspective looked really good, but some people definitely found it jarring. In future projects, it should definitely be an optional feature.
Doing the textures in Union Bytes painter became a slog. Small UI issues compounded over the course of several objects, and it stopped being fun.
Upgrading from GD3 to GD4 mid project was a big hiccup, but ultimately worth it because the syntax of GDscript is far nicer.
Though the procedural universe was really fun to tweak and play with, I don’t think it provided enough stuff for an exploration focused game. Games like Minecraft and Valheim exploit the inherent human desire to play around in a virtual space, and an EV map doesn’t really provide that; in a game like this the contours of the explored world are unique spaceships you find, well written place descriptions, missions, graphics, and the like. I never found a way to work in that level of diversity. Also, I never found an effective way to hint to players that, for example, getting lostech will allow them to increase their tech level and make more options available. Sure, it’s there in the manual, but who’s gonna read that! The upshot was that it felt like a big empty map with nothing particularly interesting going on in it, and no motivation to strike out and try to do stuff. Oh well.
It’s no secret that I’ve been captivated by trying to make vehicle driving feel good for as long as I’ve been programming. Initially Hovertank 22 (formerly OWTD) used Kinematic movement as described here. But it wasn’t quite right. I have a strong memory of how much more fun World Of Tanks was after they introduced proper physics. I decided that if a third person perspective (as oppose to top down) was going to be used, I should probably use some sort of physics.
As you can see, though wonky, the Tilter is able to navigate the terrain. It’s using a single visible steering wheel in front and the tracks are represented by two invisible wheels in the back. This movement model is, of course, built for car driving games, so the trike configuration cuts into the stability badly. The requirements of “Eamonn’s Ideal Vehicle Game” and thus Hovertank 22, however, call for tanks. Unfortunately, this has major disagreements with the movement model.
The basic idea, I figured, for implementing tank movement has been to treat each track as a series of wheels. To turn right, you drive the wheels on the left side and brake or reverse the wheels on the right side. In a real tracked vehicle, this causes it to turn. In Godot’s model, however, wheel slip seems to be very all-or-nothing: the vehicle stays in motion nicely but as soon as you cut the wheel and one track slips, the whole vehicle starts to drift uncontrollably. While some amount of drifting was desired, this turns out to be unplayable. And, worse, messing with wheel slip values didn’t really help.
Editor screenshot showing how the Cobra’s wheels are configured
Another problem with this movement style was that when the vehicle was in motion, differential steering worked far more effectively than from a dead stop (I assume that this has something to do with how overcoming friction is coded.) In order to turn from a stop you need to overcome the friction of all of the wheels, so turning while stopped was impractically slow. I implemented a fix which increased power when you weren’t moving but it was unsatisfactory and resulted in a vehicle that jerked around suddenly and violently.
I suspect that customizing the 6dof version might be able to overcome these limitations, but I don’t have the bandwidth to try it. Similarly, it might be very possible to implement this sort of thing as a custom integrator and bunch of rays, but again, that was more of a lift than I had time for.
Faced with basically a negative result from this experiment, I’ve decided that I’m going to roll back (ha) from the VehicleBody approach. I may switch back to a top-down perspective, and also may try switching out heighmapped terrain for tile terrain.
So what did I learn from this little excursion? You really need to validate your assumptions about how something is going to behave before you stake a project on it. I’m glad I didn’t fully do that (I still have a path forward for Hovertank ’22), though pulling it out is definitely going to be a setback.
EV Nova was a formative game for me. One thing I noticed about it, and wanted to document, was that there are a lot of what I’ll call name collisions: names that are almost the same but refer to different things. Did I miss any? Leave a comment, I’ll add it.
Temmin Shard / Shard (faction)
LPAD station, where Temmin Shard takes you
Temmin Shard is a character in a side quest. However, “Shard” is also used to describe a faction formed when you win the Fed campaign and everyone else comes after you.
Krane / Kane (incl. Port Kane, Kania, and the Kane band)
Port Kane
Earth, with Kane band, but also a place where you might encounter Krane
Omata Kane invented galaxy-spanning hypergates and a bunch of things are named Kane in her honor, including earth’s artificial ring, the Kane Band. There’s also a Port Kane in the Kania system. Krane is the sociopath leader of the secret fed faction that you work for in some campaigns. Very different people.
Glimmer / Gli-Tech / Gli-Tech-Nia
Home of the GLi-Tech corporation (formerly known as GLiMMER until the discovery of the Glimmer system)…
Both are companies that make missiles. Huh? Gli Tech also owns an entire planet, called Gli-Tech-Nia. But wait, Glimmer is also the name of a star system. Surely this piece of fluff for Gli-Tech-Nia clears it up:
Associated Guild Of Free Traders / Free Traders
Pirate carrier used by both
Two opposing pirate factions that fly the same ships. One is hostile by default, the other isn’t. No idea which one though; and feds don’t care which one you blow up either. According to Word Of Atmos this is intentional.
Polaris / Polaron Cannon / Polaron Torpedo
Polaris are one of the game’s major factions. Polaron refers to a Federation weapon. But the weapon is pink… the color of Polaris technology. And the Polaris have a Polaron Torpedo which is pink but apparently unrelated. Maybe Polaron refers to some specific scifi gubbin, but then that’s still colliding with the Polaris.
Vella / Vell-os
Vell-os are a race of psychic transhumans and mostly extinct, Vella are a neighboring Arouran subfaction.
Wraiths / Wraith Cannon / Wrathii
A wraith
Wrathii fired from a Wraith cannon (no relation)
Wraiths are a race of sentient space-monsters, Wrathii are pink projectiles that the Polaris fire out of a Wraith Cannon. Also the Wraiths are right next to the Polaris.
TOWCB / TCTLIDS
The Ones Who Came Before are your standard ancient race of aliens trope, TCTLIDS are The Creature That Lives In Deep Space harvested for drugs, an abandoned plot hook that somehow remained in the timeline preamble.
Hovertank is an honest attempt to bet big open 3d environments with AI agents running around working in Godot, using HTerrain and Godot Detour. I hope this is helpful for anyone who wants to make something similar in the future.
Create a new inherited scene from the “world” scene.
Add an HTerrain element to your level. Make sure it’s collision layers are 1 and 8.
Create a data directory in the levels folder
Apply a tileset to your HTerrain by dragging tileset.tres into the texture set slot, or making a new one from scratch.
Edit the terrain to your heart’s content using the generator and the tools.
Bake navmesh
You’ll need to repeat the next steps each time you edit the terrain mesh
From the “Terrain” menu up top, select “Generate mesh (heavy)” and select an LOD of 4. At least that’s what I’ve been using.
It will create a node called “HTerrain_fullmesh.” This is the node that the pathfinding library uses to actually determine where AIs can go. Hide this mesh; if you need to see the navmesh turn on “visible collision shapes” and you’ll see it (and it may lag real bad!)
Note that the flattened areas have nice clean navigation, but the more sloped areas don’t. You can use the flatten tool to cut paths across the map. Make sure you enable “pick” on it, it’s much nicer that way.
Place Entities
The prefabs folder has enemies with preconfigured weapons you can just drop right into the scene. You’ll want to drag them a bit closer to the ground though.
You can also place buildings this way. Careful not to accidentally parent stuff to random entities you’ve already placed – entities in Hovertank expect to be parented to the world.
You can set up objectives by adding the “ObjectiveMarker” component to an entity.
When all of the entities with objective markers are destroyed, the player has won the level. You can add the objective marker to any enemy or building.
The incursion spawner will spawn the entity you provide in “spawn” whenever there’s an incursion with the selected severity. Put one of the monsters in there by dragging its tscn file in to the spawn field (only monster at time of writing is our friend Kochab) (Incursions were removed, but you can see how it worked in older commits — Ed)
Add your level to the list
Add an entry to the big literal with all of the levels pointing to your level’s TSCN file, give it a name and a description, and it should show up in the dropdown in the main menu.
Godot’s High Level Networking tutorial (and book chapter) do a great job of explaining a peer-to-peer networking setup. However, many games want to be server-authoritative, and to set up a multi-area game, you sort of need to. Luckily, you can use the same primitives to build a server/client game. This is just sort of a brain dump of my notes that may be helpful in navigating the MPEVMVP source. Feel free to post any questions you have about it; I love to talk about this stuff.
The technical requirements that deviate from the basic tutorial they hand out are as follows:
Server-authoritative client/server game
Multiple levels that players can switch between
Players are able to join a match in progress
In case you haven’t tried it, the project is here: https://github.com/eamonnmr/mpevmvp. The gameplay is similar to Asteroids (and, well, similar to Flythrough.Space): it uses RigidBodies to simulate movement, you can shoot other players to force them to respawn, and you can press “J” to initiate a hyperjump after you’ve pressed “m” to select a star system from the map.
Godot’s Networking Golden Rule
A remote call (rpc, rset) is going to be called on the remote node with the same node path. That includes name of the node, the name of the parent, etc, all the way to the root node. You can set a child node’s name with set_name but if a similarly named child already exists, an @number will be added to your node. This is a major source of bugs for networked projects, so be careful. You cannot set a node to a name with @ in it. So in effect, you cannot use Godot’s auto-incremented names (since they append @increment) to sync between the client and the server. For this reason, I used a uuid library for generating node names.
The need for the same structure on client and server despite the fact that the server held a whole universe while the client only cared about one system is a major source of complexity in the codebase.
Server Authoritative
I implemented the Client and Server as singletons that exist on both sides. The reason for this is that it makes it really readable; when the client needs to send something to the server you write Server.rpc and when the server needs to send something to the client, you use Client.rpc. Besides this line of communication, I’ve used rpc and rset within various nodes to update and alter the client versions of themselves. This always happens inside an is_network_master block, to ensure that it’s being called on the server version of the game.
The one thing we do need to gather from clients is input, and for that each client has a PlayerInput node, network_master’d to them. They rset_id input up to the server. The server copy of the player nodes looks at this remote copy of the player_input to determine it’s behavior, then pushes its state back down to all clients.
Multi Level
Suppose you want to have multiple different levels/worlds/rooms in your game. The trick is that you need to mesh the following two constraints:
Node paths need to be the same between client and server (see discussion above)
The server needs to have different node paths for each level
The trick, then, is to send the client to the new level by loading the appropriate level and making sure it’s named appropriately. There’s one wrinkle though: different 2d physics worlds need to use a Viewport class, but you don’t want to add additional viewports on the client for performance reasons (tried it, it was way too slow.) My solution was to add an extra layer of nodes called “universes” in the comments which are a Node2d on the client but a Viewport in the server. They are managed on the server by ServerMultiverse and on the client by ClientUniverse. Client Universe cares about a single “universe” child whereas ServerMultiverse handles multiple children.
Sending Entities/Switching Levels
In order to join a match in progress or switch to a level that already has stuff in it (or, indeed, switch a player into a level) we need a robust way for the server to move fully-formed nodes to the client. Godot does not provide a generic “send this node” method, so we need to write one for ourselves. The approach I took was:
Assume that the ent will be instanced from the same scene that the ent on the server is
Write a “serialize” and “deserialize” method that allows it to dump a dictionary with all of its important state and recreate itself from that dictionary.
Make sure the node on the client side is assigned the same name as the one on the server side.
So when a client’s level is switched, they dump the current level and recreate the new one by loading in the scene and then, node by node, deserializing the state sent from the server. As it turns out, this means that any state can be synced freely, and it enables us to dispense with the lobby entirely and let players join and leave at will.
Sync In Multiple Levels
Each level owns the process of syncing its state to clients in that level. Scenes within the level can declare a method that serializes their state for a net frame, and the level gathers all of those up and sends them. The client receives the frames from the server, and the individual scenes use the content of those frames to interpolate their position. To save bandwidth, I only do this for ships and guided projectiles, everything else moves deterministically. This whole process is derived from the teaching of (and better described by) this video.
Player Lifecycle
Because we’re using the player’s presence in a level to determine if we should update entities in that level for that player, when a player’s avatar is destroyed the world seems to stop for that player until they respawn. This might be desirable in some games, but I think most games at least want to show the player the immediate seconds after their own demise. So what we do is replace the player with a ghost.
Tooling & Workflow
GDScript is based on Python 3 and the most basic syntax resembles it. ‘func’ in place of ‘def’, no ‘self’ and no list or dict comprehensions or other advanced features. It feels like the python of basic python tutorials. However in exchange for this, you get one thing python 3 does not offer: true static typing. In Python 3 you can offer a type hint for a function argument but it is not truly enforced. GDscript enforces the types at compile time and boy does it ever catch a lot of bugs. You also get the ability to define classes with typed members, similar to what you get in Python with Pydantic. Overall I like gdscript and the things I miss aren’t dealbreakers.
The lack of a vi mode for the editor hurts. I know I could just use the godot plugin for vi, but I actually really like staying inside Godot’s editor. Despite the slightly crowded layout, it’s really very nice. The autocomplete to node paths is a killer feature that makes dealing with complicated trees less of a pain.
Conclusion
Building a multiplayer game in Godot is possible but by no means easy. The high level multiplayer API despite its gotchas works well, but you need to implement the sync logic yourself. This shouldn’t be too surprising as games have very different needs when it comes to net code. I hear that a similar mechanism for frame based sync and lerping is going to be more built-in in godot 4, which would be sweet. The puppet system (which I initially used; you can see a version in the tutorial) seems to be useful only for very low latency situations, so I regret that it’s a first-class feature because it may lead people down a rabbit hole of net code that will not work for most games.
EVMVMVP is the awkward initialism for my latest project; a multiplayer EV-like. You can download it here, and look at the source code here. I know I said I shouldn’t do it, but I really wanted to learn Godot and having a multiplayer server with multiple levels seemed like a really interesting problem to tackle. Implementing a bunch of stuff I already know pretty well but in a new engine and language has been a fun ride. I’ve jotted some notes down about the project so far. I’ve saved a deep technical discussion of Godot for another post.
Using an engine is well worth it
After flythrough.space I decided that I wasn’t going to build too much from scratch next time, not was I going to fight against tooling. The options I considered for FTS where Panda3D and BabylonJS. However over the course of that project also tried out Unity and Godot for small side demos and ended up liking Godot (and it’s permissive license and thriving community) enough to go all-in. In retrospect this was the absolute right move and I regret nothing.
Working With Onyx’s Sprites
I’ve been staring at these sprites on and off for something like fifteen years, itching to put them into a game. The original models used to render them are long gone, but Onyx (in a tutorial) explained how to separate out the engine glows. Working with these sprites feels like stepping out of time. They’re from the 90s. There are dithering tricks here I wouldn’t even imagine. They use a tiny palette but they’re so damn weighty. Present. Metallic when they need to be, plastic when they want to be. They tend towards the Star Wars / Used Future look. They invite stories to be written about them. And the planets are just absolutely lush too. Something about that limited palette…
Testing with real people is essential
I’ve been nagging more people to play this one. On the one hand, it’s much easier to convince someone to play your game if you can play it with them. On the other hand, you really need to do that testing or you will (like I did) find out that the sync method you’re using is totally busted and you need to replace it with interpolation. Furthermore, you’ve got no idea if your game is fun to anyone but yourself unless you subject it to ruthless testing by people who will give honest feedback. It becomes very easy to get settled in and work around horrible UI issues you’ve coded because “well, I know how it works.”
The ability to test solo is essential
Wrangling people for a test is hard. You need to be able to fire up an instance of your server and client with minimal effort or you’re going to wait too long and leave a bunch of bugs that you’ll be scrambling to fix when you finally get people around to test with. And absolutely nothing is more frustrating than the stars aligning for a test only to have a showstopper rear its head at the worst possible moment.
Procedural Generation
I had a conversation with a coworker about EV games and roguelikes. They made a claim that I’m not sure is true but definitely opened my eyes-they thought that the star maps in EV games probably had been procedurally generated-once.
Actually hand-crafting a full EV map is a bit of a process. One thing I never finished doing in FTS was populating all of the systems.
Meanwhile, Mag Steel glass has developed a really cool universe generator spreadsheet. I figured I could leverage it to make a map. Traditional EV games require you to specify exactly who spawns in what star system and FTS carried on that painful tradition. For this one I had simpler rules; factions had starting locations and then grew “influence” where planets (or stations) would belong to them and their ships would spawn. If two areas of influence overlapped, they’d fight.
Document enough for people to get up and running locally
Port forwarding is a lost art. There was much grumbling when my friends and I went to go start a game of Valheim; luckily I’d learned to properly port forward as part of this project! If you need a server for people to play your game, you can’t rely on your master server; you’ve got to give people an option to join localhost and put it in your manual/readme. Having images in the readme also helps show people what your project is about; this is especially important for games.
You don’t get cross platform for free
Using cross platform technology does not absolve you from cross platform testing. All of your target platforms might have the same features but they may all have different bugs for you to work around. I’m developing on linux out of what is probably just bloody mindedness at this point, so when I did my live demos on windows I often learned exciting new things like ‘your sound exports are busted’ or ‘only one computer can be assigned to a given port by a given router’ or ‘you need to version bump the editor for correct mac exports.’ Guess which one of those lead to an incredibly embarrassing platform bug report!
Video Tutorials are worth it
Part of my commitment to overcoming my stubborn hangups was relenting and watching video tutorials. I still strongly prefer written tutorials as a medium but the content is moving to video. For example:
This (and the followup on extrapolation) gave me enough to totally re implement my networked movement.
Working In Public
I post progress updates on discord channels full of fans from the old days, and regularly demo the game with friends. This has been a source of motivation and helped me stick to a more iteration focused (and less “well, I’ll go off for a month and make all of the models/textures/features”) work habit. I’m not sure I’m going to do this for every project; part of why I did it for this one was I wanted to spur participation and that didn’t really happen. Very few people who I didn’t know personally went to the trouble of getting the game running. Part of that is because it wasn’t immediately approachable (you need to host or find a server then run another client to join it) and wasn’t immediately grippy (ok, I can buy a ship, now what?) Any amount of friction is going to turn away potential players, and if you’re used to playing rough unfinished demos this can become a blind spot. But beyond even that, getting someone to try something new is just plain hard.
People respond to Video
At the end of the day, pictures and text don’t cut it for sharing a game. Games are animation. People are used to watching streamers. You need a video of your thing and it needs to show off what the thing is about, including how you interact with it and why it’s compelling. This was my attempt:
Have features and fixes gone in since that video was made? Sure. But it’s still the best tool to show off what the project is about.
Parting Shots
Has the project met its goals so far?
Learn the Godot engine: ✔️
I’m comfortable with the technology now; expect future prototypes to be more rapid.
Use Onyx’s Sprites in a game: ✔️
I used most of the ship sprites themselves and lovingly separated out the engine glows for even the ones I didn’t use, in case someone in the future wants to use them again. Cosmic Frontier mod anyone?
Build a reusable platform for multiplayer EV-clones: ✔️
Maybe this is a partial check. If someone has an idea and that idea is based on multiplayer EV gameplay, I’m confident that if they’re willing to learn Godot they could at the very least copypasta big chunks of the MPEVMVP codebase and get something running. Or they could fork it, replace everything, add missions, remove multiplayer, and make an EV clone real fast.
Discover if EV gameplay works in multiplayer: ✔️
Learned important lessons about how much bullet hell spam a networked game can handle, and as a straight dogfighting sim it let me figure out what is and isn’t fun in PVP EV.
Build a game people want/like/play: ❌
As far as I can tell, nobody enjoyed playing this besides on demo night. The service I think people want this game to be is beyond the scope of what it can be with a team this size.
4/5 ain’t bad. Thanks a bunch to everyone who tested it, gave feedback, and flew too far to find the center of the map again.
The Emularity and Ruffle teams have finally done it – Flash is running natively in the browser. No more flash plugin. You can play flash games and watch flash animations on archive.org. Flash defined internet content in the mid 00s. It has been effectively dead since the introduction of the iPhone, and to really enjoy it you need something with a mouse, or a very large tablet I suppose. Actually playing flash has gotten progressively harder, until now.
During the aughts, these where some of the games I played the most. Call it casual if you want, but these where the games you could play on school computers, that you didn’t need to buy. You could discover new ones every day. By timing alone, at least, they’ve ended up meaningful to me.
This is a great example of how the mouse was used for what you might call a sidescroller/shooter. Rather than negotiate a level with pitfalls, the task of your Mario-like character is to dodge incoming bullets, sort of like a bullet hell shooter. It’s also got an array of different creative weapons, each accompanied by a cool robotic voice announcing it when you pick it up. It never leaves this basic loop, spawning helis as fast as you can kill them. Once you get good at it, you can keep playing it for quite a long time. You can play it here.
The game shows off its non-flat terrain very early
https://archive.org/details/fancypantsadventure_202011 This game made a huge splash when it was released. The norm for sidescrollers since eras where denoted by the number of bits systems has was for side scrollers to be very similar to Mario and have the following characteristics:
Maps made out of a tile grid
Maps defined by axis-aligned bounding boxes
Movement defined by walking and jumping.
Fancy Pants adventure subverts these expectations while still sticking to the intuitive sensibilities of a platformer:
The levels are defined by smooth shapes much larger than what you’d expect in a tile map.
The maps use curved surfaces rather than straight lines or uniform curve sections.
In addition to walking and jumping, you can build up momentum and slide
But oh man, the style. This game dripped style. The lush animation, everything about it. I don’t think I ever made it past the first level. I didn’t care. When this came out it felt like it injected new life into the platformer formula. I think Flash’s vector nature really played a role here – it could do things you just couldn’t do on an NES. You can play it here.
The flash era was defined by a callous disregard for the lives of stick figures
This is a game that really only works with a mouse, and also illustrates the obsession with violence against stick figures. The figures attempt to knock down your castle and your defense against them is to click and drag them violently into the air so that they splatter down on the ground into a puddle of blood. Eventually you get enough points and abilities to take stick figures into your castle and turn the game a little bit more into a tower defense setup. You might be able to get this working on a very large tablet, but really the interaction is tailored for the mouse. The graphics are basic and make heavy use of gradients and stick figures – both flash tropes. Yet here I am in 2020, actually getting sucked into it. It’s a very well crafted dopamine loop. Launching the little bastards with your mouse is satisfying, mastering doing it quickly before they get to your gates is rewarding, and the relief of having your job automated by a bunch of archers is even more rewarding. You can play it here.
As a big fan of the Escape Velocity series, Broken Mirror kept me playing for many hours. It’s a space trader game set in the star trek universe. Well, the Trek’s mirror universe-the one where everyone is the baddies. It’s the rare fan game but it fills the exact kind of niche that you’d love to see for that setting. It’s also absolutely dripping with humor, especially inside fandom jokes. As a fan work it is monumental. I’d daresay that until Star Trek Online was a thing, it was the definitive star trek video game experience. The open world of the space trader genera fits perfectly with the open feel of Star Trek. And really, having a big open world RPG on a platform that was mostly used for single-screen arcade games is quite an accomplishment. It plays at breakneck speed on modern systems, but you can play it here.
I’ve seen this way too often. A flashy trailer, some assets, a community project, a feverish dream at reclaiming the glory of games when they seemed new to you. I have made this tragic mistake, but you don’t have to. No matter how much you want to, do not pick up a 20+ year old video game and start trying to make a remake (in Unity! In Unreal! In Godot!) I’m not saying that you will fail, but I’m saying that you probably won’t get what you want.
You won’t get the IP
In order to use the name “Your Favorite Game” you will need to purchase it from the existing owners. If nobody is producing sequels it’s probably because the IP holder has chosen not to. You will not be able to contact the IP holder and if you manage to, they will not sell it to you. If they do offer to sell it, it will be at a price way outside of your price range. If you wanted to purchase it at that price, you’d need to take out a loan, you’d need a business plan, and the project would very quickly not be fun anymore. You could also just sort of not quite use it and hope that the IP holder does not decide to shut you down. But getting the name is extremely important, because the path is littered with other semi-remakes that didn’t use the name, and you didn’t like any of them. Somehow, none of them had “it” because you’re still looking at remaking the old one, not playing someone else’s remake. Will you fare better?
The myth of fans
But I have a ready-made audience! You cry. Except you don’t. Videogames are massively more popular now than they were when Your Favorite came out. The audience for games has increased in size but the number of fans of Your Favorite has remained constant. It might be because genres have moved on. It might be because other franchises took up the banner. But the number of people who potentially enjoy The Remake is actually much smaller than the original fanbase was. Some people will have drifted away and don’t care anymore, some have probably moved on from gaming. Some may never have existed, because you don’t know what the sales figures are for Your Favorite and it was released before social media and steam statistics so you can’t really be sure what the size of your audience is. What about the number of active posters on the discord/reddit/forum where people desperately wish someone would finally come out with The Remake? That seems like a reasonable proxy. Go find this number (I bet it’s less than 100, but you may have better luck.) This is likely to be the maximum number of people who will care about The Remake. If you still want to embark knowing that you’re working for that audience exclusively, read on.
The myth of memory
So your intended audience is the people who are still online right now clamoring for The Remake as they have been since Your Favorite didn’t get the sequel it so richly deserved. But these will also be your harshest critics. Like you, each individual who played Your Favorite had an idea of what the game was, but they’ve each had twenty plus years to elaborate on that idea, and these imagined games have diverged. There will be a multitude of conflicting expectations which will mean that you cannot possibly satisfy them all, or even most of them. Indeed, because they (and you) have had years to embellish this imagined sequel and for their expectations to diverge, it’s possible that no game will satisfy them-no game will ever live up to what they want. The Remake may not have a ready-made audience, but it does have its first and harshest critics. But surely new technology will allow you to wow them, right?
The myth of progress
Making games is so much easier now! Surely if I take modern tools such as Unity, Unreal, Godot, Source, Lumberyard, etc, I will be able to rebuild this old obsolete game with minimal fuss. This may be true for arcade games like Space Invaders or Asteroids, but Your Favorite is only about 20 years old, so this is a misguided attitude. The tools of game creation are very good at making modern games. If you are building a sophisticated but off-the-beaten-path project, you are as much on your own as the original creators of Your Favorite where. Which is not to say that you can’t create original titles with modern tools-just that by constraining yourself to an archaic design, you may not be winning yourself any saved effort. You’re not a wizard from the future, coming back to build a castle with magic spells… you’re pounding in nails with a cordless drill. Modern game engines have primitives for things like “guy walking around” and “wheeled vehicle.” Trying to mimic the behavior of weird bespoke setups from the time before physics engines will result in very little off-the-shelf stuff to use. Same goes for a million other quirky modes of interaction with games that have ultimately been replaced with stuff like “reasonable defaults” and “realistic physics.” You’ll be reinventing the wheel constantly. You might be able to make it look nice, but many (most?) such projects stop there.
The Right Move
What should I do? If you really want to share the joy that Your Favorite brought you, you need to figure out what it is about the game that you found enjoyable. Consider the cargo cult; to recapture the bounty of cargo drops, people (so the story goes) built elaborate fake airstrips, thinking that if they created the right conditions, cargo would appear. I see the same in remakes – “if we take the art assets (or clone them, or redo them but off-brand-enough that we don’t get sued” and keep the gameplay exactly the same, it’ll be awesome!” Don’t do this. What you need to do is break down the design of Your Favorite, and figure out what it was that made the game compelling. “Everything” is not an acceptable answer, you need to be critical. You need to think about what you can reproduce in $CURRENT YEAR and what’s an artifact of its time, like compromises due to affordances of the platform, or time constraints. You must translate those compelling aspects into your future projects, and discard the anachronisms and sacred cows and genre conventions that belong to the past. Make your own game.
On the eve of the Covid-19 Pandemic, with the stock market tumbling, hundreds (thousands?) of game fans breezed into a convention center to try some new stuff, purchase apparel, and frequently use hand sanitizer. It was everywhere.
There’s something sinister about the rise of Discord, but I can’t explain why yet
Thursday was far better than Saturday, so definitely go then if you can. I was able to play far more games, and the boardgame tables where much easier to navigate.
Exciting New Games
While speaking to the creator of BlazeSky, I name-checked Escape Velocity and he knew what I was talking about. But the more I look at it, the more it looks like Empty Epsilon/Artemis. The different styles of play (rescuing people, combat, exploration, etc) are represented by different characters who give you quests, which is a neat approach to writing storylines. I found the banking camera made it difficult to reason about where my shots where going, and I hope that at launch there’s an option to keep the camera steady while the ship turns, but even if there isn’t I’ll probably play the hell out of it.
Another game that was physically demanding just due to its camera was Sludge Life. After you fight through its extremely elaborate recreation of a 90s desktop interface you’re dropped in a colorful, heavily distorted 3d environment. Very Getter: Headsplitter. The distortion (I think the vertical FOV was unusually high or low or whatever) was jarring and slightly dizzying. I predict that this game will be a stoner-hit of Rez proportions. Devolver is playing in the same space as Adult Swim here.
Watched some people play Dunk Lords. The world is ready for strawberry-headed athletes. You could dismiss it as Space Jam: The Videogame but stripped of its bizzare branding, the concept of cartoony basketball feels pretty novel. Sports games that attempt to simulate a sport (like EA’s catalog) or Be a sport (like Rocket League) aren’t my jam, but using the basic rules of a sport to do something unique or new definitely is.
Watched some Panzer Paladin play. There was an enormous reproduction of the cover art, standing out against the crowd. Makes me wonder what the differentiator is. It looks like a Gameboy Advance game (specifically, it looked like Metroid) to me, and though the mechanics where cool and smooth, I wonder who’s buying enough copies of this to justify an enormous booth at PAX. What’s the differentiator. Are they just striking at the right moment? Is it the great Anime art? Am I not enough of a sidescroller fan to understand what the difference between it and AVGN Adventure (which we also demo’d) is.
A radically different sidescroller with very clear differentiation was Carrion, a game where the avatar resembles the blob monster from The Thing. I’m not sure what the gameplay is besides sliding and swinging around an industrial environment and eating (?) the little NPCs that run from you.
If you’re itching to play Star Citizen but don’t like social interaction or having to hire an entire clan to operate your large spaceship or pass flight training to join an org, and also want a game that’s finished, I unfortunately can’t recommend Everspace II yet, because it isn’t finished either. But what I did play compared favorably to Star Citizen, and I venture to say that it’ll be done far sooner. The vision of space was colorful and dense with things to explore and tractor beam into your ship.
I also got a chance to demo Brigador Killers. In addition to the stompy robots seen in Brigador, you get to play as an infantry suit or a giant floating wrecking ball. The controls are also slightly different – rather than absolute direction, your WASD controls are now relative to the mouse. It took some getting used to, especially with the wrecking ball.
Parting Thoughts
Check out the screen attached to this expensive of a gaming PC. I’m not sure words will do it justice, but if you’ve been here, you know.
The dreaded launcher update.
I also demo’d a Cookie Clicker clone which I won’t name to protect the guilty. It pitched itself as being about the development of life from molecules to technological singularity. However, in reality it is a cookie clicker clone, the meta of a game (buy stuff on a tech tree to augment your abilities) without the actual gameplay (you score by just tapping the screen. Anywhere on the screen. I wondered again what the filter was between successful games and trivial games. Was presence at PAX a marker of success or a desperate gambit? I told myself I was done with the game, but then I reached down to the tablet and tapped it a few more times.
Unrelated image of a book that was on sale at the convention
