Big Progress Report (26-2-10)

We haven’t managed to update the devlog since December, which is sad. I’ll try to fill everyone in on what is happening.

JANUARY:

January has been a very unproductive month. Granted, I (the programmer) was able to get some work done, but not near enough as I could have.

What happened? One weekend early in January I decided that I needed a break for a day (which is entirely okay, everyone needs a day off here and there) and so I bought the game Borderlands after seeing much praise from players of the game online. Unfortunately, unlike regular games that I buy for the purpose of letting me relax for a day, this hooked me. Really, really hooked me.

When it was getting towards the end of  January, I could safely say that was out of my system.

Originally I had bought it off of steam with my visa gift card leftover from the holidays, however after I realized the computer version did not have the enticing splitscreen co-op play and that it did have strange lag issues with my anti-virus* that had nothing to do with my computer specs, I dropped by a local store and picked up a copy for the ps3 (the last one on the shelf!).

Later a friend of mine and I played co-op a while. But after all that, I felt good. By the end of January I felt like I normally did after that initial few-days rush of getting a new great game. Except that this one took nearly a month to get out of my system.

Borderlands is a fantastic game. Fantastic. I have not played a game that good for a very long time. The last I remember feeling this way about a new game was back when the PS2 was still pretty new and I had gotten a few new games for it that later became added to my collection of favorites.

That being said, normally when I get a game I will declare within my own head that it is awesome and it is a favorite of mine, only to find out after I had beaten the game or shortly afterward that it is not as much fun anymore and no longer qualifies for such a title. So generally a game will have an “incubation period” where I cannot make judgments about it yet because I am still in that initial thrill. I can only really know how influential a game was upon my gaming life until long after I had dropped play activity for it down to the normal point where I play it on a rare casual basis.

And still, nearly two months later, I stand by the statement that it is one of my favorite games of all time. The incubation period is over, my adrenaline has returned to normal, and I can think clearly. And I remain standing by what I had said.

Being a hobbyist game programmer and designer myself, I had to think to myself and investigate exactly what made the game that fun. Fun enough that you can play through it several times without the fact that you know everything that will happen, who will die, and how many enemies that next room has.

I know that if we are to be successful in making a game that has such high replay value it must have “constant appeal” – A game that someone can play when they are bored without it hardly ever getting old and repetitive enough to turn them down. To cram so much of this renewable, exiting replay value into a game is a challenging aspect for a designer and it is something Gearbox has done very well with Borderlands. Not perfectly, but very well.** To me personally, this game had such appeal for the following main reason (there were other reasons, but this is the one I want people to understand):

Procedural Generation – This is something that, if properly integrated into the game, can create a wealth of replay value for low-cost work on the part of developer. In other words, it’s an extremely efficient method of recycling gameplay by automatically tweaking it where you should. Borderlands has procedural weapon generation and enemy placement. That means that the game generates weapons based off of various parts. The engine names them with prefixes and suffixes that automatically effect the stats of the gun and assigns various elemental effects based on rarity, which is also randomized upon the chests you open.

Another game that was able to do this very very well is Dungeon Siege. Dungeon Siege has been an all-time favorite of mine, and procedural generation is one of the reasons it sits at that position. Dungeon Siege had procedurally generated weapons that added loads of replay value to the game. Many original gameplay plans for Bleare Kingdoms were inspired off of this system from Dungeon Siege.

How we’re incorporating this idea:

While we aren’t procedurally generating entirely new weapons ourselves (for instance, using parts to make all new weapons), we’re having the engine auto-assign weapon quality based on ones you find. So, for example, our content developer makes an axe called “Brutish Cleaver” – it’s just  a regular barbaric-looking axe, there isn’t anything magical about it. When you find one in loot, the engine will automatically make it “Cracked” or “Rusty” or “Dull” or “Shoddy”. It could also improve the function of the weapon with good prefixes such as “Perfect” or “Flawless” or “Sharp” or even ones that tweak specific stats such as “heavy” or “light”.

Aside from the weapon system, the main part of our game we thought procedural generation would be best in is the world map. Every game you start, every character you make, will have their own functional game universe generated for them, from the big continents down to the individual battlefields and villages. This is something I think that will help us shine the most.

*: On my PC I use BitDefender Antivirus. While I think it is the best AntiVirus solution I have used so far, occasionally it has conflicts with some programs, and borderlands was one of them. I would get ~20 FPS max and after 30 minutes of play it would drop down to ~15. Not very fun to deal with.

**: Anothing thing borderlands did very well that I had not mentioned is the level cap. The level cap is so high you can continue to enjoy the game for a long period of time (1.7 playthroughs, it seems). The only thing I do not like about their system is that there actually is a max level. An example of a game that took care of this barrier is another favorite of mine, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Oblivion did not have a max level and actually did what we are planning on doing for Bleare Kingdoms. We’re going to try and introduce a gentle exponential levelling curve that makes getting new levels harder and harder as you level up, but without an increase too steep to see yourself at a “max”. We still want a day of playing the game to be rewarding to your character, no matter what level you are at.

FEBRUARY:

February isn’t over yet, but if you look at the checklist you will notice that we got a bunch of stuff done!

There is nothing to show you yet because the game still looks the same, all of our improvements were with AI and the engine, non-visible stuff unless you were to see a video (and we will make one to introduce Build 2 hopefully). We’ve added tons of weapon flexibility now, so you can attack someone and have them take fire damage over time though several turns, steal health, make them convert teams, and more!

Before we release build 2 we just need to revamp the graphics, re-type the manual and code-documentation, redesign the credits display on the main menu, and add a second level.

The second level that you can choose to play in Build 2 takes place in a dungeon. You have a group of heroes with magical equipment, and you have to survive wave upon wave of randomly generated attack forces including various sorts of monsters and military units. All of this functionality is actually available through the mod system, so a regular mod creator could have made all that too!

As for the graphical revamp, I’ll make a new post about that next. :)

-SunnyKatt, Lead Programmer and Designer

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