State of the Game - Episode 2

The current goal is to stitch together the various prototypes into a playable alpha.

This video shows off the new terrain as well as logging, mining, and basic farming. These are the basic economic loops allowing players to generate revenue. NPC behaviors are slowly being built up using Behavior Designer. 

Next up is getting the constrution of buildings up and running as well as the start of basic dialogue with the NPCs. Stay tuned for more.

Want to have input on the development? 

Come join the discord server. It's the best way to make your ideas heard!

The Bump From A "Viral" Post

Getting the word out about a game is tough. Really tough. Try as you might the world is a full of games with "great ideas." The social reach needed for a successful game launch is a huge hurdle for small teams and maybe more so for hobby or solo developers like myself.

Over the last week or so I've posted and shared a GIF and a video of a low poly waterfall. I created the scene to test particle effects for use in my second game. I spent a little extra time making it look nice as I wanted it to be a real prototype - could I actually make a half decent water fall?

Based on the response, the answer is yes, yes I can make a half decent water fall.

The Numbers

I first posted the waterfall on twitter. As of writing this the tweet has been re-tweeted 18 times and been liked 42 times. This seemly earned me 10-20 new followers and maybe a few more over the next several days as the tweet continued to get some attention. Not bad but not viral.

A post on the low poly reddits earned over 500 up votes. One or two people asked questions and I was able to share more info about the game. My website (this site) also saw a bump of about an extra 100 views. Not bad, but still not viral.

Then 10 days or so later I posted on Imgur, a site I mostly use to share images with online friends. I posted the GIF and saw 60-70 up votes before heading to bed. Nothing too exciting. When I woke up the image had over 1000 votes and was featured somewhere on the front page. Imgur classified it as a "most viral" image - at least for a few minutes. 

As I type this post the image has almost 1200 up votes and 290,000 views! Wow. 

So what?

Those votes and views trigger a dopamine rush, but what did they really do for me? How did they move my game forward?

I'll be honest I wasn't prepared. My game's landing page is pretty basic. I was updating a few bits as all the views and up votes were rolling in. I didn't link the game right away, and probably only the last third of the views had access to more info about my game.

Oops. Maybe a big oops!

So the best that I can tell here's my gains from the imgur post:

• Twitter followers - nothing significant.
• YouTube - 7 or 8 followers
• Newsletter - 28 at last count
• Discord - 8 or 9 
• Website - 480 visits and 700 page views

These numbers are small... The Newsletter and Discord were the most exciting as both were essentially at zero before. I had "launched" the Discord server just a few days earlier with zero publicity and the newsletter gets almost no push from me.

While this activity felt good it's not the 1k, 10k or 100k people that I might need to launch a game "successfully," whatever that might mean. 

My Take Aways

I'm writing this post as much to share my experience as to organize my thoughts and what I learned in the process. For me this was a break through in the PR department, even if it's small. It helped me understand and get a feel for what success could look like. 

The value of a good image is worth so much. Sharing works in progress have their place, but maybe not with the general public. People say share and share often and don't wait until the game is finished to share your work. I think this is largely true, but I also think there is something to be said for taking a little extra time to polish what you are going to share. Just because you're excited doesn't mean that very many other people will be too.

Where's the balance? I'm not sure, but I have a better feel for it now after this experience.

Motion adds so much. I've read this over and over, but I'm not sure I really understood. I also shared an image of my river at the same time as the waterfall. The river has motion but it's much more subtle - it got almost no response! At this point I question sharing much of anything unless there is some form of motion. All of our social feeds are full of static images - some are amazing, but the images that have motion are so much more engaging.

Somehow I need to reproduce this "viral" post over and over! It's scary to think what it would take to get to the social reach needed for a "successful" game....

NPC Job System

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I needed a picture at the BEGINNING... At least it's a place of work?

My day job is at full speed with my weekends being controlled by bike races (head coach) so development is coming in spurts. It's disappointing to watch the slow crawl of progress, but at least the bike team is placing first in the conference! 

Ok, that's not why you came here... But while your distracted, if you didn't notice I've added a discord channel. It's quiet atm but feel free to stop by if you have questions or comments.

The big focus for the past month or two has been the job system. It is designed to the allow the player to hire NPCs to do basic jobs. These jobs are created from tasks which contain specific actions. These jobs are then "posted" and the NPC uses a simple  value system to determine what job they want to accept. The goal is that these jobs are superimposed on top of the NPC's other needs or desires and that jobs provide money for the NPC to provide for itself. The jobs also intended to speed up the progress of the player - rather spend time to chop wood they can pay an NPC to do it allowing the player to become more efficient and do more. 

The job system has developed in three major chunks. Code backbone. User interface. Creation of actions. 

Code Backbone

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The base Actions class

The job system needed a generic framework that could be expanded and extended upon. To do this I broke the design into three main classes; jobs, tasks and actions. 

The job class is the boss of the whole deal. It controls the flow of tasks that the NPC will do and is also the communication link between the rest of the game and the job as a whole.

Task scripts are pretty similar to jobs in that they control the flow of what actions the NPC will do. Having a second container with no real effect made sense in that a task can fail and if the job contains more than one task the NPC would still be able to accomplish something... There is also the option (not fully implemented) that each task can have a time limit. The thought is that a NPC shouldn't spend 3 days looking for kindling if they could also be mining for coal. I'm not 100% sold on the need for tasks, but will likely leave them in for now. 

Actions are where, well, all the action happens. Actions are pretty specific and an individual job or task will likely have several actions. New actions can be added fairly easily due to the base class that is easily extended. Actions will include searching for items, dropping them off for processing or selling them to a vendor and whatever else seems useful.

The three classes largely communicate and interact by checking the status of their "subordinate." That is the job checks and reacts to the status of each task contained in the job and each task checks and reacts to the status of each action contained in the task. When all the actions in a task are complete the task is complete. When all tasks in a job are complete the job is complete and checks to see if it should repeat. Jobs can be done once, daily, continuously or a set number of times. For simplicity the status of jobs, tasks and actions all use the same enum - not started, running, complete, failed or paused. 

User Interface

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The ugly current state of the Job Menu

There's a lot going on in the creation and the assignment of a job to an NPC. So the UI is probably the most complex I've made so far in my short dev career. Can I really call it that? I hesitate to even show it as it's so damn ugly, but it's easier to post a picture than describe it all. 

Essentially the left panel is where the job is constructed while the right panel contains posted jobs, saved jobs and inventory items that plug into actions. Not the most refined, but it's working (mostly). 

The job menu has already been through several iterations. With many more to come. I'm trying to hold off on the fancier bits until the full design is complete or at least closer to complete. Each new action makes me rethink the design of the UI or at least the action interface. Once the set of actions are more complete the design of the UI should come together.

Creation of Actions

The first action created was a rather useless one in that it was a random wander. Not something you'd likely want to pay some one to do, but served as a good testing grounds for the system as a whole. 

I would like to keep the number of actions fairly small, but still allow a wide range of jobs for the NPC to complete. Hunting for the system that allows emergent behavior! Currently actions are focused on the collection and delivery of resources. I hacked Inventory Pro to use the item database for the job actions. This greatly simplifies what I have to create and also helps keep a common interface and database.

At the moment I have one UI prefab for all actions and I am simply toggling on/off the needed parts. I'm not sure this is the best solution, but seems to be working fairly well. The toggling is controlled by a series of booleans in the actions themselves - the info in this communicated when the action UI element is created. 

So far the available options are an item, location, range from location, and a number of times to repeat the action. These options are holding up well with the exception of needing to show or indicate the location. At the moment the location is a vector3 which is pretty useless to the player... 

The Results?

The results of this work is a functional prototype of a job system. It's not complete, it's not ready to be added, but it was a proof of concept. The job system is likely to be left out of the first alpha build, but should make it's way in once the first couple rounds of bug fixing and balancing.

What's Next?

The job system was the last major piece of coding that needed to be completed in the prototype phase. So now the working goal is a fully playable alpha build. 

This leaves me focused on the visuals. In particular I begun the process of modeling buildings and working to refine my terrain creation process. I want to include rivers and waterfalls both as eye candy buy also as potential energy sources (hyrdo), but getting a low poly waterfall to look decent is tricky... but more on that in my next post.

I'll leave you with a WIP render of some market stalls.

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A WIP render of market stalls - yes I know the lighting isn't awesome