Blizzard owes D.O.T.A.!

 

Everybody knows D.O.T.A. The Defense of the Ancients, a tower-defense game that evolved as a Warcraft III mod, has become a staple of multiplayer gaming worldwide.

[ Defense of the Ancients pits two teams of players against each other: the Sentinel and the Scourge. Players on the Sentinel team are based at the southwest corner of the map, and those on the Scourge team are based at the northeast corner. Each base is defended by towers and waves of units which guard the main paths leading to their base. In the center of each base is the "Ancient", a building that must be destroyed to win the game.^[5][6]

Each human player controls one Hero, a powerful unit with unique abilities. In DotA, players on each side choose one of 103 heroes, each with different abilities and tactical advantages over other heroes.^[7] The scenario is highly team-oriented; it is difficult for one player to carry the team to victory alone.^[8] Defense of the Ancients allows up to ten players in a five-versus-five format and an additional two slots for referees or observers, often with an equal number of players on each side – Wikipedia

Since it’s creation by an mapper named Eul, D.O.T.A. has evolved from a niche “geek” only thing to a “hell ,everybody knows it” genre of its own right. The standard for the game is DOTA Allstars, initally created by  It’s gone on to influence new games, attract millions of players (no kidding) and  to spawn international tournaments.  ]

Now enough with the intro. The fact is, DOTA as we play it today runs on the Warcraft III system, which was released sometime back in 2000 by the famous Blizzard. It’s 11 years later, and people are still running that system. Not to play the campaign (even though it has some gorgeous in-game videos), but to play DOTA. Countless next-gen RTS games have come, and gone, but Warcraft still stands – due to *cheers* DOTA.

Blizzard owes a lot to DOTA, don’t you think? Simply keeping Warcraft 3, a decade-old game, on PCs worldwide is a remarkable achievement.
Unfortunately, they’ve failed to capitalize on that fact.

Responding to worldwide fan interest in standalone games representing the DOTA genre, Riot games (with the collaboration of Guinsoo, the creator of DOTA Allstars) has unleashed League of Legends, which won several awards including 2010′s best online game design. This game has yet to catch on here in Sri Lanka, but i’ve played it and it’s incredible.

S2 games launched Heroes of Newearth, which also collected a few awards, including IGF’s Audience Award, and gathered quite a bit of momentum in SL, too. And . . .the kicker – IceFrog, the designer and lead developer of DOTA Allstars since Guinsoo left, has partnered with Valve to create DOTA 2. Already the hype of DOTA 2 has spread. Valve has shown its usual sense for creating fantastic multiplayer games by taking charge of DOTA 2; after all, they did the same with the CounterStrike mod for Half-life a while back and viola – unleashed Counterstrike 1.6 and so on( which don’t even need to be explained. They’re that famous.).

Pardon me for the ramble, but it comes down to the fact that Blizzard owes DOTA a great deal – and that they should have capitalized on DOTA sooner. With their resources and expertise, they could have rocked the world. Perhaps they didn’t want to work on someone else’s IP, or were busy with the legendary Wow, but still. Wouldn’t it have been fantastic?            - the ALCH3MIST

Learning procedural generation – episode 1

What would you give to be able to write a few sets of code and have an entire world built from scratch, a world that would be different every time you made the computer (re)build it?
Yes, that’s procedural generation. Now I’m nowhere near as advanced as that, which is why I’m going to learn how. These blog posts will chart my progress.
To start off, this has been done before. The technique’s been used in games since the 80s, and modern games like Fuel (2008) have used it to build incredible landscapes. So it won’t be a case of me having to reinvent the damn wheel.
However, Fuel-style photorealistic terrain is still a long way ahead, though it’s my dream. At this end, however, we have the most basic of procedural generation systems: maze generators.

I came across my first mazegen in a book on Java called Killer Game Programming (which, btw, totally blows the doors off Java 3D Game development).

Right.

Now step 1: Wikipedia. I hunted all over the net for procedural terrain generation methods, and guess what? Wikipedia has the answers. I ran into many semi-technical discussions, many “we use our own algorithm” posts, but Wikipedia has the answers at a reasonable depth.

For starters, there seem to be various maze generation algorithms, or methods. One of the most popular is to write a program that will first populate a grid with walls, then erase your way through, generation a pateern of spaces.
I’m not going to copy-paste Wikipedia info, so here’s the link:
Wikipedia: maze generation

2: An even better place: the Procedural Content Generation Wiki . It contains a maze generation tutorial with python code. Click here.

Now that I’ve got my info ready, let’s see if we can implement these in Game Maker . . . stay tuned for the next segment, where I’ll report my success/ failure and take a look at indie games that use procedural generation.

Immersion

Woke up this & checked out the nu indie JAMESTOWN, a welcome addition to the ailing steampunk scene.

What drew me were the visuals. The gameworld is lovingly handcrafted 2D art, and it reminded me of those never-to-die favourites – pokemon, fallout, gta, where you spent hours roaming the world for the sheer fun of it.
Now this is not a dissertion, but its a question. These days 90% of the games are so linear. Go here, get this, get out. What happened to exploration (‘find out’) as the center of gameplay?

Immersion

Woke up this & checked out the nu indie JAMESTOWN, a welcome addition to the ailing steampunk scene.

What drew me were the visuals. The gameworld is lovingly handcrafted 2D art, and it reminded me of those never-to-die favourites – pokemon, fallout, gta, where you spent hours roaming the world for the sheer fun of it.
Now this is not a dissertion, but its a question. These days 90% of the games are so linear. Go here, get this, get out. What happened to exploration (‘find out’) as the center of gameplay?

Dragon Age on FB?

Came across the news while browsing my feed in the morning. In a nutshell: Dragon Age: Legends is a 2D MMORPG on FB, developed by EA2D, and featured the same gameworld as Dragon Age II. It’s got character upgrades, combat, quests, the works. And . . . (fanfare) it’s free.

Now that’s interesting. Being cursed with an undeniably “retro” machine myself, I’m unable to play DA I or 2. And I’ve long since despiared of the senseless Zyngaworks on FB – especially Mafia Wars where it basically comes down to clicking something on the screen and seeing “You won” or “You lost”. The gameplay is so repetive it bores you out of your skull in the first week or so.

In this background, Dragon Age? Maxxa, as we say here. Finally something decent to play. Who cares if it’s 2D? I love 2D. Here’s to Dragon Age Legends
And . . um – the screenshots are bloody unbelievable.  EA, Bioware, YOU ROCK!
   – the ALCH3MIST

DA Legends on FB: Can you believe it??

Holy . . . wow

I should get this.

Ink&paper: breakout

Project Vertical, unfortunately, has gone down the trash. It was supposed to me our first twoplayer game.

The fault was less in the content than in the design, which was unruly from the start. In the end it became just another Pong clone.

However, the important thing is not to cry over the damn milk but to get a new bottle.

We’re working on turning it into something simpler: a breakout/brickbreaker game with a new, artistic touch -i.e.: trees. Instead of bricks, you tear down leaves and flowers.
Howzat?

15/3/2011 Sitrep

Woke up with a crick in the neck and spent the day reading postmortems @ gamasutra.
Its depressing. Ive gone through tons of gamedev tales, with developers cutting their teeth on the latest tech, crunching, etc.

Whereas us? We dont crunch. We dont code. We use Game Maker, damnit, and we’re barely getting anyway at that. We work at a pace that makes a snail look like a supersonic racer.
Lesson learned: when building a game, make sure your people,are commited.
Bah.

Lots of new plans for Hectic. Drew up a list of things to do with Ausaff; the thing spans 6 pages . . . but by the end of it, Hectic should be as polished as it can be. Here’s what’s done so far (see screens below):

1) Polished up the control system a bit, introduced Friction (so there’s a feeling of “moving in space”). Initially I tried acceleration, by setting relative move events in GMK, but that ended up in. . . OMG… totally INSANE movement speeds. The ship kept jumping +800 pixels at the slightest touch So now controls are up.
2) Created a healing system. AKA a repair module, AKA a blue circle thingy that is spawned automatically and heals you, homing in on you (move towards ship events in STEP).  Otherwise no one will ever live beyond 5000.

3) Now figuring out how to make the screen shake when hit . . . . and to make enemies generate sparks when hit . . . . aargh. Downloaded the GIMP, my all-time favourite image editor, and pixel pushin like crazy.

4) Oh yeah, added some COOL weapons upgrades. And made enemies explode into puffs of sparks eye candy And added a green miniboss that vomits out bullets just like yours.          - THE ALCH3MIST

 

# 2: The state of the art

Guy: “I’m making a game. It’s gonna have all these cool features, like procedurally generated maps and 75 characters to choose from and a storyline so big it’s gonna make Elder Scrolls look like a sketchbook.”
Sister: “Ok.”
- 1 HOUR LATER -
Sister: “Have you finished making the game? I wanna check my email.”

Basically, this is the story of game designers vs little sisters  everywhere, as demonstrated time and time again.

Well, it’s  a Saturday, a.k.a. Gamedev day. After a week of school and misc thingies, not the least of which include Science Societies, Interact Clubs and Media Units (I seem to be in all these things . . . no idea how, since I never applied). Anyways:
HECTIC gained a few major upgrades to the enemy spawning system. I used a timeline that runs in a 110-step cycle and spawns mixes of enemies in patterns and randomly; what patterns to spawn are also choosen randomly. Kushan added sound, and I plugged in multi-colored explosions – so basically HECTIC is getting hectic.
Kushan’s computer also overheated. As of now it is stubbonrly refusing all attempts to start it up. Ditto for aged mumbling P4s!

VERTICAL was sent all the way back to the drawing board. Blame Ausaff.

 

In the course of this week we investigated alternatives to Game Maler, which we use at the moment. Here’s what turned up:
1) Scirra Construct. Incredibly powerful; supports drap-and-drop graphics functionality beyond Game Maker‘s dreams. Pixel shader 2, 3D objects, shadows & lighting are available in version 0.99; they’re building 2.0, and when it’s done, we’ll probably be there.

2) Enigma. Written in C++, Game Maker compaible, a bit more efficient . . . hmm . .. work a try. Work in progress.
3) Gluon. Linux-only. Bah. But definitely one up for Linux users.
4) Game Editor. Looks unfriendly, but compiles to Iphone and Ipod! Take that,!

That said, I don’t think we’ll be dropping GMK. It’s got a fantastic community, and as far as polish goes, GMK has the lead. We will DEFNITELY go to Game Editor, though. Iphone support is not a thing to be thrown away.
I’m recreating a new profile for us on yoyogames.com. And my head hurts, and it’s too damn hot to breathe but we have to run down to Bambalapitiya to get some thermic paste for Kushan’s *&%$#% CPU.
- The ALCH3MIST