I didn't compile much to show, but I've been busy on the game! I just finished all of the the main character, Evi's, moves for the alpha build (I call the moves the "alpha set"). There will certainly be moves added in later but most of those will arise out of request or necessity, determined by testing.

Every time I post something I feel like an uncle visiting, obligated to present something, toys or candy for the nieces and nephews. Here's your candy. It's not that sweet, but it's something. I won't wrap it in a thumbnail for you, though.

http://girlshavecooties.com/flash/anthem/eviteaser.png

That's all really. We obviously missed the IGF deadline of October 1st, but that doesn't slow down development. Life tends to do that quite a lot already.

Matt has a blog about his adventures in coding Anthem. As a programmer myself, I find it interesting! http://anthem.skatehed.ho8.com/

I'll try to post more updates. No promises that I'll bring any candy though.

I mentioned Anthem's writer in the first post. Recently, Trent and I have ramped up production, with me doing what I do, and collaborating with Trent on the basic story events. Trent's doing all the dirty work though, and apparently all the papers have covered his kitchen table.

We're working as fast as we can (what with our day jobs and/or school getting in the way) so we can make the IGF deadline, which is October 1. Perhaps one day we can get a mention on On the Spot. I'm sure someone out there is interested in the Flash game world, right?

As you may recall, I am currently a full-time animator on Supernews, a cartoon on Current TV. I just found out recently that the Supernews writer/director, Josh Faure-Brac, used to be in a band with Gamespot's Senior Editor Jeff Gerstmann. He doesn't know it yet, but I'm coming for you Jeff! You'll play Anthem and tell me what you think! Hopefully he'll like it enough that he'll spread the word. Everyone listens to Jeff, right? Well everyone listens to Greg, but since he's run away, Jeff's our next bet.

Private alpha testing will start within a few weeks, I hope. That deadline is creeping closer at an uncomfortable rate.

Lastly, don't you like the old way GS made image thumbnails? I do. The new thumbnails look unpolished, so I'm sticking to the old look.

Hi folks, Anthem is still in development. I got a full time job a month ago as an animator on the show Supernews, on the Current TV network (check your cable/satellite listings). Moving and other stuff has slowed down progress a bit, but I'm still working on the game. Hopefully the next update will have something cool. In the meantime, if you want some cool Flash fighting, check out a game my friend co-created.

 Newgrounds Rumble

For Anthem, I'm trying to figure out some balance with move execution, because I finally get it. Get what, you ask? Why fighting games require you to move the directional stick in complicated ways and why you have to press buttons in succession at specific times. Sure it was always about your mastery of the controls, but why make some moves so hard to pull off? The answer is: gratification.

Some folks on a video game site were complaining that Capcom vs SNK took away some of the gratification of pulling off a hard move because the developers added a feature that let you map super moves or special moves to the unused buttons on the PS2 controller. They said that moves, especially super moves, take work to pull off, and you get that satisfaction that you did it; you pulled it off. It's not the same when any old schmuck can press one button and pull off Zangief's double pile driver move.

In Crackdown, I discovered the undocumented double jump move. Some say it's an exploit, but I know the devs put it in on purpose, because there's a very specific way to do it and it maks perfect sense. Every time I pull off a double jump, even though I can do it 100% of the time now, I feel like, "Yeah, I did it!" The move requires a bit of work, but the reward is jumping another 15-20 feet into the air, which in the Crackdown world is about equivalent to how high you jump when you first start the game. It's a reward for a move well executed.

So now I understand why fighting games tend to have complicated controls. It's not that I like the controls to do a Shoryuken (forward, down, down-forward+Punch), but what I'm saying is that Anthem needs moves that are not easy to pull off. The balance comes in designing controls that aren't frustrating, but at the same time having controls and requirements that you need to work at to achieve a move or attack. No more of this "all moves should be super easy to pull off" nonsense. Super moves shouldn't be easy to pull off because they are devastatingly powerful. You'll be happier when you do manage to pull off a move, that it's worth sometimes not being able to pull it off.

What this means in gameplay is that to pull off a nice move, you can't just mash the attack buttons, but you'll need to time your attacks and input the proper button combo (not a difficult one, but something more than just the attack button alone). This translates into knowing that you can only pull off super move Y right after you performed attack X and only if you input the command at the right time. You can't just press some key and do super move Y instantly, because you lose the gratification of pulling off a hard move.

With that said, there are some big moves that are doable without any prerequisite moves or stances. These moves will vary, but we can imagine one move might require a full aura meter, and not just that, but the controls to pull it off aren't super easy. You might have to press something like down, down, up+punch. It's simple enough that someone using a keyboard could pull it off, but not so easy a button masher would whip out this move constantly. I still want to keep the controls simple enough that a person's dexterity isn't an issue, but I also have to remember that a fancy move needs fancy execution.

I'm about to get Ninja Gaiden Black in the mail, as I didn't own the original Xbox and now I can play it on my 360. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it, and from what I've heard, no, Anthem will not be as hard as that game, but I will hope to provide a challenge for everyone.

I hope I didn't bore anyone, and if you like what you read, share this blog with others! I know I love reading developer's thoughts and seeing works in progress, and so I decided to share what I was thinking about move complexity and such. If you agree or disagree, I'd like to know!

The trials and tribulations of working in Flash.

Flash games are great for easy accessiblity and distribution. Pretty much anyone can load up a Flash game on nearly any computer made in the last decade. Howewer, it's a double-edged sword. Because of this easy access, and the diversity of games, people come to expect that every Flash game will run on their computer. Flash is solely CPU based, so the fact that someone has the latest top of the line video card means nothing. Is it fair for someone with a 3 year old computer to complain when a bigger-than-average Flash game doesn't run at a nice frame rate?

We've chosen to develop Anthem in Flash, but with that comes all the above. We get the big audience, but we also have to deal with the performance limitations and the fact that everyone with a computer thinks a web game should be able to run on their computer. So what do we do? We try to make the game as fast as possible but we still require people to have a fast processor. I'm not comparing Anthem with a game like Half-Life 2, but when HL2 came out, you couldn't just play the game on any old computer. If you wanted to play on a pretty old computer, you had to scale the graphics down. We're trying as much as we can with Anthem to get it to run on slower computers, but the same requirement adheres; you have to turn down the graphics for a speed boost.

The other part to getting more speed is optimization. As I create the sprites, I'm not optimizing the vectors just yet. That may not matter though, as Matt recently (yesterday in fact) experimented with a different rendering method. Basically, instead of drawing vectors straight to the final bitmap every frame, we've got the engine automatically taking the frames of animation, laying them out in a grid, like textures are in a 3D game, caching them all in memory, and finally copying them to the frame buffer. The result is a higher framerate, but the trade-off is that the sprites look a little pixelated. This also requires more RAM than the average Flash game, but with the vast majority of systems with 256MB or more, I think this is a moot issue. Processing power is still the main requirement. We might try caching to a larger bitmap, which would make the sprites look better when they're scaled.

Lastly, we're going to provide a downloadable version that plays in the Flash Projector. The projector is fast. It's full speed, no framerate hitches, fast. The game is being developed at 33fps just to be sure we can keep it that fast, and it never drops below that in the projector. It's worth mentioning that we test the game in both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6, and Firefox is definitely slower. It seems Firefox keeps plugins from overexerting the system, which is a good thing in general, but that means the CPU will never be working at 100% for one Flash game. IE doesn't care and will let a plugin run wild, even if that locks up your system. Bad design, but good for running one Flash game at nearly 100% CPU usage if needed. To reiterate though, the best option is really to download the game and play it FULLSCREEN faster than it runs in the browser (and with a gamepad, but more on that in a later update). However, as an option for folks who can't/won't download a game, we'll present the same exact game in the browser.

While I was typing this up, Matt came online and I asked him to try caching the sprites at a higher resolution. He's super fast. About 15 minutes later he sent me an update and the sprites look so much nicer now. The game runs the same! The image above is actually the better one, heh heh. Here are the two images for comparison. This is what I call optimization!  But.... the truth is the higher res caching only sort of worked, but wasn't nice enough to keep. Instead, he enabled smoothing to get the nice properly anti-aliased look. The performance hit is pretty small, as evidenced by the framerate, which is 32 in both screenshots.

The old caching: http://www.girlshavecooties.com/flash/anthem/anthem_screen01a.jpg
The new caching: http://www.girlshavecooties.com/flash/anthem/anthem_screen01b.jpg
And that's all for today! I spent a while trying to simulate the Gamespot image thumbnails with html. Of course, as I feared, Gamespot limited the html usage a lot (I can't even use tables or divs!), making it pretty much impossible, even though I replicated the look exactly. So instead, I made a template that looks like the GS thumbnails, ha!

 click for full image

The game is coming along well. The main character is Evi. The game is pretty heavy on the story-telling, so I won't say much about that aside from this: Evi is 7 years old and she's got a whole lot of moves and acrobatics. I've done over 30 sprites for her alone, with about 80 scheduled.

Matt's sprinting through the engine. The combo system is looking HOT. Right now we're working on blocking, parrying, and dodging. Gotta get that stuff down as it's highly important, especially when you're taking on 6 enemies at once. Reversals are a part of parrying, but we'll get to that later.

Through developing the combo system, I'm learning just how intricate fighting games are. The timing in Anthem probably won't be quite as impeccable as Street Fighter II, but that doesn't mean there will be a dearth of attacks or choices. If I feel the game is getting a bit repetitious, I'll add in another half-dozen attacks. Don't worry about controls though. Attacks are incredibly easy to pull off. Button mashers will have loads of fun, but those looking for some depth will also find it. I just have to get the timing for each move perfect. Even being off by one frame, an attack can feel too slow or too fast. So much testing to do... but still, making games, oh so fun!

I'd love to read comments, so leave one if you can!