Newsletter Issue 6
| Intro |
| Here in England they say April is the month of showers and not only has that been true for the weather over the past month, but we have also been showered with yet more quality releases from the Blitz community.
SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Obstacle Odyssey, apart from having the longest and most possibly most ridiculous title in a Blitz3D game to date, is also due to be the most successful. To find out why, read our interview with SpongeBob developer Mike Boeh below. Another game to be released was FleaFall, a beautifully produced game that is one of the few Blitz games to feature an online play mode. To find out how the multiplayer mode was implemented, you can read our interview with FleaFall developer Berbank Green. Also find out how FleaFall rates by reading our review. Apart from all this, we have all the other regular features including a round up of all the other releases this month which just proves yet again that when it comes to quality releases, the Blitz community delivers like no other. Enjoy the issue. |
| Member Spotlight: Mike Boeh |
| Blitz Member Spotlight
Name: Mike Boeh Forum Name: Swerdnik Age: 32 Occupation: Independent Game Developer/Publisher Pre-Blitz programming experience: 10 years C++ Programming / Commercial Game Developer Blitz programming experience: Made 3 shareware games with Blitz Basic 2 on the Amiga. 1 game with Blitz3D (Best Friends) Blitz version(s) owned: B2D, B3D, B+ Blitz bibliography: Best Friends Best Friends Development Facts Blitz Program: (BlitzPlus/Blitz3D): Blitz3D IDE of choice: Protean! Development time (start to finish): 9 months No. of lines of code: ~7500 No. of include files: 17 External resources/help used: External source for music, I did the rest. Best Friends 
How did the idea for Best Friends come about? Well, it started out a bit different, more as a puzzler, but I was having so much fun with B3D, physics, and stuff, that I decided to make it an action game in the style of Mario64 or Super Monkey Ball. Best Friends was the first Retro64 game to be programmed in Blitz3D. What prompted your decision to use Blitz3D rather than C++ as you had done for your previous games? The engine was nice and fast for B3D, and it had a bunch of features that I didn't feel like programming, like collision response and interpolated animation. Best Friends was possibly the first Blitz3D game to feature dynamic collisions. How difficult was it to implement this, seeing as Blitz3D features no native support for it? It was a total hack. As you know, if 2 objects are moving in b3d, there's a good chance that the collision will not register. So if a board was moving up, then the character could fall right through the floor instead of landing on it. My solution to the problem was really simple. Every frame, I move the character up 10 units, and them force him down. This changes the physics a little, but it's actually not too bad. The number of units I moved hum up wasn't always 10, and was tweaked from level to level. Best Friends features 75 different boards for the player to navigate. What was the design and creation process like for these boards? Also, was it particularly difficult and/or time consuming to create them all? It was extremely time consuming! I'd say that level design was at least half of the project. I would start out with an idea in my head for a level, and model it in a 3D program. y favorite program is Wings3D, but I also used some Caligari Truespace and Milkshape3D. What aspects of Best Friends was the most fun to work on, and which parts were the least fun? The programming of the actual gameplay was the most fun. Making the levels was definitely the least :) Looking back at Best Friends, how satisfied are you with the way it turned out. Is there anything you would do differently if you were to create it again? If I were to create it again, I would have done it with a chasecam. Some people have problems controlling the characters. Overall though, I am happy with it, especially my programmer art! Are you happy with how Best Friends has done sales-wise since release? Yes and no. It is a solid seller, but not a standout. Z-Ball and Bugatron usually do better, although sometimes Best Friends sneaks in there and beats them (monthly). Are there any plans for a Best Friends sequel or expansion pack? Right now, no. There are other game ideas I would like to work on. SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Obstacle Odyssey 
How did the collaboration between you and Nick.com come about? In the past, I had done Shockwave games for a company called itoons here in the Chicago area. I have known those guys for a long time, and worked with them on a bunch of different projects. So when Nick started their downloadable arcade, I suggested to itoons that Best Friends would make a great SpongeBob game, and that it really appealed to kids. They agreed and set it up with Nickelodeon, who also liked the idea. So itoons took care of the art, and I made the necessary code changes. How long did it take you to convert Best Friends to SpongeBob? Longer than it should have :) I'd say a few months. There was a lot of art and animation that had to be done by itoons, and it all has to conform to the design standards of the Nick property. Was the conversion process straightforward or was there some troublesome moments? There were little problems here and there, but nothing we couldn't get through. Did Nick.com have any input into the conversion process at all or did they just let you get on with it? They made suggestions, but didn't leash us or anything. The game was pretty much done anyway, so it was only a matter of art direction and adding a few more bells and whistles. SpongeBob is obviously targeted towards a younger audience - did you make any changes to the game to make it more easier for children to play? That's the funny thing. Children are much better at Best Friends than adults! So we did very little tweaking to the gameplay - just added a few powerups. You have gone on record as saying that you expect SpongeBob to be the most widely distributed Blitz game to date. Do you have any data at all as to how many people will possibly download SpongeBob? I was just guessing actually. I just figure with the SpongeBob name and being available at Nick.com, how could it not be? Any plans for more collaborations between yourself and other companies such as Nick.com? We have some other stuff in the works, but nothing definite. I sure hope so though! :-) Next Game Your latest game is being written in Blitz3D. What type of game is it? I am creating a game called "Hero the Dog" in B3D. This is the first project where a good portion of the art and animation is not being done by myself. itoons (mentioned above) has done most of the art and animation. Although I am making a fair amount of the art too. How is it coming along? Well, to be honest, it's in pause mode while I finish up a C++ game I am also working on. The C++ game is closer to completion, so I have decided to dedicate myself to that first. Any projected release date at all? Some time in 2004 hopefully. Retro64 You are one of only a handful of Blitz users to work as a full-time indie game developer. When did you decide to make the plunge as full-time indie developer and why? It's been a long time now. Although I had worked as a commercial game programmer before, I found myself as the "Director of Technology" (ooh that sounds important!) for rollingstone.com. Not only did I not enjoy the position, but I wasn't very good at it either. So I decided to make a game in my spare time and see how it did. That game was Bugatron, and it launched my company, Retro64. How satisfied are you with how things have gone for Retro64 since you started out? I am happy, but not satisfied. Getting to the point where you can make a comfortable living is fine and all, but my goals are much higher than that. In the coming years I would like to grow the company quite a bit and launch many games per year. What plans do you have for Retro64 in the future? Is it just a case of more games, and if so what sort of games? I really have 2 goals: release more games and increase website traffic. These are the two core things that will keep Retro64 growing. I have taken on a partnership with an artist, which I hope will allow me to split my time between programming and marketing, instead of Art/Programming/Marketing. It should also increase the visual quality of the games. Our first game, "Alien Fields", is a 2D game based on the legendary Jezzball. It should be in beta within a month or two. Then comes Hero. You are one of the more successful indie developers out there. What advice would you give to others hoping to follow in your footsteps and hoping to achieve similar success? Finish your projects! You can never sell games if you don't finish them :o Thanks Mike! Related links Retro64 Nick.com Forum Thread |
| Member Spotlight: Berbank Green |
| Blitz Member Spotlight
Name: Berbank Green Forum Name: Berbank Age: Ancient Occupation: Games Designer Pre-Blitz programming experience: Computer Science Degree + some C++ work on some computer games Blitz programming experience: 5 years Blitz version(s) owned: Blitz3D, BlitzBasic Blitz bibliography: FleaFall Apprentice, FleaFall Champion FleaFall Development Facts Blitz Program: (BlitzPlus/Blitz3D): Blitz3D IDE of choice: Standard Blitz3D IDE Development time (start to finish): 3 years (on and off, second year was essentially inactive) No. of lines of code: 13000 No. of include files: 16 (most are our own) External resources/help used: 1 other programmer, several artists. No. of Team Members: 3 core team members (1 only fully active in first year) FleaFall How did the idea for FleaFall come about? Working in the games industry and seeing hundreds of expensive, high concept games roll out with sometimes unappealing mechanics, I wanted to make something that was the exact opposite. The prototype for FleaFall was made in about 4 hours back on 11th May 2001. At that stage it was 4 red squares hopping around on blue rectangles. After playing some friends at work I then added the orb the next night. Since then it's been mostly polishing. Bugaboo was obviously an influence here, but the addition of sticking to walls, the different objectives, 4-player format, fixed jump height and static screen makes it something quite different. Other inspirations were Chu-Chu Rocket, Worms and Wild Metal (Country). FleaFall is one of the few Blitz games around to feature an online play mode. How did you find the whole process of adding online play to a game? I'm not a great programmer, so I found someone who is. Francis, a friend of mine from the games company I used to work at, has been an invaluable asset throughout the entire development process. He was in charge of all the networking code as well as many other aspects of the project. So far our biggest obstacle has been firewalls as there are so many different configurations and setups, we are improving firewall compatibility all the time. The addition of the online feature was very much like a new project, it's such an enormous task and requires so much testing. How much time was spent implementing the online part of the game as a proportion of the overall time spent on it? And how much time spent implementing the online mode was split between programming and testing? We took about 3 months to implement the online aspect of it. We did a low-key release of FleaFall before Christmas and the feedback was that players wanted a few extras, one of which was online games, so we focused on that. We tested quite a lot because I wanted to see how it was progressing. When we got Chat ability in there we could test and talk about problems while in the game. I should say that Francis lives 30 miles from me so we use Jabber (a chat program like MS Messenger) and FleaFall regularly to communicate. Fortunately testing was often fun because we still enjoy playing the game. Did you use BlitzPlay at all to develop the online mode and if so how much do you feel it helped speed up development of FleaFall. No, Francis wrote all the network code from scratch. At the moment, there are few FleaFall players to play against online. Do you have any plans to kick-start the no. of FleaFall players at all, i.e. an aggressive marketing campaign, or are you just relying on word of mouth? Yes, I'm interested to see how strong word of mouth is, and I will be doing a number of enhancements to help strengthen the online participation. We are developing a stronger lobby screen so that it is easier for players to communicate to each other and we are also doing a few other improvements that will help enormously. FleaFall doesn't hang on the success of the online game as many players are very happy with the single player games and occasionally local multiplayer games and LAN games. The online aspect is there for people who want it. There are a few game companies I know of who play this at lunch time on their LAN quite regularly. Those of you who do want to play online, you can post up times you'll be hosting on our forum www.fleafall.com/forum. The control system in FleaFall is quite unique. It's hard to master, yet relies on the use of only two buttons (left and right). How much time was spent on balancing the control system so that the two buttons, depending on how long they're pressed, can get you anywhere you want around a level? The balancing was all done in the original prototype. Once the concept of fixed jump height and unlimited horizontal velocity was established it was easy to see that this allowed movement anywhere in a level. The best way to check this is in the Host game screen where you can chat to other players before starting a game. Because it is a chat room, there are no foreground elements to jump on, there is only the screen border, and even in this room you can get to anywhere on the screen by getting your jumps right. With fixed jump height it became much easier to design levels. The challenges of the levels are often influenced by the artist's style, and we made sure we had a good variety of styles and challenges in the game. The computer AI in FleaFall seems to be very well implemented, being both convincing and challenging. How difficult was it to get the AI working to such a standard? Again I worked closely with Francis here. We both spent a long time making sure they were competent enough to handle anything we gave them, but fallible in human ways. We also studied games played with human players to watch for distinctive patterns. As an example, one thing we picked up on was the intervals between jumps. Our original fleas seemed very mechanical because there were fairly fixed intervals between jumps, whereas humans vary a lot more. The logic behind the way the fleas navigate is a mixture of trial jumps using distance to orb comparisons and zones which they attempt to use for a number of iterations before trying a new zone. Most of the variables are configurable per flea, the flea called 'Jumpy' for instance is particularly good at long jumps. FleaFall features some distinctive, high quality 2D artwork. Was this produced in-house or did you contract it out? A bit of both. I did a few levels and I asked a few friends to contribute who are all professional game artists. A number of them were done by some friends at www.camcreatives.com. All the artists are credited on our credits page www.fleafall.com/credits (there is a link to this on our links page) FleaFall is available in two versions, Apprentice (free) and Champion (full). The Apprentice version is basically a cut down version of the Champion version, but otherwise is fully functional, and is not time limited at all. Do you think the Apprentice version is possibly too generous, and therefore people will be happy to stick with that rather than upgrade to the Champion version? It is time limited for multiplayer and Internet games. Each time you play a multiplayer/internet game your play time diminishes by a few seconds down to a minimum of 1 minute. Single Player mode has fixed times for each level but you only get 3 levels and a practice mode. You do get a lot more when you buy the full Champion edition such as a full single player tournament with one of the toughest challenges to face in the final battle with the Grandmaster. Loads of new levels and free levels you can download and play, unlimited play time, 3 game modes for internet/LAN games, different end game settings, the ability to import your own levels and play them and challenge others using the Asset Transfer system. Some people will be happy with the Apprentice version and that's great, but they are missing out on some major features. We have a good number of happy owners of the FleaFall Champion edition and that number is growing all the time, at the moment a lot of them seem quite content to play one player, multiplayer and LAN games and that's fine with me. What are your future hopes and plans for FleaFall? First of all my focus is on getting the online games happening more often and getting more players to make and share their levels with others. After that I have many plans, the biggest of which is FleaFall Adventures which I've been wanting to do for some time now. FleaFall Adventures is likely to be an extension of FleaFall Champion where your flea hero gets to venture into a new world having completed his training in FleaFall Champion. Do you have plans for more games after FleaFall? Yes, I have a prototype for a 3D game which I'm getting good feedback on, but this is on hold while I continue with FleaFall. I also have a four player party game which has a full playable level which I might shop around at some stage. Thanks Berbank! Related links FleaFall Website Forum Thread |
| Review: FleaFall |
Fleas are not the type of creature you would normally expect to find in a computer game. Indeed, their outings in computer games have been few and far between over the years. It's not hard to see why - they are small, unremarkable things that do little other than stick to things and hop about. Yet it is precisely these attributes which make them perfect for an appearance in FleaFall. FleaFall is all about jumping and sticking to things. Pressing the left or right cursor keys to jump, you hop around a static single screen, holding the keys down for longer jumps. If you hit a part of the scenery side-on, you will stick to it – giving you a launch pad for higher platforms. Hit an overhanging part of the level, and your flea will go tumbling down the screen. Herein lies the beauty of FleaFall - concealed within such a simplistic control system, lies a fun, addictive game with surprising depth. Competing against you as you bound around each screen are up to three other fleas, who all share the aim of having to ‘get the orb’, a small circle that provides a purpose to all the jumping. A variety of game modes change the way you must try and approach the game – super grab mode will see you trying to be the first to touch the orb before it changes location; thief mode will see you trying to touch the orb and then hold onto it for as long as possible. While the game progresses, you will be awarded points for your success with the orb, and at the end of the game, the flea with the most points wins. Both single player modes and multiplayer modes are present in FleaFall. The single player mode is particularly well implemented - considering the irregular, often hap-hazard nature of the scenery, the fleas do a pretty remarkable job of getting around it. They don't do it in a robotic fashion either - they really do bounce about as if controlled by humans. This is key to the enjoyment of the game - when they beat you to the orb by a millisecond, you don't feel cheated - you just feel as if you have been beaten by the better flea. As good as the single player mode is, the real fun is to be had in the multiplayer mode. You are able to either play offline on a single PC or online against 2-4 opponents. The online mode is very well implemented - starting or joining an online game only takes a couple of button presses, and then you're away. Once you're in the thick of things, it then turns into a fun flea fest as all players madly chase the orb. We can honestly say that playing FleaFall online is some of the best fun we've had playing games in a long time. The presentation and graphics in FleaFall are first class. The actual flea sprites are small but still manage to pack a whole personality into a few pixels wide. The background artwork meanwhile, is on a par usually associated with traditional cartoons such is their high quality. Admittedly they do not add much to the gameplay, but their inclusion nonetheless helps give the whole package that extra feel of quality. Criticism of FleaFall is few and far between. The fixed height nature of the jumps means occasionally moving underneath low lying scenery can be a case of having to button bash. And occasionally CPU-controlled fleas can become stuck in scenery. However, criticism of FleaFall is something you really have to look for with a fine toothed comb, because in truth FleaFall really is a superb little game. To sum up, this is the perfect antidote to all the huge, multi-gigabyte 3D games out there. Packed into a flea-sized file, FleaFall will bite you with its addictive gameplay to the point where you'll be itching to play it again and again. Score: 5 Blitz rockets out of 5. 
Related links FleaFall Website Forum Thread |
| Jump Around - Community Project |
Jump Around is an example of what can be done in a short space of time when a group of Blitz users get together and all work towards a common goal - in this case, the task of creating a small, fun playable game. Written from start to finish in only a few days, the ten or so people who contributed quickly turned Jump Around from a very simple game started by Rob Farley, into something a lot more playable and pleasing on the eye. Considering community projects very rarely get off the ground no matter how small the scope is, it was nice to see one work for a change. Nice work guys. Related links Forum Thread 1 Forum Thread 2 Forum Thread 3 |
| SaturnMD |
SaturnMD is a game released as freeware courtesy of developers reeteam. A clone of the classic arcade game Missile Command, the graphics have a cool retro feel to them, while the gameplay is as frantic as it has ever been. For free, you can't go wrong. Related links SaturnMD Website Forum Thread |
| TerraEd |
TerraEd is a world editor designed for creating outdoor scenes comprising of a terrain and various scenery objects dotted around on top. As you can see from the screenshot above, it's capable of impressive results, and already several updates have been released including one which adds support for BlitzTree3D. Related links 3D Game Tool Toolbox Entry Forum Thread |
| BlitzGrass3D |
3D foilage experts Aliencodec have been at it again, this time turning their attention away from trees and towards an all new type of vegetation ready to be planted into your game: grass. Rather than having to sow grass seeds and then wait 7 to 21 days for the grass to appear, BlitzTree3D allows you to lay a thick layering of grass within seconds, instantly turning your bald terrain into a lush landscape with enough grass to feed a herd of cows. Of course, detailed 3D grass in games usually comes at a price, and with BlitzTree3D, your frame rate may take a whack should you choose to use too much. However, use the grass sparingly, and you should be OK. Next month: BlitzWeeds3D. Related links Aliencodec Forum Thread |
| New Releases Round-up |
| Games:
FleaFall SaturnMD SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Obstacle Odyssey Apps/Libs - New: BlitzGrass3D MMORPGCE Mapeditor nSprite TerraEd Apps/Libs - Updates: BlitzPlay v2.0.95 Gile[s] v1.22 Image Packer / SpriteMaster Pro / ImageMaster PaintJob3D v0.5 Protean v1.2 Screenshot Magic v1.4 |
| Code Snippet of the Month - Blitz3D |
| New Terrain LightMapper by Flynn (morphecy)
A lightmapper for Blitz3D terrains - can make all the difference between a bland terrain and something a little more bold. |
| Code Snippet of the Month - BlitzPlus |
| acidstub by skidracer
Not strictly for BlitzPlus, and in fact probably of more use for Blitz3D - but what the heck, we'll include it here anyway. A way to use Blitz's built-in engine, from C++ - so now those hardcore C++ users can take advantage of Blitz's functionality and C++'s powerful language at the same time. |
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