So, patch 9 of FortressCraft is finally released, and hopefully everyone is finding ‘not too many’ bugs with the Zombies. What’s next?

I’ll be working hard on the Onlive version over the coming weeks; I’m planning on pushing out Xbox patches to keep it in sync; the first of those fruits of my labour will be CP 9.1, which has the 31 player mode, with autobalancing server load (I got up to 31 players in my world, but it was the result of carefully managing server load; this sort of thing is trivial for a computer to do)

BitStream

Out soon on Apple devices! It’s like a racing version of Bit Trip:Beat, or like the old GBA game DotStream. It also has great music.

Locomotion (name pending)

I’ve also dusted off an old puzzle game that I never completed. No firm timescale on this, but it always looked gorgeous, and I’d be sad if I never finished it!

Yes, that is the FortressCraft grass. Actually, that’s not true. FortressCraft has the Locomotion grass!

Tactics Forever

Tactics Forever has been the subject of a couple of weekends’ recent work now; it’s all becoming quite nice and polished, and it’s a definite favourite of the testers.Sadly, I don’t really expect this game to do well. Despite being probably the best thing I’ve ever written by myself, and despite being rewarding, fun and very original, well… it’s original. That’s the issue. Very few games are original these days, and despite the hordes of people telling me that ‘If you write original games, then people will buy them!’… you only have to look at the fact that large publishers don’t dare stray from established themes to prove that particular statement wrong.

Original games either disappear from sight, or become massive smash hits. The last original game that I know of that became a smash hit was… er… uh… I think I just proved my own point.

I suspect the game will gain a small, cult following however; and as long as I’m not on the streets, that makes me happy!

We have a webpage, tho it’s a tad sparse:

http://tacticsforever.net/

Note to self, get some screenshots sorted out!

FortressCraft 2D : Zombie Survival

So, I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, and it’s been an idle pasttime for a bit. The plan is for this to become a large-scale ProjectorGames game. I’ve been asked to do a 350-player simultaneous (on one screen!) game.

The game idea is of a survival game, 2d, set in a procedurally generated, post-zompocalyspe world. There’s a heavy emphasis on traps, farming, crafting (Borderlands-style procedural weapons combined with WoW-style crafting) and long-term investment.

Sadly, the experience of FortressCraft has rather… burned me. If it was 18 months ago, I would have happily described the game as “Terraria, only without much mining or building, and loads of zombies”. Right now, I think I might end up as suicide casualty if hordes of Terraria fanboys descend screaming OMFG U RIPPED OFF TERRARIA!

However, as people have possibly noticed, I’m quite a community-focused developer, and I’ve been informed (quite a few times) that I shouldn’t worry about this, and get on and release the damned thing.

So, here’s my plan. It’s very tentative, and therefore subject to change;

I know that people are very curious how a game is developed, and love to help steer the direction of it during development. I have a few very strong ideas about the game, but also a great deal of nebulousness. So, for instance, do you play a robot? Are there NPCs to look after? Is the crafting like Monster Hunter 3? (click, and come back in 4 hours once it’s upgraded)

FortressCraft was never geared towards this sort of community input; the game itself had to veer as far away from Minecraft as it could, in order to avoid the shittons of vitriol I received.

With this game, however, I would like to consider some sort of… well, let’s say that Project Zomboid is GTA. I want to be Saints Row.

My plan is to get the game to a bare-minimum-playable state (which it’s not far off now!), and plan a release/update on Indie City Underground once a month. Each month it’s on there, it’ll go up in cost by 50 cents; so at the end of the first year, it’ll cost $6. Think of it like a reverse kickstarter; and the sooner you on get on the boat, the cheaper it’ll be!

No pictures yet! It’s all programmer art.

FC:Lite

So many people picked up FortressCraft a year ago, played it for ten minutes, went ‘meh’, and never went back to it. I’ve had the idea to re-release FortressCraft as FortressCraft:Lite, reduce a bunch of things to get it inside the 80MSP limit ($1), and let those people who haven’t seen it have a look at it. Anyone who purchased FC:Lite would also get something awesome within FortressCraft. I haven’t quite decided what, yet, but certainly a spawn-editing axe, and probably a unique, ‘contributer’-type sky. Maybe a green sky. Something to make it worth purchasing FC:Lite if you own FortressCraft.

I haven’t decided for definite on the restrictions of FC:Lite. Perhaps only 8 customs, 2 player networking, smaller world. It might even not come to pass!

As ever, dear reader, your feedback is 100% read, and 1000% important. Tell me what you think!

FortressCraft : Chapter 2

Watch this space. It might arrive sooner than you think…

I’ve already expressed my concern about the sudden rash of kickstarters; whilst DoubleFine’s incredible success is to be commended, even THAT respected studio has had it’s fair share of failures.

But at least that studio has a massive amount of experience, and, more importantly, it’s a large studio. It also has two very experience designers at it’s helm; they have every chance of great success.

But the millions they’ve been pledged (or actually received?) has started off a rash of me-too kickstarters. It’s the cool new thing to do!

Now, for those of you who haven’t written a game,you probably think it’s straightforwards. Sit down, write code, ship game.

I had the… excitement… of  being indirectly involved with a bank-robbery game. It was quite high profile, and used a popular FPS engine. Sadly, it was a GTA-style game, and the FPS engine wasn’t suited.(WARNING : MASSIVE UNDERSTATEMENT) The game stagnated, and eventually got canned.

The investors didn’t understand this. They were from a film background. In the film industry, you get the money, you make the film, you release it. In the games industry, however, sometimes things simply don’t work. Earlier iterations of Burnout4 had you smashing down buildings to make shortcuts. The idea was too confusing, so we took it out – and it was our 4th game in the series!

So, everyone now sees Kickstarters as a way of getting the funds together to make your dream game. The issue is, and I’ll write this slowly, Money. Is. Rarely. The. Limiting. Factor.

The limiting factors are usually time, and people. I might have $100 million, and want to write a game. I then need to find, hire or assemble a team to make it. 6 months later, I’ve spent $10 million, and I haven’t gotten a single line of code written. I’ve got nice new offices tho!

I predict a massive crash in Kickstarters in the future, just after a high profile game either gets canned, or massively underdelivers. (How that works remains to be seen; “You promised 100 levels, there’s only 99, I want my money back”)

I suspect I’ve also just located the game this will happen to.

It’s called “Yogventures”, and it’s a Minecraft-clone (in the correct usage of the word, as opposed to an insult).

They want a quarter of a million dollars to write this game. As indicated before, this SOUNDS like a lot of money. But that won’t run you a studio with 5 people for a year. And I mean cheap people; as a rule of thumb, a $25k developer is fresh out of college; he’ll cost you another $25k a year to look after (computers, software, taxes, accounting, expenses, power, heat, light…)

5 people. One year. All graduate level. Bear in mind that, to write a AAA game in one year would require a bare minimum of 100 people, and you’ll kill them in that time. Most AAA games these days have a 150+ team, and the big hitters take around 2 years to write (Put another way; AAA games take around 300 years to make)

So, this game has some nice pics.

Of course, they don’t have any CODE yet. This is just a picture.

What are they promising?

“The game you’ve always wanted”

Now, that’s quite a tall order. But wait! They have a feature list!

” The game utilizes technology called “Marching Cubes” which allows us to generate fantastic new world terrain that is random and editable. “

Marching Cubes is a method of rendering voxel entities, but they don’t look like voxels. I’ve seen MANY tech demos of those, but, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been one, single game that has utilised it. It’s like neural networks; it’s one of those things University graduates think are a good idea, right until the moment that they start working for a game studio, and it gets slapped out of them.

• Beautiful, randomly-generated game worlds that are different every time you start a new Yogventure
• Fully shapeable terrain – with the ability for players to raise a mountain range or create a vast ocean; you can effortlessly shape your world however you imagine it

• A wealth of novel building materials, creatures, NPCs and items

• A rich underground to mine and explore – bristling with rare outcroppings of gems and crystals, hidden tombs and dark underground terrors that drop rare weapons and loot

• A fully-fleshed out crafting system

• An in-game physics engine that will even effect the blocks you place in your creations

• The ability to customise your own unique avatar or play as one of your favourite Yogscast characters

• Easy-to-use in-game modding API including in-game scripting
• Ability for modders to have a chance to get their work added to the game

Ahh yes. “We’ll let you mod it”. There’s another year’s worth of work, right there. Still if you’re a very experienced team, and you’ve done multiple previous games, and you have an idea of the massive risks and issues and sheer amount of code time this feature would take, then, well…

“This IS our first game”

Oh dear god. You’re fucked.

TL;DR? Writing computer games is really, really hard; and just because someone promises you they can write you the game you want, doesn’t mean they can. Not even if you give them $10,000!

I do wish every luck to Winterkewl, but, speaking from many years experience doing this sort of thing, I would say that your chances of success are… minimal, at best.

Exactly 365 days ago I released FortressCraft: Chapter 1 onto the Xbox Live Marketplace, and, in doing so, managed to (more or less) single-handedly steer XBLIG down a completely new path.

At the time when FortressCraft was released, 80MSP games were the only games. To consider 240 or 400 was generally considered absolute commercial suicide. (Case in point : Steam Heroes only shipped about 150 copies!)

When FortressCraft was released, it was considered that cross-promotion with the web was useless, that Xbox owners simply didn’t go onto Youtube or gaming websites.

When FortressCraft was released, it was widely held that, if your game wasn’t a Zombie or an Avatar-focussed game, it wouldn’t sell.

It took FortressCraft about a month before it became the highest-grossing XBLIG of all time, knocking I Maed a Gaem With Zombies In It!!!!111 off the top spot – I’ve seen a lot of people claim that it was going to be there forever. (I’ve also seen a lot of people claim FortressCraft would never be beaten, well, that didn’t last more than about 10 months before it was!)

Check out OneSek if you want some pretty graphs.

These days, of course, people shout “If it’s not a Minecraft clone, it doesn’t sell!”. What these people fail to realise is the basic fundamentals of writing a game to make money – “Write the game that people want to buy, not the game you want to sell”.

Me, I happened to get lucky. “Set out to write a game to rip off Minecraft and make loads of money”? Seriously, if I had that sort of foresight and clairvoyance, I wouldn’t be sitting here in my PJs, eating cereal, fluffling my cat, and writing this post. It just so happened that the game I wanted to write, and the game people wanted to buy matched up. Hopefully that’ll happen again before I run out of money!

Exactly 1 year ago, I had a highly-paid job in the AAA industry, working on audio code. It annoys me greatly when people say “FortressCraft was only written to create a quick buck”. As I’ve said before, writing a voxel landscape engine is one of those awesome challenges that certain types of people love to overcome. I’m one of those odd people. ;-)

I should probably touch on money, actually; as I said, I was very highly paid; having been in the games industry over a decade, and having worked on some of the best respected (i.e. ‘selling’) franchises there are. I certainly didn’t want for money, more for creative freedom. Now, FortressCraft has made a great deal of money, well over $2,000,000. But Microsoft need a cut of that. And so does the tax man. I’ve also (sadly) agreed to a very generous royalty-cut for the team (8 people helped out in total, to differing amounts), so at the end of the day, I actually end up worse off than I was when working full-time – with the added level of stress that if I sit in the garden and watch squirrels, I will actually run out of money quite quickly. Oh, you rascally squirrels, you.

Over the last year, FortressCraft has seen 8 major patches. It would have been 9, but I’m currently moving down from the North of England, back to the Midlands. It’s taking a very long time – I’m not just sticking everything in boxes and dragging it down, I’m going through 20+ years of detritus, and considering if I really want to keep it. Anyone who’s been to my house will know what an epic task this is! I actually have a stack of PSP games and UMD films some 4 feet tall, to take down and trade in. :/

It’s amazing to see how much has been added to the game, looking back. I was going to re-release Version 1 for download, so people can compare, but a few highlights:

• World Generation takes about 6 minutes, down from 2 hours
• Added 32 new blocks
• Added the Workshop, allowing in-game construction of animated mini-blocks
• Added literally billions of world customisation options
• Added a dozen new items as server rewards
• Automated builder and diggers
• Copy-and-paste
• Several game mode
• And each raft of new features was backed up with an optimisation drive, to keep the FPS up :(

For a more complete feature list, check out : Feature List. I can barely remember the entire feature list these days, it’s so big.

So where next? Obviously, Zombies and Gun Turrets.

However, I suspect I’m going to be reasonably quiet for a few weeks. I like (as much as I can) to keep everyone abreast of what’s going on, so!

• W/C 9th : 3 day investment meeting, move motorbike 200 miles, attend TheBigGame LAN and get feedback on FortressCraftWorld.
• W/C 16th : Hire a huge van, drive it ~600 miles (¬.¬), finish moving all the stuff out of my old place
• W/C 23rd : Clean old house, sort out gas, leccy, internet, bills. Sort out new place as much as possible.
• W/C 30th : OnLive! Finish achievements and TouchScreen support. Aim for RC1!

In the gaps in that schedule, I hope to get CP9 out. The final list for that lives here!

And for those of you who missed it the first time, here’s this year’s April Fool’s joke :

Sooo, I finally bought my first Kinect game. And a Kinect. After having worked on a cancelled Kinect dance game for some time, I can honestly say that the ‘magic’ of Kinect was lost a long, long time ago. Possibly in a galaxy far, far away.

So, how is it? The first thing I should probably point out is the dance mode; the game itself goes ‘Ho ho, the files are all corrupt, and this can sometimes be amusing!’; it’s not a serious part of the game or story, and has as much place in a Star Wars game as a ‘huge head’ mode does in a serious football game. I’ll leave you to decide on which side of the fence I sit there. Everyone seems to be tearing into this very light-hearted and self-deprecating mode, when it’s just a small diversion. (Oddly enough, if this was Japanese, everyone would love it. The WTF level is ever so high!)

The gameplay itself is surprisingly good; the podrace stuff is certainly the best since Star Wars Episode I: Racer, the Rancor arena mode is satisfying (You have to stomp up and down on the spot to walk around, vaguely feeling like a 6 foot tall Godzilla), and the dance mode is a carbonite-copy of the Dance Central gameplay. Light Saber battles are almost exactly like Infinity Blade’s battles; ie a sort of reverse simon says.

But the main campaign? Eeech. I don’t understand. This game has been in development for 3 years. It’s the best part of a year late. Like Gran Turismo or Halo, it’s not there to make money; it only exists for one reason, to sell Kinects and Xboxes. The game would have had little-to-no budget constraints.

So why for the love of god is this game SO unpolished? Right from the very start, the protocol droid’s walk animation appears to have physics turned on, so their feet jiggle and intersect with the floor as they move. I haven’t seen anyone’s walk cycle match up with their movement speed. Antialiasing appears to have gone for a wander. Entire cutscenes happen silently.

Ohhh, cutscenes. I would estimate, in an hour of play, you spend approximately 30 minutes watching really, really bad cutscenes. Actually, that’s not true. You spend 30 minutes ATTEMPTING to skip really bad cutscenes; the ‘hold your hand out to skip the cutscene code’ appears to have been done by an unhappy intern. My plaintive cries of “Xbox, please, please, skip this horrible cutscene”, whilst sinking to my knees, were totally ignored. Maybe I should have shouted “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” instead. But gameplay is basically a short sequence of saber/flying/shooting/whatever; maybe 15-30 seconds, followed by a 10-60 second cutscene. I ASSUME this is so the player doesn’t actually get worn out, but it really begins to grind when you get into a flow, then you’re ripped out of it to see a door open and droids run in.

But is it any good? Yes, yes it is. I had a lot of fun playing it last night, and I’m certainly aching from doing so this morning (as a ‘hardcore’ game player, I realised that the way to win most hard combats is to jump over things… which you do by jumping on the spot…. ouch!).

You find yourself reaching out with an open hand, grabbing a droid with the force, closing your hand into a fist, and slamming the droid onto the floor. The game isn’t tracking your fingers, but the urge to FINALLY force-grip and force-choke in a way that isn’t ‘Press X on the gamepad’ is utterly irresistible.

Edit : Oh! And it has full drop-in, drop-out coop. In my book, that means at least 4 extra points. Works perfectly!

Is it worth 50 quid? Now that I doubt. This is the problem with so many games these days, they’re just a string of gimmicks slapped together. Once the novelty has worn off, you’re not likely to go back, except to show the game off.

However, until the novelty wears off, I suspect I’ll be finding a little free time to master my lightsaber skills.

TL;DR : Possibly not worth a purchase, definitely worth a rental, definitely worth borrowing.

And now I need to go drive a car load of things 200 miles to my new house, in heavy snow. This post was just a little procrastination, to see if the snow would stop. Apparently not.

I’m sorry things have gone a little quiet; I’m in the process of both moving half way across the country, downsizing my life, and trying to re-arrange my life around no longer having a ‘normal’ job.

Part of this involves going through a great many boxes of very old crap, and deciding what I want to keep; sadly, I’m a bit of a hoarder, and have always been what’s known as a SINK; Single Income, No Kids. I also have a taste for small, Japanese, battery-powered gadgets. So my house is basically full of cool things. Some of them are now only cool in a very nostalgic sort of way; I mean, how cool is a 40meg, 3.5″ tape drive? (Back from the days when 40 megs was enough for a month’s worth of server backups!)

I’m also attempting to create a more efficient environment to work in; as you can see from this older image, my workspace is cramped, and really geared towards gaming, not an ideal multi-computer, multi-console development environment!

Old Workspace

The new desk is custom designed from modular bits from Ikea, and looks great; I’ve got a Kolon to protect the floor (and I assure you, the jokes NEVER get old). Over the next few weeks, I’m balancing both finalising the OnLive version, getting CP9 out, celebrating 1 year of FortressCraft AND attempting to play the occasional game.

Sadly, it’s at this point that I wish I had a whole team of people to delegate to; Martijn is getting on nicely with the [TECHNICAL THING TO ALLOW BETTER DRAW DISTANCES], but he has a proper life too; other than that, everything (barring art) falls onto my shoulders.

So I’m sorry if things are a little slow. Normal service will be resumed as quickly as possible. In the meantime, please do continue to tell me ideas and changes you’d like to see in FortressCraft; reading emails and the forums on my phone is something I’m never too busy to do!

As I continue to write Indie games, and thus actually interact with the public; my AAA-game protective shields of ‘DON’T TALK TO THE PUNTERS’ now removed, it never ceases to amaze me of people’s ignorance – “But Notch worked on Infiniminer!” being one of my particular favourites, closely followed by ‘But Notch invented procedural landscapes!’

So, as you all know, FortressCraft is a VoxGame. Sadly, this more defines it in terms of rendering than gameplay – but what is a voxel and why do I use them?

Well, let’s look at Wikipedia:

A voxel (volumetric pixel or, more correctly, Volumetric Picture Element) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap.

That’s pretty good! Now, I’ve seen people say “But you use polygons!”, which is rather missing the definition. Think of a pixel – if you have a white dot moving around the screen, is the pixel itself moving? Clearly not. Pixels can only change colour. What happens there is that a series of pixels light up in turn, thus creating the illusion of movement.

The same applies to Voxels; a voxel cannot move, or rotate, or scale. It is a fixed size (FortressCraft uses 1m3 voxels, for a vast range of performance reasons)

This is explained nicely using this video:

The landscape is voxels, rendered using polygons; the flying cubes are instanced objects, also rendered using polygons. I could use a software renderer, to do raycast, scanline rendering; they’re still voxels!

The first game I’m personally aware of to use voxels was Comanche Maximum Overkill, an arcadey helicopter game from 1992.
It’s hard to look back on that game, and realise that the landscape rendering presented there was nothing short of mind blowing. The reviews called it photorealistic. Nothing like it had been seen before. And it ran wonderfully, even on a 486!

(by the year 2000, voxel landscapes looked like this, albeit only in tech demos:)

Interestingly, the terrain generation techniques used here are almost identical to that of FortressCraft (or Minecraft); a combination of Perlin noise and/or fractal fault techniques.

Voxels are fast, really, really fast; as they don’t scale or rotate, your renderer can make many assumptions about rendering, and assumptions leads to fast rendering. (Also making an ASS out of U and… mptions.)

Voxels also have one other incredible advantage over traditional heightmaps or mesh worlds; deformation and alteration. You can alter them easily; an explosion can carve out a crater, vehicles can leave treadmarks, And unlike heightmaps, you can have caves and overhangs.  Magic Carpet shows how far you can really push traditional mesh-based landscapes, and voxels sail past that level of quality.

FortressCraft *could* have gone with a landscape system like Comanche’s; the engine would certainly do it; but the user experience would be awful. Building anything out of tiny cubes would take forever! Comanche also didn’t support any sort of terrain alteration; the voxels were like a blanket, floating in space; if you could have scraped away the top layer, you’d have been left with void.

Now, as far as I know there’s a gap between ‘92 and 2000, when VoxLap was created. VoxLap is probably best known these days as ‘The Ace of Spades Engine’, but it’s been around a long, long time: Here it is in 2000:

VoxLap brought one major innovation to this; if you have, say, a diving board in a swimming pool, and you cut the base off the board, the remainder will collapse and fall. (The cut off piece disappears, it doesn’t maintain physics)

Work has continued on VoxLap to this day, and it really can look rather nice!

Again tho, a creative-style game using this level of detail would be utterly beyond most people’s time – generating this stuff by hand would be dozens of hours of work.

Whilst not VoxGames in the tradional sense, in 1997, Blood and Shadow Warrior were released; both of these games using the Build engine; traditional Wolfenstein-style raycast walls for speed, but the objects were high-detail voxels:
.

I recall being amazed at the level of detail that you can squeeze out of voxel objects (This was 1997! That was detailed!), and actually began work on my own renderer at the time.

Sadly I soon came to realise that the limiting factor wasn’t rendering speed, nor the complexity of the rendering, but the creation of the objects was an utter nightmare. I believe Shadow Warrior used a tool to convert high-resolution objects into voxel objects, much the same way that Unreal3 (Gears of War, etc) generates it’s normal and detail maps from super-high resolution source objects. The newer Westwood games (Red Alert 2, Tiberian Sun) also used voxel-based vehicles, tho I’ve really no idea why!

Of course, I didn’t know that at that time. Games programmers, engineers, programmers in general – we have this desire to see how things work, to take them apart and rebuild them our own way.

I just want to write that bit down on it’s own, for future reference; I first started work on a voxel engine in 1997.

Things went quite quiet on the Voxel front for some time; like the Realtime Raytracing scene, it’s really a dead-end technology; video cards are getting faster at such a rate that utilising techniques like this simply doesn’t work. (As I put it upon seeing the latest state-of-the-art Realtime Raytracting demo, “That’s awesome! It looks almost as good as pixel shaders!”)

Then, in April 2008, something wonderful happened; the seed that was to spawn the biggest Indie smash hit of all time.

Woaah there Nelly. Not Minecraft. Infinifrag.

You could run around, fight other people, and build blocks.

Never heard of it? It grew and grew, and spawned a sequel. I’m sure you’ve heard of the sequel.

It was called Infiniminer.

It’s important to note that this game doesn’t use any sort of texture filtering and no mip-maps. We’ll come back to that.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to link this, official, image:

I’m beyond tired of people telling me that it’s bad for me to rip off Minecraft, as it’s still in progress, but it was perfectly ok for Notch to rip off Infiniminer, as it was abandoned. It was what we like to call ‘finished’.

Ahhh, Minecraft. How could we ignore the elephant in the room? (No offence meant, Markus)

Notch was inspired by the tech and look of Infimininer to write the game we now know as Minecraft. Which is incidentally a better name than Cavetest, even if half of it was nicked from it’s inspiration (Yeah, I went there).

Minecraft has proved to be so ridiculously popular and successful that it’s catapulted Voxel games back into the limelight. Lots of games only exist now because of Minecraft; FortressCraft being one of them – but games like 3D Dot Heroes, LootFest and Terraria only came into being because people realised ‘Creating is fun’. Well, creating with 1m3 blocks is fun. Creating with 1cm3 blocks would be like pulling teeth. Minecraft also achieved the mass of sales that allowed people to look past the visuals to the game underneath; no mean feat in these days of gorgeous AAA games.

Sadly, FortressCraft and it’s success has been the catalyst for a dozen crappy VoxGames on the XBLIG service; and at least 2 really good ones. Voxels were last year’s Zombies, and for that I do apologise. I can see the comments already : ‘OH BUT IT WAS MINECRAFT THAT INSPIRED ALL THOSE!’. I can certainly see how it could look that way, but for months before FortressCraft’s release, the XNA forums were full of ‘How can I do a Minecraft-style renderer?’.

They were told it was impossible, too hard, and that no-one would even buy a game like that, because Minecraft existed (Hell, some of the people I worked with on FortressCraft told me that!).  It took FortressCraft’s crazy-ass commercial success before the clones started to pour in, and the face of XBLIG was changed forever. (If you would like to argue this, feel free; however, if you’re not a member of the App Hub forum, and don’t follow the XBLIG community as a whole then, please, don’t bother; the internet is already full of uninformed comments on forums)

But I digress. This post is on technology!

So, both Minecraft and Infiniminer don’t use any sort of filtering or mipping.This is something that I have seen a million people attribute to ‘style’, but the truth is actually a long way from this.  Solving the mip-bleed issue is a *really* difficult task; it’s something we pretty much cracked on FortressCraft, leading to it not suffering from the nasty distance shimmer that plagues both Minecraft and Infiniminer.

That shimmer in action! Not retro; ugly. (shimmer being the texture equivalent of jaggies; high alias textures exhibit temporal artifacts when scaled down. I don’t really have a simpler way of phrasing it!)

Yes, ‘retro’ is a style, and I’ve no problem with the lack of bilinear filtering; that could be considered part of the art style (the truth is probably much more in the realms of technical difficulty and programmer art tho!), but not having MSAA and bi/tri/anisotropic filtering isn’t an aesthetic choice, it’s a technical one.

So what of the future?

Well, certainly not that! Whilst it’s cool, there’s so much smoke and mirrors going on to make it practical for a real game! (For instance, in that demo, if you were to cut both edges of a beam, it would continue to hover in the air; FortressCraft already has physics like that! Look in the top left of that pic to see what I mean)

However, that only holds true for this generation. My brain has already worked out the necessary algorithms needed to allow you to cut the ends off of diving boards, and allow them to become 3d objects, and collide correctly. Doing this current generation hardware would be unfeasible. Give me a computer fast enough, long enough dev time, and somewhere to stand, and I can move the Earth.

But what of the past? What started all this off? What was the FIRST creation game?

1991, 3d Construction Kit. Build and share your own worlds. Sound familiar? :-)

The scary thing is that 1991 doesn’t seem that long ago. I wonder where we’ll be in another 21 years?

I know I should probably do a flow chart, but hey. This blog entry is one part instructions, one part ‘how development involves’ and one part ‘Don’t forget to finish that sub feature’

Basic Zombie AI :

• Is player in range? Track player
• Is netplayer in range? Track netplayer (equal priority)
• Have we received damage? Consider changing target.
• No target in range; search for nearby brain. (AKA Attractors)
• No brain in range? Wander aimlessly. (Range is 128 metres for now)

Possible solutions:

• Zombie will eat the brain, and eventually remove it
• Zombies can only move towards brains that are more than (short_distance) away

So we’ll go with the second solution; this means that a pair of brains can lead to a zombie walking between them. That should work quite nicely.

• If player has optic camo on, zombies should ignore you

If you don’t want to play with the zombies, or you’re busy trying to build a nice zombie arena, then this provides the perfect opt-out. Long-term, this won’t stay.

• If the server turns the jetpack on, all the zombies explode
• If the server has the jetpack off, then all clients cannot use the jetpack

• Population control

Now this is a pain. I can’t just allow zombies to spawn continuously – “It’s only an Xbox”. I will implement a hardcap; probably 1024; but this is going to be a severe performance drain. (As an aside, if you have a current world that is pushing the limits of the Xbox, then DON’T expect to slap in 1,000 Zombies and have the game run nicely!)

• Falling damage for zombies
• Automated gun turrets for zombie killing
• Saw blades

CP9 won’t have zombies for everyone, only keyboard users. Here’s your handy cheat sheet of object types.

• Monsteremitter – spawn zombies, unless jetpack is on
• Braain – zombies head towards this
• AutoTurret – shoots at nearby zombies
• Sawblade – damages zombies it touches
• ZombieHead – override zombie head with a custom object
• ZombieArm – override zombie arms with a custom object
• ZombieLeg – override zombie legs with a custom object
• ZombieBody – override zombie body with a custom object

There is a VERY large possibility that FPS mode will be rolled into this, and that I will start requiring resources to build things like gun turrets in the near future. We shall see!

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Unless you’re a spam bot. Just… wow.

I do not hate everything. Allow me to explain.

• Borderlands has a sucky end-game, and they stopped doing DLC
• Minecraft has totally broken minecarts
• WoW’s community is utterly dire, and the game is too easy
• Bioshock’s Vitachambers trivialise the difficulty in the game
• Portal was far too short
• Portal 2 didn’t have enough puzzles, and had too much story
• Dungeon Defenders has a poor selection of drops from anything other than Glitterhelm, leading to massive repetition and grinding.
• Team Fortress 2 is repetitive and frustrating
• Orcs Must Die’s difficulty is just on the wrong side of frustrating.

A friend recently emailed me with some surprise over my question about “if Zombie spawners should be activated by lasers”; he pointed out that’s there’s no concise feature list on the website. I’ve not thought about doing it in a while, so now’s a good time. ‘now’ being on my iPhone, as a passenger in a car, so I’m unable to satiate my urge to code!

• Enormous, completely destructible landscape
• Fully-customisable landscapes, with settings for elevation, multiple biomes, tree, cave and water settings.
• User adjustable visual settings let you choose the look that you prefer.
• 64 blocks types, with more being added all the time.
• 64 high-resolution micro blocks, allowing you to create detailed, realistic, 3d structures.
• Any one of 30 custom animation and behaviour presets can be assigned to your blocks.
• Assign functional behaviours to create interactive objects including doors and ladders.
• Provide an automated tour of your world to visitors using the tour carts.
• Add multiple lighting effects to enhance your creations.
• Use one of 20 different weapons to clear out and construct your world.
• Utilise robotic minions and the powerful copy-and-paste to minimise the tedious grind.
• State of the art surface and water shaders bring your world to life.
• A portable teleporter allows you to move quickly to and from your workshop, in which your micro blocks are created.
• Visit and rate almost 3 quarters of a million worlds using the extensive server browsing option.
• Create your own amazing world, gain votes from friends and strangers, and earn exclusive in-game rewards.
• Design intricate movement and machinery using the inbuilt tools; use the microblocks to customise this to look like absolutely anything.
• Trampolines!
• Rayguns!
• Multiple game modes:
• Creative – improve your server to gain more votes
• Hunt – one person is invisible and has heat vision, and must kill all the other players on the server. Last player alive becomes the Hunter in the next round!
• Spleef – create arenas and fight with the Spleef gun; only certain blocks are destroyable, and all other blocks kill you. Discs of Tron, brought into the new millennium.
• FreezeTag – the classic childhood game; one person has the freezegun; gain points by freezing others!
• F.P.S – Fight, Protect, Survive. One part Tower Defence, One part Survival, one part Real Time Strategy. This game mode is currently under development.
• Everything is customisable (or planned to be!). Your world will look very different to everyone else’s! (This includes doors, machinery and mobs!)
• Regular updates : about 1 a month!

Coming soon!

• Custom Zombies and Monsters
• Splitscreen support
• Specific player permissions using the Magic Wand of Empowerment
• Logic gates, utilising the laser machinery
• Power grid system to run your machinery
• Ore seams
• User-defined signposts
• 32 players
• Weather
• Plus much more!

Did I manage to list at least one feature that you weren’t aware of? :)

(And more importantly, did I forget anything?)