I would like to know this to understand why some games like Mario is still playing today and because no other. This is to implement in future game projects.
What are the factors most important to developing a game?
Gameplay or Graphics? Both?
EDIT:
It's Possible combine these two?
Gameplay, combined with the often-missed concept of ease of play. If I can't pick up a game and make progress in a couple minutes I probably won't go back to it after I've been away. It's just disheartening to have to relearn how to play a game. Mario tended to have simple interfaces, one or two commands only, which makes it easy to come back to. Comes back to this: http://xkcd.com/484/
Gameplay. So many modern games just seem to spend their entire budget on developing an incredible graphics engine and forget to include plot / interesting gameplay. One example is Doom 3. It's kind of interesting, and spooky to play, but it's SO REPETITIVE. Tunnel after dark, deserted tunnel... compare it to Doom 2 which had a plethora of different types of missions. Doom 2 had crap graphics, but there's a reason people keep playing it.
That being said, a big reason people play old games is from nostalgic value. The gameplay might not be particularly excellent, but it does bring back memories, so that automatically adds value to the game.
Graphics are, of course, also important... you can't get away with 16-color 2D sprites anymore (or at least, not as easily). Rather than spend the entire budget on graphics, though, look into an OK graphics engine, and spend some time making the game:
Fun to play.
Have replay value.
Easy to pick up.
The most important is that you ENTERTAIN your target users.
Some users want gameplay. Some users are wow-ed by just graphics.
The think the real importance is addictiveness, which, of course, is rather hard to program in. However, I think the key to that is a task which is very easy to "almost" achieve. It's the "I'm almost there; just one more try" effect that keep most people coming back.
This might be a bit old-school for most peoples liking, but I'd have to say gameplay.
Put it this way, I still find myself running old SNES games I loved on an emulator these days, but I can't see myself playing a game that had great graphics but rubbish gameplay after it has had its time.
Both are preferable, but it's gameplay that generates the classics of each era.
Game play is what gets you hooked, especially if there's a very low learning curve such as pacman or breakout. Graphics is what sucks you into downloading / buying a game. Sometimes nice graphics is a demo don't necessarily translate to a nice game. I've seen so many games that have beautiful front screens, background, etc. but the actual game graphics such as characters, objects, etc. suck. Generally it's a good idea to think about your game design to make it easy to understand and play initially, then it gets harder with later levels by adding bosses, threats, bonuses, increasing speed, etc. Then fine tune how the game looks with snazzy graphics.
I would say it depends. For indie games, gameplay is the most important because that's what will keep your players entertained. obviously for big budget games, you need both to be successful. But as long as your graphics are clean and neat, players shouldn't complaint too much.
Distinguish between designing the game and programming the game. For a programmer, a game is simply an application, no different from any other kind of software. Game design is a whole 'nother beast of a different color :) If you can program well, you can program a game well.
Good game designers are the same kind of rare creative as good storytellers--who aren't necessarily always good writers.
Gameplay in terms of being easy to get the basics but difficult to master would be one factor, for sure. For example look at Diablo II for something with some nice basic elements but also some elements to keep playing for a long long time, like horadic cube recipes for example.
Replayability is another factor. How much does the game change if I pick a different starting character, assuming a game with this style like an action RPG or FPS or beat-em-up(Street Fighter II)? Is the game enjoyable from different views? How good is the AI if I have computer opponents in a real-time strategy game and how many settings are there?
Graphics can be a nice complement but just because a game looks nice doesn't mean I'll spend hundreds of hours on it. Titan Quest would be a nice example of taking the Diablo II style and adding some eye candy that makes for a nice game.
Nostalgia is a big factor in why some old games are still played like the old Super Mario games. The memories of playing those old games and seeing how cool it was to get to the next level can be why some will go back again and again. It is the reason why I still play my SNES at times.
Related
One pet peeve I have with a lot of older rock music records from the 60's and 70's
is they sometimes are slightly of of tune with the standard a440 reference pitch, so playing along on my guitar sounds bad. Right now I manually adjust the pitch of the track by ear in Audacity, but this often takes some time. I was hoping there was something out there that could detect the frequency of the first few notes of a music file, analyze that and see how far it is from any standard A440 note, and then you could use that number to determine how much you needed to make the track sharp or flat to match A440 tuning.
Is it possible to create an app that automatically retunes slightly out-of-tune music to be A440 with Javascript?
Yes. Check out this pitch detection demo by Chris Wilson.
There are some big caveats though, and they don't really have anything to do with JavaScript.
Voice Selection
What instruments do you care about? Obviously wideband stuff like percussion is atonal... but it's still going to turn up in your audio, and will have a pitch. How about the difference between a voice and wind instruments? A lot of vocalists will go off pitch intentionally. You will need to use bandpass fliters to get the range you care about, at a minimum.
Original Intonation
What about the instruments being in tune in the first place? "Another one bites the dust" comes to mind as a rock record from the 70s that starts off terribly out of tune... and maybe intentionally.
Pyscoacoustics and Harmonics
Sometimes we hear things that aren't really there. If I play a trombone down a scale, to the very bottom of its range, it will actually stop producing a fundamental... yet because I was playing a familiar scale downward, us humans will still perceive one. This might not throw off your detection by a lot, but it will somewhat, particularly on those atonal-but-not-really percussion instruments.
In summary, this is possible but it's going to be a lot of work. Please come back and post a link once you've done this!
I'm a beginner in programming world, never touch any programming language before. But last 3 days I decide to try make a flash game, I looked some tutorial about AS3, try it, yes I understand a little bit. But I'm still confused about this:
How do I know or to decide what codes I write first, what next? example: I want to add a hero, then a enemy, then a tiles, then a background, event listener.
Is it okay if I write code randomly, example: first I add enemy, then add tiles, add background, then add hero, etc?
What is the best way to completely learn all AS3 codes, especially about flash game dev?
I'm now in frustration mode, so I decide to learn from you all who have mastered AS3.
Check out this guide by Michael James Williams. I was in the same situation as you, and that guide helped me a lot. It goes through a lot of the basics and does a good job of explaining each step.
To answer some of your questions, the order in which you code stuff doesn't matter too much. You can always go back and adjust your old code, and you'll definitely end up doing that at some point.
For learning AS3 syntax, just look through some examples and tutorials, and don't be afraid to read the official AS3 docs. They might be intimidating at first, but once you start learning some of the terminology, they're very helpful.
you can try some video tutorials like these
http://www.lynda.com/ActionScript-tutorials/AS3-language-fundamentals/123492/129625-4.html
http://www.lynda.com/Flash-tutorials/Building-Flash-Games-Starling/98951-2.html?srchtrk=index:1%0Alinktypeid:2%0Aq:flash%2Bgames%0Apage:1%0As:relevance%0Asa:true%0Aproducttypeid:2
If you're frustrated NOW, are you sure that you're ready to invest a couple of YEARS in becoming half-good with Actionscript? You'll have to like learning from your mistakes (an excellent way to learn, actually), because you will make thousands of them and they will cost you thousands of hours!
Do NOT write 'randomly' unless you want to greatly lengthen your time to mastery. Everything you do should have a purpose. I would start (if I were starting again) by giving myself a series of the smallest challenges: make an object appear; make it disappear; make it appear in one second from now; make it appear when I tap a key or click my mouse; make it move across the screen; make it move back; make it follow my mouse... etc.
There are many hundreds of basic programmatic elements like these that will add to your growing grasp of logic, data-structures and language. There are usually many ways to accomplish the same task -- learn and practice all of them.
Luckily, the Internet is full of good tutorials and references to Actionscript, and some decent forums like this one where you can get help.
I know this is king of old but someone might still find this useful.
I think that if you are serious about game development and also want to learn some techniques that are independent of the platform (Flash/AS3 in this case) you should use a framework.
For Flash the best game framework is the Starling along with Feather for UI.
They run on Stage3D which means that run on the GPU not the CPU which make them very fast.
With Starling you can also create mobile games that run in AIR so I think it really is something to consider.
On hsharma.com you can find a free video tutorial that goes through everything you need to know to get starting with game development so it should answer the question on how to create enemies, backgrounds, etc.
Hope this helps someone.
My colleague and me made an HTML 5 iPad game ( http://braille.gandzo.com/ ) and we would like to upgrade it, and our framweork is not enoguh, for what we want. Some of the things we would change are: graphics update, animations/"effects", multi-player, achievements and so on. The game would stay 2d. Now, as far as I understand, both Unity and Cocos would be good for this task, with Unity having the advantage of being multi-platform.
What I want to know is are there unknown qualites/"flaws" to these two programs which would influence my decision (maybe even by choosing something else). Examples that come to mind are "Unity is too complicated/has too much unneeded options/hoops because it's made with 3d in mind" or "Cocos is significantly more suited for 2d games".
If the game is pretty much in 2d... I would suggest for cocos2d. I am working on cocos2d for past 1 and half years... I don't have experience in Unity but ya my colleagues who used to work on Unity had so many problems with animation, texturing etc.
BTW I was not able to play you game on my Chrome. :)
I can see how this might not be a good enough question but I have just embarked on a journey to build the first decent Game Engine for HTML5 canvas that is cross browser and most of all fast. The only problem is I am very new to game design and don't know many tricks of the trade that will help me.
The game I am currently implementing for which the engine will be taken out of is a tile based 2D platformer with MANY tiles (around 3500). I'll start with some tips that I've thus far learnt.
Redraw Regions - only redraw areas that change
Avoid unnecessary function calls (Firefox does not like too many of them)
Use the DOM if you can
Chunk tiles together for quicker access
Other things I am looking for are things like Terrain Generation, Lighting in 2D, Maps, quick server communication. If this is too vague, I will try and close it. Just want to know game design better.
Links/resources would be good. Especially for physics or important maths.
Only draw stuff that's visible, that means only draw the tiles etc. that are currently on the screen. For tiles that's fairly easy, if you got lots of entities you may either want to use a sliding window to keep a list of screen local objects or use such a thing like a quadtree.
Since there's no easy/fast way to copy one canvas to another, redrawing regions is really complicated, since you can't keep a buffered state of (for example) the background if it hasn't changed. So keeping a list of "dirty rectangles" will be a computational overhead for sure.
The whole topic is very broad, even handling the FPS rate can be quite difficult, this question contains some good links and answers on that topic:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1589/fixed-time-step-vs-variable-time-step
You've also mentioned server communication, if you want to do some multiplayer you'll have to care about even more stuff, you can't trust the client, need to worry about bandwidth, synchronization issues, interpolation on the client etc.
I've done some rather simple 2D games in the past, most of them are not in JavaScript but they should give you some hints:
http://github.com/BonsaiDen/Norum
(Platformer engine demo in C, camera zones, moving platforms)
http://github.com/BonsaiDen/Tuff
(2D Platformer in Java, got never finished, powerups and some cool stuff)
http://github.com/BonsaiDen/NodeGame-Shooter
(2D multiplayer space shooter written in JS, using Node.js for the server and WebSockets for communication)
For some final words I'd say that you should start small, like for example just do a scrolling tile map first, then add a player, then rewrite the whole thing. You want write the perfect engine just from scratch it will take many iterations until you find out all the quirks and tricks.
If you want more precise answers you should open questions on the single components you run into troubles with.
hello i want to develop AI car(opponent) in car race game what should be my direction to develop them with less complexity because i don't have any idea. because the player car is moving on the scrolling track plz suggest me should i have to use relative motion or way point concept but that should also be change on the scrolling track (i.e. player car movement)
You can have a good start by browsing/using the opensteer library.
A simple first pass would be to just "cheat" and keep the opponent car within X distance of the human car, and then slow it down if the human ever gets too far behind. You vary this behaviour with the difficulty level. This is kind of how Super Mario Kart for SNES works.
If you want something more realistic then I think egarcia's opensteer idea sounds like an interesting way to go.
There is a lot of explanation on this page, with java demonstration (applets) to explains the differents solutions.
regards
Guillaume