History, Part 3 - Early tests. Finding our way.

Here I'm going to include some ugly things. Early tests and concept drawings.

Here is the first card test. I scanned a real card and made a vector based version of it using Illustrator. Love the card back, but we can't use it in the game because of copyright.

 

Perhaps someday we'll try to get permission from Kem. By the way, Kem makes the best plastic playing cards. They last a very long time and are flexible. Buy them!

Here are some early table felt tests. They were painted in Photoshop. I quickly realized I didn't have the skill to paint something I'd be happy with so I ended up rendering the table top in 3d to get the final look for our table.

We ended up with something like this

Our final look has shading that goes over the table and the cards. Some people may not notice while playing, but wow, does it look worse when we turn it off. 

Perhaps the pig can hold the table? We are trying to find our design...

Here we were trying to find the look for the table. Perhaps having the pig hold the deck. In the end, it just takes up space, gets in the way and throws the balance off.

Now we've included the first card back design.

You can check out our final results in History, Part 2. 

Here are some of the awards drawings:

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History, Part 2

To continue from History, Part 1.

Originally we developed Mad Pig Klondike for Facebook. The Facebook version is much further along than the first version we'll be releasing on the iPhone. There were awards and card backs that are unlocked with achievements. We'll get those into the iPhone version in time, but we decided to ship the game as soon as it was playable and then keep adding more features. We've even got some really cool ideas we are keeping for a surprise.

Mad Pig Klondike pretty much sat on the shelf for a year when we were waiting for the server-side, backend stuff to be written. At that point, we decided to ship on the iPhone, as I was interested in learning how to code for iOS. I wasn't  (and am not) too interested in server backend programming. If you know a super-genius client/server, Facebook programmer that has some free time, let us know! We are still going to release on Facebook eventually, but for now, we are focusing on iOS.

The Facebook version was done completely in Flash. One thing I've noticed is, I can get much smoother animation on the iPhone. We also changed the interface and design some as we reformatted for the iPhone.

Here are examples of some of the differences in the design and art...

Facebook version:

iPhone Version:

With the iPhone version, we wanted to simplify the interface on the game board. There are only two buttons and they can be hidden. Well, actually there are three... you can tap the score area to zoom in and out a bit.

Mad Pig Klondike is programmed in Objective C and uses the incredible Cocos2d for iPhone framework. Cocos2d is free, actively developed and awesome! When I was researching and deciding whether to use one of many frameworks, or to build my own, I found Cocos2d to be very similar to Flash's AS3. Another big plus is it's all written in Objective C, so I would be using the same language as if I were programming from scratch.  Cocos 2d also has an excellent support community with forums and Riq, the developer of Cocos2d for iPhone, is very active on the forums. I have to say, the framework really is nice and saved me a lot of time.

Some other cool products I'm using that are worth a mention, and a purchase, are...

Texture Packer - sprite sheet creation tool.
Glyph Designer - a bitmap font creation tool.
Particle Designer - a particle system editor.

These tools help immensely and are reasonably priced.

It's been slow going, but we are finally getting close to launch. Our day-jobs are very demanding, we've had some false starts and a bit of a learning curve. Many times, the day jobs become day and night jobs, so free time for working on the game can be hard to come by. There is also family, a dog, a girlfriend, friends and other real life stuff getting squeezed in there. We have a lot of ideas for Klondike, and even more for other games. We hope you bear with us and enjoy the fruits of our hard work. We also love to hear feedback, so contact on www.madpiggames.com if you like.

One more thing...

We've had beta testers for awhile now and the good news is, we don't seem to have to keep asking them to play the game! I'm thinking that's a good sign.

Next history post, I'll bring out some early concepts, tests and drawings.

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History, Part 1

I thought I'd post some history....

Early 2008 or late 2007, B and I decided we wanted to make games. I started teaching myself Flash and AS3 (Action Script 3, an object-oriented programming language). I'm not really a programmer (I'm an animator), but I was learning programming. It was pretty hard at first, but I really got to like AS3. I also really grew a hatred of Flash, but it was pretty much the only game in town for making small web games. Flash is such a clunky and buggy piece of software.

I decided to pick something that I would enjoy learning and might be easier to do. I started with an old school 2d shooter-style game.

Glactin

Here are a few different versions and experiments I tried out..
(click once on the flash area and use the arrow keys to move around and the spacebar to fire)

Furthest along:
http://madpiggames.com/Glactin/

I experimented with different blur effects. The CPU overhead is high on these:
http://madpiggames.com/Glactin/GlactinBlur1.html
http://madpiggames.com/Glactin/GlactinBlur2.html

Here are a couple of star tests:
http://madpiggames.com/Glactin/GlactinStarTest.html
http://madpiggames.com/Glactin/GlactinStarTest2.html

All the motion in Glactin was done in code.
I learned a lot working on Glactin. I learned how to move objects in angles. It's easy to move things straight up, down, right or left, but you have to use math to move them at an angle. I also learned how to draw everything in an off-screen buffer and show the image after drawing. This improves quality and performance.

Once I'd learned enough programming to feel like I could tackle something more complex, B and I decided to work on a game with more appeal than a 2d shooter. Perhaps someday, I'll go back and make a 2d shooter. I do like them and we've got lots of ideas on how to make a fun one.

We decided to work on a Tower Defense-style game.

Here you can see the work we did on Robot Attack! Advanced Tower Defense.

http://www.iomonster.com/PTD/PTD.swf

This is a programmer's testing version. That's why you'll see buttons to the side. When you hit Play and go to the game playfield, you'll see very rough programmer art. We would have replaced everything with higher quality artwork.

I learned how to work with sound effects and music in Flash on this one. I also learned how to do pathfinding so the bad guys can walk around and find a path through the game board. Oh, and let's not forget isometric game design, collisions and a matrix for the movements. The 2d board to the right would not be visible to the player. I used it to calculate the movements. Like I said, I'm not a programmer, so I had no experience in any of this stuff.

You might notice the web link at the bottom is www.fatpiggames.com. We originally considered Fat Pig Games, but felt some of our players might not like that name, so we made our pig CRAZY! We really are much happier with Mad Pig Games.

In the game board page, you can send bad guys and place units on the board. The bad guys currently collide.

I'm writing this and bringing out the old, unfinished work so you can see how projects evolve, change and sometimes get dropped. For us, each project was worth the time and effort as it helped us learn and refine what we were after.

While we were working on the Tower Defense game, and realizing how much work the game we had planned would become, a friend of ours suggested we do a less complex and more popular game. A solitaire game.

We decided to work on a Klondike Solitaire game.  More about Mad Pig Klondike Solitaire (our first game on the iPhone) later...

After we finished the first version of Klondike, we started experimenting with another game idea with a couple partners. We ultimately decided to not finish it, but here you'll find our test:

You'll need to click on it and then you can use the corner navigator, or arrows, to navigate. You can also click and hit the spacebar to center on whatever is selected or where you clicked. The planets are random every time you refresh the page

The rectangular buttons on the right: First one does nothing. Second shows a prototype list view. Third one shows a radar view prototype. The bottom two show a possible effect when you lose some equipment during game play. 

http://www.madpiggames.com/GalacticConquest/test/GalacticConquest.html

B did most of the planets and I did the programming and star field graphics/programming.

We will post more in-progress art and tell more of the story of Mad Pig Klondike Solitaire in future posts. 

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