Finite Improbability

I have a big game in the works. By “big” I mean much larger than any single person should reasonably expect to be able to finish soon. I’d like to see it done before I graduate, which should be in about two years. So I have a big idea that I want to accomplish in two years, working part time. I’m a big believer in constraints helping to focus creativity, but this really seems like it is pushing it. One aspect that helps here is I can look at the idea of doing this game in 3d and easily say “it won’t give me much but eye candy, and will multiply the time spent on art by at least a factor of ten”. That makes the decision to go 2d with this dead simple, which saves me a world of time. Without my two year deadline I’d probably decide to go ahead and do it since it would look better, which would probably push my time-to-completion from two years to never.

Another useful constraint is that the whole thing has to theoretically work on my Macbook. That means relatively light graphics requirements and controls operated with a single-button mouse. Sure I’ll probably get an external mouse later on for testing (I want the gameplay to be fast paced, so a trackpad might not be the best of tools), but limiting myself to a single button leaves me with the possibility of running this in an applet and ensures that the gameplay can’t get too complicated.

Even with all of those advantages, this is still a very complex game. I’m using Java so I don’t have to worry about manual memory management or deployment, so those aren’t elements of the project’s complexity. There’s a lot of well-designed Java libraries I can draw from, and it even has neat features like webstart so people can play the game without installing anything. I’m also using Scala, which has functional programming and actors and all kinds of other tools to manage complexity.

Despite all of this, I think I’m still going to need to be careful about how I go about writing this game. If I try to simply attack it directly I could easily get lost in the complexity of the game. This is compounded by the fact that I don’t know a whole lot about Scala or the programming libraries I want to use other than that they look like they offer useful tools.

So, my current goal is a lot smaller, mini-games that can be easily completed and are based on a subset of the big game. These should ideally be projects that can be finished in a week or two, and will leave me with code that I can easily port to the big game.

One aspect of my larger game is going to involve swarms of units. These swarms will have in-game objectives in the form of an in-game object that they should cluster around and perform some action based on their overal purpose. To get that idea off the ground I’m going to work on a game where you control ants trying to invade a picnic. The idea is to take a swarm of ants coming out of your ant mound and try to gather up as much of the food on the blanket as possible in the time limit before the picnic-goers return. The player can set targets that include a notion of how many ants should head toward that target, and the individual ants take care of moving toward the target, gathering a bit of food, and returning to the nest with it. Larger items of food give you more bits, and things that are further from the mound take longer to gather. The goal here is to have a rather basic game that relies on something fundamentally similar to the behavior I want for the big game.

Since this is a learning experience, here’s what I hope to get out of “Picnic Invasion”:

• A basic understanding of background and sprite loading
• Basic sprite manipulation (rotation and transformation for ants, scaling for food items and obstacles)
• Basic navigation
• An idea of how I want to structure the rendering and game update pipelines
• An understanding of actors (used to implement the individual ants in the swarm)

This is probably going to be a bigger project than most of the other small games, since a good portion of the list above will be reused practically without modification in later games. Still it seems like a great place to start. I’ll be documenting progress as I get things going.