Block Rockin’ Progress

I approached Anthony, a long-term Darkwind player with a talent for texturing vehicles, to see if he’d like to get involved as the texture artist in Block Rockin’. So now there’s a team of two ;-)

We’re working on a number of themes (Neolithic, Circus, Deep Space, etc.) and therefore different textures for all of the game objects for each of these themes. I have also purchased some music from the excellent Shockwave Sound archive. It turns out streaming music on the iPhone is quite a drain on its puny resources however, so we’re stuck with 30-second song loops.

 

Game-On

We’re going to be hosting the academic/industry crossover conference ‘Game On‘ here in Galway this year. My academic colleague Colm asked me to help out on the organising team, which I’m happy to do since I know he’ll run a tight ship and I’ll only need to row in behind him ;-)

It was only really last year that I learned that valid academic research can include computer games – this was somewhat a revelation to me, as it gives me a way to combine my two major interests into a ‘win-win’. Last year I was at a ‘Serious Games’ conference in Portugal, with a PhD student talking about our work with neural networks and image processing in the development of a ‘social agent’ for online communication tools; I also presented a paper at an AI conference in which I talked about the use of Genetic Algorithms in Darkwind to train the computer to drive races more competitively. You can download the research paper here.

This is a win-win I plan to continue with.. I’ll probably put something together about the collaborative ‘virtual whiteboard’ tools in VRCGroups, for the Game On conference itself.

3D Arkanoid

Of the various ideas I have been prototyping, one showing some promise is Block Rockin’ .. it’s a 3D Arkanoid or Brick-Out type game controlled by physics. Using the tilt sensors on the iPhone is a great way to control it too – your bat moves around a circular platform. The blocks are destroyed after a couple of strikes, but they also tumble about and (if they’re in a wall or henge configuration) you get quite a pleasing level of destruction.

Game Ideas

There’s a few loose ideas for iPhone games that I’m toying with at the moment. Shiva does a nice job of physics (it has the ODE physics engine integrated) so some kind of a sandbox physics game could be nice. It all depends on the limitations of the iPhone of course – from what I’ve seen, there is a severe limit on the number of separate draw calls that can be made if you want a decent frame rate. The number of unique moving objects is apparently much more of a limit than the actual number of polygons in those objects.

‘Block Thrower’ – I have prototyped an idea where you swipe to throw wooden blocks into the scene, where they collide with other blocks. Pleasant enough, but not exactly a core game concept yet. Something along the lines of a 3D ‘crush the castle’ might work.

Some kind of turn-based squad-level combat game could work. There are a few games like this already available for the iPhone of course; but I have learned through Darkwind that this is a niche within the turn-based genre that is relatively popular. I would use the Darkwind critical hits table, one of the coolest things it has – seeing a textual description of injuries is so much better than being told ‘you hit your enemy for 5 damage’.

Back in the mid-1980s one of the games I wrote for the BBC Micro/Archimedes was called ‘Killer’ – a squad-level turn-based shooter where you could design the maps for your friends, define the routes that the computer-controlled enemies would take, and then level-up your characters and watch them die. We need perma-death, obviously. Killer was one of the most popular of my games amongst my friends.

People love to design things. Community can evolve from sharing maps, working together and participating in ‘player versus computer’ multiplayer combats. So this ‘Killer’ game would definitely need to have a scenario-designing component and some form of AI scripting component. Perhaps you could also script the AI defenders of your base if your base was attacked by other players.