Single Player Games

Rate It: Carpe Slimum

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:48:17 GMT

Please make sure you've at least played the game before you rate it!

Carpe Slimum is a simple yet complex strategy board game by Crispy. Simple to play,but with the potential for strategic depth that is common in Crispy's games. Maneuver your slimes to engulf the slimes of your enemies and the player with the most slimes at the end wins the game.

Read the full review at BYOND Strategy.

Rate It: Plight

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:47:30 GMT

Iccusion Entertainment has been popping out cool games for years, and Plight was one of their early creations, originally released in mid-2005. Since then it has gone through numerous patches and visual overhauls in order to become the game now.

The objective in Plight is to get the most points, and you acquire points through connecting letters into chains in order to form words. No straight lines required. The better the words you find, the more points you get, although the exact formula for determining their value isn't specified anywhere that I've found. The game is played in rounds, and each round gets faster and faster until the end.

You can play Plight by yourself, or you can recruit some friends to play with on either free-for-all or team mode.

Read the full review at BYOND Casual.

A Look At Geekdash

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:36:57 GMT

The real review has been submitted to BYOND Casual. Please make sure that you've at least tried the game before you rate it.

Geekdash was created by Acebloke sometime around '05. The goal of the game is to move your little circle from the bottom of the map to the top of the map without running into anything else on the way. Exciting intro, right?

When it comes right down to it, I'm hard-pressed to write a review about this game because its just such a shallow concept that there's hardly anything to write about. The entire game is written out in a few paragraphs on the game's hub page, and all that's left is to see how far you can get.

Fun Factor

If you're the kind of person who likes puzzle games that test you to see how far you can get, then you might like this game. I believe every play through is randomly generated as far as obstacle placements go, so there's at least a little variety. But is it fun? Well, the game really doesn't have a lot of depth. There are only four obstacles that you'll ever encounter, and once you've encountered them all there's nothing left to discover (that I'm aware of). So your only goal is to get as far as you can so as to record ever-higher scores.

Control and Gameplay

The controls are very basic - you don't need your keyboard, you only need the mouse. You can click on any tile adjacent to where you are located, and it'll move you to that tile, and move everything else on the map at the same time. If your move caused you to run into one of the obstacles on the map, the game is over. Which means that you'll have to quit the game and reload it if you want to play again, incidentally.

There are four obstacles that you'll encounter as you progress through the game, namely, Arrows, Blocks (pits), Random!s and Halos. Arrows move each turn in the direction that they are pointing. Blocks, or pits as I prefer to call them, just sit there, so you need to go around them. Random!s take a random step in any direction each turn. Halos are very similar to Random!s, except they will only enter unoccupied tiles.

Graphics

Taking a quick look at the screenshots will immediately give you the idea that this is not a glitzy game. In fact, it doesn't even have color - the whole game is drawn in shades of gray. If you're looking for pretty pictures, steer clear, folks!

Sound

This game is dead silent. No sounds to speak of. Best have your own background music handy.

Replayability

As I said earlier, the arrangement of the obstacles for each level appears to be random. Given that, you can play through as much as you want and it'll always be somewhat difference. However, given that you'll essentially encounter the same thing every game, it doesn't really make that much difference.

Conclusion

Geekdash might be fun for a few minutes at best, or if you're one of those die-hard strategy/puzzle gamers, you might be inclined to strive for a high score that will take you a few play-throughs. Personally, I think I'd have a headache if I played this game for more than an hour.

Single Player, Multiple Players

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:53:47 GMT

I commented briefly about this on the BYOND developer forums, and I wanted to expand on the idea a little along with posting it where it'll be more visible. The question is, if BYOND is designed to support multi player natively, and this is perhaps its greatest strength as it doesn't have a whole lot to offer as far as single player games go than most other game development engines, then why bother making any single player BYOND games at all?

Here's the thing. Suppose you design a game. Your game just happens to be the most awesome game ever. But it only works with multiple players. So you host your game online and set it up like a spider web waiting for players to log in and get hooked. The problem is that people log in, look around, find no one to play with, and then log back out.

Now, suppose instead of designing your game for multi player, you designed your game for single player, but with multi player support. Now you host your game, and you find that people logging in get hooked on the single player aspects of the game. These may only be fun for a little while, but as long as it keeps the players engaged long enough for other players to show up, then the multi player aspects begin to be visible, and the players will continue to have fun playing the game with other players.

Poor me, no one to play with.

A lot of the BYOND games that I've seen are designed purely for multi player. There is simply nothing for the player to do unless there are other people to play with. No one plays these games. No one plays these games BECAUSE no one plays these games. If these games could keep players occupied while waiting for other players to show up, then suddenly there would be other people to play with.

Furthermore, when you allow people to play single player, you allow them to develop an interest in the game on their own, and this can result in the creation of small gaming communities. People getting together to talk about the game. If these games have multi player support as well, then these communities can serve as a means for people to get in touch and find other players, or perhaps set up hosting schedules.

The bottom line: build single player games! Even if what you truly want is a multi player game, giving it a strong single player aspect will help your game to get off the ground!

Othello

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:21:21 GMT

Xoiden posted in BYOND Casual about having "finally got some updates done" on his Othello game, and the end result is pretty fair. It could use a 4.0 interface overhaul, but the actual gameplay is decent. I played against the AI and lost. The fact that this game even has AI is good and qualifies it to be a part of the single player games guild, but the fact that the AI beat me is even better.

While playable the game does still seem to be a bit buggy. Some bits of information aren't labeled right, the setup process is awkward, the AI seems to animate stuff while its thinking, and the AI keeps thinking after the game is finished. All things that I'm hoping will be soon corrected.

Trigger Library

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:38:20 GMT

Triggers Library

This library provides a new object type called a trigger, which can be used to cause reactions in other objects in the world through the use of tags. For example, a lever is a trigger object, and when pulled, the lever opens the gate object with the appropriate tag. There are a variety of different trigger setups you can create to influence objects in your game.

Triggers work through activation and deactivation, or toggling. You can activate a trigger directly, such as when a player steps on a trigger object, using the Activate(object) proc, where the object argument is the object the activated it. You can also deactivate it directly using the Deactivate(object) proc. Or, if you're not sure whether you want to activate or deactivate it, such as in the case of using a lever, you can use the Toggle(object) proc, which will activate or deactivate it depending on its settings.

When a trigger is activated, it will add to a targeted object's triggers_set variable, and the amount added is dependent on the trigger's trigger_weight value. When the triggered object's triggers_set value equals its triggers_req (triggers required) value, then the object is activated, such as a gate's opening. When the object's triggers_set value no longer matches its triggers_req value, it will deactivate, such as a gate closing.

You specify which objects a trigger will affect through the trigger's trigger_target var. This variable is a params list of the tags for the trigger to locate. So in order to affect an object, you need to set the object's tag value, and set the trigger's target value to include the object's tag value.

Autojoining, Hub Datum, Panels and Map Storage Libs

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:55:27 GMT

In case you've missed the forum announcements, I've created several new libraries. Suggestions for improvements are always welcome!

Autojoining Library

Makes it easy to autojoin tiles using 13, 16 and 47-state autojoining. Most everything is already setup for you when you include the library, all you really need to do is decide which turf types are going to be joined and in what way.

Hub Datum Library

Makes it easy to extract information from a BYOND game's hub page and use that information inside the game. An example of how this could be used would be to generate a list of available game servers for the player to connect to from within the game. That means you may never have to visit the BYOND hub in order to connect to an online game, because you can do it from within the game itself!

Panels Library

Allows you to easily change the contents of the game's primary window using a child control, window panes and customizable panel datums.

Map Storage Library

The purpose of this library is to save and load maps for use in such things as level-based puzzle games. Currently it will save and load the entire map, and has no support for chunks, although that may change in the future. The library is setup so that if maps are tampered with, the game can detect this and optionally reject the tampered map file. Maps can also be password protected so that only the author of the map (or the creator of the game) can work with them in an editor.

Tomb Exploring With A Character - Of Sorts

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:31:08 GMT

Here's a concept for a slightly different way of playing Tomb Explorer. Suppose you actually have a "character" on the map. But you don't move that character around yourself. Rather, whenever you click on an interactive object, such as a door or a level, your character will attempt to, via pathfinding, walk his way over to the interactive object and use it. If the object can't be reached for some reason, he or she will let you know why.

The reason for this is that it gives a reference point to determine where the player is at any given time. Then, if a gate is closed (which currently isn't possible since there's no way to determine which side of the gate the player wants to be on), the player can be restricted to the side of the gate that their character is on.

It wouldn't change gameplay all that much since, end the end, you're still using the mouse for everything. But being able to close off areas after the player has accessed them would open up more puzzle possibilities.

Mind you, the "character" isn't necessarily something you'd have to wait around for while they casually meander over to the object you want to use. This is a single player game - the character can reach its destination in 0.2 seconds. Its mostly just a matter of using this character to let the game know where "you" are supposed to be.

Any thoughts?

Fade Library Update

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:03:14 GMT

I found a bug in the way the Fade library was handling MapSet() which was creating some weird behavior. Since that has been fixed, you can download the latest version here:

http://www.byond.com/developer/Foomer/Fade

Merging The Gauntlet and Tomb Explorer?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:33:33 GMT

I haven't posted much lately since I've been involved with other projects outside of BYOND, but I've had a question in my mind for a while and I thought I'd look for some audience feedback.

Aside from Solar Conquest, which I've been neglecting for quite a while, I have two other projects: Tomb Explorer and The Gauntlet. I've been wondering though, who would prefer that Tomb Explorer be played like The Gauntlet? They both have the same puzzle structures at heart, so its really just a matter of two things:

1) Use player-created levels or a single game world.
2) Use a character that moves around or click on things with the mouse.

The benefit to The Gauntlet's setup is that I already have a wide range of graphics drawn up for that style of game, while Tomb Explorer uses small, relatively abstract graphics. Also, the way Tomb Explorer is setup requires that the entire map be within the player's view, while The Gauntlet has no such restrictions.

It would be fairly easy to take The Gauntlet and combine it with level loading, level saving and scoring systems similar to what Tomb Explorer uses. Then it would be just like playing The Gauntlet, only with custom levels. The downside is that combining them into a single game like this would make it much too similar to one of the original inspirations for both games, Chip's Challenge.