Cape Guy

Global Game Jam 2018

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I’ve been working in the games industry for 15 years but hadn’t ever taken part in a game jam, even though the idea sounds really fun to me and I’ve always enjoyed hearing what other people got up to at them. So this year, when I saw that there was a Global Game Jam location at the Cambridge Makespace I decided to give it a go!

The jam has a theme each year, which the games should somehow be inspired by, though they are generally chosen to allow a large range of game ideas.

This year the theme was Transmission. The jam’s intro video gave lots of ideas of how the theme might be interpreted in the games produced. I found this jumped me straight past the blank page problem and I started having game ideas almost instantly!

I latched straight onto the idea of transmission delay, where a user’s actions are delayed in proportion to the distance of the action away from the player. I didn’t want to do anything too complicated, due to time constraints (and having never previously programmed anything of note in just 2 days!) so I restricted myself to a tile-based game. A local two-player territory control game seemed like quite a fun idea that I wanted to try out. Each player launches actions to try and take control of tiles. They can charge their actions up to take more tiles but this takes time and makes the action projectile move slower. The player with the most territory gains ‘resilience’ from the other player and the game continues until either player loses all their resilience.

So Cat in the Corner (AKA Cats vs. Unicorns) was born.

The design, programming and, not very good, art for the game were all done by me. Julian Surma did the EPIC soundtrack! The sound effects are from freesound.org and the font is Amatic SC.

I really enjoyed the 48 hour time limit with the knowledge that I’d just stop working on the game after that. I didn’t care about code quality – or any other type of quality for that matter! I just tried to bash out a prototype of my idea. There are definitely a few minor bugs in the final version, but fixing them wouldn’t be in the spirit of it :-). The whole experience also really reminded me what a great prototyping tool Unity is. It certainly helps that I’m familiar with it but I really relied on Unity’s  fast edit-test cycle to produce a game with so much going on  (it doesn’t look like much but there’s quite a lot of logic in there!)

I’m certainly keen to have another go at a game jam in the future. Perhaps getting myself into a team rather than going solo would be fun for next time too.

A* for All

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A while back, I found myself looking for a simple C# implementation of the A* (pronounced ‘A Star’) path-finding algorithm to use in 80 Days for finding routes between cities from the raw map route data used by the game.

If you’re not sure what the A* algorithm is or how it works then there’s a good introduction to it here. Alternatively, there are or some pretty nifty video tutorials about implementing it in Unity here.

I did find a few available implementations out there but wasn’t really happy with any of them. Some had a lot more code than I thought the algorithm justified – which I generally consider to be a warning sign. Some of the them required the graph to be specified ‘up front’ meaning that you couldn’t use lazy evaluation techniques to allow searching of non-finite graphs or to get good performance where there is a large overhead of looking up graph information. Others relied on an underlying grid pattern to the graph, which isn’t very useful for a lot of situations.

In the end I decided to implement my own and thought I would share it in case anyone else could benefit from it.Continue Reading

Porting 80 Days from Native-iOS to Unity

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While first getting started with Cape Guy, I also discovered 80 Days on my iPad. I absolutely loved it and, after a surprising response to a tweet, discovered that Inkle were also based in Cambridge. I already had plans for a first project but, having recently read The Lean Startup, was willing to pivot early, in this case before even actually starting in the first direction! Now THAT’s what I call being agile!

I’d always planned on building up a series of increasingly ambitious projects using Unity, which I’m still doing, but saw an opportunity for both Inkle and Cape Guy. I emailed them and we met up in the pub a few days later. It turns out that Jon and Joe are both really great guys and we got on straight away. An hour or so later we were discussing me doing a PC and Mac port of 80 Days, using Unity. Inkle could release a game to the PC market – which they’d been considering doing for a while – and I could get comfortable using Unity while not having to worry too much about game design (one step at a time!)Continue Reading

Unity Auto-Save on Play in Editor

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Years of experience (specifically a few bad experiences) have taught me to save my work as often as possible. Because of this I have a tendency to save my Unity project and scene pretty much every time I enter play mode to test something. After a while I thought I’d try and automate this process so I wrote an editor script to do it for me.Continue Reading