Hard Hat: an exercise in game design (part 3)

Hardhat part 3 - porting the game

Before we can update or improve the game, we must first recreate the basic functionality of the arcade game.

This would be a little easier if we had access to the game's source code, but without it, we need to carefully observe the game in action to figure out the proper timing and behavior of everything.

Fortunately, the game is relatively simple, but even so, I may miss some of the subtler aspects of the gameplay while porting it over.

One tool that we have to help with this port is Mame.  Pausing the emulation in Mame and using the "frame advance" function (Shift + P) allows us to accurately measure timing, this will help greatly to figure things out.

I'll spare you the details of the porting process, but in short, I started by replicating the player movement and screen scrolling functionality, then added in the letters and enemies.

My port isn't 100% accurate, but it's close enough.
A few differences between my version and the original:

1. You can walk over the letters when they have been put in place.  I did this because in the original, the letters created a huge impassible wall that only added frustration to the game.
     
2. The tornado is very close, but not exactly like the arcade version.  It's hard to figure out exactly how something works just by observing it, but I came close.  The arcade version seems to have a subtle amount of deviation from it's path that I didn't replicate, and also didn't get the tornado's starting point exactly like in the arcade version, but again, I'm pretty close.
     
3.  My hammers are larger than in the arcade version, their starting point isn't exactly like in the arcade version, and they randomly travel 24 pixels instead of 8 pixels like in the original.  Overall though, they're close enough for our purposes, as we won't be using the original arcade movement when we're done.

Hard Hat's scoring is kind of interesting:

• Removing a post = 50 points
•  Destroying a hammer with a letter = 10 points + 10 points for every hammer previously destroyed
•  Finishing the round = 8000 points (why not an even 10,000?)
•  Pushing a letter into the correct spot = 900 points (why not an even 1000?)

Also, there seems to be a scoring bug in the arcade game, as putting a letter into the correct spot by scrolling the screen gives you no points at all.

 

Anyway, I programmed this port of the game with ClickTeam Fusion.

I use Fusion for all of my development, as it is an excellent tool that's really easy to use.
 

Clickteam Fusion is a tool for developing games and applications for PC, but it has optional exporter modules for a wide range of systems such as iOS, Android, Flash and html5 to name a few.
For this game, I used the Flash exporter so you could try my game in my blog post.

 

If you're interested in trying out Clickteam Fusion, they offer a free trial version Here

Anyway, here's my current work in progress version of Hard Hat that currently serves as a port of the arcade game.

It might have a bug or 2 that I haven't found yet, but it seems to work pretty well.  If you encounter a bug, hit the Esc. key on your keyboard to restart the game.

  

 

Next time, I'll share with you a version of the game with my improvements added.

To be continued...

Hard Hat: an exercise in game design (part 2)

So, continuing with our experiment to see if the mediocre arcade game Hard Hat can be improved, we must first start by recreating the game.

Instead of recreating the arcade game exactly, I'm going to approach this experiment as though I were doing a port of Hard Hat for either the Colecovision, Sg-1000, MSX, or Ti-99/4a  home computer.  More precisely, I'm going to convert the graphics so that they are compatible with the TMS9918a video chip.

Here are some color bars from a TMS9918a video chip

I'm very familiar with the TMS9918a video chip's specifications, and it was a pretty common video chip in 1982, so if Hard Hat was going to be ported to a console or home computer in the early 80's, the port would have likely used this video chip.

The TMS9918a  produces a display of 256x192 pixels and uses a 16 color pallette.  This chip can display 4 16x16 single color sprites per row, and can display 2 colors per 8x8 background tile.  Special display modes can display more colors per background tile, but are still limited to 2 colors for every 8 horizontal pixels.

This chip is similar to the hardware of the arcade game, but not exactly the same.  So, when converting Hard Hat to the TMS9918a's specifications, a few changes need to be made.
The biggest change is the game's vertical resolution.  The arcade game has a higher vertical resolution than our target specs, so to make everything fit on-screen, we will need to remove one of the rows from the playfield.
This change affects the accuracy of the port a little, but doesn't really impact gameplay.  Though, one benefit of this change is that the word in the center of the screen is now more centered.

The sprites will all need to be single colored.  The player and the tornado are already a single color, but the hammers and the letters will need to have their colors reduced.
A few background tiles need to be redrawn a bit, but overall, the look of the arcade game can be reproduced with a good deal of accuracy.

Arcade original (left) and TMS9918a version (right)

As a self-professed pixel wizard I always feel the need to improve things a bit, so why just stop at converting the arcade graphics, why not take it a step further?  The arcade hardware can only produce 8 very basic colors, so let's take advantage of the TMS9918a's 16 color palette and pretty it up a bit.

The game has a construction theme, so let's make the walls into wooden boards, give the scaffolding a more natural grey, and make the connecting pieces look more like scaffolding connectors.

For the sprites, the player can be re-drawn to look a bit more like an actual hardhat with legs, and the animations can be improved a bit too.
The arcade tornado uses way more frames than necesary, so it can be redrawn to use fewer frames and look a little nicer.

So, now with the graphics converted and improved, we can move on to the next step of our experiment: programming the Hard Hat port.

To be continued...

Hard Hat: an exercise in game design (part 1)

Who doesn't love arcade games?
They're easy to pick up and play, full of action and excitement, and they're great for when you've only got a few minutes to spend playing.

Now, I could easily talk to you about a classic arcade game that has aged really well and tell you all the reasons why it's a great game, but instead I'm going to discuss a game that was never popular, Exidy's Hard Hat.

Why would I discuss an obscure, mediocre arcade game?  Well, I believe that we can often learn more from failures than successes, and I believe that Hard Hat had some interesting and original ideas behind it that would be fun to explore.

So, what is Hardhat?
Hardhat is an arcade game that was programmed in 1982 by Larry W. Hutcherson Sr. and published by Exidy.
On the arcade flyer, Hard Hat is billed as the "First educational coin-op game" and described as "a unique logic game with an educational puzzle to solve".
By modern standards though, Hard Hat is more of an action/puzzle game with a stronger focus on action than puzzle.
In Hardhat you play as a handyman, represented by a hardhat with legs, who runs around removing pieces of scaffolding that fill the screen. When the scaffolding is removed from one side of the screen, everything slides over one space, and new scaffolding comes in from the other side. Along with the scaffolding, there are occasional sections of wall that cannot be removed and must be navigated around. The goal of the game is to position letters atop the word in the center of the screen. For example, the first stage's word is Exidy and you must position the E,X,I,D and Y into the correct spots. Letters will slide onto the screen along with the new scaffolding. You can position letters either by pushing them, or by sliding the scaffolding over by removing it from one side of the screen. When all letters are in place, you receive bonus points and move onto the next stage.

To provide challenge are the enemies: hammers which roam around the screen at random, and tornadoes,which target the player's position at the time the tornado appears. Both tornadoes and hammers will kill the player if they collide with him, but tornadoes will also remove walls and randomly reposition any letters that come into contact with it. The only way to get rid of enemies is to scroll them off screen or by pushing a letter into them, which isn't all that easy to do.

By itself, Hardhat is an OK game, but the random movement of the hammers combined with the awkwardness of needing to position letters by using the screen sliding mechanic keep it from warranting much replay.

What I want to do with this game is to make a few minor changes to it in an attempt to make it more fun.

So, what exactly can we do with this game?

The ultimate goal would be to keep the game's same basic mechanics: joystick only control, removing pieces of scaffolding to shift the playfield around, placing letters and avoiding enemies, but somehow make the game more enjoyable. To do this, we need to address the game's flaws.  Let's start with the enemies.

The tornado seems to work pretty well: it keeps the player from staying in one spot too long, it redefines the maze/screen, and it can foil your efforts to place the letters in the correct spot. Since this works well, let's instead focus on the hammers. The hammers are random and can go anywhere except through walls and letters. The randomness makes it hard to predict where they will go, and instead of making it exciting, makes for uninteresting gameplay. To make the hammers more interesting, we need to give them better AI. With better AI, 2 things happen: First, the player's objective becomes more defined - run away from the hammers, because they're out to get you. Second, the game gets much harder.

We can balance out the difficulty by making the AI more complex than just having it make a bee-line towards the player. As the player removes pieces of scaffolding, he creates paths or open areas on the screen. If the hammers chase the player through the paths, but also have a little randomness: reversing direction, targeting a different direction, wandering, etc., then we can balance out the difficulty a little.

The other major flaw that I see with this game is that there's no real way to deal with the enemies other than to avoid them. Avoiding enemies all the time may be challenging, but isn't all that much fun. To remedy this, we need some kind of attack.

Taking a cue from the timeless classic Pac-Man, we can add temporary power-up's.
Keeping with the construction theme, we can use a buzz-saw as our power-up.

Buzz-saw icons can occasionally slide in along with the new scaffolding. When the player collects one of these icons, he can turn into a spinning buzz-saw blade temporarily. In this state, the player can move more quickly, destroy walls, and will kill any hammers he collides with.

With these 2 changes, the game should become more dynamic and interesting to play while still retaining the same basic gameplay mechanics that it was designed around.
That's the theory anyway.
To prove that this game can go from mediocre to rockstar with just a few changes, I'll need to start by recreating the original game, then adding the new features and changes.
I'll be building this game in Clickteam Fusion 2.5, and will share with you my work in-progress step by step.

Before I conclude this blog entry, I'd like to share one more thing with you:

These are the original arcade graphics that you can view in Mame.  Looking at these, you might notice a couple things:

First, the tornado uses an amazingly long 16 frame animation loop, but the player only uses 4 frames of animation for the walk cycles.

Second, it appears that the game has unused animations of the player being squished.

This is interesting, because it means that sometime during production of this game, the player must have been able to be squished by the walls.
This was obviously removed due to the extra difficulty it would have added to the game, seeing that without that feature, it's already a challenge just to pass the first round without practice.

To be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 6) Final thoughts

Ba-Bomb! was a huge learning experience for me.
It was my first time making a sequel, and I enjoyed the time I spent making the game, but the game's lack of success is a bit of a sad spot for me.

I must admit that I approached this project with a rather naive attitude, both expecting to achieve success by creating a good game, and assuming that my game design was not without it's flaws.

So what did I learn?

I learned that for a casual game to be a hit, it needs:

1. To have a "pick up and play" quality to the game.  If your 70 year old Grandmother can't figure out the game in 10 seconds, then you need to go back to the drawing board.  I came fairly close with Bombin'/Ba-Bomb!, but not close enough.  The game is deceptively strategic and logical, and even though anyone can start playing the game without reading the instructions, they may miss some of the finer points, such as paying attention to their remaining matches.  
2. Mass appeal through pretty graphics and a likable game setting.  Even though Pengi adds cuteness and general appeal to the game, it seems that bombs don't appeal to women.  Women are the #1 market for casual games, and thus Ba-Bomb! doesn't have mass appeal.
3. A multi-thousand dollar advertising campaign, or brilliant guerrilla marketing campaign.  I am not a marketing genius, nor did I have much of an advertising budget.  If I had it all to do over again, I would have spent what little advertising budget I had on something like Google Adwords or Facebook ads instead.

I also learned many new things about game design.  This was my first large independent project, and I got a good grasp on exactly how much work goes into making a polished puzzle game with multiple modes and features.  I learned how to simplify and streamline production by reducing assets and features while still providing a satisfying core gameplay experience.
I learned about advertising, code optimization and how graphics alone can impact gameplay.
I learned about balancing stats for an RPG, and making sure the difficulty ramp-up is fair.

I'm sure there were many other things I learned during the production of Bombin' and Ba-Bomb!, but they slip my mind at the moment.

So, in conclusion, is Ba-Bomb! a perfect game?
Definitely not.

Is it a bad game?  By no means could Ba-Bomb! be considered a bad game.

So what is it, then?
Ba-Bomb! is a game that succeeds in many ways, and almost but not quite succeeds in others.
It's a casual puzzle game that certainly has it's fans, though few may they be, but misses a few key marks that could have brought it success.

Personally, I love Ba-Bomb!, but I can't really be objective as I was the one who made it.

If you are looking for a fun, casual yet imperfect game, why not give Ba-Bomb! a try?

-Links-
Bombin': http://studiopinagames.com/bombin.html
Ba-Bomb! for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-bomb!/id570094968?ls=1&mt=8
Ba-Bomb! for iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-bomb!-for-ipad/id573779424?ls=1&mt=8
Ba-Bomb! for PC: http://clickstore.clickteam.com/games/ba-bomb-puzzle

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 5) Advertising dollars poorly spent.

Once work on Ba-Bomb! was completed, and the game was available on iTunes, I decided that I needed to advertise.

In my eyes, Ba-Bomb! had awesome graphics, original and addicting gameplay, and a variety of game modes that would keep any player entertained for quite a while.  With a game this awesome, I needed to get the word out so people could come and play it.
The only problem was that I didn't really have any money to market it.

I quickly learned that to properly advertise a product, you need TONS of money just for advertising.
Failing that, you'd need to be a social marketing genius.
Unfortunately, I was neither rich nor had any idea how to start a proper social marketing campaign.

The only way of getting the word out about your game for free that I could find was to start a thread on the TouchArcade forums.
If you can create a thread and get people interested, you might get some downloads and reviews, and possibly start a multi-page discussion about the game that keeps your thread at the top page for a while. Presto! free advertising, lots of downloads, multiple reviews, and even more exposure on the iTunes app store.

The only problem with this plan is that the TouchArcade forums are populated with teen and preteen boys for the most part.  Because of this, the maturity level is low, and unless your game is loaded with boobs, monster trucks, or decapitations, your thread will either be bombarded with replies of "This game sucks!", or be quickly be buried under countless threads about games that do have boobs, monster trucks, or decapitations.

Another cheap option for advertising is to put out a press release.

I studied up on how to write a great press release, and once my press release looked both awesome and professional enough, I sent out a press release through prMac.
prMac is a press release site that focuses only on apple related news.  They will post your press release on their site for free, or for about $20, they will distribute it to every media outlet that exists, and then re-distribute it again a week later.
It's a pretty cheap way to get the word out about your app, but I never saw any interest in my press release.  I did see it get picked up by a few no-name websites that post every single press release in the universe, but that's not gonna' get you any downloads.

I decided I needed to put some actual money into advertising, but I couldn't really spend much.
Eventually, I decided to take a shot on a video "review" from DailyAppShow.  They promised to create a video app review, post it to many different video sites, feature it on their site and advertise it across Facebook and Twitter, and even cover it in their podcast.  All for a comparatively low fee of $179.
Doesn't sound too bad does it?

Well, the video review is basically just some guy playing your game poorly and talking about the features for about 5 minutes.  No actual review, no positive or negative opinions, just a demo video.  They say you can send them an image/banner for their front page, but they ignored the one I sent them and just made one of their own that was pretty half-assed.  They never responded to any emails after I sent them money, and in the end, their "featured video review" service made ZERO impact on Ba-Bomb!'s downloads.
In the end, it was a waste of money, but what can you expect from a website that no one visits.

The only other advertising I tried was GreatApps.  Never heard of them either?  I'm not surprised.
These people actually called me on the phone to convince my to use their service.  To their credit, they have good sales people working for them.
The advertising package they offered sounded really good for the money. $600 (which for me is a lot), but my app would be listed on their front page (in rotation) for a full year.
The main problem with this service is that it's just another site that no one visits.  Sure, it's a big site that has info about a lot of apps, but that's all it is.  You can get the same basic info just by visiting the iTunes store.  This site looks good on the surface, but it has zero credibility.
Their service also made zero impact on downloads as well.

I guess in the end, I learned that unless you're paying big dollars for banner ads on popular sites, then you'll get no return on your investment.

Looking back on the experience, the financial failure of Ba-Bomb! is still pretty sad for me.  I had such huge hopes for the game, but ended up with pretty much nothing for all the work that I put into the project.
I don't even care so much about the money, I just really wanted to share my game with as many people as I could.  I wanted to brighten people's lives with something that I created, but ended up having my creation ignored.

Still, I take this experience as an exercise in learning, and will apply it to future endeavors.

To Be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 4) Puzzle-RPG

Quest mode: the real reason to play Ba-Bomb!

Quest mode allowed me to add in some of the wackiness and character appeal that I had always intended for Ba-Bomb!
One of the biggest challenges with creating the quest mode was figuring out how to design it so that it wouldn't take forever and a day to finish making it.  That meant I needed to limit art assets and game complexity as much as possible, while still keeping a somewhat grand scale.

I started by figuring out a story that could be told in as few drawings as possible.

Pengi's at home enjoying his favorite snack.

Monsters invade and ban Pengi's favorite snack!

It's payback time!

Ok, there's actually a few more drawings than just these 3, but I'm not going to post all of them.

I referenced older 8-bit RPG's to see where they cut corners, as well as figuring out a few tricks of my own.
One of the tricks I used was to only animate Pengi, the enemies are all just a single drawing that get's moved around on screen.  I also recolored a number of enemies to create alternate stronger versions of the same enemy to be used later in the game.

I really wanted the RPG aspect to be secondary to the Puzzle aspect of the game, so I simplified the RPG mechanics as much as I could while still making it feel like a traditional RPG.
One of the ways I achieved this was to get rid of traditional Experience and Magic points.
I replaced Experience points with Gold and replaced Magic with items that could either be purchased or found.

So, to level up, all you'd need to do is go shopping.
At the shop you can buy Attack-up, HP-up, Defense-up, as well as techniques like Counter and Dodge. You can buy various items such as the Anvil to attack enemies or a box of matches to assist you whenever you run out.
My favorite part of the shop is the Advice button.  Advice is always free, and is a mix of useful tips, sarcasm and jokes.

Most RPG's have a small party of adventurers, but I simplified it down to just having Pengi.

The biggest problem that needed to be solved with the 'gold only' single character system was healing.
In a typical RPG, healing can be done through Magic, Items, or Healers.  I replaced all of this with a single item/character: Dr. Piggy.

You can get Dr. Piggy from the shop for free.  The only catch being that Dr. Piggy is a piggybank doctor who needs to get paid to heal you.  This works fine in most instances, except for when you run out of gold.
I solved this by leaving the player with 1 HP after losing a battle, and by having Dr. Piggy offer you first aid if you have 1 HP and less than 50 gold.  So, if you keep getting your butt kicked by monsters and run out of Gold, Dr. Piggy can get you back in the game.

Random encounters also exist in the game, but are far less common then in most RPG's.

In Quest mode, you walk along paths until you encounter a monster icon.  Touch the monster icon, and you will enter into a battle.  Win the battle and the monster icon will be replaced by a red circle.  Walking across the red circle has about a 10% chance of a random encounter.  I felt that this system gave you a good deal of control over deciding when to fight, but still enough randomness to keep it interesting.

When in a battle, you start by seeing who your enemy is, as well as stats for both you and the enemy.  The enemy you will face is semi-random, but you will face weaker enemies in the first area, and the strongest enemies in the final area.
Battle difficulty isn't just determined by the enemy's Attack and Defense points, since it's a puzzle game, the number of differently colored bombs will also vary.  In the first area of the game, you will encounter easier stages with fewer bomb colors, and in the later rounds, you will encounter harder stages with more colors and rocks.

In a battle, your goal is to fill the bar on the bottom of the screen by creating the largest combos you can.  When the bar is full, you get your turn to choose to either Attack, Defend, use an Item or Run.
Attack attacks the enemy, Defend increases your defense for several turns, Item allows you to use one of your items, such as Anvil, Matchbook, or Dr. Piggy, and Run attempts to run away from the battle.
If you have purchased the Counter or Dodge techniques, you will have a significantly higher chance of countering or dodging an enemy attack if you select Defend.

Every 4 turns, the enemy will have his chance to attack or use magic.  Not all enemies use magic, but the one's who do will use stronger magic later in the game.  Magic attacks include, but are not limited to: Shuffle - randomizes bomb placement, Summon Skwid - makes Skwid enemy appear, Steal - steals your matches, Anvil - anvil falls on you, Siphon - steals your health, and my favorite: Hail of Stones - which causes stones to fall from the sky and litter the play field.
Sometimes an enemy will spend their turn focusing to build up their magic points if they've used up all their magic.

Of course, the enemies aren't the only ones who have magic.
Though, for Pengi to use magic, he must first find the enchanted Ocarina.
The Ocarina isn't too hard to find, as the shopkeeper gives a couple hints about where to find it.

In the first world of the game, there is a tombstone deep in the woods.  If Pengi has the shovel item, he will dig up the grave and encounter an enemy called "restless bones".  If you defeat this enemy, you will receive the Ocarina.
You can use the Ocarina in a battle, but unless you purchase lessons from the shopkeeper, the Ocarina's magic will backfire on you.
The Ocarina takes a few turns to charge up, and it's effects are random, but at a higher level, they are always useful.
The Ocarina can give you extra matches, extra gold, health, it can clear the screen of stones or duds, it can drop anvils on the enemies or even siphon health from them.
Although the Ocarina's magic is useful, the true purpose of the Ocarina is to unseal the door to the final boss and get the game's good ending.

The real challenge in making the Quest mode wasn't designing the maps or coming up with ideas, the main challenge was properly balancing the game:
Making sure the enemies weren't too strong or weak, balancing the amount of gold received in battle and spent at the shop, balancing the progress bar to ensure you can have a turn just as often as the enemies, etc.  Balancing takes time, and I believe that I balanced this game pretty well, as I spent many many hours testing it to make sure it was well balanced.

Overall, I felt that Quest mode turned out really well.  In the iOS versions of the game, all game modes are unlocked for free, but you only earn a minuscule amount of gold from winning battles until you unlock the full version for $1.  I felt that this was a good strategy, but I never made very many sales.
Next time, I'll share my thoughts on marketing Ba-Bomb!

To be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 3) The making of a sequel

First there was Bombin', a pretty good, completely original puzzle game with a rather poor presentation.

I had a strong love for my game Bombin', but I knew that it was far from perfect.
A little while after completing Bombin', I started developing iOS games at Studio Piña.  I wanted to create a game that would be a hit: one with the mass appeal of a casual puzzle game.  So, I worked on a few ideas until I decided that I would try porting Bombin' to iOS.

Once I worked out how to fit all the important elements onto the iPhone's screen in portrait orientation, I started work on the game design.

The game needed more appeal, so I picked through some old character designs I had done and ended up choosing Pengi, a top hat wearing penguin character I had designed as an enemy for my unfinished game "Powder Keg: the adventures of Little Barrel" which was based on "Dr. Pineapple: Intergalactic Privateer", a comic book that I self-published for 2 issues.

Here's some animations from that unfinished project:

So, now that I had an appealing character for my game, I started on the game design.

The game needed to be more than just a port of Bombin', as that game was a little too simple for what I had in mind.  I wanted this new game to be wild, crazy, totally out there and exciting.  Much akin to the exaggerated western concept of what a Japanese gameshow is like.

What I came up with was a zany experience, Bombin' interspersed with randomness and mini games, the ability to collect 'hens teeth' and exchange them for power-up's, roulette wheels, and other weirdness that did nothing but make the game weird.

As much as I wanted to make that game, I started looking at how many new art assets, extra sound effects, and hours of additional programming would be required, and realized that the scope of this project was beyond what I could handle by myself.  So, I scaled back, and worked on what was the most important: to take Bombin' and make it a better game.

Aside from getting rid of the numbers from the bombs and redoing all of the art, I focussed on making any gameplay improvements that I could.

I added a little randomness to the timing of the exploding bombs to make it a little less mechanical.

I changed the Skwid Blasters punch card to give you a couple more matches when you completed it.

I added the Boulder item, which is a giant stone that takes more hits to destroy.

And I added Brushy, a 'helper' character who sucks the color out of one bomb, then paints every bomb he touches the same color.  This, of course, can help you to create larger combos, or help you out of a jam when you just cant make any groups of 4.

One other small change I made to the game was to drop in a fully charged bomb whenever you cleared a group of less than 4 bombs.  This helps to get the player un-stuck when they can't seem to make any combos large enough to earn them any new matches.

A straight port of Bombin' with a new coat of paint, a few new elements and re-balanced gameplay was a good start, but I wanted the game to be more than just an improved port.  I needed to do something with all those fun ideas I came up with earlier, so I decided to add a couple more game modes:

Aqua, a mode where you blow up bombs to lower the ever rising water level, and Twitch, a mode where you need to be quick to succeed.

These 2 modes were more of an afterthought, because the new game mode that I put the most time into designing and building was Quest mode, a puzzle/rpg hybrid that incorporated some of the original ideas I had for the sequel and allowed me to introduce Pengi the penguin as the game's spokes-character.

To be continued...