Hey folks, today I just wanted to write up some thoughts of mine regarding the design of paper.io 2.

Paper.io2 (paper mahrio dos) is one of those games that toxic youtubers scream their heads off and overreact to the most minute stuff ever.

Well okay not really, if you’ve never player “io” games before, they’re generally very simple in design and usually involve players versing other players online. I mean you can literally just search for them and boom a whole bunch will show up (agar.io, diep.io (my fav), slither.io).

Paperio is very simple, its really a battle royale esq. game and you spontaneously spawn into a game and you want to take over the entire map.

But my point isn’t to advertise you to play this, the point is to talk specifically about how they simulate the feeling of being in a multiplayer game with other “real” players. Of course when you play the game on your phone or pc, you’ll eventually realize that if you unplug your internet or go into airplane mode, that the opposing players are just bots doing their thing. They’re not real, they’re a lie, a fraud, it’s just bots pretending to be people.

To keep it short, the A.I. in general does not seem to have it’s own “behavior” though I could be totally wrong and that they give them parameters to change how cautious they are or how aggressive they are etc.

in Counter Strike, you can actually go into a bot config file and each bot name has it’s own parameters for things like “skill”, “cooperation”, “bravery” etc.

The point of having a parameter like this is to make it so you can simulate the uniqueness of each human player in a game. (I don’t think Paperio does this but it certainly is one way to add to the feeling of fake multiplayer.)

Paperio does seem to store up to date player usernames into a database online (and offline they just have a giant file full of offline names to pull from). The advantage of storing the usernames is that you always are up-to-date with the latest meme names and in a way makes the game feel “relevant” as if real people are still playing it.

Team Fortress 2 AI does a thing where when they kill you there’s a random chance they’ll taunt. But what really sells it is that there’s a slight delay for the AI to realize they killed you. Actually just like real players if you stare at a friendly bot before the match starts they’ll taunt. (though other behaviors they could also have added might also just be stare back, run back and forth, or sometimes shoot you, duck spam)

I’ve seen some other clever attempts at this too where the “players” will actually text things like “owned” in the chat.

In some ways this sort of thing really takes me back to when I was but a wee lil’ lad playing counter strike and telling the bot teammates to “follow me”.

Really the trick to simulating real players in an offline multiplayer game is to emulate human behavior. These were just a couple of examples of how games pull it off.

What sort of offline multiplayer games have you played that try to emulate real player behaviors?

-Brandon

I’ve played consoles for years but this one, this one is pretty great. The Nintendo Switch I think was pretty gosh darn impressive just from an execution standpoint.

I mean the switch was going to be the NX, a concept that they patended before they arrived to the switch design.

It does make me think about the niche that nintendo has had, in some ways people kind of expect nintendo to do “their thing”, which I think gives them a lot of power to attempt some very unique design concepts. Where as Xbox, Playstation and even Steam Machines have a very specific market and goal in mind. That’s not to say that Nintendo has it easy, quite the opposite in fact. Since it can be harder to arrive at a final destination if you are able to freely explore vs have strict guidelines. I’d be super curious to know what kind of iterations they had to go through to arrive at the final switch design.

I think my favorite thing about the switch though actually has to be just how detailed and efficient the hardware is. In the video below, this guy tears down his switch (oof) for youtube fame points.

But if you get past the cringe, you’ll see a really impressive use of space and unique computer parts in order to accomplish the portability and “power” necessary. They really had some goals to hit, and…I mean they hit them all pretty well:

• Portability
• Power (obviously not as powerful as other home consoles, but powerful enough for better graphics (though honestly most of the switch games seem to revolve around cartoony graphics vs realism)
• Battery life (probably the most fickle one because some games drain the battery pretty fast)
• Durability (nothing worse than dropping the switch down a flight of stairs or spilling coffee on it)
• Audio quality
• Controls (iffy for some if you have big hands)
• Wifi and other networking functionality
• “Everyone can play” motto, if you’re one of those perfect individuals in the sterile world of nintendo commercials, you’ll see people playing their switch, then some one walks in randomly and they both can play.
• supah mario bros and call of duty

Yeah I don’t have much else to say, I’m pretty glad to have gotten it, though I feel that back when I bought it there was the problem of not having enough 1st party Nintendo games. (Though frankly Zelda breath of the wild and Mario odyssey had plenty of content to go around for me to care less)

Anyways, enjoy some random clips I captured since I got the console.

enjoy,

-Brandon

Hey gang, this is a post regarding my observations of the HD pixel sprite work from the game Undernight Inbirth.

For those who don’t know what UNIST is (which will eventually be UNICLR), it’s an anime fighting game.

…

yeah that’s it…

…

what?…

…

I don’t have much else to say…

…

I actually suck at fighting games and am not really into playing them (and prefer watching)…

…

Oh right, so anyways, I was going to share some of my observations and theory on their HD pixel sprite animation process and talk about how they animate their attack animations.

Games like BlazBlue (another animu fighting game) create 3d models of the character to then have the pixel artists draw over them to help with consistency.

I don’t know if UNIST does this, but I do know that regardless of whatever process you choose, there are very few shortcuts for this kind of grueling pixel work. I know for certain that the clean-up process that is involved for these kinds of games can be super intense due to scale. Hyde, the main guy in UNIST has ~650 sprites.

(This is only based on my assumption on how I would design the process to  animate a UNIST sprite.)

1. Rough silhouette, and animation (likely these placeholders would be given early to the coders for testing). (It’s possible the sprites could be using a 3d model as a pose reference but also feasible if they didn’t)
2. Pass on to another artist to Clean-up the silhouette.
3. Pass on to another artist to add base shading
4. Pass on to another artist for “anti-aliasing”, which is done in a very peculiar way where they actually just use a solid line without cleanup at times.
5. Pass on to detail artist to add things like creases, highlights and so on. (it’s possible step 4 and 5 are done by 1 person)
6. Cry and Repeat.

(of course, some steps could have been combined or the concept one was also roughly shaded, then cleaned up and detailed)

Of course this is all purely speculation since I don’t work at French Bread (yes the team that made this game is called that). But if you were involved in the process of creating these sprites for hours on end everyday for months, eventually you would go insane and would want to find any shortcuts to save time and sanity. One of the things I wanted to point out is how they handle the motion of the character attack animations.

One major aspect when they animate an attack is that they don’t really animate an in-between when a character is in the middle of their attack swing motion. As a result they mostly just focus on the wind-up and recovery animations. But…won’t players notice how harsh and sudden this is? well yes, but if this is an anime fighting game, surely there must be an easier way to convey motion without more grueling frame in-betweening…

The goal here is to have the key poses at the start-up and recovery to be a clear as possible.

In Anime fighters, it’s all about the visual flare and effects. Most people won’t notice the motion of the characters at times because of how intense the visual effects can get.

I assume creating a sword slash visual effect would be much faster to produce than making a character sprite animation. So a big part of how they create the illusion of motion is RIGHT when the first recovery attack keyframe starts, we create a visual effect over them. Notice how the character animation has less frames to work with, but the visual effect is smoother and has more frames occuring.

So by doing this, as long as the effect looks good and implies movement that matches the sprite, you can avoid spending time with animating more sprites of your character. It also makes the attack have a distinct tight and crisp feeling to it.

But again, my point isn’t to convince you that this is the best way to animate (though honestly if I was one of the pixel artists I’d use any shortcut possible). My point is that this is just one of many ways that games animate their character attack animations to fulfill the most basic goal…

…of well….making an attack animation!

What matters is having your art style and animations achieve the proper feeling that fits your game. (i.e. just because squash and stretch looks and feels good doesn’t mean it is appropriate to have for extremely realistic simulation games) It’s all about fitting the style and genre of your product.

That’s all folks!

If you enjoyed what you read, you can follow this blog by selecting the menu (top left) and fill out the email section.

-Brandon

Hi gang, I think it’s time to do a write up that continues from an older article I wrote regarding why I love goldeneye. But now I think it’s time to talk about it’s spiritual successor for the n64, Perfect Dark.

So I played through Perfect Dark on Perfect Agent at the same glorious 60fps with mouse and keyboard and it worked great. the shooting works well, the controls were fine, the music overall is good…but why do I not like it that much? Why isn’t it clicking for me? Surely if it’s made by the same developers who made the previous shooter and it pretty much uses goldeneye as it’s base, I’d at least like it just as much? Below I went ahead and really tried to break down my thoughts as to why it didn’t really “click” for me like Golden guy.

The reality is that I’m pretty biased to like goldeneye. Because it was the first one I played, I got used to a lot of it’s quirks, enemies sometimes being hilariously dumb and taking longer to shoot, “simpler” objectives, less vertical layout in levels, more close quarters level design. I really do wonder how my opinion would be if I grew up with perfect dark first, then played goldeneye? would I have liked perfect more? Well, it’s kind of a waste of time to speculate on what my alternate universe self would have thought, but hey let’s break down what I like and didn’t like from playing perfect dark.

Features

We’ll start off with an objectively obvious one, perfect dark has more features like co-op, target shooting and bot ai, it wins in this department, the end. next.

The Story

This is a tricky one for me, the cutscenes and the way in which they presented them felt kind of sudden. The overall pace of the game in terms of how levels are connected sometimes felt like too much of a jump. First we’d be in a crashed airplane area then abruptly at a sea base where every corridor looks the same (more on that), suddenly we’re in an alien ship. I feel that the designers made a bunch of levels that looked impressive visually (at the time), but then the writers had to awkwardly try and connect them somehow.

But here’s the thing, I decided to do the unthinkable, I wandered around in the game at Carrington Institute (the hub world of the game) and read lore and info about the characters, vehicles, even the whole story. Oddly enough, what I read was pretty good, like, if someone presented to me a write-up of what I saw, as a director I actually probably would have approved (mostly, though the alien stuff maybe not?).

When I look back on when I played the game for the first time, I got weirded out by how there were aliens and spaceships and so on, I mostly just expected a futuristic goldeneye with just humans. But instead got a sudden mishmash of aliens and area 51 and so on. I felt this conglomeration of ideas made the game lose its seriousness and felt like a bizarre cartoon. (It also probably didn’t help that “Elvis” the “Maian” Alien talked like Yoda from Star Wars.)

But I think the biggest reason I felt this way was because of the execution on the cut-scenes wasn’t too great from a story/character development standpoint. The way they presented the characters felt kind of thrown in suddenly and it resulted in making them feel a bit bare. I will say though that I’m definitely not jealous of whoever had to do the cinematography for those moments because you have so little time to work with in order to try and explain the story.

I don’t have much else to say. It’s a bit unfortunate (for me), because there’s some interesting character lore in the carrington institute computers

(and clearly I’m not the kind of person that was able to appreciate the story execution (unlike the reviewers who gave the game 95% scores)).

(of course goldeneye’s story is not too great either if you don’t know the movie it’s based on, call of duty)

Gameplay

I like goldeneye better, haha.

But let’s be real, it controls pretty much the same, they even added some secondary fire for some weapons which sometimes can be pretty cool (though honestly several have pointless primary/secondary options that hardly have any use and you just end up only using one or the other).

Other than my subjective taste with liking the slower and dumber enemies from goldeneye, or how they had simpler gadgets (or that there’s no aliens). I think really what this all boils down to for me is the level design.

Level Design

There weren’t many levels that really sung to me when I had recently played through perfect dark. A big problem I had was how they’d overly emphasize how vertical the game was. The first level has you fiddling with elevators that move and stop at multiple floors. Some levels like Pelagic II are just…terrible, because of how the corridors look the same and their excuse to try and make it easy to navigate is by changing just the color, yikes.

My problem with this level is that it’s basically a giant maze with the majority of the level being made up of these corridor assets…

I don’t think this really is entirely my own bias anymore with me liking goldeneye’s level design better than perfect dark:

• Most of the levels in goldeneye avoid having too many elevators to use mid level (In fact there are none! as they’re only at the beginning and end of levels), as a result there is far less waiting time with having to traverse around waiting for an elevator to get you someplace.
• Goldeneye likely had to work with size limitations so the levels are mostly smaller and focus on close quarters design (which I actually think was to its benefit because there’s more deliberate placement to rooms)
• The visual design of most levels generally avoids being distracting so you can just notice important things like doors, switches, computers etc.
• In my opinion, big opens maps from both games are the least enjoyable levels. (unless we’re talking surface 1, with that glorious stealth sniping (though really I do remember getting lost when I played that one as a kid)
• Generally most of the levels in goldeneye are simply more intuitive to navigate, the layouts have easier to remember shapes that make it easier to landmark where you were. (Basically if you are designing a level, you don’t need to put statues, crazy pillars or props in a room to make it memorable navigation-wise, you can change it’s shape to have a L,T,X,+,O,etc. shape and people can recognize that spatially)

If I HAD to pick missions that I did like from Perfect dark, they’d probably be Villa, Science Lab (mission 2) and uh…hmm….

Mission Objectives

If you read my previous article, you’d know that I didn’t really enjoy the objectives aspect from goldeneye, and the same goes for perfect dark.

I’d probably say Perfect Dark at least handles the intuitiveness a bit better because it at least explains how to do the objective…

Plus Goldeneye is guilty for the terrible gameplay extending egypt level, where you just had to keep trying to guess the correct path until you memorized it. I’m not kidding, there are no visual queues, no audio queues, nothing, if you guessed a tile wrong, you had to keep redoing it.

Yeah I’m not really a fan of the objectives from either game.

(Also you have to keep in mind that I have an IQ of -400 and am only capable of doing things like hold ‘e’ to plant a bomb, kill certain enemy, find some pickups or destroy computers.)

Enemy AI

I prefer Goldeneye’s slower and dumber AI. At times perfect dark’s enemies would shoot too fast for you to take cover.

(But at least they don’t instantly shoot at you and you pray to the RNG gods like in call of duty 4 veteran difficulty shudders)

Final Verdict

Frankly…I’m biased as all hell, I just like goldeneye for the simplicity and (to me) better level design. The fact of the matter is that the game features much more intuitive level layouts and I felt that was the biggest deciding factor for me. You just can’t beat the wonderfully designed layouts of levels like Facility, Bunker 1 & 2, Depot, Caverns, etc.. (though frigate starts to veer close to that Perfect Dark esq. layout with too many doors and too many floors to choose from (I still like Frigate don’t get me wrong)).

They’re both great games, but the golden boy takes it home for me.

(unless you ask me to play with you to do some co-op or go against some bots then oof, yeah see ya golden guy.)

Thanks for reading,

-Brandon

Hello gang, today I’d like to talk about my experience with goldeneye and why it’s one of my favorite games of all time.

Goldeneye is an old and outright janky shooter that when played on the n64 controls weird and gets really laggy. However…I found out a way to play it with mouse and keyboard at 60 fps and it’s such an incredible experience. In fact, it was so incredible that I almost felt like I was playing a mod of half-life.

goldeneye’s source material is based off of a well known movie and book franchise – call of duty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRgdy-2PRJw

But why DO I like goldeneye? What is it that makes this golden boy game so good to me? As a whole with nostalgia aside it’s pretty mediocre, there aren’t really any new mechanics or engaging gameplay features that are added to keep it interesting. The enemies are pretty much the same and the guns are honestly pretty stale in variety. With that out of the way, I will say that the funnest aspect for me would have to be the level design and the enemy AI.

Level design

Most of the level design in golden guy is really good, like it starts of linear, but opens up just enough to let you at least explore a bit and shoot stuff and find equipment. (Although I would say some other shooters like half life or doom do it better because there are more actual pickup types to obtain)

Enemy AI

Now the enemy AI, is a fine example of good shooter AI. Unlike most shooters of today, they actually animate a startup and recover animation to their attacks. basically, the enemy will see you and bring his gun up, THEN start the random hit scan shooting, THEN they start to put their gun down.

(“Hit Scan” is a special type of “bullet” in video games where they instantly reach the point of contact when shot, meaning there’s no travel time. Usually this is balanced out in games with bullet scatter randomness and other features.)

tldr:

1. Start Aiming their gun at you
2. Shoot
3. Put the weapon down to then repeat the process.

or rather the better version is

1. start aiming their gun at you
2. ???
3. Profit

This is SO good, because you have time to react and it’s completely fair if you get shot since they are telegraphing their movements. As derpy as the enemies can be in golden boy, this design is honestly something I wish more shooters would go back to and stop doing the cheap instant shooting RNG hitscan nonsense.

(Of course goldeneye enemies sometimes also do cheap/questionable things though like that one animation where they’re walking and shooting their gun towards you and somehow have an absurdly large ammo clip during that attack.)

Another thing to point out is that frankly the enemies in goldeneye are pretty stale, in terms of depth and variety. I think what barely keeps this game going is the fact that there are so many different animations for when enemies get hit that it’s compelling enough.

Basically…if you’re in development crunch time, just have one basic enemy with a lot of different animations and uh…I suppose it’s enough?

Random thing to point out, in my opinion death animations of shooters like modern warfare 2 feel better to me because they have a quicker “pop” to them and instantly respond to your shot vs goldeneye having to startup it’s animation. (not really a problem but I find the pop feels better in games like mw2)

The weapons

The guns, the guns are okay, though there is a weird delay for some guns and honestly, the pistols of modern shooters like Cod4 feel so much better than goldeneye. But that aside, the hit impact sound and fx feel good enough and work well for making the gunshots feel responsive in goldeneye.

Objectives

Probably the aspect that is least interesting to me are the objectives, especially the ones related to escorting/protecting AI or having to trial and error my way to get the goldengun, etc.. I think objectives in games are a tricky aspect to keep compelling, the best example I’ve seen for objectives would have to be Starcraft 2’s campaign levels. they do an excellent job of providing a base line goal to complete, but also provide side challenges that motivate you to accomplish more to get better rewards. I feel that if I played goldeneye now the objectives probably would have frustrated me and I wouldn’t have felt as compelled by them vs when I was younger and was way more graceful/patient with games.

The only reason I might sometimes have the bias to say “oh yeah the objectives feature in goldeneye were awesome” is because I already know how to do them.

Conclusion/Final Verdict/Final Destination

Now it is one of my favorite games of all time yes, but the veil of nostalgia only lasts for so long with this golden guy.

I feel the fun starts to drop off though once bunker 2 ends. For me statue and the latter start to lose momentum and there are no new mechanics, no new things to do, and it mostly relies on showing a new gun that shoots just slightly different in hopes that it still feels fresh (or some objective, but as you could probably tell the objectives didn’t really compel me that much). Most of the levels in the later half feel redundant and lack that brilliant flow that some of the earlier levels have. Of course to each their own, I do still enjoy some later levels like depot, archives and caverns, it’s just that some missions like streets/statue just feel kind of repetitive and don’t have as much of a clever layout to them IMO.

The length that the game is feels appropriate. I honestly can’t imagine it going for longer than what is already there. Most guns that are introduced aren’t really that special, like the ZMG, really it’s just a Klobb, but it shoots faster?…and does more damage…ehhh….

I feel that if shooters of today are going to make guns, please make them different instead of just “gun x” shoots faster but does less damage that “gun y”. There’s a reason I feel why arena shooters like doom and quake have much more compelling variety to them.

All in all, I still like goldeneye, it’s still one of my all time favorite video games, and I’m still willing to criticize it. I know there’s the argument of “well at the time it was revolutionary/ground breaking”, But I still can’t help but compare how some mechanics/features are funner and worse in old games compared to modern ones.

Maybe I should compare this to perfect dark one day, after all perfect dark is the spiritual successor, but why didn’t it click for me?…hmmm maybe next week I’ll write on that.

Thanks for reading,

-Brandon

p.s. Enjoy watching this clip of bond never running out of bullets

Howdy gang, let’s take a look at another one of them videogames.

XENO GUNNER

Xenogunner is a game jam game that features boss rush elements with mouse aiming shooting mechanics. It’s has vibes reminiscent of genesis games like Gunstar heroes and Alien Soldier. …and call of duty.

You can get the game jam game here at itch.io

The game apparently is being developed further to feature more levels and fleshed out artwork. which is great because the game is pretty fun and it’s great to see fun games be developed.

Thanks for reading!

-Brandon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Xenogunner apparently is still in development, I’m not really sure what the status is on the whole project but you can see some improvements that get tweeted by Pedrovin, the main artist for the game. Happy Frog Games seems to still be developing it while also cranking out smaller games on the side. I hope one day we will see this boy come to life and “xeno gun” all the baddies one day…one day.

The video below shows more of the game, it seems like they’ve been really trying to make the levels have more obstacles to them so you can’t just blitz through it all unless you know what you’re doing. Also that announcer voice…sounds so ExCiTe…

I think my greatest concern is whether the shooting itself won’t be super repetitive, especially when there’s little reason to not hold the shoot button (unless there are enemies in the game that counter that or there’s some sort of other incentive). Though I will say from my own experience when I designed Drone Strike, I questioned the aspect of a fire button in shoot-em-ups so I just made it auto-fire and whenever you hold the “Shoot” button it instead is a charge attack.

Regardless, I think Happy Green Frog will do a good job with handling that and also provide new weapons to use to help with balancing and keeping the game interesting.

Thanks for reading!

-Brandon

p.s. And take a look at this, who knew games had to start from scratch in order to become what they are now!

 

p.s.s.

Happy Green Frog responded with some answers to some of my questions, huzzah:

1. The status of the upgraded version of the game is that it is nearing completion. Release date is still uncertain, but it’s been playtested a decent amount, it has cutscenes fully implemented, most if not all of the graphics are done or near-done, there’s one boss battle I want to refactor a bit but it’s not strictly necessary, and from there it’s up to my publisher.

2. To answer the question of whether there’s ever a reason to let go of fire, one of the more powerful weapons has a really low fire-rate, and, without spoiling anything, some bosses move in ways in which it is ideal to wait until you’re sure you have a shot lined up before you fire. Suffice to say, manually pressing for a bit to fire a volley of it, then letting go for a bit to wait for the next good chance to strike, is, in a few boss fights, a good idea. I’m not 100% sure that it’s a sufficient way to keep the shooting from getting repetitive, honestly, but it’s something at least.

3. The old levels have indeed been updated to have more obstacles, first level aside. Additionally though, there’s a large supply of new levels, expanding the game well beyond what the GameJam version featured. If memory serves correctly there’s a fair bit more than 15 all new bosses to fight. (I think the total number of bosses, including the old ones from the GameJam version, is around 25?)

4. Some fun trivia: The voice announcer was actually me! I recorded that voice clip myself.

5. “Xenogunner” actually refers to the main villain of the game, which does make one of the lines in your article a tiny bit odd (but still kind of works overall), mainly the “xeno gun” but.