Angstron Post-mortem

Introduction:

Angstron started as a project one night, as I saw a post from Thoughtfix, requesting a Armagetron-Advanced port for Maemo. Until then, all I had with BZK was a bunch of demos , but no game at all.

The idea of a TRON game was not new for me: I did one once, in Pascal, during a boring day at college, using CRT unit. The game was coded in a afternoon and had no artificial inteligence at all. Since then, I lost this code and had no intentions of doing it again.

The BZK_Vacuum2 game engine was meant for an RPG and never crossed my mind doing an arcade game. And even then, its render was not 100% functional. But still, enough for this project.

What went wrong:

The 770 was not meant for gaming. But still lots of game got ported and a few were (at least partly) developed. And those were 2D games, not 3D. The nearest we had from it was Doom , from INdT, but we already have Doom on our microwave ovens and so on. There was a clear lack of 3D gaming on the tablet and partly becouse both the tablets cant handle it and becouse its buttons layout makes it awkward.

My first plans to mimic ArmA were clearly disastrous. I had to discard lots of levels becouse I couldnt achieve a good framerate. Many of my great ideas were also foiled by the BZK render, that wasnt mature enough nor fast enough.

Even after the final levels were designed and “approved”, I still had to do some redesign and adjustments and this kind of destroyed the charm of some of it.

What went right:

The game mechanics was very simple to design, as I had already started with my failed LOGO implementation atempt. In a few hours from reading Thoughtfix’s post, I had a prototype running on the device. I was so happy with it that I designed some simple intro screens and 3D models for the game.

After I had to scrap the first prototype levels, I developed a new concept for the game – more like TRON meets Mortal Kombat – less frenzy and more strategy. (after all, its a slow target device anyway), with a ladder , one-on-one duels and diferent, smaller, arenas. Perfect! And a good step for a permanent-”in development hell” game developer like me: A project I could finish!

A great surprise I got with Angstron was from trip to Toronto. I bought myself a Asus EeePC (2g surf – lush green!) and I instantly started coding a new menu system on it. I was very happy to see how good the game ran on it. It was like it was meant for it. (And in fact, it is, as BZK was not created solely for Maemo, but this “class” of devices, and the Eee was not diferent, as it didnt ran all the GL games I threw at it).

One last great point was that I had to juice BZK a lot so I could create a game out of it. It allowed me to see where BZK was weak.

Lessons learned:

My hardest points was on asset management, menu design (I had at least 3 false-starts) and optimizing the 3D levels for limited-power-devices. But Im sure I’ve improved my design skills on those areas – so much that I had a lot less headaches with The Riddler.

One thing Im still learning is marketing. It took me too long to write this document and to create a new web page for my games.

Conclusion:

Angstron was my first end-to-end finished game, and while it is not “good”, its “passable”. Its a good game to keep on your tablet , to play on a bank queue. Good thing the lessons learned with Angstron were quickly used in my two games in production, The Riddler, that just reached Public Beta 2, and Angstron 2: Droid Hunter, still in alpha.

The Riddler – public beta 4 – Release Candidate 1

A few friends had the chance to try it out, but now its time to a public release. The game is mostly done. There are only a few rough edges. And I also want to lit the game little bit more.

Please, test it and let me know of the results.

UPDATE: This revision RUNS on EeePC 2G Surf running Xandros AND in Ubuntu .

news from this release:

- since I lost the code from the newest version, I had to re-work everything from a snapshot on the EeePC’s SSD that was a little outdated. As a bonus, we got back the EeePC compatibility.

This is the final beta release. If this works out, I will remove some last debugging messages and package it properly.

some minor improvements in speed and now it runs on fullscreen.

the matches have all been lit!

update:

http://batterypoweredgames.blogspot.com/2009/07/riddler-final-release.html

Only Linux builds for now…Eee and Maemo builds will come later…