The 8 Minute Trial Test #2

As a continuation of the previous 8 minute trial test, five more point and click adventures get the treatment.

Colour Key: Green = pre v1.0 functionality, Orange = post v1.0, Red = unlikely to be implemented.

1) Emerald City Confidential

The Good: Polished, HD graphics, excellent audio. Single-click interface is very user-friendly. Lots of hand-holding to ease in casual players. Parallax scrolling intro.
The Bad: Slidy-walk animation. Playfirst DRM (didn't actually seem too intrusive). Objectives were clearly laid out but there was no real explanation as to why - not a lot of real plot exposition within the first 8 minutes.

Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation, Speech, Various GUI effects.

2) Nanobots

The Good: Fun concept, well introduced and setup. Impressive dual view technique on tutorial. Swearing in binary.
The Bad: Some minor clipping issues. 'Groovy Greg' seems to suffer from a mild form of Parkinsons.
Not yet possible in XAGE: Text input, Y axis scrolling, GUI customisation.

3) Time Gentlemen, Please

The Good: Finely crafted, plenty of attention to detail. Entertaining and colourful introduction. Irreverent humour. Plenty of witty banter between protagonists.
The Bad: Some very minor flickering as walking & scrolling not synched.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI Customisation.

4) Heed

The Good: Very distinctive art & audio, along with extremely simple user interface. Smooth, clean animation. Intriguing room-by-room development. Existentialist musings.
The Bad: No narrator with a tophat. The fly is a little slow.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation.

5) Five Days a Stranger

The Good: Player character is a criminal.
The Bad: Visually has not aged especially well. Interface is particularly clunky and old-school.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation.

XBLIG price changes

Microsoft have shifted down the three price points developers can choose for their indie games (from 800, 400 and 200 to 400, 240 and 80). I'm in two minds about this.

Cons: With 800 points (about $10) no longer offered, more professional outfits are likely to be turned away if the most they can charge is about $5. The race-to-the-bottom pricing is likely to make XBLIG much more like Apple's App Store. It is already quite cluttered with largely pointless apps and massage games (the dashboard update to introduce users ratings should mitigate this somewhat). In my opinion, the areas in which Indie Games differs to the App Store are its strengths, so it is unfortunate to see them being eroded further.

Pros: I had no plans to monetize my DBP09 entry, given that it will provide little more than 15-20 minutes of play. But with a price point of 75p, why not? I'll reassess this closer to completion. It also opens the door for various small AGS games, for which a 75p cost is justifiable.

OpenQuest

To distract from the fact I've not been able to get anything done in the last fortnight, here's a picture of OpenQuest running on XAGE:

It's a bit glitchy (not sure what happened to the Cleaner on the left) and has the same limitations as Demo Quest, but it works. Between the two I have a reasonable amount of source material with which to improve the AGS conversion process.

Silverlight v3.0 has now been released, so Bill Reiss is continuing his excellent work to bring SilverSprite up to speed. This means that any browser based XAGE adventuring should soon become a much more robust & enjoyable experience.

Twitsqueak

As I'm practically providing 24 hour care at the moment, I have very little time for anything, let alone coding. This means I am spending a lot more time thinking about all things XAGE than actually doing anything productive.

As you can only mull over algorithms and design for so long, I've started to devote more time thinking about the eventual ramping up of the PR machine. I've been collecting a number of decent articles on publicising independant games, though it has become obvious that this is the part of XAGE's lifecycle that I'm looking forward to least. It's cold and calculating but a necessary evil.

Increasingly people have mentioned that twitter is good for (ugh) networking, (ick) public relations and (hurray!) stalking celebrities. To this end I've created an XAGE twitter account. I generally avoid sending text messages and have a distate for anything that encourages netspeak, but having used it for a few days I can see its merits (besides following the ravings of Charlie Brooker). Updates may be few and far between for the time being.

All being said, all the publicity in the world is next to useless if you don't have a decent product. One day I'll get around to fixing those damnable dynamic object boxes.

Feedback = Features

I've had a few pieces of genuinely useful feedback so far. One suggestion was to allow developers to enable or disable each individual action as and when they're needed (much like commenting out code), which hadn't even occurred to me previously.

After adding this functionality, I then realised it would be handy to be able to annotate scripts with developer comments, so added that too. To add an extra layer of flexibility I decided to finally implement Nested IFs, meaning it's now possible to create more complex conditional logic:



So, XAGE scripts looks more and more like real code, but it's still verbose and simple enough for anyone with eyes and half a brain to understand. The only typing required is for the dialogue and occasional object value.

Another improvement has been to add WalkLines, which are similar to WalkBoxes but only have two points rather than four. This was already achievable, simply by making two points the same, but having this additional construct should make it more immediately obvious to developers about their use. There are now also more visual cues when placing any walkable areas, so you can more easily detect horizontal or vertical alignment and connections.

I'm still a few months away from ramping up the PR machine as we get closer to v1.0. One thing lacking so far is bug reports - I've only ever received two. I'd love to believe that XAGE and XAGE Editor are watertight applications but that simply isn't the case. If anyone encounters any fatal exceptions, please let me know (there's a big friendly button that does it automatically!).

Finally, I've pestered Ben304 into letting me use some of his artwork for my DBP entry. He's a well-known man about AGS-town, so if you haven't taken a look at his short games Annie Android or Shifter's Box, do so.

XAGE Publc Alpha v0.4 - Download

I'm not sure of the exact date, but it's been more or less a year since I began working on XAGE, and it's a relief to finally have something to publicly show for it. You can now download it at the following link:

www.clarvalon.com/XAGE/Release/xage v0.4.zip (2.8mb, mirror)

This includes:

• XAGE Editor (with embedded Default Game)
• Skeleton Visual Studio Projects for Xbox360 and Silverlight (included for the people who have expressed an interest in trying them out).
  

It has to be pointed out that this release is more than a bit rushed as I'm completely swamped. There are quite a lot of known issues and unfinished sections, but as a whole product it's the most feature-complete version yet. It's fair to say that the included game is a little underwhelming compared to previous ones, due to lack of fancy Lucasarts graphics and varied scripting, but it should serve as a pointer on how to achieve the absolute basic effects.

As usual, XAGE is hungry for feedback and bug reports, both of which can be submitted in seconds via the built-in menu options. Likewise it would be interesting to hear the experiences of anyone attempting to use either of the VS projects or the AGS conversion tool.

'Avatars may leave innocents or bystanders slightly injured, but not dead'

Precautionary swine flu quarantine aside, the weekend has provided some much needed relief. Easily the biggest thorn in XAGE's development has been dealing with all portability issues. I was pleased with the heavy-duty Rjindael encryption but unfortunately it was not compatible with either Silverlight or the Xbox. After scouring the web I was able to find three different, working ports of SharpZipLib, meaning I could begin work on the ...

Unified File Access:

All assets are now zipped up for published games, reducing the size and number of files. With regards to file formats, it's not even a case of working with the lowest common denominator, as there is no way of freely (i.e. without licensing issues, either by using mp3 or commercial libraries) using any two formats on all three target platforms. After a lot of trial and error and about half a dozen open source audio components, I've finally implemented a solution that satisfies all the requirements for the new integrated publishing system:

• XAGE can now play one piece of background music at a time, and any number of sound effects.
• Music is initially stored as Mp3s and sounds as Wav files. These are used when debugging on Windows (via SdlDotNet).
• For published windows games, the user is given the option of swapping the Mp3s for Ogg tracks to bypass any licensing issues. The Wav files are untouched.
• For Xbox games, the Wav files are automatically converted to Xnb via MSBUILD. The Mp3s are converted into Wma.
• As Silverlight cannot natively play Wav files, they are coverted into Wma and Mp3s are left untouched, covered by Silverlight/MS.
• All three platforms are capable of loading assets from the pre-prepared zip files (with the exception of the Xbox Music as it cannot stream a compressed Wma file).

Just thinking about it is exhausting, but it all works as expected. Publishing an XAGE game is designed to be as simple as possible (K.I.S.S applies to UIs too), so the user will be oblivious to most of the above. The Xbox and Silverlight platforms are a little more involved, and require a free installation Visual Studio 2008, but even then it's mostly just a case of hitting the big green 'Start debugging' button.

What does this all mean? Well, after debugging a game via XAGE Editor it's possible to play the same game on the 360 and a Web Browser in a matter of seconds (minutes if you've made changes to the graphics or audio):



Xbox Live Indie Games:

Community Games has been rebranded by Microsoft to 'Indie Games', which seems like a sensible move. This coincides with the release of the Xna 3.1 framework, which from XAGE's point of view doesn't yet provide a compelling reason to update. The inclusion of Avatar support is a nice touch, though there are some strange guidelines regarding their use in games.

As DBP09 closes in August, I've taken the decision to wrap up any loose ends, release v0.4 and then see if I'm able to complete my game within the competition deadline. I'd essentially be submitting a demo (not that there is any chance of me winning anything), but it will be a good exercise in finally putting the engine through its paces and will give ideas on areas of improvement. The resulting 4 month Creator's Club access will be handy too, giving me time to take a proper stab at it before releasing to XBLIG.