Have you ever noticed how the seemingly simplest of problems often turn out to the the hardest to debug? I mean, how hard could it be to make a roach run along a wall? Easy, right? Right?

Right?

I am so not having fun right now.

I’ve been busy the past week. Text writers, rug barriers, roach traps, oh my! Although the rug still needs it’s real texture painted, the one you see below is just a placeholder. And, I think I’m going to finish more or less on time. The more being that the engine is pretty much done, and you can menu your way from start to finish. The less being, well, there probably won’t be any levels -_-. I honestly didn’t budget any time in my original design for doing levels, as the plan had been just to use some sort of random/procedural generation for the rooms. The problem with that is, it’s not much fun defeating random rooms. Sometimes you get lucky, and everything is laid out just so, and you clear the room easily. Other times, you get frustrated because the room is quite literally impossible to beat. So I think that while the design concept and engine are rock-solid (that was the purpose of the game-in-a-month exercise, after all), without a human touch the game is little more than an (possibly) interesting tech demo. It needs human crafted stages to really bring out the best it can be, as besting another human’s creation is by far superior to simply getting lucky and occasionally defeating an aimless machine.

So what does this mean for the future? The long and the short of it is, I’m ready to take this game beyond the prototype stage. My initial fears that the mechanics would be too clunky and cumbersome to be fun have proven to be completely misguided. I’m getting a very real kick out of guiding these roaches to their final resting places via the lights. Keeping track of all the trajectories from the lamps and working them in such a way that the roaches go the way you want is not only mentally massaging, it also requires very quick decisions due to the fact that even if you completely turn out the lights, the roaches really only wait long enough for you to collect your scattered mind before moving lazily onward. And that’s if you’re lucky. It’s like a really weird mix of the feelings that I get when I play shmups and puzzle games. Smart, but with these really weird adrenaline surges every time you just barely manage to keep a rogue roach from scurrying under the couch, but still manage to keep the rest of them on track.

So here is the modified schedule. I will still be releasing a demo on Saturday showcasing what I’ve done so far and allowing people a chance to give me some feedback as well as some testing. After that, I’m going to take a few more weeks to create some hopefully stimulating room designs that will provide a variety of challenges and keep an average gamer busy for several days. I’ll also add more detail and visual/aural stimulus where appropriate. The last project I did, my editing tool Splashmap, was “completed” in roughly a month. It was serviceable, but hardly what I would call polished or even particular easy to use. An extra month later, however, and it went from night to day (except for the lack of undo/redo, I really should go back and add that). I hope to have the same kind of quality improvement with Roach Roundup. And who knows, I just may just find a better title yet again :).

A screenshot of the completed title screen, fully coded and ready for action. The astute will notice that the title of the game has changed. One of my friends mistook the title of the last real update blurb for the name of the game, and it kinda stuck. So here it is, stuck to the title screen.

All in all, it didn’t turn out too bad for the amount of time I put into it. Now I just need to go back to the graphics for the main game and warm up the colors a little bit. I really like the rich browns in the title screen much better than the dark grays of the main game. Color is good.

Not a big update today, just a preview of the title screen I’m working on. It’s still in the lineart stage, but I wanted to share the sheer terror involved.

Run in fear, mortals. This Fall, the Lights Come ON.

I’m now two weeks into my game-in-a-month project, and I think things are coming together better than I expected. I currently have a fully functional roach scaring simulator to play with, now all it needs is sounds, a menu system, the objectives coded in and some more polish (more furniture types, maybe a throw rug, pictures on the wall, etc). So I think I’m still good for a release on the 19th. Although, seeing as Halloween is coming up, I might just take a few more days to polish it up a little bit more and release it on the 30th for your creepy pleasure, seeing as the theme (haunted, dark mansion; ghosts messing with lights) just fits the season so well.

But I digress, on to the screenshots and new features!

As I mentioned, the code for the roaches it pretty much complete. The AI to make them move around was a lot of fun to implement, as I don’t normally think in terms of a bug’s brain when I’m pondering AI type problems. My first attempt didn’t turn out so well. The bugs seemed extremely unnatural as they would simply keep moving forward if no lights were on to influence them. After I bit of musing, I realized that what the needed was skitter, a little bit of randomness to their movement. So I made them start and stop erratically in small spurts, occasionally changing direction slightly, and even turning around completely sometimes, as if they were thoroughly inspecting the floorboards. Which they would be in real life, roaches gotta eat too! And it made a huge difference, they are almost mesmerizing to watch now, just sort of wandering about like that, forming all kind of strange patterns and just generally coming across as very roach-y.

The random wandering is only the first part of the AI algorithm, though, as turning a light (or lights) on really changes things up. Cockroaches don’t light lights, and my roaches will run from a light like a dog from a bathtub: in a straight line just as fast as their little legs will carry them. And being fairly mindless creatures, they go back to whatever they were doing before the moment the lights go off. It’s kinda funny to watch. Turn light on, watch roaches scatter, turn light off, light on, light off.

I plan on starting to add the sound effects to go with these motions this week, and I’m really starting to realize that the heart of the gameplay with this project, the bit that is “fun”, is playing God with the roaches and alternatively scaring them silly and then letting them wander. So I really want the sound design to augment that. Wandering roaches that aren’t actively being harassed by a light bulb should make little “do de do” sounds and generally just come across as having the IQ of a rock with a rubber-band motor attached to it with scotch tape. And when the lights come on, some Katamari Damacy style screams, pitched about three octaves too high, would be just about perfect. Add in a few Monty Python-esque “Run Away! Run Away!”‘s and I hope I’ll have a recipe that will delight your inner seven-year old for hours.