Xerra's Blog

Drunken coder ramblings

How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Four. —

I’ve got so slow in adding to this blog now that I have to do a load of reading old posts and digging through archived threads on Syntax Bomb to remind myself of what I planned to write about. In the last post I closed off stating that there wouldn’t be another Syntax Bomb competition until May, 2022 but it actually all kicked off in February of that year.

The theme for this competition was titled “The six sides of Qube” which someone had randomly suggested and it stuck. The idea being to make a game relating to cubes. I didn’t think it was the best type of challenge but you work with what you get and I was determined to actually get something over the line this time after the failure of my Tapper clone, and Pixel Hell. The theme wasn’t popular and there were only four entries this time, including Qube’s effort, which never counted as a place officially. So what I came up with did come in second but I’d have to admit it wasn’t worth it. More on that later.

With the cube theme in mind I started thinking along the lines of games involving dice and jumped into working together a clever graphical dice handling system with external call handling, so, in theory, I’d be able to re-use the objects in future games if I did something cards, poker or gambling themed again. I spent too long on this and I never felt it was really very good, even though it did work. I was planning to potentially use dice in several mini games as part of the whole game package but hadn’t thought much further than that when I started work.

So originally I planned to create six mini games (six sides of a Qube, yes?) all themed around dice (which are cubes in themselves) therefore easily qualifying for the games theme, and have them all played out on a kind of casino table so I could possibly involve playing cards as well. It’s been three years since I worked on the game so memory is a bit sketchy but I remember dropping the cards part of the game pretty early as I was having problems with the code causing some to disappear due to not getting the core elements right before trying to build the game on them.

It wasn’t going well and the deadline was, as usual, coming quickly, and my poor effort at putting a lot of time in coding sessions every time I worked on it was giving me signals that maybe this wasn’t a project I was feeling but it was too late to drop it, and I didn’t want to abstain from a third competition in a row. I had, at this time, the record for the most submitted games in these competitions, outside of Qube itself, and I really wanted to keep it.

I got the first dice game done, “Drop Dead”, based on an old pub dice game which is played with five dice and requires gaining a higher score then your opponent over five turns, but you have mean penalties such as negating all your dice scores if you get a five or two on any of them. That worked out ok but even I will admit it wasn’t really very exciting.

The second game was “Crown and Anchor” – a much more complicated game involving dice with royal symbols instead of numbers and a token system on the game board. I got this in but it was bugged I discovered later on and would need some fixing to get it to actually play through a round. The competition was long over by the time I discovered this – mainly due to poor testing by me and probably lack of interest in anyone who tried to play it – so I’ve never got back to actually sorting the game out, even though I have bug fixed some other stuff in the project since.

I’d come to almost deadline day when I started work on the third of the six games I was planning to put into the package. Instead of creating another dice game, i found a decent set of words in a royalty free archive and implemented a simple but reasonable Wordle game instead. I was sick of the project by this time but, fortunately, I had done all the front end work I was going to need already as I had wanted to use the dice stuff for the title screen attract mode system.

So that was the end of that. Some parts of the project I do still quite like, and I’m a bit more positive about “Faces of Qube” now it’s been a few years since I worked on it, but I don’t feel I’d ever want to go back and actually turn it into something on the same level as some of my better games.

As it was, it ended up being the only game I’d complete for 2021, so at least it was more constructive than 2020, where I’d failed on everything.

In 2022 there was also only one game competition during the year and I did start work on a kind of Fort Apocalypse game with a helicopter, lots of aliens, unlocking doors, multiple hazards including flooding tunnels and stuff like that. As the theme of the competition was “It’s all about YOU!” I was creating it with a story of a mercenary using his helicopter to rob a wealthy persons cave system where all his treasure was stored with heavy security. That’s why I came up with the snappy title “Swag!”

The game was coming along ok, but I kept messing with graphic sets trying to create the large map area I wanted, when I probably should have just tried to keep it simple. I also spent too much time playing with particle effects and getting the “right” control system so the inevitable deadline came up on me before I could even have a basic map in place, and develop some of the more involved hazards.

So that was the end of 2022 for a completed game as well. I had a couple of small games I’d been tinkering with based on Vic 20 games I had wanted to remake but neither of them were close to finishing that year.

In 2023 things would get better and, whilst I still only completed one game that year, it was another competition game, and I think it was probably my best game to date. More on that in part five.


Categorised as: Competition | Development | Game Studio 2 | Syntax Bomb



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