Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with

.” What then follows is a firsthand look at how a celebrated physicist uses a playful attitude coupled with cafeteria plates (and their complex wobbles) to refresh his joy of ‘thesis-type problems’. I’ve adapted that playful attitude myself of late, mostly to the ire of my friends: most normal people believe they already have just the right amount of linear algebra in their lives.

So with new inspiration, I recently headed to the Chicago Game Jam to see first hand what happens when you let 30-odd self-motivated individuals just do what they do best in 48 hours: play with games. Anyone who’s been involved in a game jam before can tell you it’s not just about winning (though that’s really fun), but it’s about what you take back to add to your development arsenal.

What did I learn watching these coders, artists, musicians and industry professionals? What did I learn that I could use? The answer is a lot (I haven’t been involved in a game jam since about 2005, I won’t be going that long without again), but here are my ‘key takeaways’ as applicable to Touch of Death:

 
And maybe most importantly:

 
Needless to say, the past week has seen me re-orginize our project plan to further reflect a bottom-up process for the rest of our development cycle. I’m also going to push hard for alpha, so we can get some much needed feedback.

It’s amazing what you can learn in 48 hours. Sometimes, we all have to drink from the waters of renewal. Who knew I would find them at the Chicago Game Jam?

For people seeking more information, there are some good videos of the Chicago Game Jam and an excellent write-up by our Lunar Giant’s own Jay at http://jaymargalus.com/game-jam-post-mortem-how-tos-what-id-do-differently-what-went-right/ for people interested on the execution of a successful game jam.

Kudos to everyone who made the game jam a success.

The core concept of Touch of Death features a centered character making high and low strikes through Shaolin inspired movements. Kung Fu, features a hero that uses high punches and low kicks against about 6 different types of enemies. It uses characters with long, protracted attack animations that project where and when they will hit (especially on bosses). This is exactly the type of reactionary play I want to emulate, except we’ll be doing it with enemies that move at different speeds and are more timed to our music. Kung Fu also features levels that scroll both to the left and to the right. It’s a simple flip of my draw surface to accomplish the same effect in our engine. That’s definitely going in.

There’s also value in exploring some beat em ups. Games like Double Dragon, River City Ransom and even Renegade have some excellent examples of how to simulate the ‘you vs. an unruly mob of unfortunate to be there enemies’ feel that we need to accomplish. I like how all the games have little tweaks to their AIs in how handle enemies during their downtimes. You’ll see how they slow down, but never stop, moving around the player if possible. This actively keeps the player engaged on all the enemies on the screen, as opposed to just the one directly in front of him. If you keep punching that rube in the face for too long, his partner is going to shank you in the back, or the guy on the other end of the screen is going to throw a pipe at your head. We need to add more elements like this, I think adding a few types of enemy with a ranged attack that you would need to punch out of the air, would do the trick, plus it would be in keeping with the circus like antics of heavily choreographed Hong Kong cinema fights.

Finally, you can’t pull out the NES without playing some Ninja Gaiden. Or some Ninja Gaiden II. These games were phenomenal, and for my purposes, the sequel employs some of the most wicked physics on any platform, in two very different ways:

Environmental Physics: high winds, icy terrain, dark backgrounds, and even occasional total losses of light help to keep this game fresh from level to level. We were originally intending on using weather elements mostly as post process filters to create more levels, stretch out our art a bit more, and add some challenge. But revisiting this game reminded me that you need to incorporate all those elements constantly, and consistently to use them to their maximum benefit. If I can even turn these effects on and off mid level, it will go a long way to making a simple side scroller gain a lot of character, and allows for some really dynamic levels, especially in an Endless Mode sense.

Enemy Movement Physics: those damn eagles in particular. They are a perfect example of how you can use a simple acceleration on a bad guy as opposed to moving him at a linear rate to make their timing so much more difficult. There’s a whole heirarchy of enemy difficulty in fact, and it’s relation to their movement is not coincidence: it was painfully laid out level by level. Easy enemies move at linear rates, then come enemies that bounce at you, but at linear speed, then come enemies that move slowly, and then accelerate when you’re close. Finally come the rat-bastard eagles (4-bars of health, really?) who move fast, at a non-constant rate, and take advantage of large y-axis swooping motions to throw off timing even more. They’re a medusa head from Castlevania on crack, who if they miss, they turn around and try again. This, needs to be a late level Touch of Death ninja. In fact, this whole game provides some great guidelines of how you can use different rates of movement to make 2 normally easy enemies, very, very deadly when you have to fight them in close quarters.

I’ve always known there is insight available in classic old games. And when you’re building a simple engine, it’s good to draw inspiration from some of the games that did it best, and did it with a lot less.

PS – For the funk lovers out there, I found a funky search engine that actually played Dr. Funkenstein when I first looked at it. Seems legit

For the music fans: this week has been heavily b-boy influenced so here’s some b-boy favorites, featuring some greats and some newer bands keepin it fresh and funky:

Bobby Byrd – I Know You Got Soul
Kraak and Smaak – Squeeze Me
Soul Makossa – Manu Dibango
Afrika Bambaataa – Planet Rock

For starters, Wong is the focal point of our game. I mean this in a physical sense as much as the literal. When he stretches for a long punch, he can take up a good 30% of our usable real estate. Moreover, he’s hardly ever going to be touched, meaning the user’s eyes are always going to be drawn toward him, and most tap events will occur around him, not on him.

On top of this, Wong needs to be strongly tied to our funk theme: he needs to flow with our music, and convey an attitude… those little 6-cycle dwarven walk-cycles are cakewalk compared to this order. This calls for 12-cycles with a lot of bop and swagger.

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many detailed examples of how to accomplish a walk with all our needs, so we look for some examples. Check out Travolta in the semi-famous outro to Saturday Night Fever. Never mind that the still frame at Times Square is campy as hell, and by today’s standard (or maybe any standard) he kinda looks like a pud. What we can gain from his strut is how arms need to stay loose, and how there’s a pop to every one of his steps.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Bender’s pimp-walk from Futurama. I like how there’s a little pause as each step comes down as a result of his overly-accentuated side-to-side movements, resulting in some neat changes in height. If we use that a little more judiciously, it’ll add some swagger to Wong’s step.

Neil was actually informing me about how while he was working on the walk frames last night, he was deliberately listening to music with funky beats. In specific, he discovered that Stevie Wonder’s Superstition has every other beat spread out about every 1.2 seconds, or 100 bpm. That works out wonderfully for a 12 frame walk-cycle that’s slated for about 100ms per frame Not to mention, the Bee Gees Stayin Alive also plays at 100 bpm. Coincidence? Of course it is, but it makes for a good excuse to listen to good music at work.

I’ll make sure to post again with details of the cycle when it finishes. Combined with the above, Neil’s consulting the girmoires of animation that he’s accumulated over the years, and we should have one funktified-strut in no time.

Until next time, here’s a couple of funk inspired beats that time well with 6 and 12 frame walk-cycles (100 bpm, 600 ms per beat):

Bee Gees – Stayin Alive
Stevie Wonder – Superstition
Jurassic 5 – Break
Eric B. & Rakim – Paid in Full
Wilson Pickett and Bee Gees – Hey Jude

Alright, so the last one isn’t funk, or 100bpm for that matter, but doesn’t everyone need ‘a little soul hootenanny’ every now and again?

For those of you who feared that our vision of funky kung fu was dead, worry no longer. We’re back in full time production mode on Touch of Death, and are really beginning to like what we see. Check out this teaser cell of Master Wong’s first punch (pardon my hasty cropping job)!

Phoenix Eye Fist!

As you can see, we’ve been dutifully watching far too many Shaw brothers films. Consequently, the ‘white eyebrows’ character seemed the way to go. The process by which we ended up with this traditionally taoist, slightly funky and definably ‘Lo-Pan-esque’ Wong was quite interesting: an amalgam of colors, character and culture. More on that story soon.

Oh, and for the funk-deprived, I’ve been listening to this deeper cut off a classic album a ton lately:

Parliament – Wizard of Finance

I wonder if we can work ‘The Bop Gun’ into Touch of Death somehow…

The Touch of Death Animation Studio – embedding our animation frames and timings into our png spritesheets for us. With a multiple-character viewing utility so we can easily tweak the characters in their use of funky-funky fu. Can you dig it? (we can dig it).

The Touch of Death Level Designer – a utility for: first, eye testing art assets in the same manner that they will be displayed in the engine, second, creating level files with all the art asset locations, enemy data, and spawn timings embedded! Wicked to the max!

The save formats of both of these projects are going to be really fun to design. Libpng, our first option, doesn’t seem to provide the utility we need, so we may have to ‘keep on keepin’ on’ with our own format of image data for the sprite sheets (probably something very reminiscent of png compression). More to follow on the level designer (I call it ToDD, because after programming Delve Deeper, I can type ‘DD’ really quickly now).

In more funky news… found some inspiration this past week from these two jams, check them out, we’re still considering our licensing options at this point:

The Jimmy Castor Bunch – It’s Just Begun
Sly & The Family Stone – Underdog

I’m surprised I don’t hear more Underdog samples. Catch you on the flip side.

Keeping in league with Touch of Death the game, and all things Kung-Fu and ninja, I bring you ninjabands.  The gentleman running the website is a friend of Lunar Giant, and an ardent student of the ninja way.  We found out he was selling these things and immediately said to ourselves, how very Touch of Death.

There’s nothing cooler than ninjas.

Keep your eyeballs tuned into the Touch of Death blog!

Enter Dr. Funk Fei-hung: hero of the downtrodden, master of crane-style shaolin kung fu, elder heartthrob and PHD in funkidoligy. Inspired by Wong Fei-hung, the classic kung fu (and real life folk hero) depicted in such films as: Drunken Master, Once Upon a Time in China and Iron “Perhaps you have heard of the Buddhist Palm” Monkey, I think we now have a name for our funky protagonist (note to self: ‘funky protagonist’ would make a great band name).

Anyways, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me in the near future as I get my software and skeleton apps running. I have 2 utilities on my plate to give our artist/animator: a little in house tool to test his frames with (not to mention embedding our animation timings right into our images!), and a little cut and paste scene assembler that will allow our test art to be put together just as it will be seen on an android near you soon! Some plans and methods of attack to follow shortly…

For those friends of all things funky, check out my funkpiration of the week: The Budos Band.

The Budos Band – Aynotchesh Yererfu (HQ)
The Budos Band – Chicago Falcon

From this blog, you’ll be able to follow our trials and tribulations as we design, develop, and market a game for the Android platform.

This blog was built top of WordPress and the new default Worpdress theme TwentyTen, using a modified Photoshop Android phone template for part of the header.  I also edited some of the CSS and layout to achieve the desired effect.  The form and logo are both of my creation, as well.

Here’s some concept art from our designer to whet your appetite:

Stay tuned for more blog posts and information about the game as it takes shape!