Google Pacman

And here are the assets if you want to host it locally:

Google Pacman at GitHub

In order to get familiar with the Unity engine, I followed two tutorials I found in the Unity forums. The first was a basic shmup.

The second tutorial was a redux (in C#)  of the first plus an extension that included models for the ship and asteroid.  While I followed along with this tutorial, I decided to keep everything in JavaScript.  This helped me to clarify some of the elements of the Unity engine independent of language.

After completing the tutorials, I decided to extend the game a bit to include bombs, more asteroids and large asteroids.  As of this writing, I haven’t made final decisions for how to complete the game (whether it will be a score the player must or a set time limit), but the current version can be found here:

http://programmingmylife.com/spaceShooter/spaceShooter.html

Unity makes the process of uploading any game you build in the engine to a website incredibly easy.  When making a build of a game you simply have to use the following settings:

File >  Build settings > web player      (make sure to include all scenes)

When you build the game it will create a *.unity and a *.html file (the * represents the name of the game that you set).  Assuming your web host knows what to do with the .unity file, you can simply upload the two files and the game will run at that web location.  If, like me, your web host doesn’t support the .unity file format likely this will cause your browser to fail to download the content.  I received an error on Chrome stating ‘Failed to download data file’ with details ‘Download failed, try again’, but on Firefox, the download status simply stayed at zero. To fix this,  you will simply need to include in the directory with the .unity and .html file the following in a file called web.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>

        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".unity3d" mimeType="application/vnd.unity" />

     </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>

</configuration>

I was able to find these instructions from this query at Unity Answers.  Unity Answers is a great service that runs in addition to the Unity forums.  These two complementary services along with the users give Unity a strong community that should allow users from novice to advanced to find answers to any problems they might have.

Steam recently announced that its Steam Cloud feature was integrated into Torchlight.  This feature makes gaming on multiple machines much less work.  Previously, I would have had to set up a way to share my game save files and copied them to the appropriate folder each time I moved from one machine to another.  Now, I am able to just load up the game on either machine at any time and find my avatar exactly where I left him on the other machine just seconds before.  Outstanding.

The only thing that doesn’t ‘just work’ with Steam is being signed in on two machines at once. Upon signing into my Steam account on my laptop, I was kicked off on my PC.  I am told that I can avoid this by playing in offline mode on my secondary machine, but I see this as a bug, not a feature.  I can understand not being allowed to play games on multiple machines at once due to piracy issues, but signing me out just for logging onto another machine is bad design.  This is a minor annoyance, though.

Blizzard also has a client for registering retail games.  While creating an account for the Starcraft 2 beta, I decided to register my StarCraft and Diablo Battlechests.  I didn’t have any use for the service when I signed up, but having my disks who-knows-where right now, I found the perfect opportunity to test their service as well.  The ‘my games’ section of the account is a bit buried, so finding it took a few minutes, but upon finding it, I was able to download the games patched to the most recent version in about 20 minutes each.  The system also keeps the CD keys saved so that during the install, I don’t have to search for the boxes.   Considering I would have had to patch up the disk versions, this may have actually been faster than installing from the disk.

Although both systems presented minor annoyances, they represent what is so enticing about the digital age:  I have purchased these games, whether at retail or digitally and am able to access them quickly at any time even if I don’t have the disk at hand.

As Jeff Atwood pointed out two years before the release of Torchlight (and in regard to non-gaming software), software should not be measured as a bundle of features.   While Dragon Age (another game based around character classes) easily has a greater number of features, it does not make it a better game, per se.  It would be unfair to compare the two games as they were developed by two teams of differing sizes and are built to entertain is different ways.   However, the smaller feature set allowed the smaller development team to create an incredibly well balanced loot driven game in Torchlight.

While adding more classes and skills would allow more flexibility, and possibly more replayability, who wants to replay an unbalanced loot game?  In addition to providing a reasonably scoped feature set to provide a more focused experience, the developers of Torchlight followed another great traditional software (and gaming) convention:  Let the users determine what is broken.  While Torchlight was initially a solid experience, a few of the mechanics were ripe for breaking the game.  Specifically, enchanting weapons and heirlooming gems multiple times made some items game breaking.

Instead of holding the game for months to find these subtle problems, Runic released a game that was fully functional with a few exploits (that they likely were unaware of).  When users found these exploits, Runic was quick to patch a solution.  Version 1 may have ‘sucked’, but they shipped it anyway.  When problems were found, they responded.

While Torchlight may not be the biggest selling, or most epic game of this holiday season, it succeeds in being great software with great support.

Netbooks were originally created for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which allowed less fortunate children around the world to gain access to laptops for simple tasks, such as word processing and accessing the internet.  Around the time the first netbooks were coming to market, manufacturers and consumers alike seemed to reach an epiphany that ‘hey, there is a significant portion of the laptop market (read: me, in the consumer’s case) that only needs to be able to access the internet and do some word processing.’  Thus, instead of one market for laptops, we now have market segments for gaming laptops and power users, as well as netbooks and lower end laptops that are either much cheaper or much smaller than their desktop replacement counterparts.

A similar trend has been seen in gaming in recent years.  With the previous generation of consoles, most games were delivered in the form of disks.  Nearly every game was made to take advantage of as much of the processing power as was possible on a given console, take up all of the space available on the disk it was delivered on, and arrive at market for full price.  However, with the proliferation of  smart phones and digital systems for delivering games, companies small and large have begun reverting back to retro style games that focus more on intuitive, fun gameplay mechanics rather than the most in depth physics or graphics simulations.  Now, in addition to the blockbuster games, we see segments for all types of smaller games across the range of platforms.

In both instances, consumers have increased options because someone decided to move laterally rather than forward.  Perhaps this is just forward in a different direction.

NB:  There will be spoilers in the following sections for the story of the game.

Instead of beginning with a cutscene, you begin in control of Batman walking Joker (surrounded by guards) into Arkham.  While you can’t do much at this point other than walk, it sets the tone for feeling as though you are part of the action rather than just watching it.  There are several other story moments where simply walking around tells the story better than a cutscene.  For example, rain begins falling in the halls of Arkham Mansion.  As Batman advances down the corridor, the mansion walls are replaced by one of the most famous scenes from Batman.   After walking through the scene, Batman opens a door to reveal that the hallucination was caused by Scarecrow.

It would have been simple to make a cutscene showing Batman under Scarecrow’s ‘spell’ similar to what was done in the movie Batman Begins, but changing the scenery while the player is still in control makes it significantly more visceral; it is as though the player is being influenced by Scarecrow as well.  This occurs on more than one occasion and each time is done in such a way to make the player experience it rather than just watch it.

Interactions with The Joker, the game’s primary villain, are also handled primarily while the player is in control; he toys with Batman during the game on the TVs scattered throughout the Asylum.  The backstory for many of the villains is handled in a similar way.  Instead of TVs in the game telling the stories, the player collects disks containing audio recordings of therapy sessions with the inmates/villains, which can be listened to as the player explores Arkham.

Although it deepens the experience, the implementation of the audio tapes breaks up the flow of the game occasionally.  By default, the recordings start up when the player picks up a disk, which sends the player out of the gameplay and into a menu.  The extra information in the menus is interesting, but the experience would be smoother if the audio started up still allowing the player to be in control.  This option is clearly available as there is an option to exit the menu and continue playing while the audio finishes up.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has its share of problems and poor design decisions; it’s not perfect.  However, the developers surprised me with their effective use of the medium of video games to tell an interactive story.  This certainly isn’t the first game to adopt this style, but I was surprised to see it so well implemented in a game that could have easily sold well (thanks to a powerful license in Batman) with much less care taken in the design.  Hopefully, more developers come up with ways to let players experience stories rather than watch them.