Captain Lambe is done!

Actually it has been done for a while now, but I thought I’d break the silence as we wait for Ichiro to make some progress and for Fish Squid Time Machine to get approved for XBLIG.

Here’s a music-videofied playthrough of it^[1]!

Inspired by Rob’s post, I thought I’d write up something about why I made the game I did.

Captain Lambe ostensibly takes inspiration from Inago Rage.

Like Dejobaan’s better-known AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, it takes place in first-person view amongst a bunch of floating objects with no solid ground in sight. The player jumps around with the aid of rocketboots or a jet pack or something and tries to earn a certain number of points within a time limit by collecting gems and shooting at geometric shapes. It’s a neat game! Sadly I’ve only played the demo, since the buy page doesn’t work anymore. In fact, you can’t even get the demo from Dejobaan’s site anymore, but I did get ahold of it from here or some site like it. Inago Rage was the starting point, but the two games my game ended up very different. A lot happened to that poor idea once it got in my head.

It mixed a little bit with Super Mario Acid. Super Mario Acid isn’t a real game that actually exists. It is something Tim Rogers talked about here. It’s about the great moments in platformers where you are always about to be in trouble and need to get out of there^[2]. You have a selection of moves you can use to get around and mastering them allows you to react quickly and appropriately to a wide variety of environmental challenges. You do master them, but the pressure is always on. The floor is dropping away, the enemies are coming, the powerups are running away, or time is running out. So even though the entire game up to that point has been training you for it, you fall. And that last bit is the important part, I think. This feeling of having great control but never being totally in control.

There’s a reason it is Super Mario Acid and not Sonic Acid or Gears of War Acid. Mario may not have started out this way^[3], but once Super Mario 64 came along^[4], you didn’t have just a jump any more, you had several jumps that each worked differently in important ways. You still had the vanilla jump, but now you also had the long jump, back flip, wall kick, triple jump, somersault, “superman” dive, and the Yoshi’s Island ground pound. This gave you a lot of options for getting around. David Belle has got nothing on this guy.

I probably seem a bit inconsistent saying I had that stuff in mind and yet made a game with only one kind of jump and no death! And I must admit that it does not show through much in the final product. But Inago Rage suggested to me that Super Mario Acid needs neither acrobatics nor death.

Inago Rage didn’t have a variety of jumps^[5], instead it had it’s jetpac thing that instead gave you a lot of control over how you moved vertically. Importantly, though, you were still fighting with gravity and you had limited use of it. So you are basically making the same jumping decisions, but you have finer control over how you move, which may be even better.^[6]

It doesn’t have death because I think death is unnecessary and the ubiquity of it in games is a little unfortunate. I enjoy a challenge in games, but I do not enjoy repeating the parts that I have already overcome to get back to the part just failed at. So when you are hit in Captain Lambe, you are knocked around pretty hard, but the game doesn’t stop, and everything you’ve done so far still sticks. The gameplay in it is about getting into position for shots, though, so you do have to avoid getting hit if you want to succeed. Hopefully this means that landing on platforms and dodging enemy shots are as important to the player as they would be if there were death, but without punishment and “you’re dead” screen.

It is also a little bit “floor is hot lava”^[7].

I don’t know if I was a weird kid or if everybody did this, but I used to pretend that the furniture had suddenly become islands of cool rock surrounded by lava that used to be the carpet. Simply moving around the house became a game. A couple things about that game: If you did touch the floor it wasn’t game over, it was just “whoops” and then I went back to staying off the floor, and it wasn’t somebody giving me some rules, it was me just making up a challenge because it was a fun thing to do.

Many games, I think, are too busy giving you very specific challenges and planning out specific routes through levels to allow for this sort of play. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I enjoyed the heck out of Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time even though for all of the prince’s acrobatic ability, there was generally only one way past each obstacle. Contrast this with N, where the wide open levels, the high and far jumping, wall jumping, and air control give you lots of opportunity for approaching each screen differently. I find it very interesting and engaging when a game lets you find your own challenges and do those because they are difficult and interesting to you, rather than giving you very specific challenges and checklists. I think that is partly why “quicktime events”, achievements, xp/loot, and quests rub me the wrong way. They work against some of the things I like most about playing games, and I feel like I’m being patronized when the game rewards me for an activity that should be it’s own reward. “The intrinsic reward for knifing dudes is knifing dudes.” as Chris Hecker put it. I know a lot of people see this differently, but when a game starts “rewarding” me with stuff it really kills my enjoyment of the game.

This matches my experience with sports, too. Kicking a ball around, hitting a tennis ball back and forth, and trying to hit a golf ball halfway straight are things that I find fun to do! The problem was always that when trying to play these things with others, it generally became more about the score than the activity itself and that sapped a lot of the fun out of it.

But I’ve never heard of competitive Floor is Lava or achievement unlocks for making it to the kitchen. I tried to make Captain Lambe allow that make-your-own-fun kind of thing. The floor is kind of a crappy place to be and so hopefully you want to stay on the floating platforms, and hopefully the jumping/hovering has room for letting you attempt maneuvers that might be difficult but fun to try to pull off anyway. Hopefully that kind of thing can be done without suggesting it to the player specifically or putting in punishments for not doing it.

Mostly Captain Lambe is “Bowser Jr.’s Boomsday Machine”.

Mario just gets the best damn games. In particular I find the variety to be found in his 3d outings to be among the most delightful things to ever happen in video games. Many pieces of these games could well stand on their own as separate games. At the time that I was coming up with ideas for my Indie Kombat game, I was especially happy with the “Bowser Jr.’s Boomsday Machine” boss fight from Mario Galaxy 2 at the end of world 5^[8].

I think this boss fight really captures what I was talking about above. The disappearing/destroyable clouds and the projectiles keep pressure on you, the boss’s weak spot is up high so being down low stinks, Mario’s got his set of moves which now includes a limited ability to create temporary floating platforms, and enemy shots are more likely to hit the clouds and make you fall to the ground than they are to hit you and take away health. I thought that Inago Rage‘s jetpack could be a good substitute for Mario’s moves or possibly even an improvement on them. Using shooting in place of a ground pound let me put the weak points on the sides of the boss, which made the rotation matter, and made you have to be more aware of and in control of what height you were at. It’s very slow to try and circle around the boss from far away, so I don’t think shooting really removed the need to approach the boss.

That all makes it sound like I was more deliberate about how I built the game than I truly was. What actually happened was that I came up with a vague idea of Inago Rage crossed with that boss fight and winged it from there, but these are the sorts of ideas that were floating around in my head and definitely shaped that process. I think it wound up as an interesting game. But most importantly, it was a lot of fun to work on!

1. ↑I got frustrated with my crappy video editing software and just had Windows Movie Maker do it’s automovie thing. It seems to have worked out okay.
2. ↑I guess I shouldn’t put words in his mouth. This is how I personally interpret the idea.
3. ↑In his first appearance, Mario could only jump 1x his height, and falling any further than that was lethal!
4. ↑Actually I see this a bit earlier, in Game Boy Donkey Kong, which is the greatest video game ever made.
5. ↑I think you wouldn’t want them in a first-person-view game, but it would be cool to be proven wrong!
6. ↑I think this is how Nintendo got FLUDD wrong and Hermitgames‘s Super Mario Pac got it right.
7. ↑You’d think the adjective was unnecessary, but for some reason it was always “hot lava”, not just “lava”.
8. ↑Sadly, the mistakes are edited out of this video, so it might not do a great job of showing you what the boss fight is really like.

Maybe he didn’t hear the starting gun. Maybe he can’t smell the adrenaline. Maybe he can’t see the frenzied blur of ExciteMike’s lightning quick progress. Surely though, surely he feels defeat bearing down on him.

A few days ago Ichiro sent me this screenshot of his Indie Kombat effort:

It’s a solid reinterpretation of the IGF logo, but perhaps a little premature.

I’ve been spending a bunch of time on making it pretty!

Close up of the main character, Captain Lambe. Or Captain Inago. Or Captain Ise. Whatever I end up calling it.

Yes I know I’m stealing from the wrong Indie Kombatant’s game, but Ichiro’s most recognizable game character is a marble.   Or a walking pile of random stuff.

The main character from Wonderful End of the World standing on a couch. I am not joking.

Now I really need to stop getting distracted making things glow in various ways and make the enemies (okay, enemy) fight back!

That’s the most recent thing to go in. King Ghidorah-style wiggly lasers.

It’s got some hovering around, some shooting, some floating platforms, a minimal hud, a big boss character that roams around a bit, and even some time spent tweaking those things that probably should have waited until more of pieces were in place.  That sounds like a lot for only 5 hours!  And it is.  I’ve been cheating:  I’ve been spending some time figuring out how things work in Unity before going on the clock and doing it for realsies.  I can’t make a good argument that that stuff shouldn’t count, though.

It is kind of strange that this will only be my 3rd finished 3d game.  I’m not sure how I managed to go so long without returning to 3d.  Especially considering that my other 3d ones actually won stuff ($500, a GDC pass, and a copy of DarkBasic Pro), and almost all of the messing around I did in school was in 3d.  I guess back in those days, the games that inspired me were things like Oni and Spiderman 2, whereas these days it’s Donkey Kong ’94 and… well, a number of things starring Donkey Kong, Mario, or both.

15 days left!  On the schedule for tomorrow:  giving you something to shoot at!

I wonder how it’s going for Ichiro.

Alright! I put in my first hour of work for Indie Kombat:

It’s, um, a dark box moving around on a dark checkerboard.

So yeah I was hoping for more progress than that.  I made the questionable decision of using Unity for this, and so I ended up spending most of the time just re-learning Unity.  Now that it’s all coming back to me, things should start going better.  I hope!

possibly-counts-as-cheating-alert:  I think I will spend some time off the IndieKombatClock learning to use Blender and import models into Unity.  Models actually used in the game will be done on the IndieKombatClock, of course.  That probably means I am making a game about basic geometric shapes.

As for what the heck I am trying to make here:  Ichiro made a game called Inago Rage.  I like it, but I can’t play it since it doesn’t seem to be for sale any more.  I’m going to be imagining where the game might have gone after the end of the demo (which I could only find in places like this).  At least that’s the starting point for the idea.  What I’m making isn’t actually going to look much like Inago Rage in the end.

Can Ichiro‘s monetary might defeat Mike‘s free software spirit? Is financial independence superior to independence from finance? Find out this month on INDIE KOMBAT.

The match starts today, with four weeks allocated and most of the rules still undetermined. Hold on to your seats folks, there’s no telling what these two will do to each other(s games).

Height
1.04 smoots	1.11632508 × 10^-11 Astronomical Units
Experience
28 years	9 years
Speed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHbFnwABxPM Coded in 12 minutes flat.	10 games in 48 hours
Titles Released
14	56
Copies Sold
< 250,000	0
Signature Move
	Launching random objects at you from offscreen
Catchphrase
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, empty, darkness was upon the face of the bag. Face the water and the Spirit of God moving. Thirdly, God, let there is light! There was a light. And God separated the light and shadow and light, good looks. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. At night, the first morning. God, Hood, said the sharing of water water water. God’s air, water, air, water, air, “I is not.” God called Heaven atmosphere. Morning, the second day and night. 2009: He is one of the main water and soil appears dry, the choice of Jesus. And God called the dry land, water, sea, and he called God, is good. And God said, “Keep the grass, weeds, fruits and seeds production, the type of fruit, only it was so.” He is one of 12 quality: The land of grass and plants, fruit trees and shrubs, seed head after the seed was good, my God, it was good. This is the night and morning, day three. God is trying to distinguish between the signs in the sky the night sky to light our days, years, said: Agriculture. Day of heavenly light was. God is light on two major stars of the night, and not the law recently. God in the sky, illuminating the sky, the planet Day and night, and the difference of light and darkness, and God was right. Be morning and evening, it was four days. And God said, sports biology “grade water, birds fly above the earth and life, the power of heaven. Moving and living God, with plenty of water after a good result for great whale Creator God is the best chicken wings, it was good. And God blessed them: “Please be fruit and increase and fill the earth and water birds. So PM, AM and five days. And God said, “Zoon in good condition, clean, insects and animals, and the world, my dear: It’s like this. The Nice and the world of God, and we moved the whole world, God is good. And God said, “make man in His own image, how can you allow the animals to rule the world seabirds, like all insects, insects on land.” God created man in His own image, men and women to build their image of God the Creator. God blessed them and said, “Please rise and fill the earth and fruit, which won its fish and sea birds in the sky where the creatures in the world movement. God, but I say to the grass, all that later, all trees of the world food and fruit trees, seed production. All the land animals and birds in the air, my life, I am all for that, meat is an all green plants: this.” God saw all that he has, as you can see, is very good. Morning and evening, and Friday.	var player:Player = playerLayer.add(Player) as Player;
Motivation
	Yes!