But today I got an unexpected email from GameSalad saying that 0.7.0 was released and it includes saving and loading! There still seems to be no way to implement social gaming frameworks like OpenFeint into GameSalad games (which would be awesome), but saving is a huuuuge step in the right direction and makes it actually usable for developing professional iPhone games, in my opinion. The lack of saving and loading was the reason I decided to not use GameSalad, and since I’m so early in the project, I’m considering using it again. So, stay tuned and I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

Warning: If you’re a gamer and care about reading spoilers, stop reading! I don’t know when this game will come out, probably not for a couple months, but just FYI. This post outlines the linear story, what you have to do each step of the way, or what I’ve come up with so far. If you have ideas for things that might make it better, or especially if you have ideas for how to nicely tie up the ending, please post them in the comments!

Above is the same map from the previous post. I’ve only slightly worked on it more, but haven’t bothered scanning it yet. South of the castle I’ve added a village, which will contain normal village stuff like a blacksmith, but also Haken’s house, the hacker kid. Also the line of trees closes off south of the village, with only one entrance into the forest below, which I haven’t come up with a good name for yet.

So for reference, the top left is the dragon’s lair (I haven’t yet designed the interior). The top middle is the inside of the castle castle, with the outside right below it. The top right is the girlfriend troll’s bridge, and past it the desert where Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe is. Immediately to the south of the castle is where the village will be, and south of that will be the entrance to another forest, where you have to go to retrieve a cell phone. So based on all that, here’s what I’ve got:

State 0

• Game starts out with cutscene of a witch burning. You, the princess, protest, but the king won’t listen because you’re a woman. You vow to overthrow the king and restore justice to the kingdom.
• You begin the game in the castle, in your room. Everyone in the castle and in the village tells you things like “If that dragon, Vak, that’s being kept prisoner in the mountains to the west ever got freed, he would help overthrow the king for sure.”

State 1

• Activated by talking to the troll guarding the bridge to the west. When you talk to him he tells you you cannot past, and besides he’s grumpy. If you keep talking to him you find that he’s grumpy because of he’s lonely and never gets to talk to his girlfriend. If you could just get him a cell phone so he can send her texts, he would be happy to let you cross. He hear’s rumor that there’s a cell phone hidden in a tomb at the end of the forest to the south. Until then, get lost.

State 2

• Travel through the forest, find the tomb, beat the boss, get the cell phone. When you have the cell phone, State 2 is activated.

State 3

• Talking to the troll again activates State 3. He looks at the phone and says it doesn’t work because it doesn’t have a battery. He says you should be able to get a battery from the Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe in the desert to the east.
• If you travel to the east there’s another troll bridge, and before State 3 the troll just brushes you off. At State 3, you tell her you’re getting a battery for the other troll, and you realize this is the troll’s girlfriend. She grants you passage to get the battery, and she gives you a bouquet of rotten celery to give to her boyfriend next time you see him.

State 4

• You travel through the desert and at the end find Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe, and buy a battery from the shop keeper. When you have the battery State 4 is activated.

State 5

• Travel back to the original troll and give him the battery, and the rotting celery bouquet, to activate State 5. He is eternally grateful and grants you free access.

State 6

• Past the troll, over to the mountains where Vak the dragon is being held, there’s a guard who won’t let you pass. When you talk to him State 6 is activated. He says you cannot pass without proper documentation signed by the king.

State 7

• Activated by talking to the office worker, Phil, inside of the castle. You say you need fake documentation allowing you access to Vak’s lair. He says that’s the highest treason, but he supposes he can do it for you if you do him a favor. He wants more than anything a laptop computer. It will greatly speed up his office duties, and he hears spreadsheet software can do wonders. He says he believes you can buy a laptop from Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe.

State 8

• Activated by buying a laptop from Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe.

State 9

• Activated by talking to Phil again. He says the laptop is slow and has viruses, and maybe someone in town can help. But for now it’s useless to him.

State 10

• Activated by talking to Haken, the hacker kid in the village. He gets very excited about the task and formats the hard drive and installs Linux for you.

State 11

• Activated by talking to Phil again. He gives you the fake documents you requested.
• Afterwords you can go into the mountain lair where Vak the dragon is being held prisoner. Fight your way to the end, fight the final boss guarding him.

State 12

• After defeating the boss (activating State 12), Vak is very grateful and agrees to fight with you to overthrow the unjust king. But he’s still chained up, and he says the chains have magical powers and can’t be cut with normal tools. He says he’s friends with the witches in the Wicked Forest south of his lair. They’ll help you.

State 13

• Activated when you talk to the covenant of witches in the Wicked Forest. When you talk to them before State 13, they don’t say much. Now when you tell them that plight of Vak they’re glad to help. Also, they insist that they prefer the term wiccan to witch. They say that you can only cut his chains with mystical bolt-cutters. They give you a key to a tomb that’s in the Wicked Forest and say that if you venture deep into the tomb you’ll find bolt-cutters. Bring them back to them and they’ll cast a spell on them to make them mystical.

State 14

• Activated when you go into the tomb and beat the boss. After beating it, you get the bolt-cutters.

State 15

• Activated when you talk to the covenant again. They cast a spell on the bolt-cutters and make them mystical. Now you can go free the dragon.

And so far, this is all I’ve got.

I still need to come up with a good way to wrap things up. I’m thinking in the end I want to have you, with the help of Vak and the witches, overthrow the king. And, possibly, let the covenant set up a fair and just and democratic governing system in it’s place. So peace and justice can be restored to land, where witches and dragons can live free from persecution. The end.

I just don’t quite know how to get there. I’m thinking I don’t want it overly violent, like you killing your father. Maybe the witches can turn him into a monkey instead? I’m still working on it, but I’m definitely all ears to suggestions.

Also, A Princess Tale is just a working title. I’m open to suggestions for something more fitting too.

Part 1 – Diary of a new iPhone game
Part 2 – Adventures in game engines
Part 3 – (you’re reading it)

My initial vision for A Princess Tale

Here’s some of the first sketches I did when coming up with ideas for the game:

The game will be very plot-based, and the plot will be linear. Nonlinear plot-based games can get much bigger and more confusing quickly, and since this is my first game of this type, and also since it’s an iPhone game I want to keep things as simple as possible, I’ve decided on a linear plot. This basically means that the player must do something to move the plot forward, and then they must do something else, and then something else, in that order, until finally they win.

I’m going to store this in a simple state variable. When the game starts it’s 0, and all of the characters in the game will know what to say to you because the state is at 0. After talking to the troll that guards the bridge over to where the dragon is, you then need to get him a cell phone (because he’s lonely and wants to text with his girlfriend), so the state is now 1. When you go back into the village and talk to people, they’ll know that it’s time to talk about cell phones and where to obtain them in Kingdom now.

So simple linear plot. Now the game interface. I want it to be like the original Zelda game, because that game was awesome, so my plan is to make the game world split into several screens. When you move off one screen, the next screen scrolls over. Each tile is 30×32 pixels, and each screen has 16×10 tiles. So, together this makes it so each screen is 480×320 pixels big, which is the size of the iPhone screen. You move the player by touching the screen. You attack enemies by touching them, you talk to characters by touching them. Everything will be very intuitive, just touch things to do stuff.

Since drawing the map will take the entire screen, there still needs space for a Heads Up Display (HUD). This will either be at the bottom of the screen or the top of the screen, depending on where the player is. If it’s at the bottom and the player moves closer to the bottom, the HUD disappears and reappears at the top, to stay out of the way. I haven’t completely decided what the HUD will look like, but so far I’m leaning towards: A menu button, a switch weapons button (between sword or bow), a use potion button, and some hearts displaying your current health.

The Game Engine

Ok, now that that’s all settled, how do I actually do it? My last game, teh internets, I programmed in Objective-C using cocos2d-iphone for all the graphics. Cocos2d is wonderful to work with and saves hours of time and is an awesome community-driven project, but for something like the game I’m envisioning, it doesn’t include higher-level things like a tile map editor, easy ways to script objects, etc. So I began looking into other options that can save me a lot of time.

I started with GameSalad. I downloaded it, followed some of the tutorials, and was getting really impressed. I even made myself a test game with a menu system, some moving sprites, some collision detection (and if you’re interested, you can download my test game called SaladTest here). With GameSalad, it would be easy to design a huge game world, and with the simple GUI quasi-scripting of actors, it would be easy to switch from scene to scene. I could even easily make huge maps that scroll, instead of just screen-sized maps, if I so decided. I was still a bit cautious about the lack of control. How do I make my game respond to iPhone OS events like if someone is receiving a call on their phone or if there’s a low battery warning? But I figured it looked very cool, and I went ahead and bought the $99 license.

Then, while perusing the forums, I noticed a thread asking about how to save and restore state in the game, and the answer was “you can’t yet”. I looked into this more, and even wrote an email to the GameSalad people (haven’t heard back yet though) about it. But as far as I can tell, it’s impossible to save anything to file and later load it again in GameSalad. This means each time you open the game, you have to start from the beginning. Well… damn. That ruled out GameSalad.

I briefly looked into Torque 2D also. The $750 price tag made me pretty shy about it. It’s not entirely unreasonable, especially if it can speed up the game development process a lot, but it’s also quite high for an indie developer with hardly any budget. I downloaded the Torque Game Builder and played around with it a bit, but then I started thinking more about exactly how I want the game to end up, and decided to not use Torque 2D, and go back to my very first idea. Program from scratch with the help of cocos2d.

The Map Editor

The most daunting task for this game to me is making it quick, easy, and bug-free for me to edit the vast amount of content in the game. The first thing I need for that is a map editor. So I decided to program one. I want to be able to share a lot of code between the map editor and the actual game, so I decided to make the map editor an iPhone app. So I sat down and started to think out how it might work.

It’s very sloppy, I know. But here’s the gist of it: Each map will have 4 layers, GroundBottom (for dirt or grass tiles), GroundTop (for things like flowers, that can be growing out of the dirt or grass below it), Objects, and Sky. The player will exist on the Objects layer, along with all of the solid things that the player can’t walk through or that the player interacts with, such as NPCs, trees, walls, doors, etc.

From within the map editor you’ll be able to save maps, load maps, create new maps, and delete maps. You’ll also be able to switch which is the active layer, switch which is the active actor (I borrowed the term “actor” from GameSalad, it’s a sprite — each ground tile, each tree tile, each anything, is an actor). When I scribbled those notes, I also had a vague idea of how I would need to make triggers work.

A trigger will be something that does something. I’ve decided that triggers will only exist on the Objects layer. So if there’s an actor that you can talk to, then that actor is a trigger. If there’s a door that should move you to a new map when you walk into it, then that door is a trigger. If there’s an actor that’s a new sword laying on the ground, that sword is a trigger. It’s anything you can interact with, basically. In these notes, I was originally thinking each map would have 4 default triggers attached to it, which would get called when you walk off the screen in any of the 4 directions. But I have decided to change that behavior, more on that later.

Anyway, after a couple hours of coding, I ran into an obnoxious bug. I got my map editor to a pretty good start, but then I noticed that there were gaps between the tiles when displayed. Here’s a video of it that I made to show people in the cocos2d forum, to ask for a solution.

With the help of people in the forum, I finally figured it out. I didn’t exactly fix it, so much as hack in a fix, but I think it works enough for me to be satisfied. Since then, I’ve also been changing the map editor around a lot to make it more user friendly.

The big thing that I decided though was that rather than saving and loading maps, and having directional triggers on each map to point to the next map, I would just use a grid. I looked at the giant grid map from the original Zelda game for inspiration:

And with that, I decided to make the map for A Princess Tale to be a 10×10 grid of screens, making a total of up to 100 screens for the game. I haven’t yet done this, but I’m planning on making a very quick and easy way to select which screen on the grid to edit. And while I’m working on the level editor, I’ve also been designing the layout of the world on paper:

As you can see, I still have far to go. But making the map is very helpful in thinking out the story. Every section of the map needs to be there for a reason. Every place on the map above has it’s purpose, and there’s more places that I still need to design (such as the wicked forest to the west, where the witches live, and I haven’t done any design on the village yet).

In order to save me time in the long run, I’m going to plan out the entire story of the game, and draw out the entire map for it, before I start laying out the maps, in case I end up wanting to change things around later on. Here are notes I’ve taken for the tasks that the player must complete:

And now, in its second post, this development blog has finally caught up with the development. The next couple of posts will probably be more about the design of the game, and the graphics and sound, than the development. It just seems to make the most sense to me to finish designing this game before I get my hands too deep in code. So stay tuned.

Part 1 – Diary of a new iPhone game
Part 2 – (you’re reading it)
Part 3 – The story, so far…

I’m starting on a new iPhone game, and this time I’m going to try something different. I’ll be writing regular updates about how development is going, sharing all my ideas and decisions along the way, probably even sharing snippets of source code, and overall keep you informed about the whole development process. Hopefully this will end up being useful to budding game developers trying to figure out how it’s done, and to myself, since I’m still trying to figure out how it’s done.

The working title of my new game is A Princess Tale. Crystal and I have been talking about making a game that goes against the norms in gaming for some time, in which you play as a princess whose goal is to go off and rescue a dragon. Lately I’ve been interested in retro games for the iPhone also (although I found the gameplay and plot slightly too simplistic, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia after playing RPG Quest: Minimae, and I sat there for a solid 2 hours and beat the whole game). I’ve been toying with the idea of making an RPG myself, but I decided that I would prefer to make more of a fantasy action game instead, in the same grain as the Legend of Zelda for NES. Although I’m tempted to stick to just a couple colors and make everything low-res and blocky, I’m not going to. But so far I am thinking everything will be pixel art, and all the music and sound effects will be 8-bit. I’m also a fan of the MMO Kingdom of Loathing and of Monty Python, and I think I’m going to try to go slightly in that direction in regards to humor. So that’s the premise of A Princess Tale: an old-school Zelda-like action fantasy game that’s funny and that’s about a princess who has to go save a dragon. This is the most ambitious game project I’ve started yet, but I’m confident I’ll keep with it and end up with an awesome product.

Since the original idea for the game, I’ve developed the plot some more, which I’ll be covering in greater detail later (which I suppose will include sploilers for the game, once it’s actually released, so read with caution). Here’s a brief summary: The game starts out with your father, the King, ordering a witch burning. It’s very horrible, and when you protest the King doesn’t take you seriously because you’re a woman. So you decide then and there to overthrow the Kingdom and restore justice to the land. I’m still working out the details of the story (and I’ll surely go into much greater detail later on), but you discover that the King is keeping a dragon prisoner and that surely by freeing him he will aid you in taking down the King. Along the way you’ll need to bribe a troll guarding a bridge with a cell phone (he’s lonely guarding the bridge, and wants to send text messages to his girlfriend), and befriend a covenant of witches to help you break an enchantment that’s holding the dragon in bonds.

That’s it for now. In the next post I’ll talk about the game engine and level editor, and how I intend to make them, and also my brief adventure with GameSalad. I’ll also scan in some game design notes showing off plot ideas, level editor programming notes, and maps.