My tribute to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is now available. It is a free download at http://JackGames.com.

You must defend your teeth against an endless assault of plaque. Blast with your fluoride cannon using a left mouse click. Use special weapons like floss with a double click. Navigate using either a right click or the arrow keys. I have made previous blog posts this week describing the various features and design decisions that went into the game.

Download: Cavity Crusade: Dental Evolved

In my previous posts I have discussed how I tried to make a game similar to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Because my game uses a mouse, and because I wanted to differentiate to some degree, I have added a special weapons/items system.

Once all the different types of plaque have had a chance to come out and put you on the run, special power-up items (creatively marked “?”) will periodically appear. Running your ship over these items will give you one of 8 random power ups. Double click to activate the power up. Some have a one time effect, others will last for about 10 seconds. Some items (like the shields and the floss shown here) can be combined. If you activate the floss while running shields, both will be activated and the shields effectivity will be renewed.

1-up: Double click for an extra life
Floss: Double click and a line of floss will be drawn from your aiming reticule to your tooth. Moving around will have the floss move with you. Anything that crosses its path is destroyed.
Two-Way: Double click and your reticule will start shooting back at you. This causes total destruction in-between you and your reticule, and also allows you to shoot behind your tooth.
Power Reticule: Double click and your aiming reticule will become a weapon. Move it over anything you want to destroy.
Shields: Double click to activate. The shields will protect you and destroy anything that touches you.
Sprinkler: Double click to leave a second tooth that will shoot a fluoride cannon in all directions.
Bomb: Double click to create a blast that destroys almost an entire screen.
Barricade: Double click to activate. For a limited time, your reticule will draw a barricade while you hold down the left mouse button. You can use this barricade to hide from plaque. Be warned – most of them cannot get through it, but you cannot shoot through it either.

If you can score more than 10,000 points, future plays will have a power-up appear at the beginning of the game.

Cavity Crusade: Dental Evolved will be available at http://JackGames.com on Friday 8/29.

The biggest thing that impressed me about Geometry Wars was the different behaviors all of the different types of enemies had. So as I developed my tribute to Geometry Wars I knew that this was a major component of the game that I wanted to mimic.

Like Retro Evolved, the enemies of Cavity Crusade: Dental Evolved start small and slow and continue coming in larger numbers and with more aggressive behaviors. There are 10 types of germs (or plaque) in Dental Evolved, and each will infuriate you in different ways:

Pawns: These are the first enemies. They chase you at a medium pace.
[color=orange]Heatseekers[/color]: This plaque will chase your tooth quickly and aggressively. You will need to quickly direct your fire on them or they will get you.
[color=yellow]Zombies[/color]: These plaque move slow and follow you methodically. Their slow pace often puts them just out of range of your fluoride cannons until they are too close for comfort. They also take more damage so they are dangerous if they sneak up close.
Splitters: This plaque is fairly easy to dispatch at first, but then they split into two smaller versions.
[color=violet]Jokers[/color]: These plaque try to gain position on you while constantly evading your shots.
[color=indigo]Kamikazes[/color]: This plaque will simply fly directly at you at top speed. They may easily miss, but they’ll quickly change course and dart at you again,
[color=brown]Dumpers[/color]: They rarely attack directly, but they lay down stones that are obstacles to you and your fluoride cannons.
Sinkholes: They attack fairly slowly but when destroyed, they produce a large vortex that will destroy anything in its path.
Ghosts: They attack fairly slowly but they can fly through barriers and other obstacles ensuring there is no such thing as a total safe zone.
[color=darkblue]Snipers[/color]: They aren’t interested in attacking directly. They will shoot their germs at you and keep their distance.

There are enough enemies to fill the screen and overwhelm the player with all the different ways the plauqe will respond to you. There isn’t as much creativity or variety as in Retro Evolved but there is enough to get some of the same feel.

Thus far I have outlined how I have tried to make a game like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Dental Evolved will have some of its own features, however, namely a special weapons system. In my next post I will outline how you can upgrade your fluoride cannon or even pull out the floss to dispatch the plaque.

Cavity Crusade: Dental Evolved will be available at http://JackGames.com on Friday 8/29.
Previous Entry - Design Decisions Made

I am not unique in being a fan of the Geometry Wars series. Being a Nintendo devotee, I only have access to the Wii and DS versions. I rented Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the Wii and it became the first game in a long time that converted from a rental to a purchase. The Wii version has a feature that allows you to download the original retro evolved version of the game to the DS, which made it the very first Nintendo system game that converted me from a demo to another purchase for the DS version.

Having never played the X360 versions of the game, I never developed a bias for the dual stick control method; so I am one of those rare few that prefer the point to shoot method (especially for the DS). Being an aspiring game designer, I thought it would be fun to build my own take on the game using that control scheme (mouse instead of Wiimote, of course). I decided to start the project

Decisions:
- I’ll use the mouse to point and shoot. I want to make it very easy to access so that it could be played with one hand. So the mouse can also move your ship. Most people should prefer the arrows or maybe a joystick to move the ship.
- I love Geometry Wars graphic style. I want to make mine similar but totally different. I decided to try to emulate the style but invert all the colors so the background is mostly white instead of black and the moving characters are filled with color with light borders.
- I decided to make it like Retro Evolved where you had one stage where you would continue to fight and the action would continue to escalate until you die. The challenge is to get the highest score. A stage based game like Galaxies adds another level of complexity that I am not ready for, not having experienced how my basic game will play.
- I decided to have power-ups like Galaxies however. I think that doing some different actions with the mouse will help differentiate this game that would otherwise be a straight knock-off.

Because my goal was to take the Geometry Wars look and invert it, I was now dealing with a white background with dark colored objects comprising the action. To me, it wouldn’t make sense for the game to be based in space with a white background, so I decided to do a throwback to a game I made long ago called Cavity Crusade (JackGames.com), a point and shoot (almost a light gun) game where you battle germs to save your teeth. Teeth are generally white, so it makes sense for this to be a mostly white setting. Combining the titles of my old game with the new one I was mimicking, I decided to call my new game Cavity Crusade: Dental Evolved.



I think the thing that surprised me most about Geometry Wars was all of the varied behaviors the enemies had. In my next post I will cover the enemies of Dental Evolved.

Not long ago, we got some details and screens about Tetris Party, a multiplayer Tetris game for the Wii that, among other unique features, supports play using the balance board.
http://www.destructoid.com/tetris-party-gets-fall-wiiware-release-with-balance-board-support-97401.phtml

People who have followed my on-again, mostly off-again, but now it’s on-again blog know that the concept of playing Tetris for the sake of physical activity is nothing new. Roll the clip..

Since Tetris really only requires 4 inputs from the player (move right, move left, rotate and drop), it is relatively easy to map these inputs to movements; and pretty easy for a player to understand.

I would have liked them to map the balance board to the same input as the nunchuck analog stick. That way you would instantly have a load of backwards compatible games to at least try with the balance board. But I digress…

The webcam game shown here – TetroDance is now free at http://JackGames.com if you want to give this concept a test run. Needless to say a webcam is required.

I recently posted an article regarding one of my numerous failures in trying to break free from the prison of a common life and become an overnight success in the video game world. The traffic on that article was very telling � no one really knows or cares about Jesse �The Body� Ventura anymore; at least not in the context of video games. Although it also goes back in 2002, my next tale is quite a bit timelier; as it regards one of the hottest topics in gaming right now.

I invented the Wii.

Not all of what makes the Wii the Wii. Accelerometers: no. Speaker in a controller: no. Genital-related name: no. But back in 2002 I was working with some of the concepts that make the Wii the Wii, namely: Simple and intuitive controls that rely on realistic physical motions, and development methods that allowed such controls to be implemented in existing frameworks quickly and cheaply.

Now when I say I invented the Wii, I am not implying that Shigeru Miyamoto stole my ideas, nor do I believe I was the only one in the world to have similar ideas. In fact we now know that Big N was already playing with this stuff behind closed doors during this time frame. What I am claiming is that I had very similar ideas that were ready for the public play long before the Wii was.

Don�t believe me? Roll the video.


Wait a second, other than him playing Tennis, Boxing, Baseball and Golf, doesn�t that look more like Sony�s EyeToy? Why yes it does, and we�ll discuss its similarities as well; but I am talking concepts here more that technology, and Wii is more popular for the moment so it gets the headline. On with the story:

When you leave your desk at work for the night, do you come back to find items missing or stolen? In 2001 we did. Several co-worker friends and I were finding some items (especially change) missing from our desks. Rather than just report these thefts, one of my more tech-savvy co-workers decided to institute some vigilante justice. He hooked up a web cam to watch his desk and ran it overnight. He downloaded some software that detected motion in certain areas on the screen and took pictures if motion was detected. Sure enough, three days later we have a nice flip-book of pictures of the clean-up guy rummaging through the drawers, jumping when he caught sight of the camera, and then clicking the button to turn the camera off. He didn�t realize there was actually a PC with a hard drive hooked up to it I suppose.

Nothing happened to the thief of course. My friend was warned because apparently his makeshift security system broke some privacy rules. But I digress.

I have no way to explain it, but when we looked at this security software my gamer brain wondered how I could use it to play Punch-Out. Having some basic development skills (enough at least to make simple games and applications), I set out to do just that.

Sony�s EyeToy had not been unveiled yet, but there were a few online games that made use of a webcam at the time. They weren�t really fun though, and their problems were some of the same that plagued EyeToy when it was released. I think the big mistake was they tried to be too complex, and as a result weren�t precise enough.

Let�s say you were going to play a boxing game made for EyeToy or a similarly designed game. When you punch, the software will try to place the position of you arm, calculate the speed it is traveling, and keep watching as your arm is fully extended. It may continue watching as you bring your arm back, and make sure that your fist is moving back down and not punching again. It will place your body from the start and constantly update to see where you are physically placed. If there isn�t much contrast between your shirt color and the wall behind you, or if anything moves behind you, your placement may be confused.

I didn�t set out to directly place punches or calculate fist velocity; because after doing that you would still have to make a fun boxing game using it. I wanted to play Punch-Out.

Rather than trying to constantly keep track of the players position, velocity, different limb movements, etc. I used the simplistic approach of that security software: If motion here then do this. More precisely, every possible action was represented on the webcam display by a dot. Hit (or make motion) on that dot and the action would be triggered. The placement of the dots is what would make the motions intuitive: the punch dots would be placed above your head so punching up (as Little Mac tended to do) would make the character punch. The dodge dots were placed on the left and right bottom so that they would be triggered when the player took a step either direction.

Now that I had the intuitive controls worked out it was time to integrate it into the game.

Ah but there lied the other crux of all other web cam games (and eventually EyeToy). You couldn�t take a game that was already fun (like Punch-Out) and just use your new webcam controls. You had to open up the code and integrate the new controls and webcam display into the game. Your binary or final build had to be compiled with your webcam controls already fully integrated.
Or did they? I was way out of my league to try to make my own Punch-Out, and I was certainly far from being able to hack a Punch-Out ROM to add a PC webcam display. So my solution was this, rather than having the webcam trigger an event in the game, just make it emulate a keypress. Now when I punched up, the webcam pressed A for me.

The possible implications for this were far-reaching. You could place the motion dots wherever you wanted, and make them activate any keyboard, joystick, or mouse event you wanted. Technically, you could play any game on the PC with motion controls using one separate controlling application. Granted, complex controls would be tough to separate on the webcam display, and many games wouldn�t feel natural being mapped to physical movement. But as the �casual game revolution� has shown us, there were plenty of simplistic games out there. There were plenty of games where it would work well enough until some good games were built with it specifically in mind. Bottom line: you could get intuitive motion controls into games for very cheap. And you could guarantee the games would be fun, because you could use the controls on games you already enjoyed playing.

(Hmmm� Perhaps rather than claiming to have invented Wii concepts I should be burned at the stake for inventing Wii-waggle.)

So why have you never heard of this? Perhaps because like Napoleon, I lack skills; namely marketing and social networks skills. Or perhaps just because it didn�t bring the whole package together the way Wii did. Heck, even EyeToy for the world-famous PS2 didn�t have nearly the impact of the Wii. Unlike the first story, there is not one central event that turned this downhill. I just didn�t make the right connections for commercial success, as a result it never capitalized on its potential and never really evolved from the prototypes shown on the video.



Despite the fan-boy baiting title of this article, I do not have delusions that this could have been the runaway success that Wii is. However, based on many of the game releases we see on all systems, I think it�s a fair statement to say you can have a game or program that is complete crap and get it published. Since I am a one-man team. just that would have been enough for me to call it a success. I failed at even that.

Yes, I call my site Fantendo, so naturally I got a Wii and love playing it. As a long-time Nintendo fan, I also really enjoy seeing the success they are having. But as I push pencils and fill out TPS reports in my average-joe life, I take solace in knowing that I have been swinging my virtual tennis racket longer than Shiggy himself.

What do you think? Is there still any value in a program like this in 2007? Do you have ideas on what it could be used for?

Edit: Here are direct video links for those who cannot see them.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YVcwuRNZUzg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-yJh3Cfrc7g