HemiGames.com – Developer Blog

Just made a short gameplay video from the upcoming PC release of Orbyx. Enjoy…

Orbyx – Mystic Orbs of Chaos – Gameplay Trailer March 2010 from HemiGames.com on Vimeo.

My wife and I are currently trying to raise some money for breast cancer charities by taking part in the London MoonWalk 2010. It’s a sponsored walk that follows the 26 mile London marathon route and it takes place at night. Last year 15,000 people took part, so it’s a pretty big event. Feel free to make a small donation using the link below, it’s for a good cause afterall :

To visit our sponsorship page click here

Cheers,
Chris.

I’m currently finishing-off the C++ gameplay code for Orbyx and can’t help thinking it’s more difficult and messy than it should be. Internally I’m maintaining collections of entities, some with state-machines and most with event-driven behavior, and each of the event-handlers and interactions need to be hand-coded. This is not only slow but also leaves lots of room for bugs and potentially sloppy code.

Another option is to expose the interfaces of the entities to a scripting system, but this wouldn’t necessarily solve any problems for a small team. Maybe event handlers could be generated dynamically and bound to the scripted methods, and behaviour could be changed on-the-fly, but there would still be room for script bugs to creep in and these can be more difficult to track than native C++.

What would be really nice is a Very High Level point-and-click programming tool that would have access to the entity interface and state machine definitions, as well as the current scene graph data. Behaviour could be created in the tool in a natural language subject/predicate basis, and the underlying code would be generated automatically, very quickly, and bug-free. A simple example might be (where braces indicate drop-down combo boxes) :

IF ["gameplayControllerEntity"] [State] IS [Active]
- WHEN ["buttonPause"] [isClicked]
- - ["gameplayControllerEntity"] WILL [pauseGame]
- - AND
- - ["audioControllerEntity"] WILL [playMusic]

This can simply be thought of as:

IF [entity instance] [property] IS [value]
- WHEN [entity instance] [event]
- - [entity instance] WILL [method]
- - AND
- - [entity instance] WILL [method]

There are some issues that would need to be resolved, for instance how function paremeters are specified (clicking on the function name to edit params maybe?). I also think this tool needs to be 100% generic and data-driven, with entity interfaces and even basic data types specified in config files, and the initial scene graph in a Scene Definition file or database. Maybe entity interface definitions could be created from the game code as a visual studio build step, and we could even import resource file names by pointing at a directory. In theory there is no reason why a single line of hand-written code should be necessary.

Although this idea is certainly not new and there are likely to be lots of similar projects out there, I think I might be able to get it up & running with my game engine in it’s current state fairly quickly, and the benefits could be huge.

I decided I wanted to dabble in Flash programming so wrote this little chat program as a learning exercise. I’ll post about my impressions of Flash later, but for now here’s the program. Feel free to give it a go…

I wanted to build on the earlier Silverlight experiment by adding some sort of functionality, and this is the result. It’s a proof-of-concept file uploading utility that shows how Silverlight can interact with remote servcies and dbs, and of course share files. The actual file upload is performed using Michiel Post’s excellent Multi File Uploader.

You can use this sample to create a user account, then create some virtual folders on the remote server, and then upload files to your folders. If you upload a picture file the web service will also create a thumbnail on the server.

(DISCLAIMER – This sample is intended as a proof-of-concept only and may have some bugs.)

This is as far as I’m planning to go with Silverlight for now. For any RIA development in the near-future I plan to use Flash instead.

After the previous Silverlight experiment I thought it might be interesting to try to use Flash as a client whilst accessing the same .Net web service, and it turns-out this is entirely possible using Flex.

The following Flash widget connects to the exact same web service as the Silverlight example (and so has access to the same sql server database). Although it simply checks for the availibility of user names, it could implement the same account creation process without any problems.

Like I said in the previous post, the biggest downside to using Silverlight is the relative obscurity of the plugin. Flash on the other hand is currently installed on more than 99% of Internet-enabled PCs in the mature markets and is just as capable as Silverlight for presentation and user interaction, so using a Flash front-end and .Net back end seems to be a very nice solution.

I’ve been playing around with Silverlight recently and thought this would be an interesting exercise. The widget below demonstrates how Silverlight can be used in conjunction with a web service and SQL Server DB to create extremely powerful web apps. (Note that the Silverlight plugin is required to see the widget).

See if you can create a new account and log in…

So what’s going on behind the scenes? Well there are 3 seperate elements to the program:

In this case we have an SQL Server db on our server that holds the login details, and a .net web service on the same server that has the relevant priveleges set up to read & write to the db. The web service also has a public interface defined in a .asmx file, which we then reference in the Silverlight client itself. By adding the reference we can then access the web service’s methods and classes. At runtime our function calls are communicated to and from the service using SOAP, and the relevant class data is serialised and sent for us transparently by .net.

What this gives us is a highly portable, OS independent, platform for deploying extremely interactive applications (or games). The biggest hurdle to reaching the users at the moment is still the number of people who haven’t installed the Silverlight plugin (Flash still has the upper hand in that respect), but this could still make an excellent platform for games on the web.

I thought it would be interesting to see how Orbyx fared in each of the different territories available on the XBox LIVE Indie Games, so I put together a couple of charts.

This first chart shows how many relative downloads and sales Orbyx received in each country.

As you can see, the USA is by far the most successful market, with the UK in 2nd place with about 11% of the downloads.

The next image shows the conversion ratio for each of the countries, i.e. the number of people who bought the game versus the number of people who downloaded the trial (note that the numbers are percentages).

Not surprisingly, the game has sold better in the English-speaking countries (Canada, UK, USA, and Sweden(?)), with the lowest conversion ratio in Japan. Given the potential size of the Japanese market I would be interested to know how the Japanese language games on the service have fared there and whether it would be worth localizing.

I released Orbyx on the XBox Live Indie Games channel in May 2009, and this is just a list of all the game reviews and articles I could find on the web (listed in no particular order)…

IGN.com – Top Pick of the Week

http://uk.xboxlive.ign.com/articles/980/980769p1.html

The addition of some insane end-level bonus sequences, multiple power-ups linked to different characters and a solid presentation, plus a perfect asking price make this our top pick this week. Good job, ChrisH.

SFX-360.com – 10th best Indie game of 2009 (out of 700+ games)

http://blogs.sfx-360.com/buzzkiller/?p=1560

Will have you playing for hours and hours

SFX-360.com – 8.4/10

http://sfx-360.com/index.php?idReview=99

Orbyx: Mystic Orbs of Chaos has alot of similarities to Peggle, but let me assure you that Orbyx can stand on it’s own merit. It’s a really good game that will have you playing each stage over and over again.

WorthThePoints.com – Score 8.1/10

http://www.worththepoints.com/savamizz/posts/65-Kick-back-Relax-and-Ricochet

Orbyx is an engaging adventure that will captivate you will thrilling sights and sounds while challenging you to aim carefully and plan meticulously. This Plinko-inspired mayhem would make Bob Barker proud. If chaotic trajectories are your cup of tea, the price is definitely right.

WouldYouKindly.com

http://www.wouldyoukindly.com/xna-community-spotlight-orbyx-mystic-orbs-of-chaos/

It plays very similar to Peggle and almost does it better, don’t get me wrong though, its not an exact Peggle clone, there are plenty of extra features to set it apart from Peggle … The gameplay is extremely addictive and fun, while playing Orbyx, I really had a hard time believing I was actually playing an XNA game and not an XBLA premium title.

GayGamer.net

http://gaygamer.net/2009/05/xbox_live_community_watch_5809.html

An awesome Peggle/Breakout hybrid.

IndieFlux.com

http://indieflux.com/2009/05/28/orbyx-the-orbyxal-mystery-tour-is-here-to-take-you-away/

Even though this is a clone, this is a high quality clone.

GiveUsThisDayOurDailyGame

http://giveusthisdayourdailygame.blogspot.com/2009/05/orbyx-mystic-orbs-of-chaos.html

The Pachinko Game I have been waiting for.

Xblig.co.uk

http://www.xblig.co.uk/index.php/2009/05/06/orbyx-mystic-orbs-of-chaos-pre-release-r

Being a sucker for pinball and breakout, I really enjoyed Orbyx – Mystic Orbs of Chaos and would highly recommend that if they are your sort of games too, that you at least download the trial.

SmallCaveGames – Graded ‘B’

http://smallcavegames.blogspot.com/2009/05/orbyx-review.html

You should snatch this up faster than you can say “Elven robot techno cannonballs.”

Homebrew Welt – 4 Stars (out of 5)

I don’t speak German so have no idea what the review says, but 4 stars is a pretty good score.

http://www.homebrewwelt.com/2009/10/21/orbyx-mystic-orbs-of-chaos/

LeeAndZ.com – Overlooked Budget Games – Audio

http://www.leeandz.com/podcast/006.mp3

The review starts at 9 mins 30 secs.

Developer Interview

Finally, I also did an interview for Xblig.co.uk which you can read here:

http://www.xblig.co.uk/index.php/2009/05/08/orbyx-mystic-orbs-of-chaos-developer-int

This made my day when I first saw it. It’s a great little video review of my XBox Indie game, Orbyx – Mystic Orbs of Chaos. The overall impression was that it didn’t quite live-up to Peggle’s benchmark standards, but was well worth the $5 purchase price thanks to the additions to the classic Peggle formula.

They also compiled a list of the top 21 XBox Indie games and ranked Orbyx as number 4. Not bad!

Skip to 6 mins 20 secs to see the Orbyx entry.