{"id":2072,"date":"2011-06-20T21:43:06","date_gmt":"2011-06-20T11:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=2072"},"modified":"2011-06-21T00:23:29","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T14:23:29","slug":"c4-ten-four-post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2011\/06\/20\/c4-ten-four-post-mortem\/","title":{"rendered":"C4 Ten-Four Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you’ll recall, the randomly selected theme sentence for C4 Ten-Four was the following sentence:<\/p>\n

” ‘A hundred and four.’<\/em><\/p>\n

I will confess that when I first saw that sentence, I seriously thought about ignoring it and selecting a different topic sentence. \u00a0I suppose that by chance, I’ve actually been pretty lucky with topic sentences thus far; \u00a0most of them have been meaty and had all sorts of possibilities suggested by them. \u00a0This was the first time that I had such a short sentence; \u00a0a sentence fragment, in fact, with no obvious design hooks to start from.<\/p>\n

Back in one of the early GiaW processes (I think it was #2?) I did modify the random selection rules after getting a bad initial sentence, and randomly selected a new sentence to use instead instead. \u00a0That’s how I ended up with the rule about disregarding any sentence which included a proper name. \u00a0(The themes are supposed to be suggesting novel gameplay concepts, not simply suggesting characters or locations, and so discarding sentences which specify those specifics seemed quite in keeping with the spirit of the Game in a Week process.) \u00a0But in this case, where the sentence just wasn’t suggesting anything particularly obviously.. well.. I had trouble justifying exactly why this wouldn’t be a legal sentence for me to use. \u00a0And so in the end, I went with it.<\/p>\n

So on Monday, I noticed that 104 is “CIV” in roman numerals. \u00a0Which I thought would be an amusing way to interpret the sentence, except that I didn’t actually have time to make and tune a Civilization-style game. \u00a0I find that in the “Game in a Week” format, I typically have time to make a game that’s diverting for about five minutes; \u00a0a proper civ-style game is just entirely out of the scope of what’s possible in my spare time. \u00a0So reluctantly, I set aside the “CIV” idea.<\/p>\n

On the Tuesday morning, I noticed that 104 could also be read as “Ten-Four”, CB shorthand for “message received”, and I immediately imagined using VectorStorm’s old Box2D<\/a> support to make a sidescrolling big rig game, which I would call “Big Civ’s Ten-Four”, with “Civ” being the unseen driver of the truck (and also a tip of the hat to that other way of writing “104”). \u00a0I wasn’t entirely sure what the game would be about, but I thought that there might be other big rigs that the player was trying to beat in a race. \u00a0But I wasn’t really happy with that; \u00a0seemed like too simple of a concept. \u00a0About the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted the player to be driving to the right over uneven terrain, and for the terrain to just stop so that the player falls off the world when he wins. \u00a0This, as a nod to So Long, Oregon<\/a>, which I love beyond all reasoning (but will say no more about, lest I be forced to tag this post with the “Shameless Indie Plugs” tag).<\/p>\n

By Tuesday afternoon, though, the “C4” interpretation of 104 occurred to me (‘C’ being 100 in roman numerals, leaving 4 left over) \u00a0Once I noticed that, the game basically designed itself. \u00a0My brain was going back to\u00a0Blast Corps<\/a> on the Nintendo 64, in which the player was tasked with destroying cities that were in the path of an automated truck which was (very slowly) carrying nuclear missiles to a detonation range where they would be safely destroyed. \u00a0And I wondered, “What if the truck wasn’t automated and driving super-slowly, but instead had a human driver who was in a big rush to reach the destination?” \u00a0I imagined driving at breakneck speeds, crashing through buildings, and firing off the rockets themselves (while still safely strapped to the truck) to give even more of a speed boost.<\/p>\n

In practice, though, I eventually realised that “C4” isn’t rockets. \u00a0(in fact, it won’t even explode from simple physical shocks. \u00a0But let’s overlook that; \u00a0I needed a failure condition). \u00a0And I wasn’t sure how to make that original concept into a “game”, as opposed to a simple physics demo. \u00a0And so the “big cube of C4 that must remain in the trailer” was born.<\/p>\n

The “crashing through buildings” part never happened, either. \u00a0I would have liked to get that working. \u00a0Procedural Angry Birds-style buildings which wouldn’t just fall down on their own but which also wouldn’t ever completely block the player.. \u00a0that just wasn’t practical for me to create within the time limit. \u00a0Instead, I just made several different ramp profiles, to arrange different sets of challenges for the player. \u00a0In retrospect, ramps and jumps works better with the “keep the C4 in the trailer” focus of the game than smashing through buildings ever would have.<\/p>\n

But I still think it’d have been fun.<\/p>\n

So anyhow. \u00a0With all that out of the way, here are the standard “Post-Mortem” lists:<\/p>\n

What Went Right<\/p>\n