The level’s goal is pretty straight forward.  Capture the airport, ferry a trooper over to an island and capture the city, all in 40 turns.  It’s not that easy though, as the enemy uses snipers and stealth tanks to stop you.  Whenever I would get close, they would nail me from a distance.  I could never get that airport and when I did, I would run out of time before I could get a unit over to the island.  After the first five or six failures, I started trying different strategies until I came across one that worked.

The default division is the Swarming Wasps.  At first they don’t seem like the best pick for the map.  They are cheap to build, but can’t use terrain very well and capture slowly.  They will be the key to victory,  however.  The enemy is the Black Bears and they have no real strengths or weaknesses.

To beat this level there are three things you have to do:

• Counter their snipers and stealth tanks with your own snipers and regular tanks
• Stop their reinforcements
• Use your division’s special abilities

At the start of the level, move your units up the two roads; one on the west of your main base and one on the east.  On the west road, capture the building.  On the right road, don’t bother with the building; your units will just get killed trying to capture it. The forest is helpful here, because it mostly keeps the enemy blocked from coming directly down to your base and it gives your units a place to hide. As soon as you can, make two snipers and send then up into this forest and into stealth mode.  Use your scouts to get them up there faster.  A truck would help you ferry guys faster as well, so build one in the next turn or so.  Don’t go rushing into the area north of the forest.  You’ll just get cooked.  Use your snipers to pick off their units as they get close and un-stealthed.  After the city along the west road is captured, send your trooper west to the factory and capture that for an easier time inserting units into the battle.  If possible, capture the other building as well.

This map gives you the ability to call in an Air Strike.  Don’t waste it on single units unless you are poorly matched up in an inevitable face-off.  If I didn’t see at least two enemy units in a line within five squares, I waited a turn or two to use it.  Don’t forget it exists, and use it to soften up units before making your attacks. Once you use it, you’ll have to wait for it to build up again.

Just as you get a special unit to Air Strike, the enemy has a special EMP-like attack that will cause the target and nearby units to not be able to move for the next turn.  They tend to use it well enough to slow you down right before you are about to make a move.

While you’re capturing on the left side and snipering in the center of the map, you’ll want to help yourself out by slowing the enemy reinforcements.  I’ve had success moving either a tank or an anti-aircraft gun up the east road to their factory and just camping out there.  If you wait until your trooper is capturing the factory in the west, you may be able to avoid trouble as they move units west to counter. They will occasionally try to destroy the unit on the factory, but if you keep the number of their units low, the AI will prefer to reinforce the battle rather than free their factory.

Scouts are helpful in revealing stealthed enemy units so that your snipers and tanks can attack.  Stealth units are not as effective when they aren’t stealthed, so you can take advantage of that.  On the flip side, your own stealthed units can help stall the enemy, as they will stop moving and end that unit’s turn when they come across one of your snipers waiting in hiding.  When they stop moving, it usually means they have missed a chance to attack so you should strike first with a tank or other sniper.  Afterward, move your unit away and back into stealth mode.

So far, I haven’t mentioned anything about capturing the airport.  That’s because you don’t need to.  Yes, I know that is what the mission briefing tells you to do, and I’m sure it’s possible, but that’s not the only option.

Your division has two abilities that you can take advantage of.  Double Shot creates two stealth fighters at half strength near your base.  As soon as this ability is available, use it.  Then send those two up the left side of the map.  Park them over a captured city to recharge them if you want, but it’s not totally necessary.  I’ve had to use them in combat a few times to protect the capturing trooper, but that’s not their main goal.  When you get a chance, send them up to the island in the northwest corner that doesn’t have the city on it.

The second ability of the Swarming Wasps is Eject.  This destroys one of your fighters, but does 100% damage to that square and 75% to adjacent squares.  It also dumps a half-health grunt on the ground.  It can only be used next to or on an enemy unit.

Well, what do you know?  After awhile, the enemy decides to reinforce the target island with an anti-aircraft gun.  You might think that is bad, but in actuality, you need it there.  Since the Eject ability requires an enemy to be nearby, you’ve just been handed victory.  Take one of your fighters and end it’s turn over the anti-aircraft gun.  Do the moves for the rest of your units.   If you aren’t in the middle of combat, send your units up between the water and the enemy’s second factory, and be sure to sit someone on the actual factory to stop the enemy from building anything.  Go back to the fighter and select Eject.  It should blow up the anti-aircraft gun and leave you with that damaged grunt.  Take the unit and begin capturing the city.

You aren’t home free yet.  Once you start the capture, the enemy will bring in yet more reinforcements from off the map.  An anti-aircraft gun and a rocket launcher.  The units you moved near the water should be able to overrun these two before they can do any damage.  Keep capturing the city, destroying any other enemy units you find, and prepare your victory speech.

I hope that this guide can help at least one person get unstuck on this level.  This is one of my favorite PSP games and an extremely well-done representative of the genre.  If this solution helped you, please comment and let me know!  If you need more assistance, well, I can try that too.

It’s a concept that I had been toying with this past week, jotting down some ideas and refining it along the way.  Quite simply, it’e the game Breakout, only with a twist.  In regular Breakout, you move the paddle back and forth on the bottom to keep the ball from falling off the screen.  At the same time, you are trying to use the ball to destroy all the bricks on the screen.  In my game the computer plays the part of the paddle and you instead try to defend a goal at the top of the screen by placing bricks. 

It’s a neat idea, but I by no means was able to implement all my ideas.  The number one thing that was lacking is multiple types of bricks.  This version only has two: normal and 2X Hit.  As you can probably guess, normal takes one hit to be destroyed and 2X Hit takes two.  I wanted to add more bricks that did weird and interesting things when the ball hit it, like explode or eat it. 

You build your wall of bricks by buying them from money you’ve earned while playing.  So far, the only two ways you can earn money is to play, where you get one credit every so many seconds, or when the computer misses the ball with the paddle and it goes off the bottom of the screen.  Eventually you’ll be able to get money by doing other things.

One thing that doesn’t seem to work very well is the collision.  The ball seems to react well when it hits the top or the bottom of the bricks, but if it hits the side of two bricks, it can sometimes bounce in a way that causes it to go ‘inside’ the wall.  I have a few ideas on fixing that but I didn’t have enough time to implement them.

The AI could be improved, letting it think ahead instead of having it just react to the current position of the ball.  If I project the location it will be at when it gets to the bottom, I could have the paddle waiting for it.

There are no skill levels implemented.  Smarter AI, less money and multiple bouncing balls would make it more challenging and could be set to differing degrees.

I also didn’t do any sounds for it, as the compo requires that all resources be generated within the 48 hours and my recording soundcard is not quite working.  I will create some for the post-compo version of the game.  Same for music.

I tested it on the Sun JVM 1.6.0, though it should work on on JVM 1.5.0.  It will not work on the JVM 1.4.2, as it requires System.nanoTime() that was introduced in JVM 1.5.0.

I programmed it in Eclipse 3.3.2, and used Photoshop for the graphics.

You can download the game here or the source code here.

[update: changed the above link to the .zip file.  The jar just wasn't handling some class-pathing stuff well and I don't have time to troubleshoot it right now.]

In this first jam, they created a game called Gravediggers.  The post includes a video with five people playing through a round.  The graphics themselves remind me a little of the original Joust game, with the brown floating platforms and blockish characters.   The players are represented by small rectangular blocks, and the playing field offers a lot of space to run around and shoot.  The object is to kill the rampant zombies with a gun and collect the heads to return them to the crypt for points.  Heads of the other players can be returned for extra points.  The side-view perspective shows generated terrain and two crypts randomly around the field.  The players hop from platform to platform, and over little hills.  They can also shoot through the terrain if they can’t get around it to score those zombie heads.

This reminds me of Ludum Dare’s 48 Hour Game Programming Competition held twice a year (voting starts for the LD11 theme April 11th).  There are a lot of neat little games that come out this competition, many of them that look as good or better than the NES games we used to spend hours playing as kids.  They’re just as fun too.  Entrants are allowed to use a wide range of development tools and can create on any platform they wish.  The only caution is that if other people can’t play your game, they can’t vote on it, so most entries are done on Windows.  If you are an amateur game programmer, give the LD11 a shot.  If I can get a decent desk for my computer by April 11th, I may try to enter.  Trying to type with the keyboard on an endtable is not fun.  I submitted a sad entry for LD2, many years ago.  Sad enough that I won’t bother to show you.

Shake these two things together in a glass, add a little lemon–here’s my third topic.

Sony hasn’t moved forward with any kind of amateur software development kit for creating PS3 games.  Sure, it is possible to create games for the PS3 running on Linux, however, there is no formal tool package to make the process easier.  Requiring an install of linux in order to play these also doesn’t do anything good for widespread distribution to the community. 

I don’t have a 360, so I haven’t tinkered with their system but based on what I have read, Microsoft seems to be doing a good job with their XNA community development project.  Everything from providing the tools, developing on a PC, MSDN reference, and the end-user distribution is fairly well thought out.  Of course, Microsoft has been giving out development tools for years now, whereas Sony has only been distributing professional tools directly to the game developers.  They have been touting how much easier the Playstation EDGE dev kit is for developers so perhaps a stripped down version of it would be the answer for the amateur side.  

These little amateur games fill a niche in the games industry but they haven’t really penetrated console systems.  How many hours are spent each day playing silly little Flash-based games.  It doesn’t take a three year cycle to create an interesting game people will spend hours playing.  All you need is a simple concept implemented in a way that is fun.  Bejeweled and Tower Defense are good examples.  PixelJunk even took the Tower Defense idea and twisted it enough in an attempt to get Japanese players to like it.

While we’re at it, I think I’ll mention that Microsoft is expanding their XNA in version 3.0 to allow development on their portable Zune system.  I don’t know about the technicalites of the PSP hardware and how software is run on it compared to the PS3, but I think that Sony should not forget the PSP when working on their dev kit.

There are more high-profile things that people might like Sony to work on, including Home and better in-game communication with our friends.  I agree, these things are important.  In fact, Home has arcade machines in some of the spaces, and I think that is an opportunity for people to create mini-games.

There are many aspiring game developers who could use this kit as a valuable experience for a future job.  There are also people who don’t want to submit themselves to the grind that is the professional development cycle and they can use it as a way to express themselves in a less-demanding manner.  There is no reason why Sony shouldn’t spend the resources to get a dev program going.  It really is the ultimate in user-generated content.
 

Giant Bomb.  Yea, That’s it.

Even with his termination from a large gaming website last November, it seemed pretty obvious that Jeff wasn’t done with the gaming industry.  He started a personal blog to post a few game reviews, talk about Tiger Gatorade, let us know when he’d be doing a tv, podcast or webshow, and of course, keep us primed for the announcement.  Giant Bomb is a new gaming website where people can go to get their dose of gaming related information.  This first stage of Giant Bomb is merely lighting the fuse to a greater grand opening explosion later on this summer.  As of now, it’s in a blog-style format while they finish designing and implementing the full site. 

There is another man behind the bombness, fellow former-large-gaming-websiter, Ryan Davis.  He’s been keeping his own personal blog, including a fairly-weekly podcast featuring Jeff and Alex Navarro.  The podcast will morph itself into a round ball with gunpowder inside sometime soon, featuring the same wacky conversation about games, drinks, movies and whatever else happens to be brought up.  They probably already have a title in mind, but here’s my recommendation: The Bombcast.  I don’t know if it’s in public-domain or not, but they need to secure that famous sample of some guy in a deep voice saying “The Bomb” over some of RyDeezy’s synthesized beats.

It looks like they’ll be using a new rating system for games, and I am sure it isn’t totally finalized.  The reviews of Burnout Paradise and Poker Smash have a five-star system to keep it simple.  There are a lot of different dimensions to score a game on, however an overall rating pounds and pummels all that down into a one dimensional meterstick.  You can never know what part of it either bumped the score or dragged it down, so there isn’t much of a point in using a stick with infinite tickmarks.  That only invites people to nit-pick over a scoring detail (8.8, anyone?).  A five-star system can help you decide which games were properly executed at a glance (or should be executed) and then the review will tell you why.  Depending on your own likes and dislikes, you can make your own decision.  The review is, afterall, just an opinion, and everyone puts different values on each of those different gaming dimensions. 

As Jeff said in his announcement, they’ve been listening to the feedback from their site visitors and podcast listeners and have been using that to help form the ideals of the final site.  It sounds really interesting and I can’t wait to see what they are going to do with the site to help video game players make their purchasing decisions while at the same time showing us an entertaining product.  So add it to your RSS list!

SimYard has an interesting twist to it.  Your team is made up of semi-pro players who you find while interacting with the fans around The Park.  You pick a field at the park and wait for someone to accept your challenge, or you find a field with another team waiting and accept theirs.  There is no set game schedule or requirement to play specific teams.  It’s more like pick-up baseball. 

Currently, your team has a roster limit of 40 players comprised of the usual positions.  Each player has a set of internal stats that make up what kind of player they are, ranging from 1 to 20 (I assume it’s 20.  The highest I’ve seen is a value of 17 on one of my pitchers).  The stats fall into one of three disiplines: batting, pitching and fielding/baserunning.  Batting, for instance, is made up of the Hit, Bat Speed and Power stats.   They go up against pitchers who use the Finesse, Pitch Speed and Endurance stats. 

Each individual matchup in the game is determined by the server using these stats, pitch by pitch.  You can see the current number of balls and strikes on the status display and the results of the matchup show up on a representation of the field.  You have as much control over the batter or pitcher as a real manager does in the dugout.  Sure, you can call substitutions, but like in the real game, you don’t have time to think it over too much before play continues on.  Each pitch takes about one second, and a full game can be completed in anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes.  The automatic manager does a pretty decent job replacing pitchers when they get tired and ineffective batters in the later innings, so don’t feel overwhelmed with figuring out who to pull and when.  The pitcher’s endurance stat determines how long they can go in the game and how much rest time they need in between starts.  Typically, it’s anywhere from 10 to 20 hours, which would equate to about four to six days in real life.   

The games go much like any game you watch on TV.  You root for your players like you would your favorite team, yelling at the screen when hitters can’t seem to do more than create a breeze and your pitchers appear to be throwing underhanded.  Of course, you do the same when your four-slot knocks a grand slam or your pitcher goes a complete game.

The baseball season is 24 days long, plus two days of spring training at the start of the month and two days of a post-season tournament at the end of the month.  Even though there are no official leagues in The Park, standings and stats are kept.  A simple games behind calculation determines where your team is in relation to the others.  Since everyone plays a different number of games in the schedule-less format, you can play half as many games as one team and still be next to them in the standings.  The date of the seasons is set in the late 1890’s, which some consider the beginning of modern baseball.  Everything from then to now is a blank slate… ready for you to make history.  Each new month bring a new season, new standings and new opportunity.

The top teams will play in the post-season, however not much about that has been revealed to the public yet.  I do know that you’ll set your starting rotation and closers to pair up against your opponents, and the computer will schedule the tournament with as many as 64 teams. 

All of that is free.  Starting next month, there will be a way to take your team to the next level, by purchasing a stadium license and joining a league with it’s own schedule, standings and playoffs.  Not only will you be playing against better teams, you’ll also have to keep the fanbase you built at The Park happy with good seats, concessions and souveniers.  They’ll show their happiness by attending games and spending money at the park so you can turn around and offer your players contracts and keep them on your team.   

The game is currently in beta, so you may notice some changes as the month goes on, as SimYard developer Erick Robertson tweaks things and adds features.  Erick sure did his homework when he came up with the engine behind the whole thing, so be sure to let him know you enjoy the game if you see him in the game’s chat or forums.  

So come on out and check out SimYard.  Anyone who is interested in baseball, especially those who take part in fantasy baseball should find enjoyment in taking a team of players and trying to beat the pants off of everyone at The Park.  You can find me in there as, who else? LoneStranger.