Scratch

8 steps to making a building game!

The Tip Master wrote:

It is recommended that you read the walk-through as this only gives a brief order of how to make your game, rather than teach you how to complete each part.

1. Plan It!
Without a plan, you will be lost. You need to decide whether you're goanna have scenarios or a sandbox game, what objects you're goanna make available, what each one does and what variables each one affects.
2. Logos & Menus
Create these first so that you can get a look at how your game will start. If you decide to make an animated introduction and it goes wrong, at least if you want to restart you will not be getting rid of any other features. After this, create a fancy menu and make sure every button is made, even if they do not do anything yet.
3. Game Screen Layout
You need to create a small toolbar to access everything. Perhaps this will be draggable or it will just stick in the corner? Next, create your buttons to go on top of it even if they do not do anything yet.
4. Theme
Make sure that the theme suits the business that is being run and that it allows a clear interface. By clear interface, I mean that you can see white text on a dark background. If light and dark colours don't suit your theme, it means that things will not stand out if you're limited to the same stand of brightness.
5. Objects
Make sure each object has a purpose and that you know every variable they affect. Draw up the graphics for each, make sure the variables are changed when it is placed, and depending on what place-system you are using you must make sure it is placed down on the map properly.
6. Time
You need to make time pass. You may also want to add game speed options, but the most important thing is to decide when certain variables will change (like litter will change depend on visitors and staff wages will be monthly). You may want to make some information screens for the player to know where there are problems in their created world and how much money is coming and going.
7. Goals
You will need a screen for the player to see the goals, and you will need to make sure that the goals are fair.
8. Extras
You may want to add a music player that lets the player decide what music they want to skip or listen to.

Last edited by Borrego6165 (2012-07-14 16:11:49)

Planning

Welcome to the full version of the guide! If you're starting here because you want to read the full guide, good luck with making it to the end! If I get distracted at moments it's because I'm listening to Julio Iglesias in the background (not Enrique, I'm not that sorta person!)

So, let's begin! First, you need the plan as you can imagine. The most obvious thing is to know what business or type of world you're goanna allow the player to build. I will also briefly look at management games which do not include building, seen as they class as tycoons too. If it's a military game, I'd recommend waiting until Scratch 2.0 comes out at least, then you can clone unlimited units and buildings, but I suppose a 20 unit limit per player and per artificial player would do no harm for scratch 1.4.

A business game would need quite some thinking about, but if it's a city or a military game you're making, these needs tonnes more planning! For any, you need to think about every object you're allowing the player to place, and what each purpose is and what variables they effect. If you know how many variables you'll be using at the beginning than you can keep an eye from the start on them.

You see, when you allow the player to place a plant, it may need to affect many things. If you come up with these at the last minute, than there might have been an another object that changes this, but because you never realised it before you never bothered implementing it. You may make a plant that changes happiness by +5, but then you may realise that the drinks machine you programmed a while back, may not have affected happiness because you had never thought about it at that time.

Another reason for this is to speed things up. If you're sat in front of a mound of huge scripts trying to work out if you've done all of the right things, you're goanna freak out a little and take longer thinking. If it's all written up in notes from a much calmer and happier you, you'll find it a lot quicker to just tick off the checklist. It also allows you to quickly compare those sprites with other sprites.

Everything you need to make needs to have a list of actions with arrows joining them on a piece of paper. Knowing every action necessary will help you write out any glitches, as multiple contradicting objects may cause problems for each other if you never realised that problem existed. Writing everything down is basically programming everything in a little software called "The brain" and playing through the game yourself in your imagination.

Menus

Designing a menu may seem straight forward, but a rubbish menu can give a poor first appearance on your game. If you want a sample of a greatly animated menu, see my Rayman 4 project. It does not work on JAVA player!

Your menu needs to be organised. A maximum of three options and a back option should be sufficient, and keeping the same number of buttons on each page should help improve the consistency of your menu too. Make it clear which buttons are highlighted, and if any are disabled make it clear that they are. Try to have an animated background with a carefully selected tune as well.

The Tip Master wrote:

If you have no ideas for a menu design, than a very simple one could work as good as the complicated one in Rayman 4. For example, if you had four clickable buttons on the left on the screen, and a thick rectangle across the bottom explaining what each button does (when the buttons are highlighted) than all you need is to record your game, put it in slow motion, than use a converter to turn it all into individual JPEG files and have it as an animation. The reason why you put it into slow motion is because these only convert around 1 in every 30 frames, so having it in slow motion means more frames!

Well, that's about it for menus. Make them clear, use the mode system as mentioned in the organisation section and if you need more than three or four buttons per slide, use sub-menus.

Build Mode

If you decided not to bother with the multiple game screens, and stuck to just two screens (build and live modes) than there are only a couple of differences. If this is a city game, continue on to the next paragraph as there are no differences. If your business game has any staff, then I'd suggest making a separate toolbar for those and any extra commands you want the player to give so that the build options are clearly separated in their own toolbar.

Now for the placement of objects, this is where things get very complicated if you want to use the engine from my G:4000 project. On there, you have a single region of 49 tiles on screen, and when you change the region being viewed it updates the 49 tiles. There are 225 regions, amounting to over 11200 tiles, which would be too many for any business game. So, do not be put off as you will rarely need to use that engine. The engine I will teach you is a lot simplar.

Here's probably the best way, because it- allows the player to build where they want, it is easy to program and it makes objects run properly. However, it does use a lot of sprites.
1. Each object is a separate sprite.
2. When the player places them, they place merely a stamp of it. Make sure to include detection so that things do not go on top of each other!
3. On the sprites, you need a local variable which counts how many stamps have been placed.
4. You will need a local list of all the things each object does. When a plant is placed for example, the amount happiness changes (item X in the list) may equal 2. So, if the player places 4 plants, once you have set up a script which multiplies the items by the number of items placed, it should set happiness to 8. Make sure that happiness (and any other similar variables) are global ones.
5. The issue with that system is that there would be no way to detect that an object is being destroyed, meaning that the player would not be able to undo their actions. However, in my International Inc game, I made it so that objects like plants (which could have X amount and were therefore stamped) could not be deleted, but large objects (which could only have 1 placed because the whole sprite went with it) would touch the bulldoze sensor and be obliberated.

The Tip Master wrote:

You could save a list for all of the stamped objects, than when one is deleted every stamp will be cleared and replaced, with the exception of the deleted one which would have been removed from the list. However, you still need to find a way for the stamps to detect that they are being destroyed. There are detectors on my G:4000 projects, using a list which knows the X and Y position of every single object, and if the bulldozer is at the position, it will destroy the item under it. For this to work, the bulldozer would have to be rounded by so many tiles on a grid, otherwise the player would have to manually work out the centre position of the object being deleted and try to get rid of it.

If you want to make a large building game (something like SimCity or Minecraft which requires space) than you are free to use my G:4000 project for the engine only. I don't want anyone changing the game itself. You can have more than 11000 tiles, but you need to make the marker on the map smaller (decreasing the MapZoom variable) increasing the MapWidth variable to how many regions there are (225 regions = 15X15) and the 0000section can be left as it is.

On the stage there are 15 scripts which add either 1s or "pick random 1 to 5" to the list B1 (the list which saves all of the buildings). Change the last one to the number of tiles you want, because the very last one is like a checker which makes sure that the right amount has been added.

The reason why the B1 list is deleted and has everything added again is for speed. If it had to replace each item 11000 times, it would have to do it in order to not miss any out. By having 15 scripts adding items to an empty list, they can literally just throw the numbers into the list 15 times the original speed.

Last edited by Borrego6165 (2012-08-02 07:19:34)

Level Design

First you have to decide whether the user can create their environments or not. For example, in a business game you may be limited to a certain number of shaped buildings for the player to decorate the interior. In another game, like my G:4000 example, there is a "God Mode" where the user can edit the landscape as they please.

Sandbox

A sandbox level may sound simple, just give the player a blank bit of land and let them get on with it. The trouble with these are that, players demand loads! If there is a single setting that the player cannot change in the sandbox level, it will ruin the whole experience. So, give the players variety! The whole point of a sandbox level is to give endless play and lot's of freedom. If you cannot do much, is there any point of having it? So, make sure that there are plenty of things to do and that there are plenty of ways to win, as a single way to win will make every play the same.

Offer them extra choices including:
+Starting cash (which could be set to unlimited if they wish.)
+"God mode" (where they can adjust the landscape/building shape & size)
+Research On/Off (Is everything available from the start? Must it be unlocked in a scenario first?)
+Randomly Generated Goals On/Off (You could create about 20 and the game selects 3 of them)
+Cheats Enabled On/Off (perhaps they can only be switched on in sandbox mode and never in scenario mode)

Make sure that Sandbox mode is challenging still. If the player decides to start off with a small amount of money, than the game should all be about getting the most amount of money from each customer. If the player starts off with tonnes of cash or an unlimited amount of money, than it is all about qualtiy for and happiness per customer and how many hundreds can be crammed in every day. As you can see, less money results in more micro-management, whereas even a game with everything for free needs thought and planning put into it by the player as they need to look after a huge amount of customers.

Scenarios

A good set of scenarios has some sort of logical path. A story merely makes this path obvious to the player, and even without any story the order of the levels should be self-explanitory for the player. Why does the player move from a small coffee shop near the village green to the big restaurant down-town?

The Tip Master wrote:

A cutscene or a slideshow of events would be a nice feature inbetween levels. Just don't worry too much about the plot- you're not Shakespeare! Remember that as long as it is fun and makes the next level more meaningful it is a good cutscene.

Obviously, make each scenario more challenging than the last. Just remember that increasing the number of customers that need to be served in a month is not always the solution. Once in a while it's good to make money a problem, rather than crowding. So, each level from 1-15 could have been about expanding bigger and better. Level 16 could then completely change that, by making it about micro-management. You could say it's similar to the sandbox mode when I explained about how starting with little cash could be as easy or as hard as starting with lots.

You see, for level 16 you could mention (in a cutscene perhaps,) that there was a fire which destroyed headquaters, and now every department is under tight budget, but you've still managed to persuade the bosses to keep your lot open for business. However, to do this you had to get a loan off the bank, meaning that the only money you do have isn't even yours! So, whilst you may have to serve only a quater of the customers you did in the previous level, you have to seriously get cash pumping and think fast before the time runs out!

However, that does not mean to say that they should all be like this. Big levels are still vital to give your player freedom, even if a sandbox mode is available. These levels should be thought out carefully too, so don't just get the player to serve a million customers in a year, perhaps they have to serve a million with >/ (more than or equal to) 80% happiness.

Another point is that something from a previous level may not be available anymore. This is good if you want to make the game harder, because in the first few levels this item may have been really helpful, but without it the challenge comes to find a replacement. Finding a replacement item is like a hidden goal. Remember, the more hidden goals you can come up with the better and tougher your game will be.

A hidden goal, if you haven't worked it out, is a goal which is not in the criteria and nor a requirement by the game to win, but it is necessary to beat the level. For example, having to build a school in order to educate citizens in your city will will get them a better job and increase the employment rate. This later reduces crime in the long term.

Now, let's say the goal is to reduce crime and one of the hidden goals is improving education. In this scenario, the police budget is too high and you have been told to reduce crime without building more police stations or upgrading any existing ones, you would have to rely on schools among other things as well. As explained before, schools will reduce the crime along with other buildings.

So, these hidden goals make sure that the player maximises their use of less-obvious resources. This is where players have to look at every option and decide which is the best, rather than which is the most obvious.

Last edited by Borrego6165 (2012-09-16 07:25:36)

awesome! 

Borrego6165 wrote:

Agentpieface wrote:

awesome! 

yay- help get this promoted to iTopic or stickied!

I doubt that will happen but it could be added here.

I've always wondered what the author would do if someone posted inbetween those steps? Mind telling me how you would react if someone posted inbetween your posts on the guide?

amcerbu wrote:

TorbyFork234 wrote:

I've always wondered what the author would do if someone posted inbetween those steps? Mind telling me how you would react if someone posted inbetween your posts on the guide?

He posted them all at the beginning with "reserved" written on them and went back to edit later.

EDIT: Wait, never mind, I'm completely wrong.  He did that on another thread.

The Tip Master wrote:

If you're talking about me, I'm just a quote box with "The Tip Master" written as it's title to make important points stand out.

techboy102 wrote:

Thank you so much!!!!

you're welcome

keep this near the top- it's important!

Don't bump this every 5 seconds.