This shows my favorite screenshot of the game at the moment.

What is George Game 13 and how is development going so far?

Last updated on Jul 12, 2006
Level 2 update on Jan 13, 2007 - goal left out and section 3.3 added

1 What George Game 13 is

1.1 Basic overview

George Game 13 is a multi-genre game (platform, strategy, action, racing, adventure, and RPG, in order of most to least), but is generally classified as a platform game. Throughout the game, you often jump from platform to platform, grab powerups, and obtain high speeds from numerous special abilities. There are several modes available which give more to the game:

Platform mode - platform mode the most common mode where you jump between platforms to reach a goal platform and score. Quite often, the objects in the scenery are used in addition to the platforms. Some platforms move, others don't. There are other game objects around that help.

Search mode - search mode involves searching the worlds for randomly scattered items. Given the size of the worlds, this may seem very difficult, but special abilities (and their upgrades) can make search mode possible for full completion in less than a minute.

Race mode - race mode involves racing through the worlds to cross the finish line. Along the way are checkpoints and there are special abilities to help with this.

Challenge mode - challenge mode is a highly varied mode where you never know what the challenge will be. A challenge could be to maintain from 60 to 70 mph running along the road, reaching a certain spot with restrictions, or trying to do some stunt. You just never know. If you've played or looked at The Supernatural Olympics, you'll understand this game mode.

The RPG aspect comes from using points earned from time bonuses, level completion bonuses, and other bonuses and trading them in for special abilities. The adventure part of it comes from the story associated with the game.

1.2 Origins of my game

Long ago, like when I was around 10 years old or so, I used to use my middle and pointer fingers and walk with them jumping between various places in the house or stores I visited. In this game, there was almost always "blue water" below that you could go in safely, but I avoided it at any cost. In this game I made up, you were to rescue someone named "George" by jumping between various places carefully. It originated inside the house and in stores. This game demonstrates this basic idea, but in a much better way. Strange as it may seem, I called the game "George Game 13". Why 13? That I don't know. I probably made up a version number.

1.3 Detailed overview

Imagine you bought (or rented) some other game. In it, you have a strict path to follow and otherwise can't go off the side and do anything. There are very few stunts that can be performed with otherwise little variety. You can't get any more than 99 lives and the score stops counting when it gets to 8 digits. To me, this sort of game is not fun at all. Every modern game I've played has this sort of thing and I otherwise get severely limited on what I can do taking the fun factor out.

Now imagine you bought George Game 13 when it comes out. With the huge worlds covering at least 30 square miles (460,000 square feet for indoor worlds, not including space on additional floors; over 260,000 game coordinate units on each side), there's so much to explore, it seems limitless. On top of that, you can go anywhere in these worlds whether being 50 miles high or a mile under the ocean, or trying to figure out parks in the city world. With such huge worlds, there are many places for stunts. With numerous special abilities available and many upgrades, there's a great deal of variety available. Sure, float-run up a 20-story building at 200 mph (or the speed of sound) or splash around in a lake trying to get the splashes on some object nearby (or far away given the pound stomp and a few hundred mph). This is only the surface though.

With 30 worlds available of this immense size of pretty much every theme including the desert, a medium-sized town, the swamp, ocean, theme park, you name it, it's there. Sure, go swim in the swamp water and swamp mud, race around at the speed of sound 5 miles above sea level at 1200 mph (and accelerating) in the mountains or ride the rides in the theme park. With the indoor worlds, jump around on counters, beds, figure out the pipes of houses and buildings, freezers in grocery stores, secret areas of the furniture store or hotel, or read the local newspaper. Take recess to a new level in school using the swingset to jump a mile high or run the mile in just ten seconds. Do whatever you want, any way you want to do it. Did I mention ordering food at the restaurant?

This is still only a small part of it, but a good chunk. Is 99 lives enough? Have a challenge to try and get 10,000 lives, or even more? How does passing 4 billion lives sound? Now that has got to be a challenge. What score is enough when the typical scoring per level is about 80,000 points? 8 digits? How about 21 digits? Well, yeah, 21 may seem too high, but, with all the scoring methods and bonuses around, sure, getting 7-digit scores per round is enough for most cases, but I want to open up the possibility of extreme scoring so if you want a 20-digit score, go ahead and try getting it.

Then, on top of this, want to make your own levels or race courses? That's right, you can make your own levels and race courses. If other games provide it, it's very limited in what you can do. With George Game 13, I take out as many limits as I possibly can. Not just 50 objects, but 2000 objects (maybe even more). With race courses, the checkpoints can go anywhere. The platforms can go pretty much anywhere and nearly all aspects of them can be changed: the speed, color (including transparency), size, paths they follow, even orientations. Add game objects (even 1ups and other powerups) as you want and freely distribute these to your friends so they can play them. If the hot stove or ice-cold water is a problem, add a platform or something to prevent trouble caused from it. If you want to play some hide and seek games with your friends, make a custom search mode game. After all, this takes hide-and-seek to a new level, given 30+ square miles of land to explore.

Next, graphics settings can be configured to extreme detail. If you like the way the bed looks, but not the night stands or the lamp, feel free to increase the quality of the bed, but lower the quality of the night stands and lamp. With this, and several configuration settings available, you can customize how the scenery looks to great depth. Most games just have a few settings available that affects everything. George Game 13 allows for configuring of each object individually (but can be configured in groups using an all-around option).

Also, along with being able to configure graphics settings, almost everything can be customized. Want to play without the game clock being a problem or want to add extra challenge or take it easy? Customize it! Want to jump only 15 feet high or 90? Customize it! Want to play around in ice water without freezing? There's an ability for it and you can freely enable and disable it.

With four game modes (possibly more if I think of any), there's a lot of variety. Rather than just hopping from platform to platform trying to get to the goal platform, want to try racing or even go treasure hunting? Want to try a challenge? How about just explore and try to find secret areas in some of the worlds?

1.4 My 4 goals

So, okay, George Game 13 offers a lot of freedoms. So, what do you suppose my 4 goals are? The freedoms part should be pretty obvious.

Player freedom

Topping much higher than both of my other goals put together is player freedom. As described in section 1.3 above, you can do pretty much anything with othewise no restrictions at all. The first goal and most important is player freedom.

Adult content? No way!

I strongly dislike games with excessive adult content in them (things like excessive violence and use of bad words to name some). Since I dislike adult content, I do not intend in any way of adding any. In fact, I want to reduce violence as much as possible to pretty much nothing so even 6-year-olds could play and enjoy all the freedoms. If I went with something with a high amount of adult content, it would have a big reduction in audience as well. If you drown, fall into a lava pit, or crash into a building or land at the speed of sound, I have methods to reduce the scariness of it and even have special abilities to prevent deaths. That's right, you could even swim in a lava pit, provided you can find any.

Unrestricted configuration

Tied in with the first goal, configuring anything in anyway with as few limitations as possible is my third goal. Take the platforms in the level creator. You don't just get ten or so colors, you get 16 7/9 million colors and that doesn't include 256 levels of transparency along with that. Next, rather than integerical speeds only and a short range, fractional values to great ranges are allowed. So yes, 700 mph for a platform is possible. The paths can be set freely to even 100 nodes allowing for a platform to function as a tour bus ride. Next, the sizes can be configured to several different settings, likely over 100. Their positions can be set not only to integerical values or snapped to the grid, but fractional values as well and pretty much anywhere, even up in space. That's just the platforms (let alone 2000 (or even more) such available objects. Now think of this going for onscreen display information, graphics settings, special abilities, just about everything.

Reproducing my mind game

It's been a goal since around 2003 or so - reproducing my mind game, the little thing I do in my mind that has game-like mechanics. I do pretty much everything stated in section 1.3. However, my mind game is far more complex than this as George Game 13 is only a small 30% or so of it. I have an RPG game that is an even closer reproduction of it but is far more complex than George Game 13 is. Following the law of experience, I need to do things at my own level for the fastest and easiest skill-gaining. As time goes on, I'll be able to reproduce my mind game quite well and George Game 13 is a fairly large step toward this.

2 Screenshot gallery

Screenshot gallery - These are 1024x768 screenshots of my game. Currently, there are 72 screenshots in the collection. Note: only screenshots of things from in the demo version (or in my experimental level(s)) will be available. Read the notes for further details if you'd like to get more in-depth coverage on design.

Screenshots 52 and 53 are of visions I'm having for my game (highly outdated). They show an approximation on how the game will look when it's nearly finished as I'm envisioning it.

The top image on this page is my most spectacular screenshot of my collection.

3 Progress

3.1 Current progress

You can read all about my progress day by day in my blog. However, this section will cover the major part of it whereas my blog covers minor things (such as bug fixes or new features or any new progress). Helping my progress are my very strong photo-quality visions of how the game will look and run and they've been consistant with very few differences.

Progress state last updated on Jan 28, 2006. It has been relatively unchanged since late September 2005 (even minor changes haven't been made) due to issues I've been having.

Feature	Completion*	Notes
World 1	9%	Plan set, but needs some final adjustments 1.5 objects have been built (small, 1 fully, and another half way)
World 2	1%	Plan started, but needs to be redone
World 3	0%	No progress
World 4	0%	No progress
World 5	0%	No progress
World 6	0%	No progress
World 7	0%	No progress
World 8	0%	No progress
World 9	0%	No progress
World 10	1%	Basic plans set, but current version needs to be redone almost entirely
World 11	0%	No progress
World 12	0%	No progress
World 13	0%	No progress
World 14	0%	No progress
World 15	0%	No progress
World 16	0%	No progress
World 17	0%	No progress
World 18	0%	No progress
World 19	0%	No progress
World 20	0%	No progress
World 21	0%	No progress
World 22	0%	No progress
World 23	0%	No progress
World 24	0%	No progress
World 25	0%	No progress
World 26	0%	No progress
World 27	0%	No progress
World 28	0%	No progress
World 29	0%	No progress
World 30	0%	No progress
Special abilities	15%	Plans done, but need scripting
Game objects	20%	Platforms done and some objects, but not fully scripted
Platform mode	10%	Plans need finalization
Platform mode levels	0%	No levels completed
Search mode	10%	Plans need finalization
Search mode levels	0%	No levels completed
Race mode	8%	Plans need some rewriting
Race mode levels	0%	No levels completed
Challenge mode	6%	Plans need to be finished and finalized
Challenge mode levels	0%	No levels completed
Tutorials	15%	Plans set, but the original tutorial level needs to be redone
Special areas	10%	Plans completed for shop and world navigation
Secrets	?%	Will there be any secrets? A game with all this is more than enough without any secrets, but who knows (except myself).
Story	20%	Story written, but needs proofreading and to be scripted.
Music	0%	Making songs is no big deal.
Sound effects	0%	Currently, I don't know how to get sound effects, short of vocalizing them.
Level creator	10%	Plans done
Race course creator	2%	Need to write the full design documentation on it, only a base plan is done
Characters	4%	Player made (5 attempts), and needs to be redone slightly as well as textured
Game manual	12%	Used as a design document for now which gives the basic plans on how the game will work (but expanded on). The game manual will be a shortened version of this and simpler to understand.
Pregame menus	5%	Plans need to be finished.
In-game menus	1%	Base plan or idea of content is done, but no actual plan or design document on it
Feature	%	progress made

Table footnotes:
* This value is estimated and with changes in plans, it could be made better or worse.

Although this may seem like a lot, it's quite easy. In my Jan 20, 2006 blog entry, when I was working on my design document a few days beforehand, I had an unexpected surprise: it seemed easier to make than I first thought. 90% of the work is just making the worlds alone. 3% in scripting, and 7% in testing. Worlds are easy to make. Just plot a bunch of points, build triangles, and apply a texture to it. The big time-consuming part is making lower-detail versions of the objects (LOD). Without this, you'd have very low frame rates. Scripting, with my side projects like my 2D game, isn't all that difficult either and not much is actually involved. I need Lite-C though for a big bulk of my scripting. The more important things, like movement, need to be done first so they can be extensively tested.

3.2 The only thing holding me back from progress

As good as all this seems, there's only one thing that's preventing me from making any major progress. This is the model edittor, MED. What's wrong with it? It's missing an extremely important feature that takes all of my motive away. When I create textures for something, there's no way to reliably scale the skin vertices. I can only explain the problem with screenshots, so here are screenshots. Click on them to bring up the high resolution version.

This is the shape I have. It's a quadrilateral that has a simple design, but explains the issue well. Note the vertex positions as (0, 0), (40, 0), (24, -32), (0, -32). These are in game coordinate units. 8 CU's make a foot in outdoor worlds and 32 CU's make an inch in indoor worlds.

When I create a UV map under normal means, this is what MED does. Note how the object got severely stretched. Note the texture in the 3D view and how awkward it looks. Again, this is only a simple example. The skin vertices are at (0, 0), (64, 0), (38.4, 64), (0, 64). Note the awkward stretching factors. This is bad.

To get this, I took out calculator and started punching in numbers. I took me about fifteen seconds to get just these five vertices and this is only a simple case that I can do in my head. If I used calculator for it, it'd take 1 1/2 minutes. Look how the texture looks now for the middle one for these three. It's much better looking without any distortions. The skin vertices, setting the scale to 4x (4 texture pixels in one coordinate unit thus very fine-looking), the skin vertices are actually at (0, 0), (160, 0), (96, 128), (0, 128). The bottom screenshot shows the effect for 6x scale which is even finer-looking where the skin vertices would be at (0, 0), (240, 0), (144, 192), (0, 192). The top screenshot is the 1x size and the skin vertices are otherwise at the exact same position as that of the vertices of the original model. Note how the shape remains in tact and that the sample in the 3D view now has square-shaped texture pixels and otherwise more realistic-looking? For a brick texture, the distorted one looks very weird, but this version looks much more realistic.

Now, can you imagine doing this for 2500 vertices on 3000+ models? Yeah, it's not even worth doing by punching numbers into the calculator (15 seconds per vertex on a good run making the entire task take ten hours (and when I make any mistakes, it adds even more time)) and this takes all of my motive away. Once MED gets this very important feature to me, I can finally get going on George Game 13. Without it, I'm restricted to only doing very simple things like the platforms, and planning.

3.3 Getting away from Gamestudio

Given the issue in section 3.2 directly above, and the numerous other limitations and annoyances in Gamestudio, I was tempted to learn C programming to gain the flexibility I've been after. With experiments I've done in Gamestudio, I found I can have about 380,000 visible polygons for 60 fps, but from what I've seen, by using C, this can be increased to over 2 million on the same hardware, and that doesn't include LOD. With that kind of detail, you can have the whole level in view and get 150+ fps. Before I can actually begin making George Game 13 in C, I need to first learn it and process version 1 and 2 of my 2D game to get the basic skills. For 3D, I'd first need to make a modelling program (unlike with the issue in section 3.2, I have full control over everything, but that also means having to fix the bugs) that can also create levels. Even with this, I'd still need to make a 3D game simpler than GG13 and finally I can begin work on George Game 13. It may be until the start of 2008 that I'll be able to work on GG13 again since I need to gain experience with C programming first but the big plus part is that I have a tremendous amount of control over everything in the game - the engine (lighting, rendering, collision detection, etc.), game mechanics (jumping, the various modes, artificial intelligence, finishing levels, menus, etc.), level design (platform and scenery arrangements), and many other things. In the long run, it's worth it, even though having to fix the bugs (including crashes), optimize the game speed (experiments answer this, just as I did with Gamestudio - the points system comes in handy here to gauge performance*) and other things.

4 FAQ

Q. Why has progress slowed to a stop?
A. See section 3.2 above for one. Earlier, before this, there was a feature that I despirately needed. That feature was to be able to use external textures which would save video memory. At the time, I'd quickly run out because textures, even if exactly the same, were duplicated and in order to accomplish something, there was no way I'd be able to do it so I had to wait for the update to come, of which the update was taking over a year to be released. I otherwise had to quit development in late September so I got this feature. Then the feature came that I needed and got a bit further, but then ran into the issue of not being able to scale skin vertices (as shown in section 3.2 above). Until this is resolved, I shouldn't have any obstacles preventing me from getting any progress. I've had a few bursts, but quickly lost motive because of the skin vertex scaling issue. The only exception was forming a basic plan for some of the worlds in the form of a map on a 2D image. It's nothing exciting either....

9.1.2 George Game 13
9.1.2.1 Overview and development progress
9.1.2.1-1 What George Game 13 is
9.1.2.1-2 Screenshot gallery
9.1.2.1-3 Progress
9.1.2.1-4 FAQ
9.1.2.2 George Game 13 screenshot gallery: Screenshots 1-10 | 11-20 | 21-30 | 31-40 | 41-50 | 51-60 | 41-70 | 71-80

Footnotes:
* The points system is a gauge of performance. The more points, the slower the rendering. With Gamestudio, vertices count as 2 points, triangles count as 1 point, and an entity counts as 4000 (about - not confirmed but it's pretty high). I could get about 1.1 million points for 60 fps. When I get to the point where I need to obtain these values when programming with C, I'll need to redetermine these values.