posted Feb 28, 2010 1:08 PM by Casey Doran
posted Feb 26, 2010 9:38 PM by Casey Doran
I asked here, on the first day, what the true measure of a man's worth is. This project intended to persuade you to believe that, indeed, a man is only as important as the number of balls he has retrieved from the bodies of his fallen enemies.
Over the course of this week, I have shared with you all three of my gamemodes based upon this principle. Today is the day that it is released to all of you for real.
For those of you reading this for the first time, it is probably best that you first read the posts for days one, two, three, and four so you can get up to speed.
Today's media release is in two parts. Of course, you will find a zip file containing the full source code of the game itself that can be installed on your server or GMod client. Also included is an example map containing all the entities a mapper should use when making this game. The second part is a set of 10 achievements that I propose to implement with this game.
Achievements.
Oh, Balls! Full game.
Now that the game is out, the only remaining step is the most fun- to play it! Click here to jump in to my public server, or check the game column of the Gmod server browser to find a server that is playing Oh, Balls!
Gentlemen, it has been a fun ride! See you all in the field of battle.
Yesterday's post. |
posted Feb 25, 2010 8:07 PM by Casey Doran
I've always been a fan of scientific organizations, ever since my days in physics class in high school.
There used to be a serverside mod for Half-Life 2 Deathmatch that restricted players to a very specific subset of weapons: the physical ones.
So, for the last gamemode I'm releasing in the Oh, Balls! trio, I hope to recreate the environment-as-your-weapon gameplay enabled by that mod, and adding to it with the Oh, Balls! points-as-physical objects style. Oh, Balls! Physics accomplishes that goal by restricting player weapons to the crowbar, the gravgun, and grenades. How does this affect the gameplay? Consider the following situation:
Celena is playing on dm_lockdown. He spies a distant competitor, and wishes to eliminate said competitor. Celena notes that the competitor is standing near a barrel of explosives. He drops a grenade and picks it up with his gravgun. If he launches the .5 kg grenade at an angle 20 degrees above horizontal, what initial force will he have to impart in order for the grenade to make the 34 meters to the barrel of explosives? Disregard wind resistance and use force of gravity = -9.81 meters per second squared.
Now take into account the fact that there's another competitor right behind the first competitor. Should Celena launch that grenade at all? Or should he get in close and kill them both with the same barrel?
TOO LATE! Poor Celena got killed by a flying sawblade. The 2 kg of steel hit him with a force of 250 newtons at the base of the neck and knocked all fourteen balls he had collected out onto the floor.
Science, bitches: It works.
Oh, Balls! Physics inherits color settings directly from Oh, Balls! Deathmatch. As with Deathmatch, Physics is played on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch maps as well as gm_ohballs_* maps.
Today's media release is actually a FAQ which I hope clears up some of the confusion readers who haven't played any of the Oh, Balls! games have.
Click the logo below to go to it.
As usual, I urge you to take five minutes and click here to join the public beta server- and invite your friends! The gamemode should be on the server within about twenty minutes.
Tomorrow's the big day: Final release as well as the reveal of a few more tidbits that haven't been seen thus far. Please check back and ask any questions in the comments section or in the thread, depending upon where you are reading it.
Yesterday's post. |
posted Feb 25, 2010 7:50 PM by Casey Doran
Q: How do you play
this game?
A: Oh, Balls! is
similar to many deathmatch games in that players are killing other players
(either every other player or just players on the other team) with the ultimate
goal of amassing enough points to reach a limit and win the game.
Where Oh, Balls!
differs from these games is the fact
that each time a player dies, they lose all the points they earned in that life
time, which are represented as bouncy balls in the game world. A player touches
a ball to pick it up and add a point to their stores- the actual killing has
nothing to do with the scoring of points, it is the recovery of the balls the
killed enemy drops that is important and unique to this game. Instead of
encouraging players to kill anyone that moves, it rewards the players who are
savvy enough to focus on killing whatever player is currently in possession of
the most balls. They just have to be careful to not paint a huge target on
their back by grabbing so many balls that they become valuable as well.
Q: Does this game
require any particular content such as Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Counter-Strike:
Source, or Day of Defeat: Source?
A: Oh, Balls!
Deathmatch has three modes: Teams, Deathmatch, and Physics Deathmatch. It was
designed to use the entity systems available in Half-Life 2: Deathmatch maps to
facilitate gameplay on all three of these modes. Teams mode can run on 2-sided
team maps suck as Day of Defeat: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, or even Team
Fortress 2 maps as well. However, Oh, Balls! does not specifically depend on
any of these maps or resources and can be played on either custom maps from
these games or maps made to the gm_ohballs_ format which will be released
alongside of the game itself.
TL;DR: Nope. These
maps are just nice to play on.
Q: Can I play this
game now?
A: Yes! I have a
server running until mid-march on 69.31.130.155:27015, or you can download the
gamemode and start your own server on when the gamemode is released the night
of February 26th.
Q: Are you planning
to support this game after release?
A: Absolutely.
Regardless of how this gamemode does in the contest, I intend to produce a map
pack immediately after the contest, as well as possibly maintain it to a 2.0
release with some new ideas I received while in the beta testing phase.
Q : Who the heck
writes a game about balls?
A: I ask myself that
same question a lot.
Q: Why the lame
release week posts?
A: Why not? Sure,
I've gotten more than a few dumb ratings as a result, but so long as they're
rating at all. :)
Q: Why wait until
the week before the contest cutoff date to reveal it?
A: I wasn't sure it
would be ready at all, to be honest. I run a very unusual release schedule. |
posted Feb 24, 2010 7:45 PM by Casey Doran
[
updated Feb 25, 2010 7:30 AM
]
 Teamwork, as the politically correct morons in charge of far too many organizations these days say, is the foundation for a more effective project. Me, I'll hold my own. I don’t need any help from any of the riff-raff on the internet. But if you do feel like teaming up on either team red or team blue to totally kick the collective butts of the enemy, then Oh, Balls! Teams is the gamemode for you. It plays out on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch maps, for starters. However, it also uses Day of Defeat: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, gm_ohballs_*, and maybe (in the future) symmetrical TF2 maps. In Oh, Balls! Teams, players still have individual ball counts like in Deathmatch. However, they aren't trying to reach the goal ball count by themselves. Teams must work together to keep high-ballcount players alive while killing and reclaiming the balls of members of the opposing team. Player color choice is no longer relevant, though the convar cl_rainbow_balls still randomly assigns ball colors for those that can't stand having a completely heterosexual game about balls. So how does this change the game? Well, for starters, players get to fight on far more maps than before. Any old map with an info_player axis, info_player_allies, info_player_terrorist, or info_player_counterterrorist entity will do. Additionally, players now get the opportunity to focus on more varied roles- some players might specialize in collecting balls for their teams, while others may focus on assassination. Or they might just all act like a bunch of typical mingebags and do nothing useful whatsoever. It really depends on the group. The good news is that if your team sucks (which it will), you can always just vote for a non-team-based Oh, Balls! mode and extract your own revenge. Or change teams. Whatever works for you. Anywho, today's media release is more of a technical release. It's a zip file. A super special zip file, actually: Inside of which you will find all of the clientside code for this game, as well as the code for the ball entity. Neither of which is particularly interesting due to the fact that I'm a terribly disorganized coder. Probably 90% of this code can and should be broken down into separate files, but every line is there for those who are interested in reading it. I still have about 5 more things to do on my checklist, however, so that code may change between now and final release. Tap the logo below to download it.  So that's Teams mode. It should be hitting the server within the next twenty minutes or so, and then you can jump in directly by clicking here. Yesterday's post. |
posted Feb 23, 2010 5:35 PM by Casey Doran
[
updated Feb 23, 2010 5:36 PM
]
 I realize now that I probably should have been more specific in my post yesterday regarding my gamemode contest entry. Or, should I say entries? I should. You see, the points-as-physical-objects system extends very nicely to more than just classic DM gameplay. So, well, in fact, that I actually wrote three gamemodes that use it. Today is the day you find out in-depth about one in particular, the one that you probably already know the most about: Deathmatch. Remember what you were thinking yesterday, when you were reading about the concept I misleadingly made to seem as if it were a single gamemode? Oh, Balls! Deathmatch is what you were thinking of. Played on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch maps now and gm_ohballs_* maps later on down the road when I get around to making a map pack, players use more-or-less standard HL2DM loadouts to extract balls from the corpses of their enemies in a free for all brawl. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then today's media release will blow your mind with the 14,000 words it will be valued at. Click the logo below to go to an annotated, easy to use guide to how to play Oh, Balls! Deathmatch.  "But surely that can't be your entire gamemode entry!" that same hypothetical reader whines inside of my ear. "It is so simple!" I agree. It isn't. 1. In addition to all of the awesome gameplay described in the manual linked above, I'd like to point out that there's still two entirely different modes you haven't even heard of yet. 2. The whole point of fretta is that games are simple enough to pick up and play. Is that manual necessary? No- most players who have tested it with friends were able to jump right in and learn how to play- but it might help clear up some misunderstandings you may have about this game. You want more? Bam. Done. The HUD, the dozens of balls you drop from your dead body, and the glowing trail you leave behind when you start getting close to winning all glow in your chosen color. Even more than that? Sure thing. How about I toss in a free client-side console command? Sound good? It gets better: putting cl_rainbow_balls 1 into your console establishes for the entire world your homosexuality by throwing out the color data the other players choose for their balls and replacing it with randomly-chosen data from a veritable gay bar of bright, pretty colors. Check back tomorrow for something almost entirely, but not quite completely different. In the mean time, if you want to try it out live on the server right now, click here. (Art of War Central, my kind host, has been having some issues today. If you can't get on right now, try again in a little.)Yesterday's post. |
posted Feb 22, 2010 6:15 PM by Casey Doran
[
updated Feb 22, 2010 6:50 PM
]
What is the measure of a man's worth? Is it the number of roads he walks down? The number of women he has loved? The number of zeroes on his paycheck?
Gentlemen, I propose that the true value of a man is evident in the number of brightly-colored bouncy balls he picks up from the bodies of his slain enemies.
This, then, is the true purpose of my entry into the Facepunch Studios Fretta Gamemode Coding Contest: to establish which of the many players in the Garry's Mod community is the fiercest, the strongest, the smartest, the luckiest, and the all-around ballsiest one of the bunch.
Oh, Balls! is, at heart, a Half-Life 2 Deathmatch clone. With balls. That's right: Every time a player spawns, they are given one ball. Whenever a player dies, they drop all of the balls they had picked up in that lifetime. With each kill, the total number of balls in play grows, until one player controls a certain number and is declared the winner.
"But Claudio McAwesome the 3rd," a hypothetical reader of this very post may wonder, "anyone can add an ent.create ("sent_ball") to the Class:OnDeath() function. What is it that makes this gamemode original? " and to that, dear hypothetical reader (who strangely asks exactly the questions I was hoping to answer) , I say:- Call me Casey.
- It's a lot more complex (and I hope a lot more well done) than that n00b code, buddy.
- It's original because nobody else (to my knowledge) is posting anything like it.
I intend to release this creation to the world on February 26th, 2010 at 8:00 PM Eastern Time (sorry, you GMT people). Each day between now and then I hope to bring to you a little bit of media to get you excited, the first batch of which is a series of screenshots I took while I was developing this game. Click on the logo to view the album.
If you're the least bit interested in this game, and you think you'd be interested in beta testing this game immediately, simply click here to connect directly to the server .
Regardless of whether or not you are interested, check back tomorrow for some more information- It might be something that interests you a lot more than this brief summary has. And feel free to ask all sorts of questions in the thread or the blog comments, depending on where you're reading this- they should be answered in the days to come. |
posted Feb 19, 2010 2:04 PM by Casey Doran
[
updated Feb 19, 2010 2:23 PM
]
Yeah, I'm behind on the blog. Shoot me. I dare ya!
In the mean time and between time I've done exactly what I said I would do: Write a gamemode for the Garry's Mod Fretta Contest. It's done, and I know I've had fun making it Sure, it isn't the greatest thing ever made, and sure the gameplay isn't the most original, but the point is that I learned a new language and had fun doing it.
That's why I'm here: Tonight and over the next few nights I plan to run a private beta of my mod: Oh, Balls. It's almost exactly like the hunters/nexus gamemode in bitfighter/zap, but way more 3D and with far more jokes available since the flags have been replaced with rainbow Gmod bouncy balls.
Thanks again for all of your help.
-C
|
posted Dec 11, 2009 8:53 PM by Casey Doran
Hey all, didn't want to leave you hanging. I actually did make a map for week 12, but when I showed it to the Game Design Club at a meeting we decided to take it to the next level: That's right, The Edgewood Jr./Sr. High School Game Design Club is making a Source mod! Man, that looks really scary once I type that out. I mean, in the past, if a mod team failed I could just look back and say, "Oh, what a shame. I could have helped them out so much." But now, I'm leading one of those teams. Which means I have to put my money where my mouth is, in a manner of speaking. Am I nervous? Hell yes. This is some serious stuff I'm getting myself into. But I believe that my team is one of the best in the world. We have some of the most intelligent, enterprising, ambitious, and gosh darned persnickety folks I think I'll ever meet, all working together on something they love. Whatever happens, I know it will be AWESOME.
On a lighter note, Garry's Mod is having a $10,000 LUA/Fretta gamemode coding contest. I don't stand a chance, that's for sure. But I will port the old Hunters gametype over from Bitfighter/Zap! a) on the off chance that thats the kind of thing they're looking for and b) to learn Fretta/LUA. Whatever happens, I'll be running betas here mid January.
I intend to resume posting regularly the week school gets back, January 6th-ish. I can't talk too closely about the project idea- It's a singleplayer game that is hopefully gonna be released as 1 hour episodes around once a month once we get our art pipeline up and our engine finalized. Hopefully. Maybe. Theoretically. I really don't want to say that's for sure because, you see, we haven't exactly finalized our ideas quite yet and this might never even see the light of day. But that's what we feel like we are capable of doing, so yeah.
Have a lovely non-denominational winter season, folks.
Regards,
Casey Doran
|
posted Nov 22, 2009 8:40 PM by Casey Doran
Ok, you got me. I felt guilty. I promised a map a week with very few exceptions and, Almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster as my witness, I will do just that.
So this map is a really simple example of Hammer's:
- Basic Level editing.
- Texture Browser
- Displacement tool
- Entity I/O system
that I whipped up in a team meeting at the last ten minutes of the day. I imagine we'll have more of these in the future, unless I get really REALLY bored during the holiday break. Which may happen. That or I might make Angie art direct; after all, we're new best friends. Anywho, I still have to get screenshots for the last few maps and probably catch up on a few more classes over the next week or so. Good ness is that theres only two days of school this week. I should be caught up and then some, no problem. Keep on keeping on, you crazy cats, -ttm_ElementC |
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