Procedural Content Generation on a MOBA genre videogame - Part 1

Its been a year since I started doing research on Prodecural Content Generation (PCG), and on October 28th I presented my thesis project, getting the highest grade, yaay!

As the title says, the project was a prototype of a videogame of the MOBA genre (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, think of League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, Dota, etc...), and it involved creating a MOBA game that relied heavily on PCG to create most of its content, thing that hasn't been done that I'm aware of.

On the common MOBA, developers provide most of the content of the game in the form of new and interesting characters to play. Each character is supossed to be new and refreshing in order to stand out among a huge pool of characters. The problem here is that the more characters the game has, the harder it is to create new ones, and thus comes the problem of the constant rebalancing that (I mostly play LoL or Dota 2 so I will be using those for examples) the developers have to go through. For example: whenever LoL spawns a new champion there is always a rebalancing update involved, because the new abilities brought by this new champion overshadow other(s) champions in some way, making them less viable, and since the idea of having a ton of different things to play with is to... well... play with them, the developers are forced to make changes here and there to make everything fit and make every champion kinda stand at the same height in the matter of viability (although in competitive gameplay we all know this is not and probably will never be the case).

Because of this issue regarding the creation of new characters to bring variety to the game, I thought about a solution for this problem and came up with an interesting solution, instead of having a lot of carefully crafted characters, every player would start a game with the same character, and then throughout the game, these characters would adapt to the play style of the player and change their appearance and attributes accordingly. I've called this the Character Adaptation System.

Before I get to explain the CAS I want to talk about the map. If you have played any MOBA you know that theres little variety on the maps you play. It's usually the same map over and over and over and over and over and over again and again. I'm not saying this is a problem, but who doesn't like to experience the refreshing feeling of traversing a place for the first time? This is seen on Minecraft or any game with a procedurally generated world, new content is always welcome by players and gives a nice touch to the overall experience.

Personally I think that this staticity presented on MOBA's maps comes from the fact that designing a map is hard, thus it's not worth it to create different variations of a map that is in the core the same. The best example for this is the Magma Chamber map for LoL that was never released because the designers concluded that it was just the same as Summoner's Rift but bigger (which also led to longer games). The developers didn't want to spend time developing the same thing they already had on Summoner's Rift, so they scrapped the map and created instead The Crystal Scar, which also brought with it the Dominion game mode. Both the map and the game mode are awesome and extremely fun to play, but with this you can have an idea of the consequences involved in redisigning a map just to have a different layout of roads and things like those, its hard, so hard that the developers rather not waste time on that, and I get it, it's actually what makes sense.

But since I felt like I could address this problem (and also because I'm a PCG addict) I decided I would come up with a way to generate the map procedurally so that everytime you play a game the map is different, and I'm not talking about slightly different positioning of the towers, lanes, camps, etc... I'm talking about design concerned different, where the change is so big that it has real impact on how the map is played.

With this in mind, I created a system that is capable of procedurally generating the map from scratch, focusing on the river and the jungles (which covers a huge % of the map). The other stuff like lanes and bases generation don't have much impact on the design of the map.

This is a map generated procedurally by the system I created.

This is the video showing how the whole game works, it pretty much sums up all the features it has.

And this is last build I made. It still has some bugs here and there, but thats the final version of it.

IMPORTANT:

• To be able to connecto to a server hosting the game, the server must be connected directly to the modem (for some reason I'm not aware of, Unity network interface wouldn't let me get through routers).
• If you are hosting a game and it's running at non-playable fps, try leaving the "Spawn Minions" checkbox unchecked before hosting the server.

Content information:

• The Ancient, towers and terrain textures belong to Dota 2.
• Ashe and Blitzcrank (the melee and ranged characters you can play) as well as the minions, belong to League of Legends
• The rocks and trees where made by Anguel Roumenov for another project we are working on. You can check out his work at sohardtoremember.com

Well, thats it for this post, on Part 2 I'll be talking more specifically about how the map was generated and will explain implementation related stuff so you can have a better idea of how this was achieved. On Part 3 I will explain how are the characters modified throughout the game and how the Character Adaptation System works to achieve this.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions related to the game or how did I get the content from Dota 2 or LoL

Caracas GameJam's 2013 Beatventures

Beatventures, that's a nice name isn't it? It's the name of the game my team made at the CGJ2013, but first of all I must talk about the theme.

Last years theme was an image of Ouroboros, and we had areally hard time figuring out what to make of it (if you want to read more about that, here's the post). This year... well... it wasn't even something visible, it was a sound, a heartbeat to be precise, and obviously the first thing in everyone's mind was this:

Well, a heart, you can do great deal of stuff with a heart as a premise, sure you can. So we started our painful process of figuring out what the hell to do with our game, should the player be a heart? should the player defend the heart? We thought of many things, we even thought of doing a beat-em-up where you are the heart and fight food that is bad for the heart, like fries, hamburgers, etc, I honestly loved that idea because it was hilarious, but it was a heart and our team wanted a more abstract aproach to the theme than just playing a heart, if possible we wanted no heart to be present in the game at all.

The hours passed, food eaten, drank unhealthy amounts of coke, and then drank more coke and coffee too! the usual thing. Talking about usual, our team was spending a really long time thinking about what the game should be, which is something we seem to love too much. We were throwing random ideas on the board, going back and forth between old and new ideas, we were getting kinda desperate, at least some of us.

We were stuck, we were making no progress, so I went out of the room to get some water, and do my usual walking & thinking (just so you know, my mind seems to work 300% better when I'm walking and talking to myself), and did that for around 10 minutes, trying to go back to square one and think of a new idea from there. I thought about a character in a maze looking for something, and the closer he got to that something the faster his heart would beat, so I went back into the room where my team was and talked to them about that. We spinned the idea around a bit but in the end it was no good, althought part of it seemed to mix with the other ideas we had.

In the end, just like always, after hours and hours and HOURS of discussing (and drinking coffee and coke, of course) what the game should be, we all finally got to the same place, and decided to make a rythm game. I'm sure the whole team loved the idea.

The game had this nice mechanic, were you could only move if you were in synch with the beat of the song playing. Fantastic, I'm in love with that idea, and even more with the idea of mixing that with a top-down game where you usually have free control over your movement.

Relieved that we finally could start working at around 3 or 4 am, we began to do our jobs. This time, we had split the tasks nicely, we had one person dedicated exclusively to the music (which was hella important, rythm game remember?), other dedicated to the art and the rest of the team (three) to programming. Yikes we are finally making this game happen!!!! 

Along the way we met a friend that had been present the last jam, and although he wasn't participating, he dedicated a lot of his time there helping with the art assets and teaching our artist, so by the end of the jam we actually had 2 artists.... YAY! FRIENDSHIP!!!

Ahem, anyways, near the end of the jam we were stressed, screaming "WHY WON'T YOU WORK?! WHYY?!", hitting the keyboard with our faces, it was a pretty rough moment... Well honestly it wasn't like that, but try to imagine that happening in everyone's head at the same time... Actually, that's a lot closer to reality now that I think about it.

THE JAME ENDED!!! WOHOOOO!!! WE MADE A GAME IN ONLY 48 HOURS!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!! I admit it always feel like that, which is awesome because, well... it is. 

Our team, Origames, made Beatventures.

All the other games were really cool and I really loved what people made just from a heartbeat. I must mention that this jam was huge for us, we had around 67 people in the end participating out of 70, we were almost full! and 18 games were made!! That is plain AWESOME, the people involved in making this happen are just AMAZING :)

This photo belongs to an entry from the CGJ organizer's blog (you should check it out), Ciro Duran.

Thanks for reading, go make games will ya?

Toasty-Arepa!

And this is the near-less-than-4-months-future!! Aren't we all glad? So as I promised, here's all the art that we used for the game Toasty-Arepa! I just love it, when I came up with this idea I couldn't believe that something so simple would look so nice :O.

Of course this isn't all the art, there are more funny things but I chose these so you can get an idea of how it looks, and I must say again, I LOVE this art, looks pretty nice for me.

Sadly we didn't have enough time to show the "comic" telling the story so.... JUSTICE MUST BE MADE!!!

Enjoy.

What up??

Phew! I've been really busy lately! Spent summer doing my internship at a game development studio and investigating for my seminar, really busy.

A month ago my ninth semester started and I've been attending to classes, the usual stuff, oh and also participated in another game dev contest :D. Well this was a bit different since it wasn't the usual "melt your brain in a weekend to finish a game", this was a contest made during an event that happens anually where I study, it's called CEIDEC.It is mostly a bunch of science expositions, you know, a lot of importat people exposing their ideas and projects. Sadly i couldn't attend to any of the presentations I was interested in since I was working *sadface*.

So the contest, well we were given a whole week to develop a game, they gave us a subject just like in the good 'ol Global Game Jam. The problem this time was that, we had a lot of time, but we also had a lot of homework so we weren't in the best shape, yet we amazingly pulled an almost complete game in almost just 24 freaking hours of develop (this doesn't include the art, but that didn't took too much time anyway), that's just insane in my experience, but we also owe it to Unity which is just like magic, you just drag and drop until your fingers bleed and BOOM it's a game!

Ok, the game, right, thats important isn't it? The subject they gave us was "Hybris" which is a term used to denote something that is exagerated or excessive in some way, well that may not be the accurate definition but that's how we interpreted it for our game, which by the way was called Toasty-Arepa (if you dont know what an arepa is you should google it, easier than explaining it (yezzz the lazinezzz).

So what's this Toasty-Arepa about? well the story we came up with was a girl that was really really REALLY disastrous, she did things so wrong that she would create portals to other dimensions, pretty much what we all know would happen if someone divided by zero. So what she did wrong in this case was that she tried to cook an arepa in a toaster (nonsense, by the way) and this created a portal that transported her to a weird dimension where nothing but the floor seems to make sense at all.

The game is a simple platformer where the world was generated randomly. The objective of the player is to reach the portal to escape before the time runs out (which is when the toaster finishes "toasting"). To annoy the player there are these weird flying thingies that would just watch the player and suddenly (if given enough time) would attack mindlessly, or at least that was the idea any way. The player also has this ability to becom invinsible and kill everything they touch, but this drains their HP so they can't spend too much time in this state.

Sadly we couldn't finish enough of the game, but what the hell, the game looks nice and it was done in a really short time so yay!!!... next entry will have the art and the link to the game so you can take a look.

Oh and we decided to finish this game :) so I should be writing about it in the near-less-than-4-months-future!

Delivering the Demo

It's been a while since I wrote my last entry... so... Hey! Remember when I said some time ago that I would finish making LittleWizard's demo and leave it there because it was a learning project??? well the time has finally come to let go, at least for me.

Sadly I couldn't finish the demo (there's only one sound in the whole game! and the interaction with the user is poorly made since when I made the "messages" it was just to test stuff and see flying text which is always nice), although it is quite finished, the remaining things are pretty important for a game to be fun, but I've decided that I need to move on since I have a couple of big projects coming.

So what is the demo about? You wake up in a prison-like place, and you want to escape, pretty standard stuff.
You get out of your cell only to find a weird looking Slime spawning (the reason because the slime is the "Spawner" is because... well... I WAS going to make a spawner sprite... but never did) wisp-like things that fly towards you mindlessly. After that you encounter one of this Slawners (or maybe Slimners? I don't know, up to you). There are some chests nearby that you can open, to open a chest you gotta press "E" near one. After that you will find a room with another chest, be quick because as soon as you get close to the chest you are going to be attacked by bloodthirsty wisps, which are just as scary as a pillow. In this room the whole idea is to grab the new weapon inside the chest to be able to escape such a treacherous trap. And finally the last room, supossed to be the "boss" room, has another trap, but theres a small difference, it is a lot harder to win this room, and because of this it's expected that the player looses some HP, and because of this, his suppa-duppa ability will become available saving the player from the certain death (press and hold space to use suppa-duppa skill). And that's it, after that epic battle you just walk to the exit (no indicators that it is the actual exit besides the fact that you are not able to step into that place until you win the last battle) and... YOU WIN!

Let's make a list of the things that you should know before palying this demo:

• Move: W,A,S,D
• Shoot: Left mouse click
• Change Weapons: Q (previous) and E (next)
• Open Chest; R (have to be within 2 blocks from the chest)
• Suppa-duppa skill: Press and hold Space Bar (only usable once you reach 50% of your HP) and it has a cooldown
• Bugs: The suppa-duppa skill may move you so fast that you have a chance of merging your molecules with the wall's, turning you into an abomination thus loosing. This phenomenon is also know as being "Stuck"
• Other Stuff: The wizard's movement sprites are not finished, monsters move mindlessly towards the player at all times, chests are ugly, the 70% of the color is blue

Well that's it, this is the demo I made after so much time, but as I said before, this was a learning project and remember that when I started making this I had almost no idea about how to make a game, seeing this result is quite impressive for me, I know a bunch of stuff now that I didn't before so this kind of makes me proud.

Here is the link to download the demo, also, if you don't have XNA 4.0 Framework Redistributable installed you can get it here.

From now on I will be posting about other games I will be making sooooooo...

Thanks for Reading!!