I was playing Super Mario Galaxy today, and I got to the point where you have to rescue Luigi. Some mild spoilers here, so be warned.
You come across Luigi shivering in a corner, scared for his life in a haunted house full of ghosts. As Mario you triumphantly come to his rescue, and then Luigi hands over his hard earned star to you. This is all Luigi is, a shmuck who’s trying to be as big a hero as his brother, but ultimately fails and then gets bailed out by Mario. Or is there more to it? The more you play the more you see the relationship between the two and the horror Luigi is subject to. He begins traveling around the galaxies you’ve visted to find any stars you may have missed. Once he finds it he gets trapped in the galaxy until you come along to rescue him, at which point he once again hands over the star.
Anyone reading this who grew up with an older brother probably knows this sort of relationship all too well. Mario abuses Luigi, forcing him to work for him and assaulting him should he try to take credit for it. That’s why Luigi is so afraid, he doesn’t go through the same battles as Mario to get stars only to get scared once he’s gained the star, no, he’s just terrified to find out what Mario will do to him should he try to take the glory for himself, so he sits there in his corner, shivering and crying, waiting for Mario to come along and make his life just a little bit worse, star by star.
1. Make sure the logo says ‘beta’ somewhere on it. It doesn’t matter if you’re just redesigning an application that has existed for years, beta makes your application look hip and cool and with the times. It also means that if anything goes wrong at all you can just say “Hey, it’s beta software. We can’t guarantee it will work!”
2. Get the user’s e-mail address and start sending them loads of e-mails. It doesn’t matter what it’s about really, just let them know things are happening. Have they clicked a link? Send them an e-mail and let them know they clicked a link. It shows you care about them.
3. Have annoying same-page pop-ups. Is it their first time visiting the page? Ask them to bookmark the page. Hell, if they click no remember that and ask them every time they log in if they’d like to bookmark the page. Modern browsers have no way of remembering what pages the user has visited before, so the only waythey’ll remember to visit your site is if they have a bookmark.
4. Speak like some sort of simpleton. It shows you’re fun and non threatening. Stuff like “Oh hi, [username]! Welcome to our place, hope you don’t mind the mess!”, “Woops, looks like a goose got loose, please reload the page!” or “We haven’t seen you for a while, do you not love us anymore? ”
5. Ask the user to add their friends. Everything is more fun when everyone from the user’s address book is using it, so get them to give up their e-mail account details so you can send out e-mails to all of their contacts until they join in too!
I’ve been doing some more work on Research Station Mars. Starting to add in new features for the employees. First up was re-working how the employees interact with objects. They are now linked with the object while using it in order to stop multiple employees using it at the same time.
Next was adding in degeneration to objects when employees use them, followed by the ability for janitors to repair them. That feature still needs tweaking to adjust how long they take to repair and how fast they degrade.
Finally, there was a massive problem with how the employees went about their duties. They spent a lot of time standing about even though they needed to work/sleep/eat/etc. so now they will always go and do those tasks as soon as they can or need to. So they stand about a lot less and seem a bit more realistic.
Other developments include a redesign for the graphics that looks good and is also easy for me to create, given my limited art skills. I’m also looking into re-working the GUI to keep things simple. The search bar is a nice idea but not exactly practical since there’s never really a lot that you need to filter through. The way details about employees and objects are presented is a bit limited as well, and require a bit too much explanation to understand and filtering them is awkward. So I plan on simplifying this as well.
Once again thanks to college progress has slowed down a lot. Since this is my final year project there’s loads of work to be done that you won’t see or know about. I have to do a technical manual about my project, detailing where the idea came from, technologies used, system architecture diagrams, explanations of the main sections of code in the game and then to top it off I’ll have to present my finished project to my lecturers, then a few days later at an open day for employers. All that along with 3 other projects, class tests and actually attending lectures means that there isn’t as much time to actually make the game as I’d like. This will change soon since once my final exams are done with in just over 2 weeks I’ll have a full month to just work on the game and technical manual.
Over the last number of weeks I’ve been getting lots of little bits and pieces done. The miners will now mine out the rooms that you want mined, there’s been fixes to path finding to make the game run better and loads of other little issues that needed fixing(for example clicking through the GUI when building rooms). Next you on the list of ‘thing to do’ is making equipment degrade over time, have janitors fix the equipment and finally have scientists research new objects. Looking at what has to be done by early May it seems like loads, but there’s lots of code in place that makes most of these problems a cinch so I’m confident about getting the game to the stage I want come the deadline. Graphics not included, because they’ll never be the way I want as long as I’m doing them.
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