VAVA Interactive Showroom

There you can see all the artwork for games made by our professional team.  Also we can do games and artwork for you,  so do not hesitate to send us a message using our contact page. More articles to come.

Online leaderboards

Competing only it own score or maybe your friends one isn’t that long-term amusing. With the expansion of the World Wide Web, fortunately it doesn’t have to be the case anymore. Nowadays, the most games have online leaderboards which gives you the opportunity to conquer with people all over the world.

In some case, seeing where you are compared to other players can be frustrating. As an example, you cleared a level in game Angry Birds with the highest three star rating. But, the surprise comes when you see your ranking on level leaderboard. Rank: 1’187’716., not so cool…

Achievements

Players love the bragging rights and recognition of accomplishment. Game achievements are the right approach to provide that. The three star level rating in Angry Birds is a kind of achievement. It rewards the player for doing something good (cause 1’187’716. Ranking isn’t that commending). But achievements have also other purposes then doing something good. They can guide players, introduce to new game mechanics or provide hints. Sometimes there are secret achievements and entire forum threads have sprung on how to unlock those achievements. However, achievements have become an almost expecting feater in today’s games.

Social network generation

With the expansion of the World Wide Web, a new generation was born, the «social network generation». Almost everyone on the Internet is using some social networks or communities. People are likening, congratulating, wishing luck, praising, one would say that the new generations are becoming very «social». Social Networks serve also to show off where you have enjoyed your vacation, show off your new motorcycle, show off your trained body or whatever.

So, What the hell do all this have to do with games? Actually not that much, but successful games nowadays have to be connected with social networks. Some players want to show off how they sliced 736 watermelons in Fruit Ninja, or raised 23 chickens in Farm Vile and in such a manner compete in a more public way. All this stuff is good for your games, it gives your game more replay value and exposes your game to more public.

Implementation

Implementing online leaderboard, achievements, social networks may seem complicated, but really it isn’t, especially compared to developing a whole game.

The easiest and probably the best way is to take an existing solution for online leaderboards and achievements. There are several available on the market.

For Smartphones the most popular game social platforms are Game Center And Open Feint. Game Center is Apple’s Official platform made only for iOS devices, whereas Open Feint supports also Android devices.

The Question is for which platform to go, and the answer is, both. Players are generally used to one platform and there’s no sense to force the user change his usual one.

Some hints for the developers out there:

• There isn’t much code to implement social platforms to your games.
• The Open Feints Official documentation is good enough, there’s no need to search forums and asking advice, at least we hadn’t to.
• We recommend firstly to implement OF independently from Game Center.
• After OF is implemented, it provides an easy way to add Game Center support to OF (this document is enough for this purpose).
• If Leaderboards or achievements aren’t appearing immediately online on the device after setting them up or changing them (on the OF dashboard or iTunes connect for GC). Probably their server hasn’t updated yet, so don’t panic and relax.

When everyone is on vacation, VAVA team is working hard on improving Sheriff Academy. The lite version is now about a month on the AppStore, and we’d like to thank all of you for great feedback!

We took every suggestion seriously and composed a list of improvements for the final version. The wish list was quite big, but we took the effort to fulfill most of it. In the full version of Sheriff Academy you can expect:

• Wild west weapon arsenal including the revolver, Winchester rifle, double barrel shotgun (with aiming down the sight), the awesome Colt gatling gun and more.
• Different environments including Town (which is featured in the lite version), Mexico, Coal mines and more.
• Accelerometer and touch controls (for all you gravity haters).
• User interface redesign.
• Wacky sheriff helper.
• New enemies.
• And tons more.

Part of the new features will be released with an update of the lite version, and soon after that we’ll be releasing the full version.

AS ALWAYS, HERE’S SOME PREVIEWS OF THINGS TO COME.

Here’s a part of the upcoming weapons arsenal, the Winchester rifle (left) and the double barrel shotgun (right) in wireframes.

Full game introduces new environments, and one of those is a mexican village occupied by some banditos.

These were the banditos, and here are some mexican adobes.

This was only a little preview of what you can expect in Sheriff Academy, stay tuned!

Sheriff Academy

Last week or so we were working hard on our new title, and trying to come up with a new way of involving players in our games.

But first of all, a sneak peak of Sheriff Academy!

We’ll be releasing Sheriff Academy with the starting level you saw on the screenshots freefor the iPhone 3G and later (including iPad).

Get involved!

Now you have the opportunity of influencing the way the game will progress. What levels do you want the see next?

• A train-station with trains puffing by?
• A steamboat skirmish with more bad guys?
• Sniping challenge in the mountains?

You name it, we’ll make it! Just leave your suggestion in the comments, on ourFacebook or on Twitter. We’ll be posting a poll with the most suggested scenarios.

Behind the scenes

If you’re interested in some behind-the-scenes work regarding assets and visuals, please read on. If not.. Read on as well, it’s super exciting!

We present to you the Colt. A legendary revolver, the best from the old west. Our team of artists did a fine job modeling and texturing it. This is how it look’s in wireframe.

It’s a beauty! Reliable but not very precise.

Next we meet our wooden enemies and the good guys. This is the starting concept art.

Straight from the coal mines, this bandit has an explosive surprise for you.

The gunner is a typical bandit, waiting behind the bush to rob you of your gold.

This guy wants you out of his town!

He enjoys good whiskey, kidnapping your loved loves and long walks by the river.

We wanted to achieve that hand-drawn cartoon feeling in all our visuals, while keeping lighting believable, so we decided to lightmap all our buildings.

We hope you’ll enjoy playing Sheriff Academy as much as we did making it!

TILE-BASED LEVEL DESIGN

Our intention for Donad in Magicland was to make a classic retro 2d platformer, what for tile-based level maps are the most common. Tile-based level creation is a technique which generates a larger graphic from re-using a number of smaller graphics.

This is only a segment from level 9 of Donald in Magicland. If you’ll have to include a drawing (texture) for the whole level, the texture would be pretty big. And every level would require it’s own big texture. This would be very performanse demanding and would increase the game size drastically. Fortunately tile-based level editing exists.

Here’s the tile-set, from which level 9 is entirely generated. Even better, this tile-set could be reused for multiple levels. All the game needs to load (of course enemies, sound assets, scripts etc. need to be loaded too) for level 9 is this tile-set and a matrix where the positions of the tiles are stored, (what saves a lot of ram).

Today there are many tile-based level editors. Since we’re using Unity for Donald in Magicland, the simplest approach is to use the Unitile add-on. The next video is showing how you can compose a level segment with Unitile.

Of course level composing ain’t that easy and fast as shown in the video. Levels need alteration, ascending difficulty, hidden featers, obstacles, enemies and so on to provide the player with a goal and an enjoyable play experience. All this needs planning, outlines and a good and in gaming experienced lever designer.

Smoke and mirrors In the game industry, like in the real world, nothing is perfect. But we try hard to hide the imperfections. In visuals you’re limited by the number of dots on your screen, in physics you are limited to a few simple shapes like a circle or a polygon which have to represent your game objects.

That’s what we call approximations.

This is a screenshot of our game Paper Streetball:

And this is the phyics setup for the same screenshot (shown in green):

As you can see the ball is approximated by a circle (which is good approximation) and the hoop is approximated by 2 circles on each side and a rectangle for the table.

But what if you’re trying to model this in your physics engine:

It would probably look something like this:

Now this approximation is far from ideal – trying to roll a ball down these hills would look weird. This is solved by modeling the hills with more line segments, but every line you add makes the physics engine run a bit slower – so physics in today’s games is all about balancing perfomance and accurate simulation.

Physics are free!

Instead of writing your own physics code, you can do what everyone does – use a free physics engine. You want 2D physics – use Farseer, Box2D, Chipmunk, you want 3D – use PhysX, Bullet, JigLibX. Every one of them has it’s strenghts and weaknesses, and you should choose very carefully. Picking the wrong one could (and probably will) spell disaster for your physics game to be. And as always you should promote the library you’re using by listing it in the credits, it’s the least you can do.

As Paper Streetball didn’t have a credits screen, we’ll use this blog post to promote the Farseer physics engine - even if it didn’t do quite well for our game we think that it’s a very well equipped physics engine with plenty of advanced features.

And the best thing is that when the game presents you with a physics sandbox, no tutorial is needed – people are inherently familiar with physics. Perhaps that’s why physics-based games are so popular. No learning curve, no tutorials, just instant fun.

Physics in games.

When people say “Game with physics” they usually mean physically believable movement of game objects and collision detection and response. The development of both has its roots deep in the computer games industry. Since their earliest days, physics played a big role in games. Let me give you a few examples.

Pong, year 1972. Pong is one of the oldest games you can find. And it was a physics based one – the ball bounced off the walls and the paddles in a believable way.

Asteroids, year 1979. The game that spawned hundreds of clones and variations featured realistic movement and collision detection.

There are hundreds of examples like these, and chances are that physics played a vital role in your favorite game.

It was the start of a genre now known as Physics Based games. As you can see physics evolved since its earliest days and we can now move, collide and bounce thousands of objects which opens doors to a bunch of game ideas. I’m sure you had an idea for a great physics game at one point in your life. Feel free to share it in the comments, on our Facebook or Twitter!

Some will be technical, some will be less technical and if you’re in the industry, or just curious about what happens behind the game screen we encourage you to give them a read.