Note: this article was written around December 2005 and later added to the blog during a website redesign. The game is playable online at www.nicktoonsnetwork.com.

Fire your Net Shooter at unsuspecting pests in this 3D action/adventure web game!

Capture the Newbies is an action/adventure web game designed for the Nicktoons Network.

• A kid-friendly 3D first-person shooter featuring Nicktoons characters.
• Filled with narrative content, plot twists, and surprising bosses.
• Tons of all-original graphics spanning two worlds.
• User-friendly design.
• No special browser plugins required.

Nicktoons characters and content are copyright Nicktoons Network.

Goal

The goal of the Newbies project was to create a 3D web game that is fun, kid-friendly, and featuring Nicktoons characters.

Game Design

Capture the Newbies is a first person shooter (FPS) that is immediately familiar to anyone who has played similar FPS games, like Doom or Half-Life. However, Newbies is designed for a younger audience that might not have experience with FPS games.

Newbies contains many elements of a traditional FPS. The players fires a weapon, gets powerups, and occasionally partakes in puzzle-solving. The game is driven by an underlying story, and the player must confront a few tough bosses.

Aside from minor differences, like a cartoon-style environment or a simplified health system, the main difference between Newbies and a traditional FPS is the weapon system. Instead of shooting a gun to kill bad guys, players in Newbies use a “Net Shooter” to hurl nets at unsuspecting pests – a more kid-friendly gameplay mechanic. Pests caught in a net can be “captured” by the player.

Traditional shooter games feature two types of weapon ammo: unlimited or disposable. Unlimited ammo is fired from a weapon that will never run out of projectiles to fire. Disposable ammo – bullets, rockets, bombs, etc. – are destroyed forever once fired, leaving the player to find new ammo packs in the environment. The Newbies ammo system is a different ammo type: reclaimable. Each unit of ammo is unique and reusable: after the player fires a net, the player can later reclaim the net by running into it. This creates different design challenges and ultimately allows Newbies to have a unique gameplay experience.

Interaction Design

The controls are designed to be as simple and minimal as possible. There are only two main functions: moving (arrow keys) and firing (space bar or mouse click). No other keys are necessary: doors open automatically and other objects activate when the player bumps into them (e.g., pressing a switch or talking to an in-game character). Also, weapon upgrades are permanent, so there is no key needed to switch to different weapons.

Friendly characters gradually tell the player how to interact with the game. As the game progresses, input from friendly characters is limited in order to let the player explore and discover how portions of the game work on their own.

When the game first starts, the heads-up-display is initially blank. Visual feedback in the form of status icons do not appear until they become relevant to the game.

The game involves several pages of text in order to progress the storyline. The game avoids intimidating young readers by presenting game text in large, friendly letters one paragraph at a time. Also, a “Tell me again” button is available when important text is presented to the player, allowing the player to rewind to view text again if they missed something important. Since Newbies is a web game, the mute button is always available on screen. Web games are designed for casual players, and casual players often want to quickly and immediately mute game sound because they are in a social setting (work, school, etc) or because they prefer listening to music or streaming audio without any additional sound.

Technology

The Newbies engine is Java 1.1 compatible, so virtually all of today’s desktop machines can play the game without installing a browser plug-in. Newbies also runs great on low-end machines.

The engine also contains technology not found in Java 1.1, like themed UI buttons, alpha blending, bilinear filtered scaling, animation, tweens, high-precision timers, and more.

Two things became apparent after I added high scores to Milpa: first, people are doing exceptionally well at the game. Second, the game is easy to hack. Check out those scores:

Several people were getting higher than Year 30, doubling my personal high score. I didn’t expect anyone to get that far. So, hey, you guys are awesome.

Second, the game scores are totally hackable. Year 88? No way. I took the precaution of encrypting scores before they are sent to the server, but that doesn’t stop something I knew nothing about: easy-to-use tools that can modify game memory during runtime. These tools allow you to find where a score is stored in memory and edit its value. One of these tools is called Cheat Engine.

There was a recent Digg article about hacking games where many of these tools were mentioned in the comments. People generally seemed enthusiastic about sharing different ways to cheat.

I downloaded Cheat Engine and within 5 minutes hacked Milpa. Watching the score jump from 1,000 to 100,000 felt like I had just won the lottery. It gives a sense of accomplishment, and a chance to show off to others. In a sense, it’s like playing a whole other game with a new set of rules and your own goals. So I can see why people do it.

I thought about leaving the hacked scores in and just watching to see what happens, but ultimately, that is not fair to the people who legitimately make high scores. So I did a couple things.

First, I made the game more difficult after Year 13. People getting to Year 36 is great, but at that point the game becomes a test of endurance rather than skill – playing one game must take longer than an hour, which is not at all what I intended. Because of this change, I deleted all scores higher than Year 13 so that all high scores represent the same difficulty level.

Second, the game now encrypts in-game memory. The game is still hackable, and always will be as long as the game logic exists on the client, but now hacking a score in the same manner won’t be possible. So if you want to hack, you’ve got a whole new set of rules to deal with.

Refresh the page to get the latest version of Milpa, and click the i button to make sure you’ve got version 1.2.1.

The idea of the spin mechanic in Milpa originates from an old computer game called Reverse published in the book BASIC Computer Games in 1978. In Reverse, the player is presented with the digits 1 through 9 in a random order. The object of the game is to created a sorted list by reversing the order of any number of the digits, starting from the left. There is no time limit, and there is no way to lose – the player either achieves the goal or stops playing.

I enjoyed the game a lot when I was younger, and even programmed it into a TI-85 so I could share it when friends at school. However, I noticed there are two issues with the game: for many people, the “reverse” mechanic is difficult to visualize (it needed animation) and sorting numbers just isn’t that fun.

Recently I wanted to do something fun with the game idea, and eventually settled on turning it into a match-3 game with a “spin” animation. After messing around with different parameters, the game settled with four tile types and nine tiles to spin. This felt pretty fun and also prevented the situation of being stuck with no possible matches.

Adding an arbitrary time limit to the game doesn’t appeal to me. When I see timers in games I think, why do I only have so much time? Who decided this? Would Tetris have been fun if each piece had a time limit in which it could be placed instead of falling by gravity? So, to make the game challenging, the player is given a goal of collecting a minimum number of tiles and an enemy that can eat tiles before the player has a chance to collect them. The enemy (a skull in the final game) moves faster and faster as the player progresses, and the goal gets more difficult. So, instead of trying to beat a timer, players race the antagonist. (The object of not creating an arbitrary timer was still in vain though – many players still associate the enemy with time).

At that point, the tiles were simply different colored discs, and the game needed a theme. The tiles should be something the player intrinsically wants to collect, like jewels or candy. At the time I was reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and the concept of a milpa – a field of maize and other crops – fascinated me. Consider this quote from Mann:

Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin;…. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan…. Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Masachusetts in Boston, “is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.”

The goal of the game became collecting crops for the player’s Mesoamerican empire.

Finally, the game design and the graphic theme went through tweak upon tweak upon tweak to get it just right in terms of difficulty, fun factor, and appearance. Testing early versions of the game on friends and family proved to be invaluable. A powerup was added, and a fifth tile type was added to advanced levels. It is still not perfect – some find the game too hard, others too easy, and there is plenty of room for visual polish – but I think there is a good balance and Milpa became a fun, unique game.

P.S. For the curious, so far my best score is 32,350 in Year 19