I made another game for s&box, this time it’s Tetris flavoured.
I love Tetris and think it’s amazing, and I’ve put a lot of hours into it over the years between all the different official games and the ones available online, and I’m pretty decently good at it now. One of the ones I’ve liked but always been shit at when I’ve tried it is Tetris The Grand Master. Official Tetris games since 2001 have (mostly) used a set of mechanics that are consistent across all of them, these are called the Tetris guidelines. TGM was released before then and doesn’t use the guideline implementation, so it has its own color scheme, rotation system, randomization and scoring system among others. In practice, it means that in order to get good at TGM you’ve got to learn TGM specifically rather than learning Tetris.
I wanted to make a TGM-style challenge but using the guideline mechanics, so that’s what I did. I made the first version in 2022 after we finished up Garryware where I got the main mechanics working and rendered the game using s&box’s UI system to make a 2D game instead of a 3D one. Then I ran out of time to work on it and it went on the backburner. Nearly a year later I went back to it and all the UI rendering was broken due to s&box updates so I started fixing it up to use quad-based sprites that existed in 3D, but again ran out of time to work on it.
Third time’s the charm though, since with their new scene system it was far easier and faster to get it working again. I cut out a bunch of the extra crap that I’d scope-creeped in over time and went back to it being a pure challenge. Reach the end, it’s going to be hard. If you want the best ranking it’s going to be really hard.
So this time I finally got it all working again and spent a few weeks polishing it up, designing UI and adding in menus, VFX, SFX, the works. Coming up with a proper difficulty curve for it was tricky since I wanted it to be a challenge to make it to the end for most players, which ended up with a lot of playtesting and going back and forth on numbers. In the end to increase the challenge to a level I was happy with I had to extend the speed levels past the standard 20 levels and add in master levels inspired by Tetris Effect’s master mode. The master speed levels start at roughly the same drop speed as level 20 but decrease other timers in the game to make it faster instead.
I tested it on the two best Tetris players I know and both came away happy with the feel of the game and the level of challenge, so I’m pleased with where the project ended up and how it all came together in the end.
Throwndown was a prototype of a 1v1 card game I was working on for s&box for a bit before I ran out of time to work on it for a while. It was based off of Marvel Snap, but set up to be round-based similar to a fighting game rather than single matches played through matchmaking.
I recorded the demo videos in 2023, it would need some serious overhauling to work in the latest version.
Like Snap, players have a deck of 12 cards which they deploy in 3 locations to try and have the most points at the locations at the end of the game. Cards and locations have effects which change how and where you want to play your cards. To better fit s&box’s audience, who would be sitting at a PC rather than playing on a phone, I made the game last for a best of 5 rounds so that a play session of Throwdown would ideally last between 15 and 25 minutes.
Testing out the deck builder and playing cards at locations.
At the start of each round, players are given some vague hints about what locations will be coming up in the next round so they can strategize about what cards to bring. In the first round both players get the same hints, in the following rounds the leader gets less hints than the trailing player so that the trailing player has better knowledge about what’s coming up and can try to use that to their advantage.
Players can also swap some cards out of their deck between rounds. The winner of the previous round could only swap a single card, where as the loser was able to swap multiple. The idea was for players to be constantly changing their deck up between rounds rather than sitting on one fixed deck. The losing player will be able to swap cards out of their deck with knowledge of the winners deck and their cards, so they can specifically try and shut down their strategy for the round. The winner also has to think about what their opponent is going to do and can change their deck a little bit if they wish, so they can remove a card that they didn’t use, or can swap something out to try and anticipate what the loser will counter with.
Testing the round start flow with the location hints, along with more visual polish on different parts.
For the prototype I was basing the cards off of Valve’s games for the various factions, where each faction had a theme to go with them. Half Life cards would modify the power of other cards at the location they were played at. Team Fortress cards were based around destroying your opponents cards in different ways. Counter-Strike cards would add “equipment” cards to yours and your opponents hands and decks which could be played at the locations.
The intention was to test the gameplay out and if it was fun enough to continue with then replace all the Valve stuff with new themes based around Facepunch’s games like Garry’s Mod and Rust; and games that were being made for s&box. But it didn’t get that far unfortunately.
This is an idea I’d like to come back to in the future though. This game was a bit of a mismatch for s&box’s entity-based systems at the time, but their new scene and components systems should be a lot better fit for it if/when I decide to give it another go.
My friends and I got into playing a rhythm game called DJMAX Respect V after a trip together earlier this year, and have been competing against each other on scores since. However, the in-game leaderboards don’t have a friends option so you can easily see what your friends scores are.
We were originally just screenshotting scores and posting them manually to Discord, but there’s a much nerdier way to do this so I made a small companion app that we could all run which would automatically grab the scores and post them to Discord for us.
Both the companion app and the server were written in C#. The companion app uses WPF, and the server app is uses Linux compatible .NET.
DJMAX Discord Companion
The companion is the app that everyone runs on their PC when they play if they want to submit scores to Discord. It’s very simple to use, you simply press PrintScreen when on the song select screen and it’ll read out which song is selected, button mode, difficulty, your score, and send them all to the server component to process.
DJMAX Respect V runs on Unity, but its always online and connects to a private API to get user info and scores, and it runs an anticheat to stop people from uploading faked scores. Rather than mess with the anticheat to access game memory directly and potentially get my account banned, I opted for an OCR solution that wouldn’t upset the anticheat (especially since I’m giving this to friends to use too.)
The OCR runs in three parts: one to detect the current song, one to read button mode and difficulty, and one to read the score.
The first part, song detection, works by taking a screenshot of the name and preview image of the currently selected song, shrinking it down to a specific size, turning it into a 2 bit greyscale image and using the scaled-down-and-greyscaled image as a bitmask that we can compare other songs against. Every song in the game needs to be screenshotted and entered into a database for the song detection to perform a search against when the user wants to submit a score, but this is a one time thing and only needs to be updated when new songs come out. The song database is a json file and gets updated automatically when opening the app, so when new DLC for the game released we don’t need to download new versions of the app just to submit scores.
The extracted screenshot of the song title and how it gets scaled down and greyscaled. The preview image is slightly cut off on the left so that if the user has the song in their favourites list, the triangle icon for favourite song is cut off and doesn’t affect the bitmask result.
I don’t use an OCR text engine for the song titles as some titles can have quite noisy backgrounds that mess with the engine’s ability to read the text cleanly. Additionally, there are songs in the game where the title has non-Latin characters or special characters in the name which the OCR engine I used struggled to read with consistent results.
A noisy background behind the song name messes with the OCR text engine and it can’t read the name cleanly a lot of the time.
Button mode (4/5/6/8 button play modes) is detected by checking the hue of a specific area of the full screenshot. Each button mode has a different color associated with it, in the screenshot below I’m playing on 6 button which is orange. I check the hue against the known values for each button mode and so long as we’re within acceptable values use the mode that has the best matching color. I also use this method to check if the player achieved a Max Combo in the song, and to count the number of stars that appear below the difficulty selection (these give a general idea of the actual difficulty of the song) so that we can send this to the server too, as these can change between updates.
Part of the DJMAX UI that we use to capture the player’s required info to submit scores.
For difficulty, I crop out each individual difficulty button (normal, hard, maximum, SC) and calculate an overall brightness value for each image. As DJMAX displays the current difficulty (maximum, in the screenshot above) in knockout text it means that the selected difficulty should always have the brightest overall value.
Finally, for score I use the Tesseract OCR engine as this one needs to read actual text. Unlike the song names though, the background for the score is a mostly black background, and the characters in the text will always be the 0-9 characters with a maximum score of 1,000,000. I crop out the score, increase the contrast so that the text is even more pronounced from the background, and invert the image if required so that the text is black-on-white and easier for Tesseract to read. It gets processed by the OCR engine and gives us a score which we can send on alongside all the other data we read.
There’s some error handling in there too, but the companion app doesn’t really need to do much more than this for what my friends and I use it for.
Discord Bot
Once we get the players results from OCR we need a place to send them. For this I made a very simple Discord bot that listens for incoming scores, processes the results and adds everything into a database before posting updates into a Discord channel.
Like the companion app, it’s written in C#, but it uses .NET Core to ensure I can deploy it on my little Linux server I’ve got for things like this. The scores are all saved to a local SQLite database.
The scores get posted to our private Discord where we can all compare our results and try to one up each other, or complain about how hard songs are.
There’s no fancy commands for asking the bot to do things since everything is posted into Discord anyway, so if we want to check song results then we use the search that’s built into Discord itself. If there’s no results, there’s no scores posted for that song. Why reinvent the wheel.
A while back I started working on a recreation of the rhythm game Jubeat, so that I could play it at home as there aren’t any arcades around Stockholm for me to play it at.
It took a while to slowly build the controller hardware and build the game up, but I got it to the point where it’s fully playable and I’m happy to jump in for a few songs every so often.
A more up to date demo after some small adjustments.
If you want to see some info on how I put it together, I’ve written up a bunch of info on this page: https://jameswilko.com/beatbox/
Respawn released Apex Legends this week, and it’s awesome, you should give it a try. It runs on Source, like Titanfall 2 does. Since it’s a multiplayer only game, there won’t be any unsanctioned modding going on, but I can always do a deep dive into the game and make tools for it.
So, I made an online interactive map, you can find it over at ApexLegendsMap.net, or apex.lol for a shorter url. It shows the locations of a load of points of interest for games current map, Kings Canyon. You can see the locations of every loot bin, loot tick, floor weapon, ziplines, and more. I’ve also marked the rough locations of nearly every named zone in the game, along with their most common loot tier.
I’ve got a few more things to add to the map still, and with the “battle pass” launching in March it should be interesting to see what Respawn have planned for the game, and see if I need to add anything to it. I’m loving Apex so far, and so long as I’m playing it I’ll try keeping the map up to date.
A few days ago I finally released the mods for Titanfall 2 that I’ve been working on with my small team. You can download it by going over to TitanfallMods.com.
It’s still a little rough around the edges (it’s always going to be rough after all) and I need to put some better explanations on the wiki and maybe some tutorial videos up, but it’s out there, you can download it and play with it.
I’m gonna do a post on the development of it and how we went from the original idea, to the trailer I posted last December, to now. That’s gonna have to wait until the weekend though.
It’s still being worked on, it’s just taking a while to create everything we need to launch it, and make sure it’ll be the best it can be so we can get the most people playing it.
