DISQUS

CoderHump: Tweaking your game with Google Spreadsheets

  • Jeff Tunnell · 10 months ago
    As one of the designers, I am LOVING it!
  • James Urquhart · 10 months ago
    I like the spreadsheet approach, especially after seeing it used quite sensibly in Startopia. Taking it to the next level with Google Spreadsheets is nothing short of amazing!
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    Thanks, James! :) I hope it saves other people time, too!
  • Pamela Fox · 10 months ago
    Awesome use of spreadsheets! You can also use the JSON output of the public/values feed, which I find a bit easier. It'll basically look like a database. One example of using that is here:
    http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/s...
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    Oh, cool. JSON is good - and that's a really neat example of what you can do with it.

    I do wish there was a way to access the API directly from Flash (ie a valid crossdomain.xml), even if it required an API key... That would save some trouble.

    But Spreadsheets still rocks. :)
  • David Blake · 10 months ago
    This is a great use of Google Spreadsheets. I've been looking at this for my job at ISU with some of the data that we work with on the lab team. Very cool work!
  • Mich · 10 months ago
    Wow. Very clever usage: "It has built-in revision tracking. You can edit it simultaneously with someone else. You can access live data in XML either publicly (like we did) or privately via their authentication API." That is just awesome.

    Btw, 200kb worth of tweaks for Grunts? Good lord! I'm really getting hyped now
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    Heheh - it's amazing how much can go into even a simple game! It's really cool seeing how it comes together now that all the pieces are there to make it fun.
  • John Hattan · 10 months ago
    That's quite clever. Much nicer than reading CSV :)
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    Thanks John! :)
  • David Wyand · 10 months ago
    Hey Ben, thanks for pointing out an excellent use for Google Spreadsheets. I'm not sure how I missed that one. :o)

    And congrats on getting the PushButton Engine to the public beta stage. If I had more time that's certainly something I'd like to check out.
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    It only takes a little bit of time to make an awesome Flash game... So give it a try! ;)

    Seriously, though, Google Spreadsheets is awesome. We use it and the rest of docs daily.
  • zoombapup · 10 months ago
    Nice idea. I just hacked together a similar deal using TinyXML and Libcurl. Took about an hour, mostly trying to get libcurl to link properly under VS2008.
  • Ben Garney · 10 months ago
    @zoombapup: Cool - integrated with Torque or your own stuff?
  • Leroy Frederick · 10 months ago
    Clever stuff! Gotta love Flash and web 2.0 :-D
  • timaste · 10 months ago
    This is awesome!
  • Luna Drift · 9 months ago
    really... really... really cool!
  • Alex Ionescu · 8 months ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  • Dale Beermann · 7 months ago
    so next step... a UI layer that lets you tweak the parameters for Grunts, editing the data in your spreadsheet at the same time. Doesn't seem like their API allows it unfortunately, although I haven't dug that much.
  • Ben Garney · 7 months ago
    Actually, that's a really good point. For our designers, the Google Spreadsheet UI is actually easier to work with than the custom UI we built originally. So I think that wrapping it would actually hurt productivity (at least for us). If your designers find Google Spreadsheet intimidating, then a custom UI might be worth it.
  • Dale Beermann · 7 months ago
    well it's certainly easier not to build the UI in the first place... I'm really more interested in the proof of concept rather than the actual use I guess :) Especially since we don't have designers...

    When you were using the custom UI was it in fact hooked up to the Google Spreadsheet, or was it just editing local data?
  • Ben Garney · 7 months ago
    It was just editing what was in the game. The issue was that it was a little cryptic, and too tied to the internal structures of the game. So the designer was faced with this deep tree of weird fields.

    The Google approach is way better because data is laid out sensibly, and most designers are good with spreadsheets already. Plus you get the whole cloud/collaborative thing.
  • MightyCicero · 6 months ago
    A bit late for a reply but I was wondering about your release strategy with this XML thing.

    Do you plan using the google feed on the released version of your game or do you plan on packaging the xml file with the game? Or integrating the final tweaks into an internal structure in the .swf?
  • Ben Garney · 6 months ago
    What we will probably do is just store a dump of the RSS data in the game and have the tweaker apply it right away rather than fetching it from outside. We could also go in and hand-apply all the values, but I'm only doing that if I absolutely have to. :)