Poemdexter and I are at it again! We just submitted our game, Swipe & Slash, to the 2014 Indie Game Maker Contest, put on by RPG Maker and Humble Bundle.
Poemdexter and I coded the game, while Shoehead provided the art. The music and sound was created by xezton and JamesRossi, respectively. I imagine I will be posting more about this later (especially a retrospective), however in the meantime I encourage you all to play the game and vote for us (during the period of July 1 – July 7).
Last week, the Procedural Death Jam came to an end. I teamed up with poemdexter (with help from Coldrice, xezton, JossiRossi, and Yngar) to create Ghost Ship – which you can play at that link.
We both had a lot of fun doing this, and I think we created a pretty awesome game in only 9 days. If you’d like to hear about the process, our goals, and our takeaways, we recorded a post mortem for it, which you can listen to over and over again, memorizing every bad joke and puppy-interruption!
I wanted to create a full game – something quick and easy and that would get actually get done! The Flappy Jam was going on, so some sort of difficult endless runner was a pretty natural fit. I have had this idea of an endless runner where you are attacking enemies by timing sword swings properly for a while, and decided that this would be a good time to finally get that out there. Turns out there is what looks like a really cool Thor game on the Nintendo DS with some beautiful, and perfect, art.
The game isn’t done, not by a long shot – but I am finding it hard to come with any fluffy things to say about it because I happened upon the game mechanics almost immediately. The speed, animation time, collision boxes, and randomized “enemy” sizes all felt really, really good after my first go around! I haven’t really felt the urge to change it, because it does seem like the difficulty is exactly where I want it to be. That being said, although I have a little bit of juice in the game in the form of cheesy particle effects, there is no sound or music or real art. The mechanics sure are fun, though!
Friday saw me rewriting the way that all weapons and bullets work, and all the systems surrounding them were affected as well. The bullet system was the first thing I created in depth, and the weapon class was stacked hastily on top of it, so they were both due. So although I am very excited about the possibilities with this new rewrite, for the moment it is a functional, but less robust, system.
I was surprised when searching online that there didn’t seem to be a good guide or framework for weapons and bullets in an FPS, so I’m thinking I might try and write something up for that, and hopefully it will be helpful to someone someday!
I don’t explicitly have a screenshot to share, so the Muffin launcher will have to suffice. To be fair, this does show off the fact that ANYTHING can be a bullet in this game – so more realistically, if I want to implement a gravity gun then all the parts are there. If I want to add placeable buildings/barriers, all those pieces are there as well!
Amazing how a little “juice” spruces up a game. I made a slightly more complex-looking gun, including a piece in the middle that rotates whenever you change weapons. I also applied weapon colors to the gun (although this does look awful, it’s just a proof of concept). I also added in some sounds and a simple muzzle flash particle system. I wouldn’t think that these simple things, which only took me a couple hours (the majority of the time was figuring out how to access some of this stuff, and fine-tuning positions) would make the game so much more fun to play.
I had a week-ish-long vacation coming my way, and planned to do what any red-blooded American does – spend hours every day making a game!
I’ve had a problem lately with motivation, however, and I didn’t want this to trip me up over the weekend. It’s not that I haven’t been motivated to work – maybe a better word would be inspiration. Nothing I’ve been making has really given me a good drive to keep going.
So I spent Tuesday night (the night before my vacation) listing some of my favorite games and what, exactly, the mechanics were that I enjoyed.
This was a very fun process and really got me thinking about what is it about certain games that appeals to me. My plan was to cut out the best parts, tape them together, and blammo! I’ve got a game. I didn’t end up doing that, but I did figure out my ideal game.
A 2D game where you sneak around and kill people in a puzzle-esque fashion. Where you have perfect information about enemy placement (you know where everyone is even if it’s not in line of sight) and can recoup from a failed stealthy run in some way. If that description sounds familiar to you, then you might have an idea of my deflation that night.
Molly comes to the rescue on a hike the next morning – reminding me how much I love terrible First Person Shooters (I recently bought Homefront for the second time, because I really wanted to go through the campaign again). I harkened it back to my love of bad action movies, and there it was – a wave-based FPS game where the ultimate goal (for me) would be to just have a ridiculous variety of weapons, be they useful or just dumb. This also satisfies my requirement that every game I make have a good codename/acronym – Bad Action Movie FPS = BAM. Woohoo!
New Year’s Resolution: Participate in One Game A Month. I got interested in doing this a couple months ago, but it felt like I came in too “late.” So here we go, let’s try to do some stuff!
The first theme is “Respawn.” The gif above represents the basic idea of what came to mind first. I’m thinking maybe a puzzle game?
Alright, I think it’s about time I released this puppy to the general populous.
I love Picross. It appeals to me in a way that sudoku appeals to many others, however I’ve never been able to get into sudoku too much. Picross, however, (technically nonograms) scratches an itch for me that most puzzle games do not. I think a large part of it is that you can break the puzzles down into small chunks, and easily come back to the puzzle without having to reconstruct an entire thought process, which is something I encountered in sudoku.
Anyway, you can read about Picross elsewhere. My story is that ever since I was a kid and got Mario’s Picross I have loved Picross. Unfortunately, the fact that most Picross games use actual images means that each level has to be hand done (hence there aren’t that many of them) and once you’re about 80% done with a puzzle, you can guess the rest of it without having to work.
So, a while ago I made a Picross game in GameMaker that randomly creates infinitely-many boards of arbitrary sizes and difficulties (40-50% filled seems to be about the lower limit). Now, having lost that .exe file (and being on a Mac anyway) I decided to recreate it. I do a lot of web development, so I just whipped up Picross Forever in HTML/CSS/jQuery, as it was easy for me to do.
Please note that I will occasionally use Picross Forever as a sandbox to play around with different CSS tricks. Hence, the animations and gradients and extended text-shadows.
Extremely proud to have made a game for this Ludum Dare – especially one that all of us keep coming back to and playing for fun.
I’d like to do a post mortem of this in the next week, but for now you can play it here.
Awesome. So far so good, I think I’m going to have fun making this little game as a side project because it’s immediately playable and fun and –
Dammit.