Earth Spawn is my final project for the Rapid Prototyping class. It is based on Grey Alien Games’ Metal Spawn and adds more mechanics to the game. This was completed in about two weeks during finals, so I know it could be improved, but within the time constraints it turned out pretty well.
This week’s prompt is Wedding! Had fun with this one, with generating random scrolling backgrounds and obstacles, and i believe the difficulty curve is pretty good. At some point players start to focus on getting the cakes but miss most of them because they’re too nervous about avoiding the obstacles, which is a success in my book. Also, i ripped off Castle Crashers’ music, because it is amazing.
Next assignment is to push one of the prototypes further, and that will be the final, so we have extra time.
I chose to remake the Sequel one, so i hope Jake Birkett won’t hate me!
Keep checking this blog for progress on this!
Paths was the prompt for this week’s prototypes. I immediately thought of the (quite depressing) fact that whatever paths we take and decisions we make, we’ll all end up dead at some point (insert happy thoughts here).
So i made my first CYOA.
I figured this would happen, but on Sunday night, when I had twelve hours left and still a huge amount of script yet to be written, i cut it down in half. There were just too many paths and choices to create, and i was out of time. For the sake of it being a prototype, i think it works. Wish i’d had time to implement sound, i had the perfect soundtrack for that.
On a sidenote, Anno 2070 was just released, and it’s better than all the previous games in the series (and that’s saying something). However, i haven’t seen Ubisoft talk about it anywhere, not on their twitter feed, not on their website. I only learned the game was out because Steam showed it to me. Isn’t that crazy ?
The first prototype we had to make was just a way to become familiar with either Game Maker or Construct. I chose GM, because after a bit of research I found out that it accepted raw code, whereas Construct did not.
So here’s my first prototype!
http://deammer.com/downloads/games/bounce.rar
What I thought of GM? I’ll never use it again. I ended up putting collision code on every single object, and objects in random places, and rooms in a weird sequential order, and… No. It may be good if you have no coding experience and just want to churn out an idea, but that’s as far as it goes.
In the future, I’m using AS3.
This week’s prototype is about exponential growth, or how things can get really big (or small) really fast.
My first thought was zombies!! What better than good old zombies to represent exponential growth: the bigger the horde, the more dangerous they are, and the faster their numbers swell.
I also thought about Rebuild, an awesome game by Sarah Northway, in which zombies get stronger as they get time to infect other survivors. Really awesome game, by the way.
My idea was to create a map of Europe and have a node for each capital and conveniently-positioned city. On that, the player would control the hordes of zombies, and the goal would be to take all the human cities. Human cities “spawn” survivors exponentially as time goes by, whereas zombies can only enlarge their numbers by attacking and infecting cities. But enough talk, here’s the link:
… this prototype is way too prototype-y. It is much too ambitious for a prototype, I should have cheated more and did it on a smaller scale. I actually built it so that I could add any number of cities and the game would display them. But as is, it is not fun to play. Not juicy enough. Needs graphics, needs animations, needs dev time.
Oh well, now I know not go to crazy.
Second prototype is to make anything we want, but push it further. Learn more cool stuff.
I’m back with Flash, and happy about it. I spent some time creating a framework so that my games would take less time to implement.
Here’s Cell:
http://deammer.com/games/cell/cell.html
The instructions are there because I wanted it to have instructions. You probably will not make sense of them until you have played the game a couple times.
The goal is survival: get the highest score possible. Use the Left Mouse Button to shoot (hold it down to shoot continuously) the tiny cells that follow you everywhere. If they touch you, you lose a chunk of life (displayed on the Cell you control). When you kill them, they drop debris that you can collect and bring back to “Mother”, the big cell in the middle. When Mother has enough debris, it will upgrade your damage (each missile you shoot will kill an additional cell each time) and heal you up.
The simple “swarm” behavior of the cells that chase you was quite fun to develop. They will go in your direction, but they have a turn rate and need time to decelerate/change direction. Additionally, they will randomly change course just a bit, to keep things interesting.
What I would change about the prototype:
Prototyping is fun.
This week’s prototype is about using the verb “to mirror” as a core mechanic. As you may imagine, most people made a platformer with a player character on each side, or even split up that character and made it act symmetrically.
Check out Switch.
Yes, it’s a platformer. It’s my first one too, which was pretty exciting. I’ve made lots of different blocs but ended up making only 3 levels due to lack of time (bleh, who needs sleep anyway). Decent physics and collision detection.
I needs to be prettier, it needs moar jucy, and it needs more levels, but I am satisfied with how it turned out as a prototype.