Posts from year 2009:
The child of Ludum Dare 16 – Apocalypse Adventure Tags: Games, Ludum Dare Ludum Dare 16 Tags: Ludum Dare Roguelike More thoughts; not as ambitious, still quite Tags: Plans Ambitious garbage 1.2c Tags: Excavatorrr Tiny update Tags: Excavatorrr Papapisshu! v.1.2 Tags: Excavatorrr V. 1.14 Tags: Excavatorrr Version 1.13 Tags: Excavatorrr
Posted on 2009-12-14 19:39
Had an amazing weekend! Luckily the theme didn’t end up to be Twilight fandom but instead Exploration, so I could actually get some proper ideas. The development went mostly nicely, so that I had time for other things too, except for Sunday night when I suddenly found out a Huge, Game-Breaking bug which I then spent around 1½ hours fixing. The result of my work was Apocalypse Adventure, a Fallout-esque action adventure that I quite like; the gameplay is quite good and there are not THAT many bugs.
I had seen the trailer of cactus’ Life/Death Island some weeks earlier, and when I saw the theme suggestions “apocalypse” and “exploration” getting high scores, I started to ponder something based on what I had seen. My idea was at first an adventure game with lots of emptiness and some arbitrary puzzles here and there, but it eventually turned out more action-based. Also, when I started working on the game, I decided to keep it fully top-down to make spriting easier (just rotations). By making this decision I also subconsciously changed to the jwaap-drive, which may explain why the game characters ended up looking like something ripped from 4hRPG. At some point I also changed the large empty areas to be on a separate map to avoid it becoming boring and to make navigating easier.
When I had the basic engine running, I started to design the map. This proved out to be kinda hard, because I had little time to really plan things out and had plenty of area ideas for the map. I chose 13 of them and after some pointless scribbling made a simple map with the locations of the areas you can visit. Eventually, however, one of them (a “secret” underground temple area) had to be left out because of the time limits. I could’ve spent more time designing the areas so that there would’ve been some order in which to visit them, or some puzzles that require getting items from several places, but bleh, didn’t want to, and I think I managed to get some of that in anyway.
Hum, perhaps I oughtn’t write a full post-mortem here, I’ll just link the screenshots and put a download link.
Download it through this link.
Do visit the Ludum Dare entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=491
Posted on 2009-12-10 20:26
I guess it’s better stop posting about some arbitrary plans and games that probably wont get made, so let’s take a more realistic topic.
I’m sure going to participate The Ludum Dare 48h game making competition that will be held next weekend. I’ve participated twice this far, and while my first entry was a terrible game, the second turned out to be Excavatorrr, which I thought to be certainly successfull in some sense. The atmosphere in LD is always friendly and the blog-form of the compo offers the competitors a possibility to tell about their progress (and post info about what they’re eating, hehe).
The only thing that worries me a bit that the theme suggestion “Twilight Fandom” made it to the final theme suggestion poll. I am not really interested of making a game about the romantic relationship of a girl and a pale-skinned boy. Of course that theme wont probably be chosen, and the other themes look rather good apart from some less interesting ones. Overall, I think (and sure hope) that the weekend will be rather interesting.
Posted on 2009-12-07 19:29
Having an urge to create another platformey roguelike. We’ll see what happens.
Posted on 2009-11-21 17:43
Hmm… A certain person from the Daily Click made me think of perhaps starting to work again / redo an older project I was working on last Spring, called As Usual. The project seemed mighty amazing until I realized the gameplay was really monotonous; you could only run, jump & shoot, and the slow pace made the concept seem boring. The idea was that there’d be an action platformer with branching paths, so that you couldn’t actually die, but instead losing would just send you to another path. Not always of course, because that’d soon result in huge amounts of branching paths. I had the game quite much planned out, and I was very happy with the graphics.
After this certain person talked to me and praised the demo I showed off before stopping working on the game, I thought I could perhaps try to redo the thing, this time with faster pacing, and with more thought put to the levels. Perhaps I could make it something like Contra, just with those branching paths and suchalikes. One reason I even started considering the recreation was because I liked many of the ideas behind the game; along with the branching idea, my intention was to put in a lot bizarre and memey stuff, perhaps a bit like things Paul Robertson has made. Though on a smaller scale, of course; Paul is just plain amazing and I could never achieve something as cool as his animations. Anyway, the guns that were in the game, for example, were rather hilarious.
Also I liked most of the boss ideas and enemy designs, though due to the slow pace of the game the basic enemies were kinda boring to fight; they could stand a lot of shooting, and because you had unlimited ammo, you just stood there shooting at them until they eventually died. I guess one of the ultimate reasons the game failed was that I didn’t think about the engine enough; after I had got the main gameplay idea, I hurried to get to work on the actual levels, and only later on checked if the gameplay can support a longer game.
Anyway, I’m thinking of this now. I’d definitely want to use some ideas I had reserved for the game somewhere, and I’d anyway have quite a lot assets ready. The problem is just that this time I’d really have to think stuff through before doing anything. I don’t like thinking.
Posted on 2009-11-13 23:28
Lately I’ve had a growing urge to create a retro/traditional RPG game, with the emphasis being on a ridiculously over-the-top storyline. If I made the engine so that it’d be easy to create new content over it, I could just add new places as I come up with them, thus making the game feel long even though it wasn’t that long actually. The way turn-based battle systems work also makes it really easy to create bosses, especially basic ones; just make the art, and add a list of attacks/spells it’d use. For trick bosses, make it easy to adjust the stats, strengths and weaknesses, and add the possibility to make counterattacks and so on. Though the gameplay shouldn’t be too simple, the game should of course be also fun to play on some level.
But the thing I’ve really been pondering is the storyline: I’d really LOVE to create a game where you first do something amazingly huge, like “retrieve your dad from another dimension”. Then you’d have to “prevent the foul gods from entering the worlds by gathering X magical crystals together”, and then add more ridiculous missions and silly plot twists until the player should eventually beat those gods once and for all. Imagine the situation when an oracle tells you “hey mate, now get to the Forbidden Dimension, travel past the Ethereal swamps of Neverending Doom, visit all the 12 gods of Destruction to their castles and beat them up. Have fun!”
Sounds quite like a cliché, but creating a proper game with such ambitious goals would just take forever and be not worth it, since the emphasis was on the hilariously huge scale of the storyline in the first place.
Of course I have many other ideas too, and I guess some of them might be better in terms of actually finishing something (and perhaps even something good), but we’ll see what happens. Just wanted to talk a bit about the idea, it seemed interesting to me.
Posted on 2009-11-06 12:04
So yeah, fixed another eensy teensy tiny bug in Excavatorrr; you could open the sarcophagus even when it wasn’t visible. If you’re unsure about these alphabetical naming gimmicks, look at the Readme – it says all the information. I didn’t want to add any more stuff to the in-game version.
Posted on 2009-11-02 19:23
Fixed a bug in Excavatorrr; the giant ghost wont be able to confront you straight from the beginning.
Posted on 2009-10-28 22:06
Ok, so I now have the (hopefully) last version of Excavatorrr. I’ll fix any bugs found, though, so I may release some smaller updates later.
Changelog:
-Shop system changed
-New item in the shop
-New enemy
-Stalactites should now work without flaws
-Some order-related issues fixed
-New *secret*
-It’s now easier to see where the hidden objects are, though just a bit.
Notice that it’s possible now to get a bigger score than earlier.
Get the game.
Posted on 2009-10-28 11:51
I guess my way of naming the versions is a bit weird. Let’s say that the game is finished at V. 1.2. Ok?
Anyway, get the new version from here.
New stuff, not much this time:
-bugfix on the stalactites. They still sometimes seem to get stuck in a weird manner, I have no idea what causes that. :/
-Added one secret item! It’s kinda hard to find, but it sure is useful!
-Fixed the bug about red dragon duplicating itself
-Added a new enemy!
Still to do:
-The change to the shop
-New shop item (spikeball/dart)
-1 enemy; or maybe 2.
-Add new uses to the grail. It’s almost useless as it is now.
I wonder if I should do these new features anyway, because I don’t think people will play the game much anyway. But whatever, I feel satisfied with them.
Posted on 2009-10-27 11:32
Ok, it’s out there. I made the finishing touches in a hurry, so there was a tiny bug left in, I’ll fix it later today. Anyway, here are the additions (hopefully I remember them):
-The stalactites shouldn’t bug anymore
-There’s one new enemy
-A bug regarding digging upwards/downwards fixed
-The lava raises a bit faster now! Hee hee
-The cursed idol is a bit easier to be noticed
-Fixed that energy-related bug!
-Press Control + M to mute/unmute music
-Press Control + N to mute/unmute sound effects
Other stuff I think I’ll add later on:
-at least one more enemy, probably two or even three (most of the new enemies are secret though)
-currently there sometimes seems to appear 2 red dragons; I’ll fix that for they’re totally annoying.
-I got a very nice suggestion for a new non-secret item; I’ll add that to the shop
-I’ll also alter the shop system otherwise too, to lessen the amount of moving back and forth.
I’ve been pondering those spikes; they’d indeed seem cool. Though there wouldn’t be much of them; and they wouldn’t probably kill enemies.