Ok, here I go.
My intention is to finish Sam & Sara, a simple 2D platforming game I've been working on, off and on, the last couple of months. The idea was to build something, start to finish, in 38 hours of actual work. My reason for this is to test out a time schedule I wish to implement during game jams.
I asked what to make on Twitter and got challenged to 'make a game about challenging yourself'. I translated this to a game in which a man named Sam or a woman named Sara constantly races towards their goals but get hindered by their own past.
Game play wise this means that every time you reach a goal, a ghost of the past appears that performs the exact same actions as you have done before. Hitting a ghost equals losing the game. A high score system keeps track of how many goals you could reach before getting hit by your past.
I am now 29 hours into development, meaning I still have 9 hours left to go. My goal is to use these 9 hours to tidy up loose ends and polish what I've got so far. Beneath are some screenshots of the progress up until this point.
Good luck to you all, and for god sake, FINALLY FINISH SOMETHING!
Well thanks!
No, I played around with that idea at the beginning of the process and it stuck around for quite some time but in the end I decided to switch to a randomly placed goal (from a predetermined set).
I did this for a number of reasons :
Although it fitted the theme of 'challenging yourself' very well, all these reasons ended up being more important to me than sticking to my initial idea.
Thanks for the thorough reply! I'm using the same or similar method for pickups in my game (using the predetermined set) without thinking too much about it (I'm focusing in other aspects of the game), but that design choice piqued my interest. Maybe it could work in a game with a different goal. Anyway, I love to think about metaphors for mechanics, so it's food for thought.
I think it might work well in a setting where the player gets rewarded for placing a goal further away, while also increasing the risks involved to get there (like perma death and harder enemies along your path). This way you encourage the player to really challenge themselves while also being realistic about their own skills. This would also facilitate longer play session in between goals taking away the problem of flow loss in between 'rounds' as a breather from time to time would be a good thing I guess. It still leaves the problem of level design, but there's certainly a solution for that once you know the setting of the game.
If I ever come across such a design, I hope I'll remember this thread.
If not, I hope you do. :D
I'm working in Unity with C#.
Unity has a lot of 2D tools in recent years that make working with sprites, 2D physics, etc... way easier.
The platform character controller is something I made myself though and migrates from project to project. This way it gets updates on a regular basis. This time dash and double jumps were added for example.
Good luck on your game!
Thanks SimoensS this helps alot, I'll look into Unity (is it free?... I'm sure a quick google search will tell me haha)
I guess I have these great code gaming engines in java currently, that's the main reason I'm clinging to it perhaps as I have so much flexibility and control with gravity / damage / hits / tilemapping etc
Variable jumps look like they will help a lot with strategy. Is the dash just to get you around a bit quicker, or is there any strategic benefit in that too? Was thinking it might be cool if the ghosts disappear when they were dashing so you could make little windows for yourself, but that might make it too easy I guess. Anyway it's looking cool
Atm it works just the other way around actually. Sam can't be hit while dashing, but when ghosts dash they are very dangerous! This makes dashing a tool in one case but forces you to use it carefully as the movement of the ghosts also becomes more unpredictable.
I'm not sure yet if the invulnerability will stay though. Might make Sam the 'right' choice over Sara, and I want them to be both viable.
We were itching to do a new project in a short timescale, so we're joining in as well.
This time there's two of us, programmer and artist.
Our core idea revolves around a lone space fighter defending a big mothership.
This is all we had this morning...
We want to try and focus on the balance between maintaining your mothership's integrity, and fighting off hostiles.
I can't share much further details, since we're not sure about them yet either.
I blocked out the basic ship and camera controls tonight, while my partner is researching art approaches
(It's quite exciting to see what he's got cookin' )
More to come soon!
This is my project Pn01
Its my first real unity project, heavily inspired by pn03 for GameCube :)
Its going to be made up of a series of rooms where you have to kill all enemies, simple as that.
Mechanics:
Target shot> once fired at an enemy your fire is homed at hit enemy, can be seen as green sphere in img. Without it you fire straight ahead.
Combo> Each shot hit increases your combo bar, when an enemy is killed you have x time to continue on you combo.(Seen as grey and red bar in img)
Jumping> You can jump straight up to avoid enemy fire, strafejump, and a longer strafejump.
Scoring> After each room you will get a score based on you damage, hitcount and combo count.
LVL 2. gif ruins the jump its alot smoother in game. But here you can see the combo increasing after i kill the second enemy.
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Planet Lander: Killer Rocks from Outer Space!
The objective of the game will be to survive as long as possible while getting a High Score. By destroying the Asteroids you will gain minerals, and by landing safely back to your planet with those minerals, you will give the population extra materials to build you extra ships (That, of course, represent "lives"). So there will be (Hopefully) a mechanic of destroying the spacial rocks, retrieving the precious metals that they leave behind, and taking them back to your planet whenever you can.
Defend your planet from spacial rocks and killer aliens! Last all you can before your inevitable demise! How long can you survive before you are overwhelmed by asteroids and you and all the population of your planet dies!? Find out by playing Planet Lander!
I am writing a development blog here: http://fernando-j-scherf.tumblr.com
Another two hours closer to my deadline. Only 4,5 hours left to go, this is getting tense!
I re-did the UI tonight. It didn't scale all to well before and people rarely noticed the message system or even the score before. Should be better now.
Also added sound and a little dash frame to the new dash feature.
I've changed the goal image to be a polaroid, presenting a memento from the past. Not sure if that's very clear. Any ideas?
So much little stuff left to do! I guess I'll have to start choosing my battles real soon.
Have a good gamedev day everyone!
So is the game a philosophical piece, about how spending too much time focusing on the past will impact on the present? Like chasing memories will only lead you into trouble? That's very deep, I like it.
Also, something I wondered about the past version of yourself - if you stand still after you've collected the polaroid, would the ghost jump into you and kill you?
As for the first question : yes! That's exactly the point underneath this all, I'm glad it shines through somehow cause I wasn't to sure that it did. :D
For the second question : most of the times it will not kill you. Sam and Sara have some momentum so when you grab the polaroid and stop giving input you will go on for a tiny bit. Most of the time that's enough to stop the ghost from colliding with you. The ghosts also have a tiny 'free zone' where they visuallt collide with the player but won't kill you. This let's the player have 'close to death' encounters that lead to exciting moments. This also helps with the issue.
Standing still for too long leads to unpredictable ghosts however. Cause you never know when he will start moving again :)
A background would be good I think, you have quite a few options there. You could go for something quite traditional, like a nice looking wooden table, or a miniature environment (like beach, forest, desert snow etc), or even something a bit crazier (like a floating rock in space or the back of a turtle)
Kenny, the awesome guy doing anything and everything visual, got us covered!
We've got featured on HardcoreGamer's Screenshot Saturday lineup!
http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2017/01/07/screenshot...
And it's getting better by the minute!
We've been solidifying things on the Design side, and to that end, i've been programming all the foundational things:
Menu's, scene frameworks, parameters of a single gameplay run, etc...
So except for some debug text, you're gonna have to take my word for it :)
We'll keep you posted!
Been working on finishing up the launcher page's productivity tools. While they're not core bits of the program, they're really giving the front page a purpose and are actually turning out more useful than I expected, thanks to a couple last-minute additions. Github integration is getting harder though.
Below is progress on the Contacts page (a built-in address book that automatically adds contact info for people participating in your projects), plus a show of the About button actually pulling live information.
Still need to connect the sorting features, update the profile headers, and handle the notes sections (which are beasts of their own, since I'd like to give the notes a (simple) HTML editor for formatted text). After that: connecting to the schedule page & starting on the first tools (probably the Form Creator, since that'll be the basis behind the file structure I need for those buttons on the Home page). Almost onto the fun stuff.
My Trello board / current to-do lists are also here, since we seem to be sharing them in other threads c:
Side note: Thanks, Gif. I could've found that broken code when I wasn't taking a break. //time to go make stuff load properly hahaugh.
Whoops, forgot that this discussion was in a different thread, so I didn't explain much.
Just to tl;dr, it's a program that keeps track of your creative projects' progress and details, generating certain assets while you outline and design. It also supports collaborative universes for sustainable fiction development, i.e. where a whole new world isn't built for every project.
It's mostly inspired by the fact that I'm into a lot of different types of work, but I just don't have the time to do them all from scratch for multiple projects. Most creative dev work (at least on the indie end) is really inefficient time-wise for a decent production. This is meant to combat some of that c:
I'll only be getting the bare bones done for this jam, though. It's something I'll be adding features to as they're needed.
New update: EXPLOSIONS!
During the last few days I've been implementing more complex collisions, cooler explosions, and the ability to shoot highly destructive lasers.
You can read more about it, if you want, in my blog: https://tmblr.co/ZXktVf2H4r9CK
All sorting stuff for the contacts page is now done. Just need to set up the groups / teams pages & add edit/delete features before I'm finished with that part. (I've decided to skip the Schedule & Published pages for now, so the related sections will be blank temporarily.) Will probably be testing out some stuff on the Tools page next to get an idea of what file structure the core program needs. Trello.
Another Update! Now landing is possible!
I wrote about it in my development blog. There you can see a longer version of that gif and read how landing is implemented: tmblr.co/ZXktVf2HKn_3c
Next, I am working on the sound! I have the self-imposed objective to make the game take the less amount of disk space possible (Ideally, less than 1.44 mega bytes, the size of a floppy disk), so I wont be using pre-recorded sound effects at all. Instead, I am working on some algorithms that procedurally generate the different sounds.
A year ago my husband and I decided to make a turn-based strategy game. We both like this genre. He came up with the idea of computerizing a board game that he has invented a few years ago. I already had some experience in game programming with Unity, so I started off with a map editor. Then came the game itself. Much time was spent on AI behaviour (expected) and user interface (surprisingly).
And now the first release version is finally published! I tried to finish it till the end of January to participate in this jam.
I've just published my entry to the jam. It's called 'Give Me My Houmous!', and it's an endless runner. You're a dinosaur who just wants to have a picnic, but your houmous has been stolen. It's the first game I've managed to finish, so please check it out and feel free to give me feedback if you have time!
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