Design reevaluation

Bah!

It’s already 10 days since the last post. Where did all the time flew? :p

Last week was pretty hectic, but fun. Besides celebrating one of the biggest holidays as a Moslem, there has been a LOT of changes with the game. First main thing was some design changes. This involves changes in the effort to not-look-too-much-like-Luminara. What I’m trying to say precisely is how levels work and by adding a little background story to the whole atmosphere.

For example, instead of having several dozens of Level classes and switching each levels when all enemies are eliminated, now levels are part of a Mission class where enemy waves (levels) show by time and every last level contains semi-boss enemies. Why semi-boss? It’s simply because it’s not as ‘huge’ as the stereotypical boss, but still a lot more powerful than the normal/common enemy types. Plus there are several of them in a level.

Another example is the element of a defense game, this is from the addition of a ‘System Integrity Point’. So basically, the mission is to eliminate incoming enemies coming through the playing arena or ’system’, I use the term system because I intended to have a cyber-mech-futuristic theme although I’m currently not sure how or what the system is. Now the story is, each system has a threshold of ‘holding’ several crafts at once. If this system dies, it’ll effect the whole ‘planet’/'ecosystem’ ( == gameover :p), so to prevent this there will be a bar indicating how much points it has and the more fewer of enemies in the system at once, the more slower the damage rate will be. If the system integrity reaches 0, then the player will need to make a sacrifice by deploying their life power, hence they will be destroyed. So, the faster you finish a level, the better. This enforces the player to play a little smarter but not necessarily slower, I hope. And ultimately add more fun factor to it.

And of course several other minor but significant changes. But overall, having to stop and think of the design in the middle of production, by yourself, can be somewhat frustrating. I know, I’m learning a lot of things at once, and this is good, but..

[RANT-MODE ON]

One of the problems I discovered throughout the production, is the fact I came out on the game design with these words:

“something like Luminara, BUT..“.

Yup, that’s the mindset trap. I guess, it’s ok to start something off of something, but you need to be sure what you want is clear enough. What I mean is, if you’re not intending to create something very similar of something, then be sure to think about the main feel or features that won’t be like this something. Am I making any sense?..

Like for this game, I knew I didn’t want it to look exactly like Luminara. That’s why I added a tech-tree system, which allow users to upgrade and have more options to pop stuff. I think that’s a good idea already, but suddenly after several times of testing and playing, it kept feeling like Luminara. And in that moment I felt I was in trouble. So I had to spend some time brainstorming and figuring out what could be done to fit the theme and also change the mechanics a bit. Might be ok to be off-track for some, but if you’re planning things by schedule, this can be a setback.

[RANT-MODE OFF]

I guess that’s the good thing of “rinse and repeat” method of gamedev, the more cycles you make the more you can identify if things have gone or about to go wrong. All in all, things have been fun despite the frustration. I love what I do, I hope I can stay with it as long as I can.

No pics or videos for todays post. Too much hectic to spend time on it. I will pretty soon. For now, I’m finishing the bosses, and on to the narration/tutorial system, add music + sound fx, tweak configs + finalize visuals.. and.. that’s it!..

Wish me luck!

Testing camstudio

Just to wrap todays late-night yesterdays work.. (which was a lot of progress!), I thought I’d share a little glimpse of how the game is played. I had the tech dialog from a working state (with o’ so simple graphics) to a finalized look, and also added a very simple working title screen. One part I had trouble with was my Tweener class port to haXe. It seems that I need to fix a lot of it as it always seems to hang whenever a new tween is called while it’s already tweening something else!

Oh well.. it’s in my tada list.. among other things.

And of course this is my first attempt to use CamStudio, which is an opensource screen casting app, just like FRAPS.. but free.. :p.

So as you can see in the video, most of it is playable already. You can see the little enemies that pop up on level/stage init, and currently moving randomly. There is also the, still in green, spawner which needs a lot of firepower to destroy it with the standard weapon. Then there’s the tech dialog which opens on key press. The techpoints on the top right adds on a every certain amount of score. You can then use them to upgrade your arsenal, or enhance your ship’s speed or handling.

Currently on this testplay, the settings are already pretty high. Plus, the weapons aren’t properly designed yet. For example, as you can see, the first upgrade I did is way too powerful. That includes the second weapon slot, which I deliberately set it to one of the heavy hitters (the one at the very bottom row in the tech tree), just to test things and to give a little sneaky-peaky of it .

Things will definitely have a lower ‘advancing curve’ later. I’ll make sure the level transitions are fluid, but for now I still have other features to finish! :p

PS. The game display is set to 500 x 500, but youtube needs it to be in a 3:4 ratio hence it looks rather ’short’. Fullscreen mode is much better I think. Next time I’ll add dark spaces on the right and left of the video before uploading to youtube.

Post-early visuals

So far, progress is about 70% done. Most of the basic stuff are working pretty good, the weapon system, player movement, particle system, managers, etc. What I really like about the game is how satisfied you are when destroying an enemy. The explosions and mayhem of particle systems. I know my particle system isn’t the best of code, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Here are some shots, the green boxes are supposed to be the enemy spawners (sorry, still in programmers art). And somehow, the screenshots can’t depict how fast it is, but I hope you get the idea .

So the game should be as fast-paced as possible, and although the fps aren’t dropping too bad with ~100 objects showing at once, I’m still using a brute force collision method. Later on I’d like to implement a different way to handle these collisions. I think it’ll either be a quadtree system or “loose” octrees grids.

My first step..

..to professionally start an indie game-dev career.

I’ve been dreaming this moment since 2003.

Well, I think I’ve actually lived it before, with 4 other (great) friends.. bringing our similar dreams to boldly go where none of us has taken that path before.. all the ups and downs were valuable experiences for us (at least it was for me :p) as after several years of development, we finally split up. Oh so mellow.. :”>

Ok, back to business.

I’m currently working on a shmup, no decent title yet, but I use the codename Mech-Battle for this project. I know, corny, but I gotta use some name. And as it sounds like, it’s about ‘mech’ and ‘battle’, although not nearly like it.. LOL.

Anyway, the main gameplay is about the player piloting a craft from a top-down view, eliminating waves of enemies. But unlike most shmup scrollers, this won’t scroll :p.. There will be boundaries as I might call it like a containment where I might squeeze in a theme/story about enemy crafts (viruses? aliens?) infiltrating this system, and the stages with these boundaries are like sectors. Much less like that I guess. The game idea was kinda inspired by Warning Forever, Echoes and Luminara, but I thought it might be cool to implement an RPG style skill system. Something like you’d see in Diablo II, where on level up you get to ‘install’ a new skill from the skill tree. This has something like that but called differently: tech tree. That way players can experiment several options of tech building which in turn will kinda add more replayability.

So, gameplay is very simple and casual. No innovation, but I hope it’ll still be fun. One thing I remember in Luminara is how easy it is, it’s almost relaxing. Maybe I’m not the typical hard-core gamer where my difficulty bar are always set pretty low, but the game is fun nonetheless and is second most highly played in ArmorGames. I trust that, the fun feeling, really deeply .

The game will be coded in haXe, very nice project for those of you interested in open source languages for all your web output needs. It says it’s a tad more optimized, faster performance, and faster compile time to it’s ‘official’ counterparts, so flash-developers out there might want to give it a try. The only negative part I guess is that it’s not widely used yet, so sometimes it’s kinda hard regarding user-created libraries/classes.