Yup! A ‘quick’ detour.
I wasn’t intrigued to enter at first, I never thought I had any good original ideas to come up with. But after reading about the benefits of entering (like your game gets submitted automatically for MochiAds “Be a RockStar” gamedev competition, and the possibilities of sponsorships, plus the use of MochiAds), it got me hooked. So I took the time to do several brainstorms, and had a somewhat good concept.
It’s called “Pieces”, and it’s a platformer. You play as Proo, this little character (girl?) that landcrashed to this strange place. She lost her memories about everything, even her bodywork skills (running, jumping, etc). Your goal as player is to guide her to recollect pieces of her memories, skills and craft to get her back home. The somewhat unique aspect of the game is how she learns (upgrade) her skill, which is done by doing 2 things in order:
- find objects that interests Proo (create curiosity/interest).
- find creatures that indirectly tell Proo how things are done (watch role-model).
The mechanics of getting these status is quite simple, as soon as Proo enters a map with either one point (interest or role-model) it automatically gains the corresponding status.
To make it more clear, here’s a simple example of how things would work (and will be in the tutorial mode):
You start with Proo being immobile, sitting and wondering what to do. Then Mr.Tutorial drops a food beside her only several steps away. Proo has the food in her interest slot, but you can’t command her to move her to the food. What to do? Proo needs a role-model, so Mr.Tutorial lets a creature come in running from side-to-side, probably stopping for several moments before finally it move along. By that time, Proo gains a new skill, you get a notice how to use the cursor keys to move her.
That’s pretty much the base of how the game works. Proo will encounter a certain map where she needs to jump and the same thing start over, ‘jump’ is in her interest slot and she needs to find a role model to help her understand how to jump. The placements and terrain of the map will be the puzzle and exploration is essential in the game. Monsters and obstacles? Maybe I might add them, but currently I imagine this game as ‘very peaceful’, so no death feature for Proo, I guess.
I’ll be programming this in AS3.0, using flex2SDK. One of the things I took consideration is that I’ll need to add external codes from JIG and MochiAds to be eligible to enter competition. But I’m sure there will a place for haXe coding as I’m planning to do the map editor in haXe+swhx.
Somehow I missed this post of yours. Did you finish this game before the original deadline or are you making use of the extra 2 weeks?
I wanted to enter but didn’t have enough spare time besides my job, but with these 2 weeks I’m trying to get a game done nonetheless, using haXe. Preloaders for Flash 9 are still something that Nicolas is working on, but some guys wrote haXe code for Mochiads so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Anyway, good luck with this. I like the kind of game you’re building. Reminds me of An Untitled Story, Within a Deep Forest and Knytt. Great games.
I missed the original deadline, and I’m still polishing through the extended time
. It’s nearly done, nothing major is on my todo list, but still essential stuff.
After working on flex for a while, I notice some advantages. Like, I don’t need to port libraries like I had to in haXe (my TweenLite haXe port is already outdated, for instance). Embedding media is also a plus. I know haXe has swf-lib and it’s already easy but you’ll need additional tools. If haXe can just embed, that’ll be so sweet
. And don’t forget how easy to setup a preloader with flex.
But I haven’t left haXe at all
. The map editor was build with haXe code and swhx. Really nice tech. Luvs it to the heart. And it really helped me focus on map editing when the core mechanics are done. I’ll write a post-mortem of this for sure 
Ah.. you totally got the roots of it.. yeah, this is heavily inspired by exploration-based games, namely Knytt series.. I agree, great games indeed
.
Well, I hope you manage to get your game done in time too
. I’ll wish us both luck 
Nah, I didn’t manage to finish it. Lack of time (or actually, no-lack of other priorities) and I didn’t want to send in a rushed game. That gives me some more time to flesh out a neat style for my game, though. As for haXe, I’m combining it with some Python and batch scripts, so while it took some time to set up, all I need to do know is fire up a batch file. It checks if any asset or code file has been updated and acts accordingly, then fires up the game. I’ve taken the same approach for levels so far, generating haXe arrays from level files with Python scripts.
A friend at work recently showed me some Flex. Looks good so far, but I’ll stick to haXe for now. Spent a bit too much time creating and improving a decent framework for it to just leave it for something else now.
Your game was the first I tried. It’s interesting, but it suffers from a few flaws and bugs that could likely have been spotted with some more thorough testing. Did you have some people to test the game?
Anyway, post-mortems are usefull, so I’ll keep an eye on this place.
Your game is similar to a game called knytt and its sequal Knytt stories
created by this dude http://nifflas.ni2.se/
and quite a few people got the Z for Jump confused with 2 for Jump
the font you made the text boxes with must have had a 2ish Z
as I got that confused too
Anyway you can explain how to get to the next engine peice in that cave
I already got the higher jump
I am aware on how rushed it might be, but I do have some things to add after playing your game for a while.
Although the idea of finding a problem first then an answer does seem innovative, there comes problems when the exploratory nature of the game can be the player’s undoing.
Two areas comes to mind, The place where you learn the double jump(dj), and the area right of the wall breaking(wb) ability.
The dj area is easily accessible if an adventure choses to enter the first tunnel on the right side of the landing area with the far jump ability. However, once entering, the player must have the dj ability before being able to escape, since the block with the cactus on it somehow blocks the player from returning back to the surface. This means the player can not find out why they need the double jump, and hence, not learn it, trapping them.
I was only able to escape this area by falling down the pit with the waterfall and tapping the down key to change how I fell.
The wb area is accessible after double jumping past the 2 large pits of lava and dropping down along the waterfall. Without the light body ability or a reason to learn the wall break, players are trapped here if they choose to save at this point. By careful double jumping, a player can reach the upper platform with the ship part, and then continue left to the area where you learn the wall breaking skill. However, if the player does not have a reason to learn the skill, again, the player becomes trapped with nowhere to go and no way out.