Detour: entering JIG’s 5th Game Design Competition

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:

1. find objects that interests Proo (create curiosity/interest).
2. 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.

Working on new title: MercOps

My plans for current game for sponsorship is to avoid real-time fast-paced action game :D. A little disapointed with SoM, yes.. but mostly just wanted to try a new genre. Strategies, especially tactical strategy, fascinates me. Titles like XCOM:UFO Defense and Jagged Alliance are the most favorable games. They don’t do those games anymore, so I’m determined to bring it up in flash, but more casual.

MercOps is a working title, and is basically a tactical strategy. It’s more like Jagged by theme and mechanics, although not as complex as Jagged. I planned to have it in isometric view and you start out with a set of mercs. All in default stats. Mercs will gain exp and level up automatically depending on what skill they mostly use. Certain skills will add more to exp, like ‘accuracy’ and kills. If a merc dies, you can recruit new ones after a mission ends. The goal of each mission is simple, eliminate all opposing forces on the map. Once cleared, you’ll be shown a screen of statistics and options, like recruiting new mercs and save/load. I’m not sure if money will be involved in recruiting (if it does then I should plot how will the team get money). I also haven’t laid out all possible weapons and items (armor? grenades? etc) yet, although I planned to start with a very few and maybe add more for the sequel. Yeah, I think it’s best to design for a series.. like say 3 – 5. Adding more detail and most importantly, the feature to keep mercs from previous series :).

Jagged Alliance 2: WildFire, courtesy of MobyGames.com

Development will start with prototyping, and learning from SoM, I’ll make sure to ‘prototype’ everything: including screen/GUI flow and transitions so it’s already in a ready-to-complete-by-producing-art-assets state. Doing art in between code and design can slow things down. I hope I’ll manage to be persistent this time. So currently I’m doing placeholder art and will start coding shortly. I’ll be using flex for this project. I found haXe a bit troublesome if you’re going to use 3rd party API (from portals or mochiads/mochibot). Plus the weirdness in exclusively needing flashplayer 9.047.0 when outputting flash9 in haXe (I managed to find several players discouraged with the wrong flashplayer version error in SoM). I think flex doesn’t have that, plus you can easily make a preloader on a single swf and it’s AS3 :):):).

It’s already mid-January and I’m way out of schedule. I planned to release something by February and now, I think I won’t have the time :(. But just making something vs. making something you like and worth playing is very different and that’s my base for working on MercOps. I hope I learn my mistakes from SoM and produce a worth playing game. Till then :).

SoM: post-mortem

Sentinels of Mijil finally got picked up by sponsors, namely Hallpass and ArmorGames as a collaborated/joint of sponsorship (which means each portal invested half of the total value). It’s been great working with these 2 publishers, they were professional and had clear instructions on changes or details I need to modify as part of the sponsorship deal. You can check it out here.

Besides uploading it in Hallpass, I had it up at NewGrounds and also UGOPlayer. The response was pretty good overall, despite several players disappointed with the non-existence of a preloader. Well.. not so good then, I guess, if you’d say having a score below 3.5 in NG means definitely not worth playing, plus the only 12 reviews and 1,548 views. I didn’t get the mood to put it in Kongregate which could say differently, I know I should.. you can’t get too much of feedback, can you :).

The feedback was always worth reviewing. Some mentioned features that at first I had plans to implement but later discarded. And those were the critical ones, like meters and indicators especially for the heatup-burning-cooldown stat for weapons. The beta testers hadn’t mentioned anything about it, as it was natural for them without these meters, I guess. But you’d never know how much diverse your players will be so, it’s always good to make sure. While personally, adding them means more code and I was just too frustrated handling the collision algo bit to make it as tight as possible. I know, that was just an excuse.

The enemy design was kinda faulty, especially with spawners. It seems several players had the lag time due to not responding to the hidden priorities of killing certain type of enemies. Having more than 60 enemies all at once in a screen is too much for AVM2 to handle still, I could’ve thought of something better, but then again, too lazy or just too occupied with thinking on the performance stuff. Players wouldn’t like to experience the lag, so a smooth play is very important. If the platform can’t handle a certain amount of performance need from your game, then it’s best to modify the design too keep it out of lag.

I’ll certainly keep these points in mind for the next game, or probably a sequel on SoM 😉

SoM: completed.

SoM is done. Finally completed last Monday (2007-11-26). I decided to go through an ‘agency’ so I could still focus on game production, whether it’s updating SoM (for bugs or implementing publisher backend stuff like highscores, preloader, etc etc) or working on the new project. If you’re interested in making games in flash and monetizing it through sponsorship, maybe you might want to consider FlashGameLicense. That’s where I put SoM in, and it’s currently making.. 6 bids so far. Very convenient system, kudos to my agent Adam Schroeder! 😉

On to the next project then. I have several options to decide. There are 3 ideas currently.

1. Platformer game. Idea is inspired heavily by Knytt Stories. Large world divided into 5 realms, relaxing linear game with a charming story. Working title: “The Frog Prince”.
2. Stealth game. Something like SplinterCell but in a different theme and situation. Top-down view, escalating levels, probably as much as SoM (50 levels). Working title: “Escape Prison”.
3. Platformer game with gravitation modifier. The idea first came from a level in Megaman X8. A platformer that has special nodes to rotate the level and gravitation.

I got more ideas coming but these are the ones I see fit to do with my timeframe, and also my mood :). I’ll need to do some research and minor prototyping to decide which to go for full production.

But before that’s going to happen, there are several things I might need to do first. For one, writing a tutorial in haXe about making a simple game, this is for the GDIEzine request for articles that’s due this month. :D:D:D.. I’d also like to write about the post-mortem of SoM, from start to end, the ups and downs. So, I guess.. till the next post! 🙂