The Game Project is Chugging Along (Choo Choo)

We had an incredibly productive day today on our team project. By this point, Brandon has become the de facto programming lead, as he has been the only one doing any real coding. Emily and I know enough Flash to make suggestions and provide a reasonably good sounding board for code problems, but Brandon is the guy that ends up writing it. Emily and I will end up doing a lot of level design, playtesting, and art production. The game is really starting to take shape - Brandon spent the day writing code that will allow our hero Lance to move from one room to another. Meanwhile, Emily and I got out the old graph paper and started plotting rooms for the game; by some strange twist of fate, we have exactly 69 rooms to make for the game. Sexy times.

I can try and explain a bit more of the game, which is excellently titled Epic Game of Awesome, at this point: we're creating a side-scrolling game with a level not unlike a typical Mega Man or Castlevania game. Lance is exploring an underground base filled with robot guards, trying to locate a final boss which happens to be based on two of our teachers. (Chris Mogensen and Andrew Mooney, for those keeping score.) The underground base is a series of rooms that Lance must traverse in a roughly linear fashion to reach the bosses' lair. We've designed the level so that Lance must find various power-ups to reach the boss - first, Lance will find a power-up for his hammer (yeah, he carries a hammer as a weapon - he also wears a kilt) that will allow him to destroy robots more effectively as well as break certain kinds of walls. This will allow Lance to reach the second portion of the base, where he'll have to then locate a power-up for his jumping ability, which will in turn allow him into the final portion of the base.

We had a fairly elaborate plotline developing at one point, but a lot of fat was cut off the project. We don't have time, unfortunately, to fart around with things like cutscenes and narrative justifications for player actions. It's basically gonna be Lance wearing a kilt and wielding a large hammer, descending into an underground base to bring swift melee justice to untold legions of robots. Our primary concern is to make the game fun - and I actually kinda think the game has a shot at being fun. The controls feel pretty good at this point, and I think we'll be OK if we have enough time to playtest the game and tweak the rooms to make them challenging but entertaining.

We still have a number of things to develop for the game at this point. This is a rough sketch of our to-do list:

1. Lance's attack. This still doesn't hurt anything, which makes it kind of a pointless attack, doesn't it? We need to get the HitTest code up and running for this.

2. Lance's health bar. Right now, Lance can take exactly one hit before he dies. We're going to implement a health bar for him so he can soak up a few attacks before dying. (Not that dying will be that consequential: Lance is going to end up respawning in the room where he dies anyway.

3. A few more enemy robots. We have several more enemy robots to put in the game. This will probably be the last serious piece of coding, aside from the boss fight. Which brings us to...

4. Boss fight. This warrants its own bullet point, as the final boss will require a set of graphics and code separate from the rest of the game. We've talked about cutting this part if time gets to be too short. I don't want to cut this, but it'll depend on how the rest of the project goes.

5. Art asset development. Next week begins the art asset creation. In order of importance, they are:
          - Lance: running, standing, jumping, climbing, attacking, maybe wall jumping, maybe ducking.
          - Enemy robots: each robot won't get many animation frames, so this won't be as intensive.
          - Tiles: we're building each level as a 25x15 set of blocks, so we'll need some tiles to draw walls, floors, moving
            platforms, power-ups, etc.
          - Final boss: If we have enough time, we'll need to draw a set of walking, attacking, and injured animations. He'll             need a health bar as well, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Anything that we can't get done ourselves will be represented with free graphics from the Internet. I'm really hoping we can get them all done, however.

6. Sound effects. For background music, we've chosen several songs from Newgrounds that should get us all the way through the game. We still need sounds effects, however, to round the experience out. We've already researched some places to find some free assets, but we still need to decide on which ones we'll use.

7. Title Screen, Game Over Screen, Ending Screen. We need to create the bookends to the game. It's not entirely necessary to have these elements, but I think it would add a certain level of polish, even to something that is essentially a game demo.

If we can all of these things done and end up with a relatively bug-free game, I'll be happy. We estimate that our 5 weeks of work will produce 15-20 minutes of gameplay. That is a sobering thought, indeed. It really makes you appreciate the good games, the ones that entertain you for hours and hours. I've always had great respect for game developers, but trying to make one really sharpens your appreciation for their work.

I Actually Did Play Some Video Games Last Night, Too!

I didn't bother hooking up my PS2 last night; I decided to see if our DVD player was hooked up properly, so I put on The Incredibles special features DVD - I've never watched it before, and my blog post about Wall-E has made me think more of Pixar, the one company I would want to work for if I wasn't going to make video games. The special features were really outstanding. The DVD showed animated storyboards for deleted scenes; it included a few animated shorts made especially for the DVD release; it had a number of interviews with Brad Bird, the director (who didn't look anything like I'd imagined); it even had the short animated feature that preceded The Incredibles during its theatrical release. Sweeeeeeeet. I especially enjoyed watching the part about the deleted scenes, and the reasons they cut scenes that they really liked. Brad confided that he had to cut his favorite shot in the entire film to get the running length down. It made me think of all the cuts we've already had to make to out game project - I guess it's just an unavoidable part of the creative process.

I ended up playing some New Super Mario Brothers on my trusty DS. I'm almost finished playing through it - I finished off World 7, and now I just need to plow through World 8 to beat it. Once I'm done, I'm going to go back and collect all of the coins. Why? Because I'm a 100% completionist retard when it comes to Mario games.

Today at school, I discovered what will definitely be the next game I purchase for the DS - The World Ends With You, by Square Enix.

 

I'll be honest - my taste for Square games has soured over time, but this game looks pretty fricking incredible. This game is a DS exclusive developed by the team that made Kingdom Hearts, a game that looks totally wrong on paper but plays so damn right, and I have to say that The World Ends With You is just as visually appealing as the Kingdom Hearts games. The aesthetic style of this game focuses on real-world Japan: specifically, the Shibuya shopping district, where I used to DJ on the weekends when I lived in Japan. The characters'  designs are based on street fashions prevalent in the Shibuya district, and the music will be heavily influenced by J-pop and electronica. Japan nostalgia for the win.

But the number one reason why I'm buying this game is: the combat takes place on both DS screens simultaneously, and you use the stylus and D-pad to control two characters at once. THAT IS AWESOME. I want to buy games that take unique advantage of the DS, and this is by far the coolest thing I've seen so far. That alone would make me buy this game.

The game has also been met with a favorable critical reception; check the Wikipedia entry if you're intrigued to learn more. 

Man, it feels good to be writing about games again. I'll be sure, however, to post some photos of the new place soon.