Category Archives: Game Development

Happy 4th of July!

Posted by aabicus on

Two cool things for you today, I finally put together a video of some gameplay from Gamer 2. I haven’t touched this project in months, but as you can see the skeleton pieces are all present.

 

Note that you don’t get the shooty balls for this level, I just wanted to showcase it at the end 😉

One other fun thing for y’all, a short story I wrote as part of a writing challenge for a workshop, where we were supposed to pick a throwaway background character from something else we’d written and write a 1-page flashfic giving them some backstory. I got this character by hitting “Random Page” on the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki until I hit a character made by me.

Fun fact: Serris was invited to do this challenge as well. I look forward to seeing if he participates, and if so what character he writes about. 😛

Failed Project Showcase

Posted by aabicus on

A lot of video game ideas have rolled down the ole hickory trunk on this blog, and to date none have reached the illustrious perch of completion. (All my attempts at written-word projects have though!) Every serious video game attempt has reached chronicling on this blog somewhere, however, except one. So I thought I’d acknowledge its existence so it didn’t feel left out.

Reaching both genesis and cancellation shortly after the AGS project, Seska Donitz was going to be a project starring the titular character, a daughter of (believe it or not) Werner Donitz and Seska on Gaman’s moon. Taking place like 50 years or so after the events of Ship of State, it would follow her life on the merged colony of Verner as she attempts to recover the pieces of the Einstein-Rosen bridge and open it to Earth. Sounded RPG-ey enough, and I was trying out RPG Maker so it seemed a fair starting point. Unfortunately, I got as far as the character creator and got fed up with the incredibly low levels of customization. You could barely adjust anything, at least from what I could tell, and I didn’t even see a way to upload custom sprites. So it never got beyond trying to create the titular character, who also looked nothing like I imagined her.

Pictured: Literally the complete output of my attempts to make something in RPG Maker.

Pictured: Literally the complete output of my attempts to make a game in RPG Maker.

Now the only thing I loved about this project was the story. It’s got a great story behind it, and while nobody else liked the Gaman series, I’ve always wanted to jump back in and give it something that felt like an ending. If I ever revive this project, though, it will most assuredly happen in Multimedia Fusion 2, since I recently learned about ctrl-K which lets you add layers (for example, a HUD) which can operate independently of the camera. So this one may see a revival some day. You never know.

No, I’m not Dead.

Posted by aabicus on

I just can’t figure out how to make a video showcasing the first level.

I have actually been working on Gamer 2, I swear, and I’ve finished a decent chunk of the city level (to tie in with the story leaving off with Hailey in a city.) I just can’t get FRAPS to recognize the game as the primary window, and I’m used to FRAPSing everything. I’m working with learning Livestream, if I can get that you can expect a video on the next week. (Ha!)

But for now, here are some screenshots of what will be in that video:

Hailey 1 Hailey 2 Hailey 3

Everything you see is ready to play; everyone is fully animated and gameplay is (while currently simplistic) functional. The game just needs to be a bit longer, methinks.

Announcing development of Gamer 2

Posted by aabicus on

So, that was a fun run with Chasing Seconds. Next on the agenda, video games!

We’re back to Multimedia Fusion 2, because I’ve made a number of small games on it, and have gotten quite good with it. Finally, I think my skills have reached a point I can create something worth releasing to the public.

The game I’m working on now is called Gamer 2, and is designed to be a sequel to the unfinished short story written by MrDrake. Hailey is trapped in a video game and hopes to escape. That is a sufficiently simple plot that I can focus on game mechanics instead of worrying about storyline.

From the last teaser image, you can probably guess it’s going to be a platformer. I’ve got a working prototype of a tutorial level, and I’ll FRAPS you guys a short video showcasing the completed mechanics soon. Exciting times up ahead!

Multimedia Fusion 2

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I just made a quick game using the demo of Multimedia Fusion 2 for a class and OH MY GOD IS IT EASY.

It’s incredible how easy MM2 is. I used to play MM1 for hours when I was young, made hundreds of little games, so maybe I’m biased because everything quickly came back to me. But it was nice, the feeling of the game just flowing and forming into being with no setbacks.

I definitely hope to make a game using MM2 at some point for this blog.

Great news!

Posted by aabicus on

We’re switching gears again! Yahoo!

I’m sure you’re all pleased to hear that I’m switching platforms yet again (I’m also sure you totally exist, readers). But I’ve come into contact with a talented illustrator and she wants to make the AGS game with me, and she’s less interested in the ROSS plot. So that’s been put on the backburner. If I do that game it’ll be less “my first experiences with AGS” and more “my next attempt with AGS”. This blog is off to a great start.

But I still feel obligated to get you guys a game now, not when this other game is done. So I present you a simpler plot and a simpler system; Text-based adventures. If adventure games are the classics, these are the classics of classics. The plot, I decided after five minutes of thought, will be a day in the life of my main character, Rudyard Shelton, at the lab he works, which is fully explorable. More of an exploration-based game than objective-based. Stay tuned if that sounds cool (also keep existing. My Magic 8 Ball says signs point to you existing.) 😉

The Main Character

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For the purpose of the video game, there is very little you need to know about ROSS, The protagonist of this still-unnamed video game. He escaped his prior lodgings, which are insinuated to be rather unpleasant, and now travels the Internet as a fugitive program. The first thing he’ll do is break into a secure server by impersonating a human being, his specialty at his former lodgings. (For all zero of you interested in the actual canon, this takes place between Drake’s demonstration at New Peenemunde and ROSS meeting Shelton at that fishing town).

I’m not going crazy on the personality, as this is my first game, and AI have always struck me as more straightforward in their emotions (if you could call them that) than organic beings. ROSS will be hesitant to trust others and a pretty straightforward ‘loner’ type who learns to trust others…if ‘Memento’ taught me anything its that you need a really simple premise if you plan on changing the world in any unrecognizable way. admittedly my changes to the world order aren’t nearly as big as Nolan’s, but I’m playing it safe for my first game. For a class I read a ‘comic’ book recently called “Meanwhile” by Jason Shiga, and while I enjoyed it a fair amount of the class didn’t get it, and I think it’s because his plot (which involved time travel and mind reading and a machine that can kill everyone on the planet) was just as confusing and complicated as his narrative structure, and people need something to grasp onto to anchor them in the world. Since I barely understand how the world of the video game works, I’m making that the variable and keeping story (something I understand) anchorable.

Taking AGS out to coffee

Posted by aabicus on

Going through the tutorials for AGS, and we seem to be getting along quite nicely. I’d began a project once before, which didn’t get very far. But it does mean I have a bit of a background, albeit not much.

So one of my big things about video games is: the story being told MUST require the genre. What I mean is; if the story could be told without being a video game, it shouldn’t be made as a video game. The same goes for any piece of media. A great example of this is a game that just came out called Miasmata. It’s about a plague-stricken scientist trying to find the cure on a deserted island while being stalked by this weird catlike creature. The game involves finding plants and using what skills a plague scientist would realistically have; cartography, botany, and desperate ineffective self-defense skills. Miasmata’s story could not be told in any other genre.

For that reason, I’m choosing to tell a story that focuses on artificial intelligence and what it means to be a virtual program. For a few days now I’ve struggled with determining how exactly I would do that; would every room be a circuit-board or a jumble of wires with zipping lights or something?

It was halfway through posing at my day job (I’m a nude model) that I realized I could portray AI as if they see the internet the same way we see the real world. So, picture an opening scene where the protagonist stands on a lonely sidewalk in a quiet town. Only, highlighting every house gives the response “It’s a server” and a found key is called “password” in the inventory. Make sense? We’ll see if the idea sticks. Tomorrow, a little more info on hos AGS is turning out, and a breakdown of our protagonist.

Take Two

Posted by aabicus on

I bet all zero of you reading this are noticing the significant timestamp between now and the last post and have given up on this blog. While I’m sorry to have let you nonexistent people down, I’m back in the saddle and working on a game. It’s just not the same game.

I finished the Javascript class and made a checkers game, but I didn’t really learn enough to make the game I hoped to. So this quarter, I plan to take this blog a different direction; I’m going to make a bunch of games, each using a different popular ‘game maker’ on the internet. The first up is “Adventure Game Studio”, and in order to keep my interest peaked in the project most games will expand on some story in the Darwin’s Soldiers canon.