Tag Archives: game design

Day 36

Posted by aabicus on

For an eleven minute video, very little happened today. He dropped the bombshell that (gasp!) he expects us to make more story so that our game doesn’t consist of literally a single puzzle. To that effect I have mapped out one more problem for our intrepid Traveller to solve before he may find the cure:

Find the Cure flow chart 2

The rest of the video was streamlining the code, which I mostly did before the video even happened. He taught some tricks for testing your code, but I knew them well after Oedipus in my Inventory and Electra City. 

Looks like tomorrow’s assignment is to make said flowchart into content. I can handle that, not even turning over a new leaf. All his video does is the same,. we can watch him put his code together. In that case Im going to bed early, maybe I can wake up and get said video done before work and enjoy the night.

Day 33

Posted by aabicus on

All problems fixed! Ultimately I decided to stick with the Darwin’s Soldiers plot. Even if it turns out the Unity version is more of a demo than anything else, it’s better than having a hamfisted plot I don’t care about.

Speaking of which, today and tomorrow I’ve been putting together the story, and it should be done by tomorrow. I’ve got the roadmap laid out, and to prevent any possible hype from building here it is:

Find the Cure flow chart

So you gotta divide your game into stages, and each stage need to lead to another stage. In the Twine edition of this game, more plot will happen after you escape the first room, aka you can go find the cure and turn on the bridge. But we’re making progress! 😀

Day 30

Posted by aabicus on

Ignore that last post; There’s not enough space to post honking huge paragraphs into Unity so I had to keep the intro short in-game. I’ll go back later once it’s complete and integrate that backstory into the text adventure. But yeah, that’s gonna be the plot to the text adventure. Set in the Darwin’s Soldiers universe, not that you need to know that because you literally just read the entire backstory to the game. (But if you’d like to read more of the lore, Card of Ten -> Ground One -> Chasing Seconds is the story progression you’d need to understand everything.) The game is told from anti-matter Earth’s perspective and takes place after Ground One.

The first half of today’s video was almost entirely taken up by learning how to truncate lines so you can read your code without having to scroll left or right. Seems kinda pointless but I bet I won’t think that in the future so I’m taking his word for it and learning how.

Rest of the video was spent creating more text. Sadly I don’t have the space to view all my text currently but I bet we’re gonna fix that later so I’m leaving it as is.

Starting it up

IT’S HAPPENING!!!11!! ;D  :’D  D:  XD

Update: Crap I realized how to make paragraphs, just use new print functions, one after the other. Derrrr. That is NOT how you do it, he covered it in the video. Just add /n to your content to line break.

A Good Shepherd Knows His King

Posted by aabicus on

Whoo, been a while since I posted on this ole thing, hasn’t it? What on Earth could aabicus have been up to?

Well, I recently made the jump from “literally doesn’t even count as a game dev” to “arguably a professional in the loosest sense of the word” because I’ve been hired to program a game in Multimedia Fusion! Or Clickteam Fusion as they’ve rebranded it. It’s gonna have art and music by other people, my job is simply to take their assets and bid them up into something playable. So while I wait for that project to start I’ve been coding* a proof of concept game and it’s pretty far along!

*all real programmers should scoff derisively right here

I’m not sure what aspects of it I’ll be allowed to release but I have been given permission to show some screenshots:


#policebrutality

Even if I’m never allowed to release the game, it’s taught me a lot about what MMF2.5 can do, and I plan on incorporating all of it into my next project. Also, I feel bad because my first update post in almost a year didn’t provide you guys with any new content so here’s a game I made in under two hours as part of a workshop where we all tried to make a full game in under an hour. I kinda lost track of time.

OedipusInMyInventory

 

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.

The Main Character

Posted by aabicus on

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.

Hello world!

Posted by aabicus on

Hello reader!
I am a Literature major at the University of California, but I’m now breaking into Computer Science with some beginner courses. I plan to use this blog to keep updated on my progress towards my quarter goal: completing a Javascript video game.

A decent amount of you probably started chuckling. A small order, I know, but I have no previous coding experience, so I’m starting small. My video game will be based off of Darwin’s Soldiers, something that started years ago as a simple online play-by-post roleplay, but has since grown into so much more.

At the moment, I plan to make a turn-based strategy style game where you play a worker trapped in a military base that gets attacked by terrorists at the start of the game. You’ll choose your profession (scientist, guard, etc.) and collect up to 4 teammates at a time from surviving personnel.