Archive for the 'The games that didn't make it' Category

The games that didn’t make it: Part 3 – “Sort”

Published on September 14, 2007 in The games that didn't make it. 1 Comment

This is the third, and for now final part of my series on games that didn’t make it. This game is also one I made while working on argblargs. This was abandoned more because of lack of time than anything else. I started work on this on the odd spare hours in the final stages of the project, but I ended up having to spend my time fixing bugs instead of finishing it.
This game is “pre-idea”, it’s more of a test of a vague inspiration than anything else. A real proper prototype. It uses the ball physics from flashbombs but is a bit more action oriented.
You can shoot the big balls, making them grow, if they grow big enough they’ll explode. The stars from the explosion will ignite other balls, making them too explode.
It suffers a bit from performance issues (especially running in a browser), but it’s like 60 particles with inter particle collisions in AS2, so don’t expect a thousand fps.

I think this could work as a game, add some sound and a sweet combo system and you’d be in business. But I doubt I’ll ever finish it, if I do I’ll probably do it in AS3 instead, that way I could make it a real particle extravaganza.

This will be the last game now for a while, but I still have a few potential failures in the pipeline (keeping a positive attitude is key in game development).
If you liked these articles there’s more of that flavour around here. Check out the postmortem category. If that’s not enough check out Petri’s postmortems over at Kloonigames aswell.

The game is after the break.
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The games that didn’t make it: Part 2 – “Flu Fighters”

Published on September 9, 2007 in The games that didn't make it. 1 Comment

flu fightersThis is the second part of my little series of the games that didn’t make it.
This time it’s a game I made for argblargs, this game, as many other started as a quick little hack over the weekend. The whole thing started as a test of an idea I had for a long time. Flash has this nifty little function called hitTest(), it’s pretty crap for testing object to object. But it can do per-pixel collision of points against abstract shapes. There’s a bunch of games out there that use this, it’s good because you can paint your levels using the regular brush in Flash. But as with all collision detection, it’s not really the detection that’s the hard part, it’s the resolving.
This tests points for collision against the level and then backs them up the way they came until they’re not colliding anymore.
This was all working reasonably well.
I showed it to the other guys and they quite liked it, so we decided to go ahead and make a full game out of it. I had been using my trademark ropes to try it so after some fiddling about it turned into a game inside the body, you’re this weird little creature with a long tongue that eats bacteria.

I tried something like a gazillion different ways to do the gameplay but I never really got it right, foolishly enough I put some more bells and whistles in there hoping that they might save it.
They didn’t. So after about a week’s work (spread out over two actual weeks) we decided that it wasn’t going to work. We had to cut it.

So here’s the game as far as it got done, in this iteration you’re supposed to defend the four organs that are spread out in the body by eating the bacteria attacking them. The bacteria stick to your tounge, and then you can eat them by moving the tounges tip to your mouth. If you get stuck inside a wall, just try to pull yourself further into the wall using your tounge, this should get you out.
It’s not very fun but atleast it looks pretty.

The game is after the break.
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The games that didn’t make it Part 1: Rain

Published on August 31, 2007 in Postmortems and The games that didn't make it. 0 Comments

rain game screenshotWhen you make games the way I do, using quick prototypes to test out ideas, it a natural consequence that not all of them work out. Some turn out great (Hovercrafty, dingding and even isotope2) some do become games, original, but maybe not all that good in the long run (Moonlumber and to some extent flashbombs). Then there’s the rest, the ones that don’t even make it into a complete game. It may be for a multitude of reasons, but most often it’s because they’re not fun enough.

I have a couple of these lying around, and I figured I might aswell write a bit about them. The first one is “rain”. Most my games get a short name like that while I make them, Eater of Worlds was called slingshot, flashbombs was called bounce and dingding was called grid.

This uses the Boids style simulation from Popeatron to make a cloud, it looks really nice, but with one drawback. It’s horribly slow.I could probably speed it up quite a lot using stuff I’ve learned since then, but would still be a waste of processing power to do the cloud like that.

It does controls quite nice, the cloudlike feel is there when you’re moving it about. This is one of those things that worked as a toy, but where I had real trouble finding the gameplay.

I tried playing around with mouse gestures since I didn’t want to get keyboard controls in there, the mouse is so much nicer. So, by “massaging” the cloud you can make it rain, and if you move the mouse a bit faster in one direction you’ll make a lightning bolt.

And that’s about it. I never found a way to make it into a game without making it overly complicated. Instead I moved on to make Eater of Worlds.

The game is after the break.
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