prototyprally

Words: Swamp, Secret

Description: The idea I had from that was to drive one of those swamp boats around and be generally secret. But that seemed like too much of a racing game and not very interesting. I thought a bit about what you could do with a standard racing game to mix it up a bit. I knew that if I was to make a racing game it’d be top down as anything else would have been a bit too complicated for such a short development cycle. Eventually I came up with the idea that the steering of the boat would be broken, and the player would need to use a rope to latch onto different things to steer. This would make excellent use of my new best friend, the rope.

What went right: I think this is one of my most complete games. It goes beyond being a toy with an added layer of rules on top and actually qualifies as a proper game. Whether this is a good or a bad thing I’m not entirely sure. The game has a kind of flow, which you really need to get into to get good scores and I really like that.

What went wrong: It is a bit hard to play, increasing the size of the anchors wouldn’t hurt at all. I tried to make the game zoom out with the speed of the boat but, as usual, due to somewhat hacky programming it wasn’t possible without a major rewrite.

Conclusion: With this game I found a simple, working gameplay mechanic. It’s as I said one of my most complete games. Though this in it’s current state is a better game than for instance Moonlumber, I think Moonlumber has a deeper mechanic, albeit not as simple. What I’m trying to say with this is that if I’d work a week more on both of these games I really think Moonlumber would end up being the better of the two. But, I might be wrong, this game does have a certain appeal. If you add some obstacles, different things to latch onto and bunch of real levels it might become a real killer. It’d make a nice game for the Nintendo DS for sure.

Words: Forest, Moon landing

Description: The first game made as the rules intended. On this game I was inspired rather quickly, and my first plan was to make something about driving a logging-truck on the moon. I found some tutorials on inverse kinematics and toyed around with them, and after looking around a bit I came across the rope physics example. The rope uses a combination of techniques, and handles the segments as a series of particles with constraints. Add some inertia and gravity to that mix and you have a very pleasant behaving rope. This rope was too good of a thing to pass up so I decided that you’d fly around in a saucer picking trees up instead. The first version I did had the saucer flying over a flat landscape, and the challenge was more to keep the saucer from crashing than anything else. That wasn’t really fun enough, so I experimented with wrapping the gameplay around a sphere instead. It did get more interesting, but was in essence the same game with a bit of gloss on the top. But once i made the controls a bit more forgiving and added in the possibility to throw trees I found some solid gameplay.

What went right: I find the game very visually pleasing, add a few more types of trees and a better background and it will look splendid. I really think the gameplay is there, however I think it’d be better suited for mouse control than keyboard. This would remove even more focus from controlling the ship allowing the player focus on the actual game.

What went wrong: It has absolutely horrible code. The ship isn’t really moving around the planet, it’s just rotated in to make it seem that way. This makes the physics behave a bit weird. As an example, it’s impossible to throw a tree into orbit. It will always fall onto the moon, as the gravity really is a linear gravity wrapped around a sphere. If I’d want to make something more of this game I’d have to redo it from scratch. This fact made it very hard to change things as the game went along, adding in mouse control would require a complete rewrite.

Conclusion: I like this game, it has potential. The game would benefit from a more management style approach, watering trees to make them grow, keeping vermin away and remove weeds. This would make the whole throwingmoment a bit more exciting as it’s really a bit of a gamble. You’d be able to get much higher scores, but at the same time you’d might not get anything at all. I’m glad I started working on it as early on as I did because that extra time on the end was sorely needed. Without it the game might not have had the throwing, which would have made it a lot less entertaining.

Words: Hospital, Heart

Description: This was a game I made in less than the chosen time limit, it was basically thrown together in an afternoon just to get back my feel for Flash (It had been more than a year since I did any proper stuff using it).
My original thoughts about the game was to make it a bit more of a freeform music game, where the primary object would be to keep in sync with the beat not having to press a bunch of stuff in proper sequence.

What went right: The basic idea isn’t all that bad, a proper song in the background and some better spawning of the instruments would help it a lot.

What went wrong: It’s a rhythm game that doesn’t keep to the rhythm. You need to do a bit of buffer trickery to get flash to stay on the beat. Fixing this would also add
quite a bit to the gameplay. Most of the other problems are related to this, to get the score to be even slightly accurate I had to make it so forgiving that it almost is hard to understand what it actually rates.

Conclusion: As it is, it’s not a very fun game. It does have a slight potential, but it would need several iterations to be amusing. I’m unsure how well suited it is for being mouse controlled, maybe an analogue gamepad would be better.