New Game: BEACON

This weekend I participated in the 15th Ludum Dare competition:

"Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated solo game development competition. Entrants develop games from scratch in 48 hours, based on a theme suggested by the community." -- www.ludumdare.com

The theme chosen for this competition was Caverns. I had 48 hours to build my game from the ground up based on that theme, and I managed to make the deadline! The result isn't what you'd expect; I spent the first several hours coding myself a game engine that would be really easy to maintain and create levels for, and be as bug-free as possible, to save myself agony as the hour of submission approached. And it worked.

The result: Beacon, a game about fear and reliance.



In Beacon, you awaken in total darkness, somewhere deep beneath the earth's surface, unexplored and unknown.



But a Beacon of light appears before the darkness (or whatever dwells within it) swallows you up, returning your sight and giving you hope. You must follow the beacon through the darkness, using its light and the luminescent crystals of the cavern as guides in your desperate attempt to escape this dark prison.







I will upload the game to the website later, but for now you can grab it over at its entry page at Ludum Dare. Make sure to check out the rest of the entries as well while you're over there!

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First off, sorry for the lack of posts for... three weeks now! I'm still getting used to this whole devlog thing, but I try to do 3-4 posts a month (at least!) The more I get the hang of doing it regularly, the more posts will show up. I'm still not sure really what I should be dedicating this website to: should I lean more towards developers' interests or gamers? The problem with the latter is (besides the fact that we haven't finished many games yet) that I'm not much of a gamer myself, and what I am is a pretty poor one, so I oft have a hard time connecting to gamers and seeing things through their eyes.

The engineering of games, from their approach and theories right to their presentation and flow, is something that interests me far more, so that's what I tend to write more about. So for now, I suppose, that's what I will keep doing, and hope that I can keep readers interested.

So you know, I haven't been posting, but development has been progressing on all sides at a rapid pace! Here's what I did just today:



Clicking on it will take you to my DeviantArt page. This is the first thing you'll see when you boot up your version of Skullpogo on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The game only takes a few seconds to load, so I concentrated on making it simple and cute, not too busy. You might recognize it, you might not -- but either way, it was based on this original sketch by our very own Brittney Cloud:




The gameplay is basically finished now, just finishing up the last 5-10% of development tidbits (many developers agree that the last 10% is 90% of the work), stuff like title menu, high score submitting stuff, organizing sound effects and getting them the right volume, and a few more other art tidbits (that's me!) Here's a shot right from a running version of the game (off my PC, not from an iPhone):



It's pretty clear that the HUD is still unfinished, mostly because I have to chalk up the assets for it still. Everything is pretty much operational at this point, just not perfected. In this particular game mode, killing pigs makes it more likely for zombies to pop up, and killing bats makes it more likely for ghosts to come up from the ground, both which you can hit. Ghosts move upwards, unlike the rest of the horiztonally-moving enemies, and actually are great for getting up high. But what kind of reward do you get for getting off the top of the screen? If you played the original game, you'll have some idea.

I've also been making a lot of progress with my Flash programming, which is coming along wonderfully, but I'll save that for a later post.

Cheers, all!

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iPhone Pogo is Go

Alright, after more discussion and some preliminary coding, Skullpogo for the iPhone is definitely a go. At this point, the game physics are already working, and you can already hop around on pigs and bats.

If you're wondering who this mystery programmer is, his name is Justin Smith. If you haven't heard of him, he is the creator of a lovely PC game called Enviro-Bear 2000. The game is as you see it below:



That is a bear, and yes, it is driving that car. In the original version of the game, created for the TIGSource Cockpit Competition (which it won), you play with the mouse. The goal of the game is to drive your car (using only a single paw, which follows the mouse) around the forest so food, such as fish and berries, fall into your car which you can grab and eat. The result: an utterly hilarious, awkward (you're a bear, driving a car), yet strangely captivating romp of a game. Justin tells me that 80% of the time working on the game was spent just tweaking the small stuff, refining the design of the game to as perfect as any bear-driving simulator can be.

The mouse-driven gameplay made Enviro-bear translate nicely into iPhone, which is exactly what Justin did with the game. Now, the game is available in the App Store, and fared quite well selling for only 99¢.

Having played and enjoyed the original Skullpogo, he sent me an email asking if I'd like to work with him to produce an iPhone version of the game, and I agreed. The game is coming along quite rapidly, and I am heading into Vancouver this Monday and meeting up with Justin for some serious dev jamming. We'll be fleshing out the core gameplay, as well as refining the more important aspects of the game, such as the player control and enemy behaviour/timing.

Let you guys know how things go! I've got some powerups to sprite now. Peace, and thanks for reading!

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Skullpogo on the iPhone?

First off, sorry for two barren blogless weeks! I got tied up with some summer activity and didn't have much time on the computer, and Marius was off at the first Berlin Indie Game Jam (www.bigjam.org). He was barely back for five minutes before taking off again, this time for France, so I guess that leaves me to hold down the house.

I'm trying to get back in the swing of working on Skullpogo. It's always hard to get back into development after being away from it for a few weeks, but I managed to get a few more animations done and tweak some of the code.

And now, preliminary planning of an iPhone version of Skullpogo is on the go.



The game is still in the early planning stages. While we're not quite sure yet if we'll follow through with it, after a few emails back and forth with the programmer who will be coding the iPhone version of the game, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about it!

So far, it's been decided that the game will be largely based off the first Skullpogo (as found on our games page), but using the newer graphics that I've developed for the upcoming Flash version of the game. It may have a few more features, though, based on some ideas and critiques I've received through email and internet forums regarding the original game.

What do you guys think of an iPhone Skullpogo? What do you think would work best as a control scheme? Any special features this version of the game should have?

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