Chrono Trigger Meet Bill Murray!

So Chrono Trigger is being released on the DS and aside from wetting my appetite it has me wondering what made the game so good great fantastic. Now aside from the fact that the game was designed by a dream team it also told a very compelling story that included time travel as an important theme.

I am also wondering how time travel could be incorporated into a game as an interesting gameplay mechanic. I'm sure a lot of games explore it but how many actually use it to make the game fun and how many have it as a central theme?

This also got me thinking of Groundhog Day (brilliant movie by the way). Obviously this spawned a game idea but I'm not sure how well I could execute it. Essentially the player would relive the same day over and over again like Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day but every time he accomplishes a goal that has a significant impact on the time line it creates a "time scar" (if you will).

This time scar would make it so this event happens (or happened, semantics with time travel are so confusing) through every iteration of the day. The goal of the player would be to place enough time scars throughout the day to break free of the loop and live the rest of his life.

Though the premise of the game is vague enough it is also clearly an idea that would allow the player to explore various aspect of the world without ever being punished. Say he decides to get shot by a police officer; he would only wake up at the beginning of the day again with all his previous achievements still accomplished. It would be a game about exploration and experimentation.

I used a violent example, possibly to compliment Bill Murray's failed suicide attempt in Groundhog Day, but non violent experiments could take center stage like trying to hook up two strangers or helping a cat stuck in a tree. Heck this could be a lot like Quantum Leap, man what a sweet show.

Ramblings of a Bored Fool

A friend and I were discussing his data driven architecture he's coding for his game he is programming. He got to the point where he had a working system when he realized that he had no idea as to what to make with it.

The most obvious choice was pong. He kind of grunted at the idea but we started talking about different takes on the game. There are a millions flavours of pong including (but not limited to) plasma pong, pong RPG, all flavours of battle pongs, etc but how were we to make a new pong that is still interesting?

One of the good ideas we had spawned from a joke. I hate kid's TV shows about kids with cards who duel using said cards and take their game very seriously. I'm takling about winning or losing a match is the difference between life or death (it's a freakin' card game!). So hence card game pong was born!

Essentially the game starts as a regular pong match. Every time the ball hits a paddle the player draws a card. The player can hold five cards in his hand. These cards would have effects in the game whenever they are put into play. An example of this would be a ball split card or a temporary paddle extension card.

What's interesting about the ball split card is that it could be used strategically for the owner of the card by using it against himself. Since the player draws a card whenever the ball hits his paddle if he used the split card just before it hits he would have the right to draw three cards (assuming the ball splits into three balls).

I guess the controls would use the arrow keys or wasd to move the paddle and the mouse to choose cards. My only concern is whether the player will have trouble keeping track of the cards he has while the ball is in play. It would be an interesting experiment nonetheless.

So what are other cool ideas?

Summer Projects

So summer is here and I've broken another promise I made to myself. With an actual routine of getting up for work everyday I figured that I would get into the development mood but it hasn't happened. So what's going on with the adventure game that was in the conceptual phase? We scrapped it.

I'm too worried that an adventure game, ala classic Zelda games, will be too demanding on the content level. Instead we decided to use some of the lessons we learned in the Outpost project and make a new Top Down Shooter like Shadowgrounds or Moonpod's War Angels.

I won't go into detail about the project just yet because lately my projects don't seem to lift off the ground. I figured I'd post something after a month of silence.

Not Flat Lining...

Okay so exam season is lasting forever. I managed to get my java architecture working with some extreme volatility in the frame timing so I'll have to look into it some more. Sadly I haven't had the time to touch anything since then. Studying has taken up most of my time but to stay on topic I will show off the final result of our CG class; the vogager introduction:



We got an A+ for it. I have to say my partner deserves most of the credit since he's the C++ guru. I did a little bit of modeling (not enough to actually deserve a mention here) and the scripting for the scene. It's pretty neat how it works in the back, I can create objects from a script file defined by us and change the file without having to rebuild the whole project. It really streamlines the whole process.

Java and Game Development

It really bothered me that a lot of people couldn't run NSR. I knew XNA was exclusive to Windows which I thought was fair enough thinking most people would have access to a copy (or use an emulator). However even if we ignore the non-windows demographic so many didn't have a video card that supported shaders 1.1, what a bummer.

Well while I wait for the end of the exam period and for Zedix and I to have time to fully commit ourselves to our new project I decided to explore java game development. I decided to install Eclipse and use java's own java2d stuff. From what I read it's not the best for game programming, especially when there are APIs dedicated to graphics like JOGL or GTGE, but for what time I have to invest in this project I think it will be just fine.

As far as design goes I figured that I didn't want to divert too far from the way XNA works. Now I know I can't develop something as fancy as XNA (ooh-la-la) but I could design a simple architecture that would emulate the coding feel of it.

Seeing how the major architectural feature that I use in XNA is the drawable component I made an abstract GameComponent class with the basic update and drawing functions. From there I implemented the MainComponent which would hold a list of all updatable and drawable components and iterate through them in every iteration of the game loop.

I'm unexperienced in the whole field of game loops but for how simple my project will be I will simply define a default frame per second (60) and make sure that only one frame can be executed per 1/60 seconds. I'd post some code but nothing in my design is concrete just yet.

Here are a few links that I found useful:

• javagaming.org
• gamedev tutorial on active rendering in java
• pretty cool article on a component base architecture (thanks to Zedix)
  

End of Semester => Deadlines

Well things haven't been flowing too smoothly. Little to no progress has been done on our latest project but that's mostly due to school. However since my fan asked for an update I'll add an update.

Narcoleptic Soccer Rush

Well voting ended today and we finished 7th out of 48! Crazy! We were hoping for top ten and our hard work paid off. I think all the games did well and that the voting was fair (though with so many games some games didn't get as much credit as they deserved). Congratulations to all those who entered the competition. Keep an eye out on the TigSource front page for more details.

Avoid the Asteroids

We are presenting the demo and the XNA framework tomorrow morning at 10:00am. After seeing some of the other projects I'm a little nervous seeing how our demo can't possibly last more than thirty seconds (plus the presentation).

Star Trek Voyager Introduction

I haven't really mentioned this project but we are currently putting the finishing touches on it. The presentation is tomorrow morning at 8:00am. I'd list the project's details but instead I'll point you guys to the Assembla wiki where we took the time to add everything. Right here.

Adventure Game

Well not too much to add here but I'll post the sprite I made for it. I'm pretty proud of it considering that most walking animation I end up studying a current sprite extensively, this one was done looking at the walking cycle.

Finishing Touches

Well I figured that I was done with Avoid the Asteroids but the project required a testing phase which then led to an improvement to the system. Seeing how it isn't too obvious to test a game using software metrics put forward by a program like SEG we decided to "tighten up" the collision detection and add sprite font support.

XNA makes this really easy for us so basically all I had to do was pop in a font I had drawn a while ago for Outpost and added a few functions to my GUI class. Beforehand I was cheating with my user interface by simply overlaying an image (I know, I know, it's dirty) but I didn't feel like adding the font seeing how I only had to display the introduction text and the game over screen. However the addition of the timer forced me to put it in. I think it looks much nicer.