Boolean Brothers

Crap! I knew I forgot something! Work on the game is still progressing, albeit it's a little slower than what I would like (my fault). I'm still spriting on and off but due to personal reasons I lost a huge chunk of motivation to do anything. Thankfully I'm recovering and work will pick up as soon as I can get all these school assignments done (more precisely, half-done).

Point of this post is mostly to point you guys in the direction of our game's actual development blog, not just mine: Boolean Brothers

Zedix already posted the first update on the game and it's already out-of-date! He's been working non stop on all sorts of features in the map editor which include a fill bucket (I'm excited about this one because mapping one tile at a time can be freakin' long) and a ton of tweaks. Just check it out.

Mockup Time!

The end of the holiday season was pretty busy for both of us but we finally managed to get back into it. I made myself a TODO list of tiles we could use in our first map and it's coming very close to being checked off completely. Once that's done I'll start thinking about different settings we'd like to explore and make more lists so I don't slow down too much.

The editor is coming along nicely. I won't go too much into detail since Zedix and I were kicking around the idea of making a blog for the game itself where he could post his own updates.

Here is another pictar! Not all the stuff in there is completely new but I'm particularly proud of the filler trees, we'll now be able to have a boarder around our maps that aren't just blackness.

Of Map Editors and Men...

The past 5 days have been really exciting. Zedix and I have been working ceaselessly. Our progress has been nothing but phenomenal which is kind of amusing since everytime we try to do something like this our attention wavers. This time is different because we both have something to show so we feed eachother's motivation and we end up working harder and harder.

As far as the map editor goes we're pretty much recreating an interface similar to RPG Maker's own. It won't be as feature rich but it will be more specific so that we can use the tools we build ourselves with 100% feature utilization. By building our own system we can add certain functionalities without having to google how to do it for hours with someone else's design and/or have to resolve it with a hack. That being said the editor is looking shhhweet especially since it's using our own map format.

As far as pixel art goes I figure pictures speak louder than words. Here are a few mockups:

Holy Crap, it's December!

I'm just going to post this and pretend like I haven't been absent for the past 5 months.

Zedix and I got back on the horse last night and decided to make a simple RPG. To make things easier on myself we decided to pick a modern setting. In fact the feel of the game is strongly influenced by the Mother series and Peanuts. The cartoony look allows me to use colours without always having to fill in the blank with details. The grundgy look can be pretty draining.

That being said Zedix brushed off the dust of his C# skills and managed to rebuild the map editor I had posted so long ago.

Anyways here are a few characters I drew together and a mockup. 

And the mockup.

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.