The Product

U-F-OMG! has now been live for a good eight hours (admittedly, those were between half twelve last night and  now.) I wouldn't say I'm totally happy with it, but it's not bad.
This post is a run down of the changes and fixes I've made since my last post, so here we go.

Play Incentive 
I added a goal to the game, to abduct sixty humans. Once this has been done the player recieves a win scene and can then continue on, safe in the knowledge that their race has been saved from the terrible virus.


More Gameplay
I added a new enemy type, a tank with surface to air missiles which home in on the player and can be shot down in flight, adding a bit of extra gameplay.

Wrap Around Mechanic
All of the game actors that move now successfully wrap around the scene.


Throw Humans Towards Ship
Whilst not entirely eliminated, the bug that caused humans to be flung in a strange directions has been reduced. Waiting on bug reports to see if the problem still exists.


Minor Changes
Aggro Humans now always simulate, meaning they'll chase you wherever you go!
Failing no longer increments your fail level.
Player is now able to return to main menu from the fail screen.
Tutorial has been made to look slightly more interesting.
All backgrounds have been spruced up.
Actor speeds have been tweaked to make the gameplay more intense.
Balance has been generally improved, with a slow curve of difficulty.
Play stats are no longer added to overall totals when a level is failed.
Fixed spelling errors.
Added a reference to the blog.

Somehow that doesn't look like anywhere near as much work as I actually have done, but I'm glad to say I think this project is pretty much finished (Having said that, I've uploaded three new versions with fixes since this morning)

The Action Plan

The deadline? Monday the 10th of December.

The task? A finished Game Document, a sweet blog, and a working prototype.

I've just finished my first, bare bones draft of the GDD, but finishing that shouldn't be too much hassle. However, I'm starting to wish the emphasis had been on it earlier, because as I worked through it I got a great view of the things that needed improvement in my game. Here's the subsequent list of the changes and fixes that I want to implement over the next few days, in time for the deadline;

The Incentive to Play
What I want, is a really good reason for the player to continue playing. Now, to a certain extent, that's already being done by the score system and the recording of the players stats. But I want something a little more addictive. My idea at present is a big tube filled with slime that represents how many humans have been abducted, with the goal being to fill it entirely, which will mean the player has won the game. Also, possibly, an upgrade system? It may well be too late in the game for that, but we shall see.

More Gameplay Mechanics
Another thing? A thing to do? My present thoughts, an enemy that fires a homing rocket that needs to be shot down by the player. I have an idea for the behavior in my head, the thing that might take up my time is building the art assets, so that's something to think about.

Wrap Around
It seems very important that the player not be able to shepard all of the humans into one corner and harvest them, hence I'm working on a 'wrap-around screen' behavior which should eliminate that possibility.

Throw Humans Towards Ship
It seems to me that, despite getting used to it over time, it can be quite jarring to have to try and catch the humans when they're being abducted, so I'm working on a fix for this that throws the human directly at the players position rather than into the air.

Bug Fixes
Failing increments the level - At present, due to the way the level progression system works, upon failing a level the 'level' attribute is still incremented, meaning the game becomes progressively harder no matter wether the player is successfully completing levels or not. This is an easy fix.
Check Evasion Behavior - There seem to be some bugs with the evasion behavior that cause the humans to sit still when they spawn with the ship within their detect radius. This is difficult to test but I will attempt to work out the problem.
Always Simulate Aggro Humans - At present the humans who are supposed to head towards the player and fire at them do not 'simulate' when off screen, and hence only begin to head towards the player when they come on screen. This is a very simple fix.

So that's the action plan, with any luck I'll post an update the sunday before the deadline.
Wish me luck,
Jack

Demo'ed and didn't Die!

This week, minds were blown as a demo version of U-F-OMG was successfully showcased during an AINT102 workshop, giving new insight into the world of the incredibly well crafted, perfectly executed games that I produce!

Sadly, some of that explanation may have been poetic licence. Though I didn't expect it to be a problem, I exported my demo version of the game to a .swf file for the enjoyment of my coursemates and lecturers. This sadly lead to a lot of problems with mouse lag, that, when the game runs in stencylworks, are non-existent. I think these problems stem from my attempt to include more than one human actor type, and from having a quite process intense 'always' event controlling the movement of the human actors. In response to this I have made a couple of fixes in the last week (22/11/2012), namely;

• Returning to using only one type of human actor
• Modifying the human movement AI in order to use an 'Every n seconds' event rather than an 'Always' event, meaning they check to see where the player ship is every second

I also recieved some feedback from other students and lecturers in the form of a google docs questionnaire (An idea that was blatantly stolen from me), the results of which have been made available to me now. According to that feedback and my own plans I will be continuing to develop the game over the next weeks and planning to deliver a finished prototype by the tenth of december. For the mean time, take a look at the recording taken of some demo play of the game, lag free due to being run in stencyl.

The Second Wave

Yes indeedy, it's time for the second lot of testing!

Having posted a second demo on facebook and created a second google form, I've started getting feedback on the newer version of my game. At the time of writing my main point seems to be, stop the humans from accidentally moving whilst being abducted, should be simple. I've also been given a complaint about the performance of the mouse in the game. This worries me as, whilst it could well be an easy fix, it could also mean that the game's lagging due to all the 'kill, create' functions whizzing about, which would be bad as tinkering with using the recycle command lead to all kinds of nastiness last time! Either way, it shall be looked into.

So yeah, I'll keep an eye on the form today, and hopefully I'll be working on the game all day in preparation for the demo or die tomorrow! Wish me luck!

I'll leave you with a few screenshots.

The lovely title screen, sadly I couldn't print screen the wicked music that accompanies it!

Tutorial screen

A bit of in game, by now you've probably seen this, I love it though!

My (Almost Crushingly) Honest Friends

So, remember the small play test version of the game I released? Yeah, basically unplayable.
Just kidding! Only mostly unplayable! In fact it was a fantastic opportunity to step back and have a look at what other people thought of my game, and my first notion was;

Ease of Play
 Far too many of the people I asked to test my game (Including my dear, ancient father) found it was nigh impossible to understand what was going on, and the game was so punishingly difficult that there was little chance to experiment in game. Well, fristly, I've implemented a but of logic to make the difficulty scale over time. At the minute that's not really working properly, but the game is at least quite easy. I'm also implementing a tutorial level, with one simple enemy that constantly respawns, allowing the player to get used to the controls in a less stressful environment. I also had responses that, as the ship is symettrical, it would be useful to have animations that showed plainly which direction the ship was facing, and this is something I'm still working on, as it's difficult to design a UFO with a nice grill on the front that still looks inkeeping with the aesthetic, but then maybe that's where I'm going wrong...

Fire at Mouse
At first I was of the notion that it would make it cool and difficult if I forced the player to have only one direction of fire. This was stupid. It's not fun to lose a game because the game mechanic is deliberately hobbled. Hence I've now added a 'fire at moust cursor' function, whereby the player clicks an area of the screen and the subjugation ray fires in that direction.

Score System
Despite the fact survival is the main point of the game, it was important that players be able to quantify what they were doing. For this I've implemented a score system, whereby players score a small number of points for a successful hit with the subjugation ray and slightly more points for a successful abduction.

In terms of glitches, it was reported that, upon retrying the game the human enemies no longer spawned into the play scene. This was due to a variable that I wasn't resetting at the beginning of each new scene, and has since been fixed. I also made the fade in and out times shorter between each scene. Most irritatingly a bug was reported where, upon being recycled and created in the scene again, human enemies would no longer stun properly, continuing to move but still able to be abducted. I seem to have been able to fix this by using the 'kill' command rather than the 'recycle' command, however this is messy in terms of processing, and I would rather know the exact cause of the problem.

So, here are a few screenshots of the game as it stands here, and hopefully I'll be producing another little demo some time this week, and once again collecting all the feedback I can.

Until next time!
Jack

Apologies for the Delay

Hello again! Yes, it's certainly been a while. As I should have possibly foreseen, the other parts of my course that I was moaning about rather a while ago suddenly started becoming actually important meaning less time was dedicated to the game. This alongside problems with my student bank account and a trip to the Explay event in Bath mean my progress with my game has been somewhat lackadaisical of late, but no more!

In terms of development, things have been going pretty well with the game, I have what is pretty much a fully playable demo ready, with a fail state and restart buttons and everything! So after a pretty good tutorial session (those have picked up as well) with some of the CGD staff, I got a lot of feedback on how getting some playtesting going would be a good idea. So, being the conscientious man that I am, I went ahead and created a little facebook group of a few close friends (brutally honest close friends, at that), gave them the .swf of my game and a link to a google form for feedback and let them loose.

Needless to say, this was fantastic advice. The bug reports that I got were almost all things I had missed during playtesting, and I was given some suggestions that I hadn't really thought about before, or that reinforced feelings I had about the game mechanic already. So as of this morning I've set to work fixing those bits, with the intention of releasing a second demo for the same group, to see what they think.

But that's not my only plan! I know that contracting a load of people you already know is not the best way to play test a game, so I want to get this out to a wider audience. Just how? I'm not sure yet, but there's a whole load of pin boards around the university with space on, so I was thinking of perhaps finding a bit of free, online file hosting space and posting up the address of the file and the form, hopefully catching some random members of the public, getting some good feedback and maybe spreading a bit of hype for the game? (Hmmm)


So yes, that's the plan of action, the previous events and the crap excuses out of the way, hopefully I should be able to post a few screenshots of the game looking a bit more polished soon. Until then, see you next time!

Kicking it up a Notch (Bam!)

Yes indeed, things are in motion! Having been given the green light by Dan (The bloke that runs our course) my project, which I have recently named U-F-OMG (Sweet), is in development. I'm writing this post to give you a little update on what I've done so far, and how the project is looking. In the last post I showed off some rather lacking concept art, and now I can show you the genuine article, lovingly and beautifully crafted in the Stencylworks built in editor 'Pencyl'.

Here we have the human, suitably gormless I think you'll agree. At present, he is completely inanimate, which means he just slides about the place like a duck on a frozen pond, however, watch this space *Wink*

This is you, the player. Now, I know it doesn't quite have the personality or 'Cool factor' of say, DMC's Dante or Uncharted's Nathan Drake, but it's got hidden depths, y'know? So currently this bad boy floats about, left to right, above the level raining down hot death on the hapless humans, using the subjugation ray, which brings me to my next point...

The subjugation ray! So far, the only one of my actors that has animation, this little beauty has a blue line running diagonally all down it, which is totally sweet, but completely underwhelming when illustrated here. So these fly about the level, colliding with the humans and causing them to recycle themselves (Whereupon they are placed back into a pool of actors, far less process intensive!) Of course the plan eventually is for them not to kill the humans, just stun them so you can suck them up with your abduction ray, more on that in later updates, hopefully!

And here we have the game in action! This is just a sneak peak of the adrenaline filled thrill ride this game is going to be. (Mayhaps I should stop being so hilariously sarcastic about my game...?) But as I said, this is very early on, with any luck I'll have taught it a few more tricks by the time I next post.

So, that's what's been going on in my Games Dev life, in other news, I made a fantastic Leek and Potato soup yesterday, and the whole of this post was written whilst bobbing along to the Jurassic 5 album 'Power in Numbers'. Hope that's been enlightening! See you next time.
Jack