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

The day of (hopefully) reckoning

So today is the day that I have been told that all us CGD students will be consorting with the tutors on the course, and hopefully ascertaining whether our ideas are anywhere near promising enough to actually begin designing. Only time will tell whether I actually get to complete any of the projects I have concocted, but until then, here are some pictures of the work I've been doing getting a better idea of the design of my spaceship game.

Here we have a little bit of actor design, I've been trying my best to use straight lines as much as possible as I know I have little to no skill in creating images on the computer. So yeah, very simple models that hopefully wont be too difficult to draw or animate.

This little section highlights the 'capturing humans' mechanic, starting off with hitting them with the subjugation ray and then hoovering them up using the abduction beam. This in turn gains you an amount of 'antibodies' that are used to upgrade your ship and buy more seconds of life.

This is a little mock up of how I hope the game screen will look, in much less detail (Or possibly not, depending on how crap I am at creating artwork) At the moment my plan is to have almost all actors exclusively moving left, with human NPC's reacting to the proximity of the ship by, well, running away.

This has nothing to do with the spaceship game project, but in a moment of uncertainty in regards to just how 'Virusey' the space ship idea was, I set about attempting to creat something a little different. Sort of RISK type gameplay, you play the attacking virus, infecting cells of varying degrees of importance, according to how many antibodies you currently possess. However, strategy is not my strong point, so I am not greatly enthused by this idea, it is simply a bit of musing and possibly a fall back in the worst case scenario, namely, that both my other ideas are declared as unfit for the task.

Second Idea (Space Ship Game)

So, having again woken up an hour earlier than I needed to because I forgot that the Games Workshop lecture is ten o'clock rather than nine, I thought I'd try and bash another one of these out. Again, you'll have to do all the imagery in your head, but that shouldn't be too hard, right?


Space Ship Game (Working Title)


Setting - As all around the earth, huge, unimaginably powerful alien ships ravage and harvest the human race, they are suddenly struck down by the bane of all alien invasions, the foreign virus! (However did I create such an original idea?) You are the commander of one of these great ships, terminally infected by this hideous monkey illness, currently hooked up to a life support machine which should be able to keep you alive long enough to wreak your terrible revenge, but only if you can continue to feed it human organic matter.


Objective - The player controls the alien ship, floating along a good thirty feet above the ground. Either the game will continually scroll to the left or possibly it will be up to the player to steer left and right, collecting those pesky humans. Either way, the idea is that the humans must be first incapacitated with your subjugation ray before being taken on board the ship for turning into human ooze. The subjugation ray will fire out in front of the ship, at around a 45 degree angle, allowing for the ship to incapacitate humans and then suck them up with an abduction field that will be projected directly down from the hovering ship. As humans are taken, the ship's store of human matter increases, allowing the player to head to the upgrade screen and start upgrading the ship. But what is the most important upgrade? Life! Precious seconds that can be bought with human matter, refilling the clock that will begin ticking for every moment the player is flying the ship (Probably displayed in big, red, apocalyptic letters in the middle-top of the screen.


Reason to continue playing - As you play, the humans try ever more desperately to resist being reduced to a basic slime, as, of course, is their wont. So they will begin to hide inside cars, armoured vehicles, buildings and military bunkers. With each of these, the subjugation ray must become increasingly powerful, to crack the outer shell and get at the squishy human goodness within. And the only way to increase the power of the subjugation ray is to spend precious human matter on it (Perhaps to pay the RnD team, or maybe order it off of Space Amazon) and of course, you need that matter to pay for your life! Decisions, decisions...


Controls - I think just left and right should be sufficient for movement in this one, perhaps even only left (depending on how difficult either is) with two different keys assigned for the subjugation ray and the abduction field. A couple of HUD buttons for getting to the upgrade screen and the settings menu.


Glaring Problems - It seems to me that in this case, balancing the difficulty might be the most difficult task. Too easy, and people will have plenty of time to live all the time, too hard and people will never be able to get the fun upgrades. So this requires lots of thought, but obviously I'll have to actually build the game mechanic in order to do some testing.


So there it is, the second idea. With the Games Workshop in about an hour and ten minutes, I should get some idea of whether I'm totally barking up the wrong tree or not. Should be good!


Hopefully, I'll be posting again soon. Wish me luck!

Edit: In my ever fantastic judgement I've been taking some pictures of my notepad, and the notes and  sketches within, with my webcam, in order to display them on this blog. And may the lord have mercy on my soul.

This is a fantastic rendition of the game in action, showing the player flying about in his spaceship, zapping and incapacitating humans. It also shows the big timer in the middle, counting down the precious seconds of your life, and some hud buttons in the top right, possibly for activating upgrades...or something.

This is a little bit of postulation as to the look of the shop screen, with amounts of extra time to be bought lining the left side and upgrades to your weapons on the left. Also a few notes on the fact that, as the beam fires at an angle, if the player is to be allowed to move both left and right the 'front' of the ship will need to be made obvious.