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

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.