As Asamak already pointed out in the comments of the previous post:

Big Time Monkey is being mentioned in the current issue 9/2011 of German games magazine COMPUTERBILD SPIELE. It also appears on the Silver-DVD attached to the magazine among 100 other freeware titles.

It’s also very pleasing that Gordo is printed highly visible on page 95. We all who participated in the creation of the game are glad to hear so much positive feedback on the game.  Finding our own game in one of Europe’s biggest games magazines makes our work feel particularly appreciated.

Last Thursday the MediaNight took place at the HdM Stuttgart. There we presented a first playable demo version of Big Time Monkey and we got quite good feedback. The project has also been approved and it got very good marks. We want to finish the game by the end of February.

Additionally the mini page of Big Time Monkey is online. This is where you will be able to dowload the game end of February: www.bigtimemonkey.de

We want to thank all those directly involved in the development of Big Time Monkey:

Ingmar Jännsch (music)

Torsten Helber (voice actor: Gordo)

Dolores Winkler (voice actress: Dr. Dröge, barkeeper Ulla)

Alexa von Busse (voice actress: till girl Yvonne, girl Vanessa, wife Beate, computer LISE)

Benjamin Janssen (voice actor: crook Nagel, barber Blumstingel, hippie Berger, intern Chris)

Ronny Krause (voice actor: Market Manager)

Kathrin Meier (voice actress)

Yep, I commited myself to another game project. Doesn’t this guy have enough stuff to work on, you might think. Indeed I do. And yes, I shoud finish some of my work-in-progress-projects first. But unlike all other of my projects this one has a fixed deadline in January 2011. So either it’s done till then or it’s a failure. And I’ll get marks for it at university, so there’s actually something at stake.

What’s it about? It’s a point-&-click-adventure again. It’s a little game about a monkey saving the world from the evil plans of his former mistress. The working title is “Big Time Monkey”.

It wasn’t me who initiated it. There where two other students at my university who wound up with a lot of creative ideas and I chose to join them. So there are three of us (maybe a fourth coming making some music): Marius, creating the story, the concepts and puzzles; Melina, doing character design and animations; and me responsible for project management, background art and the technical part.

It’s fun working together and I hope we will get all this work done in this short time.

A short summary of what’s done and what’s still to do:

2D-Plattformer (no official name, yet; working title: Vessel):

• Done:
  • majority of gameplay mechanics (weapons, triggerable objects, etc.)
  • simple ai architecture
  • level bitmap interpreter (creates tile based levels from bitmaps, including ai-information and entities)
  • level transitions
  • basic enemies with animations (content)
  • basic mod player (see below)
• To Do:
  • bosses (this will be the biggest part, also including some sort of ai)
  • save game system
  • menus
  • music and sounds (content)
  • additional enemy types
  • additional level tilemaps (content)
  • decoration sprites (content)
  • name and logo (content)
  • level design (content)

XM Player (no official name either):

• Done:
  • mod player core is working and playback is possible
  • panning and envelope features for instruments are working
  • set tempo, portamento up, portamento down and tone portamento effects are working
  • basic volume commands are working
• To Do:
  • automatic vibrato for instruments
  • volume effect commands
  • most effect commands are missing (quite the biggest part)
  • file loader (currently, mod files need do be embedded via AS3 in order to be played)

Now, back to work…

I had a few hours to clean up some stuff in the code and now it’s getting complicated. Time to make the artificial intelligence. I want to have some challanging NPCs but I don’t believe I can develop something super advanced in my available free time. Seems like I will have to simplify a few things here.

I’m still fiddling around with flixel. It’s a lot of fun and you can see the progress after every hour. Currently it looks like this is going to be my main project, since it is progresing so fast and my motivation to finish it increases every evening I spend with it. It is going to be a Metroid-Style Sidescroller. Nothing great or stunning, just a little fun

Following features are already implemented:

• moving, jumping, shooting, mouse aiming and all stuff like that
• tile based level generation from pngs: Each pixel represents a tile, so I can create my levels easily in Gimp
• multi-level support and level transitions

Collision and graphics are totally covered by flixel, which is preatty neat

I believe I’ll have the most headache with AI. But that’s still in remote future.

]]> http://www.thousand-thoughts.com/2009/10/a-little-flash-sidescroller/feed/ 0 http://www.thousand-thoughts.com/2009/09/my-new-friend-flixel/ http://www.thousand-thoughts.com/2009/09/my-new-friend-flixel/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:29:06 +0000 Paul http://www.thousand-thoughts.com/?p=339

This Month was quite stressful for which reason there wasn’t much activity here. I hope I will have some time for making games in the following days.

Speaking of which — I had a little time to play around with the flixel library by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman. It’s very impressive how quick you can achieve playable results with it. I’ve taken up to build a small game with it.

That doesn’t mean that I will abandon Jester Chip. Unfortunatelly I hadn’t much time for paying more attention to it. But I intend to pick it up again soon.

The Experimental Gameplay Project applies a very interesting and fresh approach in game design. Simply said, those guys prototype their game ideas in under seven days (per game) and thus reduce the risc of failure and create a proof of concept at the same time. Oh, and each of them works on his own 7-days game prototype which additionally mitigates the risc (if one fails the others still can succeed), encourages each contributor by friendly competition and widens thematic exploration.

They published an article about their process on Gamasutra: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days. A very interesting read.

You can easyly imagine that it’s more encouraging to have a playable result after seven days of work, even if it’s a rough prototype. And if you’re not satisfied whith the result you are free to catch the next idea during the next seven days. Maybe you succeed then.

I like this approach. It’s a more agile and free mindset. Maybe it’s the solution for the Curse of the Restless Mind I’ve searched for so long.

There is a game which caught my attention on the topic “art games”. The size of the game is only 1.8MB (extracted, SDL.dll and Readme.txt inclusive) and it’s called “Passage” by Jason Rohrer. You could think that I’m talking about one of those 64k demos from the demo scene showing mind blowing polygon- and light acrobaticts.

I’m talking about something totally different.

Passage has a resolution of 16×100 so the graphics are humble but fitting. And a nice midi score is playing in the background.

But firstly: what is an “art game”? Art Games are not a specific games genre. The term is as controversial and subjective as the term “art” itself. That’s why I’m not going to disambiguate this any further. I’d rather want to introduce this topic with the above mentioned example “Passage”. But before you read on, you should play the game yourself first. I promise you, it won’t take long. You’ll have “made it” in five minutes.

Played through?

Fine, so I can’t spoil the first impression by writing down my thoughts on this game (at least, I warned everybody who reads this now).

Most people will ask questionts like: “What’s so special about it? It’s just moving around in a pixelated world! Where is the fun part?”

Most people think, games are supposed to be fun. Sure, games have to be fun, otherwise they would not be games, would they? Fun is the major purpose of games. Games are defined by Fun.

Now let’s look at humor. Jokes for example. They are supposed to make people laugh. But each joke is funny for a different reason. There are dirty jokes, intelligent jokes, dry jokes, nonsense jokes etc. and some jokes are very difficult to understand. In some cases jokes require a special knowledge to be funny. The sudden understanding of such a special joke amplifies the humor.

The same principle is used in games. The learning and understanding effect of things that are happening in a game world causes fun. For example: why do so many people like to solve puzzles. These achievements seem to satisfy a lot of people.

In Passage this achievment is not done by simply playing through the game. In some ways it’s more outside the game, in the head of the player. The satifaying achievment part happens (as soon as it happens) on a much higher level: by understanding the “punchline” of the game. And this doesn’t need to happen during game time.

The game tries to express something, something like an idea or a particular emotion, a message.

Simply speaking, it’s a metaphor about the progress of life.

You start your life and you see so much future in front of you. At first, maybe you think you can move only in one direction, but you’re wrong. Maybe you meet a special person, maybe you choose not to. Maybe you go with her the rest of your life or maybe you want to be alone and free to go anywhere you want. You encounter big chances (treasures chests) during your way of life. And sometimes you have to go back to be able to move on. You’re getting older and life changes. You see so much past back there in your fading memories.

In the end you lose your loved one.

And when you die, you ask yourself: “What’s the point of all this? Where was the fun part?”

All these impressions, transported in a 16×100 pixel screen, not only through graphics, sound or animation, but mainly through game mechanics!

Never before a game has triggered so many thoughts and emotions in my head.

Understanding this game was a sense of achievement.

As I mentioned before, I’m planing to implement Jester Chip with an existing game engine like AGS (Adventure Game Studio). Such tools save me a lot of programming so I can concentrate more on concrete content. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

While working on the concept and getting started with AGS, other possible candidates for an adventure game engine caught my attention. One of them was particularly notable: Wintermute

After short evaluation Wintermute gave a good impression to me. On first sight it even seemed to be the better tool compared to AGS. These were the crucial features for me:

• C++ like scripting language
• parallax scrolling
• better tool usability (more comfortable project structure)
• cooler name

Admittedly, the last aspact isn’t a real argument. It’s also just the first impression and I’ll definitely have to take a deeper look into both tools before I make my final choice. Maybe the scripting in Wintermute is more complicated than in AGS. Additionally, AGS is the older tool and it has a bigger community base.

We will see…