Hello fellow survivors (or survivors-so-far, where applicable) of various holidays, yule-tide celebrations, mid-winter feasts, and zombie infestations.

Since LD16 I have done some additional work on my entry, “Ruins”. (And thanks to everyone who’s commented on the entry!) A lot of what I’ve done has been technical and a bit behind-the-scenes, but I wanted to share a very short (3 room) demo I’ve put together of both a new mechanic for the player and several smaller features of the engine.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can find it here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ruins-demo-1220/

(This is more of a tech demo than a “game” — you can “win” by completing all three rooms, but there aren’t any gems to collect or any leaderboards to deal with.)

And here’s a couple of quick screenshots:

From a gameplay point of view, the interesting change in this demo is the addition of a brief (about 6 seconds) period of time after dying during which you can exist as a spirit. During this spirit existence you can still interact with objects like levers and switches, but you are immune to damage and cannot attack. If you’ve created a “Patch of Life” before dying, and you reach it as a spirit before your 6 second time limit expires, you will be restored to life.

Smaller updates include moving to flixel 1.47, adding levers, moving gates and bridges, pressure plates, pushable blocks, and bats (well, a rough of draft of bat AI anyway — they’re still just brown blocks that flap around the room). I also took advantage of the post processing support in flixel to add some very basic lighting effects and some blurring and color effects during “spirit mode”.

I’m experimenting with the tilesets as well: this demo includes tiles either taken directly from, or based on, art assets released by Daniel Cook (http://lostgarden.com) and they’re certainly nicer than what I was able to whip up at the tail end of 48 hours, but for the next Ruins demo I’m planning on trying to put together a couple of more abstract (and simpler) tilesets just to see how that might change the feel of the game. (I’d like that next demo to include a rough cut of the introductory scene for the game, that way it might give you a bit of flavor for the story rather than just a bunch of technical doodads to poke at, but I’m not sure when I’ll have that ready.)

As always, feedback on any part of the demo is more than welcome.

And finally, just for fun, here’s a screenshot of the first draft of the second cave in the demo as it appears in the editor:

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 5:16 am and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.