so i made a game for sopa jam.

youre a person and you help disco pirates fight off pro-sopa jetpack policeman, with the power of rainbows.

i couldnt figure out the kongregate api/flixel stuff, but I think I will do that when I finish a bigger game. heh.

enjoy

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=7853

Time lapse here!

Ah, finished! Well, as much as I can. The graphics are…extremely lacking, there are no cutscene animations, but I figured those were things I could let go, so it’s okay.

Explanation of story

Anyways, the story of the game. It’s kind of ridiculous – Duke is this guy, a super Davement fan – so he goes back to 1990 to snag their demos, but gets stuck. He also has an anxiety disorder so needs to stay on meds at all times (12 second intervals, actually).  The whole anxiety thing came from a dream. Personally, I’d be anxious/distraught at first if I was stuck in 1990…I’ve asked other friends how they’d feel, answers range from “I’d be okay.” to “Whatever.”

So I guess that’s the premise of “alone”. Sort of forced, admittedly, but hey. Made for an element of being rushed, and it was something I could manage to do in 48 hours, so I’m fine.

Anyways, he decides to go beat up the members of Davement by breaking into their houses at night while they’re sleeping, and force them to join *his* band. And during the day, Duke runs around his house (which always changes…), collecting notes, which, uh, for some reason, makes Davement’s future hit singles!

Right…

design

The basis of the game ended up being racing against the clock, eh, overdone, but doable for now. I didn’t really have time to code other special types of tiles (in fact I had to code the coordinates of the collectibles by hand…oops, going to learn how to avoid doing that…).

The “anxiety meter” fills, as it fills more, a out-of-tune..tune…starts to play, the screen darkens, until you fail (in which an undone “you lose!” screen pops up, and you turn into a black rectangle), or you get an anxiety medication – which fixes everything!…for 12 seconds.

Right, so there’s that – on the note-collecting stages, since my resources were limited…I tried to make an element (at least on the last two stages) of trade-offs in time/difficulty – players can go for all the notes, but it takes longer time, so losing has a greater penalty in that respect – and of course there is less room for error (although admittedly the game isn’t very hard.)

And the cutscenes, well, they devolve, I could not particularly get in the mood to make them very witty or whatever. The ending doesn’t even have music! It’s a screen! That’s it…I added some variance on the ending dialogue based on how you did, from the “Ditchpork” review society…but that’s not even very funny. But, ah, that’s okay.

Graphics

…more or less, the spriting was a disaster, as the tiling. Never realized how long it takes to tile a good map, once you get the tileset drawn! Definitely something that should be simpler and still look okay next time…

There is no animation in the musical notes, and they look like crap. The pills “rotate” albeit at 6 FPS, and look terrible. The animation of the character is embarrassing, but, ah, that’s okay.

I’m satisfied with the background, though! Those are fun to draw.

Music

I ended up not writing as much music as I though for this. Just this cutscene bossa nova thing (which is basically the most cliched chord progression, with a tacked on melody), and this…chill triangle-wave stage theme. I wanted of course, an ending theme, different stage themes, but I am too tired! Ah. So i guess I’m okay with the music. Making the note sounds was fun (did it in pxtone, cut up into 5 mp3s). As is the “ambiance” for when you grow close to losing!

Challenges?

Well, time management, for one. And drawing. have to practice more at that.

As far as programming…everything ended up sort of straightforward. As much as I dislike coding in windows, the Flashdevelop IDE really is quite useful and much faster than what I was using this time (vim on ubuntu). I also had a crappy debugger for linux (just trace statements, oops), which became a pain in the ass every now and then where I’d leave a string set to null or something.

I guess the tough thing with programming is, of course, organization…i.e., setting up the attributes of certain objects, etc. Flixel is nice, but everything really *does* seem to end up global.  Ah. I suppose I “copped out” with the programming aspect, in terms of challenging things to code! But I wanted to play it relatively safe for my first time, so, yes.

———

All in all, I’m glad to have done this, and have some sort of finished product!

First, a screenshot…(click on it, it’s scaled down in the blog post.)

So, the game is going swimmingly, I think. I’m planning for 5 stages (each with two phases), I have two of those done so far, as well as most of the mechanics. Once I iron out the mechanics of the ending (gameplay influences the ending), I’m going to finish the level design (so there’s a game), then probably move on to making the tileset look less like crap.

It’s interesting to think about how to make the game design progressively more difficult. At the moment, the character really only jumps. I feel like the timer (anxiety-relieving pills) add a sense of urgency, which is a nice effect, well, maybe. I think added difficulty can come from different types of platforms (Shouldn’t be that hard to implement?), some small other interacting objects that affect the anxiety meter, etc…

I’m going to try to stretch out the difficulty as much as possible without implementing those things, first…I want to get at least a rough thing finished soon. Plus, I need to figure out how to make this work on windows. It works fine in chromium on ubuntu. Not sure why not windows – I thought the compilation process was cross-platform, but maybe not. I think I’m going to look into that now, actually…

Anyways, the plot of the game. Still more or less just absurd, but that’s okay – it’s more fun that way. I’m not really in the mood to, well, make a moody game of any sort.

Pretty excited to do the music for this. Since this game is slightly related to pavement, I might do some short mockup of one of their songs. I’m assuming I won’t be sued or anything, but hey. I’ve had some ideas for ways to incorporate music into the game other than the usual, but I’m leaving that for if time allows.

the game’s calle d”Enslaving Davement”. more on that. github has readme and my notes which explain things, but I think i’m going to type an explanation after this is all over, so straight to how it’s going…

the skeleton of the game is implemented, more or less. there are sort of 4 states to the game:

Day, Night, Ending, Cutscenes.

The states, of course, are visited multiple times (except the tentative ending). In the day, you collect musical notes…for a certain purpose…while also trying to keep your impending feeling of doom and anxiety from growing….

Then, at night, you visit members of the band Davement’s house. You must try to keep your anxiety low, make your way to the person, and…

If time allows there will be cutscenes (read: plain text and pictures, nothing fancy) between stages or at least the intro/ending. I’m hoping the ending will take into account performance on each of the stages, and produce snarky commentary based on how you did.

Right, so:

framework: More or less there- transitioning, making sure crap carries over, handling deaths. nothing pretty, just the logic.

level design: HA.

graphics: crappy placeholders.

music/sfx: nope.

The next few hours I plan to try and polish up the flow of the gameplay’s skeleton – after the most worrisome part (the programming) for me is done, I can focus on the (relatively) easier creative aspects, which will fill things in.

Excited to try this out. I’ve only recently been in the process of making a platformer using Flixel in terms of game design.

This should be a fun creative excursion!

My tools…

-Vim for coding, MXMLC for compiling from AS3 -> SWF, and Flixel as the main library.

-GIMP for tiling/spriting

-BFXR for possible sounds. PxTone, my favorite quick tracker, for music!