Just a small OYO teaser to prove I’m still alive. This isn’t quite what the game is going to look like, I just wanted to make a mock up of a building tileset and then I made a little tileset of some pipes. Threw in a few characters to spruce it up :) This image is at 50%, but the pixels are accurate (the final version will be around 288x640).
Sorry about the delay in posts! I’ve been working hard preparing for my live performance musical set! If you’re a Richmonder check it out!
BEEP SHOW - Featuring ME (and my buddies Pixeltank, Joanna O and Paranoid Androidz)!
MORE PIXEL FEVER NEXT WEEK! (I promise)
HERO OF THE WEEK - FENG ZHU
So you’re starting to work on your adventure game, and you realize - HOLY CRAP, I suck at drawing. Well, guess what? Feng Zhu doesn’t.
If you want to be a concept artist, you NEED to google Feng Zhu and just absorb as much of this guy that you can over the internet - which (assuming you have internet absorbing powers) happens to be a whole lot.
Feng Zhu shares so much of his abilities over the internet that any aspiring artist can learn a wealth of information from him. For starters:
AND THEN START WATCHING ALL OF THESE VIDEOS
Thanks, Feng Zhu, for all the things you do - you’ve definitely helped my art out!
FREEWARE FRIDAY - FREEWARE ADVENTURE GAME SUITE!
After writing that post about Myst, and reading lots of articles about the death of Adventure Games in the past few weeks, I thought - THIS HAS TO END!
So if you’re in the mood to create an adventure game, check out these tools:
ADVENTURE GAME STUDIO - I checked out about a dozen freeware adventure game making solutions, and this one looks the best by far.
GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program, everyone’s favorite solution for people who can’t afford photoshop. A great program for creating 2D images for your adventure game!
BLENDER - One of the greatest 3D modeling programs out there - and it’s free! This one deserves its own Freeware Friday (and may get one). If you want a 3D look to your Adventure Game, make models in Blender and Render out your scenes to import into the Adventure Game Studio!
RETRO GAME REVIEW - MYST
When I was much, much younger, I received a copy of Myst for my IBM Aptiva. I loaded it up and got playing.
WOW. As a child I was floored by the graphics. Also as a child, I just did not get anywhere. I probably completed one of the puzzles on the main island, but from there I was just entirely stumped. I was used to Mario, Zelda, and TMNT - give me something to jump on, stab, or at least some pizza to eat! No way, Myst is totally unforgiving - there are LOADS of hints, but they aren’t handed to you straight away.
Much, much later, I found a copy of Myst for PSX. I took it home, and with my roommate Curtis, started the quest again. First of all, being a fully grown dude helps a lot - I have a lot more patience, and I’m used to approaching difficult puzzles. Another thing that ended up REALLY helping was having two minds at work. We would take turns, I think we denoted onto ourselves two primary jobs - The Controller, and The Scribe - that’s right - WE TOOK NOTES.
We still didn’t get a few of the puzzles, and actually BRUTE FORCE hacked a couple of them (Curtis spent hours one day going through all the combinations to get into the safe in the cabin on the main world), but we eventually completed the game - and BOY did we let it get to our heads. We walked around that week proudly proclaiming our unmatched genius in completing Myst.
Several things I’ve learned from Myst that you should take into consideration:
Myst is available on SO MANY platforms, so if you have a PC, Mac, PS1, PS2, PSP, DS, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch…pretty much any kind of system that has a screen that’s been made in the past 15 years…find yourself a copy!
Evolution Chart - LVL3 - Gettin paid getting rich payin bills
In this edition, we’ll see 2006 - 2010.
NEXT WEEK - Tragedy! Redemption! Design Documents! Flixel!
DREAM PROJECT - OYO
Another post from my pie-in-the-sky project OYO. I want to make videogames because they seem like the culmination of everything I’ve worked towards. I was into art for a long time, comics for a long time, so I have the art and storytelling down. I’m currently working on programming, so that rounds me out pretty well - but one of the most important things in games is also my other huge passion - MUSIC.
This is an .XM file that is currently the working title screen music for OYO. The slow and deliberate bass and the melancholy melody perfectly fit what I’m going for as far as the pace of the story - so I’m pretty pleased with it.
You can open .XM files in plenty of programs, VLC Media Player being one. You can also open and modify it yourself in a tracker like MilkyTracker!
PROJECT UPDATE - COSMONAZIS
I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to do this week, but I did get to most of my week’s goals.
I made it so pressing UP while jumping won’t fire the weapon up (there isn’t an animation, and honestly, there’s no good scenario to use that mechanic), the player animation would also revert to an “idle” pose if you held UP while jumping, landed, and tried to fire up - even though the bullet would go straight up - so I corrected that.
The problem I was having with that stuff is when you’re making the player controls you really have to think of it like a flow-chart, and I tend to think totally linearly. In fact, I’ve learned from this (my first) project that when designing games, you really need to think “50 moves ahead” in the sense that you don’t just jump in and start coding willy-nilly, but you have to consider how different objects interact with each other, how to code them efficiently, and how to organize them so that things are grouped right, objects extend the right classes, and when you’ve got a decent project going, you can look at the code and make sense of it.
I also added an “Area Cleared” screen at the end of the level that awards you bonus points based on your performance. After doing it, and adding extra code for different areas, I feel like I should have made universal rules. So instead of this behavior:
if (Registry._area == 2 && Registry._timer <= 50) _timerBonus = 500
-which ends up being a mess of code once I enter in all of the areas and conditions, I could have used something more like:
if (Registry._timer <= Registry._goalTime * 0.5) _timerBonus = 500
So adding a public static var _goalTime in the Registry (just where I’m putting Global variables - see this excellent post by Photonstorm),and then just setting it in the different Area classes, I could have cut the code in the Area Cleared screen by almost three quarters. I might go back and change it, but the point is, lesson learned.
In lieu of working on enemy behaviors, I put the entire project up on GitHub. Feel free to poke around - and if you’re an Actionscript guru - feel free to berate me and give me tips in my Ask Box!
Things to do for next week’s update:
Play CosmoNazis 0.2b on MEGAswf!
PS - Sorry there wasn’t a Hero of the Week this week - I was up noodling around in Northern VA and Bethesda, MD attending the Small Press Expo and hanging with friend, ally and collaborator Mark! So the Hero of the Week is…me! HOH HOH HOH!
FREEWARE FRIDAY - GAMEMAKER 8.1 LITE
This is a no-brainer. You want to make games, check out Game Maker. It’s not the best solution for 3D, and it’s not the most expansive game making environment I’ve ever seen, but it’s a great tool for making simple 2D games.
I started this blog with two major intentions - so that I can showcase projects, but more importantly, to give a little push to anyone interested in making games. It’s still a new art-form, and it can be intimidating to someone who lacks a core skill of game making (especially those of us who can’t program!), but tools like Game Maker can hold your hand a bit and give you a ledge to stand on while you’re still getting your feet wet.
Aside from RPG Maker, Game Maker was the first software I’ve used to make games, and from a non-programmer standpoint it’s a huge blessing. It’s relatively easy to import and edit sprites (I know some people who use Game Maker just for sprite creation!) and link them to objects that can be placed in a scene with just a few clicks.
Another great thing about Game Maker is the community. If you’re having trouble with something, chances are someone has already asked about it and had the problem solved in the Game Maker Community Forums.
It’s technically not freeware as the lite version is just a demo of the pro version. I will say that I bought Game Maker when it was around version 5 and I’ve been enjoying free updates since, so that’s a big perk.
So if you’re interested in making games and you need a program that doesn’t assume that you’re a master programmer, check out Game Maker Lite and start having fun making games!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to play some more of the new Minecraft Adventure Update Pre-Release!
RETRO GAME REVIEW - SONIC 3 & KNUCKLES
I’ve got a lot to do today, so I’m going to do a quick review of Sonic&Knuckles with Sonic 3 shoved into it.
First of all - what an awesome thing right there! That kind of plug and play technology could have been utilized so far beyond just S&K, but I’ll let that go for now. Right now I’m just going to just tell you why Sonic 3 and Knuckles is such an awesome game.
First, the graphics, the music (google Michael Jackson and Sonic 3 for some laughable info), and the gameplay were all nailed perfectly. But for me, what really made this combo perfect was its approach to the story. In Sonic 1 and 2, Sonic goes from one level to the next with no discernible reason (aside from the last few levels in Sonic 2). In Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, there is a clear plot and awesome sequences that segue the previous level to the next. With just this one element present, it’s so much more easy to get totally saturated in your quest to set things right and foil Robotnik’s plans. You don’t think “Oh I guess Sonic just walked over to Marble Gardens” - you think “HOLY SHIT SONIC JUST JUMPED ONTO A MOVING AIRSHIP!”
The lesson here is that great pacing can carry a linear game a long way.
FUN FACT: Sonic The Hedgehog was once prototyped as Mr. Needlemouse!
