Blog

Dawn: Infinite Runner Game

Between the Ludum Dare, school, and everything else, I've been turning out a lot of small projects this month. I recently participated in a competition on The Game Creators. The competition, inspired by Flappy Bird, presented one goal: make the most addictive infinite game possible.

My entry, titled Dawn, also draws inspiration from the classic Canabalt. It's a sidescrolling runner in which you play a man who must jump, smash, and fly his way through a scrolling obstacle course as the days pass by.

This competition was focused on addictive potential, so I implemented a few different ideas in an attempt to grab the attention of players of the game:

• Online Highscores: they give the player something to shoot for. He can see what other people have done, know that it's possible, and attempt to prove himself better than them.
• Day/Night Cycles: My idea here was to give the player a concrete sense of progress - more visceral goals to shoot for than the elusive high score.
• Feel: Polish. If the game simply feels good to play, I reasoned, people will want to play it more! Key elements of this in Dawn include particles when smashing through walls and a good set of character animations that makes you feel awesome when you crash through those girders. At the suggestion of Justin Britch, I took a minute to implement a simple animation at the game end: quickly ticking up the user's score from 0, rather than just displaying it. This gives the score a sense of weight and grants the player extra satisfaction at his achievement.

It remains to be seen how effective these strategies were. Clearly Flappy Bird didn't need many of these things to become what it did!

Nonfunctional Games

It seems that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 broke all games made in DarkBASIC Pro, which would include all of those posted here. I'll need to recompile all of them with the fixed DBP compiler and reupload them. If you get an error saying that the "parameter is invalid", try downloading the game again.

That TPS, Break, Part 2

Well, it's the second day since my last post. I had a lot of problems with playing two different animations on the same object (for example, making my player's lower body play a walking animation while his upper body pointed a gun). I tried about four different ways, and all of them were bugged in some unfathomable way and didn't quite work right. I fell back on using two seperate objects, one with the lower body hidden and one with the upper body hidden, which I thought would create a terrible seam. Fortunately, it seems to be working okay (just wait 'til I get to crouching).

Anyway, I should show some of those promised screenies:

So, outside of struggling with the animation, I put in grenades and started on the AI. It's gonna be AI for the next few days, I think.

Spring Break, Third Person Shooter Part 1

It's noon on Tuesday of Spring Break week, and I spend almost all of my waking hours since Sunday morning sitting here programming. This is the project I've mentioned a few times before. The plan is to make a tactical, squad-based third-person shooter. The game will play in a number of self-contained "missions", each of which will be characterized by an important "planning phase" and then an "execution phase". During the planning phase, the player will complete a scouting mission (perhaps some sort of mini-game) to acquire information about the area the mission is targetted at (blueprints and maps and such), and will use it to lay out a rough plan for his squad members to follow. Then they and their squad complete the mission in the 3PS part of the game. The most notable elements in this part will be the ability to climb on and over walls and obstactles, and enemy AI and difficulty that should enable and encourage the use of stealth.

So far, all of the work has been on the shooting part. I have the basics (movement and collision), some very fun particle effects (flying shell casings, dropped clips, and bullet holes and impact effects), and a simplistic climbing system that allows hanging from and climbing onto map elements (just a few big boxes so far). I will post screenshots tomorrow, by which time I hope to have the split animation system worked out so the player character will stop looking like some kind of crazy contortionist.

Port Apollo Completed!

After a few bug fixes, Port Apollo is done! I'm looking forward to moving on to a new project. See the the Port Apollo project page to download.