Trash Dev Game Design

  Just because I had to work on assignments doesn't mean I'm missing Halloween. I'm working hard, the whole team is, its coming up to end of semester and everything is due. After much playtesting and many meetings with the team we have agreed that some things need to change in Lethal Cuts. Blocking is terrible, its not fun or effective. Infact most people couldn't figure out it was a block without it being explained. The Air attack is kind of useless because it only works against other characters in the air and as there isn't any other reason to be in the air its just not used. Worst of all and maybe this is a result of the other issues, every match becomes both players slamming the attack button as fast as possible while standing in front of each other. The silver lining is that apparently thats pretty fun as most of our feedback has been really positive.  I think, and play testers agree, that the game need more movement and more reasons to move. As such I want to ...

I swear its a logo officer, promise I didn't crop the Design Page Ok so, Lethal Cuts. Its a simple little fighting game but its got some interesting stuff going on. Lets start by going over the game as it was presented to the group and then ill talk about the changes I would (and hopefully will) implement as the lead designer.  lets look at the Design Page for Lethal Cuts. really this image should be all you need but ill explain anyway See that black controller? that's the most important information as far as I'm concerned. Move with the left stick, jump with A, attack with X, block with B. Ignore the Attack Direction stick, that's not implemented. The attack works basically how you expect and theirs a different animation if you attack in the air buts its pretty much the same attack. Block is a bit more complicated, your character turns to stone after a small pause becoming immune to hits for a short time. No health bars just if you take 3 hits you lose.  Now there'...

The most realistic graphics of 1993 I decided that the first thing to do to improve Actual Driving would be to give it a graphics overhaul.  I started with a sky box which was simple enough, one of the actions that comes with the With3JS Extensions is "Create 3D scene" I was already using it to make the 3D effect work but had neglected its skybox feature. When setting up the Create 3D scene action I just had to include a background image with an image ratio of 2:1 (1024:512 for example). The important part here is the background image section, "NewSprite4" Despite how simple that is this took me way longer than expected because I just could not get it to recognise my image, I added it to the scene and named it HCLDSKY2 ( I don't remember why to be honest), you may notice that in the above image I'm using "NewSprite4" though. That's because the name of the image in this case doesn't come from the name you gave the thing yourself but from wha...

  Looks at that exciting gameplay As you can see from the screen shot this is a playable game, a lot faster than the first dev cycle. In fact I'm not sure I could say the last game I was working on ever got to this point.  Some simple code got a score counter in the top right and I just set the bugs to move down the screen and get a little faster as they go so there is some ramping difficulty.  bit of a bodge job This is how iv set the bugs to spawn, I just have about 200 (couldn't get them all in a screenshot) of them go set up and spawned in at the start of the game. Very lazy but it works. Also all those lines and fields at the bottom are limiters for player movement and bullets. I think the game could be really improved from here by a way of spawning in enemy's procedurally or something, so lets have a go at that.  Very important red box Using the same tech for respawning I figured out in my last game I now have a red box that can spawn bugs, I also used the code...

  Behold 10,000 hours in msPaint A new game begins, I spoke about it in the post mortem for my last game and I am happy to say that the first step of this game was to create my own assets. Pictured above are the two enemy bugs I designed, I think their kinda cute, and I already have ideas on how they might act differently and challenge the player. But before we can get to that lets sort out the most fundamental parts of our development.  First thing first, movement. This isn't our first rodeo so...  WASD, the best controls Now we can move and that screen limiter stops us from flying off screen and getting lost. So lets spice things up with a little bit of shooting. B E A UTIFL And I am on fire, this feels good. Kicking goals. We can fly about the screen and shoot, Iv even gone the extra step of shooting actually doing something by deleting the bugs my bullets hit and adding to a score variable. Next post, lets start looking at gameplay.   

  Now I'm afraid Not afraid of the pink blob, I'm afraid of object-oriented code inside of Gdevelop. Turns out Gdevelop doesn't like it. That made implementing a kill function a bit difficult, but I got there in the end. Let's have a look at how it works now that it does work. Its working! This little chunk of code lets me use a Boolean like a function, if its ever set to true we run our code. Its a pretty simple thing, if I want the player character to be killed by something I set the value of kill to true.  like this You might notice that in the first code block I don't just delete the player I also create a new player object at "SpawnSprite". Well as part of this kill code I have also implemented respawning. The little guy is the spawn sprite When the player touches a flag the spawn sprite moves to sit above the active flag. When the player dies he respawns wherever the sprite is.  Now that a player can die and respawn I actually make a game

  Simple Beginnings  So we begin with real development. I attended a workshop where we were given assets and walked through creating a basic platformer. The little alien guy will be a stand in for Dagonet and lets call that little pink dude a terrible warrior in the employ of the wicked Mordred. Following along with the workshop I have basic movement all sorted using built in behaviours from Gdevelop. Platformer Object, Advanced Jump, Wall Jump, and Remap For Platformer all come together like Voltron to create premade platformer controls that work and feel exactly how you would expect. It does feel a bit like cheating, and I wish I was really learning to do this myself but hey I have something playable in about 5 minutes which is pretty cool.  The little pink blob is a stand in for an enemy and he actually took some real work, not just plug in behaviours.  Strikes fear into your heart, doesn't he? First thing was getting him to move, See those blue orbs with arrows i...