Does adding myself to the compo mean I’ve already violated the theme?

I tried this many moons ago and didn’t do so well, but I’m giving it a go again since the theme is one that perks some ideas. So here’s what I got:

Idea: An anti-RPG in which you lose levels, treasure, and powers as you “progress.” With a minimalist art style and possibly music to go along with it.

Tech: I’ve been learning GameMaker Studio recently, so I think I’ll use that and publish for Windows and OSX at least. My other option would be Javascript / HTML5 in which case I’d just code it from scratch. I’m giving myself an hour to put together a design doc and that will influence my choice.

Geronimo!

I have two walls, a tile, and the beginnings of a design doc. I’m thinking I’ll use GameMaker Studio. Here’s my ideas

Minimalism

Anti-RPG

7 cities

Your goal is to find the 7 cities of gold. You can get hints by talking to and trading with the natives. In the cities, you have to put gold into the urns, boxes, etc, to proceed. Once you finish each city, you lose a level and have to give up a power.

You start with 7 powers.

Map:

• Isometric color block art with shadows
• Characters are stick-like figures with simple animations
• Overland map with terrain tiles, trees, etc
• Scrolling map
• City maps are like dungeons or mazes with a central temple-like structure where the “boss” resides

Character

• Your character starts at level 7 with 7 powers
• You expend chi?
• Lose a level and a power when you defeat a “boss”

Challenges

• The cities should be possible to solve with only one power but easier/faster with more powers
• Cities possibly randomly generated?
• Obstacles as well as enemies
• Should the cities adapt to your level? That way you don’t have to travel around too much and “come back to” a city.
• For replayability, all this should be randomized, but playability first.

Two walls and a tile in Paint.net

The game screen is the window with the gray background. The player character is the little orange stick (with 4 frames of animation!). Everything is being automatically depth sorted, but the wall art looks a little rough right now and I placed it by hand so it’s not exactly lined up to the grid. Next is to get movement and the walk animation tied together.

I have no new screenshot because the game looks pretty much as it did before, but now I have keyboard and mouse movement and collision detection. I decided not to animate the character sprites, though, so that’s less art to make. One might even say minimal art. Eh-hmm.

So here’s what I’m at:

• 2d isometric anti-RPG in which the character loses levels and power as he or she progresses.
• Story-wise, you must find 7 cities by exploring an overland map. Each city has a sort of central temple with a guardian. To make it through to the guardian you must put treasure in urns, crates, etc. Once you defeat the guardian you “advance” to the next lower level and have to choose a power to give up.
• Once you reach level 0 you win! Yay!
• The powers you have make it easier to overcome obstacles, so the cities become harder to traverse but not impossible.

To-Do Next:

• Define powers and obstacles
• Get it to a playable state with one city map
• Real art instead of placeholder art
• Build levels
• Test test test

Now to sleep.

Today I’ve been working on art for my 7-cities anti-RPG game. I just got some of the new assets into the engine to replace the placeholder art, so I thought I’d share a screen.

I’m not much of an artist, so what I did is to take construction paper and crumple it up. Then I took photos with the morning light coming in the window at an angle. This gives me some isometric textures that I’ve turned into tiles. I also took a few pics of practical objects made out of construction paper like tree trunks and mountains. I used the crumpled paper pics to add to them, so its a mix of real 2.5d objects and flat textures. I forgot to turn back on the depth sorting, so the depth isn’t right, but you can see what the overland map is looking like.

In addition to art, going to sleep and showering were good times for productive thinking on the mechanics of the game, but I haven’t done a lot to implement them yet. I need to transition from art to gameplay ASAP.

Partial overland map

Well, I’d like to be further along, but I’m enjoying myself. I’m finding GameMaker: Studio to be fun to work with and I wouldn’t be as far along as I am without it. I’ll write more about that later probably.

At this point I have a bit of funky DIY art made from photos of crumpled up construction paper. I particularly like my  mountain I’m using an isometric perspective (or dimetric technically) so I have 8 degrees of movement via keyboard or mouse, dynamic depth sorting for objects, and collision checking. These all feel like achievements for me, so I’m happy there.

One thing I hope to get out of this weekend is a nice flexible text box widget for GM:S. So far that’s working well. Usually I work in Javascript and I guess I’ve taken for granted how easy it is to do text and box stuff in the browser context.

I have a few game rules coded in, but that has got to be my push now. I may abandon the 7 cities idea and keep to the overland map. Not sure.

Here’s, a screenshot:

After getting a good start with GameMaker Studio, I’, stuck trying to implement features I didn’t previously understand, assuming they worked one way and finding out they work another. At least now I know, but I’m particularly having problems with my GUI, which should be the easiest thing of all.  I doubt I’ll have anything playable today, so I’ll either have to switch to the jam or just chalk it up to an educational experience.