Brace The Gates will be a hybrid RTS/adventure game in which you take on the role of an unlucky protagonist who finds himself alone in a castle besieged by the evil forces of the undead. Reinforce the defences, rescue fellow survivors and brace the gates!
Click to try!
I’ve hacked in some movement controls for the character and I’m fairly happy with how it works. What do you think? You’ll also note that there’s slightly more colour, but I’m not too happy with how it looks. I’ll probably be using a different palette for each screen.
This post is an announcement of failure. I’d already scheduled to go away at the weekend so I lost two days and all the momentum I’d built up by Friday. This, combined with unwillingness to reduce the scope, has meant that there’s no way it’s getting done by the end of the competition; I’m simply too attached to the idea to do a cut-and-run job.
Still, this isn’t a negative announcement of failure, I feel! I’m intending to work on this up until 7DFPS and hopefully do a stellar job worthy of my vision.
Your thrusters are totally gonzo’d and you’re left free-floating in space at the mercy of gravity. Lucky for you, the ship’s engineer has managed to re-route the power and reverse the polarity of the anti-grav device. Using the on-board computer’s ten second path prediction, you sling-shot yourself around planetoids, just trying to find a way home.
A one-button game where you’re able to toggle the effects of gravity. I’ve spent a few hours on it tonight, post-pub, and it’s a working prototype! Tomorrow is all polish. Good night.
Your thrusters are totally gonzo’d and you’re left free-floating in space at the mercy of gravity. Lucky for you, the ship’s engineer has managed to re-route the power and reverse the polarity of the anti-grav device. Using the on-board computer’s ten second path prediction, you sling-shot yourself around planetoids, just trying to find a way home.
A simple one-button game where you hold and key to vastly reduce the effects of gravity.
Play it here and download the source or just view the submission here.
Anti-Grav Drive is a game about flying a half-broken spaceship through a planetary system and trying to survive as long as possible. Your thrusters are down and your only method of influencing your movement is through a cobbled-together, overclocked anti-gravity drive which you can turn on and off at will. Along with the long range scanners and a ten-second prediction routine, you aim to slingshot the ship around the planetoids and keep on truckin’.
My main criteria for the game was that I’d be able to make it in “about 2 hours” and spend the rest of the time polishing. These two hours only really included the basic gameplay, but it meant that I had plenty of room for error and improvement. It ended up taking longer than 2 hours (perhaps 3 or 4), but this meant that I pretty much had something that I could submit very early on, should something disastrous happen.
I over-obsessed on the visuals during the second day. In fact, half of the second day was spent on visuals that never made it to the final product. The green-on-black space horror sci-fi computer look was a fall-back option that I ended up defaulting to.
Overall, my time management was pretty atrocious too. While I had a working prototype after only a few hours, these few hours were after I’d been sitting in the pub all evening. Most of the first day was spent chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool. I think I was quite lucky that I could pull together the music and the game balancing during the last hours of the competition.
Get it working. Gameplay is the most important part of a game (certainly for the games I like to make). Although I did get a prototype working quickly, I think spending even longer on getting the progression and balancing working from the off could be beneficial.
Set time limits. It’s pretty easy to write down some numbers for the things Wot Your Game Needs. If I’d done this and was half-way through the allotted time for visuals without anything usable, maybe I could’ve stopped myself earlier and had more time for audio and balancing. Adding up a total number of hours also might’ve motivated me to work more during the first day to spread the load.
Don’t worry about it! Yeah, I was pretty chilled throughout the competition. Even though I criticised myself for this and maybe I just got lucky with the idea, I think it came out pretty well without too much stress.
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem