Good News Guys! Combo Princess I want to say is about 90% developed. There are still a few things left to do but nothing difficult and nothing that would take a long time. Things that I still need to do Include:
Add 1 more Enemy Type.
Add 1 more Upgrade.
Add A proper Win Screen.
Add A proper Main Menu Screen.
Testing and Balancing.
After these and a few other tweaks Combo Princess should be Golden. Its about time. When I first started developing Combo Princess I had hoped to finish it by the end of march but that doesn't seemed to have happened. In march I dropped combo princess to work full time on EverFire's GMR Project. After two weeks of EverFire I had a little bit of a hard time picking CP back up again due to the fact that I really wanted to start a whole new project. But after a Brief Hiatus I slowly began to chisel away at Combo Princess again. I've since then added the final Boss and also a post death upgrade purchase screen. My new Deadline for having CP done is now May 14. I will be showing it off that night at the MATC Portfolio Event. I hope to get criticism from people there and adjust my game accordingly in the next week before Uploading it to Kongregate.
Its been quite a little while since my last post. In case you were wondering what I was doing all that time, I have been working on a project for the GMR marketing company. I wont be blogging about it anytime soon because it is still super secret but maybe I will talk about it someday in the future because I've learned a lot so far. Working on that full time for two weeks caused me to fall behind working on combo princess but I currently have a break on that so I've resumed working on it.
As you can see there have been a number of changes. Probably the most significant being that there is actually a princess in the game. Just as I initially planned I made a more of a goth style princess. She currently doesn't have any animation but I intend on fixing that soon. Using Scott Pilgrim Vs the World sprites as reference material I over the course of a day sprited my goth princess and I think she turned out really really well.
All the parts of her body are different layers so that I can animate them inside of unity. You will also notice that I have added a Launch Bar. The way the bar works is that at the beginning of the the level the player character will Immobile. The arrow on the bar will oscillate back and forth and when the player hits jump the closer the arrow is to the center of the bar the larger the boost jump the player gets. I was initially against putting this feature in the game because of its overuse in launch runner type games, but eventually I came around to using it because it allows the player to begin the game with the action paused but the player can begin whenever he/she wants. It also makes for an exciting start to the round. I added a shield upgrade feature to the game. The shield prevents the player from taking heart damage and instead takes shield damage. When all of the shields are all used the player will then take heart damage. When the player takes heart damage the players shields will be replenished. Taking shield damage also does not cause a combo to be broken. I also added different backgrounds that when the player reaches a certain point will change to a different background. Also added a progress bar to see how far away the player is from the end of the game.
Made another tool for my API Programming Class. This one is an Oscillation Script. A game-objects Position, Rotation or Scale will fluctuate to either a Sin function or to a Built in Unity Ping Pong function when the game runs.
Its been pretty smooth sailing on Combo Princess. No major bugs or annoyances to mention except for finding out that new grounds currently doesn't support unity games. A little annoying but Ive also heard that new grounds maybe considering adding support for unity player eventually. I was considering putting Combo Princess on newgrounds but I guess I'll have to shelve that idea for now. I also learned that Kongregate doesnt support mochi ads. Which is unfortunate but I'm hoping for a sponsorship from Kongregate. If that goes through I will hopefully have little bit of money I can wave in the face of some of my colleagues. Other than that I can pretty much only hope that Combo Princess becomes a huge break though success.
I have done a ton of art related things since my last update.
Combo Princess Now:
There is also a lot of really fancy parallax that really makes it look nice. You will also notice that I decided to change the art direction entirely. I changed it from the darker sort of rainbow micro chip type look that I had to a more bright and vibrant retro type style. The reason for this was because I did not know how to craft a simple story given the dark rainbow art style. I also have now crafted a simple story to go along with the game. You are a princess that has been kidnapped by a band of giant ducks that are called Ducklords. The Ducklords then flood the entire world.(Which is why there is nothing but water.) Then it is up to Princess Combo to defeat the evil Mallord(Leader of the Ducklords. Also a duck pun.) and restore balance to the world. Also another little quirk about the ducks is that they cannot fly on their own and have to fly around other ways.
There were a few important design things that happened as well. I made i so that you lose a life when you touch the floor I started implementing and upgrade system. Right now you can increase the amount of jumps you can do and also the amount of hearts you get at the start. I also added Balloon Ducks that are just like regular jet pack ducks except the oscillate up and down. I also added Flying carpet ducks that give you more money than regular ducks.
One of the projects that I have to do for my API Programming Class is I have to make a game development tool (Preferably to be used for the my team's Capstone class next semester). After researching a few different types of tools I settled on making a tool to help manage player prefs. After digging around online a little I found that a dev name Quick Fingers had already succeed in making an awesome tool. After downloading it I added a number of features to the code including a Delete All button and a Search Feature.
To open the Manager Windows>PlayerPrefsManager.
Changes will not be made permanent until you hit the save Button.
** Made a Slight Adjustment to the Gui. As of now I have replaced the Restore Button with a save button.
Things have been a little bit crazy with Shadow Princess as of late but now that things seem to be calming down I figured Id give an update. First and probably most important I decided on a real title. I will now refer to this project as Combo Princess. So that's exciting. Also I flung another build up on Kongregate and got more than one survey response this time. I made a lot of design changes based on the survey results. I decided that overall I needed to add more than just an endless plane where the player avoids getting hit. I removed the floor so that if the player falls off the screen they die. Seems a bit harsh but I am adding an upgrade system and the player can upgrade the amount of safety nets they start with. One of the criticisms from the survey results was that there was no long term goal. I am thinking about adding some sort of boss ending to the game. I was intially thinking that the game would be endless but I think that people are more likely to come back to play the game if they have some other goal besides beating their highest score/combo.
I don't know if I mentioned this in a previous post but I am thinking that combo princess is definitely going to be a browser based game. I've looked into Kongregate to host and I probably am going to go with Kongregate exclusively, at least right away to see how the game is received, and also to get a +15% ad revenue share. I did do a few calculations and the revenue I would from ads is less than I expected but not so little that I wont finish the game I also was not calculating in Mochi ads or Sponsorship money should I decide to use either of those as a source of revenue. Using data acquired from the Combo Princess alpha builds up on Kongragate and other sources of info online I calculated that a game that has 1000000 plays generates about $2500 in revenue before Kong gets their cut. Again, not great. but its somthing. And that is assuming that combo princess gets a million plays. I definetly have to do some more research but thats what I have so far.
Another thing that happened was that I decided to change the planned art style for the game. My initial idea was to make a very computer like art style similiar to MicroDude but more Colorful. I thought it looked nice and was very unique but unfortunately I could not base an interesting narrative around that art style. So I decided to delve back into sprite art. The narrative that I have so far goes like this: You are a Princess(Not sure what kind or where you are from yet) You are kidnapped by the evil MalLord, an evil duck who rules other ducks. And thats pretty much it so far :3. I'l come up with more but til then here is a spriting of one of the enemies in the game. Just been calling him Rocket Duck.
Its that time of year again. Time to blog about how things went at the Global Game Jam. Well if you were looking for a spectacular success story of how me and my team(Raid+) created a short game that was raved about by the everyone who played it, you wont find it here. The jam began with most of the Raid+ team(minus most of our artists) in our usual class room. Waiting excited for the keynote and the topic to be played by the jam admin. We were "competing" with several other teams. The matc Capstoners + Alumni, Raid+, Second Semester Noobs, and Two teams from UWM (also The admins Mike and Emil made an unofficial game). The time eventually came. The keynote was long and boring. The game jam topic was: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Raid+ rushed off into brainstorm mode. After a while we decided to make a First person survival horror game where the player could view a number of night vision security feeds by looking at an in game tablet. I loved this idea and I felt like it had a lot of potential to make for some very creepy and unsettling moments. though unfortunately soon after that feature was nailed down, I felt that many of the designers started making really bad decisions about what was going to be in the game. The first of these decisions was to make the player unable to move while holding the tablet. This was a bad decision because it limited the ways that the player could navigate the level. I was thinking that the fun of the game was going to be learning to navigate levels from several different perspectives. Instead the player was to enter a dark room, Open up the tablet, look at the environment, then close the tablet and try to remember how the level looked from a fucked up weird perspective. There are other games that use memorization as a way to progress but the player never knew where the cameras were in relation to the player character, rendering them useless and completely disorienting. Also I just want to point out that at the time I did realize that these were mistakes and I do blame my self for not pointing out these flaws to my team earlier. I just didnt want to hamper the awesome creative juices of the designers at the time. Also I thought it would become obvious later that those changes needed to be made but they never were. Another bad decision was to make the environments completely unseeable. This one I thought was completely ridiculous that nobody else caught earlier.
Above: A picture of our game jam game...Yes it was that dark. I don't know why this issue wasn't resolved. What were we thinking! Another issue that seems kind of irrelevant now but was a big deal at the time was that the designers wanted to put in a mechanic where the player can trip over certain items. The game is unplayabley difficult to navigate already, I dont imagine being able to trip over tables would have helped much. When I mentioned that tripping over things was a terrible idea I also mentioned that we should cut out some features and they completely disregarded what I said. When Noah our lead designer, was asked why the game was like this he blamed the games quality on the fact that we went to buffalo wild wings instead of ordering dominos again. That is super dumb. It is clear to me that the reason that our game failed was because Raid+ had once again out scoped a project, and because of a few bad design decisions early in development. Other than that though I had a ton of fun making it.In programming specific news I learned a lot about corountines and how useful WaitForSeconds() is in unity. I had always tried to avoid WaitForSeconds() because you cant exit out of it until the end but it is really useful for delaying things that dont exit out of being delayed. Also learned some about cameras and occlusion. Also I just want to add that I am very proud of the way the tablet turned out especially because programmed it.
Over the past week or so I've done a number of things for (Working Title) Shadow Princess. One thing that I did was I uploaded the current build of Shadow Princess to Kongregate. I primarily did this to have a few people play what I have and then give feed back but I only got one survey response. Im not that surprised since I only posted the link to my facebook feed and didnt post it to any game dev forums but I was hoping for a few more. It was also just to test out how uploading games to Kongregate works. Not to much of a problem there. I uploaded it successfully. Not long after that, Probably the most major thing that I did was that I found the "Fun" as my Professor calls it. Or at least I think I have found the core systems of the prototype that make the game fun to play. As I was playing the game on my browser I realized how unintuitive the controls were. Coupled with the one feedback response telling me that they couldn't get past the tutorial because the controls wouldn't work for them, I decided to strip out alot mechanics and simplify what I had. I took out the dash and upper dash abilitys because having to many move options simply confused the player. Now the game only has the dive kick type ability as well as the jump and double jump. I also removed and randomly spawning platforms. So now there is only the enemy type and the collectable. I also made it so that when the enemy is dive kicked it bounces the player up. The player also bounces when a collectable is obtained. With this and the addition of a combo based point system The game becomes fun. The goal of the game is no longer survive for as long as possible but is to attain the highest amount of points you can by achieving the highest combo you can, all the while surviving.
Also Ive started seriously thinking about what the art style of the game should be. Right now Im thinking like a Tron Rainbow type style. I did a few parallax layers and its looking pretty cool. Il keep my mind open though since my last game MicroDude had a tron like art style.
Alright. First post of 2014 lets hope the coming year will be a good one. Since the end of the School year I have been doing a number of things. Eating to much and procrastinating come to mind, but now I'm ready to continue developing games. I've Already built out a number of prototypes for my next project but I think I've finally settled on one. The first prototype that I made was an Idea that I had come up with during the school year. The idea was to create a tower defense game where you control a 2d sidescroller character. After I built out the prototype in game maker I realized that not only was the scope of the game going to be way bigger than I could handle but also that 2d sidescroller mechanics dont really blend well with tower defense mechanics. I shelved that one and started work on just a 2d Platformer. The plan for this Idea was to make fast paced colorful platform game. I used the new unity 2d tech demo project as a starting point. I made a few tweaks to the project and added super meatboy style wall jumping. I needed a feature that would differentiate the game from the rest of the 2d platformers out there so I add a Divekick style dive kick ability.
The game played pretty well on controller but suffered on keyboard. This was a major problem because I plan on making most of my revenue through browser based platforms like Kongregate.
I shelved that project and then moved on to the project I currently plan on finishing which is (Working Title) Shadow Princess. Shadow Princess is a runner 2d sidscroller game. Your character runs in one direction and you have to jump and dash out of the way of obstacles. Its a genre that only recently emerged with the popularity of the mobile platform and I think its a genre that hasn't been completely over done yet. I plan to release the game on mobile but I plan to make most of my money from cites that run ads like Kongregate. But I've also been thinking about having some sort of micro transaction model as well. I really hope that this game pans out well. Also other things I've been up to are watching youtube lectures about game development and entrepreneurship. They say I should get a lawyer and an accountant but they also say I should get them when I have something to lose. Hopefully I will have something to lose this year.
Compared to the utter disaster of FireHelm last semester, the strong and motivating leadership of Raid Plus this semester was truly relieving. Firehelm had had so much trouble with leaders that most people cannot remember who was a leader and who was not. I remember myself being leader most of the time and then finally giving up my position willfully because of my failure to motivate any of my fellow FireHelm Members. Other old team members of mine distinctly remember Alex being the leader of FireHelm and the old members of Raid Plus claim that Kevin was the leader. The fact that nobody remembers that we all had a part in the leadership truly shows how dysfunctional FireHelm was. Raid Plus has shown me the qualities of a good leader. If I were to lead another team again I think I would do far better than last semester. I would keep track of my team members attendance and deadlines. I would apply things that I learned about Scrum and Sprint planning. I would try my hardest to get rid of people who don't deserve to be with us.
