press A and D to run, and spacebar to jump.
WARNING: I’m going to talk about my plans for the project, making references to other games, so if you’re not a gamer (which is probably most of the people reading this) you might not know what I’m talking about. I guess at least wikipedia is there to fill in gaping holes in your gaming knowledge, which obviously you want to fill.
As usual, I’ve decided that the best approach to making the game of my dreams is to be as stupidly unrealistic as possible, and see how far I get. So I’ll talk about my ideal game, though I doubt I’ll get anywhere near it…
Acrobatics: I want to have the acrobatics of the newer Prince of Persia games, complete with wall-jumping, pole swinging etc. but with the added fun of gravity shifts! This is what I’ll start with, so in further detail for this to work I need:
- responsive controls: unlike the first Prince of Persia, this game won’t make sacrifices in control for the sake of protracted animation. I’ll try to keep responses fast, with the jumping feeling more like Mario than Another World.
- Flexible collision detection: The platforms won’t be Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes, but instead line segments of any angle. The angle of the segment relative to local gravity will dictate whether the segment is a ceiling, wall or floor.
- Gravity shifts: I’m hoping I can make this work by simply having all the game mechanics rotate between each zone.
Fighting: I’d like something approaching the fluidity and depth of Bungie’s Oni (an underappreciated game in my opinion). I want to encourage the player to vary his/her style by having enemies increase their ability to block a certain type of attack each time the player uses it. It makes sense in my head, ok? More details when I get to it.
Story: I imagine progression in the game to be like Zelda – relatively controlled, but rewarding exploration. Just like Zelda (or Metroid), as the player progresses they’ll get more objects/abilities allowing them to access new areas in parts of the world they’ve already been in. So a player could just plough through the game’s main story in a relatively short time, or spend time exploring for extras and secrets. Oh, and I also want boss battles.
Anyway, I’ve been working on this game for three days, and thanks to my aborted earlier efforts at making games, progress has been surprisingly fast. I’ve already got most of my first two goals regarding acrobatics done, with gravity shifts hopefully coming soon.
My previous game involved space ships, which was bad for several reasons. A lot of casual gamers have real problems grasping the press-right-or-left-to-turn-and-forward-to-thrust way of controlling things, and also a space ship has considerably less personality than, well, a person.
With Dreg I already know the guy from previous projects, and it also allows me to flex my animation muscles. Throughout my life I’ve been ok at several disciplines (music, drawing / animation, programming, story-telling, programming) but not excellent at any of them. Computer games allows me to bring these skills together and hopefully get a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Anyway, at the top of this post is the game so far: A and D control movement, and SPACEBAR is to jump. You can wall-jump by jumping against a wall, then pressing spacebar again to jump off it.
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