jdnx429

Less than a month to go before the contest deadline! This weekend I’m hoping to finish up the programming for the bosses. I’ve already drawn most of them, but I still need to do some fixing and touching up. The programming should go fairly smoothly since I’ve already written up outlines on their behaviors and vulnerabilities.

I’m also at a point where I have to start thinking of the scoring system as well as possible trophies. I’m hoping to have about 75 trophies for the game. Right now I have the requirements for about 40 of them set and as I test the game more, I get more ideas for more.  The scoring system, however, is going to a bit more complicated than I originally thought.  At first, I was thinking of making it fairly simple  - the score that’s sent to Whirled is the score you achieved during a stage segment. However, some stage segments are much harder than others and the scores aren’t exactly comparable. I was thinking of setting a par score for each stage segment and then adjusting the score sent to Whirled based on that par. In addition there would be adjustments for level of difficulty and stage number - I want the latter stages to payout more.

At this point there really isn’t any hope of getting sound effects or music in the game. There just isn’t enough time before the deadline. That has always been a low-priority item, however, since I’m usually listening to music while playing games and I assume many other people are too.

Anyways, here’s a screenshot of the player with the first level boss:

Well, things keep moving along with Aliens Over Hawaii. If I could spend a full 8 hours each day working on the game I probably could have started it and finished it in a month, but real life and the job takes up most of my time. I’m not complaining, though, I’m glad to still have a job in this economy even though my new commute is now an hour long each way.

At this point I’ve finished coding up all the main enemies and started programming & drawing the 8 bosses. I have a real good idea of how the final boss is going to be and a couple of the other ones, but I only have some notes on the rest.

I’m also in the process of balancing the stages, making sure that there aren’t many easy enemies on the later stages or lots of hard enemies on the early stages. I have also have to make sure that Hard difficulty is just hard but not impossible. I originally had 4 difficulty levels – Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard but I think I’ll stick to the just the first three. The Very Hard mode was very frustrating.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to include music in the game. I still have to figure out how I want to do sound effects as well. If the game makes a noise every time a shot or laser is fired, the game will quickly become annoying.

In addition, I’m getting a bit worried about the game size. Currently it’s running just under 2.5 MB. With additional sound effects and music, the size will quickly grow. I also don’t want anyone to be waiting for 5 MB download before starting the game.  I may host the music here on this site and have it load as the player plays through the stage, but we’ll see how that works out.

There still a lot of work to do and about six weeks left do it. I suspect I will get lots done this weekend since it seems like we’ll have a weekend full of rain here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Anyways, here a couple of more screenshots for the game.

Now that the deadline has been pushed back to March 31st, I’ll have a good amount of time to finish the game. Especially since Cleaver told me to go back to work….ha.

I spent a bit of time last last night coding some basic behaviors for a couple of the UFOs, which was kind of fun. I’m looking forward to coding the rest of the enemies. I’ve yet to start on the bosses which I hope will be fun to beat but also a tad difficult.

I don’t want the game to be a simple side-scroller where you have to shoot everything to win. Since the story of the game is that of a lone airplane flying against a fleet of alien ships there will be segments in the game where the best course of action is to sit still and have the UFO pass by in order to survive and reach the mothership.

In a lot of side-scrollers, the enemies fly in a predicatble, repeatable pattern for no reason and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can. If the enemies are flying in a pattern, it’s because they have a reason for it. They will either be moving to get past the player’s ship or to shoot it. In that respect, I’m trying to get into the enemies head and think about what they would do. Some enemies would just want to ignore the player and be on their way to do their job, some will aggressively attack the player and others will only attack if provoked.

Since the game will be a bit long to do it all in one sitting, about an hour not including deaths, I planned for the game to save the player’s progress after every stage. Each stage consists of 3 two-minute segments plus a boss fight. When I was doing some testing, I realized it was pretty easy to have the game restart at the beginning of a segment so I’ll probably have the game save after each segment. That way progress can be made even if the players only plays for 3-4 minutes. That also means that I’ll increase the difficulty a bit of each segment. I want the player to just get by each segment. It shouldn’t be easy, even on Easy Mode.

Now that the holidays are over and I’ve finished up some other projects that were taking most of my free time, I have more time to code “Aliens Over Hawaii”. I haven’t actually touched the game in at least a couple of weeks. I played around a bit with some side scrolling games on a NES emulator to check out what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, here’s a couple of early screenshot of the games, there’s still a bunch of work to do but the look is pretty much solid.

I’ve also noticed there’s been a discussion on the Whirled boards about coin prices and Wyvern giving out loads and loads of coins. I checked when Wyvern was released and added it to the Coin/Bar Ratio graph, see below. It’s location is quite interesting.

Remember, however, that correlation is not causation and there are probably many, many factors influencing the ratio.

One month before the deadline for the contest and I’m still pushing away.  However, I do not think I will make the deadline. If the contests are quarterly as mentioned, then the next deadline would be the end of April so I’ll probably submit it under that contest.

Basically, I don’t want to rush the game and since this is something I do in my spare time I don’t want to feel like this is something that I HAVE to do. I want to do it because I enjoy it, not because it’s a job.  So starting today, I’m not going to let myself feel constrained by the deadline and work on the game at a pace I feel comfortable with.

This last week, during some downtime around the holidays I made a lot of progress on the backgrounds. Originally I meant to have backgrounds from many of the islands around Hawaii, but then I realized I would have needed to use other people’s pictures or free stock photography and I didn’t want to do that.

Besides, on my last trip to Hawaii, I took a few thousand pictures and made many panoramas that could serve as stage backgrounds. These were all taken around Oahu so the title of the game could more accurately be called “Aliens over Oahu” but I really like the name “Aliens over Hawaii”.

Out of all the panoramas I made, I originally selected 15 which are shown below. However, only 8 made it into the final game. There are two reasons for that. One, if I had placed all 15 panoramas, the game would have been about 5 MB in size, a bit too large. And two, some of the backgrounds just don’t fit well with the others.

In the game, each of these is 7000 pixels long by 500 pixels high and they’re Oilified so that the focus is on the foreground- the player and the enemies. It’ll take about 6-7 minutes to fly through each stage.

The next big push is working on the enemies. Considering that I have to fill at least 48 minutes of side-scrolling action I want to make sure that there are a nice variety of enemies and that the bosses are fun to beat. In addition, I have to make sure that all the enemy groups are balanced across the four difficulty levels in terms of size, experience, speed, etc. That will probably take about 3-4 weeks since I mainly work on the game during the weekend. However, this is probably my favorite part of coding the game so far.

We’ll see how it goes from here.

Well progress on ‘Aliens Over Hawaii’ is still a bit slower than I expected. However, this last weekend I played a full playthrough of the game. However, at this point the game consisted of 3 short stages avoiding missiles and fighting very simple bosses with one static background.   Still, nearly all of the framework details are done -  transitions between stages, weapon leveling,  damage and explosion details,  dying and restarting at checkpoints,  difficulty levels, etc.

There really are 4 big things I need to work right now before the game can be listed:

Enemies: The game currently has 6 different types of missile groups. I need to add lots more enemy types and groups to make a fun game. I also have to create the bosses at the end of the stage.

Backgrounds: I have yet to formally select where each of the stages will take place, but I know that at least one stage will take place in Waimea Canyon, another in Kaaawa Valley and most likely the final stage will be on the big Island at Mauna Loa.

Music&Sound Effects: This will probably be very simple. There might be a boss theme and maybe 30 second song at the beginning of each stage or checkpoint. However, I’ll have to probably use the Whirled Datapack to bring them into the game in order to avoid making the game too big.  I’ll probably have limited sound effects as well - I imagine that an explosion sound will become quickly annoying quickly the first 100 enemies are killed before the first checkpoint of the first stage.

Whirled: Drawing up all the trophies and coding them into the game.  Making sure that progress is saved at the end of each stage and that stats are being tracked.

Well progress on Aliens over Hawaii hasn’t been as much as I’d hoped for right now. Been busy with other stuff and haven’t found a significant amount of time to code it.  However most of the basic framework is done but I still need to fill that framework with backgrounds, enemies, bosses, music, sound effects and other things.

However, if I dont finish the game before the deadline of January 31st, I’ll probably finish up Blackjack Square just to get something in. I doubt it would win anything, but it’s something and then I’d spend the next quarter finishing up Aliens Over Hawaii. That’s more than enough time.

Honestly, I’d rather finish up Aliens over Hawaii before the deadline so that I can focus on a whole slew of other stuff I have working on.  But let’s see what happens.

Well now that I’ve passed my exam, I can focus more of my free time on making Whirled stuff! I’m very excited about the new Whirled Game Contest. The game I have in mind for it is going to be called “Aliens Over Hawaii”. Here are some of my inspiration pics:

I actually wrote notes for the game way before I actually went to Hawaii but the pictures I took during the trip will definitely help in creating some of the artwork and color palettes.

However, it’s going to take a heck of a lot of work to put it together - music, AI, artwork, etc. So I’ll push Blackjack Square down the list while I work on the game. I hope to have Aliens Over Hawaii completely finished and to my satisfaction by the contest deadline of January 31st.