Thinkin' about makin' a little game here
polycounter lvl 10
Long rambling post so here's a short, short stfu and get to the point preface:
-Have a little tech scene I've been working on that I've decided i might want to try making into a little game while at the same time making top end art to put in my portfolio.
-Don't know what sort of little game i want to make at this point.
-Tech demo is just a small 2D 360 spherical world you can roam around in and shoot little particles in.
-Open to suggestions, want to do something with spaceships as they require little to no animation, upgrade systems and procedural gameplay. Think tower defense, economy systems, upgrades, etc. Also trying to think of a game that has deep gameplay but doesn't require complex UI systems. Essentially just something simple but deep and fun.
Ok long version...
First off, not sure if this is even a good idea to post here. I know this place is first and foremost art, and there will certainly be a lot of that going on, but I think it might also be fun to talk game design and programming!
I've been tryin' the indie route the past several months and though the project isn't dead, it's not exactly going to be finished as soon as we'd hoped. I'm in a strange position where my portfolio's not really up to par to get me work anywhere and i've devoted so much time to learning programming and game design the past couple years i don't want to just throw that to the curb either, so i'm trying to think of a cool little side project that'll get my portfolio up to snuff and allow me to do some little bits of programming maybe making an innovative little demo game. Assets look like shyt in unity so maybe i can showcase work there in marmoset or something as I go. I'm also not looking to make some huge triple A title here either, this isn't going to be good enough to sell, just a side project.
Since I haven't posted in pimping and previews in forever I'm hesitant to post some recent work because it's mainly a tech demo and doesn't showcase any high end assets, they're for the most part placeholder, but that's what the "preview" is all about! It's always been motivating to throw caution to the wind and just put what you're doing up and get some crits and ideas which is exactly what i'm after at this point. I'm hoping in the coming weeks and months there'll be some good shyt in here to show off and put in the 'folio
Sorry this is such a general post lacking in art at the moment, but i thought it might be cool to open up some gameplay brainstorming to you guys and see if anyone wanted to maybe see their concepts get put into a game or even just start a discussion of what makes a good small scale game concept. Just a little change of pace.
Been thinking it over several hours now and a game where you control a spaceship around a planet surface seems like a good idea, since animations aren't something i want to pursue and i still want some heavy gameplay with shooting junk and upgrading stuff, yadda yadda. Maybe you fly around and build towers to fight waves of simple but cool looking enemies. Or maybe it could be a farm sim, would really scale down the AI requirements and you would just create a frarm on the planet, scoop up water and tend to your crops and animals like a harvest moon. Physics are fun and simple in unity so there's lots of room for that to boot. Really dunno where to go with it at this point and that's why i'm making a post. Doors are open to ideas, sky's the limit. At it's core, the game idea needs to be fun, be manageable, and allow for kickass art.
Here's a shitty little image of the tech demo in question, takes place on a desert planet:
And on the off chance you wanna fart around in it here's a build, 1 - 4 allows you to try out some preliminary test case weapons:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/test.rar
Any advice/ thoughts/ feedback as always appreciated! Even if it's *smack* hey dumb ass, stop doing games, focus on art.
-Have a little tech scene I've been working on that I've decided i might want to try making into a little game while at the same time making top end art to put in my portfolio.
-Don't know what sort of little game i want to make at this point.
-Tech demo is just a small 2D 360 spherical world you can roam around in and shoot little particles in.
-Open to suggestions, want to do something with spaceships as they require little to no animation, upgrade systems and procedural gameplay. Think tower defense, economy systems, upgrades, etc. Also trying to think of a game that has deep gameplay but doesn't require complex UI systems. Essentially just something simple but deep and fun.
Ok long version...
First off, not sure if this is even a good idea to post here. I know this place is first and foremost art, and there will certainly be a lot of that going on, but I think it might also be fun to talk game design and programming!
I've been tryin' the indie route the past several months and though the project isn't dead, it's not exactly going to be finished as soon as we'd hoped. I'm in a strange position where my portfolio's not really up to par to get me work anywhere and i've devoted so much time to learning programming and game design the past couple years i don't want to just throw that to the curb either, so i'm trying to think of a cool little side project that'll get my portfolio up to snuff and allow me to do some little bits of programming maybe making an innovative little demo game. Assets look like shyt in unity so maybe i can showcase work there in marmoset or something as I go. I'm also not looking to make some huge triple A title here either, this isn't going to be good enough to sell, just a side project.
Since I haven't posted in pimping and previews in forever I'm hesitant to post some recent work because it's mainly a tech demo and doesn't showcase any high end assets, they're for the most part placeholder, but that's what the "preview" is all about! It's always been motivating to throw caution to the wind and just put what you're doing up and get some crits and ideas which is exactly what i'm after at this point. I'm hoping in the coming weeks and months there'll be some good shyt in here to show off and put in the 'folio
Sorry this is such a general post lacking in art at the moment, but i thought it might be cool to open up some gameplay brainstorming to you guys and see if anyone wanted to maybe see their concepts get put into a game or even just start a discussion of what makes a good small scale game concept. Just a little change of pace.
Been thinking it over several hours now and a game where you control a spaceship around a planet surface seems like a good idea, since animations aren't something i want to pursue and i still want some heavy gameplay with shooting junk and upgrading stuff, yadda yadda. Maybe you fly around and build towers to fight waves of simple but cool looking enemies. Or maybe it could be a farm sim, would really scale down the AI requirements and you would just create a frarm on the planet, scoop up water and tend to your crops and animals like a harvest moon. Physics are fun and simple in unity so there's lots of room for that to boot. Really dunno where to go with it at this point and that's why i'm making a post. Doors are open to ideas, sky's the limit. At it's core, the game idea needs to be fun, be manageable, and allow for kickass art.
Here's a shitty little image of the tech demo in question, takes place on a desert planet:
And on the off chance you wanna fart around in it here's a build, 1 - 4 allows you to try out some preliminary test case weapons:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/test.rar
Any advice/ thoughts/ feedback as always appreciated! Even if it's *smack* hey dumb ass, stop doing games, focus on art.
Replies
i know it's not intended, but I love that if you hold a direction and hammer jump you can gain enough speed to take off and hurtle through the sky
Maybe it could be some kind of interactive explorable portfolio... nice detailed models quite close up, fly around them with your little ship
HARDCORE!
I like the mechanic of the 4th weapon. If you wiggle your mouse wildly while shooting repetitevly you can gather up a cluster of this homing missiles, I don't know if that's intendet but it would be a coold thing to gether these up for swarms of enemies or bigger ones.
No reason tanks can't look kick arse or fly around either, Master Blaster did that, star fox 64, etc. Hmmm, gonna sit on this 1 more day or two before i really start a course of action, art is so tied to what kind of cool little systems you want to do.
It's so easy to get carried away thinking about cool little things to add. Like a spider tank that could move left or right and climb up walls when you drive into them, but it brings so many technical considerations from an art and programming standpoint. Trick is to think of a few cool new ideas that are really doable and easy to make look good too.
One thing's for sure, I want to make sure the tank has cool, dynamic burst movement. Like upgradeable thrusters, fuel tanks, etc. Maybe this can replace the really buggy movement that makes you hurdle off into space for minutes at a time with no F'ing idea where the fook you are till you crash land back into the planet.
Art direction: Going for a futuristic western of sorts. Little on the dark and gritty side but definitely want to get bits of character and humor in there too. Think firefly if it was a little more steam punk/ techy. This way i can showcase some organics with futuristic buildings made of wood and metal, space cacti, etc, while also showing off some higher end metalic and sci fi type stuffs. Since i want these for portfolio use, i'll be making them to a scale much larger than needed for the game.
Gameplay:
Going to aim for a round based type single player game where you play till you die, then use the money and resources you gathered to upgrade your tank to allow you to do better and get more money the next round. some will be randomized and rare to give each play of the game a unique feel. I figure enemies will spawn till you die and difficulty will ramp up over time in each round. There may be certain items you can only buy by a certain round, adding a sense of urgency to do well early so you can get some really choice items.
Thinking of making certain parts of the planet unique and have a different vibe than other parts. So maybe one section is full of flying enemies and they drop a lot of a certain type of resource and you can strategically choose where you want to go to uprade certain things based on what you need, or specialize your build to be strong in one area and spend most of your time there.
I'm going to keep AI on the simple side and just go for a bullet hell sort of game with dumb enemies that just roll around or bob in the air shooting tons of junk at you. You'll have to use your dashes and thrusters to evade bullets and enemies. I simply don't have the expertise to do advanced AI systems, but if you throw enough bullets on the screen, the difficulty will be there regardless. It's often more fun to fight waves of stupid enemies that a few smart ones anyway.
Combat systems:
I played with some really dynamic weapon charge systems on past projects and i'm going to bring that back for this one. Not only will you be able to buy new weapons but you'll be able to upgrade those weapons in interesting ways, being able to focus on base damage, fire rate, etc. but also unique properties for specific charge levels of the weapons. Lets say you have a laser that when charged emits a sustained beam for a few seconds, maybe there's an upgrade that lets that beam penetrate multiple targets, but it takes a rare regent to do so. Getting that regent is a fun little "omg!s" type moment, but this regent can also upgrade other parts of the tank in super cool ways so you'll have to decide where to put it. Going to try to combine a fun monetary system as well as a cool rare regent drop system.
I want to expand on the "dash mechanic" that's so loved in platformers. Things like double jump, dash, etc. are all super fun and layering a couple new unique mechanics would add a lot, as well as adding upgrades to these mechanics, giving dash a damage component based on speed is an obvious potential upgrade. Was just imagining a "whirlwind" move a tank could do if you alternated left and right quickly causing your tank to first start doing aoe damage and then fly off into the air giving you a multiplier to your horizontal speed. If you have a lot of horizontal momentum and do a fast whirlwind you could fly off high into the air where maybe you encounter enemies that drop lots of moneies or just have sustained flight if you alternate at the right speed. Upgrades allow the whirlwind to do more damage, more AOE, consume less fuel, or have stronger vertical or horizontal velocity.
Upgradeable parts:
General: Going to be copying the system me and my buddy devised for our starcraft 2 mod cosmic eclipse. It's similar to the rock and roll racing upgrade system but instead of buying entire new cars, you buy individual pieces and each of those have unique parts you can upgrade. Some treads for example may allow for very high end upgrades in speed, others for health. It'll be up to you to decide how much to invest into your current item and how much to save to buy the next big thing.
turret: the top part of the tank, determines health and will likely have weight modifying overall speed. Upgrades for max health, regen, etc.
guns: pretty obvious 1-3 will switch your guns to whatever you bought. Each maybe have chargeable right click attacks
Treads: may allow you to dash, fly around with rockets, etc. Upgrade for mobility, some may allow to upgrade life, yadda yadda.
Passive weapon: Sticks to the back of your tank, and will fire automatically. Had this idea for a rocket that homes on your mouse and does small damage but if it gets the killing blow gives bonus money. Can upgrade it to do more damage or give more bonus cash.
UI: Going to have to be more robust than I'd first planned but this is a good thing. If i can make a slick awesome UI that'll be a great thing to put on my resume/ portfolio.
Essentially i want to tie those fun little flash games where you fling your dude and upgrade him in the hopes of getting further over time such as this one from adult swim:
http://games.adultswim.com/burrito-bison-revenge-twitchy-online-game.html
With fun shooter platforming from say master blaster, megaman, and metroid. But instead of getting further, you just kill more junk, try to live longer, and make a bigger more badass tank over time!
Ideas/ comments as always welcome, but I think I'm pretty stoked for this idea as is and going to hit it hard very soon! Flue/ cough's been kicking my ass for the past 5 days but i'm finally getting over it and can't wait to start diving in.
@seirei: Hmm, maybe i'll make a specific rocket that does bonus damage for a short period of time for every missile that's hit recently. So if you get a swarm of missiles going and hit one target at once it does big damage!
@rooster: Hurdeling through the sky was pretty fun! Maybe i'll add a bonus system that gives you big money for going at a sustained high speed for periods of time multiplied by your elevation. I'd have to balance it by adding some sort of uber enemy that spawns if you're going fast that will crash into you and deal massive damage or something like that. Better yet!.. how about every revolution of the planet you get a money modifier but enemies spawn a bit stronger, the money modifier would be higher than the dificulty modifier to promote this play, maybe the more you circle the planet, the difficulty modifier starts becoming much higher than the money modifier.
You should check out crazy planets on facebook, if you havent already.
[ame="
Well I finally got over this damned flu and dove in and started coding today! Now that i'm looking at this project as an actual game it's pretty exciting to work on for long stretches.
Easy fix to that max speed bug, i was checking world x velocity against max speed, not local so at the equator you could accelerate to infinity. Not as much fun without this bug, but a new one showed up, huzzah! There's no cooldown on dashes yet, so if you want just double tap "a" or "d" in rapid succession you can fly into the cosmos again. It's pretty fun to try to build up orbital speed, definitely going to try to work flying at high speeds into the core game for higher levels of builds. The idea will be that when you're really upgraded you can fly around the planet fast and build up those money and difficulty modifiers fast each round.
Some real shyt placeholder stuff for now in regards to the tank, just figuring out the sort of art i'm going to need before committing any real time to modeling. Do i want treads? Do i want wheels? If i have wheels do they flip and act as jets like in blaster master? Should the turret be able to rotate 360 degrees and clip through the tank body? What proportions work best for the art assets with this gameplay... Trying to think of these things as i go for now and not sweat high detail art assets just yet.
Got some preliminary animations in for the tank stuff. No actual frames, all simple hard coded rotation systems that build on each other. Nothing fancy, but they're workin' well enough for now.
Game plan for tomorrow is to keep tuning up movement. I'm finding test geo to be really hard to move around on if there's any slope on the terrain or geo, so i can either work on some new systems to counter slope forces or just ditch 'em completely and make flat platforms and terrain setups. Come to think of it though if i make a system to counter the average slope of underlying terrain i could use the same system to align your treads with the underlying terrain which might look cool.
Need to get double jumps in as well as a rocket pack system that draws from fuel to allow for more control in the air. Going to work on getting all these bells and whistles in first, make them fun to play around in with a myriad of test values, then turn them all off and have items enable certain systems, adjusting their values based on their stats and upgrades.
New build is here if anyone wants to check it out:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/test.rar
Feedback/ suggestions appreciated!
Got mid air jetpacking working with W and S and it's pretty cool to try to get orbital speed going and pilot the tank like a plane. Going to expand on some systems to allow upgrades to influence flight more. It'll take more upgrades to achieve high speed flight, but low speed flight will be possible for cheap upgrades. I want to add a cash bonus for "passing go" by making 1 loop around the planet to give the game a general goal of moving forward and making revolutions, maybe this bonus can be in part multiplied by the number of enemies you've killed that lap.
Added collision to the cannon and you can now use it as a break to slow down quickly by ramming it into the ground. Also have plans to make it work like a pogo stick, or possibly even a melee weapon that you swing against enemies. Could be a common tactic to fly above tough ground targets, point a spear-like weapon down and burst downward for a strong melee attack.
To do:
Get enemies in. Really need these guys in so i can better tune projectiles. Aiming feels a bit wonky. I added some simple systems to curve the bullets around the planet but they're far from perfect. Once i have actual enemies in it'll be easier to tune aiming towards what it needs to be.
With such a high movement cap for the player it's going to be interesting making enemies that can stay in range and keep up, as well as come back to the player should they make a sudden stop. Movement is pretty unconventional so it's going to be a trip trying to create a "bullet hell" in such a fast moving gameplay environment with elliptical movement. Times like these you just throw junk in, see what sticks, and expand on it.
Another build if anyone wants to check it out:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/test2.rar
Placeholder music is the title track from Outlaws. Sounds are just free bull from across the net.
Modest little update, i wont talk your guys' ears off this time. Some pretty nifty emergent gameplay happening I think, though. Going to work on upgrades and cash bonuses for achieving gameplay goals in the next week while tuning up enemies. Arts gotta wait, too much programmin' to do.
Suggestions however crazy always welcome!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/test6.rar
Went ahead and adopted a spherical world since the game has moved away from orthographic. Has a fun mario galaxy vibe now that i'm digging. Wont really have time to tighten up the graphics fully until things are more set in stone design wise.
Edit: Not sure this is going to work but with unity's 3.5 release i can finally try to link this as a web browser game:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/WebTest/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html