GLOBAL GAME JAM 2012!!!!

That's right! I went to the Global Game Jam this year too! wohooo!!! and it was amazing :), I want to share a bit of my experience this year.

So... Caracas Game Jam, this year it was on a different university and my friends (who were also my team) and I were all excited about this, the event happened last weekend so it was kinda in the middle of EVERYTHING we had to do like homework, study and all that university stuff.... but even so we went!
A while after we arrived we went to the auditorium where we were going to spend a few hours listening to some important people, talk about the problems with the recent law about video games here at Venezuela and last but not least, this year's keynote speech :). I must say I am amazed by how relaxed we were at the jam, last year we were so nervous thinking we could never finish the game on time and stuff like that and this year we were like "I know I'll manage to make the game in 48 hours so I'm not going to spend time worrying about this", we could see the difference with our newest member (he's a guy that studies at our university and went to the jam alone and well, one thing led to another and he ended up on our team) because he was really worried about this time issue .
We went a bit overtime with the speeches (fed the newcomer's fears! YEAAAH!!) and so we finished watching the keynote a bit late, then we moved to the classrooms where we were going to stay the whole weekend, and at first we had mayor power issues and the fact that none of us could access the Internet, but like 2 hours later the problem was solved thanks to the fantastic staff! yay!.

THIS YEAR'S THEME IS SO FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Ouroboros.

"What? an image? not a word? seriously?" those were my thoughts when they showed it to us. My opinion is that since a word is way more concrete than an image it is kinda easier to use but... this is an image, I mean, how many things can you tell me about that image? exactly, you can't count them! And that's how my team spent it's first 5 hours of the game jam :D hitting our faces against the wall to come up with an idea related to this image that would be a good game.

Let me explain a bit how our brainstorm worked: we wrote on a board all the words that each of us related to that picture of Ouroboros, cool, no problem there, then we started to mix those words into more tangible things, like ideas of games, and when we had enough we started to vote for the one we liked the most. It took us approximately 3 hours to do this, and when we finished we ended up with 3 ideas, then we decided to work on each of them to see their pros a cons. After we did that, we called a friend of us to help us with his opinion about the ideas (he's the person that guided and worked with us in the last game jam, he knows a lot about game design so he was like our teacher that last year, and believe me, we learned so freaking much that first game jam) and his opinion was: this won't do. Just as easy as that, our dreams and hopes shattered while we watched pieces of our effort crumble into the abyss of desperation and meaninglessness!! Anyway... we started over, we had absolutely no idea what to do, our brains were just out of juice, we were spitting any idea that would dare to cross our desolated former-creative mind. After a lot of crazy stuff, we decided to go back to the game that wasn't good enough and decided to make it good enough! Just as simple as that... you like it but it's not going to work? MAKE IT WORK! And so we did and ended up with the idea that would give birth to our game: Nom.

Finally! an idea we could work with! and let me take this moment to give details about our decision: This game was intended to be infinite, since that one of the things that Ouroboros represents, it was also... well... a giant snake eating its own tail (you see the similarity with the picture? not everyone can. Hint: it's a snake eating its own tail). But that just isn't enough, if we had settled with this we would've just made a super mario clone or something like that, it just wasn't original. But we kept going and we added this need run from the snake (at this point the player was intended to be the stick figure) by using some sort of items that would appear as the player advanced though the snake's tail. In the end we decided to turn the stick figure into the bad guy and the snake into the player, and this turned out to be a lot fresher and fun, the players will feel identified with the stick figure since it has a human form, so we did have to make some kind of tutorial to let the player know that he was trying to eat the stick figure.

We had a pretty fun game in our hands, and more importantly, it was a game that could be made within 48 hours, and to prove that, I must say that we had absolutely no rush when making it, we were making every bit of the game and putting everything together, we rested when we had to, didn't have to push ourselves, for me this was a tremendous success because it seems like we managed to divide the work on our team very very well.

One last thing, I'm sure you must be wondering what the hell is going on in the game, "why is the guy running?" , "why... WHY IS THE SNAKE EATING ITSELF?!", "why can't I think of another fun quote?!". Well, here is the answer: The stick figure is called cliché, because it represents what a cliché is (very monotonous and boring), and the snake represents creativity (very colourful and not..... boring), so the stick figure is running because it wants to get to the head of the snake and kill it, why is that? Think for a second what happens when you try to create something, you will be inevitably drawn to an idea that is similar to something that already exists, this is the cliché and it represents no effort at all to invent something new (if in the game you stop trying to win, the cliché will win, which is a pretty good metaphor to represent what happens in our brains when we are just lazy to think outside the box), now, on the other hand you have the snake (you've probably already gotten the point of this, but I'm going to explain this anyway because my friend came up with this what-the-hell-are-you-smoking idea and I think it fits the game theme so frkn much that I must finish this paragraph or else/0) which represents the creativity, when you put all your efforts on being creative and really thinking of something completely unusual and different (represented here by an infinite barrage of letters that will just keep coming no matter what you do and you will inevitably lose unless you play on "noob" mode because somebody forgot to balance the difficulty on the "human" mode to make it... winnable) you eat the cliché and the creativity persists... making you.... creative... I mean creative creative not my creative.

Wow, long entry AND ITS GOING TO BE LONGER, nah just kidding, just gonna post a few pictures of the drafts we made while making the art of the game.

One more thing! my team was amazing! and I loved the art of the game :D pretty cool dontcha think?

C yas!

New Idea!

So yeah... um.... New Idea!
Remember I was trying to mix a dungeon crawler with a shoot-em-up and blah blah blah? well I talked to a friend and realized I needed to add something else because just A + B wouldn't be so interesting, so there has to be more! something fun, something that can make you say "OMG I'M AMAZING"  or something like that, I'm sure you get what I mean.

Anyway, the idea I got was to give the player some sort of special skills, but not just those ultimate skills that when you use them you have to wait 3 hours to use them again, I'm talking about something with a much lower cooldown, and yet fun to use. The player's primary way of offence is shooting so I don't want to do a special skill that makes you "shoot faster" or stuff like that, I thought about something even better! I don't know how to call it yet but it is some kind of boost mode, were the player moves faster, but not only that, while the player is in that state he becomes invulnerable and basically turns into a human bullet. So, think about this for a sec: you are trapped in this room where dozens of monsters are coming at you, thirsty for your blood, and you are just desperately running and shooting because you just can't do anything else! WRONG! YOU CAN DO SOMETHING! *activate supa-dupa magic thingy that turns you into a freaking human bullet* and whoosh!!! you are flying everywhere trampling those suckers that just wouldn't give up on you, and now the room is perfectly safe, how do you feel? that's right, you feel like the boss.

Of course there are some implications when implementing such an overpowered weapon in a game, but here's the thing, my friend told me something incredibly true. If the enemies and the player in the game are not OP (overpowered) then you may think that the game is balanced well enough, and probably it is but... it just won't  feel that good to advance through the game, but if you turn the enemies and the player OP then nothing is OP, so... what's the point of that? the feeling of awesomeness. I dare you to tell me that it is equally fun to kill a zombie with a pistol than it is to kill it with a flamethrower! you see? this is the OP and not OP thing I'm talking about. So to balance things out for the enemies I will do something like... spamming lots of them and putting the player under some stress.

I even thought about how to give the player this special skill, it won't be something they will have when they start the game, it will be like the weapons you get before the boss fight. My idea is to do something like this: the player will get the skill while fighting the boss, I know it sounds a bit excessive but I thought about it and doesn't seems to be a bad idea. The player gets in the room, and 1 spawner starts.... you know.... spawning... and the player will be like "nothing to be afraid of", but when he gets to destroy the spawner... 2 more appear! :O!!! "aw come on!" the player will say and with a bit more of effort he will get to destroy those spawners too.... FOUR SPAWNERS! "what the hell?!" and the player will start to get stressed because they know they won't be able to take down the spawners with all the monsters running at them, they will start to get hit, lose hp, feel kinda helpless too.... but then.... when the player's health has gone a little down (say half? maybe 1/3?) some message appears saying that you suddenly remembered how to use that special skill! (I still have to figure out how am I going to fit this into the lore of the game, but I'll deal with that later) and now the player has something that can actually save them! and with a quick movement *WHOOOOSH!!* the player has now destroyed the 4 spawners, winning them the fight! YAY!

So that's what I've been thinking about these days, sadly I don't have any screenshot to show you :'(, but I am working on it, right now the boost thingy skill is almost done (also I have to give it a proper name :D) and I think after that I would just need to setup all the first level's events and.... DEMO! wohoooo!!!

Thanks for reading, I hope I can do this soon since I got a lot of work coming this weeks, including the global game jam, but I'll do my best ;)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

YEAH! NEW YEAR! AND NEW STUFF COMING! YAY!

It seems like I'm finally getting closer to a decent demo of the game, I'm gonna show you a couple of things I've been working on these days.

• New sprites: I love new sprites and I love them even more when they actually look good or at least decent, I decided I should keep the enemies as simple as possible since a lot of enemies = a lot of sprites = a lot time animating them = x.x

Well, since one of my friends though it was a bunny (wtf?) I must say it is NOT a bunny, it's a Wisp or at least something similar to one. I know they don't have eyes and blah blah but I don't care :D.

This is the sprite I made for the Orbiter, I'm really happy about this one, I think I finally managed to keep it simple and did something easy to animate and that looks good in my opinion.

I must admit I was lazy about this because it's kinda one of the hardest things for me to do, but I finally made the walking left and right animations for the wizard! that's half way to go!

• Finally I can work on game stuff! What I mean is that I can finally work on game mechanics since I got rid of most of the bugs. For example, yesterday I was thinking about how was I going to add the shoot-em-up mechanic into a dungeon-crawler, at first I was thinking about doing something like oldschool Zelda: Big rooms interconnected by doors, so there would be space to move and shoot, but I'd rather not do it like that. So today I came home and almost the first thing I did was play Spiral Knights (I'm in love with this game) and realized that the game is very similar to what I want to do, so I got an idea... Big rooms..... Long corridors! That's it! Awesome isn't it?! I know it's simple and maybe obvious but that's one problem solved.

I know this entry might be smaller than it should be, but probably I'm so excited with all the things I can finally add to the game that I just forgot other things... Anyways here's a screenshot!

This are the Orbiters shooting a lot of fireballs at the player, I seriously want to remake that fireball sprite but for the time being I'll just enjoy running around for my life from these annoying guys :D.

That's it for today, soon I'll post entries about a much more complete game and probably a demo so you can try it and alpha test it if you wanna call it like that :). Thanks for reading!

 

Oh Boy, It's been a long time!

I was REALLY busy with College but now that I'm on a break I got the chance to get back to work on Little Wizard for a while.

So let's talk about what I want to talk about. Remember the last entry? about my TODO list??? well I've changed it a bit. You see, I've been thinking and noticed that to get the feeling I wanted from a shoot-em-up I need way bigger spaces, like... HUGE SPACES, not just some freaking corridors. So, I'm not saying I'll throw away the level I made but..... I won't be using it for a while.... *sadface*.........

Aaaaaanyways.... ENEMIES! I want to talk about enemies. Remember they where in the TODO list? well, I decided I'm going to work on them now.... and I just did! yay! So here's what I managed to do:

• Health and Mana Bar!!!! Well not such a big deal, but it makes a game look more like a game so much that it's ridiculous! And to be honest I love it <3.
• Mob spawner: I love this thingy, it'll just spawn enemies till you die or just get tired. But that's not the point of it, I just wanted to make one but obviously its objective will be... spawning monsters... reasonably.
• New Enemy! DemonSlime! OMG! it sounds amazing!!!!.... not so exciting I know... It is a pretty basic enemy, it just moves towards the player and hits them when in melee range.
• New Enemy! Orbiter! (Oh God I'm just so good at naming... well not really, I just named it after the special feature it has: Orbiting around the player). It's a funny fact how I got it to Orbit around the player, I was playing around with the Sine function to make it move like... well... the Sine function. And then one thing led to another and BOOM the enemy is now orbiting around the player, wich is not something you can accidentally do... but I apparently did haha!  I'm using the DemonSlime's sprite as a placeholder for the time being.

These are the Orbiters, with the DemonSlime's sprite orbiting around the player.

Well thats it for now, I hope I can go a bit faster now that I have more time and hopefully I'll be able to write a few more entries :).

Thanks for reading!

TODO list complete

Well as the title says, the TODO list I talked about is now done:

• The crosshair works now.
• I updated the map editor to have a lot more of functionalities and now there's a lot more of feedback concerning the state of the editing tools, changed a bit of the map's format to include information about the player and enemies located on that map, soon I will add more information on this map format to store special tiles like doors and chests.
• Updated to XNA 4.0 and now the drawing problems are magically gone!
• Created a "first level", right now I wouldn't say it's going to be used on the game once I finish it, but I tried to make it for that purpose so lets see how it goes. Heres a screenshot of a draft I made on photoshop to give me an overall look of how the map would look like.

              These are only the walls obviously but I made this to see if the dungeon looked good and I think it kinda does.

Now my new TODO list will include:

• Improve the enemies (make them smarter when moving and shooting): I will have to implement a BFS ( breadth-first search) algorithm to be able to do this and I'm not quite sure about how hard will this be but I hope it doesn't get too tricky, I think the worst passed when I fixed all the collision bugs and stuff and I hope I'm right.
• Make special tiles like doors: these will lead to other maps obviously but since they do not behave like other tiles I will have to make another line on the map file to store where these doors are and where do they lead. 
• Make chests and usable items on the map: I like this part because the items are obviously and extremely important part of the dungeon-crawlers, so I'll start working on them soon.
• Modify the collision box for the player and enemies: Right now all the collidable objects in the game use a collision box determined by the very sprite they display, meaning that if there's a 15x15px block, it will use that 15x15 box to collide. I wanna change that because I want the player and enemies to only ocupy 1 tile and not 2, so it's easier for them to move and that will help me get a better top-down feeling.
• Change the weapon system: I think that my actual weapon system (the code that handles how the weapons are defined and work) is a bit inefficient and complicaded so I wanna change it to something more flexible that will allow me to handle weapons better.
• Add more enemies: YES! I do wanna add more enemies, specially because I have some ideas about different behaviours that I think will add a lot of fun to the game.
• Show a GUI: I do wanna get this one done, this will include a hotkey bar that will show the selected weapon or "spell", HP bar, Mana Bar and an Energy bar, just to keep it simple for now because you know... the player needs to know if he's about to get killed or not right?

Well that would be all for now... oh wait! SCREENSHOT TIME!!!!!