Idea 2 (To the right)
This mood board is my second set of inspirations for my second game idea. It would be focused on making the player feeling uncomfortable and scared of making the next move, knowing that every decision they make will have a huge impact on the games ending. |
(To the left) Idea 1
The mood board you see here is a perfect representation of what style my game idea would have. It will be a mix of steampunk and modern age technology (with a pinch of alien tech). Most of the gameplay will be full of action and have many dangerous encounters. (To the left) Idea 3
My final mood board with a summary of the ideas i have for the run-as-fast-as-you-can version of my game. In this idea you would have the task to prepare the fuel and logistics to prepare your DIY rocket for launch into deep earth orbit to escape the inevitable - the end of the world. Get the fuel mixture or calculations wrong, It's game over. |
Here are the mind maps of my project ideas for the final project. I decided that ID. 2 would be the best for me to work with and i think would be slightly easier to make.
The fist idea goes too into graphics and destruction, but the third one has too many mechanics involved. The middle one has a balance between the two + would mess in your head a bit making you constantly search for the games destination, thus making you end it. |
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A while ago i stumbled upon a game played by PewDiePie - To The moon. The main story wasn't my main source of ideas, but the very ending that shows a few simple but creative cutscenes and an interesting level design. It presents a rocket standing on a platform ready for launch. It's sunset and the camera is placed quite far away from the main focus point. The game has in interesting split in perspectives, top and side views making it more interactive and interesting to look at. Good idea worth considering.
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Here is a small tutorial on how do download an online flash game to your PC off a website.
Simply follow the picture steps (to the left) and you should have no trouble. |
This game inspired me to come up with my third game idea. It may not have much to do with that my actual concept but it has some elements that would go well.
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At the start when making the game level i had quite a big problem; I had no idea what to start with. Because I put forward the idea of having to look for the boom in a maze I had a limited range of options to go with. It was either a space maze (unlikely), a hedge/wall maze (too common and boring) and a surreal one (best choice). The surreal option somehow made me remind about Laputa - Castle in the Sky film, where there was a massive labyrinth made out of huge obsydian stones. That idea reminded me of the SCP -Foundation that researches anomalies and extraordinary living organisms, to be precise one anomaly I picked was SCP-015 - one that consists of various piping, pumps and pressure valves. From there my level design was born.
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For the game level i had to make something that would fit the gloomy environment i was planning to make. Because it was a maze game i had to pick appropriate walls and a matching background.
Hedges were a no go, stone pillars had no depth perception. Piping being round cancelled the second problem and looked good with the dark, cracked stone floor. I added a few layers of organic tissue texture to make the whole thing a bit creepy. |
Above i have screenshots of my work when making the player sprite and main game level. I've been doing most of the work at home since work on 2 monitors makes life much easier with projects like these.
This is the final Mood-Board for my Time Ultimatum idea. I have added a few more in depth details about the project and have changed a few ideas. Mostly the level design needed reconstruction. |
When making the main sprite that the player would control I was in for quite a dilemma. From one side I wanted to make a land traversing vehicle with caterpillars and a strong layer of armour, but because of that it would have to be slow and that wouldn't be the best for a maze game (they get boring very quickly if nothing goes on). After some thinking I decided to go with a drone. Small, agile, delicate & deadly - I think it'd be perfect for the player.
The biggest problem I had to face was how to make the thing look even acceptable, not to mention adding animations. I had to do more Google image searches than I thought to remind myself how a drone looks like.
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Because I had an aim reticle in game for easing firing, and wanted to make it different in the out game menus, I decided to rotate it 45 degrees, thin it down and slightly change the colour. Although I don't think it looks the best, and will probably need a replacement.
The biggest problem I have with making the cursor is that it has to be largely pixelated and have a limited colour palette, and be easy to distinguish from the menu buttons. After a while I came up with using one identical and one darker shade of green merging into each other. This way the player will know where the cursor is. |
When working on my project I have stumbled across many problems. One of the most annoying ones were from Game Maker. It only needs one symbol in a line of code to crash the whole game, making you search hundreds of lines of code to fix to problem. Sometimes it isn't even a typo but a miscalculation of 2 values, making the fix even harder because you have no clue what to work with. Also Game Maker has a habit to show errors in code when there aren't any, making you copy your whole work onto new sprites.
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Sometimes I had to watch YouTube tutorials, and copy code to my sprites. Everything was fine until I launched the game. A crash code shows up that i have no idea about and without experience I didn't know the solution. After some research on the GM Language I learnt to locate the errors and repair faulty code fairly quickly. The biggest challenge is writing the code from memory, or trying to compose new commands with learning how it works when copying to start with. I tried the second option and succeeded once!
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When working on my project I was trying to implement a save system, where the player could save the game and exit it without data loss. Unfortunately after some research I found out that Game Maker makes a RAM memory 'screenshot' and doesn't consider actions that require constant computing. The result gave me broken lighting, double speed in the drone and an overall unplayable experience. After this incident I scraped the save option.
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Making a game without any sound wound be quite lame, so I decided to get to work and work on some gun FX and background ambience noise.
At first I had problems with playing multiple soundtracks in one level. I found out in the GameMaker manual that the audio tracks have to be in a WAV format, not a .mp3 as I thought. After the file conversion it worked as planned and the problem was solved. Overall GameMaker has very powerful sound editing tools and easy to use drag and drop features. Throughout the entire game making process I didn't have any worrying problems. |
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This is the final gameplay of my Dronerunner game. I have no idea why but it seems that Shadow-play damaged the audio and it sounds distorted.
The final game is exported in an .exe installer file and is about 60MB large (for a game that small that's quite a lot) . I've added a download link down below. |