Prototype 9

If you’re new to my game prototypes just use WASD or arrow keys to move to the sign that says help for instructions on how to play. People who have played before may want to check out the instructions as well, cause a few new things have been added. Most notable change is that the I button toggles invincible mode which makes it easier to skip stuff you’ve played in one of my previous prototypes. Honor system, only use it to skip something you’ve already beaten.

Here it is.

Make sure to mention any bugs, or difficulties in the game, so I can address them.

And you might be wondering why it skips from prototype 7 to prototype 9. Wormholes have something to do with it.

Prototype 5

Another day, another game prototype. If your new to this use WASD or arrows o move the guy to the help sign for more detailed instructions. After that start a new game. In the first room there are a lot of people to click on to talk to. Go south to fight spiders, and south even further for a boss fight. this fight is pretty intense. After a bit of practice I beat it with just the peashooter and no firing speed upgrade, but you probably won’t want to do that.

You can buy scattershot and ammo for it at the guy by the shop sign. Going west from the room with all the shops and people is a puzzle room with three locked doors you can figure out how to unlock. The left door still goes nowhere, but should go somewhere in the next update. Go south from puzzle room to find firing speed upgrade. Go north and solve another puzzle, than head west.

Don’t shoot, those are friendly robots. Also talk to the guy in that room, and he will tell you to gather three items, only one of which is in this prototype, the rest are coming soon. After you’ve got the firing speed upgrade, and bought a lot of scattershot ammo head on down to the boss I mentioned earlier, and kill him. And that’s all that’s in this prototype.

Here it is.

leave comment etc.

Player Agency: Leaving Your Mark

In the past I have talked about player agency and how I consider it to be very important, but what is it really all about? What is so great about player agency? Player agency basically allows the player to  leave a mark on the game world, either temporary or permanent. Permanent is usually better, but will make the save file larger, and temporary changes are often nearly as enjoyable.

When I say make a change,  I don’t necessarily mean anything big, even something simple like killing a zombie is a change in the gameworld. Before there was a zombie, now there’s just a immobile corpse. Even simpler than that, leaving footprints in the snow is a way for a player to leave their mark. Uncharted 2 really impressed me because it left permanent footprints in the snow. I’ve seen a few games before that that left footprints in the snow, but after a few seconds they disappeared. Uncharted 2 was the first game I saw that had permanent footprints.

I usually care a lot more about the core gameplay of a game than little visual details, but they can improve the over all experience. It seems like there’s a trend toward cinematic game, longer and more impressive cutscenes. Now cutscenes can be nice from time to time, but I think the priorities are wrong.

The most important visuals are the ones that the player can interact with. Leaving footprints behind, flattened grass where they walk, realistic water splashing when someone steps in it(although some games are already getting pretty good at this one). These little details are more important than a 10 minute cut scene, no matter how impressive because they respond to the player’s interaction.

I have to say that Farcry 2 had a very impressive fire propagation system, which was definitely the coolest thing about the game, and was a great way for a player to leave their mark on the gameworld, even is it was temporary. Go ahead and mention any games you can think of that let players interact with the environment in cool ways, as well as leaving praise or criticism of this post.

Doom: Still Awesome

So here’s the story, I was on newgrounds and I found out someone had created Doom in Flash. Now its not like they just made it from scratch and tried to make it as close to the original as possible. If they are to be trusted, they took actual Doom source code and converted it into flash action script. As far as I know, all of the textures, enemies, and level design is exactly the same as in the original Doom. It might not be, so if something I’m saying here doesn’t sound quite right, it might be because it wasn’t a perfect copy of the original, but I do believe this is a faithful copy of the original.

The other problem is that it is 0nly the first third of the game. Since the beginning of the game is free, its perfectly okay to make a free flash game to let people play it, but the other two parts must be paid for. Right now I’m still trying to see if there’s somewhere to get the other two parts of Doom, but so far no luck. It may very well be impossible. I do think that playing the first third of the game does give me the ability to make some observations about it though.

First of all, the graphics. They are pretty horrible and it bothered me at first, but after playing for awhile I was having too much fun to even care about graphics. If you are trying to make a game that immerses the player in a new world, than good graphics are something to strive for, but for a game like this, immersion isn’t really a big deal. If you can tell who the enemies are and shoot them, then the graphics are good enough.

Another interesting thing about this game is that it doesn’t use the mouse at all. WASD for movement and the left and right arrow keys to look left and right. Which brings up another point, there is no way to look up and down. No mouse for aiming and no looking up and down at all, might seem like it would be quite bad for an FPS, but it turns out to be okay, because Doom is quite generous with the aiming. If a guy is sorta close to the middle of the screen when you shoot, you’ll hit him.

You might be wondering, whats the point of playing an FPS if the aiming is so dumbed down. Well there is another area that Doom does quite well, which I think makes up for this. Movement. Most FPSs I’ve played recently go something like this, you and the enemies sit behind cover taking turns taking potshots at each other until they all die. Since the player has regenerating health and the enemies don’t it would take amazing levels of incompetence to actually be killed. After killing all the enemies you can run to the next cover an repeat this process.

So clearly movement is not very important in most modern FPSs, but in doom it actually is. Many enemies will shoot fireballs or other projectiles that you can avoid if you react quick enough. Rather than staying behind cover, moving around is the key to beating your enemies. I actually wish more games were like this.

Level design is pretty good. If I had one complaint about this game it would be that sometimes I have to flip a switch and backtrack through an area to find the door that just opened, but its not too bad. It certainly isn’t Halo levels of backtracking so I can’t complain too much. For the most part, you keep moving to new areas without a lot of backtracking.

Another good thing about the level design, is that it isn’t as linear as some modern shooters. There are branches off the main path that have things like, health, armor, guns, ammo. Its no surprise that after FPS games widely adopted regenerating health that they also became incredibly linear. Without the  need to find health and armor, there’s really no need to have anything but one long, linear path to go down. I actually quite enjoy looking through the levels to find all the health, armor and ammo I can. Its much more fun than just advancing through a linear shooter.

Weapons. Sadly I didn’t play through the entire game so I didn’t get to use all the weapons. I understand this game has a BFG, which sounds pretty cool. Of the guns I did use, there’s a pistol, which is nothing too special, but its gets the job done against the weaker enemies. There’s the shotgun, which is awesome. Before I said the game was quite generous with the aiming, if the enemies are sorta close to the middle of the screen you’ll hit them. This goes double for the shotgun. The spread of fire is ridiculous and it does a good amount of damage. Sometimes I could kill multiple people with one shotgun blast if they were standing close enough together. And lastly there’s the chaingun, which uses the same ammo as the pistol, and for all I know, it does the same damage per shot as the pistol, it just fires a lot faster. Very useful against tough enemies.

This game had quite a few types of enemies, and if I’d played all the way through, their probably would have been more. Of the ones I did see, their were some that looked human, zombies maybe? There were some that didn’t look human, but were humanoid and brown. They shot fireballs and were a bit tougher than the human enemies. There were some sort of rather large monstrosity, that I can’t really properly describe, but they tend to use melee so its best to keep moving when they are around. And most surprising was that there was an invisible enemy that can barely be seen, except that there’s blurriness wherever they go.

At the end of the section I played there was an epic boss battle. Two really tough guys shot fireballs at me. It actually wasn’t too bad. They had a ton of health and it took most of my ammo to kill them, but there was plenty of room to move around, and they only hit me a few times with the fireballs.

Overall I’d say this is a good game. The title is slightly exaggerated, its not really awesome, but it is quite fun. Many modern FPS developers could take a lesson from Doom.

Tragic Hero: Baiting the Trap

A few days ago I had an idea about making a game were the player becomes a tragic hero, rather than watching a story unfold that has a tragic hero in it. You should probably read it, if you haven’t already, before continuing with this one. That same day I also had a post about the BrainHex quiz which tries to determine the primary motivation for why people games. It just occurred to me that the different categories in the BrainHex quiz can help me lay traps for players in the tragic game, and I will explain shortly.

So first off, the game is a traditional medieval RPG, but the player character starts out quite strong compared to other RPGs. In the last post I said I just wanted side quests, no main quest, and the tragedy would be hidden in one of those optional quests. I’ve decided that having a main quest would work better, but if you do it without following any of the optional content, the game will be very short and very bland. You will get the one “good” ending where nothing horrible happens to your character.

The other problem with my previous post was that I thought I could trick every single player into falling for the same trick, leading to a tragedy. Thanks to the BrainHex listing several different categories of gamers, we can set tragic traps that prey on specific play styles. Probably should have a few for each category spread across the game world, to minimize the chance that they will accidentally miss it.

For seekers it should be easy enough, there will be many optional dungeons throughout the game, most of which are completely safe, but a few of them will have cursed treasure, like the kind mentioned in the previous post, or some variation that leads to a similar result. The player slowly gets weaker, attempts a final quest to undo it, than dies.

Conquerors shouldn’t be too hard. Since the player starts out so much stronger than in normal RPGs most quests will be too easy and the conquerors will crave more challenge, so offering up a series of increasingly challenging quests should be the perfect bait for them. Maybe the player fights an enemy that delivers a mortal wound that will slowly lead to their death.

Achievers could be the easiest of all. Simply make an achievement that tells them something like, start a brawl in the pub, but really it can be pretty much anything we want. Unable to resist the urge to get an achievement, these guys will follow a path to their own demise. Maybe the person they get into a brawl with in the pub just happens to be a wizard who curses them, and will only lift the curse if they do tasks for him.

Some categories might be harder than others to come up with, especially socialiser, which seems nearly impossible to work out in a single player game, but maybe someone can think of a way to do that one. Anyway this is just a theoretical exercise so its not a big deal if I can’t think of something for every category.

An important aspect of the game, is that after the terrible fate, whatever it may be, has befallen the player they get quite a bit of time before the end. They can try desperately on a quest to overturn the fate that has befallen them, or they can continue on the main quest and try to finish it before their demise, or they can go on any number of sidequests, or they can sit around doing nothing while their death approaches. There will be a large number of possible endings based mainly on what tragedy befalls the player, and what they do with their limited time.

BrainHex

There’s this test called BrainHex, that is supposed to categorize you based on what games you enjoy, that several blogs are talking about. You might say, “why are all these blogs talking about the quiz?” The answer: because I willed it to happen (never mind that post by me says the quiz has 6 categories when there are in fact 7).

“Why you arrogant SOB, do you really think things happen just cause you will it?” Calm down I was just kidding. If things happened because I willed it, then people would visit my blog and leave comments, but we all know that will never happen. Anyway here are some blogs that are talking about BrainHex(because I willed it).

They’ve taken the quiz more recently than I have so there insights will be more fresh and accurate than mine. All I can say is that I thought it was pretty accurate, though not perfect(but what quiz is without fault anyway). I’m a Mastermind-Conqueror. I like to plan strategies, solve puzzles, and crush strong opponents. Another interesting thing about the quiz is that different categories are related to different chemicals in the brain, and mine are dopamine and norepinephrine.

Anyway this is basically me just telling you to go to some other blogs without saying anything really substantial, so I’ll have another post later today. If you’re new here, feel free to  read some of the older posts and LEAVE SOME COMMENTS!