uDevGames

Maneuv’It! Developer Diary by DGuy

2009-01-20T02:16:07-05:00

Hello any and all, and Welcome to my Dev Diary!

The game I chose to work on was one I’ve had in my design ideas notebook for a while: It involves maneuvering your craft through levels of narrow, twisty passage, filled with static, animated and/or free-floating obstacles while trying to avoid contact with almost all surfaces.

Control of your craft is accomplished by dragging it with the mouse. The craft is quite responsive to mouse movements but there is some lag/delay that has to be taken into account.

The challenge is too make it though each level as fast as possible, as score is based upon how much time is left on the clock at levels end. More time = better score.

I chose this game because I felt it was a nice casual one, that had simple gameplay, and that I envisioned having simple graphics, adding up to something I felt I could complete by the contest deadline.

Most of my time so far has been spent simplifying the gameplay and game-elements, trying to get the game down to its’ core elements, again, primarily because of time. I’ve also spent time doing proof-of-concept testing: Could I do, gameplay-wise and technically, what I wanted to do?

So far there’s not must to show: I’m finalizing the game internal flow, and have begun breaking the game up into managers and spec’ing out what each manager is responsible for. I’m working on creating simplified versions of the games wall tiles. I’ve also begun spec’ing out what resources (other than graphics) will be required (i.e. sound effect, music, visual effect, etc.)

Tools:
Unity – Main development tool
Boo – Scripting
Gimp – For image composition and image effects
Pixen – For pixel editing
Audacity – Audio editing

Since there’s not must to show, but I figured I’d post a few image of the artwork I’m using as inspiration for the games look and level design: Enjoy!

[LINKS REMOVED]

“Syntropy” by Tim Cool

2008-12-10T00:11:22-05:00

Syntropy
Genre: Survival/Action/Platformer
Game Description:
You play as an alien trying to survive an attack on your home world. You have to absorb the elements found in your surroundings to get through each level. Think fast, as the super being “Desumere” consumes your planet!

Primary Development Tools:
REALbasic
-SuperSpriteSurface framework
Photoshop
Spriter (custom tool)
Hardware:
iMac 2.4 Ghz Intel
Powerbook G4

Here’s the latest prototype:
Syntropy Game Prototype

Controls:
Movement – Arrow keys
Absorb Element – Space bar

Note:
The current assets used are placeholders (the real game will not feature Megaman nor Megaman/Mario music)

all comments are welcome!

“An Amoebic Adventure” (working title) Developer Diary by Joe Flores (Mojiferous)

2009-01-09T14:22:21-05:00

I may be a little late in entering the contest, but who doesn’t like a challenge? Here goes:

Title: Currently, something involving the word Ameba, Amoeba, Hot Sick, etc. etc. (suggestions, anyone?)
Genre: A real-time puzzler… Sort of an ugly man-beast-child of Frogger, Dig Dug, Super Mario Brothers, Portal, and dysentery.
Game Description: You are a parasite (at this stage in development an amoeba), happily going about your business of parasitism inside some unfortunate fellow’s body. You float through the blood stream, looking for nutrients, avoiding phages and antibiotics, and trying to (literally) divide and conquer. The game will be divided into “levels” and “worlds”- each level is a portion of a system or organ within the person’s body you are living within- so for example, the first “world” will likely be the lungs or stomach, with minor “levels” as you advance through the stomach wall and towards whatever organ you’re after next. Each level ends with a “target cell”, much like the flag at the end of a Super Mario level, full of nutrients to allow you to continue your journey, with end-of-world levels home to a much more nutrient rich cell that will give your amoeba enough energy to divide, increasing the number of “lives” you have and opening the door for possible mutation. Mutation is currently planned to be non-directional (meaning neither definitively positive nor negative) and allows for added abilities, special skills, or [possibly] unforeseen consequences.
How it will work: Like Dig Dug married to Super Mario at Frogger’s house… The player will start at one end of the level, with the “target cell” at the opposite end- in between there will be a maze of blood vessels, cells, bone, muscle, etc. etc. The player can move freely through the blood vessels, but they will be the main conduits for immune-response cells (of various kinds), antibiotics, and other such amoeba-eating nasties (everything will move through the blood vessels according to a “pulse”, and in early levels the player may not have strong enough propulsion to overcome this pulse and may be stuck riding the current. Also, as the “patient” gets sicker, the pulse will increase, making the game’s “immune response” faster as levels increase… this is the Frogger part of the game, timing your escape from the white blood cells.) Surrounding the blood vessels will be cells that the player is able to lyse, or burst- much like Dig Dug, tunneling through the body’s organs to get at the “target cell”. Occasionally these normal cells will also hold immune-system nasties or bonus proteins, making them impassible or attractive. Scattered about will also be areas that are impassible (such as bones or muscle tissue), that the player will have to plan around. Big gameplay concept: The amoeba may only destroy a limited number of cells in its quest for the “target cell”, so the player will have to plan their route to the target- will it be through the dangers of the blood stream, or can you make it through the maze of cells and tissue? if only you had enough cell-bursting power…
Graphics: The graphics will be modeled after Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the TV show), with a woodcut/etched look. Mostly black and white, but with color overlays for blood vessels, target cells, etc. Some important items or places will be labeled in a similar fashion to the book.
Controls: WASD and spacebar

Development Tools:
REALBasic
Illustrator
Inkscape
Gimp
Audacity

Team:
Joe Flores (Mojiferous) – code, design
Thorin Klosowski (King Thor) – design, script, music, sound
Liaht Rosenstein – technical consultation, editor

Additional notes: We’re hoping to have some sort of soundtrack for the game, and recorded dialog (that will sound muddied, as if you were listening to it inside the body) whether that happens, we’ll see…

Development Plan (as of 01/09/09):
1) build a graphics engine for the game with accompanying level editor, post them here, distribute to team (1 week?)
2) design levels, while sound, music, and other assets come together (early Feb?)
3) assemble levels and start building physics and logic for the game (late Feb?)
4) something close to a working game (hopefully by the end of the contest!)

uDeadGame Developer Diary by William Griffin

2009-01-04T20:34:04-05:00

uDeadGame Design Doc Part 6
———————————————————————————————————-

LEVEL SEVEN:  Poncho Co. Building Two Ground Floor.
The Glass windows leading into the office stop us for a while.
Snipers will be tagging our zombies.

If nobody escaped the Cafeteria this is the first we'll see of the Snipers.
Same rules as above for killing us off, except, if we are down
to half the zombies we started with, a bullet will shatter the
glass windows we are pounding on and the shooting will stop.

Otherwise have windows shatter after say forty strikes total.

We get out of the cold into a dark lobby leading to a security desk,
leading to a row of elevators, where one door is stuck open in the darkness.
The stairwell fire door will take 100 strikes to break, It will be reveal
a stairwell in the dark.
Tink Tink Tink
Boom Grenades!
The stairwell is oblviteration, don't go there.
But there's only one way to know that. ;-)

Entering the Elevator, the elecricity comes back on.

Muzak Plays.
The doors are closing.
Ratta tat tat
Whatever zombies are left out in the hall are
annihilated by invading swat forces.
Zombies groan and moan and screech.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
LEVEL EIGHT: Poncho Co. Building Two Ground Floor.
The Elevators open to Second floor.
There are hallways, there are rooms and offices.
There are people in offices who thought themselvs safe on the second floor.
There are windows.

Soldiers and special agents just keep coming,
until you either die, or eat your way
all the way back to the beginning of the game, down the road,
where the army is waiting for you with flame throwers
and machine guns.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
LEVEL NINE: DEATH SCENARIO
Fade slowly to black from last scene where you died.
ZZZZIP
"Thats the last bag I had in the truck."
"I'll go out and see if there are anymore"
"Well I'm not waiting in here"
"Dude, They,  aint getting up."
Click-Clack a door closes


Fade from black to last death scene with body bags lying around.
The last unbagged body gets up.
Play Guitar Rift

Fade to white...play Opening Sequence 

“Constellation” Developer Diary by Matthew Woods

2009-01-17T12:04:55-05:00

The idea for Constellation has been kicking around in the back of my head for a few years now. Thanks to uDevGames for giving me the incentive to sit down and try to encode it!

My biggest inspiration for Constellation is an obscure strategy game called Fortress (So obscure I can’t even find a screenshot!) that I had on the Apple II when I was a kid. Fortress was played on a rectangular array of squares like a checkerboard. It was a 2 player game where players took turns either placing or upgrading forts. Forts could be upgraded from 1 to 3 influence. Each fort would influence not only itself, but the squares top, bottom, left and right of it. If you could over influence an opponents for it would be destroyed. I liked the simple mechanics yet complex strategy of the game and have missed playing it. Rather than simply remake the game however, I wanted to use its mechanic for something original.

I am a big board games fan, but I have a problem with many of the more traditional strategy board games like chess, or risk. The board is always the same. I really like tile based board games like Settlers of Catan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan and Carcassonne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcassonne_(board_game) where you have to evaluate the board itself to determine your strategy. I decided I wanted to make a randomly generated board for this game. The problem was, most of the ideas I could think of for creating a random board with different terrain would force me to greatly complexify the simple mechanic that I liked so much about Fortress. The only thing I could think of was making different terrain that would limit the fortress size, but that didn’t seemed varied enough.

Enter my third influence, another computer based strategy board game called Star Chamber. http://starchamber.station.sony.com/ Star Chamber is a weird hybrid of collectible card game, board game, and 4x space exploration game. Star Chamber’s board is a placement of planets connected by jump lanes to neighboring planets. This suddenly solved my random board problems. By breaking free of a regular grid and having each planet connected to a varying number of neighbors, I could retain the simple mechanics yet create extremely varied random boards with different choke points. If you are curious to try Star Chamber, I host the mac client at: http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/starchamber/ It is probably my favorite computer game of all time.

The name Constellation comes from my first build of the map generator. The way my map generator connected the planets looked like constellations to me. The name in turn inspired the antique/nautical look for the game. Imagery comes from NASA and the Library of Congress (two great sources for public domain imagery) and from http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml a good source for free royalty free photos.

Here is a link to my current build of the game. It has no AI opponents yet, its missing a game configuration screen, and needs some more polish, but it is fully playable as a hot seat multiplayer game.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattness/constellation/Constellation-osx.zip

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Note: I am authoring in Director MX2004 so my current builds are not universal binaries. I plan to either download a trial of Director 11 or convince my boss to upgrade our software so I can build a Universal for the final submission.

“Gw0rp” Developer Diary by Stephen Johnson (diordna)

2008-12-04T20:59:56-05:00

Current Team
Project lead, programming, design, some art: Stephen Johnson
Sound and music: David J. Weiner of Atomicon
Design/content assistance: Calvin Eiber, Dan Hrovat
Art: Calvin Eiber

With the exception of David, we are all students at Case Western Reserve University.

Download the current version
Download the level editor

Old, basically accurate design document
gw0rp on github
Web site
Post comments here

Tools:
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
Audacity
Gimp
Git
Sfxr
SolidWorks
Stone Create
TextMate

Libraries:
Pyglet
Pymunk
PyYAML
Psyco
Lepton

“Boston” by Lincoln Green

2008-12-05T11:00:51-05:00

Objective: Make an outstanding game

Story consultant and design: Nathan Green
Concept art, character design, 2D game design: Micah Green
Programmer, 3D artist, sound design, level design, story design, visualization: Lincoln Green

“Stealth Man” (working title) by Mark Thomson (kiwimark)

2008-12-14T17:51:56-05:00

Newest Download: 2008-12-15 (UB): http://kiwimark-udg2008.googlecode.com/files/StealthMan20081215.zip

Hi all,

Well, this is the first uDevGames in which I’m participating in, so we can keep the history section fairly short. :-)

Project is a stealth game, where the player must avoid patrolling guards in order to reach his destination. In the future I’ll be looking to add some more interesting elements into the game to do with time, and with any luck also a few puzzles, but we’ll see how far we get, considering the three month time limit.

I’m using Unity for this project, coding in C Sharp.

So, my development log thus far:

3.12 – 9.12 Development began fairly well at the beginning of the contest. It took about a week for me to model and rig a character (art and such is not really my strong point!) and had a man who would run around on a plane by Tuesday the 9th.

10.12 – 11.12 By Thursday I had a “Bad Guy” using the same model as the main character, who would patrol along a pre-determined route.

12.12 On Friday he gained the ability of sight, and changes colour from red to blue when he can see the player.

13.12 Had an exam on Saturday and so all I implemented was that the key “r” would reset the level.

14.12 Added win (get to the green square) and lose (be seen) conditions, and camera movements to match. Designed a very, very simple level to showcase the basic idea, and set up my Google Code account. See the next post for link to a demo!

From now on I’ll try to keep a more up-to-date log going on here. For some reason I wanted to have a “playable” (if that’s the right word!) before I started this thing.

-Mark

“Chasm Bowling” (was “BowlMeAway”) by Ben Mildren

2009-02-22T08:10:46-05:00

Finally got some serious work done on my game and thought I should make a quick post.
The game has changed drastically since its initial conception and I took several false starts that lead to dead ends.
Yesterday I finally got going in the right direction and have made some good progress over these two days.
Accomplished:
-Level 1 basically complete
-made many of the models and graphics needed for the game
-made basic sounds for the game
-made short music track – WIP
-basic game mechanics and game play are done
-made (dramatic) end scene for one way of losing
-made gui
-had my kids test it out a little

Problems:
-lots of false starts getting here!

Next steps:
-lots of testing and refining level 1
-models for next levels that don’t show up in level 1
-make level 2

Software used:
Unity
Unitron
Blender
Gimp
Audacity
Garage Band

I’ll get the game info updated soon and get some screenies up too.

“Laserface Jones” Developer Diary by Justin Fic (justinfic)

2008-12-22T02:14:58-05:00

Late to the party, as always! I’m Justin Fic. You might have read my totally sweet uDevGames Survival Guide. I also wrote Kill Dr. Cote for uDevGames 2004, where it won Best Gameplay. uDG 2004 was one of the most fun and creative times I’ve ever had, so I’m excited to be competing again in 2008, with “Laserface Jones“!

Here’s the pitch:

Title: Laserface Jones vs. The Doomsday Amoeba
Genre: Omni-directional scrolling shoot-em-up
Team: Just me, at the moment. I will be looking for an artist very soon.

High Concept
The Doomsday Amoeba slides silently through space, descending on planets and suns the way stoned teenagers would descend upon bags of Smartfood Popcorn on a hot summer night. As solar system upon solar system falls to the gelatinous abomination, only one man dares stand up to the horror. And by man I mean robot. And that robot is Laserface Jones. While most robots learn how to love and develop other equally insipid human emotions, Laserface Jones spent his youth shooting things and watching them explode. And with his trusty sidekick, Gun Pod Willy, at his side, he sets forth to ensure a brighter future for the human race by killing everything in plain sight.

Gameplay Overview
Laserface Jones is my take on the space shooters I grew up with. Specifically, I’ve always been inspired by the Gradius series. Laserface Jones will play more like an old NES game called Burai Fighter, in which you weren’t a ship, but a robot that could shoot in any direction. Similar to Kill Dr. Cote in 2004, the controls will be WASD or arrow keys to move, and mouse to aim and fire. But where Kill Dr Cote was set in a claustrophobic, overcrowded room, Laserface Jones will be much more open, and the enemies presented more deliberately and systematically.

Gameplay will take place over three levels. The first will be the quintessential space victory flight, as you close in on the amoeba and blast through the outer membrane. The second level will take place in the interior of the beast, and the final level will be an assault on the nucleus. A powerup system will give the player access to dozens of guns and Jones’ sidekick, Gun Pod Willy, as well as physical upgrades and bonus multipliers.