Weapons, trolls, and ogres

Progress on the game is going well. I still have not thought of a name yet - the project itself is titled "Dungeon" because the initial design was totally different. So, maybe "Acorn Defense"? Anyways, I've finished three weapons and two monsters, while bouncing back and forth between art and programming. I estimate the game will be fully playable by the end of this month.

The most time consuming part has been the animation, but that's no surprise because I have no experience doing it. I've been doing a combination of paper doll animation for the monsters and frame-based animation for the effects. Fortunately, it took half the time to animate the troll than the skeleton. The skeletons are built from MovieClip body parts, so I can randomly give them variation. Likewise, the troll can be changed to an ogre by setting each body part to frame two.

Bazooka: Shoots further the longer the cursor button is held. Explodes and does radius damage. Can be upgraded to leave a flame behind for a couple seconds, and then upgraded again to shoot baby rockets into the air on impact.

Bow and arrow: Shoots further the longer the cursor button is held. The arrows stick into the enemies or ground. I'm thinking of it being upgraded to shoot multiple arrows, or poisonous arrows, or both. The red skeleton just got hurt (I didn't bother with pain animation sequences).

Rifle: Does more damage the longer the cursor button is held, and the laser gets brighter, just like the sniper from Team Fortress 2.

I want at least one other weapon, so it might be an uzi that gets less accurate the longer the button is held down. The protective wall can be upgraded from picket fence, to tree trunks, to bricks, to stone.

FlashPlayerDebugger.exe is already in use

I love FlashDevelop, but in many cases it can lock up FlashPlayerDebugger.exe, thus forcing me to have to kill it manually through the task manager. This can be automated by inserting this into the Pre-Build Command Line in Project|Properties...|Build:

taskkill /f /fi "IMAGENAME eq FlashPlayerDebugger.exe"

And for Adobe AIR development, you would probably want to close adl.exe as well, so insert this line too:

taskkill /f /fi "IMAGENAME eq adl.exe"

Hmmm... and if I really wanted to, then I could have FlashDevelop also execute my batch file that backs up my specified directories to an external hard drive:

XCOPY c:\_Art G:\_Art /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

XCOPY c:\_Code G:\_Code /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

XCOPY c:\_DLBackup G:\_DLBackup /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

XCOPY c:\_Photos G:\_Photos /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

XCOPY c:\_Website G:\_Website /d /s /e /c /i /h /r /k /o /y /f

I use git for source control, and push the project daily to the external hard drive, but this batch file additionally does a hard backup of all my important files including the projects. If nothing needs to be updated, then it executes in less than five seconds. This is good enough for my needs. I'm thinking of additionally doing some automated encryption and source control to my dropbox or web server.

Defend your nuts!

What a busy week! This first week being indie has really flown by. But somehow, very little of it was spent on actual development! Insurance, rolling over retirement, packing and moving out, unpacking and moving in, registering an LLC, etc. I am confident that things will settle down. Yesterday was the first full day I got to spend on the new project. I have many ambitious design ideas, but I am going to play the next project safe and make a fun defend-the-castle type game. I need to improve my skills as an artist before I whip out the wild cards, plus I love defense games.

I started off by putting on my programmer's hat and whipped up some placeholder art and basic game code:

Then I put on my artist's hat and replaced the few assets:

I considered a rich prince who defended his treasure, but that's boring, so I changed that idea to a squirrel protecting his nuts. I know games don't have to make sense, but this game is going to need more substance and some improvements to the background. In the meantime, here are some sketches of some potential undead enemies:

Going Indie

After long and careful consideration, I have resigned from my position as a graphics programmer for Firaxis Games and go independent. This is actually not an uncommon occurrence in this industry. Independent game development for mobile devices and even major consoles is hot. It is a golden age. It is easier than ever to distribute games made in a bedroom to millions of players, and although the market may seem saturated, quality matters more than ever.

So what actually triggered my decision to go indie? I could write pages about it. In a way, everything just fell into place... To start things off, I am very well off financially and my cost of living has been reduced to almost nothing. I prefer smaller projects, and I cherish the freedom to work whenever and wherever I please. The success of my first game pushed me over the edge.

My short term plan is to develop Flash games in 2-8 week development cycles and collect sponsorship and ad revenue. My long term plan is to invest in the successful games by developing a sequel for multiple platforms. Rinse and repeat.

Levels 26-30

By popular demand I added some more challenging levels by introducing a new cursor potion. Although the game was already licensed, it got front page of both Kongregate and Newgrounds so that compelled me to continue supporting it.

What to do now?

Pigs Can Fly is a successful game, but not quite a hit. The reason being it is a puzzle game and lacks challenge, scoreboards, more levels, etc. Players say it is too easy or too hard, so there needs to be more variety in level design.

There is a small demand for the game on the iPhone, but I will not simply port it over so suddenly. I want to pursue at least one other game idea I have so I can grow as an artist, and then do a proper sequel with more game mechanics and a level editor when the time is right. Plus, the game is sponsored and I want the sequel to be independent, with maybe some non-exclusive licenses sold on the side.

Interestingly, the most time consuming part of making this game were the levels themselves. Looking back they are pretty trivial, but man, it can take a long time to come up with 25 of them. I did it all of them through Adobe Flash CS5 and exported each as a swc, so my tiny engine can parse the names of the movie clips and handle them systematically. The small circles are anchor points for creating joints that I hard code for each level with some utility functions.



I did not come up with the idea of Pigs Can Fly until well after the prototype, which, yuck, looked like this:



And there was a button to reset the level and create another cursor for recording (allowing hundreds of cursors), but players would cheat by trying to do everything with just one cursor. I needed a round fat animal to be the circle so I chose a pig. I needed to limit the cursors so I made them color coded. The rest is history.

I'm thinking my next game will include vehicle physics in some way. I've improved my skill in taking a photograph and turning it into a cartoon version, so I'm thinking I could really knock out a dozen of them at least.



And sometimes I do main menus while listening to music to come up with ideas. Maybe this could be for a dungeon crawler or defense game featuring zombies and skeletons?

Pigs Can Fly

I have released my first Flash game called Pigs Can Fly, sponsored by MaxGames.com!



It has 25 levels and so far I am receiving some very good statistics on opening day (I use playtomic.com). It has not even been 24 hours and already a quarter million pigs have been given wings. Better yet, the average play time is 13 minutes which is a LONG time for a Flash game!

Here are some sites that have hosted the game...

http://www.maxgames.com/game/pigs-can-fly.html (sponsor)
http://www.kongregate.com/games/epace/pigs-can-fly
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/567006

And then it spread to these sites...

http://www.juegosjuegos.com/jugar-juego/Pigs-Can-Fly.html
http://www.vivalagames.com/play/pigscanfly/
http://www.cda.pl/gry-online/8755f3/Swinie-potrafia-latac-Pigs-Can-Fly
http://gamepuma.com/puzzle-games/Pigs-Can-Fly.html
http://www.physicsgames24.com/pigs-can-fly/

And the ratings are very positive, above 80% from what I have seen. It's a great feeling!