Stormystudios - Escape Artist (Development thread)
StormyStudio
United KingdomMember Posts: 3,989
This is a little thread to showcase my game in production (slow production) 'Escape Artist'.
Which I started making for the first 'Think Outside The Box Competition', but I ran out of time and couldn't finish it... life/babies/work getting in the way of a quick game project.
Here's the old thread if your interested:
http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=17307
Videos showing the progress so far:
1st development vid:
5th vid
and a New one today, showing the menu, and some simple game play. Lots to fix and change... the timer in the game is very temporary and will be much cooler with a character running (trying to escape I hope). You get an 'accuracy bonus' of 3 seconds if you achieve 100% accuracy on a shape. There is currently only a circle and square setup in the game. But its slowly getting there.
Please note bug was messing with accuracy going down!! (Grrr)
Story ideas...either:
a) Once upon a time in the super happy city of shapes, a dark cloud came and stole all the shapes from the city and trapped all the city folk. Then on day an artist arrives and decides to fight the black cloud by drawing shapes and freeing the city folk... one shape at a time..
or
your a magician, you have to complete different magic acts, which get harder and harder. The more shapes you draw and the quicker you can draw them the more magic acts the magician can complete...
or C) just skip the character story idea and hurry up and release it.....
Which I started making for the first 'Think Outside The Box Competition', but I ran out of time and couldn't finish it... life/babies/work getting in the way of a quick game project.
Here's the old thread if your interested:
http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=17307
Videos showing the progress so far:
1st development vid:
5th vid
and a New one today, showing the menu, and some simple game play. Lots to fix and change... the timer in the game is very temporary and will be much cooler with a character running (trying to escape I hope). You get an 'accuracy bonus' of 3 seconds if you achieve 100% accuracy on a shape. There is currently only a circle and square setup in the game. But its slowly getting there.
Please note bug was messing with accuracy going down!! (Grrr)
Story ideas...either:
a) Once upon a time in the super happy city of shapes, a dark cloud came and stole all the shapes from the city and trapped all the city folk. Then on day an artist arrives and decides to fight the black cloud by drawing shapes and freeing the city folk... one shape at a time..
or
your a magician, you have to complete different magic acts, which get harder and harder. The more shapes you draw and the quicker you can draw them the more magic acts the magician can complete...or C) just skip the character story idea and hurry up and release it.....
Comments
essentially how many shapes can you draw before the timer runs out...
With bonus's for accuracy and if you can draw the shape (shapes) in one line...
Not sure how much fun it will actually be to play... but I'll finish it anyway...
player is an animator with a deadline, once the player finishes a level he/she gets see all his the drawings party together!
The intro sting is a png sequence and sound effect.
I made the animation myself using After effects. I made one for a fellow GameSalad user for a fee before.
....
Still working on what I need to do to make the game a more complete gaming experience.
Ideas (Thinking out loud)
...
There is a little magician in the bottom right corner, he waves his wand and and a puff of cloud appears with the shape in, you draw the shape, the cloud breaks apart and disappears and some coins stars drop into the point score at the bottom.
The shapes get harder and harder...
When you finally lose out to the timer, in the scoreboard page, your points are converted into magician talents.
And you earn new magician skills, which could result in a badge, or little cut scene...
e.g. the saw the box trick, levitation, escape from water tank, escape from straight jacket, etc etc...
There can be aims for different skills. e.g. get 100% accuracy on 10 shapes in a row, score over 20000 points for another, etc etc....
Once you've learnt all the tricks you've completed the game...
Something like that anyway....
I've been practising lots of pixel art recently, got my setup working nicely doing it in Photoshop rather than Pixen.
Here's what I've done this evening... its quite relaxing drawing with pixels.
Beardy artist and a bikini wearing brunette.
Always loved cool stylised pixel art, I used to have a book think it was called mini pops with a different pixel art famous person on each page. There's actually an app where you can browse the pics from that same book. I also had a job doing the colouring for backgrounds for a pilot cartoon episode done in a pixel art style back in 2001. First job out of uni.
Then the other week one of the TOTB2 threads someone is making a pixel art Eskimo game, this is what inspired me. I started looking to see what tools there are, tried out pixen which seems very nice but since I know Photoshop I'm much happier using that. Turned off anti aliasing, use the pencil tool and been messing around drawing characteurs of people at work. No tutorials just a bit of inspiration after searching and browsing google images with the term pixel art people.
Hoping to make lots of characters and a bit of working the game to fit in with it. Plus I might make a stormystudio Pixel logo, with a desk and a mac and game salad for my website. The website needs a remake soon anyway.
really enjoying doing these little pics..
Pretty sure there will be no copyright issues, as its all my own work, can I do a pixel art image of a stormy trooper and use it in my game?
The plan is to have different characters unlocked as you achieve different achievements, draw more shapes ....
Today I'm incredibly hungover, and trying to make it through a day at work as quietly and easily as possible...(I should be typing on my quiet little ipad not this incredibly loud keyboard)
Thinking about my game and how to make sure its fun to play.
Next things to do:
- Get rid of the timer bar at the bottom of the game screen.
- Add an animated artist in the bottom left,
- As each shape arrives, a monster flies at the artist along the bottom of the screen. As you draw round the shape the artist is animated (like a wizard casting a spell with a brush) and kills the monster before it reaches him.
- If a monster reaches the artist he dies, game over, the end... splat!
- The further you get, the more tasks you complete. e.g. draw 10 shapes in a row with 100% accuracy
- Add bonus things, e.g. now and again a special star when collected makes your artist invincible for 10 seconds...
- As you complete different tasks, you save a different character... e.g draw 100 shapes and unlock 'Hot Chick'.
- You can then browse all your unlocked pixel characters.
... something like that
The speed of the monster varies depending on the complexity of the shapes.
They also speed up the more shapes you draw...up to a certain limit.
Yep the idea of releasing a game not fully finished to a certain polished level is kinda what stopped me finishing it in time for the first comp...
Update:
I've now animated the little artist character in the bottom left...
Also behind the scenes, I'm trying to improve performance a little. Reducing the amount of spawning a bit (though performance never drops before 40 fps at the moment, but thats on an iphone 4).
Hoping to have this Wednesday off work, and an empty house to play loud music and work on this for the whole day.
Any one want to suggest what I should do to get the app to some new level of awesome?
Thing I need to do:
Setup saving keys/attributes,
Animate a cooler looking monster,
Setup some targets, e.g. draw 50, 100, 500 shapes...
Fix any known bugs... those pesky little things...
have you thought of having something shoot out of the artist's paintbrush and zap the monster when you complete the drawing? lightning or something in that vein?
Yeah have thought about it, certainly need something to happen. Got a random bug that stopped me getting more done when I had a full day to work on it.
Reaching the point where I really just want to get it finished and get on with something else.
That said I won't release it until it's all functioning properly with at least one unlockable item.
I seem to hit peaks and troughs for how I feel about any game I start making. I think this looks visually cool but it's just not that much fun to play. We shall see though.
I'll post another update soon
Ace
- I've got rid of the paper background (for the time being) to see how much it improves loading. Also toyed with have a smaller tiled (replicated) paper texture.
- Added a different simple monster character for each shape, and a death animation for the painter.
- Also new game completion screen, with scores etc... and space for the unlockables
- stil struggling with a couple of bugs, that are driving me up the wall.
(On a side note, my work have allowed me some spare time to start learning the other bit of software beginning with 'C', and sounds like a nice spanish beer. its bloody hard getting my head round it...but also quite exciting at the same time...)
So, I've fixed one annoying bug, so it now plays fine.
Its just still not that much fun yet.
So my new reworking plan.
The monster is always trying to attack your character, its always getting closer, if you draw a shape with 100% accuracy it gets blasted back 10 pixels (or whatever), and the monster keeps morphing into what ever shape you are currently trying to draw.
... I think that should be cooler than the current setup...?