WIP Point and Click Mystery Game

MarkOnTheIron

Ok, it took longer than expected to recover from the New Year's eve. Some of my brain cells are still sobering up, but some of the toughest already begun creating an idea in my mind.

I have to be honest when I first saw the theme I was still a little bit drunk and I understood that Stormy set a geographical theme (like at world's end) and I imagined my game to start at the edge of Discworld with Death looking down and the he falls.

I then read what Stormy really meant and I did some research coming to the conclusion that the Mayan Prophecy had some hints of truth, due to some solar events that will take place at the end of this year, but in the end I think that unfortunately it will be highly improbable.

However I came up with a nice setting for a classic point and click story. Coding it will be easy enough the hard part will be writing it and designing it. It really looks nice in my head, let's see if I can make it nice in GS too.

Good luck to everyone else that entered the contest!


________________________________
【ツ】iPhone Icon Pack (compatible with DBA Icon Creator) 【ツ】 - 【ツ】Graphic Pack【ツ】
Free GS demos: High score simple and advanced; Game Center; App Rating System; Custom Font Score and Countdown; Advanced Snap to Grid

MarkOnTheIron

I've decided to go for a pixel isometric art. Time to research for some good tutorials on the web. It will take longer but it will be worth it if I can do it properly. I will try to create a comprehensive set of tilesets for walls and floors and then I will create the rooms and other spaces with them.

MarkOnTheIron

I got a little behind on this. Real life and the release of a big game got the most of my time. But I didn't forget about this.

I want to create an old school point and click game. The setting is an underground doomsday bunker. I imagined something quite big with 3 floors connected by stairs and elevators. The topmost one is the residential area. The middle one (the biggest) includes the common areas (leisure, eating, etc) offices, labs. The bottom one includes storage rooms and detention cells.

Here's a part of the story:

The main character will awake in one of the detentions rooms with no memory of the last weeks. He will be explained that all life on earth is being destroyed by an unusual solar activity and that those who survived were regrouped in facilities like this one. He will be left free to wander the bunker where... Ok that's enough

jobonoobdude

dude, that sounds so cool.
but wont that take a long time? we only have like two weeks left.

MarkOnTheIron

Yes it will take long to finish it. But I hope to have a full working prototype before the end of the month.

MarkOnTheIron

Ok, here's a little behind the scenes on my design process for the bunker. This is the bottom floor with two big storage areas and one central detention area. I think that I will make the link tunnels a little longer to avoid the rooms to overlap too much. I really wish that GS will allow us to move the layers during gameplay.

jobonoobdude

yes, moving layers would be AWSOME. I totally agree.
and looking good by the way

MarkOnTheIron

Things are moving slowly. I'm really getting into it and I'm considering it as a full project that will go beyond this contest.

I've done the majority of the tile sets. A big help came from "The Pixelartron" an action I created in Photoshop that ease me from the initial stages of work on an object.

As for the writing... I think I exaggerated a little. The story really got me so there's a lot of dialogues and little action. I have one questions for @stormystudio : since I'm not a native english speaker would it be ok to at least have the text proofread by someone?

MarkOnTheIron

Here's the final look of the bottom floor with the detention center and two big storage areas. I will proceed like this for the other two floors and then I will hone my skills at decorating the interiors

MarkOnTheIron

Well since I didn't went too far with the coding. I will rebuild it by making a massive use of the new table feature. I'm planning to code it so that it will use only one scene. It will take longer but it will be a great feat if successful.

wayneh001

Looking good. Will the game be set in isometric view? If so that'll be amazing, can't wait to see it.

MarkOnTheIron

Yes, it will all be in isometric view. And that's a big pain because I've decided to do everything in pixel art and it's sooooo boring

MarkOnTheIron

A little sneak peek at the first dialogue of the game.

IsabelleK

Two things Mark - if you use big background images, or other kind of images, and put everything on one scene, you will have huge problems with RAM usage.

The second thing - as far as I know, text attribute doesn't work for Retina (so text will be blurry.)

MarkOnTheIron

First thing: The new update opened up a new perspective on coding with GS. I already planned up a way to use tables to avoid cluttering ram and at the same time keeping everything on one scene.

Second thing: Display text is really shitty right now. But by the time I finish this game maybe they will have fixed it. If not the ID I used to identify the dialogues will be used to call for an image name with a change attribute behavior. I like to keep open more than one possibility

IsabelleK

Maybe I don't know something, but from my experience, one 960x640 image (with RI) takes 1 MB of image ram, on iPhone 3Gs. So if you have 20 scenes, and 20 backgrounds of your base (it looks great btw), ram just for images will increase, and it can end with crash.
But maybe Table can do something which I can't fit in my mind :P

MarkOnTheIron

I made some tests and apparently GS did something on how GS works in the background and unused images are efficiently cleaned up from RAM if RAM usage is too high. So you just have to avoid using more images at once and you're good to go. But that's only in theory when I will manage to actually get it working on a full game then I will be certain of it.

MarkOnTheIron

It's been a while since my last post. Obviously I didn't make in time for the TOTB4 contest. This project became too complicated also real life took the majority of the time I planned to dedicate on it.

Anyway, I will continue to work with it. Here's the basement for my 3 floors underground bunker. Two storage rooms and a detention center.




________________________________
Mark On The Iron - 【ツ】iPhone Icon Pack【ツ】 - 【ツ】Graphic Pack【ツ】
Free GS demos: High score simple and advanced; Game Center; App Rating System; Custom Font Score and Countdown; Advanced Snap to Grid

IsabelleK

It looks really impresive! I love the art style, and details!

HoneyTribeStudios

Yeah I'm liking the art style too. Looks like it'll be an interesting game.

Moebius

Really neat indeed, pixel all the way dude way fun that 3D looking art

SAZ_1

looks to be shaping up nicely... grammar mistake in row four of the dialogue though... "you memory" bit

App Surge

I love the art style!

MarkOnTheIron

@All Thanks!

However this will be the last time I use isometric pixel art for a game. It is really time consuming and a bad medicine for your eyes. I could swear that the last time I saw my reflection in the mirrors my pupils were squares @-)

Gnomer

Wow, looks really good!

Quick question, are they all separate images (the items). And sorry about this question but i'm quite new to pixel art, which parts are tiled?

Thanks

Clouds

Looks excellent, good stuff MarkOnTheIron.

quantumsheep

Looks very interesting!

QS :D

3xL

Fantastic. Let me know if you need music

jonmulcahy

looks awesome