Rather than wasting any time, I'll just jump straight into the next round of rapid prototyping. Also, pirates.
This time the focus was on telling a complete story with the game. This game was a particularly wacky take on high seas survival horror. The wackiness peaked when the team decided to include an enraged and undead sea cow as a pivotal plot point, and then hide this fact until the moment the game was presented.
On the technical side, I took what I had learned about platforming and punching and expanded it to a quasi-3D environment similar to classic beat-em-up arcade games.
Of course, beating up zombies will only keep them down for so long, so to permanently dispatch them, there's a more gruesome approach in which our hero puts his hook hand to work. The zombie is actually removed immediately during this move, and the hero and zombie then appear in a canned 'finishing move' animation.
The trade-off between the two was intended to be the time that must be spent in that animation, as the game becomes a race against the clock starting with the second stage.
In addition to the pirate-on-zombie violence, the game also featured a looting and pillaging system in the form of a lock-picking mechanic, which I pretty much stole entirely from Oblivion.
However, the twist here is that lockpicking must be done in real time while on the run from zombies.
Here is some of the Actionscript that displayed the lockpicking UI. It could be overlaid at any time provided the hero was close enough to the object he was trying to unlock.
I included the first part of the ending here in part to credit the students who worked with me on this and in part because of the zany.
This time the focus was on telling a complete story with the game. This game was a particularly wacky take on high seas survival horror. The wackiness peaked when the team decided to include an enraged and undead sea cow as a pivotal plot point, and then hide this fact until the moment the game was presented.
On the technical side, I took what I had learned about platforming and punching and expanded it to a quasi-3D environment similar to classic beat-em-up arcade games.
Of course, beating up zombies will only keep them down for so long, so to permanently dispatch them, there's a more gruesome approach in which our hero puts his hook hand to work. The zombie is actually removed immediately during this move, and the hero and zombie then appear in a canned 'finishing move' animation.
The trade-off between the two was intended to be the time that must be spent in that animation, as the game becomes a race against the clock starting with the second stage.
In addition to the pirate-on-zombie violence, the game also featured a looting and pillaging system in the form of a lock-picking mechanic, which I pretty much stole entirely from Oblivion.
However, the twist here is that lockpicking must be done in real time while on the run from zombies.
Here is some of the Actionscript that displayed the lockpicking UI. It could be overlaid at any time provided the hero was close enough to the object he was trying to unlock.
I included the first part of the ending here in part to credit the students who worked with me on this and in part because of the zany.
RSS Feed