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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.

Today I wanted to look at another fun topic involving robots and explosions.

For the first round of Rapid Prototyping at FIEA, each team was given an existing intellectual property to work with, chosen at random from a list provided by the students.

I was lucky enough to be on the three-man team that received the topic of Transformers.  Our team of programmer, producer, and artist decided to base our game on the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron from the begining of the 1980s animated move.

On the code side, I actually began using my individual game as a base.  I stripped the level down to one platform, added a second player, and bound the 'camera' to the mid-point between them.

As for the actual fighting action, I altered my run-and-gun shooting code to 'shoot' what I called 'punch zones'.

The 'punch zone' class and a sample of the 'punch zone' 'shooting' code can be seen here.

These zones were actually based on the hit-sparks from the previous game.  Visual flashes that would vanish within an instant.  They were altered to be invisible boxes that would appear in an instant to deliver a blow and then vanish.

This idea of having moves project hit-boxes was one I picked up by over-analyzing M.U.G.E.N. during my spare time in my undergrad years.  This is probably fairly standard practice in 2-D fighting games, but I don't think it would have been obvious to me in such a short time had I not spent so much time staring at fighting game debug information.

The two fighters 'shoot' these boxes at certain times during their various attack animations, and the boxes have a variety of properties, such as damage and hit-stun and knock-back.

The system for determining which attack to deal out wasn't terribly elegant, amounting to a series of if statements and arbitrary code numbers, but for a two-week rapid prototype, it allowed us to get in a surprisingly large number of fighting game features.

After that serious look into the code driving my Cohort's final FIEA project, let's look at something a bit more light-hearted from the very, very beginning of my time at FIEA.

Through the miracle of modern video capture, I've managed to record the entirety of the first ever game I made during that grand educational adventure.  This was a mini-game I made individually, building on a side-scroller template provided for the assignment.

The programmer art nature of it really shows in the way that there are flash gradients on everything, but I thought the heroine's running animation came out ok.

So the story behind this is that we were given some Actionscript resources and told to make a game in two weeks.  My initial thought was to take the sidescroller template and try to make a run-and-gun like a Contra or a Metal Slug.  

However, it was around this time that I began going to the producer classes and I began to think about trying to come up with more interesting game designs.

So, I made a game in which you stun and disassemble robots in order to build guns . . . which you then run with.  Baby steps.

Still, I had fun playing it when I went back to record this.  The sign at the end still amuses me for some strange reason.

Very late in the project, another student pointed out that Metroid Metal was awesome, which resulted in it more or less becoming the entire soundtrack for the game.

A useless bit of trivia . . . the heroine of this game is actually a side-character from an unfinished retro action-adventure game I made no less than three incomplete versions of prior to my time at FIEA.  In this game she's dressed up in the same uniform as Eri and Fio from Metal Slug.

One of the many things I'm thankful to FIEA for is finally giving me the necessary drive and deadlines to result in me finishing a game.  If I ever get around to posting videos of my pre-FIEA hobby games, you'll see how easily distracted I could be.

Here's a video I put together of the five rapid prototype games (and one individual mini-game) from my time at FIEA.  

The music actually comes from Master Plan, our the final project.  

I cut off a bit of the UI in the Flash Games (and deal with some white space in the case of the bouncing ball game) so I could keep the whole video at a consistent level of HD shininess.  However, I'll have some more in-depth looks at the individual games later on.