My teammate Jonathan and I demonstrated Shadow Kid today. While the prototype wasn't all that great, everyone seemed to really like the concept of me using Indie Game Maker. Both of the professors involved with game development at the school and the lead designer of Vector Force were impressed with my idea as well as the maker so I decided to post a link to that. (Above.)
Notes:
It's 60 dollars to use the license.
License enables use of all of Enterbrain's materials.
Program is fairly complicated to use, but easy enough for beginners in programming to understand if they just want to use the graphical aspects of the program to create a basic game.
The powerpoint I presented today to the class can be downloaded here.
The final (in documentation form) as well as the game prototype I used for my 440 final can all be downloaded here. (Controls: X to jump/confirm, arrow keys to move.)
It was a great quarter (in terms of this class, at least), and I'm looking forward to taking Game Programming in the Spring!
I wanted to get some blog post in to keep the schedule going of one post of every two days. I've had a lack of motivation to do much in the gaming world lately. Call it a slump if you will, but other than some progress with Chrono Cross and Dissidia, I haven't played much of anything.
As for game design:
Dojo Adventure:
I'm working on some additions to the game in the form of side quests, optional boss fights, and new weapons and other neat additions to the game. I want to do this for the sake of better scores when the game gets reviewed after being sent to some forums. It already has some good scores on the RPG Maker Web forum on Facebook and from some friends, but I really want to expand to the Independent RPG developers on PhanxGames and Amaranthia to get some additional feedback.
For the time being though: New weapons, areas, and sidequests are coming. Expect them in December. It was originally going to be the 4th, but it's going to most likely be pushed back to December 18th.
Shadow Kid:
While Unity 3D is easy to pick up, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be to learn. Not to mention I am teaching myself. I need to be disciplined enough to work through all of the tutorials to understand and comprehend how it works. I learn more by example than by an online lecture, so it's not exactly easy. We will see what happens though, I'll keep the blog posted with my future discoveries with Unity.
BETA:
A new skit is coming sometime in the future, I don't know the exact expected release, but nonetheless, it's going to be called Control Freak. We also have two more skits that are going to be filmed a week from now. One that I have written, and another that a team of three in the group has written. The one I have will be more comedy based, the other is a serious love story of sorts. It's interesting to see that we will start branching out into new genres and I'm excited to see where this group goes! We are all having a lot of fun, and a fun environment always leads to expanded creativity among members.
That's the official update for late November!
Oh and by the way, if you haven't seen our first movie:
We have picked out a game engine that we are going to use for the upcoming platformer project, "Shadow Kid". It's going to be the Unity 3D engine. It's free for PC games, but if you want to get a license for the consoles or use a Pro version of the engine, it costs a lot of money. x_x
Shadoe is doing the character artwork for the game project, which will be the basis for the character models or sprites. We're not sure if we're going to have 2D sprites on a 2.5D plane, or 3D sprites on a 2D plane. That much is undecided.
Anyway, to see the potential of Unity, take a look at a Sonic game that was redone by a fan using the Unity Engine.
Here is an RPG that was done using the same engine:
Artwork:
Credit to Shadoe for doing all of the artwork for the character creation(s) thus far. Note that these are subject to change.
