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General Discussion / Gravity Hook!
« on: September 06, 2008, 01:40:32 am »
Hey guys, I'm basically gonna copy-paste my post from TIGForums because I spent a long time writing it and it says everything I want to say and hear, so...yeah, here it is!
INSTRUCTIONS:
Move the mouse to highlight "nodes".
Click to grapple onto a node.
If you run into an active node you die.
Press 'X' to quit the game, and register your hi score (if you made it into the top 10)
NOTES:
I had a few days space in my schedule, so I made a remake of a cool prototype that Arne made a while back called "Gravity Key." In Gravity Key you used the keyboard keys to climb to the top of the level by "grappling" using a gravity function. Because it uses gravity, the closer you get to a node, the faster you go. However (IMO this is the crowning touch in Arne's design) if you get TOO close to the node...you DIE.
It was a really great mechanic, but having to use the keyboard made it....difficult. So with Arne's permission I made my own gravity grapple game, only powered by mouse clickan.
It's pretty much finished at this point, I just need to get Arne to put up a proper page for Gravity Key that I can link to, reset the high scores so Ptoing no longer dominates 7 out of the top 10 spots
, and make the md5 key for high score submission a little harder to guess.
I made Gravity Hook using my Flixel framework for AS3 (coming soon!), the Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse, Photoshop 7, Pro Motion 5, SFXR, and Audacity. Total dev time was around 5 days I think.
PERSONAL NOTES:
I had two goals for this project. One was to make a skill-based game a la Thrustburst, where there was no lock-and-key progress, just becoming more badass via experience.
The other was to make something that was intentionally and I hope evocatively abstract. I have been thinking a lot about the games I played and loved when I was younger, and I think the fact that they were FORCED to be abstract by low-powered hardware had a huge impact on me, and what I got out of the experience of playing a game back then is very, very different from what I get out of most new games. I always loved how Super Metroid told the important part of the story with the title screen graphic, and HATED how Metroid Prime let you scan anything you want just to stuff the screen full of bullshit nobody cares about.
I think Cave Story is a notable recent exception, as is Fez to some extent, and Rescue the Beagles, and Knytt too. I don't know that I succeeded in the way that those games did, but I tried to only put in things that would trigger the player's imagination, rather than prescribe or overly detail things for them. This is a new approach for me but it feels more honest or pure or something than force-feeding MY story and MY characters down the player's throat.
Thanks!
INSTRUCTIONS:
Move the mouse to highlight "nodes".
Click to grapple onto a node.
If you run into an active node you die.
Press 'X' to quit the game, and register your hi score (if you made it into the top 10)
NOTES:
I had a few days space in my schedule, so I made a remake of a cool prototype that Arne made a while back called "Gravity Key." In Gravity Key you used the keyboard keys to climb to the top of the level by "grappling" using a gravity function. Because it uses gravity, the closer you get to a node, the faster you go. However (IMO this is the crowning touch in Arne's design) if you get TOO close to the node...you DIE.
It was a really great mechanic, but having to use the keyboard made it....difficult. So with Arne's permission I made my own gravity grapple game, only powered by mouse clickan.
It's pretty much finished at this point, I just need to get Arne to put up a proper page for Gravity Key that I can link to, reset the high scores so Ptoing no longer dominates 7 out of the top 10 spots
, and make the md5 key for high score submission a little harder to guess.I made Gravity Hook using my Flixel framework for AS3 (coming soon!), the Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse, Photoshop 7, Pro Motion 5, SFXR, and Audacity. Total dev time was around 5 days I think.
PERSONAL NOTES:
I had two goals for this project. One was to make a skill-based game a la Thrustburst, where there was no lock-and-key progress, just becoming more badass via experience.
The other was to make something that was intentionally and I hope evocatively abstract. I have been thinking a lot about the games I played and loved when I was younger, and I think the fact that they were FORCED to be abstract by low-powered hardware had a huge impact on me, and what I got out of the experience of playing a game back then is very, very different from what I get out of most new games. I always loved how Super Metroid told the important part of the story with the title screen graphic, and HATED how Metroid Prime let you scan anything you want just to stuff the screen full of bullshit nobody cares about.
I think Cave Story is a notable recent exception, as is Fez to some extent, and Rescue the Beagles, and Knytt too. I don't know that I succeeded in the way that those games did, but I tried to only put in things that would trigger the player's imagination, rather than prescribe or overly detail things for them. This is a new approach for me but it feels more honest or pure or something than force-feeding MY story and MY characters down the player's throat.
Thanks!
Just to expand on the whole scrolling issue, the NES could by default do a single screen split (as seen in Megaman 6's sunset area) and in lots of other games too (e.g. the hud in Super Mario Bros). But you could also do scrolling by having animated tiles, which I think in the case of the multi-layered forest one of you posted would work great.