Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Final Game Pitch

For the final pitch I added health bar functionality. The colors correspond to following:
  1. Red - hungriness (food)
  2. Blue - thirstiness (water)
  3. Green - environment or physical health (weather)
  4. Orange - psychological health (happiness)
The red and blue are steadily decreasing and need to be recovered by food and water. The green bar changes with weather or illness and it can be recovered by hiding in the shelter. The orange one should respond to the character's psychological state, or how happy he is. In this prototype it increases a little when the character drinks or eats, and increases quite a bit when builds something (hut). It should also increase when the character rests inside the hut.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Video of Shipwrecked 2D Gameplay

This is just a very rough 2D prototype showing the game mechanics, it should be edited in some movie editor. It's missing health bars, full screen menu, some weather effects like storms to show decreased environment health bar would be nice. The health bars should be hopefully added before the final pitch.



The X BOX controls are the Stick to move, X to collect, A to build. Player needs to collect 3 sticks to build the hut skeleton, and another 3 palm leaves to finish it. We believe that it is fairly easy to build 3D game with the same mechanics; it would be only more time consuming to create all 3D assets.

More ideas about the game:
  • When health bars are low too often the character will get sick, he will need to find certain herbs to get cured also he will be required more often visit his hut to stay alive
  • When encountering dangerous wild animals the player can climb the tree, the animal will leave after a while (assumes some simple AI for animal class). It will randomly choose if the near carnivore is hungry (will attack and be more persistent) or sleepy with its belly full.
  • Player can find and domesticate some animals and make collecting his food easier (goat-like, turkey-like,...)

Friday, September 17, 2010

Pitch time is coming soon

After discussing our game with Bob and Roger we are doing short 3D walk-through and showing the game logic on simple 2D version. I'll be working on the 2D version, everything is mostly done, I am going to make the background scroll when the character is at about 1/3 of the game screen. My idea is to shoot a short video, character is walking on the beach or the outskirts of the forest collecting sticks, rocks, palm leaves. His health represented by thirst, hungriness, and environment bars will decrease. Thirst and hungriness bar will get improved by finding the water and food, to improve the environmental one (getting decreased when raining and bad weather), the character has to collect enough material and build a shelter. Building the shelter and checking how many more material is needed will open a full screen menu (this menu will be faked in a video editor).

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Shipwrecked 2D


We work on 2D only, we need some menu on the right side with collected items and with some list of build-able things, grayed out ones means the player need to collect more items for it. Player collects items just by approaching them. On the right bottom side there would be health bars, thirst and hungriness.

update 1:
Right menu should be only icons with titles; drop-down lists or any text lists may not be the best pleasing solution.

update 2:
There should be only available tool menu, and health bars. With some combination of keys enable player use the tool. Choosing what to build should pause the game and open full-screen menu. Also things may be built gradually, requiring to collect more stuff, so the game experience is more real-like.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Hacking it together


We decided on 3D walk-through. I was kind of sawing together code from these tutorials:
3D tutorials
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bg3d/chapter1
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203897.aspx

First person view
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb197901%28v=XNAGameStudio.30%29.aspx

It needs to be polished but it works. It's missing proper terrain and plant models but this can be easily changed and added. Works both with keyboard and XBOX controler. It has no engine so far, no 3D avatar.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Getting Ready for the Shipwrecked Pitch

This is just an another list of ideas for Shipwrecked:
  • this is to be a tropical island, so introducing some interesting animals, like living in Madagascar, Australia, ... may be a good idea
  • weather, day-night, seasons, wild animals would force the player to build a shelter, warm himself and cook meal, and regain his health there
  • player may escape the wild animals by climbing the tree
  • we may have to consider how to cut down on rendering the distance 3D objects, collisions may be calculated just in zones, but rendering is still a problem, too heavy on computer resources
  • the prototype will have some simple 3D walk-through, some sandy terrain, simple plants, maybe some shipwreck, also player's health bar may be put there

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Game Engine for Shipwrecked

So I am on the team building the game Shipwrecked. I am thinking about how the game engine should look like. We will need to explore the island, gather items, and finally build something from it. I found this simple flash game Build the Bridges where, well the player builds bridges... and I guess this should be a good start.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Adventures at the End of the Universe


After several years you wake up from the hibernation sleep and find out that you are hopelessly off the known star charts. Your colleges in other hibernation tombs are dead. The only way to return to home is to do almost blind hyper jumps in very inaccurate direction. Each hyper jump is another game level with more difficulties to get through but closer to the Earth.

  • cartoonish with public domain Hubble photos
  • new real-like physics engine that introduces warped gravity fields, magnetic force fields, vaporizing radiation rays, slowing down sticky nebula...
  • weapons: laser, bomb, protective force field (possible tractor beam as Bob suggested - that's doable)
  • driving: all directions, forward turbo-engine, on/off visibility of gravity field lines or dangerous radiation (radiation as reddish fog shaded out by asteroids - viz image below)
  • obstacles: physics, hot stars, black holes, asteroid fields, sticky nebula, warped space, increased radiation (will need to stay behind some big asteroid), magnetic meteorites (will be attracted to the spaceship),... many more and their deadly combination. When being pulled in by the black hole doesn't mean game over but reemerging in some other older level, player would have to repeat some number of levels between.
  • asteroids would also be driven by changed gravity field or "sticky nebula", vaporized by hot stars, breaking each other, magnetic meteorites would be sticking or repulsing each depending on polarity - this can be quite spectacular. Even that there is a vacuum in space there would be introduced some cool sound effects.
  • after finishing level option to go to hyperspace to the next level: effect something like in Star Wars but more colorful
  • easy controls, no cumbersome key combination
  • mystery touch, something like in the movie Aliens