Games Module Playtest

20th February, 2009

This pretty much marks the completion of the first ‘whole year’ module with the playtest of the game. I took some photos of our game being played along with some others of neighbouring demos:

The Sony TV:

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Gameplay Video

12th February, 2009

A video of us testing the game for the first time after setting up the arcade controller. It should be explained that we were experimenting with some of the powers, and how they might be best used in real levels, resulting in some pretty hilarious attacks and counter-attacks (that’s half way to game success already surely?):

Powers available: The map rotator, the control inverter and blindness.

Also a shot of the arcade controller we would be using:

Game Screenshot

10th February, 2009

Having finished linking animations to actual realtime world movement I thought it was time for another screenshot since the game is really coming together. Here you can observe a character jumping down from a height while the blocks get revealed by the map movement mid-transition.

Also below are a couple of power up objects.

More Game Icons (and Update)

9th February, 2009

I spent a huge amount of time over the weekend attempting to build a ‘rotateWorld’ function that animates the flipping of the world on its head, while inverting all the controls, collisions and gravity etc. to cope with being upsidedown!

More icons

Meanwhile however here are some additional collectible/buttons/mechanics icons for the game:

In order: Blank, Gravity, Vision, Random Teleports, Jump Strength and World Flip.

I’m busy

3rd February, 2009

That’s right, busy writing a game engine and considering level designs as I add functionality to what the game should be able to do. Additionally, I’m adding towards my dissertation full draft. Hence there hasn’t been much in the way of blog posts lately.

Here is the game with both players fully functional and able to move around the same map independantly:

The latest demo of the game can be seen here: http://www.srjm.co.uk/i-dat/idat310/

Game Development

23rd November, 2008

Here is a little screenshot of what I’ve been developing for our Games Module game. Basically it’s been world generation and character control, and lots of difficulty getting a decent collision system going.

I started off with using a hitTest function on all the surrounding cells only (9 in total for the sake of using hardly any CPU), but this led to issues where the character would get permanently stuck a little-way into one of the walls. Not good…

Instead I’ve implemented my own system where I have a function that tests whether the target location, ie. where the player wants to go, is solid or not, and returns true or false as to whether they can move there or not.

Some Photos

15th November, 2008

Here are a few photos I’ve managed to take despite being very busy with my final year work.

Caterpillar

A strange caterpillar that my dad had no idea what it was, which probably means it’s not from around these parts.

Synergy Games

Rob and Tom at their computer screens and below is Tom playing about with the arcade-style game controller that we will eventually be using to play the game in a social environment.

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Synergy Games

21st October, 2008

We finally decided on a name for our new website as well as exploring fonts and colour for the general company branding. Hence Synergy Games has been created for our Games Module company as the publisher identity of our game.

http://www.synergygames.co.uk/