NaGaDeMo - Make a Game in One Month! START!

Scratched wrote:

Take a look at the Mafia game. My line of thinking is that when you're involving people in your design, try to involve them as much as possible.

Could you clarify a little what you mean here?

Gravey wrote:

Would you be interested in making the game political? Drone strikes on kill list targets, with points awarded for having as little collateral damage as possible (and having no civilian deaths would be impossible). Then the repulsion would be meaningful.

That would work shockingly well with my design as it is, although I'm not sure I want to make a game that political. I'm not generally the activist type.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Scratched wrote:

Take a look at the Mafia game. My line of thinking is that when you're involving people in your design, try to involve them as much as possible.

Could you clarify a little what you mean here?

What I was aiming at was to get your players into the role more, to empathise with the choices you're asking them to make.

Two ideas popped up in my mind...

What if you gave each target a hidden "backstory" card. So maybe you bid to assassinate a guy that looks like a thug but is really a lawyer... Or you bid to assassinate a woman and it's really a teacher (1 card), rich (1 card) with a jealous spouse (a 3rd card). Maybe assign positive & negative Karma points or an ability to pay to research the person's backstory (peek at 1 card at a time) before you choose ...

And the other idea would be to have two groups vying for control. Add in a hidden deception mechanic where they can sabotage each other. Maybe on group wants positive karma points, the other negative karma points?

Just rambling

Ok...goes without saying that this is incredibly "work in progress" but here's what I've got so far.

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http://www.mediafire.com/file/qpvz9ko1av6pho4/departure_wip1.zip
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100% murder free. Guaranteed.

Basically, it's the first couple of rooms and the first major puzzle more or less intact (aside from i'll need to flesh it out a bit once I add in the NPC's). About 90% of this is still placeholder graphics but I think I'm almost happy with the first screen and am starting on getting the second room up to scratch...

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/room2_wip.jpg)

Did some nifty pointers as well - trying to click on anything with those standard sierra ones was a nightmare. They glow subtley when hovering over a hotspot (possibly too subtle though - will need to make it more obvious I think.

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/cursors_demo.jpg)

Random progress notes...

OK...fleshed out the first main obstacle/puzzle and started to work on implementing it while figuring out the scripting (most of which seems to be really simple to use, but I'm at the stage already where I REALLy need to be keeping a record of what objects are called what and which image number is which, etc).

Thing's I think I've gotten the hang of now

- Getting the PC to move to an object/hotspot before interacting with it

- Adding and manipulating inventory items

- Using said items with other items in the environment

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/puzzleexample1.png)

- Manipulating 'objects' in a room - e.g the buried door at E and the soft dirt holes at B which "change" when you use the spade (C) on them (actually all you are doing is switching out one object for another that occupies the same space).

- Simulating a "first person" view for the artifact table at (D). There may be a better way of doing this but I found that if you 'enter' that room and set the player position to 0,0 then they are off-screen, with any text they speak appearing at the top left. All I need to do now is add hotspots that trigger instantly (which they do by default and voila - fake first person close up of something.

Progress - first puzzle more or less complete and test download 1!

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Update 1 below - Scribblin!
Update 2 : laying out the map and sketch of initial 'room'
Update 3 : Rooms layed out in rough format and main character sketch
Update 4 : In which we make professional animators weep tears of horror
Update 5 : Main Character move animations done (for now) and scaled properly
Interfacepalm : decided to stick with sierra interface after wasting time trying another
...but had better luck coming up with some nice icons for it and also sorted the inventory screen to match.
starting on the first main puzzle
First Puzzle working as intended, more or less. (Download 1)
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OK..so....plan of action. Going to add my ramblings and progress here as a means of attempting to keep myself motivated...

The thing that made me download AGS is that I've been watching Magiclorelai's "Let's Play" of my favoritest of Lucasart Games - "The Dig". So I think I'm going to attempt something with a similar theme.

I.e:

1) hero (lets call him/her Playce Holderr for now) triggers alien device
2) device throws them half way across the universe to ruins of an alien world
3) hero needs to figure out how to get back

going to focus entirely on part 1 of the above for now and see how that goes (and more importantly, how long it takes so I can figure out how big to make the rest of it).

To that end....scribbles...
IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/scribbles.jpg)

Initial goals:
- sketch out a proper (readable) version of the above map and plan everything out on paper
- draw up some rough versions of the 'screens'
- stick these into AGS and make sure Playce can navigate around with no problems.

This way to Update 2

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Would you be interested in making the game political? Drone strikes on kill list targets, with points awarded for having as little collateral damage as possible (and having no civilian deaths would be impossible). Then the repulsion would be meaningful.

That would work shockingly well with my design as it is, although I'm not sure I want to make a game that political. I'm not generally the activist type.

Heh, neither am I really (I'm not informed enough to be), but if the shoe (mechanics) fits...

I love that games essentially model situations, and the meaning comes from the outcome of the model, determined by the players' actions. Of course the model is still biased by the designer, if not actively then at least by what the designer leaves in and takes out simply because a model is limited. But basically you can take a situation, like drone strikes, and say "Okay, how does this work, why does it work this way, and how could it make one feel?" Then you can explore all those questions by creating a game, where the How is the mechanics, the Why the goal, and empathy in the player should naturally come out of that. I don't believe you even have to have a clear idea—let alone a motivated agenda—for how you might want the player to feel (that's what passive media are for), so long as you're clear on the question and the model you're creating to explore it. Even something as simple as Brenda Brathwaite's game The New World is a good example.

And that basically illustrates my conclusion to the Are Games Art? question.

Also also, I remember trying out Corvus Elrod's first tip for game design: hitting the Random Article link in Wikipedia—I got Operation Enduring Freedom. "How the hell do I make a game about that?" Maybe I've come back around to it!

Downloaded and played. It's looking very cool, plays just like the old adventure games. I found all 3 stones but didn't know how they fit in the door. So far everything seems to be working though. Awesome job stevenmack!

Citizen86 wrote:

Downloaded and played. It's looking very cool, plays just like the old adventure games. I found all 3 stones but didn't know how they fit in the door. So far everything seems to be working though. Awesome job stevenmack!

Spoiler:

I added some quick temporary hints to the standing stones but the idea will be the NPC's will - in theory - offer clues in the long run. Theoretically

solution...

Spoiler:

Star top, Moon middle, Tree bottom then push button ... the other stones are red herrings.

There's more than 3 stones?? I only found 3.

Citizen86 wrote:

There's more than 3 stones?? I only found 3.

yup - possibly made more difficult than it should thanks to my temporary scribbles but...

Spoiler:

1 in the middle standing stone
2 on the table at the dig site
2 buried in dirt patches at the dig site

Ah, I did pick up the shovel, but didn't try and use it anywhere. Good call

Gravey wrote:

Also also, I remember trying out Corvus Elrod's first tip for game design: hitting the Random Article link in Wikipedia—I got Operation Enduring Freedom. "How the hell do I make a game about that?" Maybe I've come back around to it!

I got Peggy Rae. Huh.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Also also, I remember trying out Corvus Elrod's first tip for game design: hitting the Random Article link in Wikipedia—I got Operation Enduring Freedom. "How the hell do I make a game about that?" Maybe I've come back around to it!

I got Peggy Rae. Huh.

"So in this game you all play character actors, bidding on guest roles you could win..."

Gravey wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Also also, I remember trying out Corvus Elrod's first tip for game design: hitting the Random Article link in Wikipedia—I got Operation Enduring Freedom. "How the hell do I make a game about that?" Maybe I've come back around to it!

I got Peggy Rae. Huh.

"So in this game you all play character actors, bidding on guest roles you could win..."

I was also thinking you could play as movie studios making movies for target demographics. You guess how many movies you can release during a year that play to, say, teenaged girls or indie movie snobs, and are rewarded points based on your production budget vs. the box office take.

Looks like I'm just getting back into the swing of things. I lost a lot of time due to a very bad family emergency, but right now I really need something to keep my mind occupied so I'm picking my game back up again.

Here's my three heroes in a randomly created map thanks to some code I copped from a tutorial. I have movement for all three, and part of my maps class written.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/d3GwI.png)

Now that E3 week's over, and I'm getting back to normalacy, I'll start putting it in the amount of work that needs to be done given my week off. I want to get the core match field done tomorrow. Tuesday will be setuping up the shooter, and hopefully a start on the scoring system. The rest of my time will be polish and other systems I wish to implement. Pretty ambitious goals, but I want them.

First few nights of playtesting my now movie-themed card game. It's turned into something a lot more casual, a lot more party game, than I'd imagined, but I'm not disappointed. It's kinda fun! And the best part is that I get to make it more fun.

small update - had WAY too many distractions over the past couple of days so I haven't gotten a lot done (such as FINALLY getting around to watching Game of Thrones season 1).

I blame Joffrey and his stupid punchable face.

Ahem..

Anyway. I have started drawing out the next couple of rooms properly (and also removed a connecting corridor that would have ultimately been just pointless filler) and sketched out the second puzzle on paper.

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/room2_wip2.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i183/stevenmack/thatbloodygamething/room3_wip.jpg)

Failure! Horrible, Horrible failure!

So...er...yeah. Times up (tommorrow) and...well...Kind of got distracted by stuff.

I got a BIT further in the game (2/3 of the way through the second puzzle and some of the rooms were starting to flesh out nicely) but just kid of lost focus on it.

Possibly it was a tad too ambitious to tackle something that required quite a lot of custom hand-drawn art. I Think if I were to do it over (next year?) I'd probably stick with some sort of single-room based thing.

HOWEVER.

I still like the idea of putting together a little graphic adventure game, especially now that I have a reasonable grasp of AGS. Though it probably won't be continuation of the one above since I was basically just making that up as I went along. Need to plan out something in more detail first...