Yeah, haven't been making much progress on Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. I've got all the excuses locked & loaded, but really, I'm just not having any fun working on it. So I'll get back to it at some point, and in the meantime I'm getting started on something more fun.
Harvest Booze (that's a working title, officially) is pretty much what it sounds like; a Harvest Moon-like focusing on booze production. You'll farm crops for beer, wine & liquor, craft tools & machines, build Factorio-like production lines and manage a little tavern in the woods. I'm pretty sure you're a backwoods-type brewing beer for the anthropomorphic forest creatures, but maybe that will change.
I've been wanting to make a hardcore-ish automation-heavy Harvest Moon-inspired game for a while. I've got a ton of notes, but I've pared the design down to just the booze makin' parts, just to keep the project small enough that I might actually finish it. It's still the "biggest" game I've ever really thought about making. I know myself well enough to be skeptical that I'll make it past the "you're a dude in overalls walking around a field of dirt and you get stuck in walls sometimes and the game crashes when you walk off the screen" phase, but I'm feeling pretty excited to get working on it all the same.
I promise to let you know as soon as I get a guy in overalls walking around a field of dirt.
Showing posts with label Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom Update #2: Ghost & The Mechanics of Possession
Which would be a sick band name, by the way.
It's taken me a lot longer than expected to get rolling on this, mostly because of school & work but also because I've rewritten the basic movement mechanics twice now. The system is, like, embarrassingly simple, & the first two systems worked fine, but I wanted a general solution that would allow me to easily add new movement patterns for different monsters. GameMaker code is always pretty quirky though, no way around it, so at some point you've just got to call it good enough. That point has been reached, apparently.
The Ghost is complete. (Also a sick band name). For now, the player starts the puzzle by placing the ghost on any empty tile, though I suspect that will change. Also, "play" and "puzzle" are being used pretty loosely at this point. Anyway, once placed, The Ghost can spend one move to travel any distance horizontally or vertically, and is allowed to pass through walls & other monsters.
Join with me in the comforting illusion that this hastily drawn placeholder art & complete lack of animation is not actually indicative of what the game will eventually look like:
Tiles that you're allowed to move to are highlighted in blue & tiles that you can attack are highlighted in red. I figured it was worth getting this working off the bat, there's nothing fun about having to memorize a bunch of different movement patterns. That's why chess is possibly the least popular game of all time? Too late to rethink opinions, buddy.
The Ghost is unique in that its attack doesn't actually kill the monster, but possesses it, allowing the player to take control of it. These placeholder monsters can't do a hell of a lot, but man are they ever happy to be here:
You can depossess (I guess?) a possessed monster at any time, either to land on an empty tile or to possess another monster, following The Ghost's movement rules, as shown above.
Next, let's get an actual monster up in the mix. First up is The Orcish Cowboy. It's got a projectile weapon, so it has to be a cowboy. But it can't be a regular cowboy, because of the name of the game. Orcs are monsters, right? STOP THINKING JUST DO IT.
It's taken me a lot longer than expected to get rolling on this, mostly because of school & work but also because I've rewritten the basic movement mechanics twice now. The system is, like, embarrassingly simple, & the first two systems worked fine, but I wanted a general solution that would allow me to easily add new movement patterns for different monsters. GameMaker code is always pretty quirky though, no way around it, so at some point you've just got to call it good enough. That point has been reached, apparently.
The Ghost is complete. (Also a sick band name). For now, the player starts the puzzle by placing the ghost on any empty tile, though I suspect that will change. Also, "play" and "puzzle" are being used pretty loosely at this point. Anyway, once placed, The Ghost can spend one move to travel any distance horizontally or vertically, and is allowed to pass through walls & other monsters.
Join with me in the comforting illusion that this hastily drawn placeholder art & complete lack of animation is not actually indicative of what the game will eventually look like:
 |
| This is an Inky spinoff Pac-Man prequel now. |
Tiles that you're allowed to move to are highlighted in blue & tiles that you can attack are highlighted in red. I figured it was worth getting this working off the bat, there's nothing fun about having to memorize a bunch of different movement patterns. That's why chess is possibly the least popular game of all time? Too late to rethink opinions, buddy.
The Ghost is unique in that its attack doesn't actually kill the monster, but possesses it, allowing the player to take control of it. These placeholder monsters can't do a hell of a lot, but man are they ever happy to be here:
You can depossess (I guess?) a possessed monster at any time, either to land on an empty tile or to possess another monster, following The Ghost's movement rules, as shown above.
Next, let's get an actual monster up in the mix. First up is The Orcish Cowboy. It's got a projectile weapon, so it has to be a cowboy. But it can't be a regular cowboy, because of the name of the game. Orcs are monsters, right? STOP THINKING JUST DO IT.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom Update #1: Basic Mechanics
I didn't get started on this until yesterday, but it only took a couple of hours to get a basic demo up & running. So far so good. So today I'd like to address the question burning in the minds of rabid fans and detractors alike: "What the fuck is Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom all about?"
Well, calm down. It's a little grid-based puzzle game. You're a ghost in a room with a bunch of monsters, and for some reason you want to kill all of them. Also, apparently they are at a cocktail party. Look, I've gotta make this title work. The catch is that, as a ghost, you don't have any sort of attack abilities. But you can possess the other monsters and use their attack abilities against each other. So the goal is to clear the room of monsters in as few moves as possible.
The thing that I hope will make the game interesting is that in addition to having unique movement and attack patterns, the different monster types also have some action that they perform upon death. Like, maybe one explodes, killing any adjacent monsters, and triggering those monsters' death actions & so on. So you can be clever and chain multiple kills together in a single move.
That's it. I've basically got the ghost working, as well as one placeholder monster type. There are probably only going to be like 5 monster types, however many it takes to make interesting chains possible, but not so many that it becomes tedious to try to remember all of the movement and attack patterns.
Stay tuned for the next episode, in which I enthrall you with the movement and possession mechanics of the main ghost character. Gonna try to get some GIFs up in there as well, if making GIFs doesn't turn out to be too much of a pain in the ass. Probably going to be a pain the ass, though, right?
Well, calm down. It's a little grid-based puzzle game. You're a ghost in a room with a bunch of monsters, and for some reason you want to kill all of them. Also, apparently they are at a cocktail party. Look, I've gotta make this title work. The catch is that, as a ghost, you don't have any sort of attack abilities. But you can possess the other monsters and use their attack abilities against each other. So the goal is to clear the room of monsters in as few moves as possible.
The thing that I hope will make the game interesting is that in addition to having unique movement and attack patterns, the different monster types also have some action that they perform upon death. Like, maybe one explodes, killing any adjacent monsters, and triggering those monsters' death actions & so on. So you can be clever and chain multiple kills together in a single move.
That's it. I've basically got the ghost working, as well as one placeholder monster type. There are probably only going to be like 5 monster types, however many it takes to make interesting chains possible, but not so many that it becomes tedious to try to remember all of the movement and attack patterns.
Stay tuned for the next episode, in which I enthrall you with the movement and possession mechanics of the main ghost character. Gonna try to get some GIFs up in there as well, if making GIFs doesn't turn out to be too much of a pain in the ass. Probably going to be a pain the ass, though, right?
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Potato Clock Games Fall Lineup Q&A
Q: Where you been, bro?
A: Stardew Valley.
Q: What up?
A: So, Ok, don't get weird about it, but GameMaker & I got back together. Sure, we had some bad times, but man, oh man, when it was is good is was good. Like that time there was a Humble Bundle where instead of paying like a grand for the pro edition & all the output modules I got them for 15 bucks. Good times like those.
I made Flood in GameMaker as sort of a warmup (always fucking warming up) and as a, like, 85% successful test of exporting to HTML5. The online version pretty much works, but you can't save your progress & all of the numerical values hilariously show up as NaN ("not a number", for the less nerdy out there) for some reason. Math? Probably math.
I'm going to start working, today hopefully, on another little puzzle game that I've been wanting to make for a couple of years now, called Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. FYI, I'm way better at coming up with titles and nebulous sequel/remake ideas than I am at the whole actually making games bit. Anyway, more on that one soon probably.
I'm also working on a long-winded, handwritten design document for the game that will make me famous. So stay tuned for that crushing disappointment.
Q: Wait, what?
A: SEE YA.
A: Stardew Valley.
Q: What up?
A: So, Ok, don't get weird about it, but GameMaker & I got back together. Sure, we had some bad times, but man, oh man, when it was is good is was good. Like that time there was a Humble Bundle where instead of paying like a grand for the pro edition & all the output modules I got them for 15 bucks. Good times like those.
I made Flood in GameMaker as sort of a warmup (always fucking warming up) and as a, like, 85% successful test of exporting to HTML5. The online version pretty much works, but you can't save your progress & all of the numerical values hilariously show up as NaN ("not a number", for the less nerdy out there) for some reason. Math? Probably math.
I'm going to start working, today hopefully, on another little puzzle game that I've been wanting to make for a couple of years now, called Haunted Monster Cocktail Party of Doom. FYI, I'm way better at coming up with titles and nebulous sequel/remake ideas than I am at the whole actually making games bit. Anyway, more on that one soon probably.
I'm also working on a long-winded, handwritten design document for the game that will make me famous. So stay tuned for that crushing disappointment.
Q: Wait, what?
A: SEE YA.
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