It is so nice to be on Winter Break now, after what seemed like a long term it is finally over, I no longer have to worry about deadlines and banging my head on keyboards because code doesn’t work. Compile Error is done, or at least as done as it is gonna be for awhile, then there was another game I had to do for another class, so that was fun working on two games at a time. Anyway, enough of that; break has started so I now should have more time for catching up on a lot of things, this being one of them. I also have a number of things planed I want to try to do, but before I start them I want to test the water and see if people would be interested in them, so please do let me know after if you finish the post. Now lets move on to my wrap up on Compile Error and more.
He did not make it in the game...I should be shot for this one
All right, Compile Error was really an experience for me, 8 weeks to make a game for school where you don’t really know the program your doing everything in is not an easy thing. As I stated in the last dev post we we’re using flash, and it has its up and downs, it seemed like mostly downs. There were things that could have been done so much easier if we knew a few extra thing we didn’t even know about till the end.
Anyway, if we move into what I did, which is what I know best; hey who saw that one coming! I took it upon myself to do gameplay, that was my big thing I wanted to make sure it got done. I am a huge fan of the 2D beat em’ up games, and I wanted Compile Error to have the classic gameplay the rest of those games had. So, those big things came out to be the 3 hit combo, and the spin attack or the attack that takes away health to use, but is strong. For the most part I am pleased with what I was able to do, I do have both things I just talked about, and they do work; there is just a lot of tweaking I wanted to do with them, so they were dead on; time did not allow for it though. I think it was crazy enough that I was able to do these things in the last weeks of working on the game, so I can’t complain to much about it.
Another thing that in the game that was my doing for the game, was the movement. This was a really interesting thing to figure out, it was not just as simple as player moves and it works. With flash the camera is always in the same place, so you couldn’t scroll the level in the way you would think to. What had to be done is that the level itself had to move, and then it had to stop and allow just the player to move when combat is started. This was one of our early problems, but it was solved without too much of a problem. The real secret to this was to have a bool (a simple on and off switch) where if it was on, the player was in combat, don’t move the stage; if it was off, move the stage, player is not in combat. In the end this system worked really well and I think is one of the better coded parts of the game.
Now the last big thing I was mostly in charge of was the AI. Now, I know nothing at all about AI so it was something that I even came up with any of it. In the end I really wish I could have had a lot of time to work on it, so I could have made it better, but again time was a huge thing. So for AI, I really only went as far, as follow the player and when they come in range attack the player. That is about it, its simple, but it works though; this is really all I have to say about AI.
The title screen looks awesome, or at least I think so
Moving on now, to quickly talk about my other game that I worked on, I Wanna Be The Class: The Prequel. This was for my flash class at school, and is mostly a mod of a platforming tutorial I found, but I re-worked a bit of it and at some point would still like to rework the engine more to make it better. Either way this game was more or less to be I Wanna Be The Guy in flash. So I wanted to make a super hard, but fair game. Since I didn’t have really any time at all I did what I could and for the most part I think it turned out well. Right now there are only 5 levels, but that last level is crazy hard. I don’t want to go into this one too much, because not only did I go off a tutorial, I didn’t get to do very much with it, because there were some collision problems that took way long to fix so I didn’t get to put time into the things I really wanted to. Though if all goes well, I might be able to rework everything how I want it. So in the future there might be a I Wanna Be The Class: The Sequal.
All right, that is enough dev stuff; if you would like to play these games for yourself, you can find them in the games area of minusonecredit.com. Now for the site stuff, and this is more or less things I would like to have be features so big stuff, I just want to see what people think of the ideas. First off the Shin Megami Tensei feature is still planed to go on, I still plan to do my series of posts for the series, so still do be on the look out for that. I have been playing a lot of the MMO I wrote about a few weeks back, and Persona 4 came along to help steal my time.
Moving on, one thing I would really like to try is a huge feature on Final Fantasy 7, this is not what you think it is though. I personally do not care for the game much, and I want to go though it and point out the things that are not talked about, like problems with the gameplay, story, how the resolution had to be lower to render Tifa’s tits, and stuff like that. I would go though the game fully and talk about many things, this would span across some time I think, and I would think it would bring an interesting look to the game and maybe where the series has gone from there, but that is my opinion. I want to hear what you guys or gals think about this idea.
Hey, guess what Nei from Phantasy Star II died before you and was more of a useful character
My other idea that I want to do is really taking something I already planned to do at one point further. The base idea was to just do a huge post on the epic fail that is Odin: Photon Space Sailor Starlight. Then I got thinking though after I made a friend watch it and how I would talk about the thing the whole time, why don’t I do a full commentary for it, I’m sure no one has done that before. So, that is my other idea, to do a full commentary for Odin, and I mean the long version, no cheating out and doing the 90 minute cut, I am going all out. I would either have it in parts on youtube, and there would be a voice track if you own the movie and such. If this goes over well I was planing to have this be a panel at ACEN 09, but to early to call things. So, again your opinions I want to hear them.
Then that is about what I had planned for the future, but if you guys want to see something, feel free to suggest so. I do want to try to do new things that you don’t see often or at all, so if you guys have ideas, or want to do a team thing, or whatever just leave a comment or whatever. I mean it would be great to do a round table discussion about whatever, and that would be a cool idea to try, and I would be willing to put the time and effort to get it done. I mean maybe even some stuff over skype could be set up.
So this about covers everything I had on my mind for the site and such. I do plan to finally get around and have a theme done, as I do plan to make the base site minusonecredit.com start to look nice and such. Anyway, all of you have a good Holiday and I should have a post or two before the new years.