Thursday, December 6, 2012

Tile Based RPG - A Rough Concept

This is a rough game concept I've been playing with lately.  I've always wanted to make an old-school top-down tile-based RPG in the style of Phantasie from 1985.

This project started as a 2D top down view, but more recently I tried presenting it as a first person view from ground-level, which had been interesting.



It would be great to see some nice art in there, and then to experiment with more complex ways of blending the layers, to try to achieve a watercolor aesthetic.

One day I'd like to make a game that has the feel of a 70s fantasy film like The Dark Crystal, as if a storybook has come to life.



Top Down Zombie Action Game - Status Update

Here's a look at my current game I'm working on... 

I've been working on the Weapons and Vehicles.  




I'm trying a lot of new things in this game, using Tables in a much more extensive way than in previous games.  

I'm expanding on things that I tried in a basic way in Pulp Diction, and taking them much further.  Specifically, I have all the weapons in a table, defining a full set of attributes such as ReloadTime, ClipCapacity, BulletRange, DamagePerBullet, etc.  That way, the actual Weapon Actor is a single actor, but can take on the form of any number of different weapons.

Likewise, my Vehicle Actor can take the form of any number of vehicles, taking their Acceleration, Top Speed, SteerRate, etc from a table.

I'm also using a HudSpawner actor, which spawns all the different elements of the HUD, and they resize and position themselves around the screen as appropriate (depending on which device they're running on).  

Next I'll be moving on to actually dealing with the missions themselves.

Please excuse some amount of silliness and bad language.  If you leave me alone too long, I become foolish.  :)

Some thoughts on Interactive Fiction (and Inform 7)

I've been thinking about Interactive Fiction since I was very young, even though I didn't really know what it was.  I got hooked on the King's Quest games in 1984 and I was immediately in love with these living story books!

Recently I've started looking into Interactive Fiction, and looking at what tools are out there for making my own.  I found Inform 7, a free application for Mac, Windows and Linux, that let's you write your own games in a package that makes it accessible for non-programmers.  It's a pretty great little program, with good documentation, so I'm hoping to create a project with it in the future.

This has spurred many thoughts about the subject, so I thought I'd make a video about it. Any comments on the topic would be most welcome!  I'd love to check out other people's work, to see what they've done in the genre.  




Hopefully I'll have a work of Interactive Fiction (an Adventure Game!) online at my website at some point in the future.  But it might be a while in the writing!