I don't like making progress threads really - for many reasons, including that I don't finish the HUD, border and room names until the very end, so any screen captures look a bit pants.
Plus, I have a kind of wariness that describing any ongoing attempts will exorcise my creative drive, rather than doing so through the game creation itself.
Nonetheless, I'm hoping this will actually do the opposite. I'm stalling - my progress is very slow indeed - and perhaps letting some of it leak out there will help reduce the blockage somehow.
Anyway, most people will have likely read the compo thread and seen that my attempted entry is "Starship Dizzy". It's set in the future, and focuses on Captain Dizzy - an inhabitant of the planet Yolklon IV. The idea is based on Star Trek but aside from some concepts like turbolifts and "beaming down" (I included a couple of sound effects from the TV show too) none of the game story is actually based on Star Trek itself.
(Oh okay, there's a homage to "City on the Edge of Forever", and another one to Trek-spoof Galaxy Quest. But it's not a Star Trek game - just copying some of the cosmetics for fun.)
I've changed a couple of things since the compo announcement - including the fact that instead of looking for five pieces of a mysterious and powerful artifact, you're looking for five pages of a mysterious and powerful document.
My early map sketches had a doodle of 'pages' in the place where the quest artifacts should be, but the plan was to have it be five segments of a single device: a gun, or a suit of armor, or five segments of the Key to Time, or whatever!
But I couldn't do anything that was recognizable as a piece of an artifact - even though each segment flashes different colors (which should be the main indicator) it still didn't actually look like anything no matter what I did. Plus, one of the pieces is being held aloft by a single balloon - which oughtn't to be able to hold up anything very heavy at all.
So I went back to the early sketch and made them pages/scrolls. It won't make any difference to the gameplay, and should necessitate only a minor alteration of the backstory.
At this point, I may as well break up the text with a screencap:
There are five planets that you must visit, flying the Starship Eggbox between them as you hunt for the five pages of [whatever]. I've mostly completed three of the planets (little details still to be added, but the basics are there) and I'm working on the last one now. The penultimate one was simply boring me (the design is a tad dull, and I had stalled in my progression) so I decided to skip ahead and come back to Xylon IX later. I hope that my enthusiasm will have picked up a bit when I do return to working on that planet.
That's a small bit of the planet in question right there.
I'm not sure if it was a good idea, in retrospect, to design the game with so many custom tiles. (Even a lot of the stock ones are recolored to make them more interesting.) The game looks fairly nice (to me, anyway) but it sure takes a long time to complete this way! Most of my time has been spent drawing tiles (with a fair amount spent coding) which makes me bored with Dizzy-game-creation by the time I get to putting them down on the map!
Even when I finish the gameplay, besides drawing a HUD, and a border, and a title screen, I'll want a brief intro and outro to bookend the game. So there's still a ton of work to do before I even think of working out bugs and looking for beta-testers. And now I'm all depressed again...
BTW, does everyone have trouble gauging if their games are too easy or too hard? It's difficult to pitch the level - especially when you're rubbish at games like I am, and all of them are impossible!
Thinking of the future, my next game (I had it worked out if "Starship Dizzy" was going to be incomplete due to lost files - which were subsequently recovered) will be a very small one called "Dizzy Rascal". It focuses on a young and rebellious young Dizzy whose quest is to escape from his bedrrom where he has been grounded, and cause as much mayhem as possible! Smashing windows, vandalizing, that kind of thing.
The idea was to create a different approach to puzzles - no "bring the bucket to Dora" style solutions, since you're not out to help anyone but to harass them - but in practice the puzzles seem to be a tad on the boring side due to the limitations. I still like the idea, though, and hope to complete it fairly rapidly after "Starship Dizzy" is all done.
Looking even further ahead, I have started to fall in love with a time travel concept. In a cross between Quantum Leap and Life on Mars (only in the set-up, not in the story or gameplay itself) Dizzy is knocked down by a car and zapped back to the 1960s. His mother (pregnant with baby Dizzy) is also injured and Dizzy must nurse her back to health as well as figure out a way back home.
I want to include a Back to the Future-style photograph that you can consult at any time to see how much Dizzy has faded from the picture. When he's gone, you are erased from existence and the game is over.
And somewhere else in the back of my mind is an idea for Dizzy marooned on a Lost-style jungle island (I don't think the games ever did a jungle, did they?) full of secrets. Again, inspired by a TV show but not actually based on any of its specifics (although I don't think I can resist populating it with Dharma-style stations to explore).
Do any of these ideas sound feasible, or enjoyable at all?
Plus, I have a kind of wariness that describing any ongoing attempts will exorcise my creative drive, rather than doing so through the game creation itself.
Nonetheless, I'm hoping this will actually do the opposite. I'm stalling - my progress is very slow indeed - and perhaps letting some of it leak out there will help reduce the blockage somehow.
Anyway, most people will have likely read the compo thread and seen that my attempted entry is "Starship Dizzy". It's set in the future, and focuses on Captain Dizzy - an inhabitant of the planet Yolklon IV. The idea is based on Star Trek but aside from some concepts like turbolifts and "beaming down" (I included a couple of sound effects from the TV show too) none of the game story is actually based on Star Trek itself.
(Oh okay, there's a homage to "City on the Edge of Forever", and another one to Trek-spoof Galaxy Quest. But it's not a Star Trek game - just copying some of the cosmetics for fun.)
I've changed a couple of things since the compo announcement - including the fact that instead of looking for five pieces of a mysterious and powerful artifact, you're looking for five pages of a mysterious and powerful document.
My early map sketches had a doodle of 'pages' in the place where the quest artifacts should be, but the plan was to have it be five segments of a single device: a gun, or a suit of armor, or five segments of the Key to Time, or whatever!
But I couldn't do anything that was recognizable as a piece of an artifact - even though each segment flashes different colors (which should be the main indicator) it still didn't actually look like anything no matter what I did. Plus, one of the pieces is being held aloft by a single balloon - which oughtn't to be able to hold up anything very heavy at all.
So I went back to the early sketch and made them pages/scrolls. It won't make any difference to the gameplay, and should necessitate only a minor alteration of the backstory.
At this point, I may as well break up the text with a screencap:
There are five planets that you must visit, flying the Starship Eggbox between them as you hunt for the five pages of [whatever]. I've mostly completed three of the planets (little details still to be added, but the basics are there) and I'm working on the last one now. The penultimate one was simply boring me (the design is a tad dull, and I had stalled in my progression) so I decided to skip ahead and come back to Xylon IX later. I hope that my enthusiasm will have picked up a bit when I do return to working on that planet.
That's a small bit of the planet in question right there.
I'm not sure if it was a good idea, in retrospect, to design the game with so many custom tiles. (Even a lot of the stock ones are recolored to make them more interesting.) The game looks fairly nice (to me, anyway) but it sure takes a long time to complete this way! Most of my time has been spent drawing tiles (with a fair amount spent coding) which makes me bored with Dizzy-game-creation by the time I get to putting them down on the map!
Even when I finish the gameplay, besides drawing a HUD, and a border, and a title screen, I'll want a brief intro and outro to bookend the game. So there's still a ton of work to do before I even think of working out bugs and looking for beta-testers. And now I'm all depressed again...
BTW, does everyone have trouble gauging if their games are too easy or too hard? It's difficult to pitch the level - especially when you're rubbish at games like I am, and all of them are impossible!
Thinking of the future, my next game (I had it worked out if "Starship Dizzy" was going to be incomplete due to lost files - which were subsequently recovered) will be a very small one called "Dizzy Rascal". It focuses on a young and rebellious young Dizzy whose quest is to escape from his bedrrom where he has been grounded, and cause as much mayhem as possible! Smashing windows, vandalizing, that kind of thing.
The idea was to create a different approach to puzzles - no "bring the bucket to Dora" style solutions, since you're not out to help anyone but to harass them - but in practice the puzzles seem to be a tad on the boring side due to the limitations. I still like the idea, though, and hope to complete it fairly rapidly after "Starship Dizzy" is all done.
Looking even further ahead, I have started to fall in love with a time travel concept. In a cross between Quantum Leap and Life on Mars (only in the set-up, not in the story or gameplay itself) Dizzy is knocked down by a car and zapped back to the 1960s. His mother (pregnant with baby Dizzy) is also injured and Dizzy must nurse her back to health as well as figure out a way back home.
I want to include a Back to the Future-style photograph that you can consult at any time to see how much Dizzy has faded from the picture. When he's gone, you are erased from existence and the game is over.
And somewhere else in the back of my mind is an idea for Dizzy marooned on a Lost-style jungle island (I don't think the games ever did a jungle, did they?) full of secrets. Again, inspired by a TV show but not actually based on any of its specifics (although I don't think I can resist populating it with Dharma-style stations to explore).
Do any of these ideas sound feasible, or enjoyable at all?
