Here’s my progress of Bacon Game Jam game. The mechanics will be a lot like Swapper, although to be honest, I haven’t played the game yet. In fact, I was going to make a Hitman game until I discovered controlling 2 synchronized characters at once was fun by complete accident! So lets see how this goes.
As usual, when a theme is announced in a game jam, I do a brain dump on anything that reminds me of that theme. This time, the theme was “millions of them.” Let’s see what I came up with:
Now that the Bacon Game Jam has started, here’s a quick update: I fixed the buttons from last time. I’ve also improved the camera animation to react more quickly. Similar updates has been made to the menus as well. As mentioned earlier, point & click puzzles will be next.
While I’m working on Bacon Game Jam, there might be a mysterious post that claims it’s automated. That’s the playable build of Prototype: Murakami! Now that the game is in a testable state, I’ve configured the automated system to post publicly to this blog. The prototype is, well, in super-early state, but it should bring better context to these development updates.
Yesterday, I finished the navigation, and had a working menu system to navigate from one path to another. Today, I added in camera animations to provide better view on the paths the character can take. I’m still working on update the buttons to indicate direction, but as you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve made some progress on that as well.
Once I fix the buttons (you can tell the text leaking out of the screen), the plan is to start on the Point & Click puzzles. For a week-long effort, it’s exciting to see the navigation working, but I still have a long way to go!
Last time, I was in the middle of the rail system, particularly on setting up a menu that shows up when approaching a fork. Today, I have a prototype of the menu letting you know of the branching paths. Clicking on the buttons in the screenshot below will put Unity-chan down that path. Escaping from the menu is as easy as just turning around with a key-press (currently assigned to shift).
Next up will be the camera animation. In the screenshot above, it’s hard to tell that our heroine reached a fork. Thus it’ll be necessary to visually show that the path does indeed split. That’s a little hard to do with the current suspenseful camera angle, so triggers will be implemented to pan the camera out.
Last time, I was working on making Unity-chan move in a pre-defined, on-rails fashion from point-to-point. Today, I implemented a button to turn the character around 180 degrees at any point in the game. Additionally, I cleaned up the running and turning animation so that the character moves very smoothly. Lastly, I updated the physics so that the player can climb and descend hills pretty easily.
The screenshot above shows my work-in-progress with the rail system. Like Killer7, the intent is to have several branching paths. As of now, the connections between each points are working, but the ability to choose which direction to go when approaching a fork in the road is not. Hopefully that can be implemented tomorrow, making the prototype of a navigation system complete.
A long time ago (2 weeks back, in fact) I said I would make a point & click adventure after being inspired by Ko-op’s GNOG. I’m finally getting started on it, and targeting the end of November for release. First step: get Unity-chan to move to different check points.
For the code name of this project (I haven’t figured out what to title this game yet), I’m calling it Prototype: Murakami. Like the past code name convention, it’s in reference to an artist and Superflat founder, Takahashi Murakami. The plan is to create a Killer7-esque game with point & click segments, explaining the dark and flat aesthetic for this game. It is admittedly a complex and daunting task, but I’m sure it’s going to be a fun challenge.
Well, I have a title menu for the enhanced Galactic NEON I mentioned with others. The intent is to turn it into a rogue-like game with upgrades and bosses. Very unusual bosses…
Make it Juicy presentation is almost done! The new games now include achievements (or flags) and a story. While finished, there may be bugs in the presentation, so I could use as much testing as possible to make sure it’s stable. Thanks for the help!