Game Development Fun: Shooter Mock Up

Wild west light gun shooting mixed with intense boss fights! Think Wild Gunmen meets Mega Man, but with a bit of Zelda style overworld exploration mixed in. Basically all of my games are something with Mega Man and Zelda mixed in, now that I think about it, but I genuinely believe that those games have a ton to offer other genres. As much as I love the Zapper, most of the games that utilized it were pretty simple diversions. Sure, it took a fair amount of time to get good at Duck Hunt or Barker Bill, but once you hit that plateau, there wasn't much else to do. It was hard to really get lost in those games.

Of course, other light gun games came as the years went by. Favorites like House of the Dead and Time Crisis are basically just more dynamic Zapper games, but even those end up feeling shallow. Even on home consoles, the arcade origin of the shooting gallery genre is very apparent. I think this is owed in large part to the lack of traditional control options on the light guns of the past. While I seem to remember my Dreamcast guns having some kind of buttons and maybe even a d-pad, actually using it for a game was out of the question. It just wasn't comfortable.

Now, I am admittedly a huge Wii nerd, and though most people look down on the Wii remote's design, I've always been enamored with it, and I don't think any game managed to utilize it's core value better than Metroid: Other M. Switching between the NES style sideways orientation for platforming and exploration and the light gun style pointer orientation for first person shooting and scanning demonstrated both the versatility of the controller and a kind of economy of design that made the control set up of virtually any other modern game seem convoluted.

Taking that dynamic as inspiration, I designed this game with the Wii remote in mind. All of the fighting and shooting would be done in these first person scenes using the controller like a pointer or light gun, while exploration and adventuring would be done Zelda style with the controller held like a NES game pad. While I don't have all the details hammered out (should there be random encounters?), I think the idea of going back and forth between world exploration and intense first person combat could be pretty cool. With lots of different guns, locations, sub weapons, and bosses, I'd like to imagine this as the first fully featured light gun game.

No actual programming work on this game yet, as it is still in the EARLY early phase of planning. That said, I have actually made some for real progress on Super Bird Force as far as programming goes, but I'll share more on that in the near future. Some actual in game screenshots could be right around the corner!

Okay, that's it! Stuff from my trip to Comic Con later!

Bayonetta 2 Pixel Art and Twitter Glory

So Bayonetta 2 is getting pretty near release in North America, and I'm pretty excited about it. I've loved Platinum Games since back when they were Clover Studios, and more games from them is always a good thing. I absolutely adore the Wonderful 101, but I sadly missed out on Bayonetta, as I didn't have an Xbox 360 or PS3 when it came out, and never found the time to pick it up subsequently. The Wii U rerelease packaged with Bayonetta 2 will be my first time playing the original, and I'm looking forward to it.

It's been a long time since I did a real good demake, partly because nothing has caught my fancy and partly because I've been busy with other things which have occupied most of my time, but I enjoyed doing this kind of thing and thought it might be fun to do again. The goal was to picture a scene from Bayo 2, as if it were a classic 2D action game, ala Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden.

I'm probably most pleased with the sky, as capturing the sort of ethereal radiance was very tough, but I also am pretty proud of how much of Bayonetta's features I was able to squeeze into that sprite. People tend to 'oooo' and 'aaaaa' over really big sprites, but honestly those are much easier to make good, as they start to just become small drawings after a while. It's REALLY challenge to turn a hundred or so pixels into something that looks like anything, let alone a specific character, so I think I accomplished something good here.

I was also granted the supreme honor of having Bayonetta's real life daddy, madman Hideki Kamiya retweet the image with rare enthusiasm. Probably the first post I've eve made on Twitter that ANYBODY has ever looked at. Yay!

In other news, I'll be wrapping up the fourth issue of Nova Phase this week, which means it should be on (digital) store shelves in the near future, with the print compilation of 3 and 4 available on Amazon soon after. I hope. I'll make an announcement. In the mean time, issue 3 is available on Comixology now, so if you haven't already, check it out!

https://www.comixology.com/Nova-Phase-3/digital-comic/104319

Also working on the next chapter of Ja-Ja-Ja-Janken!, which is coming along nicely. With Saturday morning cartoons becoming officially extinct like, next month, I feel like my work on Saturday Morning Anime is more dire than ever.

Lots of work on AtomMan

Was seized by the desire to work on AtomMan, a project I've been working on and off on for a very long time. It was actually the first ever game I ever made, waaaay back in like 1999, when I was just a 6th grader! It originally started as a MegaMan fan game, but after a little while, I guess I wanted to make up my own bad guys and such, and it turned into a VERY thinly veiled ripoff, parody, homage, or whatever you want to call it. The sprites were even just crappy recolored versions of MegaMan characters, with pretty minor tweaks. There was a great deal of humor in the game, and some pretty terrible and basic gameplay, but I felt pretty accomplished.

Now, years later, I couldn't really resist the urge to look at these characters again, and I started to think that maybe there was some potential here. Sure, it started as a pretty basic ripoff, but some of the designs had genuinely cool elements, and I thought I could re-imagine it into something much more original, while still obviously honoring the games that inspired it.

So yeah, the inspiration is probably SUPER OBVIOUS, but I think this turned out really well. I don't want to talk to much about the story just yet, but these guys are the main bad guys.

Now, because I can't focus on anything, this is both a comic and a game, so here's some of the animations and such I've whipped up!

 Look at him go! These are just his basic animations, but there are going to be tons of other weapons and maybe even forms to take on. To get started, though, I think these are coming along nicely.

I also mocked up a little screenshot today, which I think turned out well. This is the first time since being a kid that I've gotten this far on this project, so it's pretty exciting.

 Not  finished anything yet, but just trying to establish the look of the game. Obviously very MegaMan inspired, not going to debate or deny that, but I want to push this game into some pretty out there territory. I want to try to bring all the things I loved about the Legends and Battle Network games into the basic gameplay of a 2D classic MegaMan game, but there's elements of other games from this era that I really loved back then, including Shenmue, Brave Fencer Musashi, Legend of Zelda and Mystical Ninja.

OKAY! So that's what I got so far. Feeling pretty good about it so far, but definitely a work in progress.

Bird Force Update!

Some time ago, I posted some mock-ups of a game I was half-jokingly planning about birds flying jets.  I had a fever of activity, possibly due to temporary madness induced by too much work on Nova Phase, which subsided once I was working full time. Now, however, I'm back to working on Nova Phase, and I guess the madness must have seized me again, because I started working on Bird Force again, only this time much more earnestly. I actually started trying to program the damn thing.

Using a somewhat stable free version of and HTML5 game development tool called Construct 2, I've started working pretty seriously. Things have not been going entirely smoothly, but I figured it would be fun to post my progress here. Eventually, I'd like to post a playable version here (if that is actually possible, that is), so for now, here are some shots of in development stuff!

Here's the first shot. It's a pretty simple game. You click to fly up, release to drift down. Moving rings come down towards the player, and you just need to fly through them to get points! As you can see, there is pretty minimal stuff going on here, but the basics of the game are in place. Woo, look at that score!

 Okay, no we're talking! We've got obstacles to avoid, a much more attractive score display, and slick, parallax scrolling to  fake depth on the clouds. There's also a neat little afterburner effect! Score has improved as well, thanks to a combo system that rewards players for flying through rings consecutively.

Accidentally left the game running, and got a pretty good score! Of course, the bombs weren't actually programmed to do anything other than look cool at this point, so the game was basically impossible to lose. Notice the sparkly effect around the ring! Yummy!

Finally programmed in a way to lose! Added some appropriate dialogue, as well as a cool game over screen! Now there is actually a game happening! And its actually pretty hard, as a matter of fact.

Unfortunately, after this the project literally fell apart due to some weird instability in the way the program paths files or something, and for  few days I couldn't even access my work. Very annoying. After a lot of reading on the Construct forums, I was able to figure out how to access my back up work and actually get some of my work back.

To celebrate, a title screen! Though I did a bit more tweaking on the combo system to today, this is about as far as I've come. I'd like to add a few more elements to this beta version, including at least 5 minutes of dialogue and of course maybe some music. Reading all about Famitracker and such, hopefully gonna be able to actually do something with that.

Anyway, that's it so far! Hopefully I can have something playable up here soon! I have no idea how that works, though.

Honesty important, right?

In other news, issue 4 of Nova Phase is going really well! Slowly making progress!

Amazing might be an overstatement...

This should kinda make sense to anybody that saw the movie. This was all I could think about during the big action scene at the end.

I thought it was okay. Not really very much different from the Raimi movies, I don't think. I do feel like they severely downplayed Peter's nerdiness, though.

Okay, that's it. Maybe something tomorrow.