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Completion

I actually completed my tower defense game about a month ago, but did not blog about it. (part 9 was supposedly my last post). The past month has been pretty crazy. It was wild and had lots of ups and downs, but I was able to spend one last week just finishing this game. It was week 10 then and the 10 weeks were really crazy.

I have added the official endings to this game as well as a secret ending. I have built it to be playable on Standalone, WebPlayer and WebGL (preview).This is how the final game looks.

For the WebPlayer, the game sits at a size of 26MB. It’s not too large, considering the scale of the game. The game is 50MB for WebGL.

The only thing left to do before publishing it would actually be to get people to test the game and provide feedback, which is pretty hard since I don’t really have any form of playerbase.

What’s left to do?

Aside from publishing this game, which is something I’ve always had trouble doing, I won’t have much time left to work on games any more since I will be preoccupied with daily work life now.

However, as I said earlier, this game was completed one month ago, so what have I been doing for the past one month? Have I been slacking off?

Well, I have been working on something really, really exciting for 5 weeks! It’s a game simulator. I had been inspired by several flash game simulators before – games which simulate another game and some of them deliver quite a wonderful experience and fun that the original game did not. And I want to make my own simulator.

OldStory2! That’s right, a new game project! It will simulate one of the childhood games I played, a game which I had played when I was much, much younger. Looking back there is quite a lot of ‘feels’ which have been lost in the real game. Many people probably have a childhood game -for other people it might be RuneScale, BattleOn, NeoPets, Miniclip, and they all have that magical feeling and place in each of our hearts. Just looking at youtube comments on videos of old soundtracks just gives me the feeling of wanting to make a game that has those feels.

Work-in-development screenshot

I was really, really really hoping that I would get to work on smaller games since I know work+ studies are coming up and I really do not have much time to spare. But as I was listening to some nostalgic music, I got the ‘feels’ and I couldn’t resist the urge to create another game.

The game will be made with Unity, and will be my first attempt at the platformer genre with this game engine. Basically, I will be building this game from scratch, aside from the graphics and music of the original game.

For the past 5 weeks, I have been heavily developing this game and it really looks fantastic now. I have lots to talk about this game and I already amassed 60 screenshots and lots of draft development work to show. It was really just a mad dash for the past 5 weeks to try and get as much done as possible and for a game made in such short time, I find it actually filled with lots of content. People probably won’t believe this prototype was made in 5 weeks.

Alas, there’s so much to do and I will probably write about this soon. Oh there’s tons to talk about. The prototype is fairly playable. There’s quite a number of content and features implemented so far:

• Platformer movement + game physics + slopes preview
• Character states
• Skills -active, passive, buffs, mobility, insta-cast
• Custom keyboard UI
• Leveling up, gaining EXP and skill points
• Damage effects (multi-line damage numbers appearing over enemy / player)
• Hit-able monsters and basic monster AI (about 10+ monster types, some of which can already cast magic/skills)
• Several maps and portals to transition between levels
• Upgradable equipment
• Item drops, item looting, skill unlocking and basic currency to buy stuff
• Chat panel and messages
• Tutorial
• Inventory system
• NPCs and a basic quest
• Potions and ability to recover HP/MP
• Advanced character stats (ability to crit, damage reduction, ignore defense, +buff duration, accuracy, avoidability) along with basic stats like HP,MP,Defense)

It’s kind of like an RPG already. I did list some trivial stuff like tutorial and the chat panel as well as UI. They may seem like ‘unimportant’ stuff that one can easily take for granted, but they actually take time to design and implement and is just as notable as other seemingly huge features like skill casting. Some of the stuff above are still in the test phase. For example, equipment cannot be scrolled properly yet, but can be enhanced and upgraded with money.

I will talk about the progress from week 1 to week 4 in the next few posts so you can see the scale of the game as it progresses and the incredible amount of effort it takes to actually make even a simple platformer work along with all those mechanics above in detail.

Even though I won’t be able to draw as much graphics for this game as my other games (IdleHeroes and my Tower Defense), it is still very fun to get involved in the process of developing a game.

Edit: This project is discontinued as of March 2016, but you may play the very incomplete game here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24392079/OldStory2-DEV/index.html

The game is pretty big so it will take sometime to load.